What Happened to Peleg?

A large hole in my research

"Also to Shem, the father of all the children of Eber [Shem's Great-grandson]...children were born."  Genesis 10:21 (NASB) 

Or, put another way:

Also to Name (reputation, memorial), the father of all the children of The Region Beyond...children were born."

Aside from Eber's Grandfather Arphacshad, the Bible mentions four other sons (descendant tribes and kingdoms) of Shem, along with five grandsons, two great grandsons, and 14 great great grandsons.

As much as I'd like to display at least some of the 23 tribes of Shem on the Google Earth Chart, that's a research project all by itself since I never really delved into those branches of the Seed's family tree, and very few of the sources I know of agree with each other.

Maybe as we go along, I can start making educated guesses about some of them, so here's my safest bet:

From what I can gather, after the confusion of Babel the tribes of Shem lived between Cush and Canaan, and on the Sinai Pennisula.

***

Teacher Talk: Working with Tables

I already showed you the chart of the sons of Adam down to Noah. Here's another one that covers the generations from Noah to Jacob.

Don't feel like you have to understand every piece of information before you move on, but if you can compare the next two sentences to the chart, and answer two simple questions, you're in good shape to let the story explain why I'm including it:

Noah was born in the year 1056 AA (Age of Adam); Shem was born 500 years later, and lived to be 600.

Arphacshad was born in the year 1658 AA or 2 PD (Post Diluvium (after the flood)).

Name	Yr Born	Yr Died	Age
Noah	1056 AA	2006AA/350 PD	950
Shem	1556	2156       500	600
Arphacshad	1658 AA / 2 PD	2096       440	438
Shelah	1693          37	2126       470	433
Eber	1723          67	2187       531	464
Peleg	1757          101	1996       340	239
Reu	1787          131	2026       370	239
Serug	1819          163	2049       393	230
Nahor	1849          193	1997       341	148
Terah	1878          222	2083       427	205
Abram	1953          297	2128       472	175
Ishmael	2039          382	no record	???
Isaac	2053          397	2233       577	180
Jacob	2113          457	2260       604	147

AA = Age of Adam  PD = Post Diluvium (after the flood)

Now for the questions:

• What year AA did the flood hit? [ 1656 ]
• How old was Shem at the time?    [  98  ]

You can highlight the space between the brackets to check your answers. If you like, you can share how you arrived at your answers in the comments below.

Enough Teacher Talk, Lets tell a story:

Ur of the Chaldeans, the ancestral home of Noah, was situated on the southwest edge of Shinar (Sumer). There's no way to tell if Ur was part of the kingdom Nimrod started there, but it's hard to imagine that there was no interaction between the two.

The Sumerians were farmers, and looked down on shepherds, but they had to have meat, animal skins, and wine. Ur, the Chaldeans, had all those things.

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to expand my kingdom to the north, I couldn't think of better neighbors to have in the south than my own cousins, as long as they fueled my ambition.

The dangerous thing about ambition is that it's never satisfied. Look how far north the Sumerians extended themselves. The first rule of empire being grow or die, sooner or later it becomes necessary to turn to your neighbors for additional lebensraum, elbow room.

The Four Horsemen ride again...or still.

It took about 300 years from the time the ark landed for the conditions between Shinar and Ur to reach the point of mutual paranoia, and another forty years for paranoia to mature into aggression and rebellion.

"Two sons were born to Eber; the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided..."  Gen 10:25 (NASB)

Eber was the father of the Hebrews.*

Peleg (Division), a second generation Hebrew, joined or maybe even mounted the insurgency that swallowed Babel and scattered the peoples. It's just as possible that the infant race of Hebrews didn't want any part of it, but got caught up in it. Either way, the apparent fallout would be the same.

"Peleg lived thirty years, and became the father of Reu; and Peleg lived two hundred and nine years after he became the father of Reu, and he had other sons and daughters."  Gen 11:18-19 (NASB)

Peleg only lived for 239 years, making him the first son of Noah to die (Shem lived long enough to see the birth of Jacob). It was the year 340 PD.

Peleg wasn't the only casualty of the events surrounding Babel's fall. Peleg's great-grandson, Nahor died a year later, at the tender age of 148, and conditions must have been too hot for his son, Terah who had lost his own son, Haran.

"Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans." 
Gen 10:28 (NASB)

Terah gathered what was left of his family and beat feet to points north, to a place called, coincidentally or not, Haran, in order to prepare another of his sons to turn south and plant the Seed in the land of Canaan.

