Genesis 10:1-3

New Catholic Bible

Footnotes

1. Genesis 10:1 For the ancient Semites, a person’s genealogy was not a strictly historical document, but a juridical one, meant to show the transmission of rights. For this reason, physical generation often serves as an image pointing to a legal generation, as, for example, adoption. The genealogical tree had, of course, to be composed of historical persons so as to determine a juridical succession.
   The genealogy of peoples or cities is an image derived from the preceding and can signify ties of derivation or affinity between one people and another on the ethnic, geographical, historical, political, sociological, cultural, and other planes. Since the whole matter was flexible and since we are dealing only with an image, it is obvious that one and the same people could locate themselves, from different points of view, in various genealogical lineages, including some far removed from modern-day scientific genealogies.
   On the basis of historical and geographical data, the Priestly tradition, here incorporating Yahwist features, in this chapter compiles a genealogical tree for peoples known in the second millennium B.C. The picture, in which an historical and religious intention is at work, asserts the substantial unity of the human race, which is divided into various peoples and languages. All human beings are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the same Creator God and heirs of his blessings, and all are meant to be saved.
   Given its purpose, the picture does not provide a basis for resolving the anthropological question of monogenism or polygenism, nor the historical question of the extent of the flood. In this “list of peoples” the Semites come in last place because the writer takes them as his starting point for the continuation of his story, while from this point on the descendants of Japheth and Ham cease to be of direct concern to the biblical story.