Clough Genesis Lesson 35

The table of nations; the sons of Ham – Genesis 10:6-20

We have been studying the biblical story of the origins of racial distinctions. Of course, not to anyone’s surprise, this kind of thing causes a tremendous tension in anyone who is acquainted with modern ideas of race. We have said at the beginning that looking at race from the creationist point of view is going to set you in tension with everything else that you have learned out of the evolutionary point of view, for it has been Darwin and those who have followed in Darwin’s footsteps in the 20^th century who have developed very totalitarian ideas of racism, the idea of a master race is one that is aided, if not originated, by Darwinism.

We have studied so far that Noah had three sons, Japheth, Ham and Shem, and it was from these three sons that all that we recognize as racial distinctives originated. Each of these three sons had a role to play and that role was prophesied by their father, Noah, in Genesis 9:25-27. In the three-fold role of these sons, we’ve said Japheth is always characterized, and this means not individuals necessarily but groups of people who have come from Japheth are usually people who are known for several things in history. They are known to be basically intercontinental conquerors. They have supplanted other peoples; they tend to be expansive, they tend to be domineering, they are responsible for communication to a large degree. They are people who have specialized in abstract thought. They are the originators of modern science, philosophy and theology. Interesting that systematic theology did not happen in Israel; systematic theology is a new thing born of the Church. There were not systematic theologians in the Old Testament. And this gap, or this lack, shows you that something was added, and what was added was the revelation of the Word of God came to the west and it was Japheth who did this.

Now Shem, we said, everywhere you have peoples born of Shem you have had an exceptionally strong monotheism, a monotheism that has supplanted other religions. The three monotheisms in history, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all emanate from the sons of Shem. Shem has been known for this. Everywhere Shem has gone it has been a tight, theocentric, ethic monotheism that has gone with him. He is just known for this and we believe that historical fact is explained by the prophecy of Noah concerning Shem.

Ham, everywhere you have peoples born of Ham you have had physical civilizations form. It’s interesting that of all the three sons of Noah it is Ham who has settled the first major civilization on every continent; whether you go to South America, North America, Europe, Africa or Asia, the first civilizations were always begun by Ham. Furthermore, every major invention in the human race, the wheel, the pulley, medicines, surgery, whatever you can think of, whatever you can name of the basic inventions, and you trace it back in the encyclopedia, you will always track it back to a people known in the Bible as the sons of Ham. So therefore we can generalize about Ham in that he is the inventor; he is the inventive genius of the human race. Gunpowder, for example, Hamitic; steel, metallurgy, these skills were developed by Ham. Japheth did not develop these, nor did Shem. It was Ham who has done this consistently on every continent. So Ham has had quite a history and he was the first explorer and the first, what will call, the first civilizer, the first civilizer on every continent.

Now we have studied Japheth, Genesis 10:2-5 gave Japheth’s sons. And I urged you, if you have grandparents living or great grandparents, go back in your own personal family and find from your grandparents where your family came from; learn to think back in your family lineage and at least root it to some geographical area, and from there you can pretty much guess where you connect with these sons listed in verses 2-5, if you are a son of Japheth. And we said there were several, remember Gomer, his name, and he is the originator of what we call the Saxons, the Scandinavians, and to some degree those in the Germanic area. In fact the letters g-m-r shows up in the word Germany. So Gomer is one of the great sons of Japheth.

Now Japheth, as he left the area around the ark he moved in two basic directions. In one direction he moved north and west; he moved north up into what we call Eastern Europe and western Russia. In fact, the Russians are the sons of Gog or Magog, and they are known as such in prophecy. And we again underscore, you cannot learn Bible prophecy unless you know the sons of Japheth, Ham and Shem, as they are designated in the table of nations of Genesis 10. This is the key to Bible prophecy. The prophets operate within a biblical framework of race and culture and so in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, when these men give their prophecies they will always give it in terms of the sons of Noah.

So we have the spreading forth of Japheth and Japheth spreads north into Russia, he spreads west through Anatolia, up into Greece, all through the European area, up into the Scandinavian peninsula, into the Spanish peninsula, up to France, across the channel to England and Ireland. And this is his general direction in world history. And then, we know of course of Columbus coming to America in 1492 but Japheth long preceded Columbus; other sons of Japheth preceded Columbus by centuries. And we know some of them of course, we’re taught in school how the Vikings, along this area, sailed through the Baltic Sea, went up to Iceland, went to Greenland, and went down to Labrador and Vinland, which some think is New England. And in this area he settled and left remnants of his culture. The Vikings were about 1000 AD and therefore preceded Columbus by half a millennium.

