Genesis 9:18-27
The tent
One brother sees and speaks, two walk backwards with a garment. The response, not the accident, is what the account weighs.
People of the Bible
Shem, Ham and Japheth
Three sons who walk out of the ark and become the map of the nations.
The three come through the flood with their father and are the entire human population on the far side of it. Their first recorded act as men is how they respond to their father drunk and uncovered in his tent, and the account is careful about who looked and who covered. From them Genesis builds a table of seventy nations, tracing peoples, coastlands and languages back to three brothers, and then Babel scatters what they had gathered.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Shem, Ham and Japheth
- 01
- 02
Genesis 10:1-32
The table of the nations
Seventy names spread across coastlands and languages. It is a genealogy that doubles as a map.
- 03
Genesis 11:10-26
The line of Shem
One of the three lines narrows, generation by generation, until it arrives at a man in Ur named Abram.
Why it matters
This is where the Bible stops telling the story of one family and starts telling the story of nations. The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the frame the rest of Scripture hangs on: every people Israel will meet is placed here first, and the line of Shem runs on to Abraham.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
