Our Mountain's a Molehill

The captive monarch could hardly believe what he was seeing. He could tell for some time that Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers were on the verge of being home, but young Jehoiachin, the surrendered king of Judah, could behold it now, and his mom and wives and friends could see it too, judging from their gasps. He'd been seeing glittering blue in the heart of the blue sky, but now that the tall city walls were in sight, spanning the mighty river, the mountain looming in its midst was all the more visible – a broad pyramid of seven great stages, a tower looming over everything. Jehoiachin's jaw gaped; not a sight in all Jerusalem prepared him for this... this... which could've buried the temple of the LORD beneath itself.¹ Next to him, a soldier wiped a homecoming tear from his eye. “Etemenanki,” he murmered. Jehoiachin didn't know the word. But he did recall an old, old story...

“And it came to pass, in their journeyings in the east” – these people whose wanderings hasn't let them develop a clear identity beyond a mysterious 'them,' wandering southeast hundreds of miles from the mountains of Ararat, hunting for somewhere to call home² – “and they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there” (Genesis 11:2). Shinar's the region we'd today call southern Iraq, essentially the land otherwise known as ancient Sumer,³ although 'Shinar' was a late westerner's word for the plain, not a native one.⁴ Thousands and thousands of years ago, this fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris River in the east and the Euphrates River in the west “became a magnet for migrants” from all over, able to support many lifestyles with its bounty.⁵

In Genesis, though, this story is set in a time when “all the earth had one lip and the same words” (Genesis 11:1) – not only is communication easy, but the people gathered there “share a common understanding of the world.”⁶ A prospect arises, in this “society built on confidence and trust,”⁷ of “unanimously accomplishing one single purpose,” of getting everybody on the same page for one big idea.⁸ And so “they said, a man to a companion, 'Come!'” (Genesis 11:3). “Each man thus roused his neighbor,” acting as an evangelist for this big idea, busying himself in grassroots community organizing.⁹ This is, in modern terms, practically “participatory democracy.”¹⁰ And it's a landslide, issuing in a “generally agreed-upon plan of action.”¹¹

Here's the plan: “Come, let us brick bricks” (Genesis 11:3). They took clay-rich river mud and, from March to October, spent their free time mixing it with sand and hay, kneading it with water into a thick mixture, shaping it into rectangles, and leaving it to dry beneath the warm sun for a day or two in the dry air.¹² They'd later come up with the myth that the world's first brick came from the hands of a wise god who'd nipped off a hunk of clay and grown a forest of reeds just so he could make that brick.¹³ We've found sun-dried mud bricks archaeologists say are over nine thousand years old, but almost seven thousand years ago, someone realized you could make a better, stronger brick by baking it in an oven.¹⁴ That's what they do here in Genesis: “Let us brick bricks and burn them to a burning” (Genesis 11:3), making them “stable, strong, and meant to endure for ages.”¹⁵

“To them,” the people who settled in Shinar, “the brick was for stone, and bitumen was for them as mortar” (Genesis 11:3). To Israelite eyes, accustomed to natural stone and mortar, brick and bitumen “were poor substitutes,” a hint that we should read on critically.¹⁶ But the combination of kiln-fired bricks and bitumen as construction staples in that part of the world goes back before 3000 BC, to “the beginning of urbanization.”¹⁷ It stimulates their imagination to new heights, and so “they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city'” (Genesis 11:4). The people of Sumer were exceptional pioneers at building cities.¹⁸ It's “a technical fruit of the human orientation toward social existence,” a “collective effort” that “magnifies the power of the human will.”¹⁹ In the story, the builders pitch this city as if “the fulfillment of a recurrent human dream, a dream of humankind united, living together in peace and freedom, no longer at the mercy of an inhospitable or hostile nature.”²⁰ Of course, a city, however consensus-based, will birth “technologies of control” leading to a “stratified society.”²¹

And this isn't just any generic city. Only at the end of the story does the writer let slip its name: Babel – which we know more familiarly by the Greek spelling, 'Babylon' (Genesis 11:9), on the east bank of the Euphrates River. Early Babylon, whenever it was first founded, was actually a rather unimportant podunk town, largely unnoticed by its neighbors.²² Over time, though, it slowly grew into a metropolis of “astonishing palaces, mighty temples, imposing gates..., and grand ceremonial boulevards..., the embodiment of divine and secular power.”²³ And there was, in Babylon, a temple dedicated to the city's patron god, Marduk. This central temple was called “Esagila, the exalted sanctuary,”²⁴ and in Sumerian, 'Esagila' means “House with Top Raised High.”²⁵

Which reminds us of what else they said: “Let us build a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). Even though the Bible uses just the generic Hebrew word for 'tower,' every major city in this part of the world had one special building that towered over the rest. They called it a ziggurat, from a root word meaning 'to be built up high,' and just about everybody now recognizes that the tower in this verse is meant to be a Babylonian ziggurat.²⁶ Developed from the high platforms that earlier Sumerian settlements perched their temples on, a ziggurat was “the most visible part of the Mesopotamian temple complex.”²⁷ A ziggurat was a tower of stages, wide to narrow, built of a large core pyramid of sun-dried mud bricks, covered by a mantel of baked bricks. Generally on one side, there'd be three huge ramp staircases, one coming from straight ahead and the other two running up the front of the ziggurat to meet it.²⁸ At the top was a small shrine, the ziggurat's 'head,' built of glazed brick and surrounded by groves of greenery.²⁹ Those who built a ziggurat really did say they “raised as high as heaven the head of the ziggurat,”³⁰ so that “its top was high and reached the heavens.”³¹

The ziggurat in Babylon had a name, Etemenanki, which is Sumerian for “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”³² Built in a courtyard on the west side of Babylon's Processional Way, we know Etemenanki was 300 feet wide by 300 feet long and, if we believe the Babylonians, about 300 feet high.³³ That's their great tower whose top reaches the heavens: almost a third the height of the Eiffel Tower. No wonder later Jewish imagination made it nearly 700 feet high,³⁴ or even over eight thousand feet high.³⁵ But even on the lowest estimates, Etemenanki would've taken over ten million bricks to build.³⁶ In the time when Jehoiachin saw it, Nebuchadnezzar's dad said he'd repaired it using “mud bricks without number” and “baked bricks like countless drops of rain,” cementing them together with a flood of “refined and crude bitumen.”³⁷ Nebuchadnezzar then continued the work “using bitumen and baked brick,” and at the top, he said, he “resplendently built a holy shrine, a well-adorned bedroom, using baked bricks colored with shining blue glaze.”³⁸

A ziggurat, to the Babylonians, “represented a mountain peak close to heaven and had roots like a tree reaching down to the underworld.”³⁹ These artificial buildings were meant to bind together what was above and what was below, linking all the realms of the world. So a ziggurat was “the obvious channel of communication between the celestial and terrestrial spheres,”⁴⁰ essentially a human “hotline to heaven.”⁴¹ A ziggurat was “built in honor of the divinity that resides at the summit,” since the shrine at the top “served as the residential quarters for the god” between heaven and temple.⁴² Effectively, the ziggurat was one huge stairway for a god to walk down, descending from heaven above to the earth below to be with us.⁴³ And so, by mentioning a ziggurat, Genesis implies “the first biblical mention of polytheism,” the pagan portrait of many gods made in our image.⁴⁴

