Clough Genesis Lesson 34

The table of nations; the sons of Japheth – Genesis 10:1-5

We have been studying the book of Genesis and looking particularly at the origin questions; we have so far got to Genesis 9; in Genesis 9 we have the fracturing of the human race after Noah and with that we have the biblical view of history. For those who profess to be Christians I think it’s mandatory that we take a long, hard, and very serious look at how the Bible views history and race. There’s probably no more emotional question in our own day than the question and race. It’s always been interesting to me that those who cry loudest for civil liberties and answers to the racial problem are usually precisely those who are most antagonistic to the early chapters of Genesis; it’s tragic because in the early chapters of Genesis we have the answer to race, in the sense that we know what race is and what it isn’t, what distinctions are valid and what distinctions are not valid.

Over the months we have showed to you the difference between the thinking of those authors of the Scriptures and the thinking of our own generation and one of the great differences in the area of race is that the thinkers of our own generation incessantly concentrate on surface anatomical features, skin pigmentation, etc. These things become the key in dealing and classifying people according to their (quote) “race.” It’s interesting, if you look carefully at this portion of Genesis, the Bible has nothing to say about anatomical features. It’s also interesting to know that the archeological digs that have been done and have uncovered materials dating from the time of Abraham and before, show multiracial communities in Palestine; show people, for example of definite Negroid and Oriental features to be living in the land and yet where is mention of these pigmentation and anatomical features in the biblical text?

The people that wrote the Bible were not interested in anatomical features; they were interested in genealogy or history. More important to them was who was your grandfather than what you looked like. And so in Genesis 9, at the end, those last few verses that we’ve been studying, the three sons of Noah give us a tripartite division of race. Since we are face to face with another big issue between human viewpoint and divine viewpoint, it behooves us to master a little tactic of practical application. I ran across this little tactic for Christian parents to teach their children in the Yale Journal of Law, for in the public school system the Bible-believing Christian who really takes seriously the intellectual results of creationism is compelled, by virtue of the spirit of the classroom, to go along with humanist presuppositions against the Bible. Example: in the area of evolution. And so you have a situation where a child in the public school may be asked: Evolution happened this way, a, b or c? Now that’s the kind of question like how many times last week did you beat your wife? There’s no way you can answer that question if you disagree with the major premise. The honest way of asking these kinds of questions is simply to say that we have this view of evolution or that view of creation, or evolution has supposed that it happened this way. That’s the intellectually honest way.

But we have, unfortunately, many in our public schools who teach either in a sloppy way or a dishonest way, so Christian parents, here’s a little device to teach your children. Teach them that if they ever run into this situation, it has to be a good kind of a situation, to write in the question blank, these words, that to answer question involves a compelled unconscionable declaration of belief, period; and leave the question and go on to the next one. When the teacher downgrades the paper for this kind of response, if they do, keep the paper as a legal record and you are on legal grounds to sue for the reason that you have just pointed out that to answer this question involves a transgression of your first amendment rights by the federal constitution and therefore the teacher and school officials involved are liable for violation of federally guaranteed rights. Remember, you have this right by the constitution. If you would like the reference I refer you to The Yale Law Journal of January, 1978 and there’s an entire article devoted to this tactic. Now it’s too bad we have to use these tactics but it’s also too bad that creationists are not respected in the public schools and have to resort to these kinds of things to defend themselves. But these kind of things are things that we have studied again and again in the Genesis text.

Another area where we are in a very volatile area is when we look at Noah’s three sons and we recognize Japheth, and Ham, and Shem. The Bible is reporting to us in no way that one race is superior to another race. There have been segregationists who have used the Bible text to justify segregation but I challenge them to show how an honest system of interpreting Scripture in a historical time honored way would ever yield the segregationist position. What the Bible does say is that certain groups of men have certain skills that others lack; the Bible divides the human race in a tripartite way; the sons of Japheth are those people who, as I will show you today, are Indo-Europeans in stock; ancient historians knew this very well. Unfortunately, in the last 100 years this has been overlooked by historical writers.

But wherever you find the sons of Japheth you will find a tendency to abstract thought. For example, think, where did all philosophy arise? Didn’t it all arise with the Greeks? Hasn’t philosophy in only one other place in the history of the world has there ever been philosophy and that’s been Vedanic Hinduism. And it arose because the Aryans crossed Himalayan Mountains and went into the subcontinent of India. In both cases, philosophy and abstract thought are the product of the sons of Japheth. Now it’s true that Japheth, when he originates a system of education, would therefore tend to make that system of education emphasis the abstract. And I believe this is why men like Jensen and others who have written in a book, Race, Intelligence and Education in 1971, a tremendously volatile document, one that people are greatly emotional over in our own day because Jensen’s thesis is that the black child in the public school rates lower in IQ scale than the white child. We would simply say maybe Jensen’s data is right but it doesn’t show the inferiority of the black, it only shows that perhaps the black child, as a son of Ham, is being asked to think the way a Japhetic does, abstractly, and therefore our very measurement of IQ is telling us a different thing.