But now there’s increasing evidences that the Vikings, or their predecessors, not only came to Labrador and New England but traveled down the Appalachian Mountains, leaving debris as they went, traveling all the way through Central America, landing on the north shore of South America and went down into Peru. And so we have evidences of the white man coming to both North and South America centuries before Columbus. And we have evidences written in the tribal cultures; we have, for example, a group of people known in South America, in the mythologies of South America, as the cloud people, and the Indians all speak of a blond white raced that at one time controlled much of the mountainous region of Peru, which is located down here on the western side of South America. And it’s a mysterious race that came and went, disappeared in history and all that is left is mythologies of it. However, recently an anthropologist traveled into the area to seek remnants in modern day times. And they while examining an Indian tribe he said he came upon five tall men, much taller than the average of the region. They were blond and blue-eyed with long thin faces and [can’t understand word] noses. Now some can argue whether that was an intermarriage recently or not, but he seems convinced that it goes far, far back in that Indian tribe, to the times when the white man, Japheth, had traveled along these shores, never dominating them but traveling for purposes of trade and so on.

So Japheth, then, was an expanse of people as Noah prophesied his son would be. Everywhere Japheth has gone there has gone with him great travel and communication. But there are several things to notice. Japheth did not expand across the western hemisphere until approximately after the time of Christ. Now one of the evidences that Japheth did so and one of the evidences, incidentally, that the Bible is correct, is the problem of the heathen. Today we read Psalm 19, the choir sang part of it, and in that psalm you remember “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” Well, from time immemorial critics of the Christian faith have argued, well what about the heathen, what about those who have never heard. If Christianity is the only way of salvation what do you do with the races and cultures that have never heard? Well, here’s an illustration of why you are going to be a dead person in apologetics or evangelism if you don’t learn to present all of the Christian faith and don’t do it piecemeal. You can’t take one little doctrine out of the Christian faith and parade this all around for people to look at unless you link it with all the other doctrines and the other doctrines say that all the human races, take any tribe on any continent, and if we’re worried that these are heathen that have never heard let’s ask our self a question. Maybe they’ve never heard about Christ, maybe they’ve never heard about redemption since the time of Christ, but they have heard and they have heard plenty about God’s existence, they have heard about sin, they have heard about promised redemption, because they were sons of Noah, are they not.

Are not these heathen, who we think have never heard, are not they the sons of Noah. If they track their lineage back from son to father to grandfather, so on and so on, all the way up the family tree, wasn’t it true that at some point in their family they had access to revelation? Didn’t Noah carry revelation? Didn’t Japheth, Shem and Ham carry revelation? Surely! And so therefore it’s not true that heathen cultures have never heard; it may be true that because they have rebelled against the Scriptures and they have suppressed it and held down the truth in unrighteousness that the traces of that once viable tradition have been all but erased; that may be true, but it is not true that a people have never heard. All people have heard. Isaiah 40:21 says, “Have ye not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not heard from the foundation of the earth?” The implication of Isaiah of Isaiah 40:21 is that all peoples, all continents, in all places in all times have had access to a minimum amount of revelation.

One interesting evidence that Japheth carried revelation with him is in a poem or in an epic that most of you in high school English read, Beowulf; it is the oldest epic in the English language. Beowulf is an epic poem, and interestingly, as a recent scholar pointed out, Beowulf repeats the imagery of Genesis 1-6. Now isn’t this strange, the oldest English epic, dating as far back as AD 500, preserved an account of God, God is known and Beowulf as the protector of heaven, the King of glory, the eternal prince, the lord of life and so on. Cain is described; his being kicked out of the Garden of Eden is described in Beowulf. The flood is described; the giants who walked the face of the earth before the flood are described. So we ask, where does Genesis 1-6 come in, in the middle of this English epic, Beowulf. Well, there’s only one explanation that’s correct and that explanation is that that’s Japheth and he brought Genesis with him, and when he came to France and across the Normandy coast into England and Scotland and Ireland, he kept remnants of that revelation, as Isaiah 40:21 says. You see, the sons of Japheth were not heathen who never heard; they had heard very well and they treasured the memory of Genesis 1-6.

Now people say wait a minute, wait a minute, Beowulf was something written in 500, surely in 500 Christian contacts were made with Britain and therefore by 500 you can explain these elements in Beowulf simply to be the Christian missionary movement. Ah…no you can’t! Beowulf was constructed in 500, but the material, and the substratum of legend on which Beowulf has been written dates back prior to the time of Christ, for reasons like this: If Christians had come to Britain and if Beowulf is indeed a result of Christian missionary work, why isn’t Christ mentioned? Why isn’t God known as the Father? Why is it that no recent revelation, why isn’t Abraham mentioned? Why isn’t Moses mentioned? Why isn’t the Exodus mentioned? Why isn’t the virgin birth, the resurrection, the cross of Christ mentioned? It’s simple; because the substratum of Beowulf dates from before those things ever occurred; it dates from the time that Japheth left the culture and he had no longer contact with it and therefore didn’t keep up with progressive revelation. He represents a frozen form of the early spread of revelation in the human race—Beowulf, Genesis 1-6. And by the way, it cuts out at Genesis 6 which tells you when Japheth left; he left after these events and he no longer remembers anything because he wasn’t there when Abraham was there, when Moses was there and so on. So don’t buy this legend that the heathen have never heard; the heathen have heard very well.

