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.