This is the history of the generations of Shem: Shem was one hundred years old when he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood. Shem lived five hundred years after he became the father of Arpachshad, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Arpachshad lived thirty-five years and became the father of Shelah. Arpachshad lived four hundred three years after he became the father of Shelah, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Shelah lived thirty years, and became the father of Eber. Shelah lived four hundred three years after he became the father of Eber, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Eber lived thirty-four years, and became the father of Peleg. Eber lived four hundred thirty years after he became the father of Peleg, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Peleg lived thirty years, and became the father of Reu. Peleg lived two hundred nine years after he became the father of Reu, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Reu lived thirty-two years, and became the father of Serug. Reu lived two hundred seven years after he became the father of Serug, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Serug lived thirty years, and became the father of Nahor. Serug lived two hundred years after he became the father of Nahor, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Nahor lived twenty-nine years, and became the father of Terah. Nahor lived one hundred nineteen years after he became the father of Terah, and became the father of more sons and daughters.
Terah lived seventy years, and became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
Now this is the history of the generations of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran became the father of Lot. Haran died in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldees, while his father Terah was still alive. Abram and Nahor married wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah, the daughter of Haran, who was also the father of Iscah.
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv10, 27, 28 10. These are the generations of Shem. Concerning the…
10. These are the generations of Shem. Concerning the progeny of Shem, Moses had said something in the former chapter Genesis 10:1: but now he combines with the names of the men, the term of their several lives, that we might not be ignorant of the age of the world. For unless this brief description had been preserved, men at this day would not have known how much time intervened between the deluge and the day in which God made his covenant with Abraham. Moreover, it is to be observed, that God reckons the years of the world from the progeny of Shem, as a mark of honor: just as historians date their annals by the names of kings or consuls. Nevertheless, he has granted this not so much on account of the dignity and merits of the family of Shem, as on account of his own gratuitous adoption; for (as we shall immediately see) a great part of the posterity of Shem apostatized from the true worship of God. For which reason, they deserved not only that God should expunge them from his calendar, but should entirely take them out of the world. But he too highly esteems that election of his, by which he separated this family from all people, to suffer it to perish on account of the sins of men. And therefore from the many sons of Shem he chooses Arphaxad alone; and from the sons of Arphaxad, Selah alone; and from him also, Eber alone; till he comes to Abram; the calling of whom ought to be accounted the renovation of the Church. As it concerns the rest, it is probable that before the century was completed, they fell into impious superstitions. For when God brings it as a charge against the Jews, that their fathers Terah and Nahor served strange gods, (Joshua 24:2,) we must still remember, that the house of Shem, in which they were born, was the peculiar sanctuary of God, where pure religion ought most to have flourished; what then do we suppose, must have happened to others who might seem, from the very first, to have been emancipated from this service? Hence truly appears, not only the prodigious wickedness and depravity, but also the inflexible hardness of the human mind. Noah and his sons, who had been eye-witnesses of the deluge, were yet living: the narration of that history ought to have inspired men with not less terror than the visible appearance of God himself: from infancy they had been imbued with those elements of religious instruction, which relate to the manner in which God was to be worshipped, the reverence with which his word was to be obeyed, and the severe vengeance which remains for those who should violate the order prescribed by him: yet they could not be restrained from being so corrupted by their vanity, that they entirely apostatized. In the meantime, there is no doubt that holy Noah, according to his extraordinary zeal and heroic fortitude, would contend in every way for the maintenance of God’s glory: and that he sharply and severely inveighed, yea, fulminated against the perfidious apostasy of his descendants; and whereas all ought to have trembled at his very look, they are yet moved by no chidings, however loud, from proceeding in the course into which their own fury has hurried them. From this mirror, rather than from the senseless flatteries of sophists, let us learn how fruitful is the corruption of our nature. But if Noah and Shem, and other such eminent teachers could not, by contending most courageously, prevent the prevalence of impiety in the world; let us not wonder, if at this day also, the unbridled lust of the world rushes to impious and perverse modes of worship, against all the obstacles interposed by sound doctrine, admonition, and threats. Here, however, we must observe, in these holy men, how firm was the strength of their faith, how indefatigable their patience, how persevering their cultivation of piety; since they never gave way, on account of the many occasions of offense with which they had to contend. Luther very properly compares the incredible torments, by which they were necessarily afflicted, to many martyrdoms. For such an alienation of their descendants from God did not less affect their minds than if they had seen their own bowels not only lacerated and torn, but cast into the mire of Satan, and into hell itself. But while the world was thus filled with ungodly men, God wonderfully retained a few under obedience to his word, that he might preserve the Church from destruction. And although we have said that the father and grandfather of Abraham were apostates, and that, probably, the defection did not first begin with them; yet, because the Church by the election of God, was included in that race, and because God had some who worshipped him in purity, and who survived even to the time of Abraham. Moses deduces a continuous line of descent, and thus enroll them in the catalogue of saints. Whence we infer, (as I have a little before observed,) in what high estimation God holds the Church, which, though so small in numbers is yet preferred to the whole world.
Shem was an hundred years old. Since Moses has placed Arphaxad the third in order among the sons of Shem, it is asked how this agrees with his having been born in the second year after the deluge? The answer is easy. It cannot be exactly ascertained, from the catalogues which Moses recites, at what time each was born; because sometimes the priority of place is assigned to one, who yet was posterior in the order of birth. Others answer, that there is nothing absurd in supposing Moses to declare that, after the completion of two years, a third son was born. But the solution I have given is more genuine.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv10, 27, 28, 29 He returneth to the genealogy of Shem, to come…
He returneth to the genealogy of Shem, to come to the history of Abram, wherein the Church of God is described, which is Moses’ principle purpose.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv10, 11, 12, 16, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29 Gen 11:10 These [are] the generations of Shem: Shem…
Gen 11:10 These [are] the generations of Shem: Shem [was] an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:
Ver. 10. These are the generations of Shem.] To whose genealogy Moses here returneth, that he may come to the history of Abraham, the father of the faithful.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv10, 11, 17, 24, 26, 28, 29 Not all the generations of Shem, as appears both…
Not all the generations of Shem, as appears both from Gen 11:11, and from the former chapter; but of those who were the seminary of the church, and the progenitors of Christ.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 We have here a genealogy, not an endless genealogy,…
We have here a genealogy, not an endless genealogy, for here it ends in Abram, the friend of God, and leads further to Christ, the promised seed, who was the son of Abram, and from Abram the genealogy of Christ is reckoned (Mat 1:1, etc.); so that put ch. 5, ch. 11, and Mt. 1, together, and you have such an entire genealogy of Jesus Christ as cannot be produced, for aught I know, concerning any person in the world, out of his line, and at such a distance from the fountain-head. And, laying these three genealogies together, we shall find that twice ten, and thrice fourteen, generations or descents, passed between the first and second Adam, making it clear concerning Christ that he was not only the Son of Abraham, but the Son of man, and the seed of woman. Observe here, 1. Nothing is left upon record concerning those of this line but their names and ages, the Holy Ghost seeming to hasten through them to the story of Abram. How little do we know of those that have gone before us in this world, even those that lived in the same places where we live, as we likewise know little of those that are our contemporaries in distant places! we have enough to do to mind the work of our own day, and let God alone to require that which is past, Ecc 3:15. 2. There was an observable gradual decrease in the years of their lives. Shem reached to 600 years, which yet fell short of the age of the patriarchs before the flood; the next three came short of 500; the next three did not reach to 300; after them we read not of any that attained to 200, except Terah; and, not many ages after this, Moses reckoned seventy, or eighty, to be the utmost men ordinarily arrive at. When the earth began to be replenished, men's lives began to shorten; so that the decrease is to be imputed to the wise disposal of Providence, rather than to any decay of nature. For the elect's sake, men's days are shortened; and, being evil, it is well they are few, and attain not to the years of the lives of our fathers, Gen 47:9. 3. Eber, from whom the Hebrews were denominated, was the longest-lived of any that was born after the flood, which perhaps was the reward of his singular piety and strict adherence to the ways of God.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv10–26 These are the generations of Shem,.... Or a genealogy…
These are the generations of Shem,.... Or a genealogy of the posterity of Shem; not of all of them, only of those of the line which led to Abraham, by which might appear the true line in which the Messiah from Adam through Abraham sprung:
Shem was one hundred years old, and begat Arphexad two years after the flood; by which it is pretty plain that he was younger than Japheth; See Gill on Gen 10:21 of Arphaxad his son; see Gill on Gen 10:22.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 Observe here,
Observe here,
1. That nothing is left upon record concerning those of this line, but their names and ages; the Holy Ghost seeming to hasten thro' them to the story of Abraham. How little do we know of those that are gone before us in this world, even those that lived in the same places where we live! Or indeed of those who are our contemporaries, but in distant places.
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2. That there was an observable gradual decrease in the years of their lives. Shem reached to 600 years, which yet fell short of the age of the patriarchs before the flood; the three next came short of 500, the three next did not reach to 300, and after them we read not of any that attained to 200 but Terah; and not many ages after this, Moses reckoned 70 or 80 to be the utmost men ordinarily arrive at. When the earth began to be replenished, mens lives began to shorten so that the decrease is to be imputed to the wise disposal of providence, rather than to any decay of nature.
3. That Eber, from whom the Hebrews were denominated, was the longest lived of any that were born after the flood; which perhaps was the reward of his strict adherence to the ways of God.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv10, 12, 26, 29 Verse 10. These are the generations of Shem] This…
Verse 10. These are the generations of Shem] This may he called the holy family, as from it sprang Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve patriarchs, David, Solomon, and all the great progenitors of the Messiah.
We have already seen that the Scripture chronology, as it exists in the Hebrew text, the Samaritan, the Septuagint, Josephus, and some of the fathers, is greatly embarrassed; and it is yet much more so in the various systems of learned and unlearned chronologists. For a full and rational view of this subject, into which the nature of these notes forbids me farther to enter, I must refer my reader to Dr. Hales's laborious work, "A New Analysis of Sacred Chronology," vol. ii., part 1, c., in which he enters into the subject with a cautious but firm step and, if he has not been able to remove all its difficulties, has thrown very considerable light upon most parts of it.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 Gen 11:10. Observe here, 1st, That nothing is left…
Gen 11:10. Observe here, 1st, That nothing is left upon record concerning those of this line, but their names and ages; the Holy Ghost seeming to hasten through them to the story of Abraham. How little do we know of those who are gone before us in this world, even those that lived in the same places where we live! Or, indeed, of those who are our contemporaries, but in distant places. 2d, That there was an observable gradual decrease in the years of their lives. Shem reached to six hundred years, which yet fell short of the age of the patriarchs before the flood; the three next came short of five hundred, the three next did not reach to three hundred, and after them we read not of any that attained to two hundred but Terah; and not many ages after this Moses reckoned seventy or eighty to be the utmost men ordinarily arrive at. When the earth began to be replenished, men’s lives began to be shortened; so that the decrease is to be imputed to the wise disposal of Providence, rather than to any decay of nature. 3d, That Eber, from whom the Hebrews were denominated, was the longest lived of any that were born after the flood; which perhaps was the reward of his strict adherence to the ways of God.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 - Section IX - The Line to Abram
- Section IX - The Line to Abram
- XXXV. The Line of Abram
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18. רעוּ re‛û, Re‘u, “friend;” verb: “feed, delight in, enjoy.”
20. שׂרוּג śerûg, Serug, “vine-shoot.”
22. נחור nāchôr, Nachor, “snorting.”
24. תרה terach, Terach, “delay?” Aramaic.
26. אברם 'abrām, Abram, “high father.” הרן hārān Haran, “mountaineer.”
The usual phrase, “These are the generations,” marks the beginning of the fifth document. Accordingly, we now enter upon a new phase of human development. The nations have gradually departed from the living God. They have not, however, stopped at this negative stage of ungodliness. They have fallen into polytheism and idolatry. And the knowledge of the one true God, the Maker, Possessor, and Upholder of heaven and earth, is on the verge of being entirely lost. Nevertheless the promises, first to the race of Adam, that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head, and next to the family of Noah, that the Lord should be the God of Shem, were still in force. It is obvious, from the latter promise, that the seed of the woman is to be expected in the line of Shem.
The present passage contains the pedigree of Abram from Shem. From this it appears that the sacred writer here reverts to the second year after the flood - a point of time long before the close of the preceding narrative. “Shem was the son of a hundred years,” or in his hundredth year, two years after the flood, and therefore in the six hundred and third year of Noah, and consequently three years after Japheth. Abram was the twentieth, inclusive, from Adam, the tenth from Shem, and the seventh from Heber. A second Kenan is inserted after Arpakshad in the Septuagint, and in the Gospel according to Luke. But this name does not occur even in the Septuagint in 1Ch 1:24, where the genealogy of Abram is given. It is not found in the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Targums, or the ancient versions. It does not appear in Josephus or Philo. Neither is it found in the Codex Bezae in the Gospel of Luke. It must therefore be regarded as an interpolation.
The following table is a continuation of that given at the fifth chapter, and will serve for the comparison of the different forms in which the numbers are presented:
Line of Abram
Hebrew
Sam. Pent.
Septuagint
Josephus
Date
Son's
Birth
Own
Death
Son's
Birth
Own
Death
Son's
Birth
Own
Death
Son's
Birth
Own
Death
Of
Birth
Of
Death
11. Shem
(97) 2
600
(97) 2
600
(97) 2
600
(97) 12
1559
2150
12. Arpakshad (Καινᾶν)
35
438
135
438
135
535
135
1658
2096
13. Shelah
30
433
130
433
130
460
130
1693
2126
14. Heber
34
464
134
404
134
404
134
1723
2187
15. Peleg
30
239
130
239
130
339
130
1757
1996
16. Reu
32
239
132
239
132
339
130
1787
2096
17. Serug
30
230
130
230
130
330
132
1819
2049
18. Nahor
29
148
79
148
175
304
120
1849
1997
19. Terah
(Haran)
70
60
205
70
60
145
70
60
205
70
292
205
1878
2083
20. Abram cd.
Enters Ken.
70
75
70
75
70
75
130
75
2008
2078
Sum
422
1072
1302
422
D. of Flood
1656
1307
2262
2256
D. of Call
2078
2379
3564
2678
From this table it appears that in the total years of life the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Septuagint agree on Shem; the Hebrew and Septuagint on Terah; the Samaritan and Septuagint on Heber; and the Hebrew and Samaritan on all the rest. In regard, however, to the years of paternity, the Hebrew stands alone, against the Samaritan and Septuagint agreeing, except in Terah, where they all agree. The difference is not in units or tens, but in the addition to the Hebrew numbers of a hundred years, except in the case of Nahor, where the addition is fifty years, or a hundred and fifty according to the Codex Vaticanus (B) of the Septuagint. Here, again, it is remarkable that Josephus while agreeing with the Samaritan and Septuagint in most of the separate numbers before paternity, agrees with the Hebrew in the sum of years from the flood to the 70th year of Terah (292 years, Josephus I. 6, 5). In Reu and Serug the numbers are transposed, seemingly by a mistake arising from the inverted order in which he gives the numbers.
In Nahor he, or his transcriber, seems to have added one hundred years according to the uniform law, and neglected the nine. To make up for this omission, the inexact round number 10 has been apparently added to the number of years after the flood, when Arpakshad was born. We have already noticed that some MSS. of Josephus gave 1656 as the sum-total of years from the creation to the flood, in which case the sums of Josephus and the Hebrew exactly agree. We find him also stating (viii. 3, 1) that the world was created 3102 years before Solomon began to build the temple, and that the deluge took place 1440 before the same point of time. Hence, we obtain 1662 years between the creation and the deluge; and this, if we only deduct from it the six years added to Lamek, agrees with the Hebrew. In the same passage he states that the entrance of Abram into Kenaan was 1020 years before the building of the temple.
Hence, we infer that 420 years elapsed from the flood to the call of Abram, which, if we count from the birth of Arpakshad, allow sixty years to elapse between the births of Haran and Abram, and date the call of Abram at 70, will exactly tally with the Hebrew. These sums cannot in any probable way be reconciled with the details in his own text, or in the Septuagint, or Samaritan. Again, Josephus calculates (x. 8, 5) that the temple was burnt 3513 years from the creation, and 1957 from the flood. Hence, the interval from the creation to the deluge would be 1556 years, differing from the Hebrew by 100 years, and reconcilable with it, if we suppose the 500th year of Noah to be the terminating date. He also concludes that the burning of the temple took place 1062 years after the exodus, thus making the interval from the flood to the exodus 895 years, while the Hebrew makes it 852. If we reckon the 100 years from the 500th year of Noah to the flood, the 292 which Josephus gives from the flood to the birth of Abraham, the 75 years to the call of Abraham, and the 430 from that to the exodus, we have 897 years, which will be reduced to Josephus’s number by omitting the 2 years from the flood to the birth of Arpakshad; and to the Hebrew number by omitting the 100 years before the flood, adding the 60 between Haran and Abram, which Josephus here neglects, and dating the call of Abram at 70 years. But by no process that we are aware of can these calculated numbers of Josephus be reconciled with the details of his own text, or the Samaritan, or Septuagint. It seems perfectly clear that the Hebrew numbers lie at the basis of these calculations of our author.
The age of paternity in the Samaritan from Peleg down is beyond the middle age of life, which is contrary to all experience. The editor of the Septuagint seems to have observed this anomaly, and added 100 years to three of these lives, and 156 to that of Nahor, against the joint testimony of the Hebrew and Samaritan. If the year of paternity in the Vatican be the correct reading, a much greater number should have been here added. The Samaritan deducts 60 years from the age of Terah, against the joint testimony of the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Josephus, seemingly because the editor conceived that Abram was born in his seventieth year.
From the Targum of Onkelos and the Peshito it is evident that the Hebrew text was the same as now up to the Christian era. Before that time there was no conceivable reason for shortening the chronology, while national vanity and emulation might easily prompt men to lengthen it. It is acknowledged that the text of the Septuagint is inferior to that of the Hebrew.
The age of puberty in the Hebrew affords more scope for the increase of population than that in the other texts. For if a man begin to have a family at thirty, it is likely to be larger than if he began a hundred years later and only lived the same number of years altogether. Now the Hebrew and Samaritan agree generally, against the Septuagint, in the total years of life; and in two instances, Heber and Terah, the Samaritan has even a less number than the Hebrew. It is to be remembered, also, that the number of generations is the same in every case. Hence, in all human probability the Hebrew age of paternity will give the greater number of inhabitants to the world in the age of Abram. If we take the moderate average of five pairs for each family, we shall have for the estimated population 4 X 5(to the 9th power) pairs, or 15,625,000 souls. This number is amply sufficient for all the kingdoms that were in existence in the time of Abram. If we defer the time of becoming a father for a whole century, we shall certainly diminish, rather than increase, the chance of his having so large a family, and thereby the probability of such a population on the earth in the tenth generation from Noah.
