The list of Noah's descendants in Genesis 10 has been fully identified with known nations of Ancient times. Unlike pagan myths, the Bible describes both the name and location of each nation accurately. This Table of Nations includes Japheth's son Madai as father of the Medes. His other sons went mostly north of the Ark's resting place. Shem's sons settled closer, to the south and east. Ham's descendants went south and west, to include populating Africa: Mizraim ("Two Rivers") is both Upper and Lower Egypt, and Put is eastern Libya (old Cyrenaica).
Yet, we know that the sons of Noah did not at first scatter so far and wide as God had commanded Noah (Genesis 11:1-9). One of Ham's tribes, Cush, gravitated to the lower half of Mesopotamia, followed by the rest of the descendants of Noah. They all spoke the same language still, and they fell under the sway of the Cushite tribe. At the same time, they carefully maintained their tribal identities. This does not mean that there was little or no inter-marriage, only that it did not affect the identity of the tribes. One of the sons of Cush -- Nimrod -- gathered a kingdom around himself. He was reputed to have been a great hunter, but his name was later synonymous with rebellion against God. In the Hebrew mind, the proper model for a king was the shepherd, not the hunter.
Nimrod's kingdom would have been rather small, but they wasted no time in building a city in the fertile lands of Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia). They found mud that could be baked into bricks for building, and petroleum deposits that leaked onto the surface of the ground, from which they made mortar. The sticky substance soaked into the dried bricks, making the structure stable as solid stone. Under the leadership of the Cushites, the kingdom began to defy God.
With the appearance of stars for the first time in human history, the people began to worship them as gods. The high fertility of the Shinar Plain allowed them to use less of their labor resources to grow food, and more for their astrology religion. As kings and high priests of this religion, the Cushites directed a great building project, the first ziggurat. A ziggurat is basically an astrological observatory with a shrine on top. We can safely date this kingdom before the earliest ziggurats discovered so far, perhaps 4800 BC. This is about the same time pottery appears in archaeological excavations. The Cushites were literally kings of the world, and had no intention of losing their place. They convinced their subjects that it was the will of the star gods to keep every human on earth together in the Kingdom of Babel.
The name the Hebrew writers gave this kingdom, "Babel" (baw-bel), was a play on words, a common feature of Hebrew literature. The Babylonian word for ziggurat was bāb-ili (whence our English Babylon), meaning "Gate of the Gods." The closest word in Hebrew was baw-lal, "to confuse." God could not allow the situation there to continue, or things would have become hardly different than they were before the Flood. He caused their mouths, and by implication their ears, to vary from their single language to the point where the clans were mutually incomprehensible. It is not known how this was done, nor how long it took. It was obviously quick enough to stop the project. Without a common tongue, their unity was doomed. The tiny kingdom scattered across the world, as God had commanded in the Covenant of Noah, and the disappointed Cushites themselves migrated to the coastal area of modern day Ethiopia.
The focus of the Hebrew text moves next to the descendants of Shem (Genesis 11:10-32). They stayed closest to old Babylon. Again, the genealogical table is not to be taken necessarily as a lineal succession. It covers a period of nearly 2000 years. During that time, there was a radical shift in the tectonic plates of the earth, sliding on the remnants of the subterranean pools before things settled in place. One of the names in the table -- Peleg -- means "Earthquake," or "Fissure" (1 Chronicles 1:19), a name commemorating a change in the earth's topography. The implication here is that the continental separation occurred over a short period of time, as opposed to the common assumption today that it took millions or billions of years. The crustal plates would have slid rather quickly on a cushion of water. (The Hydroplate Theory is not widely accepted in academic circles yet, but provides one of the best explanations for all the current facts.)
At any rate, by the time we come to Terah, we note that the ancient longevity had been significantly reduced to 200 years, down from Noah's 600 years. During that time, the knowledge of the One True God was nearly drowned out. Somewhere in the history of the Mesopotamian Valley, there arose one or more schools primarily studying religions, it would seem, for there were several religions overlapping there at various times. The God of Creation became to their minds one of many other gods. Yet it seems there was always at least one scholar who knew the basic requirements for worshiping Him. He would not allow the knowledge of revelation die out.
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Ed Hurst
revised 06 December 2003
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