What this has by way of application to education is that maybe not all teaching methods are valid; maybe it is wrong to put the sons of Ham, Japheth and Shem in the same classroom and expect them, with the same methodology, to produce the same results. Maybe the Bible is saying we ought to treat them respectively according to their strengths and according to their weaknesses. It was Sir Andrew Huxley, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science who wrote in the September, 1977 issue of Chemical and Engineering News that, speaking of this controversy over Jensen, “There is one feature of the present day situation that appears to be much more sinister than anything that occurred in the evolution controversy.” Keep in mind the author, who he is. “The Huxley family has done more in the British Isles to further Hinduism than any other family.” Historically, they go all the way back to Thomas, great-grandfather Huxley, who was known in history as Darwin’s bulldog. “There were, as I have said, scientists, including very distinguished ones back in those days who opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution but they did so on grounds that were at least ostensibly scientific. But I do not believe that there were any of them who took the position that an evolutionary origin of man from apes by a random process was something that scientists ought to even contemplate because of the chance that the conclusion would be in conflict with religious ethics. In contrast, today there is now a body of scientists who take up the equivalent of that position in relation to the heritability of human ability who regard the assumption of equal inherited ability as something which does not require experimental evidence to establish, and which it is positively wicked to question because the conclusion might disagree with their social and political preconception.”

So you see, if we operate on the basis of the Scriptures we do have a problem and that is as Bible-believing Christian we hold to the moral equality of men, the sons of Adam, but we are open to the possibility that different sons of Adam actually think in different ways; not that one thinks and the other doesn’t, but they think in different ways. And we just raise the question, is the assumption of a unified education of everybody and anybody, regardless of their background, crammed together in one classroom, is that assumption valid? We question it.

So we go on and look today at some of the evidences of Noah. Looking first at Genesis 9:24, because we have a feedback card, someone asked me: It seems to me that you jumped over Genesis 9:24 with no explanation of how Noah knew what Ham had done to him. I didn’t really jump over it, I don’t think. In Genesis 9:24 it says “Noah awoke from his wine, and he knew what his younger son had done unto him.” Now the text nowhere tells how he knew what Ham had done to him, it just says he knew it. I have no idea because the text doesn’t tell me how he knew it. So therefore where the text is quiet we are quiet. Now in verse 22 it does say, when his father was drunk that Ham “saw the nakedness of his father,” and it’s true that some commentators down through the church’s history have argued that that was a homosexual act. We do not so argue on the basis, as I said last time, that when this occurs straightforwardly we take it straightforwardly, that it’s simply an observation, not any act involved.

But we did say last week that Genesis 9:25-27 give us this three part division of the entire human race. The human race has no part of it that is not of Japheth, Ham or Shem. Now for those of you who do think more biblically about your own family, and I urge you young people that have grandparents, or great-grandparents, for heaven’s sake, before they die go to your grandfather, go to your great-grandmother and ask them about your family, where did you come from, what is the history of your family? You ought to know these things; you’ll see things in your own soul that are results of your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents, just patterns, things that may seem an enigma to you but all of a sudden they jell: this pattern occurred in grandfather and great grandfather, it’s just part of our family. You ought to know your family. So your family is the background in genealogical references in how you plug into history; far better to approach history this way than to start with saying that something happened in 1492, something happened in 1775, etc. etc. etc. and then regurgitate this string of events on an exam and come out saying I know history. No you don’t; you ought to integrate history to your own family, this happened in the days of my father, this happened in the days of my grandfather, this happened in the days of my great-grandfather, so that you become part of the historical process. This is how the Bible authors speak.

Now you may say I’m making a big deal out of these three sons of Noah, so to head that objection off we’re going to look now at five illustrations in other parts of the Bible where the tripartite nature of the human race is implicit in the Bible; that is, it’s just there, it’s not argued, it’s not explained, it’s just that the authors of the Bible presume this and the pattern recurs again and again.

