Category: The Table of Nations

The Bible clearly purports to be a general history of the human race, albeit specially concentrated on God chosen people. The main reason of these genealogies is to establish and teach the lineage of the Jews among their relatives, neighbors, and enemies. This explains why there is no effort to trace people more distant.

Here is the purported problem: surely the reason the tribes listed in Gen 10 were from the areas surrounding Israel is that this was the world known to the Israelites. But does this not undermine the scriptures’ pretensions to give a God’s-eye view of human history? There are three possible reasons (not necessarily mutually exclusive) for what appears to be a provincial listing: (1) these were the only known tribes; (2) these were the first descendants of Noah, and it was from these places relatively near to the landing of the ark that the rest of the earth was populated; (3) these were the descendants of Noah who figured in the lives and history of the Hebrews. First, it is true: these were the only early tribes known to the early Hebrews. But on the other hand, the assertion is that these were the men who lived within just a few generations of Noah. Hence of course it does not presume to give a history of all of humanity. Finally, it is also quite true that the Bible deals with just that portion of humanity that deals directly with the Hebrews. The text purports to be written with inspiration from God, but not to teach things irrelevant to the covenants God made with the Hebrews. So all three of the explanations are reasonable.

Anthropologists have found homo sapiens skeletons in many places going back thousands of years—well over 100,000 years—in many places. These are surely inconsistent a Young Earth history, and particularly with a view in which Adam was created in the fifth millennium B.C., or even a few millennia before that. Considering that, it is probable given the extra-Biblical evidence that mankind has been roaming earth for tens of thousands of years. You might say that even if that were true, mankind might have been wiped out in the Flood and then the Table of Nations would still be accurate as a snapshot circa 2500 B.C. of the nations centered around Israel. The problem with that response is that we have evidence that the ancestors of today’s Australians are ancient pre-Flood Australians, and the ancestors of today’s Europeans are ancient pre-Flood Europeans, and so forth. Moreover, it does not seem likely that the Flood, if it lived on in global memory from ancient times, could have lived on in that way for literally many thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of years. If the Flood of the Bible, it would have had to have happened roughly when it was supposed to have happened—sometime between 4000 and 2000 BC, say (Henry puts it at 2349 B.C.). So this is one question on which I am afraid that in all honesty I have no good answer. I simply do not see how the Table of Nations is plausible, at least when combined with a worldwide flood.