After reading about Noah’s life the Bible zooms back out from micro and we begin to go back to a macro view of people. Instead of a few chapters dedicated to the individuals we begin to look at people by name and relation only, sometimes even accounting for how long their lives where. I see people in the Bible remembered in these categories:
The Characters (like Adam & Eve, Noah, Abram/Abraham & Sarai/Sarah, Joseph... Chapters or entire books in the Bible are dedicated to their life or parts of their life in a micro level to some degree.
The Names (like the named sons between Adam and Noah: Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaiel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah & Lamech). These folks are nearly forgettable. We often feel put upon to have to wade through their lists of names in the chapters dedicated to the genealogies.
The No Names (like all of the siblings of the named people, such as in Genesis 5:4 Then the days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he fathered other sons and daughters). Sometimes the Bible will account for a father who had a son who is named and then it will say that the father had other children. That’s it, no names are given for them. They are painted in the back drop, so to speak, to give us a perspective of community and family.
Why do you suppose God chose to remember some of us partially and some of us with a microscope for all of our descendants to study and commemorate? How does He decided who’s who? Does He have favorites? Perhaps just because some are recorded doesn’t mean that they are a favorite but they sure do stand out. Perhaps not though lol. I think that God loves the righteous, He loves people who tend towards purity and righteousness because that is what He is about and that is what His kingdom is about.
I find it fascinating to read about Noah’s sons and the genealogy that comes from them. When we get to his sons: Shem, Ham & Japheth we stay at a birds eye view and see the names and we also see where they lived which is a cartographers dream. I love maps and seeing on the map where these ancestors lived and traveled! It brings our history to life & feeds the imagination but more than that, it tells us about our origins.
I have a really cool book called Lands of The Bible, a Golden History Atlas, by Samuel Terrien who was an Auburn Professor of Old Testament Union Theological Seminary. This atlas was copyrighten in 1957. Here is a really cool map they published that rocked my world because I never had mapped out in my personal notes the locations before as described in Genesis chapters 10 & 11 about where Noah’s sons traveled to. I wanted to be sure to vet this information though and I didn’t find much about the map in this atlas so I was going to not mention this finding. So I pressed on searching for other resources, perhaps digital Biblically historic maps.
I was so pleasantly surprised to find this next map online from a separate resource!
We can only imagine how greatly the flood impacted Noah’s sons. Common sense though gives us some clues because we can conceive of what trauma, intense stress, adventure, being uprooted, moving and having the father take on a new career does to kids during their childhood. We can fathom what it is like for modern day kids to go through growing up in a crime infested neighborhood or region. When I was a kid (in the 80s) my family lived in Southern CA and famous and non-famous gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips affected my life at school. We had gang activity at school and we were sent home from school in Jr High a couple times because weapons were found in the lockers.
Before the flood, Noah’s boys, Shem, Japheth & Ham had grown up in a world that was so corrupt and filled with violence that God was sorry He had created people and animals and such. When God gave Noah instructions it is implied that Noah’s sons aren’t at his side so we don’t have any idea if they fully trusted their father in the building of the ark and getting ready for the flood or if they had any doubts or concerns about the pending doom for their community. Maybe they were “tight” and happy to comply but as we look at God’s great reset of humanity with the greatest flood we look to Noah and his family to get an idea of how humanity started over again under their leadership. In Gen 7:1 God tells Noah that he (Noah) alone was seen as righteous before God during that time.
In Mesopotamia, which is modern day Iraq, there was a story told for generations about a great flood. The man who survived the flood was called Ut-napishtim & according to the story an angry god decided to destroy the world but another god told Ut-napishtim to build a great ship and take his family for protection. Everyone else outside the ship drowned. After many days, Ut-napishtim sent out birds to search for dry land. Finally the ship was grounded on a mountain top and that is where Ut-napishtim offered sacrifices and the gods who were hungry for the smell of roasted meat, promised him that they would not send a flood on the earth again. To these people who tell that story the gods behave like quarreling kids but in the Bible God is righteous & He is a triune God: Father, Son & Holy Spirit. How did these people from Mesopotamia get this information but with the wrong names and with twisted information about God. We see evidence of the telephone game, where the information is passed along by someone or some people who didn’t retell it accurately for some reason to their offspring. Was that intentional? Is that a reflection of their relationship with God & with Noah, of their perspective about their leadership during the great flood? Did the a son or some sons of Noah refute, doubt and try to rewrite Noah’s explanation about what was going on during the great flood?
