The Early Chapters of Genesis.

W. Kelly.

(Bible Treasury Volumes N1 & 2, 1896-1898, [36 sections].)

GENESIS 10: 1.

This comprehensive, instructive, and interesting chapter, followed by Gen. 11: 1-9 which has its own special importance, is devoted to a description of a new element among mankind, its various nations divided in their lands, every one after his tongue. Before the deluge no such distinctions subsisted. Immense as the population might be, they were not thus associated any more than marked off one from another. Jehovah took care that the line of Seth should be guarded for His ways then, and for His purposes in the future. There were moral differences between Cain and his descendants from early days; and an awful form of creature lawlessness arose before God executed judgment on all flesh in an earth corrupt before Him, and filled with violence. But there was no government on the one hand yet established by God, nor was there any division into nations, nor yet diversity of language.

After the flood God had introduced the principle of government, committing the charge into the hands of men. As the next fact of the widest moment for the earth, the origin of the nations which were about to play their part is made known to us; and this with a special view to His choice of a people for Himself, and separated to Himself. Even it is seen first tried and failing through sin, as Adam had been in the world before the flood. Of this the O.T. is the ample witness and the awful proof, before His grace intervenes in the Second man and the Messiah of Israel to deliver both man and Israel, as He will the church and the universe, on the ground of divine righteousness and ever enduring mercy to the praise of Himself and the Lamb.

The fact is before all eyes. Nothing exists more notorious in ordinary and universal knowledge (save perhaps for the most isolated of savages) than the many races and tongues and peoples of mankind, each having its own separate bond of union. Yet how this fact began, so pregnant in history, not one of these nations can tell; nor do the most ancient — one does not ask of formal records, but — of incidental monuments go far enough back to explain. Yet here it is written with simple and calm dignity by the instrument God chose for the purpose. It was easy for Him, Who knew all from before the beginning, to make known distinctly and accurately what it seemed good in His eyes to reveal to His people. This He has done in the short compass of a single chapter, Gen. 10, with His moral ground for so separating mankind in the first paragraph of the following chapter. We shall find there an adequate, not to say absolutely necessary reason for His intervention at once for His own glory and on behalf of guilty man; unless we assume that He Who but recently instituted responsible government in man's hand was indifferent to a rebellion as slighting to Himself as ruinous to man. This drew out from Him a dealing equally simple and effectual, which issued in the scattering of man over the earth according to God's will, but in separate nationalities to the frustration of man's will against God.

As Israel then was to be His earthly people, God made known in a brief survey the sources of all the nations here below, having provided, laid down, and committed to man government in its root principle. None of these facts applies to the antediluvian earth, where all consisted of a vast indiscriminate population of one tongue and under no restraint of government, as it ended in all but universal lawlessness and a judgment that spared a family of only eight persons, including its head. He Who alone could reveal the primeval state when the first man and woman were made, and ushered then into an unstained earth, now deigned to tell the story of how nationalities began with their miraculously started distinct languages, spreading over different lands according to their families. His pleasure was both to bring to nought man's union for a name of pride and to set Israel in the most central spot, not more for righteous government than for shedding on all the earth the knowledge of Jehovah and His glory. So says Deut. 32: 8: "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the children of Adam, He set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel." The people were redeemed first, then the land: all in view of Messiah and His redemption and reign in manifest glory, when they shall bow in faith who are still unbelieving, and living water issuing from the house eastward shall heal the Dead sea and gird the globe with blessing. See Ezek. 47, and Joel 3: 18; and Zech. 14: 8, 9 adds that half goes westward: the sign doubtless of universal blessing from the divine centre in that day.

The first chapter of Genesis presents the origin of the world, especially of the earth, sea and land, and its inhabitants, above all of man himself its head and God's representative; then in Gen. 2 the special relations of man with God, with the lower creaturehood, and with woman his counterpart, which necessitates for completeness and accuracy the special divine name of "Jehovah" Elohim. The slighting of these revelations exposes to Atheism or a powerless Theism. Science cannot penetrate the secrets of the beginnings by the confession even of one so self-confident and sceptical as J. S. Mill (in his Logic). The domain of science is either purely abstract or applied to what is already created; but how it came to be is outside its ken. Here in Gen. 10 we are given to survey a fact of immense importance to the government of the earth. The first rise of families into separate nations and tongues, history has utterly failed to indicate, as science fails, in the material realm.

Revelation, as it kept intact two chronological lines in Gen. 5, here too supplies the manifest and invaluable light of God with a special view to His earthly people, followed by the moral cause laid before us in Gen. 11 which brings in (as it ought) the name of Jehovah throughout its earlier paragraph; whereas it only appears exceptionally, though for good reason, in Gen. 10: 9. All the lessons and monumental records of all the earth combined are not to be compared for certainty or comprehensiveness with this sacred ethnography, grounded on genealogy, and linked with geography. God gave it by Moses as He alone could. Facts of great weight as to the antediluvians are related in Gen. 4, and, what to some may seem strange, in the family of Cain with religion but without faith. Therein arose city life, arts, and sciences, literary verse, among men who forgot the fall, ignored sin and the Saviour, and strove to embellish the earth into a worldly paradise. As the unity of the race was absolute at the beginning, so it was virtually in Noah after the deluge. The outward progress of mankind must have been all the greater because of their longevity. Whatever it was, the sons of Noah possessed all on their new start. No theory is more fallacious than the pretended ages of stone, bronze, and iron. Men, in their wanderings into rude forest life or other forms of savagery, fell into the circumstances of such facts, which still exist under similar conditions: to generalise them, as successive periods through which all passed, is mere myth, not history.

"And these [are the] generations of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; and sons were born to them after the flood" (Gen. 10: 1). This is the true place for such a statement given after Noah's fall and its remarkable consequences; just as the genealogy of Adam's sons followed in Gen. 5 after his sin and that of Cain led to the revealed state of the world before the flood. Noah lived on for centuries after, but is mentioned no more in the history, as Adam disappears after his sin, with Cain's crime leading to Seth given instead of Abel. One Spirit forms the narrative beyond the wisdom of Moses, and in total disproof of incoherent fragments pieced together, least of all at an epoch when all was crumbling to ruin among the chosen people. It was well ordered that none of Noah's sons had children till they emerged from the ark. So Adam became a father only after the fall and expulsion from paradise.

GENESIS 10: 2.

It will be noticed that the order of Noah's sons is now changed. Japheth has the first place, when we come to genealogic survey; and this is even explained when we arrive at the line of Shem (ver. 21), who for spiritual reasons had been uniformly set in that place of honour hitherto, even Ham being other wise put before Japheth. That many Jews, followed by others, should overlook the spirit of scripture, in their zeal for the progenitor of the chosen people, is easily understood; but some weighed the word with more care and less prejudice. So Nachmanides remarks that the enumeration begins with Yapheth, because he is the firstborn. It proceeds with Cham, although the youngest, and reserves Shem to the last, because the narrator wishes to enlarge on the history of his descendants. Rashi also, though admitting the doubtfulness of the phrase, decides similarly from comparing other scriptures:- "From the words of the text I do not clearly know whether the elder applies to Shem or Japheth. But as subsequently we are informed that Shem was one hundred years old and begat Arpachshad two years after the deluge (Gen. 11: 10), it follows that Yapheth was the elder. For Noach was five hundred years old when he began to have children, and the deluge took place in the six hundredth year of his age. His eldest son must consequently have been one hundred years old at the time of the deluge; whereas we are expressly informed that Shem did not arrive at that age till two years after the deluge."

We next come to the family of the firstborn. "Sons of Japheth: Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras" (ver. 2).

Here is presented the distinct statement of what scholars have regarded as the greatest triumph of modern research in comparative philology. The Asiatic Society instituted in 1784 at Calcutta gave the great impulse, Sir W. Jones declaring that "no philologer could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family." Long after this scholars were still incredulous, clinging to the heathen notion of aboriginal races with their respective tongues, modified by the thought of a Hebrew primaeval source. Hence, in his prejudice for the honour of Greek and Latin, so cultivated and able a person as the late Professor Dugald Stewart (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, iii. 100-137) denied the reality of Sanskrit as a tongue of the past! and imputed its forgery! to unprincipled Brahmans whom he supposed to have founded it on the model of the old classic languages to deceive the world. F. Schlegel however, though more a genius than a scholar, had scanned the secret early in the century when he gave the name Indo-Germanic to the Aryan tongues of ancient Persia (the Zend), Greece, Italy, and Germany. He might have included quite as surely Celtic, Scandinavian, and Sclavonian under the wider generalisation of Indo-European. They were the tongues of the Japhetic or, as moderns speak, the Aryan families. It was the task of Franz Bopp to set the matter on a sound basis of proof, not only in his essay of 1816 and others, but in his Comparative Grammar of 1833-1852. Others, as Eugène Burnouf in France and Max. Müller in this country, have contributed not a little since.

Now if the Mosaic account had been given its just place, the fact would have been known all through, which is far more simple and to the believer more authoritative than inferences ever so plain and sure drawn from the comparison of these many languages. For it became evident that Sanskrit, old as it may be, is no more the parent of these tongues than Greek, but that they were all sisters, derived from a language earlier than any of them. Thus the tongues were seen to have a family relationship no less than the races of mankind; and phonetic changes follow according to observed principle instead of the more obvious derivatory resemblance. That they had (as Sanskrit proved) in the east a common source was for the learned a recent discovery. But in our verse we are told authoritatively that Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras were sons of Japheth. Thus were they all linked together, dialectically distinct, but of common origin. Nor is it difficult to distinguish those races in general.

Thus Gomer embraces the Cimbri, or the more modern Kelts, who appear to have come first of the Aryan family to Europe from their early seat in the north of India. At one time they had a considerable hold on northern Italy, as well as Spain, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and south of the Danube; but Belgium, Britain, Gaul, were long their own; and even now the Welsh and the Breton dialects (and till recently the Cornish) attest the fact, as also the closely related Erse, Gaelic, and Manx. It was a body of marauders from Gaul, chiefly the three tribes of Tectosages, Tolistobogii, and Trocmi, who overran Asia Minor and gave their name to Galatia where they settled: a consideration not without considerable interest to those who weigh the Epistle addressed to them by the apostle Paul. They seem to have migrated to Asia Minor on their route to Europe, before this final return and settlement for some in that quarter.

Next, Magog (cf. Ezek. 38: 2) quite as certainly is identified with the land we call Russia (a name derived from the river Volga, called Greek  Ῥᾶ, as  Ῥῶς is their Greek title). To these must add Meshech and Tubal, races long known as Moschi and Tibareni: these are the Muskai and the Tuplai of the Assyrian inscriptions, who find their representatives in Moscow and Tobolsk. This is the Sclavonian branch.

Madai again is the unchanged name for the Medes and their country, with whom was the Persian race or Parsec, though Elam was Shemitic. Even to this day, the Persian tongue, though debased by Arabic importations, is essentially Aryan, as the older language, the Zend, was exclusively, and of course closely akin to Sanskrit.

Javan also is the proper Hebrew for Greece, as in Daniel 8 where we hear of the Medes and Persians. The less may be said as here no question can be. Details will follow in due course which confirm the general fact.

There remains but Tiras, which from the likeness of the name has been generally believed to mean the representative of the Thracians. Though they lacked cohesion and persevering purpose and so made little mark politically, it is well to remember that Herodotus set them next to the Indians as the most considerable nation in his day. The absence of the vowel "i" may be accounted for by its subscription in the Greek term. Still the question cannot be said to be settled, like all the others which precede.

The learning of the Greek was at fault at least as much as the tradition of the Jew. Scripture had not been weighed or trusted by either. And when the discovery of Sanskrit came, the issue was so startling that the erudite at first recoiled from that which not only brought in larger views, but shook to its foundations much they had been building up. The method of derivation alone had been trusted; whereas the newly ascertained facts pointed to parallel descents from a common parent in at least six great lines with their modern offspring. But this so revolutionised the entire groundwork as to show that erudition had been on a false scent, especially as to the inflexions and the conjugations of tongues ever so distant locally, which indicate affinity far more surely and thoroughly than isolated words. K. O. Müller was one of the first seriously to own the old position embarrassing; and G. Hermann before him had written sarcastically of those who sought light from "a sort of aurora borealis, reflecting the gleams of eastern illumination, and who, betaking themselves to the Brahmans and Ulphilas, endeavoured to explain Greek and Latin by the help of languages which they only half understood." K. A. Lobeck carried on the war in his celebrated works, Aglaophamus (1829), Paralipomena (1837) and Pathologia (1843), as Ellendt did in the Preface to his Lex. Sophocl. (1835). Yet the truth remains that God marks certain families of language in the great dispersion, and that with their specified differences they give sure evidence of a common kindred. The same grammatical framework belongs to them; and it differs totally too from that of the Shemitic tongues; as the varied Turanian group differs in this from them both.

The Jews, as is known, assign to Cush (translated Ethiopia ordinarily) not only his African seat but the opposite coast of Arabia and the southern shore of Asia generally into India. And this is well founded. But Arabia received also a large Shemitic population which gave character to their language; and this as we shall see not only from Joktan, Eber's son, but from Jokshan, Abraham's son by Keturah, and from Ishmael's twelve sons, with some of Esau's descendants. Even Homer (Od. ii. 23, 24) speaks of Ethiopians as divided into two parts, the most distant of men, some at the setting sun, and some at the rising. It was a Turanian race, which included the Turks, but not the Armenians who were rightly given to Japheth. But the Jews seem never to have realised the fact that the ancient Persian tongue (Zend) and that of northern and central India (Sanskrit) yield the fullest indication of Japhetic origin.

GENESIS 10: 3.

Of Japheth's sons two only have their descendants specified, Gomer the head of the Kelts, and Javan, from whom came the Hellenic-Italian races.

"And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah" (ver. 3).

Jeremiah (Jer. 51: 27) introduces Ashkenaz as one of three kingdoms set apart and called together with Ararat and Minni against Babylon, when the kings of the Medes also played their decisive part. There seems no sound reason to doubt that as Ararat and Minni were parts of Armenia, here as elsewhere falling under Togarmah, so Ashkenaz and Riphath occupied the peninsula of Asia Minor at that time and took their place with Cyrus the leader of these races during that notable struggle. But this in no way weakens the general fact that Gomer pushed westward and into Europe, allowing that at least Togarmah settled in Armenia.* For this is as sure as any fact of history; and scripture is decisive as to it, not only in the past, but for the future.

*It is generally accepted that Armenia is Har-minni," the mountains of Minni," though Ararat and Minni were distinct localities. Togarmah, being the name of the race, included all the land.

For instance, Ezek. 38 beyond doubt unveils the judgment of Russia at the end of this age, and lets us see its supporters compelled to follow and share the general ruin. Among those of the north are Gomer and all his hordes, and the house of Togarmah from the uttermost north and all his, as well as the southern races of Persia, Cush, and Phut under the same influence.

It is quite unfounded to pretend that this vast confederacy of the nations (or its overwhelming destruction) applies to any action under the Seleucidae, any more than the then state of the Jews in the land agrees. For it is clear that Israel previously has been brought back from the sword, gathered out of many peoples, and that they are dwelling in safety, though in a land of unwalled villages, having neither bars nor gates. Again, the position is made all the plainer by taking into account the two preceding chapters, Jer. 36 and Jer. 37. The prophet in the first declares that Jehovah will call them from among the nations, and gather them out of all the countries, and bring them into their own land. This restoration is to have a national completeness and a holy character beyond all precedent. "And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean; from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols will I cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you, and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and keep mine, ordinances, and ye shall do them. So ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God."

This new and mighty work of divine grace for Israel is clearly seen to be confirmed symbolically in the next: Jer. 37, where we see the valley of dry bones caused to live and stand up, an exceeding great army; then, under the two sticks made one in Jehovah's hand, the old rent of the divided tribes completely healed, and one nation made on the mountains of Israel with one king to them, as has never been since the days of Rehoboam. "And they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all. And they shall not any more defile themselves with their idols, or with their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions; and I will save them out of all their dwelling-places wherein they have sinned; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. And David my servant shall be king over them; and they all shall have one shepherd; and they shall walk in my ordinances, and keep my statutes and do them." It is a bright and blessed prediction awaiting its fulfilment. In these circumstances will Gog lead his vassal hordes to perish signally on the mountains of Israel, and a fire shall also be sent on Magog and those that dwell at ease in the isles; and they shall know Who it is that thus judges them in the day that all Israel shall be gathered out of the nations into their own land, none to be left any more there.

The Rabbins have it that Ashkenaz subsequently migrated into that part of Europe which was afterward called Germany. And a learned German who has devoted much research to the details of this chapter comes to the same conclusion. But the evidence is far from being clear, though all agree that the Teutons are Japhetic and of Gomer. Herodotus indeed (i. 125) tells us of the Germanioi. as with other tribes an agricultural class, not pastoral like several, and distinct from the princely and noble, into which the ancient Persians were divided. It is probable that they were at any rate connected with Carmania, the modern Kirman, as Mr. W. S. Vaux suggests; so Agatharcides (Mar. Erythr. 27, Hudson) and Strabo (xiv. 723) use the name of Germania, for what Diodorus (xviii. 6) calls Carmania. But it seems only a curious coincidence. Besides, of old, "Germans" was not the name the Teutonic family gave themselves, but from without. Far less is the ground for applying Riphath to Great Britain as some have done, or to the Rhipaean mountains (in all probability a geographical dream of the ancient Greeks), though here again the rationalist coalesces with the Jewish doctors and labours to find in the Carpathian range a temporary seat for the Kelts or Gaels. But there is no good reason for doubting that those we call Germans were of Gomer, no less than the Kelts,

GENESIS 10: 4.

We have now to offer such explanation as we can on another branch of the Japhetic race. It may be premised that they come next after Madai. Of this last we have no details; only indeed of Gomer's sons, as now of Javan's, the. Keltic and the Italo-Hellenic, families respectively.

It has been already shown briefly on ver. 2 that Javan represents Greece. Ionia however, or Ionis, answers most nearly to the Hebrew name, a narrow district in Asia Minor, of which Greek colonies are said to have possessed themselves more than a thousand years B.C., some time after the Dorian conquest of Peloponnesus, and even after their advance toward Attica (Müller's Dorians, ii. 511, Tufnell and Lewis' Tr. 1830). Not only was Ionia remarkable for its commercial prosperity, but for excellence in art and poetry, in history and philosophy, before the mother-country attained any eminence in these pursuits (Smith's Dict. of Gr. and R. Geography, ii. 61, col. 1). Ezekiel 27: 13 speaks of Javan among the traffickers with Tyre: only we must distinguish from it Javan of Uzal in ver. 19, which seems to mean the capital town of Yemen or Arabia Felix. But those who migrated here and elsewhere were the race who long before were in Attica and in part of the Peloponnesus. Of course none can wonder at varied forms of mythical genealogy; but the fact is certain of the early predominance of the Ionian name, as Moses here gives it, for a general description of Greece (Thirlwall's Hist. i. 134). In fact Greece is so designated from Gen. 10 to Zech. 9. Homer in Il. xiii. 685, Aeschylus, in Pers. 176, 568, 948 and Suppl. 72, employ a word that approximates to the Hebrew term.

"And the sons of Javan, Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim" (ver. 4)*

* Dathe renders the verse, "Graecorum coloniae sunt Elis, Tartessus, Italia et Dodanaei," seen since this paper was written.

