Decoding the Table of Nations: Reading it as a Map

Nations and races in Africa, East Asia, most of Europe, Australia and America were beyond the horizon of the writers.

Attempts to crack the code of the Table have not come up with satisfactory solutions. See S.R. Driver, The Book of Genesis, London: Methuen 1904, p. 113; N.M. Sarna, Genesis (The JPS Torah Commentary), Philadelphia – Jerusalem 1989, pp. 68–69; P.S. Alexander, “Early Jewish Geography,” ABD 2 (1992), pp. 977–988, esp. p. 980; J.E. Hartley, Genesis (New International Biblcal Commentary), Peabody: Hendrickson 2000, p. 116.

For more on Hittites and other “descendants of Canaan,” see Yigal Levin’s TABS essay,“Abraham Goes to Canaan.”

For more on the Philistines, see Shirly Ben Dor Evian’s TABS essay, “The Philistines.”  

Alexander, ‘Jewish Geography’, col. 980b.

I. Cornelius, “How Maps ‘Lie’ – Some Remarks on the Ideology of Ancient Near Eastern and ‘Scriptural’ Maps,” JNSL 24/1 (1998), pp. 217–230, esp. p. 223.

Het, Arkat, Arvad, Zumur, and Hamat (15–18). See the related entries in Bible Lexica.

A similar change of a map center can be found in the book of Jubilees. For the description of the distribution of Earth among the children of Noah, the book uses a well-known Greek map. That map describes Earth as a flat disk surrounded by water. The disk’s center was in Delphi. The book of Jubilees describes Jerusalem as the world’s Omphalos (Jubilees 8–9). See: P.S. Alexander, “Jerusalem as the Omphalos of the World: On the History of a Geographical Concept,” in Jerusalem, Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity and Islam (ed. Lee I. Levine; New York: Continuum, 1999), 104–119.  

Admittedly, I am oversimplifying here, as I am only dealing with the J text, and chapter 10 is not only J; some of the sections derive from P. The J lists, as opposed to P lists, use the verb י-ל-ד (“give birth to”) for connecting parents with their children. But since a source division is not critical for understanding the main point of this essay, I will leave off offering a textual reconstruction. I will note, however, that the Priestly tradition also reads best when viewing Kadesh/Petra as the center.

Driver noted that the nations that were the closest to Israel are not included in the Table of the Nations, as they have their own genealogical lists. See: Driver, Genesis, p. 113.

On the topic of Ashur, my analysis does not solve the problem of Nimrod, the builder of these Mesopotamian cities, being a descendent of Kush (Sudan). Some scholars have suggested that in the original J list, Nimrod was a descendent of Kashmir, an ancient Mesopotamian nation. As in Hebrew “Kush” and “Kash” are both spelled כש, the compiler, by mistake, placed Nimrod among the descendants of Ham instead among the Semites. For bibliography see: Driver, Genesis, 120; T.E. Fretheim, “The Book of Genesis, Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible 1 (Abingdon, 1994), 319-674, [408b].

In fact, it is unclear what this author could have known about the origins of either the Philistines or the Hittites. He may have thought they always lived where they were in his time.