Now a further thing about the spread of Japheth: Noah said that Japheth would expand, for his name Yepheth, means expanse, Japheth would expand when he dwelt “in the tents of Shem.” Now what does it mean to dwell “in the tents of Shem.” We said last time to dwell in the tents means to have fellowship with, to have social intercourse with. And so how does Japheth dwell in the tents of Shem? Japheth dwells in the tents of Shem when he leans on what Shem gives him. What does Shem give him? What Shem has given the whole human race, ethical standards and monotheistic truths. And when Japheth has rested upon those Japheth has always prospered.

For example, take this map. The arrows on this map indicate the spreading of Japheth but most of the spreading occurred after the time of Christ. Most of the spreading, of course, to the western hemisphere certainly took place after the time of Christ. What caused this lust for expansion on the part of Japheth, this adventuresome spirit that the sons of Japheth always seem to show, the idea that there always has to be lands beyond and we have to conquer and we have to explore to find these lands. What caused that? I suggest it was the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul went west from Palestine, to the center of Rome and I believe he was led there by the Holy Spirit so that the sons of Japheth would be the great missionaries of the gospel, and indeed most missionary activity has come from Japheth. Japheth, the Japhetic races have been the aggressors in evangelism.

Now it’s interesting that Christians got up to the British Isles, for those of you who disbelieve the spread of Christianity because again I think you have been subtly infected with evolutionary thinking, Christian spread to the British Isles by 37 AD. By 37 AD the gospel was preached on the British soil. One of the greatest preachers of the gospels of Jesus Christ in Britain and Ireland was Patrick; he was not a Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholics claim him but he is not, he dates from before the time of the Roman Catholic Church by at least two centuries. Patrick was a Celt and he came out of the Celtic church and it was the Celts and spreading the gospel centuries and centuries before Rome came into this area; the gospel had gone forth in Paul’s day to the ends of the world, and Japheth figured prominently in that gospel expansion. So these are some truths of Genesis 10:2-5 of the sons of Japheth.

This morning we come, beginning in Genesis 10:6, to the second great category of the human race, the sons of Ham. “And the sons of Ham: Cush, and Mizraim, and Put, and Canaan. [7] And the sons of Cush: Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabteca. And the sons of Raamah: Sheba, and Dedan. [8] And Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one in the earth. [9] He was a mighty hunter before the Jehovah: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD. [10] And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. [11] And out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, [12] And Resen between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city. [13] And Mizraim begot Ludim, and Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim, [14] And Pathrusim, and Casluhim (out of whom came the Philistines), and Caphtorim. [15] And Canaan begot Sidon, his first-born, and Heth, [16] And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, [17] And the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, [18] And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the Canaanites spread abroad. [19] And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and Admah, and Zeboiim, even unto Lash. [20] These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.”

Now the sons of Ham represent an entirely different pattern, both in composition and in expanse. The sons of Ham followed a different migration pattern. Instead of leaving the ark and heading north and west with a little split group that went down into India, the sons of Ham spread south and southwest and east, and these form the great Hamitic races on the face of the earth. There are several characteristics of the Hamites: as the Hamites spread they are known by these characteristics. One, they have tremendous linguistic variability, that is, their language changes and it changes from geographical area to geographical area. I am told by missionaries who spent their lives in language studies in South America that they can spend twenty to thirty years cracking a native tribal language, putting it into writing to teach the Word of God to that tribe and by the time they have done it there will be a segment of that same tribe that has another dialect. That is how fast the languages fracture among the native tribes in South America. And this seems to be characteristic, for wherever the Hamites go, as we’ll discuss in Genesis 11 later in more detail, wherever they have gone language changes extremely rapidly. This is a feature, linguistic variability.

A second feature of the sons of Ham is that they vary physically and in their pigmentation. They vary from the white man to the red man to the yellow man to the black man; from the occident to the orient, the sons of Ham. They represent both white and what we call the colored races, the sons of Ham’s physical variability. Now there are reasons for this that God has designed for His purposes and I’ll show you why in a moment, but first we want to see, just observe these facts. They vary linguistically, they vary geographically, and they vary racially. Note, for example, on this map, where I’ve indicated the placement of the settling of the sons of Ham in red, notice if you look at the areas of latitude on this map you will see that the sons of Ham lived in every major climate known to man. Notice, for example, the Eskimo, who is a son of Ham; he lives in the far north in subzero cold, on the arctic tundra and he survives. Notice others of the son of Ham live in equatorial humid Africa, in the dripping wet jungle with high humidity and heat and they survive. Notice them going into some of the areas of South America, into the mountainous high altitude areas and they survive. The Hamites have populated far more than Japheth and far, far more than Shem, every major geographical zone on earth.

Let’s look at some of the details of the sons of Ham. Genesis 10:6 gives you the immediate sons of Ham and then the following verses develop their sons, so we want to study what some of these sons did in history. First the son called Cush, and then in verse 7-12 we have Cush and his family expanded. So let’s look at Cush. Cush means black and here we have the first evidence of the black man in history. Why we have a physical difference we’ll suggest later, but Cush was the father of Ethiopians and he is known so in the Scriptures, the Cushite, and therefore we know they represent the black race. But here is an interesting thing and scholars have pondered why, but in Genesis 10:7-8 Cush is not yet in Africa. If you look carefully and Genesis 10:7, 8, even in verse 11, you will see the geographical location of Cush is not Africa but Mesopotamia, so therefore this represents an early stage as Cush descends from Mount Ararat and he moves southward. His first place of occupation is the Mesopotamian plain, not Africa yet.