As Javan unquestionably answers to the Greeks in general and is represented in the Ionian race particularly, it is acknowledged that Elishah also belongs to that people. Ezekiel 27: 7 helps us to the conclusion that the isles or maritime parts pertained to his lot. Josephus applied the name to the Aeolians, as others to Hellas (which was adopted by J. D. Michaelis, Spicil. i. 79). But Bochart preferred the Peloponnesus as an extension of Elis. The commerce with Tyre points to the islands as well as to the Morea.*

* We may compare with this what the late Bp. of St. David's gives as a note to his Hist. of Greece, i. 40. "Welcker, Ueber eine Kretische Kolonie in Theben, p. 30, observes that Πελασγοὶ or Πελάγονες (for Πέλαγοι), signifying the illustrious, is most probably only another form of  Ἕλλοπες and Πέλοψ; and, having illustrated his proposition by a number of examples, concludes with the remark: 'Hence it appears that the forms, Ἕλος,  Ἕλλος,  Ἕλλην,  Ἕλαξ,  Ἕλακος or  Ἕλαγος (in Πελάγων, as well as in Σέλαγος, in Crete Σάλαγος, Paus. viii. 4, 8.) and have all one origin.'" The Hebrew name corresponding is more certainly Elishah, the eldest of Javan's sons, as we may add. Indeed Αἰολις, Αἰολεύς, κ. τ. λ. would seem to be but another class or form of the same fruitful stock; which, like the foregoing, Greek imagination personified, and developed into a variety of poetic myths. In scripture we have nothing but the simple and solid truth, as far as it fell in with the divine design to give it, in carrying out His plans for the earth, of which Israel will ever be found to be the centre, save in the abnormal state when through their apostasy they became Lo-Ammi as they are still.

Tarshish follows; and here it appears that we need not doubt an original settlement on the south shore of Spain, where also the Phoenicians later had factories, and whence by their ships they brought to Tyre silver, iron, tin, and lead, as Ezek. 27: 12 informs us. The ships of Tarshish were the most famous for merchandise in ancient times. Ps. 72: 10 is of itself sufficient to indicate a considerable stretch of country, not merely the well-known city of Tartessus at the mouth of the Baetis (or Guadalquiver). There is no valid ground to doubt that this was the region to which Javan's second son gave the name. There may have been another place so called in the south east or Indian ocean, to which Solomon's ships sailed from Ezion-Geber (cf. 1 Kings 9: 26, 2 Chron. 9: 21). For we have no ground to suppose the route round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope was then known; nor, if it were, could the south of Spain supply ivory, and asses, and peacocks, which point rather to India or Ceylon. Tarsus in Cilicia, which Josephus conjectured, in no way meets what is said in the references of scripture.

There is no difficulty as to Kittim, which is a term beyond controversy applied to two of the peninsulas of Europe, first Greece [or Macedon], then Rome or Italy. So the writer of Maccabees speaks of Greece (chaps. i. 1, viii. 5); as Dan. 11: 30 is decisive as to Rome. So in the prophecy of Balaam (Num. 24: 24) we learn of a fleet from the west afflicting Asshur, when all man's power comes to destruction. In Jer. 3: 10 and Ezek. 28: 6 we hear of the "isles" or sea-coasts of Kittim; which can hardly mean Cyprus, as understood Josephus and many since his day, though Gesenius approved. He allows however that a wider signification is called for as in not a few Scriptures here cited.

Dodanim remains, which some, from the similarity of sound it seems, would connect with the famous Dodona in Epirus; but the celebrity of an ancient oracle would scarcely give warrant for a place in this chapter. There is another reading which appears in 1 Chron. 1: 7, and Rhodians have been thought to correspond with it. The Sept. has the same people for Dedan in Ezek. 27: 15, which is assuredly an error. The learned Bochart suggests the Rhone, at whose mouth was an ancient Greek colony and emporium. More than one Targum understood the common reading of the Dardans; and Gesenius inclines to this view in his Monumenta Phoen. 432 and Thes. LL. Heb. and Ch. 1266. It was a branch of the widely spread Pelasgic stock. Curiously enough Strabo (vii.) preserves a fragment of Hesiod, of Dodona as a seat of the Pelasgians. See also Hes. Goettl, ed, alt. 295,

GENESIS 10: 5.

The general summary of the Japhetic distribution is given in the closing verse 5: "From these were separated the isles (or, maritime districts) of the nations in their lands, each (man) after his tongue, after their families, in their nations."

Of the seven sons of Japheth, we have the descendants of but two, Gomer and Javan; from Gomer, three, and from Javan, four; seven only specified of the second generation, as of the first. That Magog and Madai had sons cannot be doubted, for we hear of their posterity to the latest times as well as of Tubal and Meshech; and as little can we doubt of Tiras. But it did not here fall within the design to give details of more. The prophets speak of others who sprung from these early forefathers to figure in the latter day. It is clear also that the order of time is not in question here; for in the following chapter difference of tongues is shown to have been imposed suddenly by a divine act of judgment, only after the project of building a city and tower, and thus making themselves a name. Our chapter therefore anticipates what is historically set out in what follows, and so speaks of the sons of Japhet distributing their seats of settlement, as it does of the Hamite race and the Shemitic in their respective places. On the other hand the "dividing" of the earth in the days of Peleg (chap. 10: 25) should be distinguished. Dispersion preceded: a different term is employed in the Hebrew, as there ought to be in the translation. The isles are said here to be "separated," as the earth there is "divided." The orderly partition followed the confused dispersion.

Hence in Deut. 32: 8 we read,

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,

When He separated the sons of Adam,

He set the bounds of the peoples

According to the number of the sons of Israel.

Israel is thus declared to be His earthly centre, though as yet we see not His glorious plan, which the prophets fully disclose. Hitherto no more appears than a passing but instructive shadow under David and Solomon, even these bringing in seeds of ruin, with occasional glimpses of better things in such as Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah, but as a whole gradual yet sure downfall till "there was no remedy," and the chosen people were by reason of their apostasy branded as Lo-ammi, Not-My-people. And so they are from the Babylonish captivity to this day. A remnant of Judah was according to prophecy restored to the land by Cyrus; and a further test of the first man followed, no longer under the failing sons of David, but in the presentation to them of Messiah Himself, the Righteous Servant. But those who had wholly broken down in violating God's law and even in persistent departure after false gods to their shame by the renunciation of one Jehovah, their only true God, proved themselves yet more inexcusably His enemies and the slaves of Satan by rejecting His anointed, though according to flesh of Israel — of Judah — He was, Who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen. But Him they crucified in blind hostile unbelief by the hand of lawless men, and therefore are they dispersed to the ends of the earth. Beauty and Bands are severally both cut asunder.

But the cross of Christ in the wondrous wisdom of God is made His basis for the counsels of His grace, and the display of His righteousness, and the bringing out of His heavenly purpose, the hidden mystery or secret concerning Christ and concerning the church. For He is now in glory made Head, not merely over Israel or even all nations too, but over the universe, expressly over all things that are in the heavens and that are on the earth; and the church is united to Him as the Head of that one body which is soon to share His heavenly and universal glory. Yet shall the Jews, purged by disciplinary judgments, be brought to His feet, and see Him as their Deliverer Whom once they pierced, and all Israel be saved in God's mercy, to make good His plans, laid down from the first, accomplished at the last, to bless all the families of the earth, and fill it with the glory of Jehovah, and with the knowledge of it and of Him, as the waters cover the sea. So little is this chapter to be counted dry or unedifying; for barren as it may seem now, what fruit of righteousness shall be in that day through Jesus Christ unto God's glory and praise!

At present God is working in the gospel, and in the church, but it is for His heavenly purpose in Christ, Whose members suffer with Him and wait for Him. The sole dispensation now as to the kingdom is of the heavens in its mysterious form, While the earth-rejected King sits at God's right hand on high. He must come and appear. in glory to bring in the manifested kingdom, which alone the prophets predicted, when the daughter of Jerusalem shall have the first dominion here below, as Micah declared. Then, when the heavenly counsels have been completed, shall Jehovah make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: not according to the former Levitical one which they broke; but He will put His law in their inwards and write it in their heart, and He be their God, and they His people. Then, and not till then, shall Jerusalem be the throne of Jehovah; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of Jehovah, to Jerusalem; and they shall no more walk after the stubbornness of their evil heart. Instead of taking out of the nations a people for His name, as God is doing now by the gospel and in the church, the day will have come to destroy in the mountain of His holiness the face of the veil which veileth all the peoples, and the covering that is spread over all the nations. For Jehovah of hosts shall reign on mount Zion and in Jerusalem and before His ancients in glory: a state in strong and manifest contrast with all that goes on now, whether we think of God or man, of heaven or earth.

The word usually rendered "isles" not only admits of an application to coast-lands also (as to the Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Scandinavian peninsulas), but to settlements or habitations wider still, as Gesenius contends with ample consent of the more learned modern Jews; and such is the version of de Sola, Lindenthal, and Raphall in this verse. Again, the division is marked by four particulars: their lands, the tongue spoken, their family descents, and the resulting nation.

We shall see from Gen. 11 how little man's will had to do with the distribution. Here we have simply but clearly the fact. It was quite a new thing on earth, not only unprecedented before the deluge, but the very opposite was man's purpose after it; so that the replenishing of the earth could not but seem distant indeed, however fruitful Noah's sons might be. But the God of creation is the God of providence, and He knows how to give effect to His word; and here we have Europe, though not Europe only, the destined scene for the Japhetic line, of all the earth the most varied in contour, the fullest of coast-line as being the most deeply indented, and so the most accessible through its inland seas, and as well the most open to foreign connection. It was exactly suitable for him who was to be enlarged in his activity beyond his brethren. What a contrast with Africa or even Asia, and their more elevated highlands and extensive plateaus!

Yet contrary to this common purpose each country was allotted to its respective race, and in all this startlingly new fact of lands partitioned by families constituting nations, and distinguished by its tongue appears, as we have seen, the line of Japhet, which mainly and in due time settled in Europe. The remembrance of the deluge would not dispose men to separate. But God meant it to be, and so it was: one race of Adam, but with all the variety into which the several stocks were to divide and replenish the earth. And the immediate occasion was the opposing determination of man, and the practical end for which they united, as the history relates afterward, along with the simple and effectual way in which God confounded their vain and selfish purpose and accomplished His own.

Nor was the earth itself externally out of harmony with God's mind about man, but adjusted in general to his use who was to eat bread in the sweat of his face, and especially to the new condition, fitted to their separate life as nations with mountain barriers and river boundaries, till man's enterprise made even the seas the ready means of intercourse, commerce, and conquest.