Turn first to Genesis 11:29. For those who wish to study further I suggest you study Arthur Custance’s work, Noah’s Three Sons, by Zondervan. Dr. Custance is a physiologist in Canada with the Anglican Church. Dr. Custance points out that when Abraham marries he has relationships with three women in the Bible: the first one, his wife, Sarah. We know Sarah and we know her genealogy; Sarah is a daughter of Shem. And most of you know the story of Abraham and the maid, Hagar. According to ancient custom he went in to her so that he might have a son to inherit his property. And who was Hagar but an Egyptian, and who are the Egyptians but Hamites, and so Hagar is a daughter of Ham. And then after his first wife died, Sarah, he married a woman by the name of Keturah in Genesis 25; Keturah, by Jewish tradition, was a daughter of Japheth. And it’s interesting that the originator of the house of Israel married women from each of the three sons of Noah, once again showing there are three women and it is not coincidental that they happened to come from these three sons. That’s just one; you can excuse that away as just chance.

Turn to the New Testament for another illustration. As you know there are four Gospels and you know that scholars refer to the first three Gospels as the synoptic gospels and then John’s gospel is added. And the three synoptic gospels are all comparable in their form, Matthew, Mark and Luke. And it’s been an observation for some time that Matthew’s gospel is very Semitic, it concentrates on genealogy. When you begin Matthew’s gospel it’s the begets and the begots that hit your eye first. In fact, in my office I have a New Testament that has been translated by the Bible Society for the state of Israel, it’s going to be used in their school system. And when you open up the first page and you look at the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1, and you’re familiar with Hebrew, it looks for all the world like you’re looking at an Old Testament text. And that’s the way it’s organized, so and so beget so and so who beget so and so. So Matthew, which argues the case for the state of Israel and argues the case for the relationship of the kingdom to the nation, has a Shemitic viewpoint; it looks at Christ through the eyes of a Shemite.

Now let’s take Mark’s gospel. It’s often been said that in Mark’s gospel Christ is pictured not as the verbal teacher but as the miracle-doer, and therefore Mark pictures Christ often in the guise of a servant of Jehovah, the One who does the physical work of Jehovah, and that is the viewpoint of Ham. And so isn’t it interesting the Holy Spirit devotes the second synoptic gospel looking at the Lord Jesus Christ through the eyes of a Hamite, not that the authors were Hamites but that the viewpoint is in the Hamitic direction.

And then Luke; Luke is the only one that mentions the times of the Gentiles, in Luke 21:24, and Luke is the one that emphasizes that the kingdom will be taken from them and given to the world, and so Luke looks at Jesus Christ through the eyes of the Japheth.

Now I don’t think this pattern is accidental; it’s because Jesus Christ has to be communicated to all men, whatever their race, and so there are these Gospels written for this purpose. And so in some cases, in some cultures, in some men, Matthew might be the best way of seeing Jesus Christ. To other men in other places and other times and other continents Mark might be the best picture for them of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then for other people who would follow in a more strictly Japhetic line, aware of Japheth’s history, Luke would be a good picture of Jesus Christ. So we have a second occurrence of this tripartite division of the human race.

Let’s look further, let’s look for a third one, and this time let’s ask this question: of all the groups that come as a group to seek Jesus Christ, let’s list them. The first one that we know in history was the shepherds, we sing of them at Christmas, the shepherds who were watching their fields by night in the town of Bethlehem. They were all Shemites and in Luke 2 we record their coming to Jesus to seek the King. And then in Matthew 2 we read of the second group of people, the wise men and they come from the east, as can be shown, most probably, on the basis of tradition, that these are the sons of Ham. So the second delegation in the New Testament to come to look at Jesus as a delegation is a group of Hamites. And then we have a third, halfway through the Gospel of John, in John 12 we have John’s enigmatic statement, certain Greeks come to look at Jesus Christ. So now the third group, the sons of Japheth, seek as a delegation as the Lord Jesus Christ. Is it an accident that this pattern occurs again and again? That’s the third trilogy or tripartite illustration in the Bible. But that’s not all.

Let’s go to a fourth one; let’s go to the book of Acts. After the Church begins on the day of Pentecost the gospel begins to go out to the ends of the world, who is it that it goes first to? In Acts 2 it goes to Shem, remember the Jews are all clustered together in the city of Jerusalem, they are all sons of Shem, the Holy Spirit comes upon them with flames of fire. And then as the gospel begins to go forth in Acts 8 we have the first black man mentioned in Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of Ethiopia, and here is the son of Ham who receives Christ. And then we have Acts 10 and in Acts 10 Cornelius, the Roman centurion, obviously very much a son of Japheth. And so again we have the tripartite division of the human race, all people from all areas coming to know Christ.