It's not for nothing that the earliest Sumerian way of writing the word 'god' was a little star, because these many gods were held to manifest their judgments through heavenly portents people could observe and interpret.⁴⁵ The peoples of Mesopotamia were famously obsessed with astrology as far back as records go, and it's often thought that ziggurats, which we now know were built to align with the heavenly bodies, hosted special rituals and also made a convenient place for priests to gather their data.⁴⁶ If so, then on the tower, “the priests, watchfully yet apprehensively, conducted measurements of the heavenly motions, on the basis of which they sought knowledge useful for the life of the city,” using “celestial divination as a source for effective policy creation” in Babylon.⁴⁷

That's what the builders have in mind when they call to “build ourselves a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). But the Babylonians had a different story about where their city and its tower came from. In the beginning, they said, the gods were at war with a monster-goddess named Tiamat, a losing battle until a strapping young god named Marduk stepped up to bat for them. Marduk carved up Tiamat's corpse to make the world, and as the crowning achievement, Marduk declared he intended to make himself a home in this world: “I will name it Babylon, Houses of the Great Gods!”⁴⁸ Out of gratitude, the other gods say they want to build his shrine of rest, and he happily accepts their generous offer: “Build Babylon, the task you have sought; let bricks for it be molded, and raise the shrine!”⁴⁹ The gods spend a whole year just making all the bricks, and then, “when the second year arrived, they raised the top of the Esagil..., they built the soaring ziggurat... and established homes for Anu, Enlil, Ea, and him. In splendor he sat down before them.”⁵⁰ Marduk welcomes the gods at last to a fancy feast, declaring, “This is Babylon, your place of residence; sing merrily here, sit down amid its joyfulness!”⁵¹ So, to sum up, the Babylonians said theirs was a city built by gods and for gods, shortly after the world was made – “Babylon, called into being by the heavens.”⁵² These same gods had built the tower of Babel, the “soaring ziggurat,” whose shrine welcomed the gods of highest heaven.

That was the mainstream story, but other Babylonians had an even more radical one: “All the lands were sea,” and then “Babylon was made, Esagil was created,” and only then, after Babylon and its temple, did the original god make the other gods, who gratefully “gave an exalted name to the pure city,” Babylon, “in which they were pleased to dwell.”⁵³ In that version, Babylon and its temple actually predated the gods worshipped in it; they were born there, which is why some called “Babylon the place of the creation of the great gods,”⁵⁴ and “Esagil: house which creates all the gods.”⁵⁵ For some Babylonians, their city was even more divine than the gods!

They called it “Babylon, the city whose brickwork is ancient,”⁵⁶ but Genesis shoots back that there was no Babel in the beginning; Babylon appears only chapters and chapters into the world's story.⁵⁷ They even called it “Babylon, the creator of god and man,”⁵⁸ but Genesis answers that it's just a city and tower “which the sons of humanity built” (Genesis 11:5). The builders of Babel may be taken by the later residents for gods, but Genesis has their number: they're the children of Adam, wayward flesh and blood. Babylon is seriously demoted.

And Babylon, Genesis says, shouldn't have gotten started. The order of events so far has been mimicking the kinds of building stories Babylonians told. First they'd start with the circumstances that led to the decision to build something, then they'd discuss the preparations that were made, and only then would they go on to narrate the construction. But in Babylonian stories, the decision to build something never went ahead without stating that the gods signed off on the project; in fact, Babylonians would tell you that any time people tried to build a new city without divine approval, it was an open invitation to disaster. Well, guess what gets pointedly skipped over in Genesis? The part where the builders of Babel get permission. It's “a major violation of divine/human protocol.”⁵⁹ The sad truth is that “they took counsel with their own judgment, not with God, to build a city.”⁶⁰

What makes it worse is why they're doing it. “Let us build to ourselves a city and a tower” (Genesis 11:4). The Babylonians may claim all this work is a tribute to the gods, may aim to pass it all off as hospitality toward heaven, but Genesis exposes their piety as a pretense for pride: “Their motivation for constructing sacred space was to bring benefits to themselves.”⁶¹ So it's really all about them, “co-opting religion in the service of self-worship.”⁶² Pagans of this character can't even help but take the names of their own false gods in vain!

A ziggurat would've been visible from many miles away, “from practically every point of the urban hinterland,” and that visibility would define a sense of territory and community.⁶³ Babylonians thought of Babylon as the center of the world, and their gods claimed it as a “place of repose for all time,” never to find a closed door or a missing welcome mat there.⁶⁴ Just like that, the builders in Genesis aim to avoid being “scattered on the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4), losing the protection and stability of this home they're building, forfeiting what they feel they've gained.⁶⁵ As if they're the gods of Babylon, they want it as their place of repose forever, there to maintain strength and safety and security through their dense crowd and thick city walls.⁶⁶ And once people accept the city and take rest in it, they'll be stamped by it, Babelites forever.⁶⁷

The builders also declare, “Let us make for ourselves a name” (Genesis 11:4). They want “to be remembered in perpetuity,” to achieve something so remarkable that it “will never pass into oblivion.”⁶⁸ They aim to be “the agents of their own eminence.”⁶⁹ That was part of the reason for a ziggurat, whose landscape-dominating power on the plain would easily “generate a sense of civic pride” within.⁷⁰ The Babylonians really did want their city, Babylon, to “be exalted throughout the inhabited world,” to have fame and influence everywhere.⁷¹ And if it were, then the whole world might forever have ziggurat minds and ziggurat hearts.

It's not for nothing that they describe a tower “with its head in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). While Babylonians think their ziggurats bind heaven and earth together, from the Bible's point of view they “transgress the boundaries of heaven and earth.”⁷² Nebuchadnezzar himself described his work on the tower as “raising the superstructure of Etemenanki to have its summit rival the heavens.”⁷³ From the Bible's point of view, that boast to 'rival the heavens' is “offensive and blasphemous.”⁷⁴ Though Babylonians never thought to use a ziggurat to storm heaven, their latent dream was “to ascend to heaven” (Isaiah 14:13), as if their burnt bricks were squared seraphim ferrying them aloft, that mortared mud and clay men might touch heaven with their earthiness,⁷⁵ and so maybe “to become like gods themselves.”⁷⁶ No wonder later Jews spoke of “the tower of war against God.”⁷⁷

The builders of Babel made a monument, “the massive structure of a building of fantastic proportions,” as the heart of an even vaster and growing city.⁷⁸ It's a perennial truth that “the human race... always longs for more and reaches out for greater things..., always lusting after more.”⁷⁹ We have “a boundless capacity to dream up grand projects,”⁸⁰ and Babel rises from the page as “the place where every human achievement was possible.”⁸¹ “This they have begun to do; and now all that they imagine to do will not be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6). “Whatever human minds conceive, they can achieve.”⁸² That's what Babel is all about.

If humanity enjoys unmitigated success here and now, “nothing will succeed in checking their impulse” – they'll run roughshod over every boundary.⁸³ We'll never believe that any no is serious, that any line should be drawn, any limit respected. And in our day especially, “the project of Babel has been making a comeback,” yielding “everywhere evidence of a revived Babylonian vision.”⁸⁴ We cleave the atoms of the universe in twain, we ape life and monkey around in genetic codes, we design artificial intelligence to slave for us and stave off a cosmic loneliness, we dream of setting foot on Mars, then colonizing heaven and her stars – but would we build anything there but a Babel above?⁸⁵ There's a frightfulness of human reach without restraint, power and genius naked of wisdom and love.