In these circumstances we are disposed to abide by the Hebrew text, that has descended to us in an original form, at least until we see some more cogent reasons for abandoning any of its numbers than chronologers have yet been able to produce. And we content ourselves, meanwhile, with the fact that the same system of numbers manifestly lay at the basis of all our present texts, though it may be difficult in some cases to determine to the satisfaction of all what was the original figure. The determination of the chronology of ancient history is neither a question of vital importance, nor, to us now, a part of the primary or direct design of the Hebrew records.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv12, 20, 27, 29 Sale, or Cainan. See Chap. x. 24; Chronicles i.…
Sale, or Cainan. See Chap. x. 24; Chronicles i. 18, in the Septuagint. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v10 The race of Shem. The Commenced and Interrupted Migration…
FIFTH SECTION
The race of Shem. The Commenced and Interrupted Migration of Terah to Canaan. The Genesis of the Contrast between Heathendom and the germinal Patriarchalism
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Gen_11:10-32
1. Genealogy of Shem—to Terah.
10These are the generations of Shem: Shem was a hundred years old and begat 11Arphaxad10 [Knobel: probably, highland of Chaldæa] two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. 12And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah [sending]: 13And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. 14And Salah lived thirty years and begat Eber11 [one from the other side, pilgrim, emigrant]. 15And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. 16And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg [division]: 17And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. 18And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu [friendship, friend]: 19And Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters. 20And Reu lived two and thirty years, and begat Serug12 [vine-branch]: 21And Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters. 22And Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor [Gesenius: panting]: 23And Serug lived after he begat Nahor two hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. 24And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begat Terah [turning, tarrying]: 25And Nahor lived after he begat Terah a hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters. 26And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram [High father], Nahor [see Gen_11:2], and Haran [Gcsenius: Montanus].
2. Terah, his Race and Emigration (Gen_11:27-32).
27Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah bagat Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot [veil, concealed]. 28And Haran died before [the face of] his father Terah, in the lend of his nativity, in Ur [light; flame] of the Chaldees (כשדים). 29And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai [princess]; and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah [Queen], the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah13 [spier, seeress]. 30But Sarai was barren; she had no child. 31And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go unto the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran and dwelt there. 32And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GENEALOGICAL TABLE OF THE SHEMITES
This genealogy of the Shemites is really an appendage to that of the Sethites, Genesis 5, and in this way forms a genealogical series extending from Adam to Abraham. It is continued on the line of Nahor (Gen_22:20-24), on that of Keturah (Gen_25:1-4), of Ishmael (Gen_25:12, etc.), of Esau (Gen_36:1, etc.), on the line of Jacob (Gen_46:8-27), etc. (See the article: “Genealogical Register,” in Herzog’s Real Encyclopœdie.) According to Knobel this table has the character of an element of fundamental Scripture (p. 129); we are satisfied to designate it as elohistic universalistic, since it embraces not only Abraham’s race, but also the nearest branches of it that at a later period became heathen. The table of the Shemites embraces ten generations, as does the table of the Sethites. The first (conformably to the number ten) denotes a perfect development, which runs out in Abraham, the “father of the faithful,” representing, as he does, a numberless race of the believing out of all humanity. Abraham must be reckoned here with the tenth, as Noah in Genesis 5. It is clear, too, that this table is designed to indicate the growth, or establishment of the patriarchal faith, together with its previous history. Most distinctly is this expressed in the migrations of Terah,—and in the individual names of the patriarchs. In the son of Arphaxad, Salah, there is announced a sending, or mission, in Eber the emigration, in Peleg the division of the theocratic line from the untheocratic, in Reu the divine friendship, in Serug the entangling or the restraint of the development, in Nahor a conflict or a striving, in Terah a setting out from the heathen world which in his tarrying comes to a stop. And so is the way prepared for Abraham’s departure. We cannot maintain, with Knobel, that these Shemitic patriarchs must have been all of them first-born. They are, throughout, the first-born only in the sense of the promise. Bunsen interprets the name Eber as one who comes over the Tigris. But in a wider sense Eber may also mean pilgrim. The names Reu and Serug he interprets of Odessa and Osroëne. As coming, however, in the midst of personal names, these also must have been expressed as personal names, from which, indeed, the names of countries may have been derived. On the interpolation of Cainan in the Septuagint, and which is followed by Luke (Gen_3:36), compare Knobel, as also on the varying dates of the ages, as given in the Samaritan text and in the Septuagint. The numbers we have here are 600, 438, 433, 464, 239, 239, 230, 148, 205, and 175 years. Here, too, as in the case of the Sethites, we can get no symbolical significance from the respective numbers, although Knobel is unwilling to recognize their historical character. In connection, however, with the general gradual diminution of the power of life, there is clearly reflected the individual difference; Eber lives to a greater age than both his forefathers, Arphaxad and Salah. Nahor, the panting (the impetuous), dies earliest. According to Knobel, the genealogical table advances from the mythical to the legendary period; at least we have no sufficient grounds, he thinks, to deny to Abraham and his brothers an historical existence. The same must hold true, also, of his fathers, whose names, with their theocratic characteristics, must have belonged, without doubt, to the most lasting theocratic reminiscences. The table before us is distinguished from the Sethitic by being less full, in that it divides the life-time of each ancestor into two parts, by the date of the theocratic first-born, whilst it leaves the summing up of both numbers to the reader. “In Gen_11:26 this genealogy, just like the one in Gen_5:32, concludes with the naming of three sons of Terah, since all these have a significance for the history to come: namely, Abram as the ancestor of the elect race, Nahor as the grandfather of Rebecca (comp. Gen_11:29 with Gen_22:20-23), and Haran as the father of Lot (Gen_11:27).” Keil. The table in Delitzsch gives us a good view of the series of Shemitic families (p. 324). According to Bertheau the Septuagint is right in its interpolation of Cainan. Delitzsch disputes this; comp. p. 322. “The Alexandrian translators inserted this name because the Oriental traditions have so much to say of him as the founder of astronomical science; and, therefore, they were unwilling to leave out so famous a name. There may have been a brother of Salah, through whom the main line was not propagated.” Lisco. Delitzsch gives a reason for its not being called the tholedoth, or generations of Abraham, from the fact that the author makes the history of Abraham himself a large and principal part. That, however, would not have prevented the setting forth of Abraham’s genealogical history. But in such a representation there might have been, perhaps, an obscuring of the idea that the seed of Abraham in the natural sense goes through the whole Old Testament, whilst, in a spiritual sense, it pervades the New (see Romans 4 cf. Genesis 15).
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. Gen_11:10-26.—Shem was a hundred years old.—See the computations of Knobel and Keil.—Two years after the flood.—This must be understood of the beginning of the flood.—And begat sons and daughters.—See the ethnological table; also, Gen_11:17. “For the sake of tracing the line of the Joktanides the author had already given, in Gen_10:21-25, the patriarchal series from Shem to Peleg; he repeats it here, where he would lay down fully the line from Shem to Abraham, with the addition of the ages.”—Arphaxad.—Arrapachitis, “in northern Assyria, the original seat of the collective Chaldæan family.” Knobel. “It was the home of the Χαλδαῖοι and Καρδοῦχοι mentioned by Xenophon and Strabo, as well as of the modern Kurds.” The same writer refers the names that follow to cities or territories, to which we attach no special importance, since in any case the districts here would be themselves derived from the names of persons.
2. Gen_11:27-32. The family line of Terah. According to Keil, this superscription must embrace the history of Abraham, so that the tholedoth of Ishmael, Gen_25:12, and of Isaac, Gen_25:19, correspond with it. But then, in the spiritual relation, Abraham would be subordinate to Terah, which cannot be supposed.—And Haran begat.—“According to the constant plan of Genesis, it is here related of Haran, the youngest son of Terah, that he begat Lot, because Lot went with Abraham to Canaan (ch, Gen_12:4), and Haran died before his father Terah, whereby the band which would have retained Lot in his father-land was loosed.” Keil.—Before his father Terah.—Properly, in his presence, so that he must have seen it; it does not, therefore, mean simply in his life-time. The first case of a natural death of a son before the death of his father, is a new sign of increasing mortality.—Ur of the Chaldees.—This must either be sought in the name Ur, which Ammianus calls Persicum Castellum, between Patra and Nisibis, not far from Arrapachitis, or in Orhoi (Armenian, Urrhai), the old name of Edessa, now called Urfa (see Kiepert and Weissenborn: ‘Nineveh and its Territory,’ p. 7).” Keil. Delitzsch, correctly perhaps, decides for the castle Ur mentioned by Ammianus, although, doubtless, the Ur in our text has a more general, territorial, and, at the same time, symbolical meaning. “The old Jewish and ecclesiastical interpretation reads ‘out of אור’ (fire), meaning that Abraham, as an acknowledger of the one God, and a denier of the gods of Nimrod, was cast into the fire, but was miraculously preserved by God.” Delitzsch. The same writer finds therein the idea that Abraham was plucked as a brand from the fire of heathendom, or from its heathenish fury. We would rather suppose, on the contrary, that by Ur is meant a region in Chaldæa, where the ancient monotheistic symbolical view of the heavenly lights and flames had passed over into a mythical heathenish worship of the stars, as a worship of Light and Fire; wherefore it is that the starry heaven was shown to Abraham as a symbol of his believing progeny (Genesis 15), whilst, for the heathen Chaldæans, it was a region of divine (or deified) forces. Knobel explains the word as meaning Mount of the Chaldœans. Rawlinson holds to the reading אוּר as equivalent to עִיר (city). The interpreting it of light and fire is both etymologically and actually the more correct. “The family of Terah had its home to the north of Nimrod’s kingdom (in northeastern Mesopotamia), and worshipped strange gods; as is clear from Jos_24:2.” Delitzsch.—Iskah.—By Josephus, the Talmud, the Targum of Jonathan, and others, this name is held to be one with Sarah. On the other hand, Knobel properly remarks that according to Gen_20:12, Sarah was the daughter of Terah, and, according to Gen_17:17, only ten years younger than Abraham; she could not, therefore, have been a daughter of Abraham’s younger brother. It is probably the case that the Jews, in deference to their later law, sought by means of this hypothesis to weaken as much as possible Abraham’s kinsmanship to Sarah. Delitzsch assumes the possibility that Haran was a much older half-brother of Abraham, and that Abraham, as also Nahor, had married one of his daughters. According to a conjecture of Ewald, Iscah is mentioned because she became Lot’s wife. But it may be that Iscah was thought worthy to be incorporated in the theocratic tradition because she was a woman of eminence, a seeress like Miriam, according to the signification of her name. Knobel alludes to the fact that Abraham bad his sister to wife, without calling to mind that she was a half-sister (Gen_20:12), or might even have been his adopted sister. So also he says that Nahor married his niece, and that in like manner Isaac and Jacob did not marry strangers, but their own kindred. He accounts for this on the ground of a peculiar family affection in the house of Terah (Gen_24:3-4; Gen_26:35; Gen_27:46; Gen_28:1); just as at the present day many Arabian families ever marry in their own, and do not permit one to take a wife from any other (Seetzen: “Travels,” iii. p. 22). The ground, however, of such kindred marriage in the house of Terah and Abraham, is a theocratic one, and thus far are the children of Abraham placed in a condition similar to that of the children of Adam. As for the latter, there were, in general, no “daughters of men,” out of their own immediate kindred, so for the sons of the theocracy there were no spiritual daughters of like birth with themselves, that is, of monotheistic or theocratic faith, out of the circle of nearest natural affinity. In this respect, however, they did not venture to tread in the foot-steps of the Sethites (Genesis 6); for it was theirs to propagate a believing race through consecrated marriage.—But Sarah Was barren.—A prelude to the history that follows.—And Terah took Abram his son.—Without doubt has this removal a religious theocratic importance. At all events, this divinely accomplished withdrawal from Ur of the Chaldees must mean more than a mere providential guidance, as Keil supposes.—And they went forth with them.—The word אִתָּם (rendered, with them) makes a difficulty. It may be easiest understood as meaning with one another. On the other hand, Delitzsch reminds us that the suffix may have a reflex sense, instead of a reciprocal (Gen_22:3). This is the very question, as otherwise the sentence would be indefinite; the expression, therefore, must mean not only with one another, but by themselves; that is, they withdrew as one united, exclusive community. Besides this, there are two modes of taking it. Keil understands only Lot and Sarah as the subject of the verb, and, therefore, refers אִתָּם to Terah and Abraham. There are three things in the way of this: 1. The withdrawing (or going forth) would be separated from the previous introductory expression: Terah took Abraham, etc., which will not do; 2. it would be a withdrawing from that which leads, and the accompanying would become the principal persons; 3. Abraham would have to be regarded as a co-leader, which is contrary to what is said: Terah took Abraham. Moreover, Abraham, regarded as an independent leader, would have been bound in duty to go further on when Terah broke off from his pilgrimage in Mesopotamia. Delitzsch, on the other hand, together with Jarchi, Rosenmuller, and others, refers the words they went forth to the members of the family who are not named, namely, they went forth with those named; but this is clearly against the context. By the expression with them, it would be more correct to understand, with those, namely, with the first-named (Terah, etc.), went forth those just previously mentioned, or named immediately after them. Later, is Haran denoted as the city of Nahor (Gen_24:10 as compared with Gen_27:43; Gen_29:4; Gen_31:53). For other interpretations see Knobel.—And they came unto Haran.—Terah intended to go from Ur to Canaan, but he stops in Haran, wherefore he also retains his people there. According to Knobel, the mention of Canaan is an anticipation of the history that follows.—Haran.—Carra, Charran, lay in northwestern Mesopotamia (Padan Aram, xxv. 20), ten leagues southeast from Edessa, in a fertile region, though not abounding in water. The city now lies in ruins. It was the capital of the Gabians, who had here a temple of the Moon goddess, which they referred back to the time of Abraham. In its neighborhood Crassus was slain by the Parthians. More fully on the subject, see in Schröder, p. 520; also in Knobel and Delitzsch.—And Terah died in Haran.—Terah was two hundred and five years old. If Abraham, therefore, was seventy-five years old when he migrated from Mesopotamia, and Terah was seventy years old at his birth, then must Abraham have set forth sixty years before the death of Terah. And this is very important. The emigration had a religious motive which would not allow him to wait till the death of his father. As Delitzsch remarks, the manner of representation in Genesis disposes of the history of the less important personages, before relating the main history. The Samaritan text has set the age of Terah at one hundred and forty-five, under the idea that Abraham did not set out on his migration until after the death of Haran. The representation of Stephen, Act_7:4, connects itself with the general course of the narration.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
See above: The significance of the genealogical table of the Shemites.
1. The decrease in the extent of human life. In the manifold weakenings of the highest life-endurance, in the genealogy of Shem, there are, nevertheless, distinctly observable a number of abrupt breaks: 1. From Shem to Arphaxad, or from 600 years to 438; 2. from Eber to Peleg, or from 464 years to 239; 3. from Serug to Nahor, or from 230 years to 148; beyond which last, again, there extend the lives of Terah with his 205, and of Abraham with his 175 years. Farther on we have Isaac with 180 years, Jacob 147, and Joseph 110. So gradually does the human term of life approach the limit set by the Psalmist, Psa_90:10. Moses reached the age of 120 years. The deadly efficacy goes on still in the bodily sphere, although the counter-working of salvation has commenced in the spiritual. Keil, with others, finds the causes of this decrease in the catastrophe of the flood, and in the separation of humanity into various nations.
2. Chaldœa and the Chaldœans.—See the Theological Real Lexicons, especially Herzog’s Encyclopœdie, The Fragments of the Chaldæan Author, Berosus, as found in the Chronicon of Eusebius, and the Chronographia of Syncellus. This people seem to have been early, and, in an especial sense, a wandering tribe. The priestly castes of Chaldæans in Babylonia must have come out of Egypt. Strabo and others transfer the land of the Chaldæans to a region in lower Babylonia, in the marshy district of the Euphrates near the Persian Gulf; the same author, however, finds also, as others have done, the seat of the Chaldæans in the Chaldæan Mountains, very near to Armenia and the Black Sea. The proper home of the Chaldæans was, therefore, at the head waters of the Tigris.
3. Ur in Chaldæa. See above.
4. On the indication of a great yet gradual provision for the variance that was to take place between the race of Eber and the heathen, see the Exegetical and Critical. The later Biblical accounts of Terah and the forefathers of Abraham appear, in general, to owe their form to the reciprocal influence of Israelitish tradition and the Israelitish exegesis of the passage before us. According to the language of Stephen, Act_7:2, Abraham was already called at Ur in Chaldæa. We must, therefore, regard him as the proper author of the migration of his father, Terah. The passage, Jos_24:2, according to which Abraham’s forefathers, and Terah especially, dwelt beyond the river (the Euphrates), and served other gods, has special relation to this fact of Terah’s suffering himself to be detained in Haran.—This, then, is to be so understood, that in consequence of the universal infection, idolatry began to take up its abode very near to the adoration of the one God, as still maintained in Terah’s family (see Gen_29:32-33; Gen_29:35; Gen_30:24; Gen_30:27; and to this belongs what is said, Gen_31:34, about the teraphim of Laban). We may well suppose that Joshua, from his stern, legal stand-point, judged and condemned that mingling of worships, or that image worship, as strongly as Moses did the setting up of the golden calf. The little group of wanderers, Gen_11:31, appears to have originated from a similarity of feeling which, after long conflicts in the line of Eber, was finally to tear itself away from this conjectural capital of the Light and Fire worship in Chaldæa, and, in that way, from heathenism altogether. Their aim was Canaan, because there, partly from their decidedly foreign state, partly by reason of their antagonism to the Hamitic race, they would be protected from the contagion. But Terah cannot get beyond Haran, and to this not only does Joshua refer, but also the later Jewish tradition respecting Terah. To this place, where he settles down, Terah seems to have given the name of his dead son, in loving remembrance, and it may have been this name, as well as the fair land and apparent security, that bound him there. The circumstance that Abraham, according to Gen_11:32, does not appear to have departed before the death of Terah (with which, however, the history otherwise does not agree), has been interpreted by Syncellus and others as implying that Terah was spiritually dead. A like untenable Jewish hypothesis, which Hieronymus gives us, assumes that the 75 years which are ascribed to Abraham, Gen_12:4, are not to be dated from his natural birth, but from the time of his deliverance from the furnace of fire, which was like a new birth. But that Abraham tore himself away before his father’s death has, at all events, the important meaning that, in the strife between filial piety and the call of faith, he obeyed the higher voice. The family group in Haran, however, is thus distinctly denoted, because it now forms the provisional earthly homestead of the wandering patriarchs, and because, also, as the later history informs us, it was to furnish wives of like theocratic birth for their sons.
5. Legends concerning the migration of Abraham. See Rahmer, “The Hebrew Traditions” (Breslau, 1861, p. 24). According to a Hebrew Midrash (Rabba 38, in Hieronymus), Abraham, at Ur, was cast into a furnace of fire, because he would not adore the fire which the Chaldæans worshipped, but was miraculously preserved by God. His brother Haran, on the contrary, was consumed, because he was unresolved whether to adore the fire or not. It was Nimrod who had him cast into the furnace. Here belongs, also, the Treatise of Beer, entitled “The Life of Abraham, according to the Jewish traditions.” Leip., 1859.
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
As Abraham’s life of faith develops itself in his posterity, so did it have its root in the life of his forefathers.—How the life of all great men of God rests upon a previous hidden history.—Comparison of the two lines of faith, that of Seth to Noah, and from Shem to Abraham: 1. outwardly, ever less (at last reduced to one point); 2. inwardly, ever stronger (attaining at last to the one who makes the transition). [Thus Noah passed through the corrupted race and through the flood; thus Abraham made the transition through heathenism.]—Terah’s migration to Canaan: 1. its spirited beginning; 2. its failure to go on.—Abraham and his kinsmen: 1. He was probably the author of their movement; 2. they, probably, the cause of his tarrying in Haran.—The death of children before the eyes of their parents (Gen_11:28).—Sarah’s barrenness, the long and silent trial in the life of Abraham.
Starke: The Sethites, among whom the true church is preserved.—God’s remembrance of the righteous abides in his blessing.—Osiander: A Christian when he is called, must, for the sake of God, leave joyfully his fatherland; he must forsake all that he loves, all that is pleasing to him in the world; he must follow God obediently, and only where He leads.