Now who forms, as far as we know in history, the first civilization in the Mesopotamian area? The people’s name are called the Sumerians, and you know Samuel Noah Cramer was the great scholar who has devoted his life and has tremendous sources on the Sumerian civilization. But interestingly the Sumerians were known by all the other people who lived in the Middle East as (quote) “the black-headed ones.” Now scholars have insisted the Sumerians were white and they had black hair and this is why they were known in history as “the black-headed ones.” However, as Dr. Custance has pointed out, everybody else in the Middle East has black hair. The Semites always have black hair. So therefore what’s distinguishing about somebody who has black hair? Therefore we take the fact that the Sumerians as “the black-headed ones” to mean that they were Negroid, it was more than just the black hair; their skin was black. And of course they had clothes on and they walked around and the only part of the body exposed was their face, and so they were known as “the black-headed ones.” And they founded the great, great civilization of Sumeria.

Interestingly, further to the east, in India, a group of these people broke off and went into India and formed what we call the twin city civilization in the Indus valley. There were two cities, Harappa and the Mohenjodaro. Mohenjodaro and Harappa were the great early cities of India before the Aryans and Japheths came across. Again, you want to compare the migration patterns of Ham with the migration patterns of Japheth. Ham first came into the Indian subcontinent; after he did you have the break off of a sub group of the Japhetics, called the Aryans, who come across the Himalayan Mountains and invade India, and the story of that is recorded in the Hindu sacred books, the Vedas. Interestingly in those sacred books the Aryans are said to have triumphed (quote) “over a black and nose-less people,” obvious Negroid characteristics of the previous twin city civilization. So we suggest that the Indus valley civilization too was a black civilization. And once again two major civilizations, tremendously important for the survival of the human race, were done by the sons of Ham, in particular Cush.

Now we have other sons mentioned here in Genesis 10:7, “Seba.” Seba is mentioned in the Scriptures and other places in the Bible and we know where he settled. He settled in southern Arabia; notice not yet, Genesis 10 doesn’t know that Cush has gone to Africa yet, which shows you that Genesis 10 is giving us a snapshot as the men have just begun to move out and they haven’t reached and really formed Africa yet. But they are down in the southern part of Arabia; you notice this, by the way, because the entrance to Africa has always been through Ethiopia. There are two gateways to Africa, the Suez Canal and the isthmus just south of Alexandria and this isthmus across is not an isthmus, it’s just the crossing of a narrow body of water on the south end of the Dead Sea.

And who has been after the Suez Canal for the last 20 years? The Russian have! And who has taken over Ethiopia in the Ogaden war? The Russians have! The Russians are not stupid; the Russians are the sons of Japheth who have studied their geopolitical theory very, very well and although our State Department might not like it and the American public may not like it the Russians have Africa for their goal; Africa has the great resources they need and they want; Africa has wealth and the Russians want that wealth, they need it to make their kingdom go, the reason because they’re so inefficient and socialists. Socialism consumes vast amounts of resources for X amount of production and to keep feeding the machine the Russians need resources, and watch them go into Africa, always letting somebody else doing their dirty work for them while the Americans back up, back up, back up, and then injure the only friendly nation we have in Africa which is Rhodesia. Now we have a brilliant foreign policy erected on total façade of foolishness, and this goes back to history; historically the gateway to Africa is the table described here.

Seba and Havilah were in southern Arabia; later they crossed that small point of land and entered Africa from the east. Sabtah, and Raamah, these are names which are not well known. And now we come to the word Nimrod.

Genesis 10:8, “And Cush begot Nimrod,” who was the most famous of his sons. Nimrod, we’ll have more to say when we get to the tower of Babel and the world government movement in Genesis 11. But for now let’s look at the word “Nimrod.” It comes from a Hebrew word, [sounds like: harad], which means to revolt, and the [sounds like: ni]} prefix is a first common plural prefix, meaning “we,” combined it says, “let us revolt.” Against who? Against God and against God’s law. Nimrod was the first rebel on a political geophysical size scale. For example, in verse 10, there you have the first use of the word “kingdom” in the Bible; it’s significant. And it all began in verse 10 at Babel.

So we have the first defiance of God and it’s no chance event that in the book of revelation, at the end of history, where does the antichrist have his home? In the land of Babel. So Babel represents, so to speak, the satanic navel of the earth. It’s the place where the parties began in rebellion against God and His postdiluvian civilization and it’s the place where all the world is now headed back to. Ten years ago people would have laughed that Babylon today would be anything, it’s not just a plain with a little mound on it out there today but it’s in Iraq; it’s in the center of the oil producing nations of the world. And so with the petroleum dollars increasing we can see that it’s very easy to conceive how Babylon may come back into prominence, fulfilling prophecy.