So it is in our lives. What are we prepared to build in life to avoid the things we fear? What do we do, to dreams do we chase, in our endless quests to make ourselves a name that lasts, to build a legacy that can be looked at? To what lengths will we go to advance our vision for how the world should be shaped, how life should be lived? Even the nobler ziggurats we profess to build to God are often brick-by-brick paeans to ourselves and our agendas. Unmoored, that way always “ends with us rallying all the forces at our disposal to serve whatever god of worldly flourishing we have made for ourselves.”⁸⁶

But still its builders persist. They raise their tower, “intended to pave the way for a divine entrance to the city.”⁸⁷ At this point in a building story, we expect a festival to celebrate the finished tower, where the building will be dedicated and the god is invited to come down on it.⁸⁸ No doubt they expect “the lord of Babylon, Marduk the exalted,”⁸⁹ to show up, of whom they believe that “no god can alter the utterance of his mouth,” and “when his anger is ablaze, no god can face him.”⁹⁰ But instead we read that Yahweh, “the LORD, came down” (Genesis 11:5). And Babel will find him to be a very big surprise indeed.

What they have built – and what we build – may be “so gigantic from a human perspective” that it appears in their eyes as a literal skyscraper; but God does not see as we see.⁹¹ “The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of humanity had built” (Genesis 11:5). Their lofty, impressive, fabulous tower, and their vast, lively, mighty city, which they expect to present loud and large before his face, is in his eyes “so puny,” “so insignificant,” that they aren't even visible from his heaven.⁹² They're “so far from the heavens that God must come down to see it,”⁹³ that he has to “go down in order to scrutinize the scene.”⁹⁴ It's actually an extremely funny satire, as if they present before heaven their monumental city and tower, and the Lord makes a show of grabbing his microscope and stooping to squint at their miniscule grandeur.⁹⁵

But “what could empty human presumption have achieved... even if it outstripped the whole region of the cloudy air?”⁹⁶ Every ziggurat was highly “prone to collapse” and needed constant maintenance, due to subsidence in the ground and its unstable core – and that went double for Etemenanki.⁹⁷ You can visit the site today, but you won't even have to lift your eyes; it's a little dirt hill inside a sunken square moat, hardly worth writing home about. Babylon, as an icon of human achievement, was as unstable as a house built foolishly on shifting sands (Matthew 7:26). So are the little Babels we can't seem to stop ourselves from building whenever people “follow the feelings and desires of their own heart in doing or saying whatever they please.”⁹⁸ Like the pitiful ruins in Iraq today, our labors for self are “impermanent and futile,” hardly rising before the Lord.⁹⁹

Babel was a template, and the Bible's last dizzying visions zoom out on human history and behold there one vast culture, Babylon the Great, which through the ages allures and intoxicates the world's peoples, plying them with prosperity and pride (Revelation 14:8). “She glorified herself and lived in luxury” (Revelation 18:7). This is “the great city that has dominion” within world culture even today (Revelation 17:18), for “in the spiritual sense, Babylon is the devil's city.”¹⁰⁰ And to all, she offers a drink from her “golden cup full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4). It's a nauseating picture, a genuine grotesque.

But the city that boasts it births its gods will mourn their deaths from her own deathbed. “Her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (Revelation 18:5), so “her judgment has reached up to heaven and has been lifted up even to the clouds,” higher than Etemenanki's peak (Jeremiah 51:9). “Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height,” even if Babylon achieves every dream she can muster, “yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 51:53). As for the Babylon of history, so for Babylon the Great. On that day “the great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell” (Revelation 16:19), “for here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14). “Thus shall Babylon sink, to rise no more” (Jeremiah 51:64).

But as the Lord once came down and shall come down again to see that tower and its city, so in between did the same Lord God come down, in our flesh and in our blood, to survey our sin and the monuments of our pitiful pride. He came to call us in mercy to tear them all down and to cease our construction, that we might instead move to a better “city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14), “the city that has foundations” of grace amazing, the city “whose designer and builder is God” and not the sons of men (Hebrews 11:10), “the holy city... coming down out of heaven from God,” and not trying to rise up to heaven from earth (Revelation 21:2).

St. Augustine offered these shocking words of wonder, that “all the wicked belong to Babylon, as all the saints to Jerusalem. But Babylon gradually changes into Jerusalem; and how could it do that, unless through him who justifies the godless?” The gateway to this new city is the cross by which the Lord justifies even the ungodliest Babel-builder who will only hand his brick-basket over to the thorn-crowned God who stooped to serve. Zion is Babel's only hope. So now “walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers..., that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever” (Psalm 48:12-14). It has towers – its tower is the church, raised not by human hands¹⁰¹ – but it needs no ziggurat standing tall, “for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb,” and “the glory of God gives it light” (Revelation 21:22-23).

Two cities there are, then: Babylon, grand and luxurious, and Zion, a city under Babel's thumb until her years are done. And two perspectives there are: the sight of man, in which our towers rise high and nigh unto the sky, and the sight of the LORD, in which love looms larger and mercy alone is monumental. Of such things, Babylon has not known. Which city stands at the heart of the world? Which is the center of your world? Is it the city of man, or is it the city of God? Is it the city of today and tomorrow, or the city of eternity? And whose sight do you trust? For in what you see as mountains and what you see as molehills, therein lies the vision that will guide your life. May you see and walk by the glory of God. May you climb no tower but the cross, on whom the One in whom heaven and earth are bound as one died for you, that a better city might rise again. Amen.

A Broader View; or, Here Comes Everybody!

“This tenth chapter [of Genesis] is seemingly barren and appears to serve no purpose. … It is considered full of dead words.”¹ That was Martin Luther's admission about how a lot of people felt about it five centuries ago. And I'm guessing you won't find it too hard to sympathize! I doubt this is anybody's favorite chapter. Nobody's picking their life verse out of Genesis 10. This isn't the place you turn for inspiration or consolation, most likely. It's a long list of names, barely any of which we recognize. It's so tempting to skim it or skip it; let's get on with the good stuff. That's the temptation. Except Paul had to nag us about how “all Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16) – and he didn't make an exception here. Luther ended his consideration of this chapter by calling it “a most precious treasure..., a mirror in which to discern what we humans are.”² So... what's it all about?

This chapter of the Bible is so unique it has its own special name: the Table of Nations. Really, this is the first time the word 'nation' even shows up in the Bible; there are no nations, no distinguished ethnicities, that show up in the first nine chapters, but there sure will be after this.³ In my Bible, the word 'nation' shows up 594 times – starting with five here (six in Hebrew) in this chapter. And what makes Genesis 10 unique is that it's basically “a verbal atlas,”⁴ “a sophisticated exercise in world cartography,”⁵ “a kind of ethnic map of the world.”⁶ Using the shape of a genealogy, it's a world map; the names in it are mostly not individuals, they're people groups.

The names in it might seem pretty unfamiliar, and that's no new thing. For millennia, readers of Genesis have been trying to hunt down all the names in this chapter, correlating it to their pictures of the world's peoples.⁷ But now in the twenty-first century, after a couple hundred years of archaeology, we've nearly managed to fully sketch out this Bible altas. The 'sons of Japheth' are peoples, “all Indo-European nations,” who lived north or northwest of Israel, especially in what's now Turkey, Mediterranean islands, and into Europe.⁸ Gomer's the Cimmerians, who lived by the Black Sea; listed under him are Tegarama, a city in east-central Turkey, Riphath (still a mystery), and Ashkenaz, a people otherwise called the Scythians; Magog is the country of Lydia, a rich and powerful people of west Turkey; Madai are the Medes of northern Iran; Javan are the Ionian Greeks of south Turkey, and associated with him are Elishah and the Kittim, all of Cyprus; the Rodanim, of the island of Rhodes; and Tarshish, the distant colony of Tartessos in south Spain; Tubal and Meshech are neighbors in east Turkey, Tabali and Mushki (Mushki is where the famed Midas was a real king); and Tiras is could be a Mediterranean people called the Turscha or even the ancient Turkish city of Troy, of Trojan Horse fame.⁹

Ham is mainly associated with peoples who lived south and southwest, especially in Africa, and his sons are listed from north to south. Cush was a famous people who lived in Ethiopia and Sudan, and the various sons credited to him are all in east Africa or across the Red Sea in southwest Arabia; Mizraim is just Egypt, and of his listed sons, the Naphtuhim and Pathrusim are just the people of north and south Egypt, the Ludim are Lydian mercenaries who fought for Egypt, the Anamim are a North African people west of Egypt, and the Caphtorim are from the island of Crete to Egypt's northwest; Ham's third son Put is further west of Egypt in Libya; and then Canaan covers all the peoples up the east Mediterranean coast, with some being the groups Israel fought for their promised land, like the Jebusites, Amorites, Hivites, and Girgashites, while others lived further north in Lebanon and west Syria, like the cities of Sidon, Arqa, Siyannu, Sumur, Hamath, and the island of Arwad.¹⁰

Finally, Noah's last-listed son Shem covers the peoples who lived east, southeast, and northeast of Israel in different parts of Asia. Elam is the furthest east, and was a prominent people in southwest Iran, later replaced by the Persians; Asshur is, of course, the Assyrians, in north Iraq; nobody's really sure what Lud's doing here; Aram is the Arameans, who lived in different places including much of what we call Syria, though his sons are tougher to pin down; and the delightfully named Arpachshad probably refers to south Iraq, while his descendants through Joktan are almost all tribes, towns, and oases in southern Arabia.¹¹

To the people who lived thousands of years ago, before we had the kinds of maps we use today, that was a big world, full of so many different kinds of people to keep track of; no wonder the Bible sums each bunch up “by their clans, by their languages, in their lands, in their nations” (Genesis 10:20). One ancient Bible retelling of the Bible, with people cast as animals like a cartoon, pictures here “every kind of species: lions, leopards, wolves, dogs, hyenas, wild boars, foxes, conies, pigs, falcons, vultures, kites, eagles, and ravens.”¹² The Bible has its eyes wide open to so many clans with many customs, pursuing diverse ways to express their humanity.

This list has “about seventy members”¹³ – some say that “the peoples listed amount precisely to seventy,” if you count 'em right.¹⁴ Even though some are vast populations and others are single cities, the Jewish rabbis regularly referred to them as “the seventy nations of the world.”¹⁵ And this picture of seventy, hardly a coincidence for being such a round multiple of seven and ten, is “a literary device to convey the notion of the totality of the human race,”¹⁶ revealing “the completeness of God's order.”¹⁷

Now, again, this chapter is a world map as drawn from an Israelite perspective, a “repository of traditional knowledge.”¹⁸ We shouldn't expect to read here about nations Israel didn't already know by name, like peoples in China or England or the New World.¹⁹ For that matter, this chapter was likely revised and edited at several stages to update it in light of Israel's changing contacts with the world.²⁰ Appearance and skin color play zero role in how this table maps the world; instead, it's organized by things like geography, political relationships, and economic ties.²¹ This chapter “attaches equal weight to multiple levels of belonging.”²² So it's really not surprising we have our share of duplicates here – Lydians creeping into all three divisions, Sheba and Havilah showing up in both Ham and Shem, not to mention a bunch that'll later resurface as Abraham's kids. As one bishop said, “if somewhere the name of a people... has been registered doubly..., let no one wonder or doubt.”²³

Okay, so why did God bother to stick this chapter in his Bible? What is it supposed to tell us? Well, remember that “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 9:1). That was just a chapter ago, and “the blessing is in the process of being realized” in chapter 10.²⁴ The blessing is working! All Noah's sons are fruitful; they're multiplying, and the earth is being filled.

Second, “such a table of nations is unique” in the literatures of the ancient world,²⁵ showing off “a universal consciousness not perceived elsewhere” in any other culture,²⁶ except somewhat in ancient Greece.²⁷ Weirdest of all, Israel's table of nations doesn't even name Israel, as if confessing that “Israel appears late on the world stage” and “cannot elevate itself” above other nations.²⁸ This chapter shows off “God's broad concern for all peoples,”²⁹ that he takes “an interest in all people, in their own right.”³⁰ God is “a God whose purposes transcend the particularism of Israel,” and so his scriptures are calling them to transcend it, too.³¹ They cherish this humbling list without their name, a portrait of a world still waiting for them, a gentle reminder to us as well to “appreciate the different people groups of our own time” in their own right, all the peoples of the earth.³²

But each of those nations is listed under the heading of at least one of the sons of Noah, for these are “the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on earth after the flood” (Genesis 10:32). St. Paul, when he's preaching in Athens, comments that “God made from one every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26). In saying 'God made,' he's attesting that no nation is a mistake of mortal man, that each has its distinctive dignity, a God-given peoplehood to live out; but in saying 'from one,' he's saying that this wide world of nations, “as diverse and distinct as they might be, had a common origin,”³³ that they “share a common heritage.”³⁴ This chapter's genealogy “conveys relatedness across the entire system,”³⁵ “binding all humanity together” as “children of one father, Noah.”³⁶ And so “brothers remain brothers, even if they choose never to interact,” or worse.³⁷

Ancient genealogies always “made creative use of the past” so as to speak “to a present situation.”³⁸ This chapter is littered with sevens – seven sons and seven grandsons of Japheth, seven total descendants of Cush, seven sons of Mizraim (the Philistines don't count), twelve plus twice-seven children of Shem, a set of four-times-seven genealogy words – but “no sevens in the structuring of the Canaanite genealogy,”³⁹ which is the detailed but disruptive passage “literally at the center of the chapter.”⁴⁰ The chapter orders Noah's sons in increasing circles of contact with Israel,⁴¹ and subtly draws our attention to the thrice-invoked name of Eber.⁴²

