Free Bible Commentary
“Additional Commentary on Genesis Chapter 10”
Categories: GenesisGenesis chapter 10 can be a very confusing and frustrating chapter when trying to pick through all the details. It is important to keep our eye on the big picture view when sifting through the sand of the finer points. The following is a perspective from Nahum Sarna about how Genesis 10 fits into the grand scheme of God's dealings with humanity:
“The peoples listed amount precisely to seventy, excluding Nimrod, who is an individual. There are fourteen Japhethites, thirty Hamites, and twenty-six Shemites. The figure seventy, even if not explicitly given, can hardly be fortuitous. The mere recognition in verse 5 of the existence of additional, unnamed ‘maritime nations’ lends added significance to the enumeration as being deliberately chosen. In the biblical world the number seventy is ‘typological’; that is, it is used for rhetorical effect to evoke the idea of totality, of comprehensiveness on a large scale, as opposed to the use of seven on a smaller scale. Thus, according to Genesis 46:27, the entire household of Jacob that went down to Egypt comprised seventy souls. The representative body of the entire community of Israel in the wilderness consisted of seventy elders, as recorded in Exodus 24:9 and Numbers 11:24; and the prophet Ezekiel, in 8:11, uses the same figure at the end of the period of the monarchy…
"In light of this convention one may safely assume that making the offspring of Noah’s sons total seventy is a literary device to convey the notion of the totality of the human race… This device affords an insight into a major function of the Table, a document thus far unparalleled in the ancient world. This strangely perplexing miscellany of peoples, tribes, and places is no mere academic or scholastic exercise. It affirms, first of all, the common origin and absolute unity of humankind after the flood; then it tacitly, but effectively, asserts that the varied instrumentalities of human divisiveness are all secondary to the essential unity of the international community, which truly constitutes a family of man…
"The number seventy, which is not only emblematic of the totality of the human race but may also function to intensify the general prefiguring thrust of the Table. The number seventy resonates with the composition of the offspring of Jacob who went down to Egypt. The special significance this assumes is demonstrated not only by its emphasis in Genesis 46:27 but also by its reiteration twice more, in Exodus 1:5 and Deuteronomy 10:23. It is as though the totality of the nations and the totality of the Israelites who migrate to Egypt are intertwined. The fundamental biblical theme of Israel and the international community is delicately insinuated in the text. It is not coincidental that God’s first communication to the patriarch Abraham immediately places his offspring in a worldwide context: ‘All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’”
Please read Genesis 11:1-9 for tomorrow.
Have a blessed day!
- Louie Taylor
