From the Table of Nations to a Promise: Genesis 10–12

We're on Lesson 14, and we've arrived at Genesis chapter 12. And before I read Genesis chapter 12 and going to the Abraham story, okay, so we're leaving behind the pre-Abraham portion of the Bible, the Book of Genesis. We're no longer dealing with stories like flood, fall, cane-enable, satanic invasion, tower of Babel. And we're now going to follow the career of one individual. Everything's been narrowed down. Now the story of God's redemptive purposes in the world, we're going to see its genesis in the life of a single individual, not one of the great men, not one of the kings of the earth, but a man who has no notoriety in the world that we know of, who literally comes from almost nowhere and is chosen to be the vessel through which God's redemptive plan goes into effect. God is no longer dealing with people groups, at least hundreds of thousands or millions of people at this particular point. He's now dealing with one man

and his family. But before we go into Genesis 12, I've said before my goal is for us to read the whole Bible through as we go through Genesis to Revelation. So at least we're reading every verse of the Bible on this journey. Now you may have noticed I skipped Genesis chapter 10 reading it. It consists mostly of genealogies. But in this lesson leading up to Genesis 12, now it's a good time for me to go back to chapter 10, read those genealogies and then read a genealogy, another genealogy that comes up at the end of chapter 11, comes after the story of the Tower of Babel that we did last week. I'm going to put these two together and then that will serve as a kind of frame or context for the beginning of the Abraham story. Okay, Genesis chapter 10, these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham and Jabith. Sons were born to them after the flood. The

sons of Jabith were, we're going to get a lot of names here. Let me pause for just a moment and say, I do endeavor as often as possible to engage your interests and hopefully pique your curiosity. But I'm not always going to be able to, with every passage of Scripture that we come across. It's in Scripture. I simply, if I tried to make it interesting, I might betray it. But sometimes it's just us going through the labor of carefully reading everything, being faithful to it and caring about it and not tuning out or checking out because it's not setting the sanctuary on fire. All right, so a lot of names are going to come up. I'm going to pause on some of these names whenever a name comes up that might be of interest for later studies. All right, one final note before I get back into it. What you're reading here are the table of the nations. Okay, so the nations that

sprang from the family of Noah, the 70 or depending on which count, 70 or 72 nations that came out of the line of the sons of Noah. And the author of Genesis felt that this was important enough to name each of these individuals. It may be of less interest to us today because some of these names are completely lost on us, but the further you go back in time, the more interest these names might have been. There would have been anybody who lived 2000 or 3000 years ago would have been able to find their family in one of these names. Trace back to one of these names. Okay, a list of names. Let's say you go to a graduation ceremony. It's a big graduating class, 2000 graduates, and you just see name, name, name, name, name on the bulletin, the handout for the ceremony, just names. If your name's not on there or your kid's name's not on there, it's just names. But

when your name's on there or your kid's name's on there, then that list has quite a bit of interest for you. Again, these people would have found their family somewhere in this list. And it kind of creates a setting for the story of Abraham. All right, the sons of Japheth. Japheth isn't the oldest of Noah's sons. He has three sons. Japheth is the middle. Shem is the oldest, but he doesn't start with Shem. All right, and there's a reason for that. Here we go. Sons of Japheth are Gomer, Magog. That comes up in the book of Revelation. Medai, Javan. Just making sure all these names are up there. Okay, Javan. Javan, it seems to be a reference to... This is the Hebrew way of referring to the Greeks, if that's of any interest to you. The Greeks, Javan. Tubal, Meshach, and Tiris. The sons of Gomer, Ashkenaz, that name becomes interesting. It's actually interesting in our time because they're essentially, as far as