[Excursus on the Confusion of Languages.—That there was here a supernatural intervention the language of Scripture will not permit us to doubt. We need not, however, trouble ourselves with the question how far each variety of human speech is connected with it, or regard, as essentially affecting the argument, the greatness or smallness of the number of languages now spoken upon the earth. There is, doubtless, many a local jargon, the result of isolation, or of unnatural mixtures, that has but little, if anything, to do with an inquiry in respect to this most ancient and world-historical event. It is so difficult to determine what is a language in distinction from a dialect, or mere local variety of idiom and pronunciation, that such lists as those of Balbi and others can have but little philological value. For all essential purposes of such inquiry, therefore, there is no need to extend our view beyond that district of earth in which languages now existing, either as spoken or in their literature, can be historically or philologically traced to peoples connected with the earliest known appearances of the human race. We give this a very wide sweep when we include in it Southern and Middle Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. Here philological science, though yet very imperfect, has found great encouragement in its inquiries, and within this district has it begun to make out, with some clearness, what must have been the earliest divisions of language. The result thus far, as stated by some of the latest and best writers, has been the recognition of three general families or groups. In giving names to these, there has also been recognized, to some extent, the ethnological division supposed to be made from the sons of Noah; and hence some have been inclined to call them the Japhethic, Shemitic, and Hamitic (Bunsen, Khamism and Semism). It was early perceived, however, that the ethnologic and linguistic lines do not exactly correspond even in the Shemitic; and there is still more of aberration and intersection within the supposed limits of the two others. The first group has therefore been called the Indo-Germanic, and of late the Arian. In the third the term Hamitic has been generally dropped for that of Turanian. The general correspondence, however, gives much countenance to the first ethnological naming. But whatever method be adopted, it does not affect the main characteristics belonging to each of the three. These may be thus stated. The Shemitic is the smallest, the most unique, both in its matter and its form, the most enduring, the most easily recognized, and having the least diversity in its several branches. The group termed Arian, Indo-Germanic, or Japhethan, is less marked in all these characteristics, though retaining enough of them to make clear the family relationship in all the best-known branches. The third is so different from both these, it seems so utterly broken up, that Pritchard, and other philologists, have given it, as a whole, the name Allophylian, using it simply as a convenience of nomenclature. There exist, however, marks of affinity that show it to be something more than a mere arbitrarily separated mass (see Max Müller “Languages of the Seat of War,” pp. 88, 90, and Rawlinson: “Herodotus,” vol. i. 524). To make use of geological analogies, as Bunsen has done, the Shemitic may be likened to the primitive rocks, the Arian to the stratified formations, broken, yet presenting much clearness of outline and direction, the Turanian to confused volcanic masses projected from some force unknown, or solitary boulders scattered here and there in ways inexplicable, yet showing marks of the localities from whence they came, and evidence of some original correspondence in the very irregularities of their fracture. Or we may compare them, the first, to a temple still entire in its structural form, though presenting tokens of catastrophes by which it has been affected; the second, to wide-spread ruins, where whole architectural rows and avenues still show a clear coherence, whilst even the broken arches, fallen columns, displaced capitals, give evidence by which we are enabled to make out the original plan; the third, to scattered mounds of rubbish, in which shattered slabs, obscurely stamped bricks, and faint marks of some joining cement, alone testify to a structure having once a local unity at least, though now exhibiting little of inward plan and harmony. To drop all such figures, it may be said that the Shemitic has preserved what was most enduring of the original form, the Arian what was most permanent of the original matter, whilst in the Turanian has fallen all that was most frangible in the one, or most easily deformed or defaced in the other.
Now to account for such a condition of things in language, especially in its earliest appearance, is equally difficult, whether we hypothesize the primitive movement as a tendency to gregariousness and to a consequent unity of speech, or as a tendency in the opposite direction, or as being both combined in an attractive and repulsive polarity. The phenomena in each and all are at war with every such induction. There is in the one family a strangely preserved unity. There is in another a totally different peculiarity of form stamped upon it from times that precede all historical memory; it is full where the first seems to be scant, free where the other is tense; sometimes just the reverse,14 having as a whole a look so exceedingly foreign as never to be mistaken, yet with an equally unmistakable familiarity, or family likeness, of its own, within which the many dissimilitudes among its different branches never efface the strong and seemingly ineradicable affinities. There is a third so marked by an almost total dissolution that its very looseness would seem to make its only classifying feature, were it not that certain indices found in every branch (such as the numerals and some pronominal forms), point to a community of origin, whilst appearances of correspondence, even in its fractures, suggest a common disorganizing catastrophe. Viewing these three families in their relations to each other, we find that there is not only separation, and that of long standing, but great diversity of separation. The original cleaving dates from a most ancient period, before which nothing is known, and in its general aspect remains unaffected by time. The Hamitic, or Turanian, seems to have been confused and tumultuous from the beginning. Such is said to be its appearance on the early trilingual inscriptions made to accommodate the incongruous peoples in the Assyrian empire who had, in some way, been here and there wedged between the Arian and Shemitic portions. See Rawlinson’s “Herodotus,” i. 527. Again, the Shemitic, though oftentimes in close contiguity, has put on none of the essential features of the Arian, nor the Arian of the Shemitic. The German and Arabic are as distinct in modern times, as anciently the Greek and Hebrew. The minor specific divisions in each family have varied more or less, but the great generic differences have remained the same from age to age, still showing no signs of blending, or of mutual development into some common comprehending genus, according to the process which Bunsen supposes to have produced such changes in the antehistorical times. What has stamped them with features so ancient and so diverse? Nothing of any known natural development, either of one from the other, or of all from a common antecedent stock, can account for it. If Sinism, or Chinesian (the name given to this hypothetical beginning of human speech), developed Khamism, and Khamism Semism, and Semism Arianism, how is it that we find nothing like it as actual fact in historical times, and no marks of any transition-period in the ages before? Surely, if Bunsen’s favorite comparisons be good for anything, we ought to find in language, as geologists do in the rocks, the visible marks of the process, or if we are compelled to adopt a theory of sudden or eruptive breakings in the one case (whether we call them supernatural or extraordinary matters but little to the argument) why should a similar idea be regarded as irrational in the other. Thus there are no linguistic marks in Greek and Hebrew (regarded as early representatives of two great families), or in Syriac and Sanscrit, showing that at any time they were a common language,15 or any beginning of mutual divergency as traced downwards, or any evidences of convergency as we follow them up the stream of time. In fact, they stand in most direct contrast in their earliest stages; even as the fresh geological rupture must present, doubtless, a more distinct breakage than is shown after ages of wear and abrasion. When history opens, these languages stand abruptly facing each other. This may be said with some degree of confidence, for our knowledge here is not scanty. We have the Shemitic all along from the very dawn of history to our latest times. The Arabic of the present day, copious as it has become in its derivative vocabulary, is as rigid in its Shemitic features as the oldest known Hebrew. There is some reason for regarding it as retaining even still more of the primitive type. The Greek was in its perfection in the days of Homer, and as Homer found it. It has never been surpassed since in all that makes the glory of language as a spiritual structure, in its classifications16 of outward things, in its still higher classification of ideas, in its precision and richness of epithet, in the profound presentation of moral and æsthetic distinctions,—in this respect ever in advance of the people who used it—in the elements it contained for the expression of philosophic thought whenever its stores should be required for that purpose, and, withall, in the melodiousness, the flexibility, and the exuberance of its vocal forms. The Thucydidian Greek falls below it in all these respects. Certainly it had not risen above it. It is the tendency of language, when left to itself, to decline in the attributes mentioned. The assertion may be hazarded that the evidence of this fact is exhibited in most modern tongues. More copious are they doubtless, better adapted to a quick political, social, or commercial intercourse, or to certain forms of civilization in which a greater community of action, or of understood conventional proceedings, makes up for the want of pictorial and dialectical clearness as inherent in the words themselves—but everywhere, in their old worn state, presenting a lack of that vividness, that exquisite shading of ideas, that power of emotion, which astonishes us in the early languages just mentioned. The tendency, in fact, is towards Sinism, or a language of loose arbitrary symbols, not away from it. As savagism is the dregs of a former higher civilization, so Sinism is the remains of language, bearing evidence of attrition and fracture; and this, however copious it may be, or however adapted it may be to a mere worldly civilization, such as that in which the Chinese have long been stationary, or slowly falling, and to which a godless culture, with all its science, is ever tending. There is in language accretion, addition, looseness, decay; but we rarely find, if we ever find, in any speech that has long been used, what may be truly called growth in the sense of organic vigor, or inward structural harmony.17 That young and vigorous constitution which is discovered in the earliest Arian and Shemitic speech, they must have received in some way for which it is very difficult to account on any natural or ordinary grounds. Convention will not explain it, as Plato saw long ago in the very dawn of philological inquiry; onomatopic theories fail altogether to account for the first words, to say nothing of grammatical forms; development is found to be mere cant, giving no real insight into the mystery. If the originating processes fall wholly within the sphere of the human, then must we suppose some instinctive logic, some sure intelligence working below consciousness, and somehow belonging to the race, or races, rather than to the individual. If this is difficult to conceive, or to understand, then there remains for us that which hardly surpasses it in wonder, whilst it falls short of it in mystery, namely, the idea of some ab extra supernatural power once operating on the human soul in its early youth—whether in the first creation, or in some subsequent early stages of remarkable development,—and now comparatively unknown.18
When we study language on the map, the difficulty of any mere development theory bringing one of these families from the other, or from a common original stock, is greatly increased. Whilst the Arian and Shemitic present, in the main, certain geographical allotments tolerably distinct, this Hamitic or Turanian conglomerate is found dispersed in the most irregular manner. It is everywhere in spots throughout the regions occupied by the more organic families; sometimes in sporadic clusters, as in parts of Western Asia, sometimes driven far off to the confines as is the case with the Finnic and Lap language, or, again, wedged into corners, like the Basque language in Spain, lying between two branches of the Arian, the Roman and the Celtic.
Had we found rocks lying in such strange ways, it would at once have been said: no slow depositing, no long attrition, no gradual elevation or depression, has done all this. They may have exerted a modifying influence; but they are not alone sufficient to account for what appears. Here has been some eruptive or explosive force, some ab extra power, whether from above or beneath, sudden and extraordinary in its effect, however generated in its causality, and however we may style that causality, whether natural or supernatural, simply inexplicable, or divine. Such eruptive forces are not confined to rocks and strata, or to sudden changes in material organization. They have place also in the spiritual world, in the movements of history, in the souls of men, in remarkable changes and formations of language. There are spiritual phenomena, if the term may be used, for which we cannot otherwise easily account. The evidence here of any such intervening power may be less striking, because less startling to the sense, but to the calm and reverent reason they may be even more marked than anything analagous to them in the outer world of matter. Great confusion has arisen in our theological reasoning from confining this word miraculous solely to some supposed breakage or deflection in the natural sphere.
To say the least, therefore, it is not irrational to carry this view into the history of man regarded as under the influence of supernatural, as well as natural, agencies. And thus here, as we contemplate the remarkable position of the early languages of the world, and especially of the three great families, some force from without, sudden, eruptive, breaking up a previous movement, extraordinary to say the least, would be the causal idea suggested, even if the Scripture had said nothing about it. A primitive formation has been left comparatively but little affected; all around it, east and west, are linguistic appearances presenting the most striking contrasts to the first, and yet the most remarkable family likenesses to each other; elsewhere, as a third class of elements show, the eruptive or flooding force has broken everything into fragments, and scattered them far and wide. Philology cannot account for it; but when we study the tenth and eleventh of Genesis in what they fairly imply as well as clearly express, we have revealed to us an ancient causation adequate, alone adequate, we may say, to the singular effect produced. The language of the account is general, as in other parts of Scripture where a mighty change is to be described, universal in its direct and collateral historical effect, without requiring us to maintain an absolute universality in the incipient movement. From some such general terms in the commencement of chapter 11 it might seem, indeed, as though every man of the human race was in this plane of Shinar, and directly engaged in the impious undertaking described. Taking, however, the two chapters together—and it is too much to say, as most commentators do, in the very face of the arrangement, that the eleventh chapter is wholly prior to the tenth—we must conclude that one line, at least, of the sons of Shem, that of Arphaxad, the ancestor of the Chaldæans, and of Eber, the more direct progenitor of the Hebrews, remained in the upper country of the Euphrates. It is fairly to be inferred, too, that the Joktan migration to Arabia had commenced, carrying with it the Shemitic element of speech to modify or transform the Cushite, whether introduced before or after it. Some of the sons of Japheth may have already set off, west and east, in their long wanderings (to Greece and India perhaps), whilst Sidon, a descendant of Ham, had even at this early day, founded a maritime settlement, and ventured upon the seas. It is not easy to understand why the narration of the tenth chapter should have had its place before that of the eleventh, unless a portion, at least, of the movements there recorded, had been antecedent in time. It is commonly said that the tenth is anticipatory in respect to what follows, but this is not altogether satisfactory. As the story of the greater scattering comes after the ethnological divisions in the order of narration, it may be consistently maintained that it was subsequent to some of them, at least, in the order of time, whilst the seeming universality of the language may be explained on the ground of the magnitude of the later event, and its world-wide effect in the human history. A close examination, however, shows that, even in the diction, this universality is not so strict as some interpretations would make it. After these earlier departures, as we may supply from chapter 10, it proceeds to say, “the whole earth (land country) was (yet) of one language and one speech.” It had not been broken up, though it may have begun to be affected by causes which would naturally produce changes of dialect. “And in their journeying,” or “as they journeyed onward (מִקֶדֶם), they found a plain in the land of Shinar.” “As they journeyed,” that is, as men journeyed onward, or migrated more and more. Who or how many they were is not said, and these indefinite pronouns give us no right to say that every man of the human race, all of Noachian kind, were in this plain of Shinar. There is the strongest proof to the contrary. We cannot believe that Noah was there, although he lived three hundred and fifty years after the flood, or that Shem was there, who lived one hundred and fifty years later, and even in the days of Abraham. The idea is abhorrent that one so highly blessed of God, and in “whose tents” God had promised “to dwell”—Shem, the Name, the preserver of the holy speech, and the direct antithesis of that false “name” which these bold rebels sought to make unto themselves—should have had any participation, even by his presence, in so unholy a proceeding. As little can we believe it of any of the line from which came Abraham, or even of their not remote consanguinèi, the Joktanite Arabians. The same feeling arises when we think of the pious fathers of Melchizedek, king of Salem, king of righteousness, and who had consecrated him a priest to El Elion, that Most High God of the Heavens (see Gen_14:18), who is here so blasphemously defied.19 Who were they, then, that composed this strange assemblage on the plain of Shinar? A vast multitude doubtless, a majority of Noah’s descendants perhaps, yet still, as is most likely, a colluvies gentium, a gathering of the bad, the bold, the adventurous, from every family, but with the Hamitic character decidedly predominant.20 Nimrodian, perhaps, might they be called with more propriety, if we take the constant Jewish tradition that Nimrod was their leader in rebellion. The nobler sons of Ham are to be distinguished from these Babylonian Hamites. The founder of the Egyptian monarchy, and, perhaps, the Arabian Cushites, had in all probability gone to their respective settlements. The very name, Nimrod, shows a difference between them. It is not the name of a country, or of a family of descendants, like the others mentioned Gen_10:8; a fact of which Maimonides takes notice (see marg. note, p. 349) when he calls attention to the manner in which Nimrod is mentioned irregularly, as it were, or out of the line, after the other sons of Cush had been disposed of. He was not, like them, a “father of a people,” a patriarch, or ancestor, but a bold adventurer, a “mighty hunter of men before the Lord,” or in defiance of the Lord, who gathered together, out of every people, those who were like himself, not to settle the world, but to prevent its peaceful settlement by engaging in bold and reckless enterprises of an opposite nature. He may be said to have represented the empire-founding, instead of the planting or colonizing, tendency. He was the postdiluvian Cain, and there would seem to be a significance not to be disregarded in the fact that here there is given to this rebellious multitude that same name, בְּנֵי הָאָדָם, “sons of men,” which, in its feminine form, is used Gen_6:4 (בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם) to denote the godless in distinction from the more pious. The line here indicated, between the sons of God and the “sons of men,” was less distinct, perhaps, than that which was drawn between the Sethites and the Cainites, yet it still existed to some extent, making a division between the better branches of the Shemites, with some from both the other lines, and this vast rabble of the sensual and ungodly. The grammatical form of the name Nimrod (which is very unusual for such a purpose) shows that it had a popular, instead of a family, origin. It is the first person plural future jussive, נִמְרֹד, “come let us rebel.” It was the watchword of the impious leader, afterwards given to him as a title by his applauding followers: “Let us break Jehovah’s bands, let us cast his cords from us,” let us build a tower that shall reach Him in the Heavens.21
On this impious host of Nimrod, predominantly, although not solely, Hamitic, fell especially the scattering and confounding blow, like the bolts from heaven aimed at the rebellious Titans; and hence this rabble of tongues called Hamitic or Turanian, or these allophylic conglomerates which philologists find so remarkable as compared with the enduring unity of the Shemitic, and the diversified, yet unmistakable Arian relationship. These two were, doubtless, affected by the shock; one of them may have had much of its subsequent modification, if not its origin, from it; but on the Hamitic host fell the stone that ground them to powder. “For there22 Jehovah confounded the language of all the earth” (land or country). This Nimrodian Babel of tongues wrought more or less of confusion everywhere, making the universality in the effect rather than in the immediate causality—a view perfectly consistent with the soberest interpretation of the artless language of Holy Scripture.
The causative influence, we may believe, was primarily a spiritual one. It was a confounding not only of their purposes (מַחְשְׁבוֹת לֵב, Gen_6:5)—thus introducing confusion, madness,23 and discord, into their camp—but also of their ordinary thinkings and conceivings, τῶν ἐνθυμήσεων καὶ ἐννοιῶν καρδίας, Heb_4:12, “reaching to the dividing line of soul and spirit,” ψυχῆς τε καὶ πνεύματος, holding back the divine gift of reason, and thus introducing disorder into the sense and the utterance through a prior confusion in the spirit. It deranged their word-formations by a previous derangement of their thoughts.
The difficulty attending the mere outer view, here, arises from a fundamental error which may be found, even in acute treatises of philology. Words do not represent things, as outer existences merely, according to the common notion, but rather what we think about things. They are in truth symbols of our own inner world as affected by the outer world of things around us. They translate to us our own thoughts as well as help us to make them known to others. The animal has no such inner world, and therefore it is that he cannot use speech to represent it to himself or to other animals. This would be readily admitted in respect to words representative of thought alone; but it is true also of that large class that seem to stand directly for outward sensible things per se. Here, too, the word called the name represents only remotely the thing named, but nearly and primarily, some thinking, conceiving, or emotion, in our souls, connected with the thing, and giving rise to its name.24 As proper names are last of all, so these names of outward objects must have come after words denoting action or quality, and from which their own naming, unless supposed to be purely arbitrary, could alone have been derived. Originally they must have been all descriptive, that is, they had a meaning beyond their mere sign significance. In proportion as such primary meanings have faded out in modern languages, have words lost vividness and emotive power, though still remaining as a convenient classifying notation. Thus in early speech the names of animals, for example, were all descriptive. We find it so even now, as far as we can trace them in the significance of their roots. They invariably denote something which the animal does, or suffers, or is, or is supposed to do, to suffer, or to be—thus ever implying some judgment of the human mind respecting it; and tins corresponds to what is said in the Scripture of the animals being brought before Adam to see (לראות for Adam to see, judge, decide) what name should be given to each one. This name is ever taken from something more general, and the name of that from something more general still, and so back from the concrete to the more and more abstract, until we are lost in the mystery, and compelled to admit that there is something in ourselves, and in language, which it is not easy to understand. We may be sure, however, that in all these primary names of animals there was something descriptive, though in many it may have been long lost. In some cases it still shines dimly through the wear of time and usage, enabling us to infer it universally. Thus bird, we may be certain, means something more than bird, and dog than dog, even as fowl, fugel, vogel, still carries with it some faint image of flying, and chien, hund, κύων, canis (cano, canorus, קִינָה), suggests the clear, ringing, houndlike sound that denoted the animal in the earliest Arian speech.25 Connected with this there is another thought that has importance here. The first impression is that nouns, or the names of things, must be older in language than verbs. Examination, however, shows just the contrary as a fact, and then we see that it must be so, if names are not arbitrary, but ever imply some action or quality of the thing, and so an antecedent naming of that action or passion. But not to pursue this farther, it is enough to show that the spring of language is in the thought, the conceiving, the affection, as the source of names for things, and for the relations of things. Confusion here is confusion throughout, and this would be much more operative in a multitude thus affected than in an individual. Break up the community of thought and the community of language is broken up, or begins to break up along with it. It affects not only the matter but the form, the soul, the grammatical structure.26 Going still deeper, it changes the mode of lexical derivation, or the process through which secondary senses (as they exist in almost all abstract words) come from the primary—the inward etymologies, as they may be called, which are of more importance in determining the affinities of languages than the outward phonetic etymologies on which some philologists almost exclusively insist, and which are so easily lost—all the more easily and rapidly when the more spiritual bonds are loosed. So, on the other hand, the maintaining secure against mutation the higher ideas that dwell in a language, especially its religious ideas, is most conservative both of its matter and form. Thus may we account, in some degree, for the way in which the Shemitic endured the shock that left all around it those masses of fragments which philologists call the Hamitic or Turanian. The great name of God was in it in fulfilment of the promise. Those other remarkable appellations of Deity, El, Allah, Eloah, Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai, El Elion, El Olam, παντοκράτωρ, ὕψιστος, ἀιώνιος, have been to it like a rock of ages, giving security to its other religious ideas, whilst these again have entered extensively into its proper names, its common nouns and verbs, conserving it against the corruption and degeneracy of those who spoke it, and giving even to its Arabic and Syriac branches a holy and religious aspect beyond anything presented in any ancient or modern tongue. Well and worthily have the Jewish Rabbis called it לשון הקודש, the holy tongue. Truly it is so, whether we regard it as the original Noachian speech, or something later preserved entire from the wreck of the Babel confusion.27
How this extraordinary breaking up of language took place we may not easily know, though maintaining its possibility, and its strong probability, as a fact, aside from the express Scriptural declaration. There is no department of human inquiry in which we so soon come to the mysterious and inexplicable as in that of language. Some have maintained its onomatopic origin, as has been lately done in a very clear and able treatise by Prof. Whitney. If this, however, is confined to vocal resemblances in the names of sounds themselves, it accounts for only an exceedingly small number of words; if carried farther, to supposed analogies between the names of certain acts, or efforts, and the effort of the organs in pronouncing them, it takes in a very few more; beyond this it would be that idea of some inherent fitness in sounds which has been already considered in the note, p. 377, and to which the name onomatopic may be given in its widest sense; though then, instead of being the easiest, it would be the least explicable of all. So the philologist may endeavor to find the beginning of speech, especially in the names of animals, in the imitation of animal sounds; or he may absurdly trace it to a conventional naming, overlooking the truth that for the initiation of such a proceeding language itself is required—or he may deduce it from accident, or, give him time enough—and a past eternity is very long—he may fancy it coming out of inarticulate or merely interjectional sounds, making its random “natural selections,” until, after ages of chaos, a light inexplicable begins to gleam, an intelligence somehow enters into the process, and thus, at last, language comes into form, as a vehicle of rational, that is, of logical28 thought. But for human minds, λόγος, speech, and logos, reason, are one; and the serious thinker, who cannot separate them, takes but a few steps in this mysterious search before he is forced, either to acknowledge something superhuman, or to admit that in the birth and growth of language, the instrument of all reasoning, there must be some strange generic intelligence, if such a thing can be conceived, that we utterly fail to discover in the individual logic. In other words, men as a race, or races, do what the individual singly never does, something of which he is wholly unconscious, and which he cannot understand. The thought of divine intervention is the less strange; it presents the less difficulty, and is, therefore, the more rational. We are not to be unnecessarily introducing a divine agency into the world’s drama, but here, surely, it is a nodus vindice dignus, a knot which a divine intelligence can alone unbind. There is not in all nature anything like that spiritual mystery which meets us on the very threshold of an inquiry into the origin and development of human speech.
Leaving these more abstruse regions, and descending again to the clearer field of inductive observation, there still meet us those geographical difficulties to which some attention has already been given as inexplicable on any theory of gradual or mutual development. Allusion was before made to the appearances presented by those broken allophylic tongues to which has been given the common name Turanian—showing themselves among the other families, sometimes in contiguous beds, and then again as lying far away and far apart in space, even as they indicate a remote location in time. In such cases everything indicates the sudden projection of an early people, and of an early speech, entire. Succeeding waves of migration have pressed upon their shores, but changed no feature of their language. That seems to have had its form fixed in the beginning, and to defy mutation. Its isolated state, though surrounded by hostile elements, has only rendered it more unyielding in this respect. It will perish rather than change into anything else. There may be pointed out another geographical anomaly on a larger scale, and only explicable, too, on the ground of some early intervention to change the course of what might otherwise have been the ordinary historical development. A little less than a century ago, the learned began to perceive a striking resemblance between the Greek and the ancient language of India; a resemblance both in matter and form. They are both of the Arian or Indo-Germanic family, and yet we have no right to say that one has been derived from the other. From a period transcending all history they have been widely parted, territorially, from each other. They stood in the days of Alexander as distinctly separate as at any time before or after. In all the antecedent period there is no record or tradition of any colonizing on either side, of any military expedition, of any commercial or literary intercourse, that could have produced any assimilating effect. All this time, and for long after, there lay directly between them a territory and a people, or peoples, having nothing, socially or politically, in common with either, and speaking a language, of all others, the most directly foreign to both, or to any common language of which they both could be considered as branches. From Southern Arabia to Northern Syria, or the head waters of the Euphrates nearly, there was the continuous strip of the Shemitic, unbroken and unaffected during all that time. This, as has before been remarked, was, and is, the most tenacious and enduring of all linguistic families. It is still a wide living speech, although Greek and Sanscrit have both died, and been embalmed in their common and Sacred literature, and although this parting language, until comparatively modern times, had no literature except the scanty and most secluded Biblical writings. A branch of the Shemitic, if we may not rather call it the Shemitic itself, continuous and unchanged, is still living, strong and copious. Notwithstanding the addition of many new words, and many new senses that have attached themselves to the old, the Bedouin still talks in a manner that would have been recognized as familiar in the days of Abraham. Could we suppose the patriarch now listening to it, he would hear some strange words mingled with the great body of its earliest roots, and some few later forms, but in its pronouns, its prepositions, its tenses, its conjugations, its logical and rhetorical particles, in the nerves and sinews as well as in the bones of the language, it would strike him as substantially the same kind of talk that had passed between him and his sons Isaac and Ishmael.29 This most enduring ancient speech has suffered nothing that could be called development from anything on either side of it; and there has been no development across it from one parted shore to the other. Such theories as that of Bunsen, by which he gets Khamism out of Sinism, and Semism out of Khamism, and so on, would never explain this. The difficulty clears up somewhat if we bring in the extraordinary, and suppose some early supernatural cleaving and transformation, leaving one primitive type standing in its place, another, greatly changed, to be carried east and west by one people suddenly parted, and meeting again historically after ages of separation, whilst another type, broken into fragments, is dispersed far and wide to remote portions of the earth. This may be called cutting or breaking the knot, rather than untying, but even if the Bible had been silent, it is better than any hypothesis called natural, yet found to be wholly inadequate to explain the extraordinary phenomena to which it is applied. It is true, give a theorist time enough, and hypothetical conditions enough, and he may seem to develop almost anything out of anything else. Grant him enough of “natural selections,” and he may show us how to make worlds and languages by producing, at last, seeming congruities, falling into place after infinite incongruities. But then, such a method of proceeding, supposed to be inherent in the nature of things, cannot stop (if it goes right on without cycles) until it has abolished all things seemingly incongruous or extraordinary, and introduced a perfect level of congruity everywhere, in the physical, social, and philological world. Only take time enough, or rather suppose, as some do, a past eternity of such working, and the only conceivable result is a perfect sameness; all disorders must long since have been gone, all species must have become one, and that the highest or the lowest, all languages must have become one, and that the best or the poorest—something rising in its linguistic architecture far above the Greek and Sanscrit, or sinking in its looseness below anything called Turanian or Sinitic. The extraordinary, now and then, would be not only the easier conception, but an actual relief from the weariness of such a physical monotony.
But we have a more sure word of testimony. The great Bible-fact for the believer is, that, in order to prevent a very evil development of humanity, at a very early day, God interfered with men and confounded their language. There is nothing irrational in this if we believe in a God at all. The manner of doing it is not told us. What is said in Genesis 11 may not wholly explain the linguistic phenomena so early presented, and even now so remarkable; but it may be safely affirmed that far greater difficulties oppose themselves to any other solution that has been, or may yet be offered.—T. L.]
Footnotes:
[10][Gen_11:1.—אַרְפַּכְשָׁד. Arphaxad,—pronunciation derived from the LXX., Αρφαξαδ; according to the Hebrew pointing, Arpakshad. It is a compound, evidently, of which the principal part is כשד, from which the later כשדים, Chaldæans. It would appear, on these accounts, to be the name of a people transferred to their ancestor, as in many other cases. Among the early nations names were not fixed, as they are with us in modern times. The birth name was changed for something else—some deed the man had done, or some land he had settled, and that becomes his appellation in history. Sometimes the early personal name is given to the country, and then comes back in a changed form as a designation of the ancestor. Thus Josephus speaks of the five primitive “Shemitic people, the Elamites (or Persians), the Assyrians, the Aramites (or Syrians), the Lydians (from Lud), and the Arphaxadites, now called Chaldæans.”—T. L.]
[11][Gen_11:14.—עֵבֶר. The line of Shem in Arphaxad seems to have remained along time after the flood in the upper country; and it may be doubted whether this branch of the Shemites, from whom Abraham was directly descended, were with the great multitude of the human race in the plain of Shinar, or had much, if any thing, to do with building the tower of Babel (see remarks of Lange, p. 367). Eber’s descendants came over the river, and began the first migrations to the south. The word עבר may mean over in respect to either side, and so it might be applied to one that went over, or to one that remained. This passing over being a memorable event, the naming would come very naturally from it, whether as given to the ancestor who stayed, or to the descendants who left the old country. Each side would be transeuphratensian to the other, and so truly עִבְרִים עִבְרִי, or Hebrews. It would be very much as we speak, or used to speak, of the old countries as transatlantic, on the other side of, or over the Atlantic; the Hebrew עבר having every appearance of being etymologically the same with the Greek ὑπέρ, German über, and our Saxon over. Compare Gen_14:13, where אַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי, Abram the Hebrew, is rendered ’Αβρὰμ ὁ περάτης, Abram the passenger.—T. L.]
[12][Gen_11:20.—שְׂרוּג). Some would resort to the primary sense of שרג or סרג to get the meaning entangled (verwickkelter), to make it correspond to some other derivations which are fancied here as denoting either the advance, or the retarding, of this early Shemitic movement. But besides the faintness and uncertainty of such derivations, the names they seem to indicate could only have been given long afterwards, when the facts on which they are supposed to be grounded had acquired a historical importance. Gesenius would render it palmes, a young vine-shoot (from שרג, to wind, twist). No name-giving could be more natural and easy than this. Compare שָׂרִוֹגִים, Gen_40:10; Gen_40:12; Joe_1:7; and what is said in the blessing of Joseph, Gen_49:22, פֹּרָת יוֹסֵף בֵּן פֹּרָת, fruitfulness Joseph, son of fruitfulness—our translation, a very fruitful bough.—T. L.]
[13][Gen_11:29.—יִסְכָּה, Iscah. The Jewish interpreters, generally, say that Iscah and Sarah were the same. Thus Rashi—“Iscah, that is, Sarah, so called because she was a seeress (סוכה) by the Holy Spirit, and because all gazed upon her beauty,” for which he refers to Gen_12:14. The root סכה (see, gaze upon) is quite common in the Syriac, the oldest branch of the Shemitic, though it does not come in the Hebrew. It is revived, and becomes frequent, in the Rabbinical. It is equivalent to the Hebrew חוֹזֶה, Prophet or Seer. Aben Ezra has the same interpretation.—T. L.]
[14][Thus the Shemitic greatly excels in the number of what are called its conjugations, or ways of modifying the primary sense of the verb. Otherwise its form may be characterized as the very grandeur of simplicity, suggesting the comparison of the majestic palm, whilst the Greek and Sanscrit may be likened to the branching oak. And so, again, in some of its aspects, the Shemitic presents a surprising bareness. In the Hebrew and Syriac, for example, there is the least show, or rather, only the rudimentary appearance of any optative or subjunctive modality, that is, in outward modal form, since all the subjective states may be clearly and effectively expressed by particles, or in some other way. It is the same, even now, in the Arabic, only that this embryotic appearance is a little more brought out. Three thousand years, and, within the last third of that time, a most copious use (philosophic, scientific, and commercial, as well as colloquial), have given it nothing, in this respect, that can be called structural growth, nothing that can be regarded as an approach to the exuberant forms of modality to be found in the Greek and Latin even in their earliest stages. It has kept to the mould in which it was first run. So also in the expression of time, the Shemitic still preserves its rigidness. It keeps its two tenses unmodified in form, though it has ways of denoting all varieties of time, relative or absolute, that any other language can express. Compare it with the Greek and Sanscrit copiousness of temporal forms; how early born are they, and how fruitful, in the one case, how unyielding, how stubbornly barren, we may say, in the other! Surely, one who carefully considers such phenomena as these, must admit that there is in the birth and perpetuity of language some other power—either as favoring or resisting—than that of mutual development, or reciprocal change, however long the periods that may be assumed for it as a convenience to certain theories.—T. L.]
[15][This is said more especially in reference to the form, or what may be called the soul of each language respectively. Of the matter, or vocalized material, as it may be styled, there is a good deal that is common. There are many roots in the Arian that are evidently the same with the Shemitic, whether coming from a common original stock of sounds, or from a later borrowing from each other. Words pass from one language to another, or original vocal utterances are broken up, in an immense variety of ways; but the structural forms are unyielding. In this resides the characterizing principle of perpetuity; so that it is no paradox to affirm a generic identity in language, in which the greater part, or even all the articulated sounds had been changed, or have given place to others. When we consider the great facility of mere phonetic changes, through cognate letters or those of the same organ, through transition letters, by whose intervention there is a passage from one family into another (as i and y make a transition from the dentals to the gutturals, and w or v from the gutturals to the labials), or through nasal combinations, such as ng, nd, mb, which, on dissolution, may carry the syllable in the new direction of either element with all its affinities, thus making, as it were, a bridge between them—when we bear in mind how sounds wear out in the beginning or at the end of words, entirely disappearing, or easily admitting in their attenuated state the substitution of others belonging to a different organ, or how, in the middle of words, the compression of syllables bringing together harsh combinations, crushes out letters in some cases (especially if they be gutturals), or introduces a new element demanded by euphony—we cease to wonder at the great variety and extent of vocal changes. It is seen how in various ways any one letter almost, or syllabic sound, may pass into almost any other, and how the same word, as traced through its phonetic changes, presents an appearance in one language that neither the eye nor the ear would recognize in another. To take one example that may stand for an illustration of some of the most important of such changes, who, by the sight or sound alone, or by any outward marks, would recognize the Latin dies in the French jour, or the English tear (teaghr, δάκρυ) in the Latin lacr, lacrima, or the English head in the Latin caput and the Greek κεφαλή, though nothing can be more certain than their relationship as traced by the phonetic laws. The real wonder is that the changes in this department have not been greater than they are found to be. It is the soul of language, the unyielding rigidity of its form, that, by its association, prevents the utter dissolution and mutation of the material. Its conservatism, in this respect, is shown in, the case of languages that are merely spoken. It has its most complete effect in those that have a written and printed literature.—T. L.]
[16][The arrangement, in the mind, of things to be named, belongs to the formation of language, as much as the naming, if it may not rather he said to be the most important part of the naming itself. Things, thus regarded, may be divided into three general classes: 1. Outward sensible objects; 2. actions, qualities, etc., as the ground of their naming, and themselves, therefore, demanding an antecedent naming; 3. mental acts and states, thoughts, thinkings, emotions, etc., regarded as wholly spiritual. In respect to the first, it may, indeed, be said that nature makes the classification, but the mind must recognize it, more or less correctly, before it can give the names. The second lies in both departments; since acts (doings, sufferings) must be the source whence direct names are drawn for the first, and figures, pictures, or spiritual representatives, for the third, as is shown in that large class of words that are said to have secondary meanings, or abstract ideas denoted by something material or sensible in the root. The third classification is wholly spiritual or within, though its namings are thus drawn from without. We find all this work done for us when we are born. The earliest languages have it as vividly as the latest, more vividly, we may say, if not carried to so wide an extent in the classification of outward objects, more profound, as analysis would show, in the distinctions of moral and æsthetical ideas. Whence came it? We must ascend to the very taproot of humanity to find an answer, if we are not to seek still farther in some divine teaching or inspiration. The phenomena lie ever before us; their commonness should not diminish our wonder at the mystery they present.—T. L.]
[17][We may thank God that some of the noblest languages (Greek, Hebrew, Sanscrit, Latin) died long ago, or in their comparative youth. They have thus been embalmed, preserved from decay, made immortal, ever young,—their expressive words and forms still remaining as a reserve store for the highest philosophical, theological, and even scientific use. They are called “the dead languages;” but that which some would make an objection to what has long and justly been deemed their place in education, is the very ground of their excellence.—T. L.]
[18][It is not extravagant to suppose something like this still lying at the ground of that mysterious process which we witness without wonder, because so common,—the rapid acquisition of language by the infant mind. It is not the mere learning to speak the names of outward, sensible, individual things—there is nothing much more strange in that than in teaching a parrot to talk,—but the quick seizing of those hidden relations of things, or rather of thought about things (ideas of the soul’s own with which it clothes things), and which it afterwards tasks all our outward logic to explain. How rapidly does this infant mind adapt words, not merely to chairs and tables, but to the relational notions of number, case, substance, attribute, qualifying degree, subjective modality, time relative and absolute, time as past, present, and future, or time as continuous and eventual, knowing nothing indeed of these as technical names, but grasping immediately the ideas, and seeing, with such amazing quickness, the adaptability to them of certain forms of expression, a mere termination, perhaps, or the faintest inflection, and that, too, with no outward imitative indices from the sense, such as may aid in the learning of the names of mere sensible objects. This indeed is wonderful, however common it may be. We never do it but once. All other acquisition of languages, in adult years, is by a process of memory, comparison, and conscious reasoning—in other words, a strictly scientific process, however certain abbreviations of it may be called the learning of a foreign tongue by “the method of nature” and of infancy. Something in the race analogous to this process in the individual infant soul, may be, not irrationally, supposed to have characterized the earliest human history of language. The failure of every system of artificial language, though attempted by the most philosophical minds, aided by the highest culture, shows that neither convention nor imitation had anything to do with its origin.—T. L.]
