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.

Civil Conversation

This is an article from the Commercial Appeal that showed up on my Facebook feed, and my answer's too long for the comment section, so I'm posting it here.

Why can’t we hold a civil conversation on race?

Because we ask, "Why can't we?" The question (intentionally ironic or not) is a roadblock. It sounds like we're already prepared to accept disappointment. 

If you'd like to talk about some of the things that are holding us back from the most necessary conversation we've never had (the one W E B Duboise tried to start over a hundred years ago), I might have a few useful insights.

Why we say can't

• Because a civilized conversation requires getting personal about our History and Heritage without being swift to defend the past with arguments that are older than the concept of racism itself.

• It would mean rewriting our learned memory, and developing a new narrative; one that admits History and owns the burdens of Heritage.

• We would have to stop using History to cast and deny blame, and start assuming responsibility for the Heritage that got us to here-we-are-now.

• We would have to get over our fear that our not-white neighbors want to put the shoe on the other foot, without expecting written assurances to the contrary, 'cause there's a lot of pissed-off brown people out there.

• It would require us to let go of the anger that blooms from the frustration of accepting the fact that we can't go on being Large and in Charge, and nor should we be. Nor should any other classified and cataloged group. This is America dammit, there's more than enough good to go around. Good grows here like fishes and loaves when we share it.

• We would have to accept the disparity between forgetting our anger and validating theirs.

• We would have to admit that we're part of the problem every time we insist we know the solution.

• We would have to stop expecting the government to fix everything, and try to get this whole We the People thing right.

I am sure there are other roadblocks that we've made for ourselves, but maybe there's a way to start removing some of these by asking:

How do we open a civil conversation on race?

No...really...How?

Peace Y'all

The Tyranny of Babel

"The Lord said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. and this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech.'"      (NASB)

So let me get this straight... Civilization is clicking along, everyone's cooperating, people are speaking the same language, building great monuments and temples, and along comes God. He whammies them, and strikes a dissonant chord in the harmony they had created.

Why would he do that?