“Now this is the genealogy of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And sons were born to them after the flood.” (v.1)
This chapter deals with “The Table of Nations,” which lists the genealogy of Noah’s descendants and tells us where the various people groups and nations throughout history originated. Not only is this a remarkable chapter, it is also a remarkably accurate and is even acclaimed by those not of the faith.
Henry Morris writes, “Dr. William F. Albright, universally acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on the archaeology of the Near East, though himself not a believer in the infallibility of Scripture, said concerning this table of nations, “It stands absolutely alone in ancient literature, without a remote parallel, even among the Greeks, where we find the closest approach to a distribution of peoples in genealogical framework…The Table of Nations remains as astonishingly accurate document.”
One of the mistakes made by many today (including the church), is to believe that the these three sons of Noah end up producing what people refer to as the three main races of people, with the Hamites representing the black skinned people, the Japhethites the white skinned Caucasion people, and the Shemites the Oriental people.
The concept of race is not found in the Bible, it's a distinction of modern day thinking. All people on the face of the earth are descended from Noah and the characteristics that typically define races are merely genetic characteristics that can be calculated through the existence of recessive and dominant genes.
This chapter deals with the table of nations, not races and is a interval that occurs before the next chapter (11) that tells us how all of the various languages came about in the first place, at the Tower of Babel. But for now, chapter 10 summarizes that, “the nations” were separated into their lands, every one according to his language, according to their families, into their nations.” We will get the “how” in chapter 11.
The Truth: “These were the sons of Noah, from these the whole earth was populated.” (Genesis 9:19)