Thus also the principle of government, which God laid on Noah and his sons, was to prove its great practical value, as its control could now be brought to bear far more readily when men were distinguished in their nations. If it was a fresh start for the race, it was not under one man, Adam. The post-diluvian earth began with three sons of Noah, and their three wives, besides Noah and his wife, all of them inheriting whatever was known and learnt in the long era before the deluge. Agriculture and live stocking were long familiar, city as well as tent life had begun, forging of copper and iron for instruments of every sort, with musical instruments for wind and hand, and metrical composition, from very early days. Since the flood God had entrusted to man's hand the responsibility of the civil sword (Gen. 9: 6), the root of government in restraint of human violence which includes the lesser rights in the greatest; and this well suited to the national bond of each independent nation which was now commencing. Families of course had been before in the midst of an undivided race. Henceforth in the new state of things they take their place in their lands by the lesser relation of their nations, each welded together by that tongue which severed him from others of different descent and locality, with their own associations and their independent interests and aims.

The importance, as well as the permanence, of this new condition of humanity will be felt all the more by comparing the prophecies of the O.T. and the Revelation of the New. In the former may be identified the descendants of the Japhetic line as well as those to follow of Ham and Shem. In the others, when the heavenly saints are transferred to their proper home on high, the question of the earth is raised and we hear of every tribe and tongue and people and nation, out of which the Lamb purchased saints to God by His blood, and the ensuing conflict for the inheritance here below. For Christ, the Son, is alone Heir of all things, and the day hastens when His rights shall be asserted with indisputable power.

GENESIS 10: 6.

The Holy Spirit now brings before us in a general way the descendants of Ham or Chain. As there seems prophetic significance in the name of Japheth ("may he spread"), and it was expressly claimed for Noah in Gen. 5: 29, there appears to be also in that of his younger son, which means "warm" or hot, and so "dark" or black.

"And the sons of Ham, Cush and Mizraim and Phut and Canaan" (ver. 6).

The prominent fact that strikes one here is that this is the branch of mankind which after the deluge distinguished itself by the earliest and most vigorous civilization; and this not in an isolated instance, but alike in Asia and in Africa. Scripture attests the truth; and even rationalism, though ever hostile, cannot dispute it. But along with material progress another characteristic is no less marked: the degradation of the race, their fall into ways and habits of savagery. Phut illustrates this as distinctly as Cush and Mizraim and Canaan showed themselves in different respects pioneers of earthly progress.

However opposite, both are effects of departure from God. In an unfallen earth and the innocence of man, there was room for neither the savage nor the civilised state. No dream of unbelieving poets is more remote from the truth than the pictures they have drawn of early human beings unable as yet to converse, and subsisting on acorns, wild fruits, edible roots scooped with difficulty out of the reluctant earth; at length imitating the birds, or rising from ejaculations, to express wants and feelings. Then in the course of time, instead of wandering after precarious food, some conceive the idea of collecting seeds, and cultivating their growth in patches cleared from the forest or brushwood; others, again, betake themselves to the chace, and so provide food and clothing for themselves, and begin also to barter with those that tilled the earth, who bethought them too of rearing the animals capable of domestication in order to their supply or exchange. Later in time rude huts and ruder rafts or canoes were made for land and water and with the long awaited social life villages and towns would arise and give birth to the useful arts in their variety, and to the unlimited refinements of life.

We have already seen how the inspired history contradicts this fanciful scheme. In God's account of man sinless in the paradise of Eden we see our first parents surrounded by every good thing, endowed with mind and moral feelings as well as speech, with a given sphere for activity, and placed under a defined responsibility to the only true God Whose presence and intercourse they enjoyed, and Who thus blessed them whom He tried as bound to obedience under penalty of death. It was a state of natural blessings enjoyed with thanksgiving to Him Who gave them. Alas! they disobeyed Jehovah Elohim, and were expelled from their earthly paradise, but not without a fresh revelation suited in God's mercy to their fallen condition, and directing their hearts to a Deliverer. He from the nature of the case could not but be divine, yet One Who in some wondrous way must be human also, to suffer indeed but to triumph over the mighty and subtle foe — the bruised Seed of woman to bruise the Serpent's head. Alone, with this hope did Jehovah Elohim clothe them with coats of skin — with that which had its origin in death: a thing suggestive, especially in connection with the revelation then given, of grave but comforting assurance to guilty man, in lieu of a merely natural device in vain adopted to cover their nakedness.

But it is equally sure, according to scripture, that the arts of civilisation began and were developed in that family which rejected God's revelation for nature; which resented His disapproval and vented hatred on the believing brother, as righteous as Cain was not; and which in despair and defiance betook themselves out of a bad conscience and its fears to civic life in its cradle, and sought to make, if not a paradise, a substitute for it in the elegant arts and letters that embellish society. This is surely civilisation in the germ; and we see it in Cain's line from the earliest age ever expanding, and recounted for our serious thought in Genesis 4. To impute its rise or progress to revelation is what none could do who reads believingly.

It is no less plain that Ham and his sons are as marked after the deluge by their progress in civilisation, as by the degeneracy into barbarism. To this, war would naturally expose the sufferers from superior power, fleeing into distant lands and forgetting at length what had once been familiar in the new sphere where they sought liberty.

Of Ham's sons Cush has the first place. According to scripture that stock settled in lands the most remote. There is without doubt an Asiatic as well as an African Cush. Gen. 2: 13 presents its difficulty, but it would seem to be anticipative like Havilah and Assyria; for it is certain that till the flood there was no actual settlement of lands in their nations. But we know from our chapter that a notable departure was first taken by one of the Cushite descent to possess himself of power by usurpation, and this not in Africa but in the plain of Shinar, of which there are details to follow. It was certainly not after their arrival in Africa that this ambitious movement took place, but early in that day of change; and in fact not a few traces exist, philological and historical, of early connection between Ethiopia, Southern Arabia, and the cities on the lower Euphrates, as may be seen in Rawlinson's Herod. i. 442, 443. No one doubts that in general Cush as a country lies beyond higher Egypt; but as a race they settled far more widely, as already pointed out. And this explains more than one passage, which is commonly and altogether misunderstood from not taking the facts into account no less than from holding fast the strict wording of scripture. Thus, Isaiah (Isa. 18: 1) says, "Ho! land shadowing with wings, which art beyond the rivers of Cush." It is absurd to infer that this means either Egypt or Ethiopia, any more than Babylonia. The object of the phrase is on the contrary to distinguish the land in question from either those lands or from any within those limits, which had in the past interfered with Israel. It is the prediction, not yet accomplished, of a land beyond the Nile in the south and the Euphrates in the north, which are the rivers of Cush. That unnamed land, described in striking terms as distinctly outside the Gentile powers which had hitherto acted on the chosen people, is to espouse their cause at a future day; but to no good effect, for the nations will oppose, jealous and hostile as of old, just before Jehovah takes up the matter and restores Israel to the place of His name, to Mount Zion. So in Zeph. 3: 10 we read, "From beyond the river of Cush my suppliants, the daughter of my dispersed, shall bring my oblation." Egypt or Ethiopia might be described as on one side of Cush, and Babylonia on the other; but Jehovah shall bring His dispersed from lands expressly beyond both.

There is no question as to the identification of Mizraim, and the great magnificence of its civilisation as of the Asiatic Cush in the remotest antiquity. The form of the word in Hebrew is the dual, which some would refer to higher and lower Egypt. However this may be, the context decides that both Cush and Mizraim mean men, and sons of Ham. Ephraim, born in Egypt, has also the dual form, but is none the less surely the name of a man.

Phut or Put exemplifies the more degraded stock of Ham's descendants in Africa, contiguous to Egypt and Ethiopia, and named with one or other at times. But Phut can hardly be the Libyan as A.V. makes out of Jer. 46: 9, or Libya as from Ezek. 30: 5, and Ezek. 38: 5 where it should be Phut as in Ezek. 27: 10. The Lubim as in Nahum 3: 9 point rather to the Lybians. The very obscurity which covers this African branch of Ham's sons serves to show how low they had fallen.

But Canaan, last named, has the most unenviable place of all, as the early object of curse, and the direst adversary of Israel in the land assigned according to promise: a highly civilised race, but steeped in shameless idolatry and every moral abomination, and therefore given up according to earthly righteousness to extermination, both because they deserved it, and as a safeguard lest Israel should be drawn into like iniquities; as indeed, failing to execute His sentence, they proved to their own sin, shame, and cost. More details we hope to have in due course.

GENESIS 10: 7.

The posterity of Cush we have next, as being Ham's eldest son. "And the sons of Cush, Seba and Havilah and Sabtah and Raamah and Sabtecha. And the sons of Raamah, Sheba and Dedan" (ver. 7; see also 1 Chron. 1: 9).

The man Seba gave his name to the country and people afterwards known as Meroë between Ethiopia and Egypt. The ruins of the metropolis also so called are not far from the Nubian tower of Dschendi or Shendy, as Gesenius tells us (Thes. Ll. H. and Ch. ii. 993). Bruce in his travels (See. Ed. v. 317) says, "If we are not to reject entirely the authority of ancient history, the island of Meroe, so famous in the first ages, must be found somewhere between the source of the Nile and this point where the two rivers unite; for of the Nile we are certain, and it seems very clear that the Atbara is the Asaboras of the ancients." In his vol. vi. 445, 446, he confirms the former statement, and gives its latitude as 16 deg. 26 min. for the city, adding that there are four remarkable rivers that contribute to form the island Meroe, the Astusaspes (or Mareb), the Astaboras (or Tacazzé), the Astapus (or White river), and the Nile (or Blue River). It is rather of course a Mesopotamian tract than an island proper; but no one need wonder that it was so called. Strabo (xviii. 823) corrects Diodorus Sic. (i. 23) in that 375 miles would be not the length but the circumference, and 125 miles the diameter. It was rich in mines of gold, copper, iron, and salt; possessed woods of ebony, date-palm, almond-trees, etc., and abounded in pasture-lands and millet fields of double harvest, to say nothing of forests where game and wild beasts were caught.

