1) Genesis 10
Genesis 10 was written by the Priestly class to link the story of The Flood to the story of The Tower of Babel. It’s important to recognize, however, that genealogies do more than merely link interesting events, and Genesis 10 provides a great example of how the writers of the Bible work on several levels at once.
Coming out of the ark, Noah had 3 sons: Shem, the eldest (listed first), Ham, the middle boy (listed second), and Japheth, the y0ungest. Remember, the story of the Flood posits that all humankind was destroyed; so Noah and his family were the only humans when the waters receded. It is a “second genesis” of the human race.
Genesis 10 details the descendants of each son in order to account for all of the people known to inhabit the world. And if you follow the account of each son’s descendants, you learn:
The eldest, Shem - who, by the way, inherits his father’s divine blessing - turned out to be the progenitor of Abraham. Through Abraham, God called the Hebrew people into being and gave them His new blessing. In that new blessing we see the continuation of a direct, blessed line of descent from Adam to Abraham to the Hebrew people. They are, by descent, the chosen people of God, inheritors of the fullness of God’s choosing and blessing.
Ham, the middle son, was the second-closest to the full blessing of God. His descendents were structurally situated to be the next-closest to God’s heart,but remember that it was Ham who uncovered his father’s nakedness (chapter 9), bringing down Noah’s curse on his line. From the perspective of the Priestly class, writing around 500 BC and looking back at the long history of conflict between Hebrews and Canaanites, that curse set the descendants of Ham’s first son, Canaan, on their blighted course. Ham’s son, Canaan, was not only the father of the Canaanites, but the Canaanites founded both Sodom and Gomorrah – which tells us a lot!
Ham’s second son, Mizraim, begat a line that eventually resulted in the Philistines – who were the arch-rivals of King David (descendant of Abraham). Their territory was the coastlands now largely known as the Gaza strip, where the Palestinians are located.
Ham’s third son, Cush, begat the well-regarded king, Nimrod, who with his descendants founded the towns of Babel and Ninevah. Babel, of course is where the Tower was built. Ninevah was one of the greatest of ancient Middle East cities. It was the capital of the Assyrians, who destroyed the northern half of David’s kingdom, in 722 BC.
So, according to the biblical account, through the descendants of Ham – second in line for God’s blessing but cursed for his disrepect of his father Noah – the Semitic peoples of the Middle East are accounted for. They are close cousins to the Hebrews but perpetually at odds, and perpetually second-in-blessing to the line of Shem and Abraham.
The third son of Noah, Japheth, begat a line of sons who eventually comprised the “coastland peoples of the Gentiles” (10:5). Japheth, twice removed from the fullness of God’s blessing, is the progenitor of all of the rest of us, who are neither Hebraic nor of Semitic stock. We, too, are children of God’s second founding couple, Noah and his wife, but we are most removed from the fullness of God’s grace as children of the third son.
Thus, through the account of each of Noah’s sons, the Priestly genealogists accounted for the origin and relationships among all of the nations and people’s of their known world.
2) The Tower of Babel
Genesis 11:1 tells us (New King James Version): “Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.” Language, as we discussed in class, determines what we see and how we understand the world, and allows us to communicate. When a people share one language unity of perception, understanding and communication, and therefore of purpose, is best achieved. And the Bible says that because of their unity, the descendants of Noah decided to built a tower.
But not just a tower, a tower that would reach into heaven and, through its sheer size and achievement, “make a name for” the builders. It would, in their estimation, bring them renown, put them in the history books, and assure that they would not be “scattered abroad over the face of the earth” (11:4).
It is a tower for the ages, built before the children and grandchildren of Noah spread out over the empty earth. It was built to ward off a fear that they would be scattered and, in their scatteredness, become impotent. To secure their potency, they proposed to build a tower that would not just be tall, but would reach into heaven. (Keep in mind the ancient Hebrew conception of the world – click here. God was understood to be resident in heaven, which was the highest layer of the firmament that separated the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament.) What the tower builders intended was to build a tower that would pierce the firmament and allow humankind to climb up into God’s realm. To, in effect, put themselves on the same level as God.
And that means they meant to become their own gods. In other words: the temptation that toppled Adam and Eve had returned in the children of Noah. The natural temptation of the flesh to deny any spiritual authority and limits, to desire the right and power to pursue any appetite, had returned. (God’s desire to wash the temptations of the flesh away in the baptism of the flood had failed.)
God recognized the corruption of the human heart: “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them” (11:6).
Recognizing the danger, God took action. He confused their language so that they could not understand one another. And so the people separated into groups based on their ability to understand one another, and separated. The tower was abandoned, and the challenge to God’s supremacy was squashed.