So we have, then, Babel and we have Nimrod, the first kingdom. It says, Genesis 10:10, at “the beginning [of his kingdom] was Babel, and Erech,” those of you who have studied history in ancient form, you probably saw this city like this: Uruk, that’s the way it’s usually presented in traditional scholarship but the Bible presents it here as Erech, same city. “Accad,” one of the great ancient languages that you study in graduate school if you’re interested in ancient history is Akkadian and three is the source of that language. “… and Calneh, in the land of Shinar,” that is in the land of Mesopotamia.

Genesis 10:11, then “Out of that land went forth Asshur,” now Asshur, again here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Turkish peninsula, the sons of Ham have come down here on the plain and they’ve settled a vast set of cities and out of those cities came Asshur and he settled a new complex described in these verses. “Out of that land went forth Asshur, and he built Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, [12] And Resen [which is] between Nineveh and Calah….” Now Nineveh, Calah and Resen are all names of the cities or sub districts in this composite. You’ll notice these verses end with a strange statement. At the end it says in verse 12, “the same is a,” singular, “a great city.” Well, what is “a great city?” It means the city that was made up of the complex of these cities. Those of you who have the King James translation of verse 11 have it “the city Rehoboth,” now I forgot to look at what the New ASV has there, but those of you with other translations will notice that something’s flip-flopping here. You’ll notice that translators are not translating the end of verse 11 consistently; each guy seems to have his own idea of how it goes. And the reason for this is that literally Rehoboth means plaza or open market place, and the ancient cities are structured around the open market where they sold their goods and literally in the Hebrew it says, “and he went to Nineveh, he built Nineveh, and he built Rehoboth city,” that means plazas of a city. So it indicates then that there was a tremendous closeness to all these and later in history they came together to be known as Nineveh, one of the great cities of the ancient world and the backdrop for the famous story of the book of Jonah. So Nineveh was an historic site of extreme importance. Later on the Assyrians, of course, came there and destroyed Israel in 721; Nineveh, the place of missionary movement in Jonah.

Genesis 10:12, “Resen … the same is the great city;” “the great city” draws emphasis to the fact that Genesis was written to be understood as history. Don’t let somebody come up to you and tell you that these are just allegories and stories. Now the Bible, at this point… there are allegories in the Bible, but this isn’t allegory; this purports to be an account of literal history and the reason is because the people in the Bible knew they could not have a foreign policy, they could not exist as peoples, they could not preach the Word of God unless they knew the cultural background of each major group of people. And so I believe the prophets, like Isaiah, Jeremiah and so on, studied Genesis 10 and studied it very well; I see no other way that they could ever erected their prophecies the way they did unless they had first studied all of these people.

Now we come to the second of Ham’s son; we’ve traced the sons of Cush as those who moved east into India and south into Africa and colonized and settled this area. The next son of Ham in Genesis 10:6 is called Mizraim. Skipping from verse 6 to verses 13-14, Mizraim is a name for Egypt. Genesis 10:13-14 give you some of those who came forth from Mizraim. Now here’s the significant thing about Mizraim: he is a white man and he settles North Africa. So watch what happens; Cush is a black man and settles southern Africa and India, and the Mesopotamian Valley and Mizraim comes down here and settles North Africa. Mizraim maybe appears in history as King Menes. King Menes was the man who originated the dynasties of Egypt, somewhat after the first settlers in the land because of the longevity curve in Genesis 10 and 11. But Mizraim is known in history, if he is Menes, for getting political power by a very simple device. He attained political power because he discovered a way of draining fields from water. You see, North Africa, as I said during the study of Job, this was back late in the Pleistocene epic, replacing the seasons very different from traditional historical geology, the late Pleistocene epic had this area all under water; there were lakes in the middle of the Sahara Desert, you can fly over them and look at them today, they’re their, lake sites. And so North Africa was flooded. So in order to get fields to grow things on, the Hamites, when they first settled in North Africa had to have a drainage system; Mizraim figured it out and he became their leader and the father of Egypt.

Now his sons in Genesis 10:13; “Mizraim begot Ludim,” we don’t know anything about Ludim. Incidentally, notice all the names in verses 13-14 end in “im;” “im” endings are plural endings on Hebrew nouns and so what this means is, we call it the Mizrais, the Ludis, the Anamis, and the Lehabis, that’s the way you translate it, leave off the “im” and replace it with “s” and that’s how you have a contemporary English translation. So there are subgroups of people. The Ludim I have been unable to find any reliable information about. The Anamim likewise, very little information available on them. The Lehabim, they are traditionally the fathers of the modern Libyans, the Libyans trace their heritage back to Lehabim, and that figures, they are a North African people.

