abstract
| - The Generations of Noah or Table of Nations (Genesis 10 of the Hebrew Bible) is a traditional ethnology representing the expansion of humankind from the descendants of Noah and their dispersion into many lands after the Flood. The term "nations" to describe the descendants is a standard English translation of the Hebrew word "goy", following the c.400 CE Latin Vulgate's "nationes" / "nationibus", and does not have the same political connotations that the word entails today. The list of 70 names introduces for the first time a number of well known ethnonyms and toponyms important to biblical geography such as Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, from which is derived Semitic, Hamitic and Japhethic, certain of Noah's grandsons including Elam, Ashur, Aram, Cush, and Canaan, from which Elamites, Assyrians, Arameans, Cushites and Canaanites, as well as further descendants including Eber (from which Hebrew), the hunter-king Nimrod, the Philistines and the sons of Canaan including Heth, Jebus and Amorus, from which Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites. As Christianity took over the Roman world, it adopted the idea that all the world's peoples were descended from Noah. But the tradition of Hellenistic Jewish identifications of the ancestry of various peoples, which concentrates very much on the Mediterranean world and the Near East and is described below, became stretched. Northern peoples important to the Late Roman and medieval world, such as the Celts, Slavs, Germans and Norse were not covered, nor were others of the world's peoples. A variety of fanciful arrangements were devised by scholars, with for example the Scythians, who do feature in the tradition, being claimed as the ancestors of much of northern Europe. According to Joseph Blenkinsopp, the 70 names in the list express symbolically the unity of the human race, corresponding to the 70 descendants of Israel who go down into Egypt with Jacob at Genesis 46:27 and the 70 elders of Israel who visit God with Moses at the covenant ceremony in Exodus 24:1-9.
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