The Grandsons Who Re-populated the Earth

How many grandsons did Noah have?  Do you know?  I didn't. 
But, I thought it would be interesting to look at them briefly and see which part of the world they settled.  We can find a lot of information in the so-called "Table of Nations", in Genesis 10, our text for today, and also in other scriptures and sources.

First, let's consider domesticated dogs.  (Well, that seems like a real tangent, doesn't it?)
A couple, friends of ours, gave us a tabletop book recently called, The Spirit of the Dog.  It describes several breeds and how they came to be, their countries of origin and so forth.  It is staggering to look at the variety of dog breeds existing in the world today, and to realize that one single pair of the "dog kind" entered the Ark.  From that "kind" came the wolves and the domesticated dogs, the dingos - - all canines.  How much more so could three pairs of humans re-populate the Earth?

Most scholars agree that the Ark settled somewhere in the "mountains of Arafat", which are in modern-day Turkey.  Each of Noah's 3 sons had sons and daughters.  Of necessity, similar to how Adam and Eve's children intermarried to populate the Earth originally, Noah's children intermarried, cousin to cousin, to repopulate the Earth in the years following the Great Flood.  So, let's dig in.  For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to more-or-less list these with brief notes.1

Japheth's Sons: (of the three sons, he was the most prolific)

Gomer - Ezekiel 38:6 - to Galatia/Turkey/Armenia and to France and Spain, Germany and Wales

Magog - Ezekiel 38:15 and 39:2 - the Sythians - Romania and Ukraine

Madai - Daniel 6:8, 12, 15 - (along with Elam, Seth's son...) - the Medes/Persians - ancestor of the Iranians and people of India

Javan - Daniel 8:21 and Genesis 10:4 - the Elysians, the Greeks, the Cypriots (Cyprus)

Tubal - Ezekiel 39:1 - Soviet state of Georgia

Meschech - Russian - Meschech is the ancient form of the modern city named Moscow.

Tiras - the ancient Thirasians, the people of Thrace, an area later known as Yugoslavia.

Shem's Sons:

Elam - Acts 2:9 - as mentioned earlier, the Elamites settled Persia (modern Iran).  In fact, Iran was formerly called Persia (in my lifetime - - I am old, lol!)

Asshur - Asshur is the Hebrew word for Assyria.  It was said that the rulers of Assyria ruled only with the express permission of Asshur's deified ghost.  Ain't that some apples....smh

Arphaxad - Genesis 10 and 11 - settled Chaldea/Mesopotamia (modern Southern Iraq) and also Arabia (the Arabian Peninsula). Arphaxad was the progenitor of Abraham, and therefore, the Jewish people.

Lud - Revelation 3:1 - settled western Turkey

Aram - 2 Kings 18:26 - Arameans settled Syria

Ham's Sons:

Misraim/Mizraim - Psalm 106:22 - Egypt, (Mizraim is the Hebrew word for Egypt)

Cush - Psalm 106:22 - Northern Africa, Ethiopia

Put (Phut) - Daniel 11:43 - Libya

Canaan - Genesis 10:14-18 - modern day Israel and Jordan - descendants were Canaanites, Philistines, Jebusites, Amorites

Can you determine from which grandson you are most-likely descended? 

The next question becomes, "How did some of these people groups get to the Western Hemisphere?"
Keep in mind a couple of probabilities:

1.  The Tower of Babel incident was the driving factor in dispersing various people groups all over the globe.
2.  The advanced knowledge that existed before the Great Flood carried over to some extent into the early world afterwards.  These people had the knowledge to build ships.
3.  The climate of the Earth was continuing to go through metamorphoses. The Flood took place around 2348 BC.  Almost immediately, the Earth began to have a "mini-Ice Age", and it lasted for 700-800 years.  So, for example, the Arctic Circle was likely much warmer than it is now and much more navigable2.


Sources:

1     https://creation.com/the-sixteen-grandsons-of-noah

2     https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j19_1/j19_1_65-72.pdf

Another Strange Bible Tale

Image: Jill Wellington, via Pixabay

After The Great Flood, which preserved the continuity of mankind through the family of Noah, one might expect that these paragons of humanity would live sterling lives and proceed to, well, "live happily ever after".  They were, after all, THE family God chose to preserve through the cataclysm that killed off every other human on the face of the Earth.
Instead, the very first story recorded in the Scriptures after Noah and family had disembarked from the Ark, is a debacle of drunkenness, nudity, ridicule, humiliation, cursing and perhaps things more diabolical.
Human Nature, that carnal, sin-sick inheritance from our forefather, Adam, is a real beaut.

The story is found in Genesis 9:18-29.