This chapter not only mentions all these nations, but focuses on their “lands” (Genesis 10:5, 20, 31); and old Jewish retellings make that a key part of the story. In those retellings, Noah's three sons settle at the base of the mountain, with Japheth facing west, Ham facing south, and Shem facing east.⁴³ As the decades pass and their people begin fighting over space, they divide it “in an evil manner between themselves.”⁴⁴ In response, Noah “divided by lot the land which his three sons would possess,”⁴⁵ putting their deed into writing, “portioning out each part according to an inheritance for each.”⁴⁶ “Noah divided by lot for Japheth and his sons... the whole land of the north in its entirety,” and “for Shem there emerged the second lot” in “the middle of the earth,” and “for Ham there emerged the third share” “toward the south.”⁴⁷ Then “the sons of Noah divided their allotments among their sons” accordingly.⁴⁸ The retellings close the scene with Noah making “them all swear an oath to curse each and every one who desired to seize a portion which did not come in his lot.”⁴⁹

Now, the psalms confess that “the LORD is high above all nations” and “reigns over the nations” (Psalms 113:4; 47:8) – all nations live in “one world governed by God”⁵⁰ – and the proverbs remind us that “the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). So even if Noah had his sons cast lots, ultimately it was the LORD who “apportioned for each... a territorial possession, specifically establishing the boundaries thereof.”⁵¹ That's what Moses tells us, at least: “the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance..., he fixed the borders of the peoples” (Deuteronomy 32:8), “each group occupying the country that they lit upon and to which God led them, so that every continent was peopled by them.”⁵² That's why St. Paul preached to the Athenians that the very God they “worship as unknown..., who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth,” also “made from one every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined... the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:23-26).

So far, so good. But we haven't yet let Moses finish his statement: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance and divided the sons of Adam, he fixed the borders of the people according to the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8). Ancient readers understood here that “there are many nations and many people, and they all belong to [God], but over all of them he caused spirits to rule,”⁵³ that the nations should be “handed over to angels” and remain “under them.”⁵⁴ “For by an ancient and divine order, the angels are distributed among the nations,”⁵⁵ “entrusted with the patronage of nations.”⁵⁶ Thus, “in dividing the nations of the entire world, he appointed a leader for each nation,”⁵⁷ “its own patron angel.”⁵⁸ Jews zeroed in on the chief guardian angels of these nations as “seventy shepherds,”⁵⁹ who “bear responsibility for the welfare of the nations of the world.”⁶⁰ This is the Bible's mighty answer to the stories other nations told, where it was the gods who drew lots to divvy up the land among themselves, and whichever people lived there were just an afterthought.⁶¹

So if each nation has its own appointed guiding spirit, why's the world... you know... the way it is? Some Jews speculated that these 'sons of God' were less than faithful, that “those seventy shepherds were... guilty,”⁶² since, like the psalm says, these “sons of the Most High... have neither knowledge nor understanding” of the mysteries of God's plan (Psalm 82:5-6), so they “judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked” (Psalm 82:2). While some Christians countered “that the angels have done their guardianship, and that it is no fault of theirs if other nations wandered off,”⁶³ Jews lamented that “the polluted demons began to lead astray the children of Noah's sons and to lead them to folly and to destroy them.”⁶⁴ They wondered if maybe that was the mystery of God's plan, that “he caused spirits to rule so that he might lead them astray from following him.”⁶⁵

Either way, “when those who dwelt on earth began to multiply, they produced... many nations, and again they began to be more ungodly than were their ancestors.”⁶⁶ That's why the Apostle Paul tells his sad story of how, although they “knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21) – “all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17), living in a state of “separation from the knowledge of God,” leading to a spiritual void that ached to be filled.⁶⁷ For “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened; claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21-22) and “began to worship creatures.”⁶⁸ In spite of this, Paul reflects that God “allowed the nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14:16), and to “set up new ways of life for themselves and new institutions of their choice,” for better or for worse.⁶⁹

The Old Testament tends to think it was for the worse that “the nations have sunk in the pit that they made” (Psalm 9:15). How often we read lines like, “the LORD is enraged against all the nations” (Isaiah 34:2), “the LORD has an indictment against the nations” (Jeremiah 25:31)! He shows Ezekiel a frightful vision about “the land of Magog” and “Meshech and Tubal” (Ezekiel 38:2), with whom are aligned “Persia and Cush and Put..., Gomer and all his hordes..., the house of Togarmah from the uttermost parts of the earth” (Ezekiel 38:5-6), all supported by “Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish” (Ezekiel 38:13). “All the nations of the earth will gather against” the people of God (Zechariah 12:3). But it's a trap for them: “In the latter days, I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me when through you... I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (Ezekiel 38:16). “A sword shall come upon Egypt, and anguish shall be in Cush... and Put and Lud and all Arabia and Libya” (Ezekiel 30:4-5), “I will send fire on Magog and on those who dwell securely in the coastlands, and they shall know that I am the LORD” (Ezekiel 39:6), “and I will set my glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see my judgment that I have executed” (Ezekiel 39:21).

It's no wonder the Apostle Paul adds a twist to Moses' words, saying that God apportioned nations not just space but time – that he “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26).⁷⁰ The nations aren't eternal groupings; their boundaries, identities, and their very existence are all “flexible over time.”⁷¹ Peoples and nations die away by catastrophe or demographic collapse, by merger or assimilation. But nations are also born – gradually (Isaiah 66:8), but it does happen. You won't find Americans in this Table of Nations, but here we are. Paul wants us to know that all this is in the hands of God, that in the wisdom of his plan he assigned both a place and a time to every nation, “all to be overturned in divinely appointed times.”⁷²

And yet, Paul says, God's purpose in doing so was “that they should seek God, if perhaps indeed they might feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:27). After all, even as the nations strayed in willful forgetfulness, God “did not leave himself without witness, but did good” to each nation by providing for them (Acts 14:17). The psalmists begged God to reveal himself even more to the nations, “that you way may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations; let the peoples praise you, O God” (Psalm 67:2-3). They pledged themselves to the task: “I will give thanks to you, O LORD, among the peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations” (Psalm 108:3). And they called on others to join them: “Declare his glory among the nations” (Psalm 96:3), “say among the nations, 'The LORD reigns!'” (Psalm 96:10). They call to the nations directly to “praise the LORD, all nations; extol him, all peoples!” (Psalm 117:1). The early Jewish rabbis noticed that each year, at the Feast of Booths, over seven days God had them sacrifice seventy bulls, plus a seventy-first bull on the eighth day (Numbers 29:12-38). They reasoned that the last bull was for themselves, and with the others Israel was called, as God's priestly nation in the world (Exodus 19:6), to atone for the sins of the other seventy.⁷³

The Old Testament is full of faith that the LORD God “shall inherit all the nations,” not just his chosen portion (Psalm 82:8). For the prophets saw coming a time to “gather all nations” to “come and see my glory,” God says; “I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish and Pul and Lud who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away that have not heard my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations” (Isaiah 66:18-19). “To the LORD shall bow down, each in its place, all the lands of the nations” (Zephaniah 2:11). “O LORD..., to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say, 'Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit'” (Jeremiah 16:19). “Many nations shall join themselves to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people” (Zechariah 2:11).

And the prophets knew that it would take a Prince of Peace – “of him shall the nations inquire” (Isaiah 11:10). This Child of Promise, the Servant of the LORD, “will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isaiah 42:1), will be “a light for the nations” (Isaiah 42:6), so that the LORD's “salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). To that end, during his ministry, not only does Jesus select twelve apostles for the twelve tribes of Israel, but he “appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two” (Luke 10:1), an advance group “to teach the salvation of all peoples,”⁷⁴ symbolizing ahead of time that “Jesus is sending his representatives into all the known nations of their day.”⁷⁵ These seventy disciples discover that “even the demons are subject to us” in Jesus' name, for he's given them “authority to tread... over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:17-19) – the nation-misleading spirits, even the seventy shepherds, are subject to the seventy disciples.