But its fame was long after the first ages of the Pharaohs; and the derivation (Diodorus Sic., Josephus, etc.), of Meroë from a sister of Cambyses who died during his expedition, is very doubtful. It is rather an adoption from the native designation Meru, which in ancient Egyptian means island, as shown in Smith's Dict. B. iii. 1189. Our Auth. and Rev. Vv. have "Sabeans," in Isa. 45: 14, where it should surely be Sebeans (Sebaim), as the country is named with Cush or Ethiopia in Isa. 43: 3. In Job 1: 15 the error occurs of calling the men of Sheba "Sabeans." Both Sheba and Seba are brought together in Ps. 72: 10; and we shall find a Cushite Sheba presently, as well as a Joktanite and a Jokshanite of the Shemitic line later on, both of whom found their settlements in Arabia, not in Africa.

There is far from the same clear evidence as to Havilah, the second son of Cush, and also another of similar name, the twelfth son of Joktan (ver 22). As we know there is a country so called in the account of the rivers of Eden (Gen. 2: 11), some have sought it in Colchis or in modern Georgia; or again to the north of Suez (cf. Gen. 25: 18; 1 Sam. 15: 7). From the scanty references to the Cushite Havilah in scripture, it is not possible to speak with decision; but there is no doubt that they found their way into southern Arabia; and it would seem that the difficulty is increased by their intermingling with the Shemites of the same name, where the district of Khäwlán is supposed to have been theirs. It is well known that Niebuhr the elder says there are two districts of that name (Descr. 270, 280); whence some have inferred one for each of the two races. But the second seems a town rather than another large district. There is more ground to look for the Cushite Havilah in the Avalitae on the African coast S.W. of the straits of Bab-el-Man-deb.

The next son of Cush, Sabtah, is generally thought traceable among the Adramitae on the Red Sea coast of Aden, where we have the modern name of Hadramaut. Cl. Ptolemy and Arrian speak of them, and Pliny the elder (N. H. vi. 32) notices a city, Sabatha, which seems to recall their forefather. It is mentioned by Knobel (in his book on these peoples) that there is a dark race in that quarter though not confined to it, quite different from the ordinary Arab, and pointing to a Hamitic stock.

More distinct is the identification of Raamah, not only through his own name, but in his sons' too. Indeed Ezekiel names father and son as represented long after by the merchants from the eastern coast of Arabia. "The trafficking of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy traffickers; they traded for thy wares with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones and gold" (Ezek. 27: 22). These were pre-eminently products of Arabia Felix on the Persian Gulf. It is interesting to observe, as Mr. E. S. Poole points out in Smith's Dict. B. ii. 983, that the LXX. version of our text helps to trace Raamah's name,  Ῥεγμά in connection with the same in Ptol. (vi. 7) and with Ῥῆγμα in Steph. Byzant. (de Urb. ed. Berk. 653). Mr. Forster (Arabia, i, 62, 64, 75) thinks that the tribe's name, whether in Ptol. or in Pliny, is drawn from "Rhamanitae," and hence from their progenitor; and he says that Ramah is still the name of a town as well as of a tribe and a district in that region.

Sabtecha is the last-named of Cush's sons, of which scripture makes no mention beyond the genealogical list here and in 1 Chron. 1. Hence we cannot say anything sure, and need not repeat more than Bochart's conjecture that they found their way to Carmania on the Persian shore of the Gulf, and that the name seems changed to the Samydace of Steph. Byzant. In his Thes. Gesenius suggests  a yet less probable idea.

Of Sheba and Dedan, sons of Raamah, we may say more when we come to compare them with the same names in the Shemitic line. This only may be noticed that in Ezek. 27 Sheba occurs twice; first, with Raamah in ver. 22, which fixes him as the Cushite in the same part of Arabia; secondly, with Asshur, etc., in ver, 23, which points to the Shemitic line, confirmed by the distinct merchandise of each. In like manner the men of Dedan in Ezek. 27: 15 appear to be Cushites on the Persian gulf (where the isle of Dadan perpetuates the name) and with imports and exports accordingly; whereas we have Dedan distinguished in ver. 20, who seem to be Shemitic through Keturah. Compare Ezek. 25: 13.

The Jews therefore did not err in assigning to Cush, not only Ethiopia and the contiguous parts in Africa, but the opposite coast of Arabia and the southern shore of Asia generally unto India. But Arabia received also a large Shemitic population, as we shall see, which gave character to their language; and this not only from Joktan, Eber's son early, but from Ishmael's twelve sons, and from Jokshan, Abraham's son still later, with some of Esau's descendants. Even Homer (Od. i. 23, 24) speaks of Ethiopians divided into two parts, the most distant of men, some at the setting sun, and some at the rising. We shall find a Cushite element active early in Babylonia and Africa. It was a Turanian race which included the Turks, but not the Armenians whom they rightly gave to Japhet. But they seem never to have realised that the ancient Persian (Zend) language, and that of northern and central India (Sanskrit), disclose the same Japhetic source.

GENESIS 10: 8-10.

From the manner in which Nimrod is introduced, it would appear that he was a descendant of Cush rather than son in the strict sense. Why else should he be named after not only the five sons of Cush, but his two grandsons through Raamah?

"And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before Jehovah: wherefore it is said, like Nimrod a mighty hunter before Jehovah. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar" (vers. 8-10).

Nimrod then was assuredly a Cushite. This only it was of moment to communicate, because of a new departure which originated in him. And as we do not hear particulars of his immediate connection beyond that fact, so neither are we told of his descendants. Personal ascendancy is ascribed to him first, which made the brief notice of himself of sufficient interest to turn aside from the hitherto simple tracing of the genealogical lines, the origin of the various races. "He began to be a mighty one in the earth." It was no question of divine appointment or providential succession. His own right hand wrought on his own behalf. The Jews have as usual much to say where scripture is silent, and strive to fill up the outline of truth into a fabulous picture. So do others follow them in this natural propensity, which they represent as hoary tradition; so in Arab astronomy Nimrod is transformed into the constellation Orion, "Giant," in Hebrew "Chesil" (Job 9: 9, Job 38: 31, Amos 5: 8). We need not occupy our readers with the various hypotheses which have been reared on this latter word; but those curious in such speculations can find them in Michaelis' Suppl. ad Lex. Hebr. No. 1192.

But there is nothing mythical in the little that scripture says. Nimrod "began to be a mighty one in the earth." Not so had it been with Abel or Seth, with Enoch or Noah. What they enjoyed was God's gift. They looked for Him Who is coming; Nimrod sought great things for himself like Cain who was the first builder of a city in primeval days, as Nimrod was the first after the deluge, and on a large and repeated scale. Present power was his aim; and God allowed it apparent success.

We are further told that "he was a mighty hunter before Jehovah." There seems no sufficient reason to question that this is meant literally. It made a great impression on his contemporaries, so that his prowess as a hunter became proverbial. "Wherefore it is said, like Nimrod a mighty hunter before Jehovah." It evidently gave him the exercised skill and strength which passed at length into another field of far deeper interest and gravity.

Yet more important is it to note that Nimrod was the first to set at nought the patriarchal headship which hitherto prevailed, as it subsisted elsewhere for ages afterward. His ambition could not be bounded by the chase, and led him from wild beasts to mankind. "And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel." We have to wait for the chapter which follows to see the significance of this fact; and we learn from it and other remarks how little our chapter has to do with chronology. For though it does give the origin of races in their lands and tongues, it intersperses notices by the way which occurred not a little while after; and this episode of Nimrod is one of them.

It was among the Hamitic sons then that a kingdom was first set up among men. God was not in any of Nimrod's thoughts; He was not sought, nor did He give the least direction, in the case. Nimrod conceived the design through his own ambition, and executed it through the force of his will, and the address and skill he had acquired in his hunting. How different the way of Jehovah at a later day! For, when Israel would have a king in imitation of the nations and chose one who served himself, and brought no deliverance even from Philistines within their border who slew him and his sons, He took His servant David from the pasture, from following the sheep, and made him prince over His people, over Israel, to feed them, and assured him that his house and his kingdom should be made firm for ever before him — his throne established for ever.

But the present use made of this is not the perpetuity of that kingdom, secured as it did become in Christ risen, the sure mercies of David; but the beautiful preparation which pleased Jehovah Who chose him lay, as we have seen, in his lowly and tender care of the sheep, in marked contrast with the first king among men who made his mark in the snaring and slaying of wild beasts. The race of man had already proved how little it regarded aged Noah who was not only chief of all the saved from the deluge but set up by God with the sword of magistracy then first committed. And if he had through heedless self-indulgence fallen into an act whose effects put him to grievous shame, what wickedness in any near him to expose him to mockery who had covered all his own through the dangers of the flood! Of this line it was, though not of Canaan's descent, that Nimrod arrogantly set up first a kingdom. Terrible and dreadful we may say, as the prophet said of the Chaldeans, his judgment and his dignity proceeded from himself.

His kingdom Nimrod began with Babel. This is most characteristic. What recked he, if it had begun in impious self-will to centralise mankind in direct opposition to the divine design and command of replenishing the earth? or if it had been abandoned by the builders under a divine judgment which compelled them to scatter abroad upon the face of all the earth? The abandoned city and tower exactly suited his project of a kingdom for himself, not a universal commonwealth. So "the beginning of his kingdom was Babel." And success in his project encouraged him to go forward; "and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar" followed. As there is no doubt about Babylon, there need be as little that Warka (Irka, or Irak), some forty-three miles east of Babylon, answers to Erech, certainly not Gesenius' identification with Aracca on the Tigris, any more than Jerome's notion of Edessa (or Urfah). More weight is due to Jerome's report of Jewish judgment, that Accad was represented by Nisibis, the ancient name of which was Acar (Rosenmüller ii. 29). The Talmud identifies Calneh with Niffer, about sixty miles south-east of Babylon. Here Arab tradition revels abundantly; but their flights of fancy are not worth recounting.

GENESIS 10: 11, 12.

The important fact imparted to us, in the verses immediately preceding, we have seen to be the first establishment of royal power in the Cushite Nimrod; and this by force and fraud, transferred from hunting wild beasts to acquiring dominion over mankind for personal aggrandizement. His city building in Babylonia we have also seen, the earliest development of the kind since the deluge. Nor is any architecture more characteristic of race, as Mr. Ferguson has shown, than the massive monumental style of the sons of Ham.

This is confirmed by the true sense of Micah 5: 6, where "the land of Assyria" is expressly distinguished from "the land of Nimrod," which last was really the plain of Shinar. They were quite distinct and separated by the Hiddekel or Tigris. In "that land" i.e. Babylonia there were Shemitic and Japhetic elements no less than the Hamitic, which at first was predominant.

It is such an episodical notice as seems to account for the mention in this place of a counter movement on the part of the Shemite Asshur, of whom we read in his due place afterward. A step forward among men naturally finds imitation ere long. And the record of the new policy in the south is followed by that of a similar course in the north as far as the building of cities is concerned, though this may not have been at all contemporary but later than that. Their kindred nature sufficiently explains the mention of both at this point.

"From that land went forth Asshur, and built Nineveh, and Rehoboth-Ir, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah: this is the great city" (vers. 11, 12). It is not intimated that Asshur was driven out by the Hamitic race, but rather is it inferred from the language that the success of Nimrod set the example, and gave the impulse to a like ambition. How completely Noah's authority (for he still lived) was forgotten by all, is evident by all that is revealed. Patriarchal place yielded to men's thoughts and will.

Of these four cities, the first is beyond any just question. Yet it is late in the history of the world when we hear of Nineveh. Then in the days of Jonah it was a "very great city," according to some of still greater extent than Babylon when the "golden city" rose to its zenith. But human accounts of cities long passed away need to be read with caution, as the chroniclers long after were apt to stray through exaggeration. Still the Biblical intimation of its later existence is of immense extent, vast population, and exceeding splendour. The remains exhumed in our day attest that the words of scripture are here as reliable as everywhere else. Yet we need not conceive anything more when Asshur wrought his work than a little beginning of that which was at length to attain such power and magnificence. This it retained to triumph over the ten tribes of Israel and to menace Judah and David's house, when it received a blow so manifestly divine that it never troubled the holy land again. Ere long it fell never to rise, when God was pleased to bring forward Babylon from a provincial position, though with a king and sometimes independent, to become the mistress of the world, and the captor of the guilty capital and king and people of the Jews.

Rehoboth-Ir appears to be so specified to distinguish it from Rehoboth the Nahar — "of the river." This latter (Gen. 36: 37; 1 Chron. 1: 48) was unmistakably on the river Euphrates; and in fact the name is still found given to two places on the river, one on the western bank, eight miles below the junction of the Khabûr (Rahabeth, Chesney's Euphr. i. 119, ii. 610), the other with an added name (Rahabeth-Malik), which Gen. Chesney does not notice, but it is given in Mr. Layard's Nineveh, a few miles lower on the eastern bank. Rehoboth-Ir was in Assyria proper. Kaplan, the Jewish geographer, identifies Rehoboth of the river with Rahabeth-Malik, but distinguishes it from Rehoboth-Ir, which he believes to have disappeared (see Smith's Dict. of the Bible, iii. 1026, col. 1). As no trace of this city has as yet commended itself to any explorer, it may be worth naming, that Jerome, not only in the Vulgate but in his works (Quaest. ad Genesim), gives it as his opinion that it was part of what became Nineveh, meaning "the streets of the city" (i.e. plateas civitatis), This is a mere conjecture, which may be cleared up by better knowledge.

But Calah was too important a city to be so easily hidden. This the Septuagint renders Χαλάχ, and distinguishes from Halah in 2 Kings 17: 6, 18: 2, and 1 Chron. 5: 26, rendered  Ἀλαέ Chesney (i. 22, 119) appears to accept Sir H. Rawlinson's identification of Calah with the ruins of Holwáa, situated near the river Diyálah, and about 130 miles east of Baghdad. If so, it is now Sar. púli Zohab on the slopes of the Zagros, and in the high road leading from Baghdad to Kirmán Sháh, vol. ix. 36 of Royal Geogr. Journal (Chesney ii. 25). It seems once to have been the capital of the empire, the residence of Sardanapalus and others, till Sargon built a new capital on the site of what is now called Khorsabad. But it still retained importance till the empire fell.

Resen has been by some identified with the  Ῥέσινα of Steph. Byz and Ptol. (Geog. v. 18); this, however, was not in Assyria, but far west. Bochart (Geog. Sac. iv. 28) suggested the Larissa of Xenophon (Anab. iii. 4, §7) which call hardly be doubted to correspond with the remarkable ruins now called Nimrud. Mr. Rawlinson leans to the view that these ruins answer to Calah, and that Resen, therefore, lay between that city and Nineveh, and that its ruins are near the Selaimyeh of modern times, and cuneiform inscriptions at Nimrud give Culach as the Assyrian name of the place. This tends to support the claim of Calah rather than of Resen.

GENESIS 10: 13, 14.

Let us now look a little into the family of Mitzraim. "And Mitzraim begot the Ludim and the Anamim and the Lehabim and the Naphtuhim and the Pathrusim and the Casluhim (out of whom came the Philistines) and the Caphtorim" (vers. 13, 14). So it is also in 1 Chron. 1: 11, 12.

As there was a Shemite Lud (ver. 22), it is important to distinguish from him, the ancestor of the well-known Lydian race in the west of Asia Minor, those descended from Mitzraim, who spread themselves west of the Nile. They were archers as we learn from Isa. 66: 19, and Jer. 46: 9, where the African people seem enumerated and so described. It would appear to be the same in Ezek. 27: 10, and in Ezek. 30: 4, 5 also. In the Auth. V. of Jer. 46 is given the word "Lydians," as in Ezek. 30 "Lydia." This conveys the impression that our translators probably understood the Asiatic people. But there ought not to be a doubt that they were African.

We next hear of the Anamim, of whom nothing more is said in the Bible than in the two genealogical lists. It may perhaps be gathered, from comparison with the names which follow, that they were a race that settled in the Delta of Egypt. But it must be allowed that no reliable trace is known either in the ancient Geographers, or in the monuments hitherto deciphered. Here we have the unfailing record of God, Who alone saw the end from the beginning and has been pleased to communicate to us the truth otherwise unnoticed. The judgment of the habitable earth in a day which approaches will prove that the races are not extinct.

The Lehabim, called also Lubim in 2 Chron. 12: 3, 2 Chron. 16: 8, with the people called Phut, or Put, (if not Pul, as in Isa. 66: 19), answer to the ancient Lybians; save indeed that the ordinary usage of Lybia in olden time is vague, and extends far and wide to almost all Africa west of the Nile. The Phut of scripture apparently corresponds with the hieroglyphic bow, or Pet. This is also applied to a people, or rather confederacy of peoples, conquered by Egypt, and called "the Bows," or "Nine Bows," Na-Petu, though Brugsch understands simply "the Nine Peoples." This would seem to connect itself with the Naphtuhim immediately following the Lehabim, who are the same as the Lebu or Rebu of the Egyptian inscriptions, as Mr. R. S. Poole has shown, the Libyans proper. The A.V. renders Phut the Libyans" in Jer. 49: 2 ("handling the shield") distinguished from the Lydians, or Ludim ("handling and bending the bow"); and in Ezek. 38: 5 "Libya," again marked with other powers by the "shield." In Nahum 3: 9 we see Phut and the Lubim helpers of No-Amon (the god Amon of No, or Thebes of Upper Egypt), the ruins of which, in spite of Cush and Mitzraim, is set by the prophet as a warning to Nineveh. Again, and bearing on what is still future, we are told that when the last king of the north subdues and spoils Egypt, the Lubim and Cush shall be at his steps, though Edom and Moab and the chief of the children of Ammon shall be delivered out of his hands.

What plainer proof can there be to the believer that these races are yet abiding and to take their part in the great catastrophe of the latter day? The reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, directly or indirectly, did not extend beyond Dan. 11: 31, 32. That which we have pointed out is after the great break of ver. 35, and expressly supposes the renewal of the two powers of the north and the south, when "the king," the lawless one, is in "the land" between them "at the time of the end." Thus that time is as clearly future as sure. Compare Isa. 11: 14, which not only confirms the fact of tie old cognate but hostile races on the borders of the land, but declares their final subjection to Israel under Messiah "in that day."

Of the Naphtuhim a little has been already said when speaking of the Lubim. More is given in scripture respecting the next name of Pathrusim. From Isa. 11: 11 Pathros as distinguished from Egypt would seem to be the upper part of the land. Ezek. 29: 14, 30: 13-18 are supposed to point at the Thebais the desolation which the prophet declared should overtake all the land. The chief difficulty is, that Jeremiah speaks of Pathros (44: 1) in connection with cities in Lower Egypt, and in a yet more. general way later on (ver. 15). But there does not appear in the group anything so decided as to set aside our referring Pathros to the land farther south.

There remain the "Casluhim (out of whom or whence came the Philistines) and the Caphtorim." These races can hardly be doubted to have occupied the Delta before the Philistine migration to the Shephelah. Some suggest here a transposition; as Deut. 2: 23, Jer. 47: 4, Amos 9: 7, expressly connect the Philistine immigrants with the Caphtorim. Pusey, commenting on the last of these scriptures, inclines to the conclusion, that there were different immigrations of the same tribe into Palestine (as of Danes and Saxons into England, where they all merged into one common name). The first day have been from the Casluhim; the second in time but chief in importance from the Caphtorim; and a third of Kerethim (probably from Crete) in the era of the Judges added but a little to their strength (1 Sam. 30: 14-16). Of these last, Cherethites and Pelethites figure as lifeguards of King David, foreigners like the Gittites.