What would you first do when you came off the Ark, after nearly a year of watery captivity?
Well, you'd probably do what you believe you do best.  In verse 20, we are told Noah was "a man of the soil" (Berean Study Bible).  In other words, he was, at heart, a farmer.  Of course, after you've lived 600 years, you would have probably learned lots of skills.  But, he loved to farm, apparently.  So, he planted a vineyard of luscious, juicy grapes.  And, when they were ripe, he made wine.

Perhaps he had not had wine in over a year.  Who knows?  For whatever the reason, he enjoyed his new wine so very much that he passed out drunk, totally naked, in his tent.

That's when his youngest son, Ham, comes on the scene.  "Wait a minute," you might say, "wasn't Ham the middle son?  They are usually listed as 'Shem, Ham and Japeth'!"  Yes, they are, but many translators and commentators believe Ham was the youngest.  Even though Genesis jumps around a lot on this topic, consider the following scriptures:

After Noah was 500 years old he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.  

Genesis 5:32

{This means all three were born, grew up and got married, during the several decades Noah was building the Ark.)

Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters came upon the Earth. 

Genesis 7:6

Sons were also born to Shem, whose older brother was Japheth....

Genesis 10:21*

Genesis 9:24 tells us flat-out, plain as day, that Ham was Noah's youngest son.  So, at least that's settled...

Therefore, the birth order was as follows?  Japheth, Shem and Ham.

A point of concern is that they are usually, though not always mentioned in this order:  Shem, Ham and Japheth.  But, the Bible will often list people in order of importance, as opposed to (in this case) chronological age.

*At the risk of perseverating on this point, go and read several different translations of Genesis 10:21.  In some translations, Shem is called the oldest; in others, Japheth was deemed the oldest.  For that matter, look at the Sources listed below.  Then....refer back to the title of this blog post.

Allright, moving further on into the strangeness ....
So, Ham wanders into his father's tent and finds him drunk and naked.  What would you do?  I would hope I would cover up my parent, leave, and say nothing of the incident.
That's not what Ham did.  The Hebrew word root used in 9:24 is "ra'ah", which means to "see keenly".  We find the same root used in Deuteronomy 14:13, in noun form this time, to denote birds of prey that use their eyesight to hunt.  Some scholars theorize Ham even went and got his son, Canaan, and showed the sight to him, which is why Canaan was cursed by name in Genesis 9:24.
Other scholars believe some sort of incest or rape took place, involving Canaan in some way, and that the incident was so awful that Scripture is deliberately curt and vague about it, out of piety.
However, all of these are just conjecture.  We must be careful what we "read into" the scripture.

What IS explicitly stated is that Ham did NOT cover his father up.  Instead, he went and told his brothers about the humiliating situation.  In contrast, the two older brothers, went and got a covering, walked backwards into the tent, and covered their father.  Huge difference in behavior.

Let's go back to Canaan a minute.  Why did Noah specifically curse him?  Ham had four sons, with Canaan being the fourth, the youngest (Genesis 10:6).  (In addition to Canaan, he had Put, Cush and Misraim.)  Why Canaan?  Well, again, we honestly do not know.  Anything else would be guessing.  I've mentioned possible explanations above, but that is just it - - they are merely possibilities.

Another curious thing about the end of chapter is that, sometime after cursing the line of Ham via Canaan, Noah goes on to bless his other two sons, but did not ordain the birthright to flow through the eldest, Japheth.  Instead, he blessed them both, but decreed that Japheth and his descendants would serve the descendants of Shem.  (Jesus Christ was born from the ancestral line of Shem.)  In a future  post, we will examine Noah's 16 grandsons and what we can determine from Scripture about where they settled in the big, wide world.

Sources:

https://www.gotquestions.org/sons-of-Noah.html

https://answersingenesis.org/contradictions-in-the-bible/my-three-sons/

https://thetorah.com/noah-ham-and-the-curse-of-canaan-who-did-what-to-whom-in-the-tent/

Revival and High-Powered Rifles

I am fond of engaging in public discourse on Twitter.  Since August 4th, 2019, a day of infamy in the history of our country, the public discourse in the media has been dominated by calls to address the root causes of what led to the two mass shootings that occurred within a 24-hour period.  The problem is - - few are getting down to the root cause.

Today's reading is from 2 Kings 22-23 and 2 Chronicles 34-35, the story of King Josiah.  You may have studied King Josiah in Sunday School when you were young, as did I.  This Bible story has long been a favorite of Sunday School curriculum developers for children, because King Josiah was a young child when he inherited the throne of the kingdom of Judah.  He was a mere 8 years old.