Now for the fifth illustration of this pattern let’s go to the cross itself and ask on whose shoulders does the weight of the cross fall. In Matthew 27:25 the Jews cry out, “let His blood be upon us and our children,” and what is Shem? Shem is always the one who has a moral view of history and so the moral weight of the cross, in this sense, technically obviously all men are involved in the cross, but emphasis, the moral emphasis of the cross is upon those who say “his blood be upon us.” Sons of Shem say this. When Jesus Christ was carrying the cross he fell, and another man, Simon of Cyrene, came and picked it up, Luke 23:26 and it can with great probability be shown that he was most likely a son of Ham, carrying literally the physical weight of the cross. And then we come and consider that in Matthew 27:26 who was it that pronounced ultimate sentence for the crucifixion of Christ and turned Christ over to the crucifixion process? It was Pilate; the apostolic [can’t understand word] was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and so therefore Pilate, who was the son of Japheth, and he was the one who bears the legal, what we would say the systematic, the bureaucratic weight of the cross. So the three prime actors in the cross are the sons of Noah. We say, then, that this is an implicit pattern of Scripture.

Now let’s look at a prophecy, kind of at random, but turn to Ezekiel 38 because we want to show you something before we get into Genesis 10 of how important this table of nations really is. Too long Christians have ignored Genesis 10 and paid a bad price. In Ezekiel 38:2 we have one of the thousands of prophecies in the Bible. Now observe this prophecy a moment; just look at the nouns, the nouns, the names in this prophecy. “Son of man, set thy face against God, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophecy against him, [3] And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I am against thee, O God, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.” Now these aren’t fairy story characters, Ezekiel wasn’t recording an exercise in futility; these are against real people, not alive however, by the time verse 2 was written. These names are names of tribes and the tribes on the face of the earth all men are not known as Russians, Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Latin American, that’s not the labels the Bible uses. The Bible uses the labels based on your genealogy and so the prophecy in verse 2 is directed against the children of Magog, the children of Meshech, the children of Tubal. So how, we ask, without studying the table of nations in Genesis 10, can you ever hope to answer the questions of prophecy like verse 2? You see, you can’t.

So here we come to a powerful motivation to study Genesis 10. Without Genesis 10 you cannot understand Bible prophecy. People often say to me because I’m a premillennialist, because I believe in a literal fulfillment of prophecy and therefore I believe that Christ is going to come back and form a kingdom for a thousand years before the end of history… people say to me because I’m a premillennialist and they are amill or postmill, they say look Clough, you can’t possibly believe in literally fulfilled prophecy for one very simple reason: all the nations that existed in the ancient world when the prophecies were made are gone. Is there Assyria today? No, there’s no Assyria, we have Iran, Iraq, but there’s no Assyria today so how can the prophecies against Assyria ever come true? The prophecies are gone. The answer is because the prophecies weren’t against the nation of Assyria as a political entity, they are phrased as being against the sons of Asher, and the sons of Asher still exist somewhere on the face of the earth today. God knows where they are and the prophecies will come to pass. They may be living inside the political boundaries of the state we call Iraq, or some may be living within the boundaries of the state we call Iran, but they exist. God looks on men from our heritage.

People often say is the United States in prophecy? I wouldn’t expect to see the word “United States” in prophecy; no. I wouldn’t even expect to see the political subdivision called the United States in prophecy but I would expect when we know that the sons of Japheth live here in the United States and when prophecies concern those sons of Japheth then the United States is in view. That’s the answer to that one; the Bible views men genealogically.

Let’s come back to Genesis 10. Genesis 10 scholars have called the table of nations. It’s an absolutely unique document in history. You may study ancient history for years and years and years and never, never come across a document like this. Dr. Albright who was the father and the dean of American archeology for many years, he worked at Princeton, called this an absolutely unique historical document, unparalleled by all the other civilizations in history. The reason is because only in Genesis 10 do we have a preliminary tracing of the dispersion of the human race away from Ararat.

I’m going to give some reasons why Genesis 10 is an ancient document. The liberal critics of the Scriptures must argue that Genesis 10 is a late document; they, on their basis, say well Moses didn’t write these books, later people wrote these books, and they all have different theories, the documentary hypothesis and the various modifications of that today.

But here is some evidence that Genesis 10 is a very old document: Number one, Japheth. Japheth and his family as they appear in Genesis 10 disappear after three generations, nothing is heard of them and that shows you that whoever is writing the document called the table of nations lost sight of Japheth as he left the area of the Middle East and Ararat to go out and fill the earth, and he was gone, in three generations the contact was lost and it’s reflected in the table. Another evidence is Ham appears chiefly in Cush, and Cush appears here chiefly in Babylon. Now the reason that this is an evidence of early history is because in early history, if we can draw a map here of the ancient east, here’s the end of the Mediterranean, here’s Egypt, and over here we have the Saudi Arabia Peninsula and so on, we have Babel over there, in this location, and according to the [can’t understand word] used in the table of nations Cush has settled in this area. But we know from the time later in the Old Testament Cush wasn’t there; Cush went down here and formed what you and I call Ethiopia. So therefore Cush’s location is wrong if this is a late document. Another reason is that Sidon is mentioned in this table of nations, but not Tyre. Yet Tyre was a thriving city in the time of Solomon and the prophets. Why, if this a late document, isn’t Tyre mentioned? It’s obvious, because it’s not a late document, it’s an early one. And finally, Sodom and Gomorrah are still existing by the time this document is written.