It is plain and certain that the architecture, whether of temples or of palaces, the sculpture and painting, and the various other monuments of Egypt for living or dead bear, like its original language, the marks of extreme antiquity and of, high civilisation. Idolatry flaunts us everywhere, but as Heeren remarks (African Nations, ii. 271, Oxford Talboys, 1832), "The first idea which presents itself from a view of these monuments must be that Thebes [the No, or No-Amon, of Scripture] was once the capital of a mighty empire, whose boundaries extended far beyond Egypt, which at some distant period comprised a great part of Africa, and an equally large portion of Asia. Her kings are represented as victors and conquerors; and the scene of their glory is not confined to Egypt, but often carried to remote regions. Prisoners of distant nations bow the knee before the conquerors, and count themselves happy if they can obtain their pardon . . . . This is further confirmed by the many examples which evince the refinement of domestic life, and the degree of luxury to which the people had arrived. The narrow valley of the Nile could not supply all the articles, such as costly garments, perfumes, etc., which we find here represented. An extensive commerce was requisite, not only to obtain all this, but also to produce that opulence, and that interchange of ideas, which constitute its foundation." Denon (Voy. dans la basse et haute Egypte, 1802), the great French Government work (Description de l'Egypte, 1811, 1815), Hamilton (Remarks etc. 1809), Belzoni (Narrative etc. 1822), Minutoli (Travels, 1824), and both series of Sir G. Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians are the chief modern authorities.

GENESIS 10: 15-18.

The youngest branch of the Hamitic race now comes before us, already branded with curse (Gen. 9: 25), and a bondman of bondmen to his brethren. Yet no doom long seemed more unlikely. They were enterprising beyond any, and no more disposed to tarry at home than the sons of Cush. Who spread themselves abroad as they? Canaan, who naturally gave the general designation, had a more special application to the "lowlanders" of the country. They are carefully pointed out as races. which possessed themselves of the land destined for Israel. As the song of Moses so forcibly expresses it (Deut. 32: 8), "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For Jehovah's portion is his people, Jacob is the lot of his inheritance."

This is a revelation of the highest importance for God's government of the world. Men willingly forget that the times of the Gentiles are in this quite abnormal. For He has no direct government of the earth, only providential, during their course. The only time when He governed immediately was when Israel afforded its theatre. To this end He chose the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as His people, and gave them the land of promise from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates. To Israel He made Himself known as Jehovah, the one living and true God, as He had to their pilgrim fathers as the Almighty God. But through the self-confidence of unbelief they forgot their redemption from Egypt and their preservation in the wilderness up to Sinai, all of grace; and then accepted law as their condition at Sinai, instead of pleading the promise. Hence their history became a history of sin and ruin, chequered by wondrous interventions of mercy, as well as solemn chastisements of their rebellious iniquity, till at length even the house of David led the last remaining tribe of Judah into abominable idolatry, and God delivered them as captives to Babylon, the first of the four "beasts," or Gentile imperial powers. Finally under the last of these bestial empires (the Roman), the Jewish remnant, which was permitted to return to the land for a fresh trial, rejected their own Messiah and even the gospel founded on His death, which was first sent to them, and wrath has come upon them to the uttermost.

It is in the Jewish people only that we have a kingdom of the earth set up by Jehovah Himself under the direction of His law. But even under its earliest and brightest phase, when David reigned, what failure and presage of downfall! yet not without shadows of abiding righteousness, power, and glory, as often seen in the psalms! And the man of peace, his son, outwardly more magnificent, brought in but plain evidence of ruin, even then come and far more approaching and sure till there was no remedy. Yet was the history full of instruction both of what man was as responsible under God's law, and of God's ways in blessing and punishing according to the principles of His earthly government.

All this was, however, only a witness in the hands of a people prone to evil and departure from Him. But God has in no way abandoned His purpose for the earth. He is using the interval, since His rejection of the Jews because of their rejection of Christ, to call a people out of both Jews and Gentiles, who put on Christ in Whom there is neither, to form a heavenly family in union with Christ, the body of the ascended Head, God's habitation in the Spirit. When this is complete, the Lord Jesus will come and receive us unto Himself and present us in the Father's house. He will also in due time appear executing judgment, not only on the fourth Beast revived and the Antichrist in the land, but on all hostile powers and peoples, delivering a remnant of Jews then righteous, the nucleus of the nation, believing and expectant, blessed and established for ever as a blessing to all the families of the earth. Such will Israel be under Messiah and the new covenant, and mercy endure for ever, as they will then sing in truth of heart. And the Gentiles will in that day cast away their idols of silver and gold, and everything high and lifted up, and lofty looks and haughtiness of heart, cordially bowing to the kingdom with Zion as its centre, and the mountain of Jehovah's house established in the top of the mountains and exalted above the hills. For Messiah will reign, the only perfect judge between the nations, who shall not lift sword nor learn war any more.

Now the races of Canaan occupied that land which Jehovah intended for Israel. Nor was this all. They were conspicuously vile, most of all the cities of the plain, whose wickedness was not to be named. They were therefore cut off by a sudden and manifestly divine infliction. But when the cup of the Amorites was full, and the land became so unclean that Jehovah must visit its iniquity, He was pleased to make Israel the executioner of His vengeance. What could be more righteous in itself? What wiser for His people, its destined heirs? All unnatural evils as well as idolatries (their very religion ever binding on them these abominations) had become their "customs," from which Israel must be kept. It was no question of cruelty; and it was Israel's fault not to exterminate as completely as Jehovah enjoined; so that the spared did not fail to ensnare and corrupt the chosen people into like infamy.

Of these races we need dwell on no more than the first two. These can be more easily severed, as they only are personal names, the rest Gentilic. "And Canaan begat Zidon [or Sidon] the firstborn, and Heth" (ver. 15). The name of the first means, like Saida its modern appellation, "fishing." The city was built on the northern slope of a spur projecting into the sea with its citadel behind on the south. The plain was narrower between Lebanon and the sea. But the daughter city of Tyre in time outshines it, as the later prophets indicate. In earlier days we hear of "great Zidon" (Joshua 11: 8, Joshua 19: 28). So even Homer, who repeatedly speaks of it and its people, never named Tyre. They were then skilled in manufactures, later celebrated for their marine and as merchants. But they corrupted even Solomon's house by their abominations.

The Hittites were of Heth or Cheth. Their daughters troubled Isaac and Rebecca, though we hear of Abraham friendly with them and others. They like the Jebusites and the Amorites betook themselves to the mountains from the south, and afterwards were outside in the valley of the Orontes. So in 1 Kings 10: 29 their kings are spoken of with "the Kings of Aram" or Syria; they seem without doubt to be the Khatti of the Egyptian inscriptions, on the western side of the Euphrates. They had however shared in the efforts against Joshua (9, 11) and suffered accordingly. In Ezek. 16: 3, 45, "thy mother was a Hittite" is no more meant literally than "thy father was an Amorite." They are the prophet's figures of moral reproach.

As for the races mentioned after these, little more is to be said than what lies on the surface of scripture: "And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, and the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, and the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite" (vers. 16-18). The Jebusites held Jerusalem, though defeated by Joshua, but not dispossessed till David. The Amorite was in the mountain land of Judah, but pushed east where on their full or expulsion the two and a half tribes settled east of the Jordan. The Girgashites disappeared from view. Of the Hivites we have the remarkable tale the Book of Joshua tells, and of its consequences, at least of those in Gibeon; for there were others further north and outside, near whom settled the latter five families, or on the coast, and also in the isle of Aradus.

GENESIS 10: 18-20.

The notices of the Canaanite families are more minute, as God considered His people whose duty it was to execute judgment and dispossess them of the promised land. However they might be "spread abroad" or dispersed, and seen to flourish for a while, the curse was on them, from the first on moral grounds, aggravated at last by enormities against God and man which to His eyes called for extermination.

It may be remarked that we do not hear of Perizzites in this genealogical account, though the name occurs in Gen. 13: 7, Gen. 15: 20, Gen. 34: 30; Ex. 3: 8, 17, Ex. 23: 23, Ex. 33: 2, Ex. 34: 11; Deut. 7: 1, Deut. 20: 17; Joshua 3: 10, Joshua 9: 1, Joshua 11: 3, Joshua 12: 8, Joshua 17: 15, Joshua 24: 11; Judges 1: 4, 5, Judges 3: 5; 1 Kings 9: 20; Ezra 9: 1; 2 Chron. 8: 7; and Neh. 9: 8. This appears to imply that they were not a distinct race, but rather such as separated from the town-life, to which the Canaanites generally were addicted, and remained villagers; as in the later history of Israel those who were religious separatists were called Pharisees.

"And afterwards the families of the Canaanites spread themselves abroad. And the border of the Canaanites was from Zidon, as thou goest toward Gerar, unto Gazah; as thou goest toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, unto Lasha. These [are] sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, in their nations" (vers. 18-20).

The border is thus traced from Zidon on the N.W. of Gerar and Gazah on the S.W., and from the four doomed cities of the plain in the S.E. to Lasha (probably Laish or Leshem in the N.E.), though Jerome identifies it with Callirrhoe on the east of the Dead Sea, and Bochart with a city called by the Arabs Lusa in the south of Judah. Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim are specified on which fell fire from heaven in early patriarchal days, as recorded in this book, to their utter destruction: a dealing of Jehovah in His wrath, which was recalled to the warning of Israel from Moses (Deut. 29: 23) to Hosea (Hosea 11: 8) and Jeremiah (Jer. 20: 16).

In reviewing the posterity of Ham, this we cannot but see, that none sprang so early into prominence of earthly power and dominion, that none carried forward civilisation so rapidly and extensively in primeval times, that no other peoples were so distinguished at first with material grandeur, both in the plain of Shinar and in that remarkable country which lies along the Nile, that is, in both Asia and Africa; and that they were long the sole pioneers of commerce in west and east, north and south. But the true God was absent from their souls; nor this only: they out-ran all other races in their vain thoughts, ungratefully abandoning Him when they knew Him, and their foolish heart was soonest darkened. Professing to be wise they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and quadrupeds and reptiles. Wherefore God gave them up to the lowest defilement and vile affections contrary to nature, and worse than brutish, reprobate. Their very mind had pleasure in evil. Such man became without God, none so audaciously, and shamefully as the Canaanites, whose judgment therefore was most righteous save to such as are more or less reprobate.