By this time, in 640 BC, King David had been dead for 330 years.  His glorious kingdom had been perpetuated by one of his sons, King Solomon, during whose reign the magnificent Temple had been built.  The heirs of Solomon and their descendants however, had been pagan kings, who had led Israel to split into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom, called Israel, and the southern kingdom, called Judah.  This was largely due to the pagan religious practices of the many wives and concubines King Solomon brought into Israel during his reign as king.  For such a wise king, as the Scriptures say, this was not a wise move.

When Josiah took over the throne at age 8, obviously the kingdom was ruled by his senior advisors for 18 years.  However, when he was in his mid-20s, Josiah began to be bothered by the state of disrepair of the Temple.  The people were being taxed to maintain it; yet, the silver they paid was not going to its intended purpose.  Josiah gave a command to reverse that, and in the refurbishment, the book of the Law, that is the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah) was found.  AND, it was Moses' original copy; it was "written in his own hand".  Imagine that!  When it was found, the high priest ordered it taken to the king, who commanded it be read in his presence.

When the king heard the words of the law, he tore his clothes.

2 Chronicles 34:19 (CSB)

What a revelation!  There was a lot of eye-opening information in that scroll!
"Rending the garments" was, in those days, a sign of extreme sorrow, anguish and repentance.  The words of the Law revealed to Josiah just how enmeshed in sin the people were, how far they had strayed from God's commands in The Torah.  The disarray of the Temple was merely a symbol.  So, Josiah went on to cleanse the land of the pagan worship, which was extensive.  Many false gods were being worshipped, including those who burned babies on fiery altars and practiced male prostitution in their houses of "worship".  (2 Kings 23:4-14)

In the vacuum this purging created, Josiah re-instituted the Levitical practices that the Lord, through Moses, commanded.  Now, here is where I learned something, reading this account yesterday.  There is little mention of King David celebrating Passover. The same is true of King Solomon.  According to 2 Kings 23:22-23, in the first Passover of Josiah, the Passover had not been celebrated in such an original fashion since the days of the prophet/judge Samuel, (also see 2 Chronicles 35:18) whose leadership brought forth a revival of keeping the sacred festivals God had commanded for His chosen people.

Isn't that fascinating?!  See, I had just thought that, after God commanded Passover in Exodus 12, it had been "kept" or celebrated consistently down through the centuries.  But, this is not so. Through the years, the Hebrews waxed hot and cold in their worship of Yahweh.  When they were enmeshed in pagan worship, the true "holy convocations" of Passover, Feast of Tabernacles, etc. became lost.  It is believed that the priests had even forgotten about them.  After the days of Samuel, the next time Passover is recorded in scripture having been celebrated is in the days of King Hezekiah.  And, then a few years later - - Josiah. 

There was a great revival during the reign of King Josiah.  We are told that the people covenanted with the king, who made a covenant before the Lord, to keep His commandments and His Law.  And, for the remaining 13 years of his reign, the Lord God was worshipped supremely in Judah.

What relevance does this have to us today?  All the talk today about preventing further incidences of mass murder focus on restricting access to guns, or increasing services to those with mental illness.  Mental illness is certainly present in the men who perpetrate these acts.  However, evil is also present.  Evil is not born out of a mental disorder.  Evil is a cancer of the soul.  It grows out of a heart, dark and devoid of God.

If you are old enough, think back with me.  30 or more years go, did you fear going to shop at your local grocery store or worship at your local church, afraid you'd be mowed down by a demon-possessed lunatic?  No, you did not.  This type of behavior grows out of a culture that has banished God from "the public square", a society that has relegated God to Saturdays or Sundays, if even on those days.  Our youth are taught in public school that if you are a person of faith you are "dumb", that being bright and intellectual is antithetical to being a Christian.  Instead of making the Savior central to our lives, we fill our minds and spirits with filth and our bodies with the dietary equivalent of the same.  We are forced to look at the people who worshipped Chemosh, the demonic false god of the ancient Moabites, by throwing live babies into a fiery pit, and confront our society's scourge of abortion, which is basically the same.

And, we wonder why we have mass murders?  Our laws condone the devaluing of human life to the extent it is legal to murder our own babies in the womb.  Thousands are murdered every, single day.
It's not the guns, People.  
Those possessed by evil will always find a way.  Pray for Nigerian Christians, who are being slaughtered for their faith daily, by machete and fire.
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/world/hundreds-of-christians-killed-in-nigeria-attacks

If you are truly concerned about the state of our nation, get on your knees with me and beg God for an honest-to-goodness, Holy Ghost revival to sweep over our land and for it to start with us, the Body of Christ.