two kinds of Jews that weren't born in Israel. The Jewish diaspora means you were born outside the land. And there are two kinds of those, the two basic kinds. The first was Sephardic. Sephardic Jews, my understanding is tended to come from Eastern lands in the East. But Ashkenazi Jews came from, as I understand it, the West and tend to be lighter-skinned. But here, one of the sons of Japheth is named Ashkenaz. And Japheth is associated with Europe, the nations of Europe. Not always, not in every case, but mostly, Japheth came from, or Japheth, his sons and descendants, found the nations of Europe. And Ashkenaz is one of those. Riphath and Togarma. The sons of Javan, these are the Greeks. Alisha, Tarshish, like Tarsus, or maybe even as far as Spain, you might remember that Jonah fled to Tarshish. Cateen. Cateen is interesting because that's the ancient Hebrew work for the Romans. And Dodoni. From these, the coastland people spread in their lands, each

with his own language by their clans and their nations. All right? Now, if you remember, you remember the sons of Noah. Shem is going to be the elect line through which God's purposes are going to be achieved. He's going to be, in the end, God's favored or blessed people. Japheth is going to be a helper and is going to be oftentimes an ally of the sons of Shem. And Ham's descendants are going to be typically or very often are going to be against God and they're going to be on the cursed side of the equation. And all right, so we have there a description of some of the founding peoples of what would later become the Europeans. Now we move to Ham. We skipped right over Shem and we're now at Ham. And the reason seems to be he puts the final, the favored or blessed, elect son, Shem last in the genealogy. All right, so now he goes to Ham. The sons

of Ham are Kush, Egypt, Pute and Canaan. Okay, Kush is an ancient word for what became known as like Northern Ethiopia. Egypt, the Egyptians. Pute, I can't remember off the top of my head anymore. And Canaan, these are going to be the people that are dispossessed by the Israelites, the children of Israel. Okay, the sons of Kush are Siba, Havelam, Saabta, Rahama and Saptika. The sons of Rahama are Siba and Dadan. Kush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore, it said like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel. We talked about this last week. Erech, Akkad and Calnae in the land of Sinar. From that land, he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth, Eir, Kala and Rezin between Nineveh and Kala. That is the great city. And you might see a pattern here in the descendants of Ham are some

of the traditional enemies of Israel. That's why, by the way, the Book of Jonah, just passing reference to the sons of Japheth. They're distant and far away and don't have much to do with the story of the Old Testament. But the story of Ham's descendants have everything to do with the history of the Old Testament. So, we're getting a more microscopic or closer look. Verse 13, Egypt fathered Lideen, Anami, Lahabi, Naftuhim, Pothrissim, Kaushuhim, from whom the Philistines came. See again, get all those names and oh, Philistines. Okay, that's why he mentioned all those. Philistines are going to be important, right? And Kaftereen, Canaan fathered. Canaan is the second son, it seems, of Ham. Now we get Canaan's descendants. Canaan fathered Sidon. His first one, Sidon is going to be a traditional enemy of Israel. It's modern-day Lebanon. It's a chief city at one time of Lebanon. And sometimes there's a good relationship with Lebanon. Sometimes it's a bad relationship. But some of the

Lebanese help Solomon build this temple. And that sounds like a good thing. But in the end, it turns out that it wasn't a good thing. Maybe we'll get to that when we get finally the first kings or second kings in 10 years. Somebody, Carter, maybe? Carter asked me, how long is this going to take? And at our current pace, a chapter a week or so, we'll get through Genesis in one year. And then, you know, and the thought is, well, why are you doing it? Why don't you do it like 10 chapters at a time? Could do that. And the thought is, you know, you might not live that long. And I know that. But I would rather go through it carefully this way. I really would. And let's just hope and pray for good health, at least for me, to get through this. And if I don't get through it, if I can't make it all the way through, if I don't

have that much time in life, still won't we have honored God by going carefully through every verse and every scripture? Don't you think we've done, given greater worth to scripture that way? So let's just leave the time in the hands of the Lord and just go through carefully and not be in a rush. Okay. That's right. That's right. And kids and grandkids, they'll pick up in Exodus when I'm done. All right. But I did tell Carter, I said, I think it'll take us 10 to 15 years. That's okay. It's okay. All right. Where are we? King and fathered site is first born and heth and the Jebusites. Anyone remember the Jebusites? The Jebusites are the people who King David took or conquered who were ruling in Jerusalem. So they were Jerusalemites. So Jerusalem was not originally an Israelite city. It was a Genesite city who was descended from him, the cursed son of Noah. Okay. And then there's the Amorites. We're still in