Next time: The Sons of Terah Through Nahor

Peace Y'all

*All Hebrews were Semitic, but not all Semites were Hebrew.

The Kingdoms and Nations of Japheth and Ham

This is where the story the Bible tells begins to emerge from the fog of mythology, and into the dim shadows of Legend, Geography and History. The fog isn't going away, but that's one of the cool things about this story of us, we Heirs of Abraham.

After the Flood

Eden had been washed away. The Sumerian population had apparently been nearly wiped out by a natural disaster that may have been made worse by all the irrigation ditches. The people who lived east of the Tigris, and north and west of the Euphrates, however, were poised to come into their own and displace, absorb, or perhaps cleanse the Sumerians (I don't care to guess which, but it's believed that the Sumerians' reputations were based on how bad-ass and rich they were).

Oh, sure, there were Sumerian survivors of the flood, in addition to Noah and his kin. They had a Noah story to, only the man's name was Utnapishtim and his ark landed in the Zagros Mountains (modern Iran), east of the Tigris. 

Whether one both or neither of the myths is the "real" one, or the first one, or even close to actual fact, is a discussion best left to the comments section and/or another post.

What's important to us is that this is the story the Bible tells, and it's an historic fact that Noah's story has been widely believed for millennia (If you can manage it without getting judgmental, spell propaganda).  

What the Bible doesn't make clear (myth and fog) is that anyone who lived near the northern edge of "the world," in the pasture lands west of the Euphrates, or in the Zagros Mountains to the east escaped the disaster.

HEY SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS!
I made this chart using Google Earth satellite technology, a digital camera, and Power Point.

We call the people who lived west of the Euphrates, Semites (get it? Shem-- Shemite -- Semite). 

So far, I've called the sons of God; Adawmish, Sumerian, and now Semitic. Before we get to Abram, one of the more talked about men among Shem's descendants, I'll start calling them Hebrews.

We'll get back to Shem and the Hebrews in future posts, because first you need to know what became of Japheth and Ham, and their descendants.

Japheth

Japheth basically took his tribes north and west to contribute Adam's DNA (and culture) to other early ancestors of the Greeks, Phoenicians and other ancient peoples who had yet to assume their identities. 

This is pretty much the last we'll see of Japheth, except for when Solomon buys all that cedar from the Phoenicians, and even then Shem's younger brother isn't mentioned. 

Ham

Ham's sons stayed a little closer to home. Canaan's and Mizraim's descendants weren't the only ones who, in the centuries that followed, would clash with the sons of Shem. In fact, our story implies that the descendants of Canaan's brother, Cush would establish an empire to the east and would be the first to run afoul of the seed God planted in Eve.

The Sons of Cush

Cush had a son named Nimrod, "a mighty hunter before the Lord."

Nimrod started (see that word? started) a kingdom that eventually stretched from Erech to Ninevah. 

Have you downloaded Google Earth yet? 

Look at Ur, where Shem lived. See how it's on the outskirts of the kingdom Nimrod started, on the west bank of the Euphrates where Sumerian farms gave way to Semitic pastures? Well -- You do now, because it's going to be a good thing to remember when we talk about the tower of Babel and how much Abram knew about it.

Canaan

The tribes of Canaan moved away from the banks of the Euphrates to the fat land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where they adopted different languages and established different kingdoms. The Bible mentions them often, and usually in a list that reads like a rogues' gallery.

"The Jebusite and the Amorite and the Girgashite and the Hivite and the Arkite and the Sinite..."

The list gets shorter after Moses leads a million plus people out of Egypt, but it's here that the account describes the territory the Canaanite tribes would inhabit hundreds of years later:

The territory of the Canaanite extended from Sidon as you go toward Gerar, as far as Gaza; as you go toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha.   (NASB) 

Google Earth lets you use grid coordinates to make sure your location markers are accurate.
Don't research without it.

MIZRAIM

Mizraim, another son of Ham, had seven sons, one of those sons, Casluhim was a forefather of the Philistines.

As you build your collection of locations and save them to "My Places" on Google Earth, making custom charts is easy enough for your students to learn how to make their own charts.

This one took a total of five minutes to make. What could you do if you put Google Earth in your classroom toolbox?

Segue

Remember: the nations that sprang from the sons of Noah did not form in the time it takes to read one verse then the next. It took hundreds of years and many generations to make names for themselves and to build their kingdoms. They also developed at different rates and in different cultural directions.