The next people we have anything to do with is Genesis 10:14, “the Casluhim, (from whom came the Philistines), and Caphtorim.” The Philistine and the Caphtorim occur again and again in the Bible; you know the Philistine, David’s war with the Philistine. These Philistines occupied the Mediterranean so much that in the days of Moses, when the Jews liberated from Egypt, Exodus 23:31, the Mediterranean Sea was known as the Sea of the Philistines. They dominated the area but again notice the location checks out and is consistent; they are North African merchantmen, they are people who occupy Crete and Cyprus and the islands in the Mediterranean Sea, and they dominated the area, they were fierce soldiers and very, very strong. They also had almost a monopoly on iron at the time. So the Philistines and the Caphtorim, very close relation, settled down in Palestine along the coast, they never went inland, they were coastal people only.

Continuing, that’s the second son of Ham. “Cush, Mizraim, and Put,” we don’t know where he went; he obviously migrated off in the wild blue some place and whoever compiled the table of nations did not know anything where Put went. So he’s eliminated and we come to the fourth son, “Canaan,” and a lot was known about him because his sons form the tribe in the land of Palestine. Incidentally, it’s an irony; do you know where the word Palestine comes from? Philistine, the modern day land is named after the Philistines. This is why, when you read about the Jewish people are very sensitive about the name, they keep calling it the Eretz Yisrael, which is the “land of Israel” in Hebrew; they don’t like it… that’s a way to insult it, to call it the land of Palestine because Palestine is a Gentile. The Philistines gave their name to Palestine.

Now Canaan; Genesis 10:15, “And Canaan begot Sidon,” and this tells us something interesting about the date of this book because Sidon was always linked in history to its sister city, Tyre, located here, recently under bombardment in Lebanon by the Israeli’s. Sidon is located right near Tyre, but in the Old Testament Tyre was a strong city, not Sidon. And yet here in the table Sidon is mentioned without Tyre; there’s one of the evidences that this is ancient material. The author of this doesn’t even know about the city of Tyre so obviously he wrote before Tyre came into existence. Now Sidon; “Sidon, [was] his first-born,” and he settled along the coast of Lebanon.

The next ancestor was “Heth,” and he’s very interesting in history because from Heth comes the Hittites. The Hittites were a strange group of people; a people said for years didn’t exist, people who went to college in the 1920s and 30s heard from their liberal professors, their anti-Christian anti-Bible type professors, that well, the Bible is wrong because the Bible mentions this race of people called the Hittites and tut-tut-tut, we know that the Hittites never existed. Of course, the “we know” is an argument from silence because there was no evidence for the Hittites, but lo and behold, in the 20s under Guerney and others the Hittite civilization was dug up. And now we know there was a group called the Hittites. There’s still some problems synthesizing it with Biblical history but the Hittites lived in Palestine at the time of Abraham and Abraham did business with them. They later apparently moved northward and merged with the Assyrians because later in Elijah’s day he mentioned there are only two armies worth fighting, the Egyptians and the Hittites. Well, we know from history the Assyrians, not the Hittites, the Assyrians were up there. Well, if he’s interchangeably using the name Hittite and Assyrian it shows that the Hittites moved northward, and they had some contact with Turkey and that’s where a lot of the artifacts have been dug up. But here’s a very interesting feature. By the way, also remember the Hittites were used for military advisors, David’s Uriah, the first husband of Bathsheba, was a Hittite. But the real clinker is, in the artifacts the Hittites are Orientals. They have pigtails, they have cheekbones, they have all the features of an Oriental race. So this is a most marvelous discovery, that the Hittites first showed Oriental characteristics and here they are as the son of Heth. They leave the land and are not heard from.

[Genesis 10:16-17] The Jebusites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, all of these sort of just kind of disappear throughout Old Testament history; they stay in the land. The Hethites, or the Hittites leave and go somewhere else, the Bible doesn’t know where they go. They go somewhere north and just disappear. We suggest that the Hittites are part of a migration that went east; we suggest that this migration preserved its name in one of the famous names of China, Cathay, and this may be a linguist memory of Heth. This doesn’t mean that all Oriental races come from Heth; some may have come from Put, verse 6, whom we know nothing of because the Bible doesn’t trace him.

But one of the sure ones that at the end of verse 17 is the “Sinite.” The Sinites never did stay in the land; they left the land and they went some place, and that “some place” is recorded in archeology. The “Sinites” the Bible calls them but the Assyrians call them by the Siannu, and the Siannu in Assyrian inscriptions are Oriental merchants from China, and they are called the Siannu. So we have this name preserved. Those of you, who remember history, remember the Sino-Russian War. So the word S-i-n or Sino is still a preservation, we believe, of this son, of Sinite. Moreover, a Chinese scholar describing the origin of the Chinese civilization writes this way, (Quote): “The place most closely associated by the Chinese themselves with the origin of their civilization is the capital of Shensi, namely, Siang-fu.” Notice the close correspondence in the words, and then this scholar, who is not trying to be a Christian, puts a parenthesis around “Siang-fu” and says “(Father Sin)”. So we raise the question, hard to track this, very difficult, I just suggest that the Sinite in verse 17 is, in fact, one of the great fathers that migrated eastward and formed what we know as the Oriental cultures of the Far East.