verse 16. Amorites became one of the great enemies of Israel and tried to stop Israel from being able to enter into the Promised Land. The Gurgoshites, the Hivites, the Archaites, the Sinites, the Arvodites, the Zemarites, and the Hema thoughts, Hema fights, and lots of bites. Afterward, the clans of the Canaanites dispersed and the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon. That's way up in the north from Israel in what is today Lebanon in the direction of Gerar, which is way in the south of Israel, down in what's like the Negev desert down by Egypt on the border of Egypt. As far as Gaza, that's coming up, isn't it? That's of interest to us. Gaza has been disputed territory for thousands of years. This war didn't start a couple of years ago. It's been going on for a long time. And in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboin, as far as Lasha, these are the sons of Ham by their clans, their languages,

their lands, and their nation. To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, if you ever wonder where the name or the word Hebrew comes from, it seems to be owing to this particular representative of the sons of Shem, Eber, or Hebrew. His people became known as Hebrew, Hebrews. Keep losing my place. There we go. To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japheth, children were born. The sons of Shem were Elam, Asher, Arpaxod, Lod, and Aram. Now, the sons of Shem doesn't just mean the Israelites. You have Israel, the Israelites and their cousins, the Shemite cousins. You know where we get the word Semite as in anti-Semite. It's anti-Shemite. So if you're an anti-Semite, you're not only against the Jewish people, but you're anti all of the relatives of the Jewish people, which would include some of these names that we're talking about. Aram is one of them listed. The name Aram is

the original Hebrew word for the people of Syria, the Syrians. They were called Arameans. They are cousins of the Israelites. There we go. The sons of Aram, verse 23, are Uz, Hul, Gathar, and Mash. Uz is the land that Job was from, but we don't know much more than that or where it was at exactly. Arpaxod, verse 24, fathered Shee-La, and Shee-La fathered Eber. This is the Eber that we have the name Hebrew from. Verse 25, to Eber were born two sons. The name of the one was Pelag. For in his days, the earth was divided. It's interesting to throw a note in like that. I mean, we've just been getting name, name, name, name, name, name, name. And then all of a sudden we get this little biographical note. His name is Pelag because the earth was divided in his day. Hebrew for divided is the word Pelag or a close derivative. And we don't know what it means to say that

the earth was divided. We don't know exactly what that means, but we do know that during the time of Pelag, the ages, the human age was cut almost in half. So, you have people living really, really long time until Pelag and after Pelag, everyone's living about half the lifespan. So, maybe there's some kind of God right there curtail human lifespan or some thought that it's in these times, the continents are created. Who knows how long ago, but it seems that all the continents were at one time, one continent called, you know, we call it Ze'epangaea. If you look at South America, you got a picture of South America in your head. Now, move it east, move it east, move it east and just a little bit north and turn it just at like a 20 degree angle. And all of a sudden it fits perfectly against the backside of Africa, the continent of Africa. If you take, if you take, you see a

picture in your head of Australia, it looks like this, like a kind of jagged tomato. And if you take India and you pull it down, it fits perfectly at the top, the northern north of Australia. And strangely enough, one of the same species that are in India seemed to be resident of Australia. So all these kinds of quirks. So maybe the land or the earth was divided is referring to some kind of clad cataclysm. I don't, I don't know. I don't know if they're people adventure to guess that this is a reference to the flood. I don't know. His brother's name was Jaktan. And Jaktan fathered Al-Madad, Shenos, Hazaramath, Hazaramath, Mavath, Zarejera, Hadron, Uzal, Diktlah, Obol, Aba, Abinai, Abiliel, Shiba, Olsver, Havibah, and Jopad. All of these were the sons of Jaktan, the territory in which they lived extended from Misha in the direction of Seafar to the hill country of the east. These are the sons of Shem by their clan, their

