NOTES for Gen 10:1-32

The tenth chapter of Genesis is devoted entirely to describing the settlement of Noah's descendants throughout the earth. In a certain sense it resembles the pre-flood genealogies, but with one important difference: here there is still a certain geographical anchoring. At least we can speak of the Near Eastern region as the territory occupied by Noah's descendants. Such localization should not surprise us: the flood, although the Bible calls it worldwide, is in fact described as a more or less local event connected with that same Near Eastern area. And the whole Prologue of Genesis has primarily the Near East in view; the territory, for example, "east of Eden," where Cain goes after murdering his brother, in effect takes him beyond the bounds of God's world. Eden, if we follow the sacred geography of the Prologue of Genesis, is in Mesopotamia. The eastern border of Mesopotamia is already the border of God's world.

There is nothing surprising here: the point is not the earth as a whole, but a concrete inhabited world, a territory that the bearers of one civilization or another perceive as their own, so that on it they feel, if not at home, since an inhabited world does not have to coincide with state borders, then at least in their own familiar world. For a Jew of the sixth century before Christ, when Genesis as we know it today was written, the inhabited world was the territory from the Ionian islands in the west to the eastern border of Mesopotamia in the east, and from Asia Minor in the north to Egypt in the south. Everything beyond that was another world, alien and foreign.

If a catastrophe occurs on the scale of the inhabited world, for its inhabitants it becomes worldwide, perhaps even universal. There were quite a few such catastrophes in antiquity that affected the whole Near Eastern civilizational region; hence the traditions about a flood, naturally a worldwide one. And the settlement of the world after the flood also takes place on the scale of the Near Eastern inhabited world, which is entirely logical.

There in the Near East, beginning with the age of the first great civilizations, representatives of three large ethnic, and therefore linguistic, families really did live: Hamitic, Semitic, and Aryan. The last were speakers of languages of the Indo-European family, and even in the first half of the last century scholarly literature called them Japhethites. The world is populated anew after the flood, becoming different and at the same time remaining itself, as always happens after cataclysms and catastrophes.

Two things are not easy to understand. First, Ham's guilt seems out of proportion to the punishment; we tend to minimize his guilt, especially in the face of such a terrible punishment. And second, it is unclear why Ham sinned, but his son Canaan and all the line that followed were cursed: not Ham and all his line, but precisely from Canaan onward.

In fact, we must consider Ham's sin on the same scale as the fall of Adam and Eve or the sin of Cain, as a very important event described in highly symbolic language, an event that affected the fate of many, many people in later generations. A person and another person's sin, Ham and Noah's sin: this is the original situation. How should one relate to another person's sin? Noah's nakedness becomes the key point. There is nothing scandalous or ill-mannered here. Here, as in the account of the fall of Adam and Eve, nakedness means a self-willed departure from under God's protection, defenselessness. The one who has sinned is defenseless, and the one who is nearby must return that protection to him, even if not in full, as it was in Eden, then at least in the form possible in the fallen world. The symbol of this protection, already familiar to us from the fall of Adam and Eve, is the covering of nakedness. This is precisely what Ham does not do.

Why, then, was Canaan cursed, and not Ham? According to the interpretation of St. Philaret (Drozdov), "Noah spared Ham, respecting the blessing of God in which he had participated after coming out of the ark". He adds that perhaps there is also a prophecy here about future sins. Other interpretations can surely be given as well.

It is important to understand that such is the law of sin: it has the power to penetrate through generations of people, it is inherited, and this is one of the chief and most terrible properties of evil. This is not at all about the vindictiveness of God or of His people, such as the patriarch Noah.

The historical basis of the parable of the Tower of Babel is obvious: Semitic tribes, among whom were the ancestors of the Hebrews, then still living a nomadic life, first saw stepped pyramidal temples--ziggurats--in Mesopotamia, where they first came around the middle of the third millennium BC. Meanwhile, the builders of the ziggurats themselves perceived them as a ladder linking heaven and earth. It is no surprise that in the historical memory of recent nomads, gradually settling on the land in Mesopotamia and joining the civilization of the Sumerians--the builders of sacred towers--traditions arose about builders of ladders leading to heaven.

But on the basis of these traditions, the sacred writer creates his own parable, in which he places his own emphases. First of all, he draws readers' attention to the fact that the builders of the tower want to become famous, "people of name," so that they will not be scattered over the earth. The same kind of "men with a name" as the pre-flood "giants." And in order to carry out the grandiose project, they create a strong state, so that all the builders became "one people" with "one language" (these Hebrew expressions are calques from Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon, in which they denoted unity of power over a certain territory and over certain peoples).

Indeed, how else could fallen humanity assert itself on earth except through a demonstration of its own strength and significance? And for this, great projects carried out by great powers fit perfectly. Only, as we see, God has no need of either these projects or these powers. He "comes down," draws near to the builders, and from His nearness the great power collapses and the great project stops. When God is close, when He is near, those who feel His nearness no longer have time for imperial greatness or "great construction projects."

And meanwhile the story did not end in antiquity: even the contemporaries of the author of the parable, written in Babylon during the exile, could see the same tower. Ziggurats were built not only by the Sumerians, but also by the Babylonians. The history of fallen humanity continued. The history of collapsing great powers and unfinished great construction projects falling into desolation.