[19][Thus Rashi interprets their הָבָה, “Go to, now let us climb the firmament and make war upon the most High.” Melchizedek and his forefathers were, in all probability, Canaanites. There might be piety and faith even among these, as is instanced, afterwards, and in a time of still greater corruption, in the case of Rahab, who was a direct ancestress of our Lord! What Paul says (Heb_7:3) of Melchizedek’s being ἀπάτωρ and ἀμήτωρ, “without father and without mother,” is not intended to deny his having any earthly lineage.—T. L.]
[20][The opinion that the men in the plain of Shinar were not the whole human race, but predominantly Hamites, or followers of Nimrod, is maintained by Augustine, and, among modern authorities, by Luther and Calvin. See also the account of Josephus (“Ant.” i. 4). who makes Nimrod the great leader of the whole rebellious movement.—T. L.]
[21][It was a thought exceedingly wicked, yet having in it a kind of terrific sublimity. Neither could the idea of reaching the heavens, or sky, be called irrational, or absurd, however unscientific. They reasoned inductively, Baconianly, we may say, from sense and observation. Their limited experience was not against it. It showed a vast ambition. It was not an undertaking of savages, but of men possessed with the idea of somehow getting above nature, and having much of that spirit which, even at the present day, characterizes some kinds of scientific boasting (see remarks, p. 355). It was not the success merely of the undertaking (from which we are yet as far as ever), but the impious thought, that God meant to confound, and to strike down, whenever it arose in the minds of men. History is full of overthrown Babels; and it is still to be tested whether our excessive modern boasting about what is going to be achieved by science, progress, and democracy, will form an exceptive case.—T. L.]
[22][כִּי שָׁם; for there. It may denote fact or circumstance as well as place. For there—in that event, or in that confusion. Compare Psa_133:3, where this particle, שָׁם, is used in just the same way to denote the opposite condition of brotherly love, and the opposite effect: כִּי שָׁם צִוֶּה יְהוָֹה, “for there Jehovah commanded the blessing, even life forever more;” not in “Mount Hermon,” or “the mountains of Zion,” merely, but as belonging to this holy affection of brotherly love. Compare 1Jn_3:14.—T. L.]
[23] [For a notable example of this, see 2Ch_20:23, where the hosts of Ammon, of Moab, and of Mount Seir, who rose up against Jehoshaphat, are suddenly turned against each other. Profane history records such events as taking place, now and then, in great armies; cases of sudden and irretrievable confusion, giving rise to hostility as well as flight. They are called panics, whether the term means simply universal disorder, or what was sometimes called “the wrath of Pan” (Πανὸς ὀργή, see Eurip. “Medea,” 1169), bringing madness upon an individual or a multitude; it denotes something inexplicable, even if we refuse to call it supernatural. See Polyænus: De Strateg., Genesis 1; also a very striking passage in the “Odyssey,” xx. 346, which shows, at all events, the common belief in such sudden madness falling upon multitudes of men, whatever may be the explanation of it:
μνηστῆρσι δὲ Παλλὰς ’Αθήνη
ἄσβεστον γέλω ὦρσε παρέπλαγξεν δὲ νόημα.
Among the suitors Pallas roused
Wild laughter irrepressible, and made
Their mind to wander far.
Even where there is nothing startling to the sense, how many examples are there—they can be cited even from very modern times—where the minds of assemblies, composed sometimes of those who claim to be most shrewd and intelligent, seem strangely confounded, and, without reason, and against all apparent motive, they do the very thing which is the destruction of all their schemes. They seem seized with a sudden fatuity, and act in a manner which is afterwards unaccountable to themselves. We may explain it as we will; but so strong is the conviction of an ab extra power somehow operating in such cases, that it has passed into one of the most common of proverbs, quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat—“those whom God would destroy, he first makes mad.”—T. L.]
[24] [The first thing denoted in outward language must have been something purely inward; a conscious state of soul, a thought or an emotion, which demanded an outward sign in some articulated sound representing it, not arbitrarily, nor accidentally, but by a conscious fitness for it, such as other sounds do not possess, and of which there can no more be given an explanation than of the correspondence between a thought, or an emotion, and an outward look. It is as real, and, at the same time, as inexplicable, as the harmony which is felt to have place between a feeling, or an idea, and a musical modulation. From the primary roots representing these most interior states, and which must be comparatively few in number, comes the next order of names, namely, those of qualities and actions of outward things regarded as affecting us. From these, in the third place, come the names of outward things themselves, as having such qualities or actions, and as denoted by them. Later, indeed, though still very early, there arise metaphorical words, or words derived from the second and third classes, with secondary tropical senses intended to represent mental states as pictured in some outward thing, scene, or act; but these do not belong to the prime elements of speech, which must begin with radical sounds supposed to represent something inward by a real or imagined fitness. That there is some such primary fitness seems to be assumed by some of the best philological writers, as by Kaulen in his Sprachverwirrung, and William Von Humboldt, in his work on the Kawi language, although they are unable to explain it. It is not likely that philology will ever penetrate the mystery. The great argument, however, for the reality of such a correspondence between articulated sound and thought, is, that, on the reverse theory, language is arbitrary throughout, which we cannot believe it to be. The denial brings more difficulty than the assumption, however inexplicable the latter may be.
On this deeper psychology of language we have a hint, it may be reverently said, in what is told us, 1 Corinthians 14., concerning the mysterious “gift of tongues.” It teaches us an important fact, though revealing nothing of its nature or mode. Although miraculous, it must be founded on something in the essential human spiritual constitution. There was a real language here. It is a profane trifling with a most sacred matter to treat it as a mere thaumaturgic babble, designed only to astonish or confound the unbelieving beholders. It was the true outward expression of an elevated inward state. The words uttered must have been not only articulate (that is, formod of vowels and consonants) but truly representative. They were none of them ἄφωνοι (Gen_11:10), or mere φθογγοί, sounds, or noises. They had a real δύναμις τῆς φωνῆς (Gen_11:11), a true “power of voice,” and this could be nothing else than an inherent fitness in the utterance to represent the entranced state, not generally, merely, but in its diversities of ecstatic idea or emotion. They were not understood by the hearers, because, in their ordinary state, there was nothing within them corresponding to it. Even the utterers could not translate it into the common logical language of the νοῦς (Gen_11:14), or understanding. They were spoken ἐν πνεύματι, in the spirit, and only in the spirit could they be understood, like the words that Paul heard in his entranced state, “whether in the body, or out of the body, he could not tell.” Paul certainly does not mean to deny, or disparage, the greatness of the spiritual gift in what he says, Gen_11:19, but only to set forth the greater outward usefulness of the prophetic charisma. “I thank God,” he says (Gen_11:18) “I speak with tongues more than you all.” He was often in the state that demanded this language to express itself to itself. In respect to the connection of this peculiar case with the general argument, the analogy holds thus far, namely, that these ecstatic utterances were real representative words. They represented an inward spiritual state of thought, or emotion, or both, from a real inherent fitness to do so. We may, therefore, rationally conclude that a similar correspondence between words and ideas was at the beginning of all human speech. Had man remained spiritual, this connection would have continued as something intuitively perceived, and leading ever to a right application of articulate sounds to the things or acts signified, as it seems to have guided the first humanity in the naming of animals from some spiritual effect their appearance produced. This primitive gift or faculty of intuition became darkened by sin, sensuality, and earthliness turning the mind outward, and thus tending, more and more, to make words mere arbitrary signs. With all this, there is evidence that in the earliest speech of men there was more of vividness, more of a conscious living connection between words and that which they signified, than afterwards existed when languages became more copious and more mixed. In this way may we suppose that the early roots, though comparatively few in number, had more of a self-interpreting power, and that, in proportion as this continued, there was the greater security against the changes and diversities which a lower spiritual state must necessarily bring into language. A total loss of it among this rebellious Hamitic host may have led to a more rapid confounding of words and forms, and, of consequence, a greater ruin of language than ever came from any other event in human history. There are examples enough to show how soon the best language becomes a jargon in a community of very bad men, such as thieves and evil adventurers. Here was a similar case, as we may conceive it, only on a vastly larger scale.—T. L.]
[25][The name given to an animal could never, of course, be a full description. It is the selection of some predominant trait, action, or habit, as the distinguishing or naming feature. This may vary among different people. In one tongue the same animal may be denoted by his color, if it has something peculiar, in another by his manner of movement, in another by a burrowing property, or by his method of seizing his prey. These different conceivings may give rise to different names; and yet if the actions so represented by these names have the same or similar verbal roots they may be indicative of a remoter unity.—T. L.]
[26][If our modes of conceiving individual sensible objects have such an effect upon language, much more important, in this respect, are the more abstract conceptions, such as those of time, relative or absolute. The conserving power thus arising may receive an illustration from the scanty, yet most tenacious, Shemitic tenses, as compared with the Greek. In the Hebrew, time is conceived of as reckoned from a moving present, making all that comes after it, future, although it may be past to the absolute present of the narrator or describer, and all before it, past. It need not be said how much more of a subjective character this imparts to the language, especially in its poetry. It has had, besides, the effect of giving a peculiar form to the two tenses, and of making these, deficient as they may seem in number, denote all the varieties of time that are expressed in other languages, but in a more graphic manner. Whilst dispensing with an absolute present form, which would make it fixed and rigid, it has a flowing presence which may become absolute whenever the narration or description demands it. In the Indo-Germanic tongues, on the other hand, there is a fixed present and a fixed form for it, which will not allow a departure from the absolute time, except as sometimes implied in the assumption of a poetical style. Hence a much greater number of tense forms are demanded, not only for the past, present, and future, simply, but for a past and future to the past and future respectively, besides an indefinite or aorist form. Thus there is a wide machinery performing these offices—accurately, indeed, though with little more precision than is found in the Shemitic—whilst there is a loss of pictorial and dramatic power. There is no time, relative, or absolute, denoted by the Greek tense forms, that may not, in some way, be expressed in the Arabic; whilst the manner in which the latter shifts its present, as we may say, by hanging it on a particle, or making it depend upon its place before or after, gives a greater vividness of narration. It is astonishing how such scantiness of mode and tense escapes confusion and ambiguity; and yet there is a comparative test of this which is conclusive. The Arabic is written and read without anything like capital letters or italics, without any grammatical or logical punctuation, of any kind, making any division of paragraphs, sentences, or clauses. From the beginning of a book to the end, there are none of these helps to relieve deficiencies of expression, whether the result of carelessness, or coming from unavoidable looseness in the language. In English this could not be done. Without such outward helps, the most accurate writer, take he ever so much pains, would be full of grammatical constructions that might be taken in different ways, and not a few unsolvable logical ambiguities.—T. L.]
[27][This is on the supposition that the Shemitic (for any difference here between the earliest Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, is of little consequence) was the primitive Noachian speech that came out of the ark. The best argument for it is that there is no good argument to the contrary. If no other has any better claim on inward philological grounds, the Bible history greatly favors the idea, to say the least, that this language of the ark continued the purest in the line of Shem. Kaulen, however, in his Sprachverwirrung zu Babel, presents a philological argument that certainly seems to have weight, though, in itself, it may not be deemed conclusive. He insists upon the fact that throughout this family, the most important modifications of the verbal idea are made by vowel changes in the root itself, and not merely by additions more or less loosely made to a fixed root, growing only by agglutination. Thus from one root, k-t-l (as written without vowels), we have katal, katel, kotel, katol, katul, kittel, kattel, kuttal, ktal, ktel, ktol, etc., all presenting distinct though varying ideas. The modification of the idea is in the root, not attached to it, as in the Indo-Germanic languages, by a modal or tense letter or syllable, taken from something without. The author connects this with a view he maintains, that the vowels, as distinct from the consonants, represent the more spiritual element in language. For the argument in its detail the reader is referred to the very able work above named, p. 73.—T. L.]
[28][See the distinction that Plato makes in the Dialogue de Legibus, p. 895, D, between the thing, its spiritual word or λόγος (which is, in fact, the reason of the thing, or that which makes it what it is for the mind, its constituting idea), and the ὄνομα, the vocal name representative of the spiritual word itself.—T. L.]
[29][This would especially be the case in respect to subjects falling into the Scriptural or Koranic style. In Reckendorf’s Hebrew translation of the Koran (Leip., 1857), there are, sometimes, whole verses in which the Arabic and Hebrew are almost wholly identical, both in the roots and in the forms.—T. L.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On v28 Ur--now Orfa; that is, "light," or "fire." Its name…
Ur--now Orfa; that is, "light," or "fire." Its name probably derived from its being devoted to the rites of fire-worship. Terah and his family were equally infected with that idolatry as the rest of the inhabitants (Jos 24:15).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv10, 27, 28, 29 The Generations of Shem, Gen_11:10-26.
The Generations of Shem, Gen_11:10-26.
The narrative here again doubles back upon itself, returning over a century to take a new departure from the birth of Shem’s eldest son, two years after the flood. Having described the judgment that scattered the nations, the historian now returns to give at one view the pedigree of Abraham, the heir of the promises made successively to Adam, Seth, Noah, and Shem, and the father of the covenant people. The great post-diluvian rebellion, which gave rise to all the manifold idolatries of the Gentile nations, has been described, to set forth the need of the Abrahamic call and the Israelitish election; in other words, the dark background of the picture has been painted to set forth more vividly the forms of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judah, to whom the divine artist now turns all his attention. Abraham was the tenth, inclusive, from Shem, and the twentieth from Adam.
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Important variations from the Hebrew text are here found in the Samaritan and Septuagint, similar to those described in the notes on chap. v, giving rise to two different systems of chronology, the long, or Septuagint, that of Jackson, Hales, etc.; and the short, or Hebrew Masoretic chronology, that of Usher, adopted in our English Bibles. There is also a third system, the Rabbinic, which follows the Hebrew with certain variations. These arbitrary changes made by the Septuagint translators, although the question will long remain an open one among the most judicious scholars. The Samaritan, also, adds 650 years to the period between the flood and Abraham’s call, by making six of the patriarchs 100 years older, and one of them, Nahor, 50 years older, at the time of begetting the firstborn son. But the Septuagint, in addition to this, interposes another name, Canan, (comp. Luk_3:36,) between Arphaxad and Shelah, making him 130 years old at the birth of Shelah, and also adds 100 years more to the age of Nahor at the time of the birth of Terah, thus increasing the Samaritan period by 230 years, and the Hebrew period by 880 years. By the Hebrew chronology, followed in our English Bibles, it is, then, 422 years from the flood to the time when Abraham entered Canaan, while by the Samaritan it is 1072 years, and by the Septuagint it is 1302 years. Josephus gives minute chronological data, but he cannot be fully harmonized with either of the above systems, or with himself, although it is evident that the Hebrew numbers are the basis of his calculations.
Now since we find by the Peshito and the Targum of Onkelos that the Hebrew text was the same as now up to the time of the Christian era, and since most of the variations above recounted can be accounted for by the supposition of arbitrary changes on the part of translators and transcribers, it seems wise, with our present light, to adhere to the Hebrew chronology. The reasons for so doing may be found well set forth by Murphy in his Commentary, and are also fully given in M’Clintock & Strong’s Cyclopedia, (Art., Chronology.) It is, meanwhile, to be remembered that these chronological facts, although scientifically most important, yet form no essential part of divine revelation.
10. Shem was a hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood — Hence he was ninety-eight years old when he came out of the ark. Comp. Gen_5:32; Gen_7:11, and notes. The generations to Peleg are repeated from Gen_10:21-25.
18. Peleg — Division; that is, of the peoples at Babel. At the flood the average duration of human life was shortened nearly one half: Noah, 950; Shem, 600; Arphaxad, 438; Salah, 433; etc. And now, after the Babel catastrophe, it is shortened about one half again: Peleg, 239; Reu, 239; Serug, 230. After the call of Abraham it was shortened again about one fourth: Abraham, 175; Isaac, 180; Jacob, 147. There are, then, three distinct epochs in human longevity, marked by three divine judgments: the deluge, the Babel judgment, and the call of Abram, which left the idolatrous nations to their own ways.
26. And Terah lived seventy years, and begat (began at that time to beget)
Abram, Nahor, and Haran — Although Abram is mentioned first, as father of the covenant people, as Shem is mentioned first among the sons of Noah, yet Haran was probably the oldest son, begotten when his father was 70 years old. Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran, (Gen_12:4,) which, according to St. Stephen, (Act_7:4,) was after Terah’s death. But Terah died in Haran at the age of 205, (Gen_11:32.) Hence Terah must have been at least 130 years old at the time of Abram’s birth. But see note on Gen_11:32. Nahor is here mentioned because he was the ancestor of Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel; and Haran as the father of Lot and Iscah, (Sarah,) all of whom were blended with the covenant people.
Shem was ninety-eight years contemporary with Methuselah, who was two hundred and forty-three years contemporary with Adam; so that, if we assume that the genealogy is here completely given, no generations being omitted, there was but one link of tradition through which the story of the creation and of the fall passed over the flood. Shem was, also, one hundred and fifty years contemporary with Abraham, so that the father of the faithful received from an eye-witness the narrative of the flood, and was removed but two generations from the creation; that is, he received the history of events that Adam witnessed and experienced as if from his great-grandfather. The successive links were Adam, Methuselah, Shem, Abraham, thus:
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From this plan it is clearly seen that Methuselah was contemporary with Adam from A. M. 687 to 930, and with Shem from 1558 to 1656; and that Abraham was also contemporary with Shem from 2008 to 2158. Thus there was little chance for false tradition.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 10–26. The Genealogy of the Patriarchs from Shem to…
10–26. The Genealogy of the Patriarchs from Shem to Abram. (P.)
This genealogical table is taken from P. It resembles the table in chap. 5 (1) in the manner of the enumeration of years, (a) at the birth of the firstborn, (b) at the patriarch’s death: (2) in the general length of the list, nine (or, including Cainan, ten) generations: (3) in the last name, Terah, being represented, like Noah, as the father of three sons.
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The gradual diminution in the duration of life from Shem (600 years) and Arpachshad (438 years) to Nahor (148 years) should be noticed. See Special Note on the Longevity of the Patriarchs, Gen_14:17-24.
The period from the Flood to the birth of Abram covers 290 years. In LXX the period is given as 1070, in the Samaritan text as 940. See Note on the Genealogy of Shem, see below.
The names Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, and Peleg coincide with those in Gen_10:22; Gen_10:24-25 (J).
NOTE ON THE GENEALOGY OF SHEM
NameMassoretic TextSamaritan TextSeptuagint TextBook of jubileesTotal1st SonAfterTotal1st SonAfterTotal1st Son1. Shem100500600100500600100500600102?2. Arpachshad3540343813530343813543056566?[Cainan]130330460573. Shelah30403433130303433130330460714. Eber34430464134270404134370504645. Peleg3020923913010923913020933961(L. 134)6. Reu32207239132107239132207339597. Serug30200230130100230130200330578. Nahor2911914879691487912920862(L. 125)9. Terah701352057075145701352057039010401170669(L. 1174)From Flood to Birth of Abram290940107056710. These are the generations] The heading of a new section in P: see Gen_2:4 a.
Arpachshad] See note on Gen_10:22, where Arpachshad is the third son of Shem. Possibly Babylonia, or a locality in it, was regarded as the primitive home of Abram’s ancestors.
after the flood] Shem (see Gen_5:32 and Gen_7:6) was a hundred years old when the Flood began.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv10, 27, 28, 29 (10-26) These are the generations of Shem.—Here also, as…
THE TÔLDÔTH SHEM.
(10-26) These are the generations of Shem.—Here also, as in Genesis 5, there is a very considerable divergence between the statements of the Hebrew, the Samaritan, and the Septuagint texts. According to the Hebrew, the total number of years from Shem to the birth of Abram was 390, according to the Samaritan, 1,040, and according to the LXX., 1,270. These larger totals are obtained by adding, as a rule, one hundred years to the age of each patriarch before the birth of his eldest son, and the LXX. also insert Cainan between Arphaxad and Salah. The virtual agreement of two authorities, coming from such different quarters as the Samaritan transcript and the LXX. version is remarkable, but scholars have long acknowledged that these genealogies were never intended for chronological purposes, and that so to employ them leads only to error.
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Like the genealogy of Seth, in Genesis 5, the Tôldôth Shem also consists of ten generations, and thus forms, according to Hebrew ideas respecting the number ten, a perfect representation of the race. With the exception of Arphaxad (for whom see Gen_10:22), the names in this genealogy are all Hebrew words, and are full of meaning. Thus—
Salah means mission, the sending out of men in colonies to occupy new lands.
Eber is the passage, marking the migration of the head-quarters of the race, and the crossing of some great obstacle in its way, most probably the river Tigris. With this would begin the long struggle between the Semitic and Hamitic races in Mesopotamia.
Peleg, division, may be a memorial of the separation of the Joktanite Arabs from the main stem, but see Note on Gen_10:25. Through him the rights of primogeniture passed to the Hebrews.
Reu, friendship, seems to indicate a closer drawing together of the rest after the departure of Joktan and his clan, which probably had been preceded by dissensions.
Serug, intertwining, may denote that this friendship between the various races into which the family of Shem was by this time divided was cemented by intermarriage.
Nahor, panting, earnest struggle, indicates, most probably, the commencement of that seeking after a closer communion with God which made his descendants withdraw from contact with the rest and form a separate community, distinguished by its firm hold of the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. From the words of Joshua (Jos_24:2) it is plain, not only that idolatry was generally practised among the descendants of Shem, but that even Nahor and Terah were not free from its influence. Yet, probably, the monotheism of Abraham was preceded by an effort to return to the purer doctrine of their ancestors in Nahor’s time, and the gods which they still worshipped were the teraphim, regarded both by Laban and Rachel (Gen_31:30; Gen_31:34) as a kind of inferior household genius, which brought good luck to the family.
Terah, wandering, indicates the commencement of that separation from the rest caused by religious differences, which ended in the migration of Abram into Canaan.
In Abram, high-father, we have a prophetic name, indicative of the high purpose for which the father of the faithful was chosen. There is a difficulty about the date of his birth. We read that “Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran;” and in Gen_11:32 that “the days of Terah were two hundred and five years.” But St. Stephen says that Terah died in Haran before Abram’s migration (Act_7:4), and in Gen_12:4 we are told that Abram was seventy-five years of age when he departed from that country. Either, therefore, Terah was a hundred and thirty years old when Abram was born—and Abram was a younger, and not the older son—or the Samaritan text is right in making the total age of Terah a hundred and forty-five years. The latter is probably the true solution: first, because Nahor died at the age of a hundred and forty-eight, and it is not probable that Terah so long outlived him; for human life, as we have seen, was progressively shortening after the flood: and secondly, because Abram, in Gen_17:17, speaks of it as almost an impossibility for a man to have a son when he is a hundred years old. Had he been born when his father was a hundred and thirty, he could scarcely have spoken in this way.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29 These are the generations of Shem. The new section,…
THE GENERATIONS OF SHEM (CH. 11:10-26).
CHAPTER 11:10-26
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These are the generations of Shem. The new section, opening with the usual formula, (cf. Gen_2:4 Gen_5:1 Gen_6:9 Gen_10:1) reverts to the main purpose of the inspired narrative, which is to trace the onward development of the line of promise; and this it does by carrying forward the genealogical history of the holy seed through ten generations till it reaches Abram. Taken along with Genesis 5., with which it corresponds, the present table completes the chronological outline from Adam to the Hebrew patriarch. Shem was a hundred years old (literally, the son of an hundred years, i.e. in his hundredth year), and begat Arphaxad. The English term is borrowed from the LXX, the Hebrew being Arpaehshadh, a compound of which the principal part is d giving rise to the Chashdim or Chaldeans; whence Professor Lewis regards it as originally the name of a people transferred to their ancestor (cf. Gen_10:22) Two years after the flood. So that in Noah"s 603rd year Shem was 100, and must accordingly have been born in Noah"s 503rd year, i.e. two years after Japheth (cf. Gen_5:32 Gen_10:21) The mention of the Flood indicates the point of time from which the present section is designed to be reckoned.
Vers. 10-26.
From Shem to Abram.
I THE SEPARATION OF THE GODLY SEED. The souls that constitute the Church of God upon the earth are always, as these Hebrew patriarchs
1. Known to God; and that not merely in the mass, but as individuals, or units; nor simply superficially and slightly, but minutely and thoroughly. He knows the fathers they descend from, the families they belong to, the names by which they are designated, the number of years they live, and the children they leave behind them on the earth (cf. Psa_1:6; 2Ti_2:19)
2. Separated by God. This was one of the great ends contemplated by the division of the people which happened in the days of Peleg, which was designed to eliminate the Shemites from the rest of mankind. Then the migration of the sons of Eber contributed further to the isolation of the children of the promise. And, lastly, the selection of the son, not always the firstborn, through whom the hope of the gospel was to be carried on tended in the same direction. So God afterwards separated Israel from the nations. So he still by his providence and his word calls out and separates his people from the world (cf. 1Ki_8:53; 2Co_6:17)
3. Honored before God; by being selected as the vessels of his grace, the channels of his promise, the ministers of his gospel, and the messengers of his covenant, while others are passed by; and by being written in God"s book of remembrance, while others are forgotten (cf. 1Sa_2:30; Psa_91:15; Mal_3:16; Mat_10:32; Rev_3:5)
II THE SHORTENING OF HUMAN LIFE. A second characteristic of the postdiluvian era.
1. A patent fact. Even Shem, the longest liver of the men of this period, did not continue on the earth so long as Lamech, the shortest liver of the previous age, by 177 years; while the life of Arphaxad was shorter than that of his father by 162 years, and the days of Terah at the close dwindled down to 205 years.
2. A potent sermon. Whether the comparative brevity of life immediately after the Flood was due to any change in the physical constitution of man, or to the altered conditions of existence under the Noachic covenant, or to the gradual deterioration of the race through the lapse of time, or to the direct appointment of Heaven, it was admirably fitted to remind them of
(1) The reality of sin. With its penalty descending so palpably and frequently it would seem impossible to challenge the fact of their being a guilty and condemned race.
(2) The necessity of repentance. Every death that happened would sound like a trumpet-call to sinful men to turn to God.
(3) The vanity of life. The long terms of existence that were meted out to men before the Flood might tempt them to forget the better country, even a heavenly, and to seek a permanent inheritance on earth; it would almost seem apparent to these short livers that no such inheritance could be obtained below. Alas that the shortness of man"s career beneath the sun is now so familiar that it has well nigh ceased to impress the mind with anything!
(4) The certainty of death. When men"s lives were counted by centuries it might be easy to evade the thought of death. When decades came to be enough to reckon up the longest term of existence, it could scarcely fail to remind them that "it was appointed unto all men once to die
III THE NEARING OF THE GOSPEL PROMISE. Ten generations further down the stream of time do we see the promise carried in this second genealogical table. It was
1. A vindication of the Divine faithfulness in adhering to his promise. Already twenty generations had come and gone, and neither was the promise forgotten nor had the holy line been allowed to become extinct. Ever since Adam"s day in Eden the covenant-keeping Jehovah had found a seed to serve him, even in the darkest times, and had been careful to raise up saints who would transmit the hope of the gospel to future times. It was a proof to the passing generations that God was still remembering his promise, and was intending to make it good in the fullness of the times.
2. A demonstration of Gods ability to keep his promise. Not once through all the bygone centuries had-a link been found wanting in the chain of saintly men through whom the promise was to be transmitted. It was a clear pledge that God would still be able to supply the necessary links that might be required to carry it forward to its ultimate fulfillment.
HOMILIES BY W. ROBERTS Vers. 10-26.
The order of grace is
1. Determined by God, and not by man.
2. Arranged after the Spirit, and not according to the flesh.
3. Appointed for the world"s good as well as for the Church"s safety. W.
HOMILIES BY R.A. REDFORD Vers. 10-32.
Divine traditions.
A genealogy of Shem and of Terah, in order to set forth clearly the position of Abraham and that of his nephew Lot, and their connection with Ur of the Chaldees and Canaan. The chosen family is about to be separated from their country, but we are not told that there was no light of God shining in Ur of the Chaldees. Probably there was the tradition of Shem"s knowledge handed down through the generations. Arphaxad was born two years after the Flood; Salah, thirty-seven years; Eber, sixty-seven years; Peleg, one hundred and one years; Reu, one hundred and thirty-one years; Serug, one hundred and sixty-three years; Nahor, one hundred and ninety-three years; Terah, the father of Abraham, two hundred and twenty-two years no great length of time for traditions to be preserved. The call of Abram was not merely his separation from idolatry, but his consecration to the special vocation of founding the religious institutions which were to be connected with his family. R.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 These are the generations of Shem
Gen_11:10-26
These are the generations of Shem
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The generations of Shem
I.
THE LINE IN WHICH THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUE GOD WAS PRESERVED.
II. THE DIRECTION OF THE STREAM OF HISTORY TOWARDS THE MESSIAH. God calmly and resolutely proceeds with His purpose of mercy. In the accomplishment of this eternal purpose He moves with all the solemn grandeur of long suffering patience. One day is with Him as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Out of Adams three sons He selects one to be the progenitor of the seed of the woman. Out of Noahs three sons He again selects one. And now out of Terahs three is one to be selected. Among the children of this one He will choose a second one, and among his a third one before He reaches the holy family. Doubtless this gradual mode of proceeding is in keeping with the hereditary training of the holy nation, and the due adjustment of the Divine measures for at length bringing the fulness of the Gentiles in the covenant of everlasting peace.
III. THE GRADUAL, NARROWING OF HUMAN LIFE. In the manifold weakenings of the highest life endurance, in the genealogy of them, there are, nevertheless, distinctly observable a number of abrupt breaks--
1. From Shem to Arphaxad, or from 600 years to 438;
2. From Eber to Peleg, or from 464 years to 239.
3. From Serug to Nahor, or from 230 years to 148; beyond which last, again, there extend the lives of Terah, with his 205, and of Abraham, with his 175 years. Farther on we have Isaac with 180 years, Jacob 147, and Joseph 110. So gradually does the human term of life approach the limit set by the Psalmist (Psa_90:10). Moses reached the age of 120 years. The deadly efficacy goes on still in the bodily sphere, although the counter working of salvation has commenced in the spiritual. (T. H. Leale.)
Post-diluvial genealogy
The general title is expressed thus, These are the generations of Shem. Of these Moses was speaking (chap. 10), so far as Peleg, whose name was given him upon the occasion of dividing the earth; by way of parenthesis, he includes the history and cause of this earths division, in the former part of this chapter. He now returns to draw up the line full unto Abram, about which this title is set in the front. Consider the use of all these mentioned in the title.
1. To point where the Church of God was after the flood.
2. To show Gods providence in singling out some generations in the world for His Church, these and not others.
3. To make known to us the state of the Church either for truth or for corruption at this time.
4. To continue to us the right chronology of the world, not for speculation only, but for pious practice to us, upon whom the ends of the world are come.
5. To make us better understand some passages of the prophets mentioning these persons or their conditions.
6. To show us the true line of Christ, and to confirm the New Testament given by Him. Every generation in the Church from the flood is but to bring Christ nearer. (G. Hughes, B. D.)
Race of man
The human race may be compared to an immense temple ruined, but now rebuilding, the numerous compartments of which represent the several nations of the earth. True, the different portions of the edifice present great anomalies; but yet the foundation and the cornerstone are the same. All spring from the same level, and all should be directed to the same end. The walls of the building have been thrown down, and the stones scattered by a great earthquake; yet a mighty Architect has appeared, and His powerful hand is gradually raising the temple wails. The only difference between one side of the edifice and the other is, that here the restoration is somewhat further advanced, while there it is less forward. Alas! some places are still overgrown with thorns, where not a single stone appears. Yet the great Architect may one day look down on these desolate spots, and there the building may suddenly and rapidly spring up, reaching the summit long before those lofty walls which seem to have outgrown the others, but which are still standing half-raised and incomplete. The last shall be first. (Merle DAubigne.)
Lessons
1. Gods providence hath pointed out His Church and recorded its line, after as before the flood; herein helping the faith of following ages.
2. God chooseth what generations and families He pleaseth to pitch His Church in them.
3. A family God may choose out of the world to set His name upon them, when the world is passed by; a few or little remnant God reserveth.
4. Every generation in the Church from the flood is but to bring Christ nearer.
5. Times are appointed for the birth of everyone in the Church for His work (Gen_11:10).
6. Length of days, etc., God giveth to His chief witnesses, as Shem was to Isaacs days; much work he had to do in that compass of time.
7. The eminentest in the Church, may have many children degenerate from it. More care should be used to keep them closer to God (Gen_11:11). (G. Hughes, B. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v27 Gen_11:27-32; Gen_12:1-5
THE CALL OF ABRAHAM
Gen_11:27-32; Gen_12:1-5
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WITH Abraham there opens a new chapter in the history of the race; a chapter of the profoundest significance. The consequences of Abrahams movements and beliefs have been limitless and enduring. All succeeding time has been influenced by him. And yet there is in his life a remarkable simplicity, and an entire absence of such events as impress contemporaries. Among all the forgotten millions of his own time he stands alone a recognisable and memorable figure. But around his figure there gathers no throng of armed followers; with his name, no vast territorial dominion, no new legislation, not even any work of literature or art is associated. The significance of his life was not military, nor legislative, nor literary, but religious. To him must be carried back the belief in one God. We find him born and brought up among idolaters; and although it is certain there were others besides himself who here and there upon earth had dimly arrived at the same belief as he, yet it is certainly from him the Monotheistic belief has been diffused. Since his day the world has never been without its explicit advocacy. It is his belief in the true God, in a God who manifested His existence and His nature by responding to this belief, it is this belief and the place he gave it as the regulating principle of all his movements and thoughts, that have given him his everlasting influence.
With Abraham there is also introduced the first step in a new method adopted by God in the training of men. The dispersion of men and the divergence of their languages are now seen to have been the necessary preliminary to this new step in the education of the world-the fencing round of one people till they should learn to know God and understand and exemplify His government. It is true, God reveals Himself to all men and governs all; but by selecting one race with special adaptations, and by giving to it a special training, God might more securely and more rapidly reveal Himself to all. Each nation has certain characteristics, a national character which grows by seclusion from the influences which are forming other races. There is a certain mental and moral individuality stamped upon every separate people. Nothing is more certainly retained; nothing more certainly handed down from generation to generation. It would therefore be a good practical means of conserving and deepening the knowledge of God, if it were made the national interest of a people to preserve it, and if it were closely identified with the national characteristics. This was the method adopted by God. He meant to combine allegiance to Himself with national advantages, and spiritual with national character, and separation in belief with a distinctly outlined and defensible territory.
This method, in common with all Divine methods, was in strict keeping with the natural evolution of history. The migration of Abraham occurred in the epoch of migrations. But although for centuries before Abraham new nations had been forming, none of them had belief in God as its formative principle. Wave upon wave of warriors, shepherds, colonists have left the prolific plains of Mesopotamia. Swarm after swarm has left that busy hive, pushing one another further and further west and east, but all have been urged by natural impulses, by hunger, commerce, love of adventure and conquest. By natural likings and dislikings, by policy, and by dint of force the multitudinous tribes of men were finding their places in the world, the weaker being driven to the hills, and being schooled there by hard living till their descendants came down and conquered their conquerors. All this went on without regard to any very high motives. As it was with the Goths who invaded Italy for her wealth, as it is now with those who people America and Africa because there is land or room enough, so it was then. But at last God selects one man and says, "I will make of thee a great nation." The origin of this nation is not facile love of change nor lust of territory, but belief in God. Without this belief this people had not been. No other account can be given of its origin. Abraham is himself already the member of a tribe, well-off and likely to be well-off; he has no large family to provide for, but he is separated from his kindred and country, and led out to be himself a new beginning, and this because, as he himself throughout his life said, he heard Gods call and responded to it.
The city which claims the distinction of being Abrahams birthplace, or at least of giving its name to the district where he was born, is now represented by a few mounds of ruins rising out of the flat marshy ground on the western bank of the Euphrates, not far above the point where it joins its waters to those of the Tigris and glides on to the Persian gulf. In the time of Abraham, Ur was the capital city which gave its name to one of the most populous and fertile regions of the earth. The whole land of Accad, which ran up from the sea-coast to Upper Mesopotamia (or Shinar), seems to have been known as Ur-ma, the land of Ur. This land was of no great extent, being little if at all larger than Scotland, but it was the richest of Asia. The high civilisation which this land enjoyed even in the time of Abraham has been disclosed in the abundant and multifarious Babylonian remains which have recently been brought to light.
What induced Terah to abandon so prosperous a land can only be conjectured. It is possible that the idolatrous customs of the inhabitants may have had something to do with his movements. For while the ancient Babylonian records reveal a civilisation surprisingly advanced, and a social order in some respects admirable, they also make disclosures regarding the worship of the gods which must shock even those who are familiar with the immoralities frequently fostered by heathen religions. The city of Ur was not only the capital, it was the holy city of the Chaldeans. In its northern quarter rose high above the surrounding buildings the successive stages of the temple of the moon-god, culminating in a platform on which the priests could both accurately observe the motions of the stars and hold their night-watches in honour of their god. In the courts of this temple might be heard breaking the silence of midnight one of those magnificent hymns, still preserved, in which idolatry is seen in its most attractive dress, and in which the Lord of Ur is invoked in terms not unworthy of the living God. But in these same temple-courts Abraham may have seen the firstborn led to the altar, the fruit of the body sacrificed to atone for the sin of the soul; and here too he must have seen other sights even more shocking and repulsive. Here he was no doubt taught that strangely mixed religion which clung for generations to some members of his family. Certainly he was taught in common with the whole community to rest on the seventh day; as he was trained to look to the stars with reverence and to the moon as something more than the light which was set to rule the night.
Possibly then Terah may have been induced to move northwards by a desire to shake himself free from customs he disapproved. The Hebrews themselves seem always to have considered that his migration had a religious motive. "This people," says one of their old writings, "is descended from the Chaldeans, and they sojourned heretofore in Mesopotamia because they would not follow the gods of their fathers which were in the land of Chaldea. For they left the way of their ancestors and worshipped the God of heaven, the God whom they knew; so they cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into Mesopotamia and sojourned there many days. Then their God commanded them to depart from the place where they sojourned and to go into the land of Canaan." But if this is a true account of the origin of the movement northwards, it must have been Abraham rather than his father who was the moving spirit of it; for it is certainly Abraham and not Terah who stands as the significant figure inaugurating the new era.
If doubt rests on the moving cause of the migration from Ur, none rests on that which prompted Abraham to leave Charran and journey towards Canaan. He did so in obedience to what he believed to be a Divine command, and in faith on what he understood to be a Divine promise. How he became aware that a Divine command thus lay upon him we do not know. Nothing could persuade him that he was not commanded. Day by day he heard in his soul what he recognised as a Divine voice, saying: "Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy fathers house, unto a land that I will show thee!" This was Gods first revelation of Himself to Abraham. Up to this time Abraham to all appearance had no knowledge of any God but the deities worshipped by his fathers in Chaldea. Now, he finds within himself impulses which he cannot resist and which he is conscious he ought not to resist. He believes it to be his duty to adopt a course which may look foolish and which he can justify only by saying that his conscience bids him. He recognises, apparently for the first time, that through his conscience there speaks to him a God Who is supreme. In dependence on this God he gathered his possessions together and departed.
So far, one may be tempted to say, no very unusual faith was required. Many a poor girl has followed a weakly brother or a dissipated father to Australia or the wild west of America; many a lad has gone to the deadly west coast of Africa with no such prospects as Abraham. For Abraham had the double prospect which makes migration desirable. Assure the colonist that he will find land and have strong sons to till and hold and leave it to, and you give him all the motive he requires. These were the promises made to Abraham-a land and a seed. Neither was there at this period much difficulty in believing that both promises would be fulfilled. The land he no doubt expected to find in some unoccupied territory. And as regards the children, he had not yet faced the condition that only through Sarah was this part of the promise to be fulfilled.
But the peculiarity in Abrahams abandonment of present certainties for the sake of a future and unseen good is, that it was prompted not by family affection or greed or an adventurous disposition, but by faith in a God Whom no one but himself recognised. It was the first step in a life-long adherence to an Invisible, Spiritual Supreme. It was that first step which committed him to life-long dependence upon and intercourse with One Who had authority to regulate his movements and power to bless him. From this time forth all that he sought in life was the fulfilment of Gods promise. He staked his future upon Gods existence and faithfulness. Had Abraham abandoned Charran at the command of a widely ruling monarch who promised him ample compensation, no record would have been made of so ordinary a transaction. But this was an entirely new thing and well worth recording, that a man should leave country and kindred and seek an unknown land under the impression that thus he was obeying the command of the unseen God. While others worshipped sun, moon, and stars, and recognised the Divine in their brilliance and power, in their exaltation above earth and control of earth and its life, Abraham saw that there was something greater than the order of nature and more worthy of worship, even the still small voice that spoke within his own conscience of right and wrong in human conduct, and that told him how his own life must be ordered. While all around him were bowing down to the heavenly host and sacrificing to them the highest things in human nature, he heard a voice falling from these shining ministers of Gods will, which said to him, "See thou do it not, for we are thy fellow-servants; worship thou God!" This was the triumph of the spiritual over the material; the acknowledgment that in God there is something greater than can be found in nature; that man finds his true affinity not in the things that are seen but in the unseen Spirit that is over all. It is this that gives to the figure of Abraham its simple grandeur and its permanent significance.
Under the simple statement "The Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country," there are probably hidden years of questioning and meditation. Gods revelation of Himself to Abram in all probability did not take the determinate form of articulate command without having passed through many preliminary stages of surmise and doubt and mental conflict. But once assured that God is calling him, Abraham responds quickly and resolutely. The revelation has come to a mind in which it will not be lost. As one of the few theologians who have paid attention to the method of revelation has said: "A Divine revelation does not dispense with a certain character and certain qualities of mind in the person who is the instrument of it. A man who throws off the chains of authority and association must be a man of extraordinary independence and strength of mind, although he does so in obedience to a Divine revelation; because no miracle, no sign or wonder which accompanies a revelation can by its simple stroke force human nature from the innate hold of custom and the adhesion to and fear of established opinion: can enable it to confront the frowns of men, and take up truth opposed to general prejudice, except there is in the man himself, who is the recipient of the revelation, a certain strength of mind and independence which concurs with the Divine intention."
That Abrahams faith triumphed over exceptional difficulties and enabled him to do what no other motive would have been strong enough to accomplish, there is therefore no call to assert. During his after-life his faith was severely tried, but the mere abandonment of his country in the hope of gaining a better was the ordinary motive of his day. It was the ground of this hope, the belief in God, which made Abrahams conduct original and fruitful. That sufficient inducement was presented to him is only to say that God is reasonable. There is always sufficient inducement to obey God; because life is reasonable. No man was ever commanded or required to do anything which it was not for his advantage to do. Sin is a mistake. But so weak are we, so liable to be moved by the things present to us and by the desire for immediate gratification, that it never ceases to be wonderful and admirable when a sense of duty enables a man to forego present advantage and to believe that present loss is the needful preliminary of eternal gain.
Abrahams faith is chosen by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews as an apt illustration of his definition of Faith, that it is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." One property of faith is that it gives to things future, and which are as yet only hoped for, all the reality of actual present existence. Future things may be said to have no existence for those who do not believe in them. They are not taken into account. Men do not shape their conduct with any reference to them. But when a man believes in certain events that are to be, this faith of his lends to these future things the reality, the "substance" which things actually existing in the present have. They have the same weight with him, the same influence upon his conduct.
Without some power to realise the future and to take account of what is to be as well as of what already is, we could not carry on the common affairs of life. And success in life very greatly depends on foresight, or the power to see clearly what is to be and give it due weight. The man who has no foresight makes his plans, but being unable to apprehend the future his plans are disconcerted. Indeed it is one of the most valuable gifts a man can have, to be able to say with tolerable accuracy what is to happen and what is not; to be able to sift rumours, common talk, popular impressions, probabilities, chances, and to be able to feel sure what the future will really be; to be able to weigh the character and commercial prospects of the men he deals with, so as to see what must be the issue of their operations and whom he may trust. Many of our most serious mistakes in life arise from our inability to imagine the consequences of our actions and to forefeel how these consequences will affect us.
Now faith largely supplies the want of this imaginative foresight. It lends substance to things future. It believes the account given of the future by a trustworthy authority. In many ordinary matters all men are dependent on the testimony of others for their knowledge of the result of certain operations. The astronomer, the physiologist, the navigator, each has his department within which his predictions are accepted as authoritative. But for what is beyond the ken of science no faith in our fellow-men avails. Feeling that if there is a life beyond the grave, it must have important bearings on the present, we have yet no data by which to calculate what will then be, or only data so difficult to use that our calculations are but guesswork. But faith accepts the testimony of God as unhesitatingly as that of man and gives reality to the future He describes and promises. It believes that the life God calls us to is a better life, and it enters upon it. It believes that there is a world to come in which all things are new and all things eternal; and, so believing, it cannot but feel less anxious to cling to this worlds goods. That which embitters all loss and deepens sorrow is the feeling that this world is all; but faith makes eternity as real as time and gives substantial existence to that new and limitless future in which we shall have time to forget the sorrows and live past the losses of this present world.
The radical elements of greatness are identical from age to age, and the primal duties which no good man can evade do not vary as the world grows older. What we admire in Abraham we feel to be incumbent on ourselves. Indeed the uniform call of Christ to all His followers is even in form almost identical with that which stirred Abraham, and made him the father of the faithful. "Follow Me," says our Lord, "and every one that forsaketh houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My names sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." And there is something perennially edifying in the spectacle of a man who believes that God has a place and a use for him in the world, and who puts himself at Gods disposal; who enters upon life refusing to be bound by the circumstances of his upbringing, by the expectations of his friends, by prevailing customs, by prospect of gain and advancement among men; and resolved to listen to the highest voice of all, to discover what God has for him to do upon earth and where he is likely to find most of God; who virtually and with deepest sincerity says, Let God choose my destination: I have good land here, but if God wishes me elsewhere, elsewhere I go: who, in one word, believes in the call of God to himself, who admits it into the springs of his conduct, and recognises that for him also the highest life his conscience can suggest is the only life he can live, no matter how cumbrous and troublesome and expensive be the changes involved in entering it. Let the spectacle take hold of your imagination-the spectacle of a man believing that there is something more akin to himself and higher than the material life and the great laws that govern it, and going calmly and hopefully forward into the unknown, because he knows that God is with him, that in God is our true life, that man liveth not by bread only, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth of God.
Even thus then may we bring our faith to a true and reliable test. All men who have a confident expectation of future good make sacrifices or run risks to obtain it. Mercantile life proceeds on the understanding that such ventures are reasonable and will always be made. Men might if they liked spend their money on present pleasure, but they rarely do so. They prefer to put it into concerns or transactions from which they expect to reap large returns. They have faith, and as a necessary consequence they make ventures. So did these Hebrews-they ran a great risk, they gave up the sole means of livelihood they had any experience of and entered what they knew to be a bare desert, because they believed in the land that lay beyond and in Gods promise. What then has your faith done? What have you ventured that you would not have ventured but for Gods promise. Suppose Christs promise failed, in what would you be the losers? Of course you would lose what you call your hope of heaven-but what would you find you had lost in this world? When a merchants ships are wrecked or when his investment turns out bad, he loses not only the gain he hoped for, but the means he risked. Suppose then Christ were declared bankrupt, unable to fulfil your expectations, would you really find that you had ventured so much upon His promise that you are deeply involved in His bankruptcy, and are much worse off in this world and now than you would otherwise have been? Or may I not use the words of one of the most cautious and charitable of men, and say, "I really fear, when we come to examine, it will be found that there is nothing we resolve, nothing we do, nothing we do not do, nothing we avoid, nothing we choose, nothing we give up, nothing we pursue, which we should not resolve, and do, and not do, and avoid, and choose, and give up, and pursue, if Christ had not died and heaven were not promised us." If this be the case-if you would be neither much better nor much worse though Christianity were a fable-if you have in nothing become poorer in this world that your reward in heaven may be greater, if you have made no investments and run no risks, then really the natural inference is that your faith in the future inheritance is small. Barnabas sold his Cyprus property because he believed heaven was his, and his bit of land suddenly became a small consideration; useful only in so far as he could with the mammon of unrighteousness make himself a mansion in heaven. Paul gave up his prospects of advancement in the nation, of which he would of course as certainly have become the leader and first man as he took that position in the Church, and plainly tells us that having made so large a venture on Christs word, he would if his word failed be a great loser, of all men most miserable because he had risked his all in this life on it. People sometimes take offence at Pauls plain way of speaking of the sacrifices he had made, and of Peters plain way of saying "we have left all and followed Thee, what shall we have therefore?" but when people have made sacrifices they know it and can specify them, and a faith that makes no sacrifices is no good either in this worlds affairs or in religion. Self-consciousness may not be a very good thing: but self-deception is a worse.
Here as elsewhere a clear hope sprang from faith. Recognising God, Abraham knew that there was for men a great future. He looked forward to a time when all men should believe as he did, and in him all families of the earth be blessed. No doubt in these early days, when all men were on the move and striving to make a name and a place for themselves, an onward look might be common. But the far-reaching extent, the certainty, and the definiteness of Abrahams view of the future were unexampled. There far back in the hazy dawn he stood while the morning mists hid the horizon from every other eye, and he alone discerns what is to be. One clear voice and one only rings out in unfaltering tones and from amidst the babel of voices that utter either amazing follies or misdirected yearnings, gives the one true forecast and direction-the one living word which has separated itself from and survived all the prognostications of Chaldean soothsayers and priests of Ur, because it has never ceased to give life to men. It has created for itself a channel and you can trace it through the centuries by the living green of its banks and the life it gives as it goes. For this hope of Abraham has been fulfilled; the creed and its accompanying blessing which that day lived in the heart of one man only has brought blessing to all the families of the earth.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 Gen_11:10. These are the generations of Shem] The genealogies…
CRITICAL NOTES.—
Gen_11:10. These are the generations of Shem] The genealogies are here only given in part, the writer’s object being to trace the pedigree of Abram from Shem.—
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MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Gen_11:10-26
THE GENERATIONS OF SHEM
“These are the generations.” This is the usual phrase, employed in several places in this book, to mark a new development in the history. Here, it marks the beginning of the fifth document, in which the generations of Shem are recorded. As is often the case with such genealogies, some links are wanting, but a sufficient number are given to indicate the general course of the history. The details of the record are governed by the main purpose of the historian, which was to introduce us to Abraham through the line of Shem. The object of the Bible is not to satisfy a minute and prying curiosity, but to put us in possession of the great facts upon which the doctrines of salvation are based. We learn from this document:—
I. The line in which the knowledge of the true God was preserved. Shem was destined to preserve the name of God through all the corruptions of the old world. The knowledge of God might have perished from the earth, had not one people been selected to preserve it. The wisdom of God therefore provided a home for the safe custody of His truth and the maintenance of His worship. This was necessary because the nations had now begun to depart from the living God. Not content with ungodliness, they fell into positive error—into all the absurdities of polytheism and idolatry. The hope of the human race henceforth centres in the chosen people. It is because of the precious interests of this hope that the Bible confines itself mainly to the history of one people, which though insignificant in themselves, were truly great on account of the purpose of their existence. The very phrase, “The King of the Jews,” shows that the Messiah King was to arise out of that nation. The Bible is not a history of all men, but a history of the kingdom of God, and therefore the heathen nations gradually drop from the sacred page, and only appear at distant intervals when they come in conflict with the chosen people. All things in Scripture are subordinated to its main purpose. We learn also—
II. The direction of the stream of history towards the Messiah. If we can say that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev_19:10), we may also affirm that the spirit of sacred history centres in the same testimony. In the records of the chosen people, we can discover a movement towards a sublime end. The promise of a Messiah was at first vaguely given, but in process of time it grew clearer in outline, and richer with concentrated blessing. It increased in definiteness until “God was manifest in the flesh.” “God calmly and resolutely proceeds with His purpose of mercy. In the accomplishment of this eternal purpose He moves with all the solemn grandeur of long suffering patience. One day is with Him as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Out of Adam’s three sons He selects one to be the progenitor of the seed of the woman. Out of Noah’s three sons He again selects one. And now out of Terah’s three is one to be selected. Among the children of this one He will choose a second one, and among his a third one before He reaches the holy family. Doubtless this gradual mode of proceeding is in keeping with the hereditary training of the holy nation, and the due adjustment of the Divine measures, for at length bringing the fulness of the Gentiles in the covenant of everlasting peace.”—(Murphy.) We learn further—
III. The gradual narrowing of human life. As a judgment upon the sin of the old world, God determined to contract the duration of human life. That judgment was not inflicted at once. The threatened limit was but slowly reached. God is not in haste to inflict penalty. His justice proceeds with a solemn majesty of movement. In this history, which shows how the span of life is gradually narrowing, it would appear as if the old energy does but slowly leave the children of men. “In the manifold weakenings of the highest life endurance, in the genealogy of them, there are, nevertheless, distinctly observable a number of abrupt breaks—
(1) from Shem to Arphaxad, or from 600 years to 438;
(2) from Eber to Peleg, or from 464 years to 239;
(3) from Serug to Nahor, or from 230 years to 148; beyond which last, again, there extend the lives of Terah, with his 205, and of Abraham, with his 175 years. Farther on we have Isaac with 180 years, Jacob 147, and Joseph 110. So gradually does the human term of life approach the limit set by the Psalmist (Psa_90:10). Moses reached the age of 120 years. The deadly efficacy goes on still in the bodily sphere, although the counter-working of salvation has commenced in the spiritual.”—(Lange.)
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Gen_11:10-11. The general title is expressed thus, “These are the generations of Shem.” Of these Moses was speaking, Genesis 10, so far as Peleg, whose name being given him upon the occasion of dividing the earth; by way of parenthesis, he includes the history and cause of this earth’s division, in the former part of this chapter. He now returns to draw up the line full unto Abram, about which this title is set in the front. Consider the use of all these mentioned in the title.
1. To point out where the Church of God was after the flood.
2. To show God’s Providence in singling out some generations in the world for His Church, these and not others.
3. To make known to us the state of the Church either for truth or for corruption at this time.
4. To continue to us the right chronology of the world, not for speculation only, but for pious practice to us, upon whom the ends of the world are come.
5. To make us better understand some passages of the prophets mentioning these persons or their conditions.
6. To show us the true line of Christ, and to confirm the New Testament given by Him. Every generation in the Church from the flood is but to bring Christ nearer.—(Hughes.)
A second Kenan is inserted after Arpakshad in the Septuagint, and in the Gospel according to Luke. But this name does not occur even in the Septuagint in 1Ch_1:24, where the genealogy of Abraham is given. It is not found in the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Targums, or the ancient versions. It does not appear in Josephus or Philo. Neither is it found in the Codex Bezae in the Gospel of Luke. It must therefore be regarded as an interpolation.—(Murphy.)
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
F. W. Grant 1903 · Public Domain On v10 Subdivision 4. (Gen 11:10-21.) Abraham.
Subdivision 4. (Gen 11:10-21.) Abraham.
Abraham, the "heir of the world" (Rom 4:13); and the pilgrim-walk and trial of faith. (Fruit of the ground, third day.)
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Abraham occupies an especial place in Scripture, as the pattern of faith so far as the Old Testament could give it, "the father of all them that believe." Coming after Noah, in the series of Genesis-lives, he typically presents to us, and in the most striking way, the pilgrim character, which is the result of the consciousness of the heavenly calling. Called to Canaan, the type of our heavenly portion, he does not yet possess it, except in faith, and is therefore a sojourner only, -a man of the tent, and not the city. Lot is his contrast and opposite in this, and that he is a child of God makes him more strikingly so.
His history divides into two sections: the first of which gives the call of God and his obedience to it (Gen 11:10-14); the second, the conflicts of his faith as regards his relationships and the promises of God.
Section 1. (Gen 11:10-14.)
The call of God and the obedience of faith.
We have in the first section a complete sevenfold picture: —
1. His genealogy, or birth-title, as descended from Shem: the line of promise. (Gen 11:10-26.)
2. The hindrances of nature to faith. (Gen 11:27-32.)
3. Abram in the land: the heavenly portion realized. (Gen 12:1-8.)
4. His failure in Egypt: the saint going down into the world, and its consequences. (Gen 12:9-20.)
5. Abram and Lot: our choice and God’s choice for us. (Gen 13:1-18.)
6. Abram as overcomer: the strife with the kings. (Gen 14:1-16.)
7. Where the heart rests. (Gen 14:17-24.)
God, nature, heaven, the world, victory over self, and the victory over opposition from without are all represented here, while the last of this series closes it with so blessed an assurance of what Christ is for the heart occupied with Him that we know without any doubt that there can be nothing beyond it. Let us look more closely at these things.
1. Abram’s descent from Shem shows him in the line of promise. Jehovah’s revelation of Himself to Shem was to be realized above all in that Seed of Abram whose day his own faith rejoiced to see. But the promise itself expressed a grace in God which preceded all personal claim whatever on Abram’s part. In the chosen line itself, though we have only a scanty record of names and of the length of life, it is plain that there is decay, and that continuous. No doubt the years of man’s life were every where shortening, but there was at any rate no exception, and elsewhere we read of spiritual apostasy on their part, which left all possibility of hope to the sovereign grace of God. The root of all the blessing following is here and only here.
2. But not only does nature furnish no help: it is in conflict with the call of God when this has come, and not least so when it volunteers obedience which it never performs, and proposes to lead where it cannot even follow. "Terah" means "delay," and he delays: they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and they came to Haran and dwelt there. And Terah died in Haran.
3. Now, and not before, Abram comes into the land. We have here,
(1) the call of God with its accompanying promise;
(2) his coming into the land to the place of Shechem, or "shoulder," to the oak of Moreh, "instructor." The "shoulder" is that which bears the burden, and it is in stooping to serve that we acquire ability to learn of God: "to virtue" we add "knowledge."
(3) Jehovah appears to him, and Abram builds an altar and worships. His tent is pitched in view of Ai ("ruins"), -a judged world upon the one side, and Bethel, the house of God, upon the other.
