Genesis 10

This chapter provides plenty of meat for folks fascinated with the dispersal of humankind to the various parts of the world. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those folks.

I'm not going to copy Louis Sachar's brilliant Sideways Stories from Wayside School and write an essentially empty chapter. (Basically, he wrote that there was no 19th chapter because the school had no 19th story. And of course, in the sequel, he wrote three chapter 19s.) So I guess I'll wring what I can from this chapter without regurgitating the extensive archaeological footnotes from the NIV Study Bible.

Many of the people mentioned (Egypt, Cush, Canaan) apparently established or played a part in the regions or countries for which their names are generally more well known. Gomer, mentioned in verse 2, is interesting because there's another Gomer in the book of Hosea--but in the latter book, the name refers to a woman, not a man. I suppose it's analogous to Chris or Taylor as a unisex name. Verse 5 also mentions people starting to sail the seas in search of new territories to lord over.

The author devotes a whopping five verses (8-12) to a fellow named Nimrod, a great non-white hunter who ended up founding Ninevah. Nowadays, though, when we call someone a "nimrod," we're basically questioning their mental capacity. We don't get quite enough of Nimrod to determine whether he was an idiot; from the way the Bible mentions him, he seems like a pretty ambitious, competent guy. Imagine learning that, in several thousand years, your name will eventually degrade into an insult.

I'm struggling to think of some half-decent way to end this, and I'm too tired to conflate this post with chapter 11's. So I guess I'll just say that Noah obviously had to be the ancestor of the remaining peoples on Earth, but it's still cool to be reminded that so many variegated cultures--all of them, in fact--stemmed from a man who had faith in God.