On the map above Mesopotamia is the stretch of land between where Elam to where Eber Peleg settled. Mostly Shem and some of Ham’s descendants lived there but it was very close to where Japheth’s descendants settled too.
Some years after the greatest flood, I speculate anywhere between 3.5 to 5 years at a minimum even on up to 25+ years later based off of what was documented about Noah making the wine from seed to bottle, Shem (who predominately migrated to the lower Middle East & the Arabian Peninsula) and Japheth (who predominately migrated to the upper Middle East) were both given blessings by their father but Ham, the youngest son, disgraced his father (in Gen 9:20-29) and cursed Ham’s son, Canaan. Noah called Canaan a servant of servants (the lowest of servants) he will be to his brothers. Noah went on to say blessed be The Lord, The God of Shem, may Canaan be his (Shem’s descendants) servant. May God enlarge Japheth & may he live in the tents of Shem and may Canaan be his (Japheth’s descendants) servant. Did Shem, the eldest son of Noah, regard God more righteously and understand Him more accurately? Elohim was the creator of all of Noah’s sons but was He their ruler? I get the feeling from this text that Shem was recognized as the son who was (?most?) reverent to God as His God, The God.
I LOVE to see the correlation between these people groups and where they migrated to and where they lived after the flood woven together with their relationships in their family to their father and siblings. It helps so much to see generations of a discussion and working out what was spoken and prophesied. You get a sense of attitudes, beliefs & personal perspectives of Noah’s sons that were handed down to their children who would become main characters in our Biblical history as well as people groups, like the Canaanites.
Isn’t it interesting that Noah gets so mad at his youngest son, Ham but doesn’t curse him nor all of Ham’s descendants, he curses Canaan, who appears to maybe have been born in the Ark???? See Genesis 9:18. We see in Ham’s character though that he probably lived a life cruisin for a bruisin as did his seed such as Goliath and the other Philistines, Nimrods Kingdom - Babel, the Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites & Hivites.
We see over time that God’s blessings pronounced over Noah and his sons in Gen 9:1 & v7 will carry on. They were fruitful and they did multiply and filled the earth. We also see that Ham’s descendants had these tendencies to get sinful ideas and dive into them head first. The tower of Babel came from his children’s children. They came up with this plan to build “for ourselves” a city (notice they don’t mention that is was for God in some sort of way) and a tower whose top will reach into heaven. Funny, they wanted to make a name for themselves it says in Gen 11:4 and they did accomplish that goal but unfortunately it wasn’t a good name. Their motive was fear, they said as recalled in Gen 11:4, “otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.” Well they made the city and began making the tower but in the end the very thing they feared is what they got despite their talents and collaborations. Gen 11:8-9 So The Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore it was named, Babel, because there The Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there The Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Shem displayed and is remembered by his father as faithful to God and from him comes Abram!!!!!! That is who we will start to look at next. I am having so much fun with this assignment. My time is stretched pretty thin and this blog doesn’t produce much any finances currently but I think about it all the time. Some of the big pulls on my time these days are tending to the dogs, grooming mostly, there’s lots to learn about that, more so for Ted than for Siobhan. The gardening and growing seeds into seedlings successfully to have a bountiful garden. Keeping up on the house and property. The grass keeps growing and boy are there a lot of ants around here, lol. The family and I keep on eating so there’s always more kitchen work than I ever wished upon myself. The kids keep growing and benefit from schooling. Everyone’s hair in our home keeps growing and I am the hair cut lady too. All of that to say is that I absolutely enjoy writing about the history of our faith to God and His promises and provisions to us. If it becomes a big money maker I will for sure fix my schedule to pivot around it more which would be SO COOL but for now since it is not yet, I have to tend to all the other ways I help us to earn money (via tutoring a reading student) and save money (growing food, making food, cleaning, giving hair cuts, grooming the dogs).
There’s so much I want to tell you but that is for another blog on another day. I’ve been up since 5am today finishing this article up but it is now 9am and the family is buzzing so I gotta scoot and get into the day with them.
Love you. May you be blessed during this upcoming Passover week. May you be greatly blessed through God this Spring! Let Him be your Cornerstone, keep going back to Him and build up from your relationship with Him.