nations, their lands and their nations. These are the clans of the sons of Noah. So we're wrapping it all up here. According to their genealogies and their nations, and from these nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. And then as I mentioned last week, then you get the next chapter, it's chapter 11, and it tells you how these people all decided at some point or their fathers decided to consolidate in the land of Shinar and then God, they tried to build a tower and then God confused their languages and then they spread out and created all these different nations. Okay, now that's the story of the Tower of Babel that comes next. I want to, since I did Tower of Babel last week, I want to skip down to verse 10 now of chapter 11, and we're going to read the last genealogy. For some reason, the author of Genesis felt it necessary to revisit the genealogy of Shem. We already

just did that. That's what we did in the previous chapter, but he does it again. Again, it's highlighting the importance of Shem. Oh, oh, oh, I forgot to mention, just want to make a quick note again. In Genesis chapter 6, I said this last week, you remember the offspring of the fallen angels and human beings, that hybrid form, they were men of great, what? Renown is the English translation, but it's literally in Hebrew, there are men of great name, okay, in Hebrew name. Then in the Tower of Babel story, let's build us a tower so that we can make a name for ourselves, okay? All right, the first time we had this great name idea, we get a flood. Second time, we get infusion of languages, all right? And I'm going to come back to why that's important here in just a second. All right, verse 10 of chapter 11. These are the generations of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old,

he fathered Apoxá宛, two years after the flood. Shem lived after he fathered Apoxá 500 years and had other sons and daughters. When Apoxá宛 had lived 35 years, he fathered Sheila. And Apoxá lived after he fathered Sheila 403 years and had other sons and daughters. And Sheila had lived 30 years. He fathered Eber. And Sheila lived after he fathered Eber 403 years and had other sons and daughters, when Eber had lived 34 years, he fathered Peleg and Eber lived after he fathered Peleg 430 years and had other sons and daughters. When Peleg had lived 30 years, he fathered Riyu. Peleg lived after he fathered Riyu 209 years, had other sons and daughters. Riyu had lived 32 years, he fathered Sarek. Riyu lived after he fathered Sarek 207 years and had sons and daughters. And this is the point in which you're probably checking out. Stay with me. When Sarek had lived 30 years, he fathered Nahor. It's going to be important. And Sarek lived

after he fathered Nahor 200 years and had other sons and daughters. Nahor, as we're going to find out, is the grandfather of Abraham. Okay. When Nahor had lived 29 years, he fathered Tara. That's the father of Abraham. And Nahor lived after he fathered Tara 119 years and had other sons and daughters. When Tara had lived 70 years, he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Heron. What happens when a man in the first 12 chapters of the Bible has three sons? Good things. Adam had three sons that we know of. Three named sons, Cain, Abel, and Seth. Noah, three sons, Ham, Japeth, and Shem. And now we have another one, Abraham. Abraham is part of three boys sprung from Tara. Okay. A couple peculiarities. The question is, is this a complete genealogy? And if it is a complete genealogy, then you should be able to say that the earth is 6,000 years old, because you could put all the genealogies together in the Bible and then

you've got about 6,000 years or so. Up to the time of Jesus, then you can add 2,000 years. However, I don't know. Here's why. I don't know if this genealogy is exhaustive. No, the only thing that makes me think it could be exhaustive is that the author is actually not just telling us, this person begat that person and that person begat the other person and so on, so that you could get this idea where maybe the writer is skipping generations and counting a great-great-grandfather as the father of somebody. So you're skipping generations in between. But in this genealogy, you're actually getting how old the man was when he had the son and how old he was when he died. Okay. So you're getting these kinds of triangulated dates. Now, you could say, well, that pretty much settles it then. We're dealing with a genealogy that's very exact. The trouble with that is, it creates this scenario. Imagine this scenario. The reality would be

that Noah lived into the lifetime of Abraham. Noah would have lived into the lifetime of Abraham. That's almost unimaginable. Okay. Also, Shem, the son of Noah, would have outlived Abraham by 36 years, according to this genealogy list, if you're reading the genealogy list as an exhaustive list, including everybody. It's unimaginable that the son of Noah outlived Abraham by 36 years, unimaginable. Okay. And Eber, the founding name of the Hebrew people, would have outlived the lifetime of Jacob, Abraham's grandson. Okay. So something that the list is not exhaustive, it seems to me. It seems to me that there are lots of names left out that the writers economizing. Okay. All right. Now, now these, verse 27, are the generations of Tara. Tara fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father, Tara, in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abram and Nahor took wives. So the two remaining sons of Tara,