So Genesis 10 and the table of nations give us a snapshot of history, very important. Today we are going to look at the details of one part of that snapshot; we’re going to take three Sundays to do this. This Sunday we are going to look at the sons of Japheth. Next Sunday we’re going to look at the sons of Ham, and then the sons of Shem. And as we do this here’s what you ought to try to do. If you have gone back in your family and you’ve asked your grandparents where you came from, and what general location on the earth you have come from, either on your mother’s side or your father’s side or wherever you can get data, what you ought to try to do as you look through here is to consciously think when you read the text, which one of these men is my great-grandfather. These men are part of your family; don’t look at them as some creature of the Bible divorced, totally separated from you. Somewhere every one of you that is sitting here this morning, your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, way back, is listed, because you have descended from Noah and his wife and their sons.

Let’s begin in Genesis 10:2 and look at the sons of Japheth. “The sons of Japheth” are said to begin with “Gomer, and Magog, Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.” By the way, do you see two names there that you saw in the Ezekiel 38 passage? [3] “And the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. [4] And the sons of Javan: Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. [5] By these were the isles [borders] of the Gentiles [nations] divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations,” the division of this third, this one-third of the human race.

As thinking Christians we want to make sure that we have uncovered all the evidence there is to uncover, at least start to uncover the evidence. What evidence do you suppose… where do you suppose we’d find it to substantiate the table of nations. I used to have a professor of missions at Dallas Seminary who argued and argued and argued, I think he still is arguing, why is it when we send a missionary out into the field we don’t do the obvious and the obvious is to stop starting translating the Gospel of Mark or Matthew for some tribesmen that have no biblical background; why not study the mythologies of the native class and see where there are connections between the native mythologies and Genesis 1-11, and the first document we translate for our natives in an evangelistic process isn’t the Gospel of Mark but Genesis 1-11. Then we could show the native and get over to them and realize that we’re not coming as a white man out of America with some sort of an American gospel. We are coming with the Word of God that their great-grandparents knew at one time and have since lost; far better to approach it on that basis. So we want to look for Japheth and we would go to genealogies and mythologies to look.

Let’s take the Greeks; they have several mythologies of their origin; they date themselves back as started by a man by the name of Hellen, that’s a man’s name, not a woman’s name, from which we get the Hellenic people. And his father was one you saw, the name you saw in that film that we had on the flood, Deucalion; he survived a flood which may have been Noah’s flood, it may not have been, I doubt it was. His father was Prometheus, and his father was a Titan and his name was Iapetos… interesting isn’t it, that we would expect the Greeks to descend from Japheth and sure enough, in their mythology he’s mentioned. He occurs a little different spelling but I think with a little imagination you can see that there is Japheth showing up in Greek mythology.

More interesting than that is Japetos is known to the Greeks as a Titan, a giant, a powerful man and he was the son, it says, of Ouranos and Gaia, of the ocean and the earth, and I believe this is a confusion between Genesis 1 and Genesis 6; the flood and the creation are then synthesized together and so really Ouranos is Noah, and the Greeks have simply confused it and said that Japheth is this son.

But the other thing we want to ask is why do the Greeks insist that Iapetos is a Titan, a giant, a superman. Wait; what does Genesis say about the longevity of men after the flood? It was declining. Now who would have lived longer, a man four generations down or a man only one generation away from Noah? Obviously this man; Iapetos is known as a Titan because he was, physically the men descending from Noah… remember your life span it descends along the exponential decay curve all the way from 930 years down to 70; there’s a tremendous shock going on in the human race as longevity is just declining very, very rapidly at this point. And so to generations living then they looked back and they said Japetos, he was the strong man.

But something else is interesting and this we will get to when we get into Genesis 11 again is that this word is a Greek word: Hellas, when you read Greek this is what the Greeks call themselves, but it’s interesting that Japetos is not… those that study languages argue that this root is a Semitic root. Now behold, this thing, here in history we have had a linguistic shift. The Greeks way, way, way back had Semitic names and as we come forward in history to our day they get Greek names. What is happening to the language? It’s changing. What does Genesis 11 say? The tower of Babel. So here’s another evidence if people would just look and stop being so skeptical that the Bible can’t possibly be right, that every one could have written Genesis except who Genesis says wrote it, and just look at it, and look at the problems, you would be very surprised.