That being said, we're all set to continue tracing the path of the seed, the one God planted in Eve over 1000 years earlier, as we try to discover who was where when the Tower of Babel was the symbol of Human ambition and accomplishment.

Next Time: The Tyranny of Babel

Teachers, my caption questions weren't rhetorical. The paradigm is shifting, if our strategies don't shift with it History may become a thing of the past, and STEMSS (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics and Social Studies) will never be a thing.

What are your thoughts on the flood myths? How much can we really say about what happened 4000 years ago?

How do our separate but equal memories (myth, legend, and propaganda for example) often override more plausible constructs of our shared past (History)?


Peace Y'all

The Morning After

You know the story. Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, took off his clothes then passed smooth out in the middle of the tent. Ham apparently walked in on him and thought it was funny enough to call his brothers in to share the spectacle. The next morning, Noah curses Ham…and this is where the preacher or other story teller goes off on… “Bad Ham…” and “Bad Noah…” and “Preach on the Devil Alcohol…!”

Enough already! The Word weeps over the human experience it wants us to understand, but we’re too damn busy looking for people to stone for their sins to listen.

First of all, no one takes note that Noah’s sons were there that day. They were grown and married before they got on the ark in the first place. How much time could they waste before they started building their own families, and taking advantage of all that empty land? I mean sure, they probably got together often, several times a year I imagine, but each time they did it was bound to be a full blown occasion.

Here’s the part we need to get: The night in question was years after the flood.

So let’s rewind a little bit, and go back to the day Noah finally ripped the cover off the floating barn he’d been living in for the past year, and I’ll tell what I think led up to Noah’s embarrassment. Just remember, before we start judging Noah and branding him as a drunk, we ought'a consider the difference between Ham's response to God's grace.

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given. Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant."                                     Genesis 9:1-3 (NASB)

Noah and his kin went back to Ur, probably skirting the west bank of the Euphrates, and I’m betting they took extra care of the twelve bovines, twelve sheep and twelve goats they already had, and collected the choicest grapevine roots as they went. The grapevines were there for the taking all along that stretch of abandoned orchards, vineyards, and washed out villages between the mountains of Ararat to the north and Noah’s ancestral home, near or perhaps even on the future site of Ur, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers far to the south.

When he got there, and this is weird, he went straight back to farming…but wait a minute. Wasn’t Noah the one who was supposed to give the tribes of Adam rest from the curse of the land?

That’s why he had a cartload of healthy grapevine roots behind the pair of oxen God told him to save.

Grapes aren’t like grain crops. Grain crops take about nine months or less to produce. Vineyards take years before they bear usable fruit, but once established the yields and the profits can be enormous, especially if you’re apparently the first one in your area to produce wine.

The upshot is that Noah was pretty well settled in when he and the whole family, grandchildren included, got together to celebrate a (their first?) successful vintage. A regular family reunion -- ahem  -- a holy day solemnly dedicated to …Naaah… There was a party. Those things can go on for days, especially when you consider what they were celebrating.

So…yeah…Noah overdid it and ended up flat on his back and naked, but like I said, it was a family reunion. Everything would have been fine if Ham had just tucked his father in for the night and forgotten about the whole thing.

I mean, Damn man! Be cool with each other. Especially when it comes to your parents.

But Cain’s drunk ass thought it was funny, and he just had to make sure everyone (the entire world, it turns out) knew about it.

Ham’s brothers Shem and Japheth on the other hand, had the presence of mind to salvage their father’s dignity. They did their best to not even look as they tucked their father in for the night.

Of course, Noah found out and for the first time in the Bible the father bestows blessings and, when called for, curses on his children, and appoints his successor as patriarch and seed bearer, in this case Shem.

So he [Noah] said,

"Cursed be Canaan;

A servant of servants

He shall be to his brothers."

He also said, 

"Blessed be the Lord,

the God of Shem;

And let Canaan be his servant.

"May God enlarge Japheth,

And let him dwell in the tents of Shem;

And let Canaan be his servant."

Genesis 9:25-28
(NASB)

What Ham had done was so reprehensible that his father didn't even bother cursing him. He cursed Ham's son, Canaan and the tribes that would descend from him.
Funny thing about the blessings and curses in the Bible; they often foreshadow events hundreds of years later, because the Canaanites would dominate the area around the Jordan river centuries later when Moses lead the Israelites to, but not into, the Promised Land.

Next Time: The Kingdoms and Nations of Japheth and Ham

Peace Out Y'all