The prophets foretold, though, that this Lord would suffer “by oppression and judgment,” be slaughtered and buried (Isaiah 53:8), even as the wicked cast lots to divide his clothes as if they were the world divided evilly by the nations (Psalm 22:18). But through this, “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD” (Psalm 22:27). From his cross, this Savior “shall sprinkle many nations” with his saving blood (Isaiah 52:5), by which he has “ransomed people for God from every tribe... and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). “And his resting place shall be glorious” (Isaiah 11:10) – because his tomb is empty! Jesus lives, that “repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations” (Luke 24:47)!

And so “go, therefore,” says he in resurrection splendor, “and disciple all nations,” baptizing and teaching them the ways of the Lord who tears away “the veil that is spread over all nations” (Matthew 28:19-20; Isaiah 25:7). He did not say to preach to some nations, to disciple some nations, to give life to some nations; he said all nations. Before the world is at last redeemed in full, “the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations” (Mark 13:10), so that the Church which manifests God's omni-national mystery may astound “the rulers and authorities” over nations “in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10) – “and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:24). What that end brings, John has seen and told us: “Behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples..., standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out in a loud voice: 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on our throne and to the Lamb!' And all the angels were standing around the throne..., and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying: 'Amen!'” (Revelation 7:9-12). Amen, and amen!

In the Tents of Shem

The air hangs heavy as his ending exhalation spirals softly outward. His lungs don't draw another to replace it; his heart beats its last. Father Noah is gone (Genesis 9:29). We've spent so long with the man that it feels nigh impossible. We've walked with him from his birth nearly a millennium ago, or so the Bible pictures, when his father Lamech cradled him with a humble prayer (Genesis 5:29). Noah – may this man of rest bring comfort to the weariness of human hands, struggling against a cursed earth. Noah took his first steps in a hard-scrabble world tainted by evil running out of control, would-be heroes turning tyrant, violence and lawlessness reigning. But Noah, this boy, found favor in the eyes of the LORD God, and faced opposite the world (Genesis 6:1-9). One day, he heard the voice of that God, breaking through the stony heaven to warn of disaster and give him a ridiculous job: to build a boat big enough for the world (Genesis 6:13-21). Setting aside his celibate devotion, he married and raised three sons, who helped him pour all he had into this boat, a shocking and silent witness to the judgment to come (Genesis 6:22). As a herald of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5), Noah held out the prospect of salvation to all and sundry until the rain was falling. And he trusted the LORD to close the door on his kin and their critters (Genesis 7:16).

In all this, Noah presented an advance image of Jesus, building his Church to divine specifications, calling all to enter it, and washing the world with a baptism that drowns sin but ferries the Church to salvation (Genesis 7:1-24). Through the flood, God broke down the first world, unwinding it to its roots; but in remembering Noah, God saw a reason for life to go on. So he blew his Spirit, parted the waters, raised the land with its plants, called forth the birds and beasts and eight straggling souls onto the mountain height. The Lord God had given rest to the ark; now Noah spread a restful aroma heavenward with his worship, and put all to rights, a sabbath to cut the tape on a squeaky-clean creation (Genesis 8:1-22). Like the first people, humanity received again a blessing, against a grant of grace with food to eat, and again a law, one thing withheld: blood (Genesis 9:1-7). God even protected this second world with a covenant and a sign for all to see (Genesis 9:8-17).

Noah's life then wasn't quite two-thirds through yet. At some point in the decades to come, he craved a garden for his new world, so he planted a vineyard. From the grapes he grew, he made a rest-bringing wine – but this fruit, we found, packs a kick to it, and like the Adam before him, it left him naked in his tent (Genesis 9:18-21). Now today, “Noah awoke from his wine” – he sobered up, albeit probably with a hard-won hangover – “and he knew what his young son had done to him” (Genesis 9:24). He had been humiliated by his son Ham, who had infiltrated his tent, gazed at and deconstructed his naked authority, and gone on to spread his shame in the street, as though he were a powerless captive (Genesis 9:22). His other sons, Shem and Japheth, had resisted their brother's tempting song, and had gone out of their way to remedy his indignity by cloaking his nakedness in sightless silence (Genesis 9:23). Yet Noah now needs to reestablish himself as a man of authority.¹ And he'll do so by sitting in judgment on his sons for their actions in the aberrant episode of his apparent abdication.

This is the point, after everything we've been through together, when for the first time we hear Noah break his silence; here begin his first spoken words in scripture.² And it doesn't start out pretty. You have to figure, if we just saw the fall in the garden repeat itself, we're at the part of the replay when God questions Adam and Eve and then starts speaking in curses of judgment. And that's the very first word out of Noah's mouth: “Cursed” (Genesis 9:25). Alas, “the new world is not free from curse.”³ But since Shem and Japheth did what Adam and Eve didn't in resisting temptation, perhaps the curse won't be the last word of the day. “The LORD's curse is on the house of the wicked,” we're told, “but he blesses the dwelling of the righteous” (Proverbs 3:33).

Since Ham played the snakiest of roles, we expect him to get reamed out with the words, “Cursed be Ham.” To our surprise, that's not what Noah says. “Cursed be Canaan,” we hear (Genesis 9:25), having been reminded over and over that “Ham was the father of Canaan” (Genesis 9:18). This surprise twist has been confusing us for two thousand years plus. If Ham's done the crime, why's his kid doing the time? Some readers speculate there was an earlier version of the story with Canaan in Ham's place,⁴ or read between the lines to find Canaan as “a participant in the offense against Noah” somehow.⁵ But as we have our Bible, “no clear wrongdoing great or small has been indicated on his part.”⁶ So why does Noah pick on this baby of the family instead?

Why not Ham directly? Maybe in part “because of the nearness of kin,” because he was just too close to Ham to bear it.⁷ But it might have more to do with how the chapter started, when “God blessed Noah and his sons” (Genesis 9:1). Even in the garden, God never directly cursed Adam or Eve in their person, since he'd blessed them at the start. God later says, “You shall not curse the people [who] are blessed” (Numbers 22:12). So how could Noah dare? “He did not curse Ham, but his son, because God blessed the sons of Noah.”⁸

So as not to contravene God's blessing, Noah punishes more indirectly. Last Sunday, we saw the parallels with a story of David's wife Michal who judges him naked in public, despises him in her heart, and berates him when he comes home from celebrating the LORD's goodness (2 Samuel 6:20). There's a reproductive consequence for the crime.⁹ The last we read of Michal is that “Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death” (2 Samuel 6:23). The curse Noah speaks can't make Ham childless – he's already a dad – but he can be “cursed through his one son.”¹⁰ Then “the father is... more deeply saddened at the punishment paid by his son,”¹¹ enduring perhaps “greater anguish” than if the curse had met Ham under his own name.¹²

Ham should have known better. As a father himself several times over, he challenged his father's fatherhood. Canaan, as the youngest and most impressionable, would see that and be profoundly shaped by it. How could Canaan ever respect Ham's fatherhood for its own sake now? Seeing Ham throw tradition out the window, why would Canaan ever deem him trustworthy? Ham has burned down every support for parenting his own son; it's bound to impact Canaan's future life and behavior. Canaan will struggle to ever understand life as other than self-will versus coercion, license versus slavery. All Canaan knows is that his shame is his dad's fault; Noah's words drive a wedge between Ham and Canaan, putting Ham in a position to be just as resented by his son as Noah has been by Ham.¹³ By cursing Canaan, Noah gives Ham as close as possible to what he dished out.