Let’s go to India and see if the Indians, they have a lot of rich mythology, maybe they have recorded something like this. They tell a story of their Noah. Don’t ask me to pronounce this, I would say it’s Satyaurata has three sons; watch their names: one is Sharma, the other is C’harma, and the third one is Iyapeti. Knowing that “Y” is a “J” phonetically, doesn’t this look like Japheth is being preserved here? Isn’t this the Indian version of exactly what we are reading in our Bible? Why do all these people, as far away as the Peloponnesian Peninsula to the west, to the Indian subcontinent in the east, why are they all recording the same thing? It’s a very simple hypothesis—because it’s true, it actually happened, the myths are simple distortions of what has gone on. And so we find evidence of Japheth, his name embedded, as it were, in the mythologies of all the people.

Let’s look at Genesis 10:2, [“the sons of Japheth: Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.”] it says that Japheth had a son, and one of his son’s name was Gomer. Gomer is said in many Bible prophecies to refer to the people living north of the Black Sea. Now if you look at the Black Sea a moment and think, what is located near the Black Sea, very significant to everybody that reads the Bible? The Black Sea is near something; what is it near? Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat is located right here, the southeast corner of the Black Sea. Now where would we expect to find the sons of Japheth? Somewhere around the Black Sea. And sure enough, the Bible speaks of Gomer as going north from the Ararat area and locating in the area around the Black Sea. Now let’s look at some possible evidences; these are debated by students of language but I think there’s something behind it. That area is known historically as the Crimea; now just look at the consonants in there, “C” interchanging with “G”, “r” and “m”; “r” frequently inverts in language in general. Isn’t this a trace of Gomer in the word Crimea? In other words, the sons mentioned in Genesis 10 you know by the names that you know the geography by. For example, the city of Lubbock is named after a man and so frequently across the face of the earth areas that you know by certain names reflect the men’s names who went there. People usually aren’t named for the place; the place is named for the people.

Let’s look at another one. Historians tell us in Josephus’ day that Cappadocia, the area we know around that area was known as Gamir, do you see the “G” the “m” and the “r” appearing in that word; again the trace of Gomer has been left. There was a group of Celts that figured prominently in history, they started around the area of the Black Sea, they migrated to Britain, to France, and then a sub group came back to settle in the area of Galatia and Paul’s epistle to the Galatians was written basically to people who are quite French in their background and these particular Celts were called the Cymric Celts; again we have the trace of the stem “G-m-r” in that word. We come to places in England, for example, Cumberland which has the same three letters with a “b” put in the middle of it; in Italy a place called Umberland, and so we find some linguistic traces of this mysterious son of Gomer and all of them fit together in that he went north and he went west from Ararat; he went north of the Black Sea and he went west from Ararat. It’s a consistent tracing that we’re picking up here.

Instead of looking at the next son let’s drop down to Genesis 10:3 and trace Gomer’s family. If Gomer went somewhere he took his sons with him. Maybe we know where those sons settled down; in fact, maybe some of them are your fathers. “The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.” Now Ashkenaz is known in the west most easily today because in Israel they have a problem with two different kinds of Jews; there is a great deal of discussion going on in the state of Israel between the Ashkenazi or the Jews from Eastern Europe and the Sephardic Jews who come from Spain and there’s quite a bit of social friction between these two elements. Now the Ashkenazi, you see, preserve quite clearly this name Ashkenaz. And they have come out of Eastern Europe; Jeremiah 51:27 refers to them. Ancient historians call them identical to the Scythians. There’s a place north of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley over across this area that is named, it’s in Russia I think now, Lake Iznik and there you will see the consonants from the name Ashkenaz. Another lake area named in that same place is a Lake Ascenia, for sure tracing this same name. Homer mentions the Askaeni in Phrygia, during the Trojan War the Trojan prince was called Ascenius.

Now, interestingly others have noticed, and this will be of interest to you of Scandinavian descent, that Scandia is also known as Askania and this would then argue that this particular son of Gomer would probably… we can’t be tightly dogmatic, but would probably be the father of the Scandinavians. If you trace your family back to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and you have Scandinavian blood the chances are that here is your great-grandfather, Ashkenaz. We’d also trace it and it has been traced and you can read the reasons why, that this may be related to the Saxons, who left the continent and invaded England, so if you come from England and have Saxon blood Ashkenaz may be involved there. Also in Germany. So those are the areas where Ashkenaz settled, as evidenced by his name, most probably.

“Riphath,” the next one in verse 3, who’s he? Unfortunately the Bible doesn’t give us much data to go on by prophecies but there’s one word in our language that preserved this man’s name and it’s in the same area, the Carpathian area, located here again in Eastern Europe and Southern Russia. Notice the “r,” the “p,” and the “th.” So the word “Carpathian” may also indicate a survival of Riphath. These are things I’m putting together; if you want all the bibliography and history to this I refer you to Dr. Custance’s work.