And so we go on, Genesis 10:18, “And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite,” these passed out of existence of history and the Bible doesn’t give us any help. Verse 19 records the fact that all the cities around Sodom and Gomorrah are still existing. This is significant because it means the southern half of the Dead Sea had not formed yet. The cities… the Dead Sea is located like this in the Bible and this southern section is… apparently what happened, the Sea originally was stopped right there and this blew out and formed and settled in this whole area and underneath there are the areas of Sodom and Gomorrah. Josephus said you could take a boat across there and look down and see some of the ruins in his day. So therefore, the picture we are getting here of Genesis is very, very early in history.

Genesis 10:20, “These are the sons of Ham, after their families, their tongues, in their countries, and in their languages [nations],” a tremendously important group of people because if it were not for Ham the human race could never have survived. Ham has given to the human race all of his inventive genius.

Now we must, in the course of this teaching, we must attempt, at least, to bridge some gaps in what normal people read in their history books, and people will have questions. You have questions, you hand them in on the feedback; this is why I take time to bring this material in. From time to time I get objections to what I’m doing here by saying why do you go into all this deep stuff? Because I get asked; there are people in this congregation who think after 12:05 and so therefore they’re interested in applying the Word of God and for their benefit we try to provide them with food.

Why do we have across the faith of the earth tels like this, this is a mound and it has various occupation levels in it; they are usually occupied Roman II, Roman III and so on, these are ancient cities. Now in these ancient cities, down at the bottom levels of the tel you have many, many different levels. Now archeologists have come along, say for example in Jericho you have about 80 of these down here, just one right after another. And they say well surely that shows thousands of years passed by, while one city was built and destroyed another city was built and destroyed, how do you fundies with your short earth history account for these multiple occupation levels, there is a proof that you can’t handle. Yes we can, because all those occupation levels are adobe; what happens to adobe in a moist climate? It’s going down. They didn’t use wood to build their houses because there weren’t that many forests available right after the flood; all the forests had been destroyed, it took centuries for the forests to build up again so you could use wood to build houses with. So you have these multiple successions of adobe cities.

What is not usually taken or assumed in the classroom, or taught is the smallest of the cites… for example, take the city of Troy. Do you realize that the original city of Troy is only 100 yards across? Now 100 yards barely… to play a football game on. And that was the outer limit of the original city of Troy. So when we talk about ancient cities and occupation sites we are talking about camp sites, largely… no bigger than the KOA campsites you find along the highway; in fact, some of them are bigger, much bigger, than the early cities of the world. These are very small cities.

Now another tip off; Jericho, by the way, down at its lower levels, is only 100 by 200 yards, very small site. But here is the tip off that thousands of years did not pass by for these multiple occupation levels because we can go out to the burial grounds and we can link, by pottery, the burial ground to all of these levels; here is your burial yard, and count the number of burials, and here we get one, a city called [sounds like: Ah lah jah], has 13 graves, supposedly occupied for a thousand years; 13 people died in a thousand years? What’s happening here? Jericho has dozens of graves but certainly not hundreds.

And on Mount Carmel in Israel, a very interesting place, when the Neanderthal man and Homo Sapiens apparently coexisted for a long time, we have this interesting thing; they tell us that this site was occupied for a long, long time, the site is located right here, that little jut of land out into the Mediterranean, is called the Carmel range, the place where Elijah had his little show one day. And as the Carmel range comes out to the edge of the Sea there’s this cliff. In that cliff there are caves and in those caves are the men, the Neanderthal and more modern like species. There’s a debate over whether they actually coexisted or not, but here’s the inside of one of these caves. Now the interesting thing about all this is that there’s only 60 graves around here. Isn’t that a little bit strange for the face that we have people very obviously interested in burying their people, even the common men are buried, they supposedly live on a site for thousands of years and only buried 60 people. Now I suggest to you they didn’t live there for thousands of years, they lived there for a very short time period and that’s why the graveyards are so small. We have, then, these evidences of early man radiating out from the Near East.

Now we have to answer another problem and that is the problem of what about, what we will call “primitive characteristics.” We, because of our evolutionary way of thinking, associate a caveman-like skull with somebody who’s stupid. Now it’s very interesting that these very so-called stupid people did cave paintings, did advanced abstract art, basically had all the tools you and I have, knew how to raise grain and so on; they are not stupid people just because we think they happen to look stupid. Several theories have been devised to explain this. One of the most famous examples was the wrestler, French wrestler called Maurice Tillet. Maurice Tillet lived and did his thing on the wrestling circuit in the 1940s and he was seen by Mr. Field who owned the Field Museum of Natural History, and when he saw this guy he said hey, this is a natural Neanderthal type. The guy looked exactly like it and so he worked out a deal one day with Maurice Tillet and had him behind these great glass enclosures that you walk in the museums and there’s these life-sized wax figures, and it was this big exhibition of Neanderthal man with live-sized was figures, and he said to Maurice Tillet, now you go in there and we’ll dress you up like Neanderthal man, just stay still, because I’m going to bring a group of people out here and I want to see what happens. And so he brought in some anthropologists and some public and they all sat in front of this glass case while Tillet was standing there, was quiet as the lifeless wax statutes, and then in a wave of his hand, Mr. Field gave him a signal, all of a sudden he charged, and besides having heart attacks in the delegation, great surprise and consternation that all of a sudden they’d met a real Neanderthal.

