Table of Nations

You know I'm a historian when Genesis Chapter 10 is the book of the Old Testament I spend the most time thinking about. Known as the "Table of Nations," it is the how the tribally organized peoples of ancient Israel conceived the world. Jan Retso believes it has two layers, a primary organization dating from the 12th century BCE, and a later expansion during the 7th century BCE. According to him, for example, the Hamites are all Hamites because they were living in the territory ruled by Egypt at that time, while the Semites were a bunch of independent city-states stretching from southern Turkey into Mesopotamia and the Japhethites as the peoples of the far north.

This table might suggest some root causes for why egalitarian ethical monotheism arose in a tribal society. In ancient Israel, everyone in the world was defined as part of a whole, and seen as related. No one is inherently superior to anyone else. You can yank Israel out of history and still have history - this table doesn't even get to Abraham. Did that have deeper effects on the early Jewish religious thinkers, and later the early Muslims in the similarly organized Arabian Peninsula? That, alas, is something we can never truly answer.