The third one in verse 3 is “Togarmah.” “Togarmah” is mentioned as being in Turkey in the Bible, and if you are of Armenian background then you’ll be interested that the Armenians traced their ancestry back to a man by the name of Hiak who was called the “Son of Targom” and here you have this “r” reversing again, but nevertheless, we have got evidence from the Armenians that they are known as the “House of Targom”. The Turks are called the Togarmah by Jewish rabbinic writers. So much for the sons of Gomer.

Back to Genesis 10:2 and look at the second son of Japheth. After Gomer we look at Magog. This is a little difficult but Magog is also related to just Gog, the “ma” may be an old prefix, we don’t know. But Marco Polo referred to a people which he called interchangeably the Mongols and the Magogites. Now the question is where did Marco Polo get his data; we don’t know for sure but he was connecting those two names together. But the interesting is that if you take the word, and this is significant because of the terrain involved, Caucasus, this word here, when you sound it, Cau-ca-sus sounds a lot like Gog, and this last word run together, Caucasian, is the stronghold and translated it is called the stronghold of Gog. So all we’re trying to show here is that there’s lot of linguistic evidence in words that you don’t normally think of for these sons; these men have survived in the way people have named things.

Now it’s interesting, and perhaps unfortunate, that in the prophecy I referred you to, Ezekiel 38:2, it talks about the prince of Meshech and Tubal; those two are listed here in Genesis 10:2. Notice toward the end, Tubal and Meshech, these two names survive in two words; Meshech-Moscow, and the other one is another Russian city, Tobolsk. The significance of this is they are occurring in the same general location on the face of this earth. But this prophecy says he is “the prince of Meshech and Tubal,” it’s also interesting the word “prince” comes from the Hebrew word head rosh, [Ezekiel 18:2 chief prince is rosh prince] and there is linguistic evidence again that the word Russia is nothing but a derivative of rosh. If this is so, it’s unfortunate, but what it’s saying that Ezekiel 38 is referring to a conglomerate of the sons of Japheth, powerful aggressiveness. And as we see the Russian buildup today we ought to think about that prophecy.

Continuing in Genesis 10:2, “Magog” is followed by “Madai,” that’s easy. Those are the Medes, that’s just an interchangeable word for the Medes. “Javan”-- that’s easy too because the Assyrians called the Greeks the “Yavnan”, so the Greeks are somehow related also to Javan. How we don’t know but they are related. The Indian myth of the split of its race makes this statement--- remember we said the Indo-Europeans split: one group went to the east across the Himalayas and went down into the Indian subcontinent and the rest of them wandered around Europe. And this group is the same to this group because they bear a common linguistic structure, Sanskrit. Sanskrit is very much in its basis like Latin and Greek. So there’s a linguistic conservativism, we’ll get into that in Genesis 11. But the interesting thing is, when the Indians describe this, they say that this group of people are called the “Aryas” and this group of people are called the “Yavanas”, and there’s Javan occurring once again in our mythological records of history.

“Tiras” in Genesis 10:2 we don’t know much about, it’s a guess, some had said the Thracians. Whatever, you get the general idea that there’s an even distribution in history to these races and men who have studied the question have put this in the form of certain general principles and I’ll show you a chart and a very, very famous map atlas; I disagree with a little bit of it but nevertheless it’ll show you as a good idea of why we’re not just completely out to lunch here. And it shows three spheres: one sphere… and they should really intersect, not on Jerusalem, it was a Jewish person that drew this map, it should really intersect here at Ararat, but Japheth goes up all in this area, north and west of Ararat. Shem settled this area, the Arabian sub peninsula and Ham settled this area, went south, and he also went east and formed the Oriental peoples. But there are clear areas of distribution and dispersion in the human race. And Genesis 10, the table of nations, shows this.

One further thing in Genesis 10:4, “the sons of Javan: Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.” Let’s hurriedly respond to these. “Elishah” in history is an alternate form of the Cyprians, the Ugaritic text called Cyprus, the land of Elishah, so once again ancient historians know peoples by this name. Those of you who are Greek students and you’ve read your classic Greek, do you remember the phrase in the Iliad, the Elyssian field? All right, the Elyssian field is the same noun that’s being used here. It’s Elishah, the same area, same terrain, same geography.

What about “Tarshish”? Tarshish is difficult because it seems to be used of a merchant class that went through the Mediterranean and everywhere they settled they liked their name so much that they labeled the city Tarshish. So we have a Tarshish where Paul came from; we have a Tarshish in Spain. In fact, the Mediterranean Sea was known by the Egyptians at one time as the Sea of Tarshish. 2 Chronicles 9:21 says Tarshish brought to Solomon ivory, apes and peacocks. They were apparently businessmen who had connections in the deep parts of Africa.