4. But as yet he cannot hold this place. The south country attracts him, and he gravitates toward Egypt. A famine in his own land follows, just as barrenness in spiritual things comes surely when we are looking toward the world. Then, upon going down into it, the boldness of faith gives place to disguises and prevarication. As the direct result, Abram loses his wife, and is enriched by the world. Sarai, as the apostle tells us, speaks of the terms upon which the believer is with God. She is the "covenant of grace:" the grace in which we stand God has linked with faith, and with faith alone. It belongs not to the world. We are of God, and the whole world lieth in the wicked one. But who can maintain such testimony when the world’s help is wanted and association with it sought? Sarai must be left open to the world as such; and thus, by sacrifice of their exclusive place, Christians have bought the favor of the world today. But the world will yet learn by judgment that Sarai is not its own. This manifest, the world’s favors cease, and Abram is sent away.
5. Abram gets back to where he was at the beginning, and his real restoration in heart comes out in this section; while, on the other hand, he who has been walking with Abram rather than with God manifests the power of what he has been in still over him, as we shall see. Abram’s own power over Lot seems lost also by his failure. The wealth acquired on both sides comes in to separate; but Abram, master of himself once more, offers to Lot his choice as to the land before him. Lot without hesitation chooses, and you see the man in his choice. The plain of Jordan is like the garden of the Lord -like paradise! there is his religious self-justification, and Lot will keep his religion and the world as well. Here is the under-current that carries him: it is like the land of Egypt. Association with the world follows, however bad the world may be, and Lot’s tent (soon to be given up) stretches toward Sodom.
Then he who has not chosen is shown what the Lord has chosen for him, and he is bidden to walk through it and enjoy it as his own. So faith is called to enjoy its heavenly portion.
6. As Sodom is a type of the world in its open evil, so Babylon is clearly identified in the New Testament with the world-church, whose head is Rome. (Rev 17:9; Rev 17:18). Here we have, not Babylon named, but Shinar, first in a coalition of four kings -the world-number, while the kings on the other side are five -the number of the senses, the merely sensual man. Between the open world and the world-church there is constant strife; but man must have a religion, and the latter in general prevails, and puts its yoke upon the other. In the present war, Lot, dwelling in Sodom, is carried captive with the rest: the way a child of God falls under the power of spiritual evil is here pointed out; it is through getting into the world. Abram the overcomer is noticed here (the only time) as the Hebrew, the passenger, the pilgrim. This is the secret of spiritual power. Lot is thus delivered by the power of another, but because only thus, falls back into Sodom.
7. And now we come to Melchisedek, king of righteousness, king of Salem (peace), priest of the Most High (God’s millennial name), possessor of heaven and earth, -type of Christ in the day when He shall claim the earth for God and bring it back to Him. To him Abram gives tithes of all. Faith owns in Christ the One to whom all belongs, partaking of His true "bread and wine," the memorials of His fruitful suffering, and so refuses to be enriched at the world’s hand. Present rest for the heart is here, and the future rest when He fulfills this type. The end of this series is reached, then, with this.
Section 2. -Faith’s conflicts.
A very different line of truth is found in the second section. We have here faith’s conflicts as to relationship and the word of God. The fifteenth chapter clearly gives a new beginning, as Abram here for the first time is recognized as righteous by faith, the true beginning for every soul spiritually. Here again we have seven subsections: —
1. The covenant of promise and the righteousness of faith. (Gen 15:1-21.)
2. Hagar: the legal covenant, manward and Godward. (Gen 16:1-16.)
3. Circumcision, the seal of the covenant of promise, and faith in the God of resurrection. (Gen 17:1-27.)
4. The tent-door at Mamre, and the intercession for Sodom. (Gen 18:1-33.)
5. The gate of Sodom and the end of Lot. (Gen 19:1-38.)
6. The Philistines’ land and the failure there. (Gen 20:1-18.)
7. Isaac: the promise fulfilled. (Gen 21:1-34.)
The connection of these chapters is mostly plain, and Isaac is evidently the Melchisedek of this section. He is, in fact, the type of the same blessed Person, but in quite a different character: here as "dwelling in the heart by faith." The first leaf we turn in this gives us the promise as to Him; the last shows us (typically) the fulfillment. All through, directly or indirectly, we are occupied with Him.
1. The promise is really threefold: of the one seed, Isaac, typically Christ; of the numerous seed, which, as represented by the stars of heaven, directs our eyes especially to the present children of Abraham by faith; thirdly, of the land, type of our heavenly possession. The first is the ground of the second; the second, of the third.
Christ, the heavenly seed, and the heavenly inheritance are all (typically) the subject of promise here. The covenant is of promise, -that is, of grace; the answer to it is faith -dependence on another; and the believer it is who is counted righteous. Every thing is assured to us by God without condition, and to take freely what is freely given is the secret of all joy, all peace, all power. Faith in one’s self is what we are never called to, and is but so much glory taken from God. But this we are slow to learn.
In the third promise, as to the land, we have the worth of Christ’s sacrifice opened up to us. In these different animals He is variously seen, and by these, passing between the divided parts, God binds Himself. He is seen also as the God of resurrection. The deep sleep falling on Abram is like that of Adam, and even the Egyptian oppression which it represents was, as it were, the death of the nation, from which only such power as that of resurrection could bring them forth. Here, the might of the sacrifice is seen when faith itself seems in collapse. He who guarded it from the birds of prey is now guarded by it; and in the furnace of Egypt, no less than in the word of deliverance, it is the covenant-keeping God who acts. Grace secures holiness, and the means to it; and God acts from Himself and glorifies Himself, where man is powerless. Thus the promise is complete.
2. Promise is grace, and thus the promise already given can only be fulfilled in Sarai, who speaks of this. (See Gal 4:24.) Her name is Sarai -"my princess," for "grace reigns." She is the free-woman and brings forth to freedom; but in contrast with her, another is now seen -Hagar, the law, the full account of which, spiritually and dispensationally, is given us here.
Hagar is an Egyptian, as the law is the "principles of the world" (Gal 4:3), and she gravitates naturally to Egypt. She is Sarai’s handmaid, as the law is to grace, but taken up by the believer in whom some strength of nature still remains, in the impatient desire for fruit. Grace in him even urges him to it; but God has not to do with it, except that when the relationship is entered on, He sends her
back to Abram that the fruit might be seen as not what He had promised. Thus the law came in, (faith and grace having long been joined together of God before it,) not at the beginning, but as sought of man himself naturally: and God takes her up, and by the fountain of water makes this child of nature to know Himself. We get thus the law and revelation joined together in the Old Testament. But God declares at the same time the fruit of law, easy enough to produce, to be but lawless (the wild man), though "God hears" the child of law -the Jew.
3. God now re-affirms His principle; for circumcision is the seal of the covenant of promise, and the sign of righteousness by faith. (See Rom 4:1-25.) Abram’s body is now "as good as dead," as Sarai’s womb is. Grace will do nothing except as the power of the living God works in it, and for this, nature must be seen as worthless. God is now to be the Almighty, and Abram to walk before Him as such. Significantly thereupon He changes his name, adding but one letter, in fact, to it, in the middle of it -the letter "h," the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and which stands for 5. This, we have seen, is 4 + 1, -"the weak creature in the presence of the almighty God:" thus Abram ("high father") becomes Abraham, ("father of a multitude.") He is abased to be multiplied; and this we know well to be the spiritual law. How blessed are the thoughts of God!
Circumcision is thereupon ordained in the flesh of all the family of faith: in its inner meaning, "the putting off of the body of the flesh." (Col 2:11.) The typical answer, the "bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may be manifest." (2Co 4:10.) As born into the family of God, and come into the new creation (the eighth day), and as purchased with the money of atonement, still we are to have this sign.
And now God declares Himself the God of resurrection. Sarai is to have a son -the first positive announcement of it. And her name also is changed: from Sarai (my princess) she becomes Sarah (the princess), the merely personal element removed with the "i," which stands for the number 10 -the number of responsibility, to make way again for the "h" -the 5, where the creature stands once more in its weakness before this almighty God. Thus grace and faith, the ways of God and the conscious need of man, exactly suit, and are united to one another; and now grace shall be fruitful, Sarah shall have a son.
4. Hereupon the practical fruits appear. Abraham is found in his tent-door in Mamre ("fatness"?), and this is here as characteristic as the "gate of Sodom," in the next chapter, is for Lot. Here, Jehovah appears to him in the new form of man: communion is evidently more realized than at previous times. Note how faith in Abraham recognizes God; how suitably yet to His manifestation of Himself he entertains Him; and how ready a response is given to his invitation.
The material for entertainment is typically Christ, in His death, and in the glory of His person; three measures of meal -all the fullness of the Godhead in Him bodily. Such material have we ever to invite God to remain with us.
Then comes once more the promise, in which God more openly takes His place than before. The powerlessness of man is more revealed, faith in the Almighty is challenged, and unbelief rebuked.
And now God reveals as to His "friend" His purposes as to Sodom -the world; as to which, judgment does not come till there has been full testing: only when the state of things is fully proved does God proceed as if He "knew."
Then Abraham draws near to intercede, pleading that the righteous should be distinguished from the wicked, and God’s governmental ways come out. For the sake of even ten righteous He will spare the city, and after six successive and effectual pleadings, Abraham stops with this.
5. The gate of Sodom now comes before us, and Lot sitting there. All is in contrast with the former chapter, -the evening; the visit of two angels, not now "men;" the invitation hardly accepted; the city fare, poorer than that under the tent; -all this makes a significant picture.
Then comes the interruption of the men of Sodom: (Abraham had none!) -like the evil things which association with the world produces to destroy communion. How Lot also smells of the company he keeps!
God can manifest Himself here only in judgment, and call to separate from what is to be destroyed; but Lot’s dwelling in the city has rendered ineffectual his witness against it, and his sons-in-law take it as a jest. (Notice how, through all the sorrow of this scene, the "angels" become once more "men.")
Lot too lingers: they hasten him, lay hold upon him, bring him out. Notice how different the prayer of unbelief from that of faith! -his plea is unbelief, fear of the consequences of doing what he is bidden; a little city -God can do a little thing! Blessed be His name, He spares it.
Then the judgment comes, in which his wife also is involved. His own being spared is now seen also as for Abraham’s sake: of him, though one of His own, God is ashamed.
Finally, we have the end of Lot in a shame which is that of his daughters also. His death need not be mentioned. But from him thus spring Moab and Ammon, the enemies of the people of God.
6. In the Philistines, we find undoubtedly a form of that which meets us in full development in Babel. They are not Canaanites, though sons of Ham. They sprang, according to Gen 10:14, from Mizraim, -i.e. were of Egypt; yet we find them in the land of Canaan always, on the lowland of the south-west coast, with their outlook indeed toward Egypt, with which they had (Exo 13:17) the freest and most unobstructed communication. They hold but a border of the land of Canaan, and its lowest part; beyond that, may ravage, but not possess; although looming in men’s eyes so large as to give their name ("Palestine," from "Philistine,") to the whole of it. It is easy to see in this the picture of the world as come into the church, and become the church. Abimelech, whose name (whether "whose father [was] king," or "father of a king,") speaks of successional derived authority, is their king, and Phicol, "the voice of all" -as men say, "the voice of the Church," -is the captain of their host. Who can fail to see here the shadow of that traditional authority to which human religiousness, ignorant of the living Spirit, ever appeals?
This externalism speaks much of grace, divorcing it from what God has joined it to alone -the living faith which is seen in Abraham. Alas! faith too may easily yield here its exclusive claim, and with the son of the bondwoman in the house, and not yet Isaac, seem ready to yield up its choicest possessions to the demand upon it. This is a chronic evil, as is plain here, and apt to reproduce itself, as we see in Isaac afterward. Philistines are, as we know, ready enough to claim Sarah: the men of tradition speak largely of "grace," but it is in their sacraments and outward observances. And this claim imposed for ages on even the men of faith. Yet Sarah in the Philistines’ house cannot, do what they may, become their own: grace will not be handled by men’s hands. Nay, more; her presence there stops all the wombs of the house of Abimelech: this barren pretension to grace prevents all real fruit; with it, they are just as the "ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance," and so cannot repent; but that is where all true fruit begins. But how guilty, then, are we if we seem even to justify them in this claim! and how well may they reproach us with it!
On the other hand, with Sarah we may sojourn in the Philistines’ land, for it is our own, though only a border tract. To adopt their language, we may say, for instance, the sacraments "sacraments remain to us, though only two, (the witnesses to something better than themselves,) not seven (as Rome makes them), the perfect fulfillment of that of which they speak. This is only a sample. All the land here is ours, and it is a fruitful land: may we claim it all!
7. And now the promise is fulfilled, and Isaac is born to dwell in Abraham’s tents: the consummation of the life of faith is when Christ dwells in the heart through faith; the true fruit of faith in us is Christ thus abiding. Dispensationally, it is the coming of Christ and Christianity that we reach here, the two, as it were, identified, for are they not one? Therefore the child is circumcised, (as I take it, at the cross,) and weaned gradually, and there is a great feast when the child is weaned. Is not this the blessed truth which was given through Paul, and which especially brought out the mockery of unbelief and persecution of the Church by the Jews? Then the bondwoman and her son are sent away, the nation is in the meantime as such rejected. The wandering in the wilderness of Beersheba (the "well of the oath"), is a striking picture of their present condition. The water, the word of life, is spent for them, and the well they see not, though the oath of God, the covenant with their fathers, secures it for their final possession. This, therefore, their eyes are yet to be opened to, and Hagar herself to become a means of blessing to them (Deu 30:1-3); their dwelling still and ever outside of Canaan -the heavenly inheritance.
The contention for the wells is characteristic with the Philistines: they do not dig them, but stop them with earth, though they are made here finally to own that God is with the man of faith, and that the well he digs is all his own.
F. W. Grant, The Numerical Bible (4th ed., 1903) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On v10 generations of Shem
generations of Shem
Genesis 11, 12 mark an important turning point in the divine dealing. Heretofore the history has been that of the whole Adamic race. There has been neither Jew nor Gentile; all have been one in "the first man Adam." Henceforth, in the Scripture record, humanity must be thought of as a vast stream from which God, in the call of Abram and the creation of the nation of Israel, has but drawn off a slender rill, through which He may at last purify the great river itself. Israel was called to be a witness to the unity of God in the midst of universal idolatry (Deu 6:4); (Isa 43:10-12) to illustrate the blessedness of serving the true God (Deu 33:26-29) to receive and preserve the divine revelations; (Rom 3:1); (Rom 3:2); (Deu 4:5-8) and to produce the messiah; (Gen 3:15); (Gen 21:12); (Gen 28:10); (Gen 28:14); (Gen 49:10); (2Sa 7:16); (2Sa 7:17); (Isa 4:3); (Isa 4:4); (Mat 1:1).
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The reader of scripture should hold firmly in mind:
(1) that from Genesis 12 to (Mat 12:45) the Scriptures have primarily in view Israel, the little rill, not the great Gentile river; though again and again the universality of the ultimate divine intent breaks into view (for example; (Gen 12:3); (Isa 2:2); (Isa 2:4); (Isa 5:26); (Isa 9:1-2); (Isa 11:10-12); (Isa 42:1-6); (Isa 49:6); (Isa 49:12); (Isa 52:15); (Isa 54:3); (Isa 55:5); (Isa 60:3); (Isa 60:5); (Isa 60:11-16); (Isa 61:6); (Isa 61:9); (Isa 62:2); (Isa 66:12); (Isa 66:18); (Isa 66:19); (Jer 16:19); (Joe 3:9); (Joe 3:10); (Mal 1:11); (Romans 9-11); (Gal 3:8-14).
(2) that the human race, henceforth called Gentile in distinction from Israel, goes on under the Adamic and Noahic covenants; and that for the race (outside Israel) the dispensations of Conscience and of Human government continue. The moral history of the great Gentile world is told in (Rom 1:21-32) and its moral accountability in (Rom 2:1-16). Conscience never acquits: it either "accuses" or "excuses." Where the law is known to the Gentiles it is to them, as to Israel, "a ministration of death," a "curse"; (Rom 3:19); (Rom 3:20); (Rom 7:9-10); (2Co 3:7); (Gal 3:10). A wholly new responsibility arises when either Jew or Gentile knows the Gospel; (Joh 3:18); (Joh 3:19); (Joh 3:36); (Joh 15:22-24); (Joh 16:9); (1Jn 5:9-12).
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv10, 27 The Generation of Shem
The Generation of Shem
v. 10. These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old and begat Arphaxad two years after the Flood. The genealogical table of Shem is now repeated in detail, because the narrative gradually tends toward the story of the people of God, whose progenitor was Abraham, a descendant of Shem through Eber.
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v. 11. And Shem lived, after he begat Arphaxad, five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.
v. 12. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat Salah;
v. 13. and Arphaxad lived, after he begat Salah, four hundred and three years and begat sons and daughters.
v. 14. And Salah lived thirty years and begat Eber;
v. 15. and Salah lived, after he begat Eber, four hundred and three years and begat sons and daughters. Up to this point the ancestry of the Joktanites and of the Abrahamites follows the same line.
v. 16. And Eber lived four and thirty years and begat Peleg;
v. 17. and Eber lived, after he begat Peleg, four hundred and thirty years and begat sons and daughters.
v. 18. And Peleg lived thirty years and begat Reu;
v. 19. and Peleg lived, after he begat Reu, two hundred and nine years and begat sons and daughters.
v. 20. And Reu lived two and thirty years and begat Serug;
v. 21. and Reu lived, after he begat Serug, two hundred and seven years and begat sons and daughters.
v. 22. And Serug lived thirty years and begat Nahor;
v. 23. and Serug lived, after he begat Nahor, two hundred years and begat sons and daughters.
v. 24. And Nahor lived nine and twenty years and begat Terah;
v. 25. and Nahor lived, after he begat Terah, an hundred and nineteen years and begat sons and daughters. A careful comparison of this list with the genealogical table of Genesis 5 shows a very decided shortening of the average life of man after the Flood. While Noah still reached the age of 950 years, the age of man, with Arphaxad, sank down below 500 years; this again, was reduced, with Peleg, to 239 years and with Nahor to 148 years. In the short space of eight generations, therefore, the average age of man was reduced almost to the level which it has maintained since. This was due partly to the change of climate on the surface of the earth, partly to the different mode of living.
v. 26. And Terah lived seventy years and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran. That is, the oldest son of Terah was born when he was seventy years old, and three sons are mentioned in this instance, Abram, afterward Abraham, as the father of the Jewish race, Nahor as the grandfather of Rebekah, and Haran as the father of Lot.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 General Information:
General Information:
The rest of this chapter lists the line of Shem's descendants down to Abram.
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These were the descendants of Shem
This sentence begins the list of Shem's descendants.
flood
This is the flood from Noah's time when people had become so evil that God sent a worldwide flood to cover the earth.
became the father of Arphaxad
"had his son Arphaxad" or "his son Arphaxad was born"
Arphaxad
a man's name (See: How to Translate Names)
a hundred ... two ... five hundred
Translators may write the words or the numerals "100," "2," and "500." (See: Numbers)
translationWords
descend
Shem
flood
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv10, 18, 27, 28, 29 11:10 This account of Shem’s family resumes the line…
11:10 This account of Shem’s family resumes the line of Shem from 10:21-32, now with special focus on the line leading to Abram. Only Abram and Israel are heirs to Shem’s God (see 9:26-27; Deut 32:8-9). The Babel story vividly repudiates the culture that Abram was called to abandon (Gen 12:1; 24:6-7). Together with the account of Terah’s descendants (11:27-32), this second account of Shem’s line forms a bridge from the universal history of chs 1–11 to the national history of Israel that begins in ch 12. Abram is the remnant from Babel’s confused world. God called him as an act of grace whereby the fractured world of Babel would be blessed (12:3). • the father of: Or the ancestor of; Hebrew genealogies do not necessarily list every single generation.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.