Abram and Nahor, took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai. Her name's going to be Sarah later on. And the name of Nahor's wife is Milka. The daughters of Haran, the father of Milka and Iskia, or Jessica. Now, Sarai was born, she had no child. That's the first time we get this instance of somebody having an inherent difficulty. That's the one thing that you can't, the one problem that you can't have if you're going to be in a genealogical list. But the genealogy takes the time to say she was barren. It's almost like God picks the least, likely people, and through them accomplishes His purpose. Verse 31, Tara took Abram, his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife. And they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go on the land of Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there the days of Tara, where 205 years in

Tara died in Haran. Okay. I went so fast over that right there, you may not have noticed that Abram's brother married his niece. These kinds of clothes, it's called endogamy, where you're marrying within the family, is very common in the ancient world. The farther you go back in time, the more common it is. Okay. And if you think about it, human beings come from two people. At some point, there had to be endogamy. Okay. But over time, if this keeps on getting repeated, you end up with serious physical defects. Okay. But at one time, it seemed it was okay. It worked. But then, when you get into the book of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, Deuteronomy, you find out that marrying your niece is strictly forbidden and called incest. Okay. So you're like, wait a minute, it was okay for Abram, not okay for the people after Moses' time? Yes. By the way, by the way. Oh, there's this theory that's very popular in

academic circles about the book of Genesis, particularly. I say the book of Genesis was not written during the time of Moses. It wasn't an early document. It wasn't written until the time of the Babylonian captivity, which would have been somewhere around the year 550 before Christ. So the book of Genesis was only 550 years old or so when Jesus was born. Okay. And there are lots of justifications for making that particular claim, which would mean Moses didn't have anything to do with it, that it was a document not actually written about the historical past, but these are just legends that are passed down. They grow in the telling. So what you get thousands of years after the events they describe is actually legend. There's just fiction essentially being written. But one of the things that should always give anybody who has that kind of nerve to think you know more about things that happened thousands of years ago than people who lived thousands

of years ago knew. If you have that kind of nerves, here's something that flies in the face of that particular idea. Again, the idea is they were just writing fiction. The law of Moses had been created in about the year 1000 or maybe the year 1300. And then the book of Genesis is an actually history about what happened before Moses. It was something that was written as kind of fiction in the year 550 while the Israelites were in captivity. And they were trying to create a history that people would read as history, but wasn't actually history. But it was made history in order to kind of justify an agenda, a later agenda. Okay. So again, the idea is, is that the book of Genesis is younger than the law of Moses. That's the academic theory. Okay. But there are problems with that. One of those is, if you're saying down to write a book of fiction and you're going to tell all these

stories about the people that came, that were the ancestors of Moses, how is it reasonable for you to write stories about them that describe them in ways that absolutely violate the law of Moses? Like the laws of incest. Why are all these patriarchs that come before Moses living lives and doing things that the law of Moses speaks is dead set against? Okay. So I think that there's no embarrassment here in the authors telling of this genealogy. There's no embarrassment whatsoever that Nahor is marrying Nelka, who's his niece. And then we find out, we're going to find out in chapter 20 of Genesis that Abram married his sister. What's his half sister? They have the same father, different mother. This is told with no embarrassment whatsoever. Okay. I think this is evidence of the authenticity of the history of the book of Genesis. If you're writing fiction, you don't tell stories about your patriarchs that are out of, completely out of step with more