“Kittim” is known in ancient works as Cypress also, notice again the same area. The “Dodanim” are connected with the island of Rhodes and they survive in our word, the Dardanelles. So don’t make light of these areas. Now I know there are always skeptics that say well, that’s the Old Testament and as a Christian I don’t have to believe that because nobody else does. Well, let’s see about who believes the table of nations. Turn to Deuteronomy 32; I think Moses might be considered an authority and in Deuteronomy 32:8 when he gives the history of Israel he says: “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.” Now you wouldn’t normally connect that with Genesis 10 except the number of the house of Israel going down into Egypt was about 70; the number of names in the table of nations is 70. Moses here is referring to the table of nations; he does so elliptically but he is referring to the table of nations. So Moses is obviously a believer in this view of history.

Well, that’s the Old Testament, I can hear it being said. Let’s turn to the New Testament and look at Paul in Acts 17:26. In Acts 17 where is Paul? Mars’ Hill, the center of the Greek intellect. Here is the most intellectual confrontation of the Christian faith with the pagan world. Why in this chief apologetic address of all addresses in the Bible, what does Paul mention in verse 26 but the table of nations. “And He has made of one blood all races [nations]” or “subdivisions of men to dwell on all the face of the earth. That is a summary of the table of nations in his speech on Mars’ Hill. So Moses and Paul, and I say what’s good enough for Paul is good enough for me, regardless of what my history professor says; he does not have all the facts, God does. And while God hasn’t given us all the facts either, He has given us at least some true facts as a starting point in our investigations.

Well, what’s all this got to do with the gospel? I want to take you to one last passage to show how with this view of race with this view that we are all in the body of Adam physically, we now have a powerful basis for missions. Turn to Psalm 2:1; in Psalm 2 it starts, “Why do the heathen rage, and why do the peoples imagine a vain thing?” If you read Psalm 2 now, see how you can read the Bible wrongly. There are two sets of glasses you can use on your eyes when you read Psalm 2. You can come to Psalm 2 like you’ve been trained, like we’ve all been trained in our social studies classes, that history is just chaos and you try to grab a date out of the box here and there and put something together, regurgitated on an exam and then we’re all done because we’re masters of history now, or we can look at history as the dispersion of one family. No matter how distant people may be in language, in culture, in race, there was one household, Noah’s, and all the potential was sitting down at the dinner table every day, the potential for all the racial cultures.

So when you think of the far off heathen muttering a vain thing, it’s not that these people are stupid, it’s not that they’re in darkness completely, that they have no reference point, that they are completely separate from you… they aren’t. Looked at in the way of history we’re studying now in Genesis they represent on their tree all the way back up, and if I take my tree and I go all the way back up, our trees get closer and closer and closer and closer until they intersect in the family of Noah. So when I take the Word to a strange people, to a heathen people, they are not so strange after all; they’re part of the sons of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and I also know because of my view of history that these heathen that are raging and the people that are imagining a vain thing have also at one time in their own personal history known the truth and they’ve turned away from it. They carry the truth; Shem didn’t have a corner on the truth when it all started. Our ancestors, most of us here probably from the sons of Japheth, Japheth had the truth, he knew Genesis 1-10, he’d heard it in his home. Why is it, then, that before the Word of God came to us out of Israel we didn’t, in our families, know this truth. Do you know why? Because our families are sinners, they are totally depraved and they seek to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The dark heathen, the pagan who (quote) “has never heard,” ought to be looked at as the man who has lived in a family who has turned away from the truth and hated it, and this is what Psalm 2 is all about, why they rage, the people imagine a vain thing.

Psalm 2:2, “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against His anointed,” and the word there is the word “Christ,” “against the King and against His Christ, [3] Let us break their bands asunder,” see the spirit of autonomy. That’s why the Word of God isn’t know in the tribes beyond, because we wanted to break their bands asunder, we want to throw away their cords, throw away their authority, and so Psalm 2 ends in the last three verses, 10-12, with the only way that the sons of Noah can ever get back to the supper table again, and that is they must have a guest that comes to dinner and re-invites them home, and it’s the Lord Jesus Christ. And now we will have Noah’s Christ in Japheth, Ham and Shem, he acts as the unifier, and this is what the appeal is Psalm 2:10-12, “Be wise, O ye kings,” this is addressed to all the children of Noah, “be instructed, ye judges of the earth. [11] Serve Jehovah with fear, and rejoice with trembling. [12] And kiss the Son,” a reference to Jesus Christ, “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.”

We’re going to sing…….