Still, even if we see the logic and maybe the inevitability, we can't help but ask how it's fair to Canaan, that his teeth be set on edge by Daddy Ham's sour grapes (Ezekiel 18:2). But if we step back, we realize that Noah is being, not unaccountably cruel, but unaccountably kind. Canaan isn't being cursed as an individual, but as a stand-in for the Canaanite nations said to come from him. Noah utters this curse and leaves it as a possibility in the hands of God, to be unfolded as his justice sees fit in later history.¹⁴ Until their “iniquity is complete,” God doesn't let Noah's curse touch their lives at all. If they choose not to walk in Ham's ways, then it will never touch them at all (Ezekiel 18:14-17). Ultimately, it's their own later behavior that earns Noah's curse (Leviticus 18:27). It's Canaanite society as Israel actually saw it that's the target of Noah's curse here.¹⁵

Now, that's mighty merciful. Noah could have spoken his curse against Ham – but “had he been cursed, all the sons of Ham... would have been cursed along with Ham,”¹⁶ so “the punishment would have passed to the race as a whole.”¹⁷ And that's exactly what Noah doesn't want. Noah skips over Ham as well as his three oldest sons, choosing only the youngest one whose descendants would earn it. For the rest of the seed of Ham, there's no sword of fate hanging over their heads; “the other descendants of Ham escaped the curse.”¹⁸

And that's really important, because these words of Noah are going to be heavily and heart-breakingly abused to justify horrendous evils – especially here in America, where, through “a single perverseness of interpretation,”¹⁹ many people read the words of this curse as an endorsement of racial supremacy and an institution of slavery. It never ceases to dismay how badly we're able to misread the Bible. Every now and then in the early church, somebody would smooth out the story in retelling, saying that not Canaan but “Ham became a servant of servants for both of his brothers.”²⁰ One eccentric book, over five centuries after the apostles, jumbled things further and identified Africans, Egyptians, and Indians as the cursed offspring of Canaan.²¹ What made things worse is when the story reached the ears of the first Muslims, who – not having Bibles to set the record straight, and getting deeply into slave trading after conquering Africa – pictured all descendants of Ham as black slaves.²² A long season of Islamic rule in Spain left these toxic ideas to leach slowly into Europe in the Middle Ages,²³ so once the slave trade took off, Europeans reinterpreted this verse to explain differences in skin color.²⁴ But it was especially here that Noah's curse became crucial to the quest to justify race-based slavery.²⁵ American defenders of slavery wielded this verse as “a charm to spellbind opposition” which they never left home without.²⁶ One critic called it “the oldest bill of rights slaveholders are wont to plead.”²⁷

Oblivious to where their ideas really came from, some tried changing the words in their Bibles to conform to Arabic copies that curse Ham.²⁸ They thought, after all, that Ham's name meant 'black,' and interpreted Noah's three sons racially.²⁹ Even when they admitted Canaan was the one cursed, they lazily identified Canaan with Africa³⁰ or else assumed he should be “considered inclusive of Ham's descendants in the other branches.”³¹ They pushed their own views into the Bible under the guise of “facts and history,” figuring that since slavery and Africans seemed to go together naturally, it just had to be what Noah meant.³² Reasoning circularly back to what they wanted to believe, they concluded that Noah's words were an eternal decree by the Holy Spirit where “God appointed the race of Ham judicially to slavery,”³³ an institution they defended as “a cornerstone of a good society..., essential for producing and maintaining social order.”³⁴ (A ridiculous position, but a sincere one.  Sincere, and wicked.)

It's important to hear those voices from our national past, and to know how they got there, as a reminder of just how much damage we can do when we read into the Scriptures what we already want to believe, instead of allowing the goodness of the Scriptures challenge and shape us. Through the power of self-delusion, many American men and women solemnly believed that Scripture told them their obvious evil was good, and they built their society on it and waged war to defend it – even while clearer eyes saw that their tortured readings borrowed “the worst logic the devil ever used,”³⁵ in which, they said, “it is difficult to decide when the monstrous or the ludicrous predominates.”³⁶ These clearer eyes rightly pointed out that the curse was confined to Canaan only,³⁷ that Canaanites weren't black,³⁸ that none of the African nations traced descent from Canaan,³⁹ and that, thanks to generations of sexual abuse of female slaves, a large proportion of African-Americans were no longer legal heirs of Ham anyway.⁴⁰ They asked how slaveholders could be sure Noah's curse was still in force,⁴¹ or that they themselves weren't heirs of Canaan,⁴² especially since “probably more of the posterity of Shem and Japheth... have been enslaved... than those of Ham have. ”⁴³ They questioned whether Canaan's servitude was to be “individual bondage” rather than “national subjection and tribute,”⁴⁴ and showed that the Bible could've meant nothing like the crime of American slavery.⁴⁵ They left the self-deluded without excuse.

No one could deny, though, that Noah's words of curse changed the relationships among his sons, and sorted the world into winners and losers in a way there just hadn't been on the ark. So here Noah turns from the line of Ham to the line of another son, Shem. To balance the curse, we expect here to read a blessing, and we do – but indirectly.⁴⁶ Noah identifies the LORD as “the God of Shem” (Genesis 9:26). We haven't heard of the LORD as God of Adam, God of Abel, God of Enoch, or even God of Noah, but he's God of Shem. And Noah blesses this God of Shem, giving the LORD credit for Shem's godly kindness. Noah honors Shem in the best way possible: by glorifying God on his account. That's far better than any praise that could attach to my name or your name. So much better than hearing, “What a great job!”, “What a great sermon!”, is to hear, “What a great God!” The gift Noah gives his son is that the LORD should be “recognized and hallowed as the author of Shem's life and victories.”⁴⁷ And so “in blessing God, he made Shem beneficiary of greater blessing.”⁴⁸ Wherever Shem settles, Noah hopes there the LORD will be: “May the LORD dwell in the dwelling place of Shem.”⁴⁹ What's funny in all this is that Shem has the Bible's least creative name. Because that's what the name 'Shem' means: 'Name.'⁵⁰ “Hi, what's your name?” “Name... just Name.” The God of Name, the God of Renown, is Shem's God. So the psalmists will forever cry, “Sing to the LORD, bless his Shem” (Psalm 96:2), and call out, “For your Shem's sake, O LORD, preserve my life!” (Psalm 143:11). In this, we know we expect Shem to lead to Jesus.

