King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 10
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Now these are the generations of the sons of , , , and : and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of ; , and , and , and , and , and , and . And the sons of ; , and , and . And the sons of ; , and , , and . By these were the isles of the divided in their lands; every one after his , after their families, in their nations. And the sons of ; , and , and Phut, and . And the sons of ; , and , and , and , and Sabtecha: and the sons of ; , and . And begat : he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before : wherefore it is said, Even as the mighty hunter before . And the beginning of was Babel, and , and , and Calneh, in the land of . Out of that land went forth , and builded , and the city Rehoboth, and , 12And between and : the same is a great city. And begat , and , and , and , And , and , (out of whom came Philistim,) and . And begat his , and , And the , and the , and the Girgasite, And the , and the Arkite, and the Sinite, And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of spread abroad. And the border of was from , as thou comest to , unto ; as thou goest, unto , and , and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha. These are the sons of , after their families, after their , in their countries, and in their nations. Unto also, of all the children of , the brother of the elder, even to him were children born. The children of ; , and , and Arphaxad, and , and . And the children of ; , and , and , and . And Arphaxad begat Salah; and Salah begat . And unto were born two sons: the name of one was ; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was . And begat , and , and , and , And , and , and , And , and , and , And , and , and : all these were the sons of . And their dwelling was from , as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east. These are the sons of , after their families, after their , in their lands, after their nations. These are the families of the sons of , after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis