stephan huller

i am aware of the arabic. yemen = right. but al sham is still consciously related to shem perhaps only as a folk etymology

Iskander

Martin Luther said that Chapter 10 was ‘full of dead words’. I take this to mean that replacing any word by another one selected at random would not make any difference.

A chapter as eloquent and meaningful as a cemetery full of dead words.

sotto voce

Rather like Martin, if so. But, while this chapter retains the story myth character that validated it to ancients, it has two biblical purposes; one is the immediate one of providing context for the Babel allegory, that teaches the pride and pretension of mankind, and the resulting opprobrium of deity; and the other is of course that it links Jesus to Adam genealogically as noted in Luke, which links with the promise of Genesis to oppose Satan through Adam's offspring, the recurrent theme of the whole Bible. It also provides the Lucan view of Jesus as both fully human and fully God, tempted, suffering, yet innocent. None of this in Ch. 10 is to be taken literally, of course.

It is not so wise to take any part of the Bible as 'dead'. The very fact of a genealogy is significant. One can perhaps see significance in the meanings of Hebrew names, also.

Clivedurdle

steve_bnk

opprobrium, learn someting new everyday.

outhouse

LOL


they usually avoid discussions with people educated on the subject

Zwaarddijk

Not sure if you're phrasing this badly by accident or I am reading things into what you're writing that aren't there, or you subscribe to some weird notions: do you really think the intent of the Jewish authors back in ~500BCE was to link Jesus to Adam when writing this? That seems rather to be a thing forced onto the text by eisegesis at a way later point.

How Gen. 10 provides any real backdrop for the Lucan view of Jesus, again, seems to be by Lucan eisegesis rather than by original design.

I find the most likely explanation is that it in part served as a just-so story for why some tribes are more similar to the Hebrews than others in customs and language (they're distant cousins, others are even more distant cousins, some again, are even less distant cousins - Edom and Ishmael, for instance.) In part such a just-so story will be kind of similar to reality in some ways for the closest tribes, e.g. if a Swede came up with the idea that Swedes, Danes and Norwegians derive from a common ancestor and that's why they speak similar languages, he wouldn't be that far off from the truth. Only, it's not just one common ancestor, it's a bunch of them, and there's no guarantee each member of the three nations will descend from each of those ancestors.

What we have then is a simplified account of how Jews, Idumeans, Ishmaelites, etc, are related. However, we find that tribes we know they likely were closely related to, but to which there was some stronger kind of enmity were located further away in this genealogy - the kanaanites are presented as descendants of Ham's grandson, whereas in reality they were closely related to the Jews. Probably because the idea of fighting a close relative may have seemed somewhat unattractive?

sotto voce

If you want to think so, go ahead.

Zwaarddijk

What a helpful answer. It completely clarifies your stance.

Sheshbazzar

#3