Now before they knew what his problem was they had no problem accepting that he was Neanderthal. The anatomy was perfect, but afterwards, when they found out, oh no, that was just a freak, and he was found to have acromegaly. Usually this kills somebody but in this case it didn’t kill him, he went on to be an adult, he was a wrestler and he was also fluent in four languages. So I suggest that he wasn’t stupid just because he looked stupid. So be careful, you can’t tell a book by its cover and that’s exactly what evolution is teaching people to do, to read people by their cover; just because somebody has a sloping forehead or because their anatomy is different that makes them stupid? Now where is that coming from? It is not coming from the Scriptures; it is coming from evolutionary thinking, and here’s one of the ethical after effects of this sort of thing.

Moreover, advanced studies done on the backbones and spines of Neanderthal man have found great cases of osteoarthritis. Now what causes this? Well, among other things, damp climate. What did we say the climate was after the flood was? Damp. Now let’s see if we can tie all this together so that when we look at racial differences as a Christian, something can go through our mind that will give us a balanced view of people as people and not get hung up on this racial prejudice kick. I suggest here’s a way of looking at it. When we observe, whether it’s in history books or in real life, racial differences, let’s say to ourselves: Father, I understand that this is an evidence, it’s a memorial basically, to the dispersion to the human race, for the caused racial difference, was it not the diversification after the flood. Isn’t that the primary reason the Bible would suggest for this difference, and were not men obeying the Word of God when they were dispersing across the face of the earth. Wasn’t that God’s command? You bet it was because in Genesis 11 He said be very hard-nosed about making man disperse across the face of the earth.

So what we observe and get all hung up and bent out of shape about simply is nothing more than the diversity of the human race trying to fulfill its mandate. And every race has its place. We have in Christianity the doctrine of spiritual gifts that says that says that you may be an evangelist, I may be a pastor-teacher, somebody else may have the gift of helps, somebody else may have the gift of administration. We make a big thing in Christian circles about the doctrine of spiritual gifts. I suggest to you there’s a doctrine of natural gifts, given not to the body of Christ but to the body of Adam, and that every race represents one of these physical gifts, that this person in this culture, with this race, has a gift to do and to execute something on the face of the earth in history. And all the races and subgroups have this. There is no such thing as a racially degenerate group. There are culturally degenerations that don’t have anything to do with anatomy, they have to do with the human spirit and that’s the damnation on Cain in the land of Palestine. It wasn’t because of his race; it was because of his thought life, because Canaan was white, he wasn’t a colored race. So I hope none of you have this stuff about the colored races are somehow cursed in the Bible; they are not! I can’t find one curse directed to any colored race in the Bible. The curses that are directed are directed to the white races in the Bible. The only place you can come to any conclusion with regard to that is the single case of Nimrod, who probably was a black man, but that doesn’t mean the black people are cursed because the curse fell on Nimrod. Not at all; completely wrong.

So the Bible offers no hope for segregationists; let’s make that clear. The Bible has a very, very even-handed approach to racial distinctives and it would tend to suggest that racial distinctives are a result of the dominion of this earth.

Let’s conclude by turning to Psalm 98 which addresses itself to all the races of men. Some of the things we face as Christians is that Christianity is a religion merely of the West; it’s “the white man’s religion,” that it developed only in Europe, and therefore somehow doesn’t apply to Africa, to the Orient, but if our view of race is correct then all races had pieces of this revelation at one time and Ham, Shem and Japheth sat together for evening meal with Noah, think of what you would have been if you had been an observer to a meal in Noah’s house. Just visualize this for a moment, knowing what you now know of world history, and knowing the tremendous racial diversity that came out of Noah, can you imagine what an exciting experience it would be, sitting down to four men, Noah seated at one end of the table, Ham, Shem and Japheth, and they sit and they eat together, and you know as they talk and converse in probably a Semitic type language, talking about the Word of God, that each of those four bodies bear the genes for every racial distinction that has happened in the some 5,000 years since that supper. Isn’t it amazing; there the human race was together at one point.

In Psalm 98 we have the future, addressed to when the Word of God in the millennial kingdom reigns over all races and cultures. “Oh, sing unto the LORD a new song; for He has done marvelously things; His right hand, and His holy arm, have gotten Him the victory.” And what is the victory? Verse 4, this is the response to God’s plan. “Make a joyful noise unto the LORD,” who? “all the earth,” metaphor for human beings, it’s really not a metaphor; it’s a part for the whole here, metonymy, for the whole human race, “Make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” Notice in verse 9, do it “Before the LORD: for He comes to judge the earth,” and the word “judge” here means to rule, it doesn’t mean judgment in a bad sense, it means to set up and establish his kingdom; “for He comes to set up His kingdom on earth; with righteousness shall He set up His kingdom, and the people with equity.” In that day there will be people from all races who have one thing in common; they have personally responded to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.”

We’re going to conclude by singing…..