The people who sought to use their own, human power to prevent being scattered across the earth ended up scattered by the power of God.
3) Hesed
God’s action was a form of hesed.
Remember that Life – unity, harmony, delight, fulfillment – can only exist within certain constraints. By refusing to allow humankind to pursue whatever we wish without limits or boundaries, God keeps alive the possibility of humankind finding and experiencing Life.
What appears from a human perspective to be good – the uniting of the whole world around a common agenda to unite and preserve ourselves – is from God’s perspective not automatically good. That is, not every common human enterprise is holy. From God’s perspective, that particular effort – to mount into heaven and stand on an equal footing with God – was unholy. It would break the boundaries of being human within which it is possible to discover and experience unity, harmony, delight and fulfillment.
God’s thwarting of that act of human unity, and His scattering of the people across the earth, created the conditions within which He could begin His saving work. Working through history and within the lives of His scattered creatures, God would work to restore His original Earth Creature as the obedient creature who lives in unity, harmony, delight, and fulfillment with one another and with their Maker.
4) Jesus Christ & the Holy Spirit
According to Acts 2:1-12, after Jesus’ resurrection and appearances on earth, after he was lifted into heaven, on the day called Pentacost (penta = 50; hence, 50 days after), the Spirit of Jesus was poured out upon his disciples. And when the Holy Spirit landed upon them, they began to speak in strange tongues.
This outpouring of the Spirit “confused” the language and speech of the disciples. But when they went out into the streets of Jerusalem – where people from all around the known world congregated to conduct business and pleasure – each found that some portion of the population understood them. In other words, the confusion of language – which had been a curse upon Noah’s descendants – became a blessing to the descendants of those ancient people. The confusion of the disciples’ tongues became the means by which all the world could hear the unifying Good News of what God had accomplished in Jesus.
In Jewish theology, biblical history begins with God calling Abraham to walk before Him, in Genesis 12. That is the beginning of God’s activity in the realm of time to draw creation back into relationship with Himself. And the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) is an interpretation of the history of the Hebrew people that uncovers the places and ways in which God has been active in the world to achieve His goal.
In Christian theology, biblical history ends with Jesus Christ. Jesus is the human being God has been calling forth since Abraham. Jesus is the “perfect” son, the “obedient” son, who has the full measure of God’s Spirit in him, and so is fully united with his God. His relationship to God is that of a Father and Son, and in Jesus humankind is restored to the Edenic relationship with God. In Jesus the Earth Creature is restored, creation is redeemed, and history – the only history that matters, the history of God’s redeeming work – is fulfilled. Barriers of language, race, ethnicity, culture, time, gender and class are overcome by being demolished. Unity, harmony, delight and fulfillment – full mutuality – reigns.
Christian theology claims that after Jesus and in Jesus human history is complete. It is over. Now we live in the end-times. In Jesus the kingdom of God on earth has been restored, and when we are in Jesus we abide in God’s kingdom, in God’s presence, and we have peace with God. Unity, harmony, delight, and fulfillment are ours when we are infused with and giving the lead to the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God.
The Church- the true Church - exists where that knowledge is understood and embodied. That place, and those people, constitute the body of Christ in the world. And in the Body of Christ God is supreme and human creatures occupy the middle place between heaven and earth, mediating God’s grace to the creation, husbanding the earth toward holiness – as intended in Genesis 1.
5) A Last Word on The Myths of Creation
The Myths of Creation serve a three-fold purpose. Through the four stories we learn what the human predicament is. It is -
a struggle to wrest life from the earth
amidst brotherly contention and strife
in a world of evil-acting, power-grubbing people.
Comfort comes from the knowledge of God’s hesed: that love God has for us that nothing we do can change, limit or destroy.
God’s enduring love eventuates in the incarnation of His creative and loving Word, appearing to us in history in the person of Jesus Christ, through whose perfect obedience the purpose of history is fulfilled and we are reconciled to God. In Christ, the Garden of Eden is present again as it was before the Fall of Adam and Eve, and we can enter into that garden when we allow the Christ’s Spirit to govern our lives.
That is the Good News (the God Spell, or Gospel) of Jesus Christ.
6) This Concludes our Study
Thank you to everyone who has participated…in person and online…I have enjoyed our discussions and have gained new insights as a result of your comments, questions, and conversations.
As a study group, you have been a blessing to me, drawing me back into work I love after I had been away from it for two years. Thank you.
Have a great Spring and Summer. Perhaps we can do some new study in the Fall…
–Terry