But there's one last brother to mention, Japheth, whose name probably isn't even Hebrew, but it makes for a good Hebrew pun, because it sounds so much like the Hebrew word for 'wide' or 'open,' which is exactly what Noah prays for Japheth.⁵¹ It sounds, at first blush, like a prayer for Japheth's territorial stretch and prosperity, and early Christians figured he got just that: “Japheth increased and became powerful in his inheritance in the north and in the west,”⁵² with “many descendants.”⁵³ And yet, when Noah prays for Shem, he uses God's first name – LORD, Yahweh – but in praying for Japheth, Noah uses only the generic word 'God,' Elohim.⁵⁴ Japheth may prosper in the world, be big and strong, multiply and fill the earth... but they'll know God more distantly.

So Noah adds a further prayer for Japheth: that he will “dwell in the tents of Shem” (Genesis 9:27). Japheth, so great and vast, will move in to Shem's space. Some have read this as the privilege of conquest, Japheth taking Shem's property away and dispossessing him. Or maybe this reminds us that all Japheth's decency and nobility can only achieve true greatness through Shem's spiritual shepherding.⁵⁵ So Noah prays that Japheth and his seed will “participate in God's special blessings upon Shem” and, through him, come to know not just a god but the LORD.⁵⁶ Noah's prayer for God to make Japheth 'wide' is just as much a prayer to make Japheth 'open' – open of heart, open of soul, open to receive, open to respond, open to a share of Shem's blessedness.⁵⁷

At each of these stages, Noah reiterates the substance of his curse on Canaan, but presents it as a blessing to the other two lines. For Shem and his God, the LORD, “let Canaan be his servant” (Genesis 9:26). And once Japheth comes to share in what's Shem's, “let Canaan be his servant” (Genesis 9:27). Looking ahead, we know that God chooses tribes, the Hebrew offspring of Shem, and that they dwell in a foreign country, Egypt, “the land of Ham” (Psalm 105:23). But the LORD performed “wondrous works in the land of Ham” (Psalm 106:22), striking down “the firstfruits of their strength in the tents of Ham; then he led out his people” (Psalm 78:51-52). And he led them with careful instructions to “not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, nor do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you” (Leviticus 18:3).

And so after this exodus from the land of Ham, the LORD “brought them to his holy land..., he drove out the nations before them... and settled the tribes of Israel in their tents,” the tents of Shem in the land of Canaan (Psalm 78:54-55). Canaan fought that tooth-and-nail, but “the Israelites destroyed the dwelling places of Canaan and pressed their leaders into bondage.”⁵⁸ But one Canaanite family confessed their faith that “the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11). “Justified by works” (James 2:25), the Bible says this family was “saved alive” (Joshua 6:25), and later tradition made them, through Rahab, ancestors of King David (Matthew 1:5). Another Canaanite district, Gibeon, chose to outwit Israel by tricking them into a peace treaty (Joshua 9:3-4). Joshua spared them but applied Noah's words to them: “You are cursed, and some of you shall never be anything but servants and cutters of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God” (Joshua 9:23). Obviously, Israel didn't start buying and selling Gibeonites. They had the privilege of carring out essential tasks for God's worship – filling the water basin in which priests purified themselves (Exodus 30:20), chopping the wood that would be burned up with holy sacrifices on the altar (Leviticus 1:7).⁵⁹ They gave their service at the Tent of the God of Shem, and so “this case of the Gibeonites,” one early Christian said, “fulfilled... the servitude of Canaan” already.⁶⁰

Centuries passed, and, “after being oppressed by the righteous people for many generations,” gradually the rest of Canaan's remnant “submitted to their control.”⁶¹ Yet, far from mistreating the Gibeonites, King David respected their rights and even made them an offering of atonement for Saul's zealous cruelty toward them (2 Samuel 21:1-9). David left the original Tent and Altar at Gibeon (1 Chronicles 16:39-42), where Solomon offered sacrifice and received his great wisdom (1 Kings 3:4-15), after which Solomon began building God a new house, a new tent, a temple (1 Kings 6:1-38). But he relied on the labor of Canaan's remnant: “these Solomon drafted as forced labor, as it is to this day; but of the people of Israel, Solomon made no slaves” (1 Kings 9:21-22). That shining temple where the LORD God condescended to dwell on earth? Canaanite hands carried the stones, Canaanite hands set the beams in place, Canaanite hands continued to bring the wood and water. Canaanites humbly offered these unseen labors as the backbone of the glorification of God! Yes, Noah, Canaan is a servant of the servants of God, that the LORD be exalted!

Isaiah there dreamt a day when the sons of Japheth, “who have not heard [God's] fame or seen [God's glory,” would hear the good news and gather to worship the LORD at that place (Isaiah 66:19-23). But it would have to wait. For the sins of the sons of Shem, they were subjected beneath “the descendants of Japheth who would rob the descendants of Shem.”⁶² But then the Word of God took on Semite flesh and Semite blood, pitching his tent among us as Jesus Christ (John 1:14), “the son of Shem, the son of Noah” (Luke 3:36). Salvation is from the Semites (John 4:22), and Jesus ministered chiefly to Shem while on earth. But he welcomed and celebrated the faith of a Roman centurion, a son of Japheth, and a Canaanite woman, a daughter of Ham, as even greater still (Matthew 8:10; 15:28). And so it was fulfilled: “Our God turned the curse into a blessing” (Nehemiah 13:2). Both trusted that in Jesus they could find a place in the tents of Shem, that a crumb of mercy there is wider than the world outside, that it's better to labor in the tabernacle of God than to rule where demons roam.

When St. Paul was sent forth, he reached out to his fellow Semites wherever he went, but acknowledge himself chiefly “an apostle to the Gentiles” (Romans 11:13), longing to bring Japheth into the tents of Shem. He'd found “the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations,” not even to Noah, “as it has now been revealed” (Ephesians 3:4-5). The mystery was that in the tents of Shem, Gentiles too taste the promises of God, Gentiles too share an inheritance, Gentiles too can belong to this body (Ephesians 3:6). Shem, who foreshadows Christ, is “the foundation, the root,”⁶³ but Japheth and Ham “were grafted in among the others and now share in the root of richness” (Romans 11:17). Christ “is our peace, who has... broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14), the dividing curse of Noah (Galatians 3:13).

Now “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free..., for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). “The same Lord is the Lord of all” (Romans 10:12), the God of Shem but also God of Japheth and God of Ham (Romans 3:29-30), “bestowing his riches on all who call on him” (Romans 10:12), that Jesus “might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross” (Ephesians 2:16). The apostle's preaching stretched the tent to the world, ushering Japheth in, to the point that Martin Luther thought Ham could only enter by “irregular grace” because he remained barred from “access to the spiritual blessing.”⁶⁴ But today, more than one in four Christians lives in Africa, on track to be more than one in three in a couple decades – Ham's will become a plurality voice in the global church choir.⁶⁵

The beautiful truth is that Noah's curses and blessings were prophecies of a salvation history that ends with a tent wide open – wide open for all. It's just like Christians were saying nearly from the beginning: “Therefore, men from every land, whether slaves or free men, who believe in Christ and recognize the truths of his words and those of the prophets, fully realize that they will one day be united with him... to inherit imperishable blessings for all eternity,” in “the true tent that the Lord set up” (Hebrews 8:2), the Lord who bears the Name that is above every 'shem' (Philippians 2:9)!⁶⁶ For there, in that tent where “no longer will there be anything accursed..., his servants will worship him” as one blessed body, world without end (Revelation 22:3). Amen.