What an illustration is their history of the words of the apostle on the first man as contrasted with the last Adam! "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." The book of nature man never did read aright, though he ought; and conscience, the monitor of fallen man, shows him his sins, but of itself never leads to repentance: only God's goodness does, above all revealed in Christ. But the Hamite races were the leaders of the departure from God, and none so flagitiously as the Canaanite.

GENESIS 10: 21.

The races which sprang from Shem come before us in the last place. This is quite independent of the respective ages of Noah's three sons. Ham, we know, is declared to be "the little" one (Gen. 9: 24), — generally translated "youngest"; and chronology shows that not Shem but Japheth was the eldest. Accordingly Leeser joins Mendelssohn in the rendering of the A.V. and the margin (not the text) of the R.V. The first place assigned to Shem, in the usual formula of "Shem, Ham, and Japheth," is due not to the order of birth, but to the spiritual purpose which gave Shem that position (Gen. 5: 32, Gen. 6: 10, Gen. 7: 13, Gen. 9: 18, Gen. 10: 1). When, however, "the generations" are given in detail, Japheth's sons are enumerated first; and a similar order prevails in 1 Chron. 1. If primogeniture here in Japheth had its honour, if precocity in his rising to political place and natural power is recognised in Ham, for Shem was reserved, though named last, the honour Godward. "And to Shem also were [sons] born: he [was] father of all the sons of Eber, brother of Japheth the elder" (ver. 21).

Undoubtedly the manner of Shem's introduction is so peculiar as to arrest attention. He had descendants like the other chiefs derived from Noah. But he is specified, on the one hand as the father of all the sons of Eber, and on the other as the brother of Japheth the elder (or, great one). Of the latter enough has been said; but we may compare Gen. 14: 13, "Abram the Hebrew," in order to understand better what seems meant. And here the LXX give περάτης, "the passer," as Aquila has ὁ περαΐτης. This at least gives a distinctive stamp, where as only tradition does it to Eber personally.

The head of that people, above all distinguished among those who sprang from Shem, passed the Euphrates on his memorable way. As Joshua said to all the people at the close of his service, and a little before his death (Joshua 24: 2, 3, 12, 13), "Your fathers dwelt of old on the other side of the river, Terah the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods. And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the river, and led him throughout the land of Canaan," etc. "And now fear Jehovah and serve him in perfectness and in truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river and in Egypt, and serve Jehovah. And if it seem evil unto you to serve Jehovah, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods whom your fathers that were on the other side of the river served, or the gods of the Amorite in whose land ye dwell." Scripture thus lays a stress on that fact far beyond what it does to an ancestor who does not stand out from others in the genealogical line, save as the father of Peleg and Joktan. An important event marked Peleg's days; yet it did not concern the chosen people particularly but "the earth" at large.

That Gen. 14: 13 connects Abram in the passage of the eastern river, rather than his remote ancestor Eber, seems clear; for this was the regular Gentile name given to God's people by those without, not Israel but Hebrews, as we find from the earliest to later times. And it is intelligible that a tangible fact like that event would be patent and abidingly known.

It is another question whether "all the sons of Eber" can be legitimately connected with any other person than him of whom we read in vers. 24, 25, and Gen. 11: 14-17, with the corresponding list in 1 Chron. 1. In Num. 24: 24 we have the only other reference, I think, which can be connected with it: an early prophecy which looks on to the latter day. For there comes a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, not merely to cut in pieces the corners of Moab but to destroy all the sons of tumult. The great conflict of the future is contemplated, as nothing in the past quite meets all. "And ships shall come from the coasts of Chittim, and afflict Asshur, and afflict Eber; and he also shall come to destruction." West and East and Israel shall be in collision and suffer; but as the previous word runs, "Israel doeth valiantly, and one out of Jacob shall have dominion." That Eber is used figuratively for the Jews seems unquestionable; and that they arise to earthly supremacy, when the destroyers of the earth are destroyed and Messiah reigns, is what the prophets declare.

Herein lies the real and superior dignity of Shem. Messiah is to come of his stock; as Canaan was accursed, not Ham wholly, but Canaan; so the living oracle said, "Blessed be Jehovah the God of Shem." This was not predicted of the elder, but "God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem." And so it has been. How vast in His providence the spread of that energetic race! Have they not dwelt, too, in the tents of Shem, not as mere conquerors, but, among other ways perhaps, as sharers in that blessing which was shadowed so finely in Israel's "own olive-tree." Here in due time would be the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the law-giving, and the service, and the promises, and not the fathers merely but the Son, the Messiah with a personal dignity far beyond what Israel has owned — to their own deep loss as yet.

GENESIS. 10: 22.

The immediate descendants of Shem are next enumerated, it would seem in the order of birth, as Arpachshad, the progenitor of the chosen line, stands in the third place, neither first nor last, either of which might be done as elsewhere for special reasons.

"The sons of Shem, Elam, and Asshur, and Arpachshad, and Lud, and Aram" (ver. 22).

Elam, the first apparently in natural order, gave his name to that part of Khusistan, which the Greeks and Romans called Elymais, which had of old Shushan for its capital, of which we hear so much in the book of Esther (Esther 1: 2, 5; Esther 2: 3, 5, 8; Esther 3: 15; Esther 4: 16; Esther 8: 14, 15; Esther 9: 11, 15, 18; as also in Neh. 1: 1). There has been no little debate among men of learning on the precise locality, some contending (as Dean Vincent, Anc. Comm. i. 439) for Shuster on the Pasitigris or Kuran, others for Susan a good deal to the east of Shuster. But Mr. Loftus, following Sir W. F. Williams, appears to have set the question at rest in favour of Shush (to the north-west of Shuster), where only an immense mound of ruins remains of the once magnificent fortress and palace of the Persian monarchs, possessed before that by the king of Babylon, as Dan. 8: 2 attests. There it was that the prophet saw the vision of the Persian ram, and the Greek or Macedonian he-goat, though some will have it that the prophet was only there in vision. It is known that Nabopolassar, father of Nebuchadnezzar, seized the land of Elam or Susiana, which succumbed afterwards to Cyrus; and Susa or Shushan became the regular residence of the Persian monarch for a part of the year. There is no reason to doubt that the excavations made in our day lay bare the plan, with certain remains of the palaces," indicating a structure, with its dependent buildings, which occupied a square of 1,000 feet each way, in a massive style of architecture with fluted columns, and those in the outer groups with bases like an inverted lily (which Shushan means).

In the days of Abraham we bear of Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, with his three allies coming 2,000 miles to punish his vassal kings in the vale of Siddim: a plain proof of early power, though signally chastised by the father of the faithful. It seems that subsequently the Hamites, who earlier still rose to power in the east as well as south-west, gave the name of Cissim to this district, as Herodotus (v. 49) and Strabo let us know. They were Cossaei, and Cushites.

But it is of importance to mention that Elam joined the Medes to overthrow Babylon, as we see predicted in Isa. 21: 2, the latter a Japhetic race, as the former was of Shem. In Jerusalem's day yet to come Elam will figure with its confederates against Jerusalem. For the mysterious succession here, as in Isa. 14, not applying to the past, looks on to the future, when the last Shebna shall give way to the anti-typical Eliakim, (Whom God hath appointed). Yet we know also from the assured word of prophecy, that however ravaged in the past (Ezek. 32: 24, 25, and Jer. 49: 34-38), Elam will have its captivity brought again in the latter days according to Jer. 49: 39.

On Asshur there is the less motive for dilating, as every reader of scriptural history knows how splendid a part their race played in the comparatively early history of the world, when the struggle for predominance seemed to lie between Assyria and Egypt. Of this we find authentic accounts in the O.T. especially when both came into collision, the Assyrian especially, with the chosen people in its decay through idolatry, sweeping away the kingdom of Israel, and menacing that of Judah. But the awful check given to Sennacherib in the height of his scornful pride soon proved no real opportunity to Egypt; for Babylon that joined in destroying Nineveh was destined of God to be the head of power, as all know according to God's word. Here again shall mercy triumph over judgment; and Isa. 19 is express that in the day of Messianic power and glory Israel shall be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth. We need not speak of Israel, but may say that this was never the case with Egypt and with Assyria in the past. Both wrought innumerable evils for man; both sinned shamelessly against God. But what cannot, will not, mercy work on God's part, even for the enemies of His guilty and chastised people? What a monument will not the trio be "in that day"!

Of Arpachshad we may say still less; for he leads directly down to the time of promise, about which the O.T. is almost wholly occupied.

Lud is the next son of Shem; and there is the more need of care, as there was another race of similar name which had its seat in Africa, the first named of the Mizraim or Egyptian peoples, of whom we have spoken (Gen. 10: 13). There was thus Ludim of Ham, as well as of Shem. Josephus (Ant. i. § 4) was justified in stating that the latter race settled in Asia Minor, the Lydians. Herodotus (i. 7) says indeed that the Maeones or early dwellers in the far from definite land called Lydia, for its extent changed greatly from time to time, afterward adopted the name of Lydians, being in fact as he thought the same people. But this was a mistake. Even Strabo (xii. xiv.) recognises on ancient testimony, that they were distinct races, as Niebuhr (Hist. of Rome, i. 32) and others in modern times are convinced. The Maeones were the early Japhetic settlers whom the Shemitic Lydians conquered. Indeed that careful historian, Dionysius (i. 30), notices that the Lydians had nothing in common with their Pelasgian predecessors. It can hardly be doubted that Jer. 46: 9 and Ezekiel 27: 10, Ezekiel 30: 5, refer to the African race, perhaps Isa. 66: 19, though this be not so certain. But they join in the great catastrophe of "that day." Of Aram we shall speak in considering ver. 23.

GENESIS 10: 23.

Aram is the last of the sons of Shem. His name was generally given to the high table-land north-east of Palestine, though applied also more widely in combination with other terms, as will presently be pointed out. In the A.V., following the Septuagint and