The Point of The Genealogy in Genesis 10

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3 quick points about the genealogy in Genesis 10, the descendants of Noah:

  1. The Bible wants us to understand that the spread of peoples over the earth is just as much part of God’s plan as the creation of the animals in Genesis 1. People are of course freely moving and spreading out, but this is nonetheless a fulfillment of God’s command that humanity be fruitful and multiply.

  2. All of humanity is part of the same family, even though the different nations seem so different.

  3. Israel is a small nation among many, and yet it’s the one God uses to save the world.

 

Today’s Scripture

Genesis 10:1-32

This Insight Makes the Genealogy Worth Reading

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With the birth of Seth to Adam and Eve, things look promising. But, a few chapters later, we read of the intense evil of man and of God’s plan to destroy wicked humanity with The Flood. Why? What happened?

Leon Kass has a fascinating paragraph about the genealogy in Genesis 5, of all things(!):

 

“To discover the worm in the family tree, we must read with a magnifying glass—and with a timeline and a calculator. Because the text reports the lives of these antediluvians [people who lived before the flood] in sequence—chronicling each man’s birth, the number of years he lived before and after begetting his first son, his life span, and his death—the complacent reader does not notice that there is more than a half century (between the year 874, in which Lamech is born, and the year 930, in which Adam dies) during which all nine generations of human beings, from Adam to Lamech, are alive at the same time, with all their myriad descendants. Then, suddenly, in the year 930, Adam drops dead. Next, in 987 (readers can do the calculations for themselves), Enoch “was not, for God took him.” And in 1042, Seth also dies. Readers of the Garden of Eden story need no longer remain in suspense: the prophecy of human mortality (“you shall surely die”; 2:17) is, at long last, fatally—and fatefully—fulfilled. Indeed, this may well be the purpose of reciting the entire genealogy in all its numerological detail: to prepare the…reader to learn…how human beings—especially the men—react to the discovery of their unavoidable finitude. For with the death of Adam, and after nearly a millennium of “immortal” human existence, natural death has entered the human world.”

—Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, 154.

 

Did you catch that? If you read the genealogy carefully, you notice that all of a sudden death finally comes upon mankind. The unavoidably reality of death had been delayed for a while, but when it comes, it comes quickly, and the fear of death and the desperation it brings may be the reason humanity turns so wicked in the next chapter, setting up The Flood.

I find that fascinating: there is a 50 year period in which all 9 generations are alive at the same time!!

 

Today’s Scripture

Genesis 5:1-32

Joseph Was and Wasn't Jesus's Father

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Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus; as Luke has already told us, Mary miraculously conceived. So, why does Luke give us Joseph's genealogy? Because he was born into Joseph's family, and raised as Joseph's son.

Today’s Scripture:

Luke 3:21-38

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