of what seemed to be morality in the day. Okay. All right. Yikes. That took way longer than it should have taken. All right. So we're not going to get anywhere near into the story of Abraham here. I can just briefly mention a couple of things here at the outset of chapter 12. Okay. Remember, again, there's this emphasis on somebody trying to make a name for themselves and it going wrong. Here's the thing though. The Hebrew word Shen is the Hebrew word for name. God has chosen the name tribe as his elect or favored people. See, the idea seems to be that if you try to make a name for yourself, it's all going to go wrong. It's going to end in catastrophe. You seek fame, seek popularity, seek notoriety, try to make a name for yourself. It's going to blow up in your face. But if God gives you a name, okay, and the tribe that he chooses, the people he chooses are

called the Namites, Shemite, but it gets even stranger. Watch this. This is chapter 12 verse one. Put that up there. Here we go. Now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred in your father's house to the land that I will show you and I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you'll be a blessing. See, human beings want to make a name for themselves, selfish reasons. When God gives you a great name, it's so that you'll be a blessing. I'm going to make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you. I will curse and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abraham went as the Lord had told him and went with him. He might be saying, why is his name Abraham? My father's Abraham. We'll get

to that later on. God makes his name even better. Do you have that document you could put up there? I don't know how well you can see that. There we go. That's a little bit better and I don't have a highlighter, but can you point your mouse on Ur, which is just the right of the rope figure there? There it is. That seems to be where the story starts. Right here, this is modern day Iraq. This is where Abraham's family is from, or at least where they were living when they heard the call of God, to come out from essentially Iraq and then go over to the mess. See, Ken, the root that you would think they would take it would be right here, something like that across this figure. But instantly go way up north, way, way up north into what is today Syria. And there, Abraham's father decides he doesn't want to go anymore. He doesn't want to go to the

land of Canaan. He doesn't want to follow the call of God all the way to the land that he's been called to. He stops halfway. It's up to Abraham now or Abraham to go all the way to the calling. And I just want to say real quick, this is not just Abraham's story. This is our story. It's our story. God calls us and some people walk with us along that calling. But sometimes they only go with you halfway. But you can't let their call, their decision to stop you. Follow the call of God all the way, even if a family member, even if a father or mother says this as far as I'm going, go where God called you to go. Do what God called you to do. Don't do halfway. And this is true, by the way, for everybody. You grow up in the house of God unless you have your own calling, unless you follow God's calling on your own, not

your parents calling, your calling, unless you do this yourself. You're just going to remain an idolater for the rest of your life, buying into the American vision, buying into the modern vision of what's right, what's good, what's a successful life. You're just going to grow up and be a church idolater. You're in the right place. You're in a good place, but you're not following call of God yourself. You have to. Everybody has to have their own lock with God, everybody. You're not going to. You're not going to go where God wants you to go if you're depending on your father or your mother's calling. All right. Abraham took this journey by foot. Long, long journey. Go to the next site if you would. And then he increased just a little bit. Okay. He's still a couple of thousands of miles with his feet. It's way up here up north, up around where Damascus is. And then he's going to cut left or west

and come all the way down. Little bit further up can stop right there. He's going to stop and check him. He's going to build an altar right there. It's a small, long journey by car or by plane. He walks it and then go all the way south. By our airs, Jerusalem up there, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea right there. He's going to stop at Hebron at one point. He goes to the left, but in fact, Hebron is where his wife, Sarah, is going to die. And way down here in this region of our, he's going to, he's going to run into coughs like we'd be Egyptians with the Pharaoh. And we'll get into that a little bit next week. It was a long, long journey following the call of God. And when he died, the book of Hebrew says he died not having received the promise that he was promised, but died in the day. But to his dying breath, he followed the call

of God. Why? Because he sought, the scripture says, a city that has foundations whose builder and maker was not man, it was God. Amen. Father, in the name of Jesus, we pray for your people that they would grow in their love for your word. And follow your call like Abraham did long ago. The sons of Abraham, the children of Abraham are those who follow the call of God. I pray that we would take no half measures that we wouldn't rely on anyone else's walk with God, but we would have our own. In the name of Jesus, in the lovely name of Jesus, we pray, Amen. Lord bless you all.