Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“The sons of Noah who went out from the ship were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham is the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated.”
(Genesis 9:18-19)

“But I will establish my covenant with you. You shall come into the ship, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you” (Genesis 6:18). “who before were disobedient when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ship was being built. In it, few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water” (1 Peter 3:20). These eight people were it. No one else was living on the entire Earth. And two of them were not planning to have more children. Only the three sons of Noah and their wives were supposed to procreate. Mathematically, assuming an average generation of 26 years and each couple having at least three children, it would only take about 20 generations over only 535 years to reach 9 Billion people. The only reason it took longer was that not everyone had three or more children, there was resource scarcity in some regions of the world (fallen world, had to toil to produce), some people had no children at all, and there was killing (wars, murders, etc). In spite of all those limitations, we can see how EASILY we could get from three couples (six human male-female pairs) to the current world population. It is not a fable or a stretch of our imaginations.

Ham is specifically called out as the father of the Canaanites. This is probably because those were the people that the Israelites were dealing with when Moses wrote down what Holy Spirit told him.

The sage Sforno writes: ‘Cham was the father of Canaan. Canaan infamous for his wickedness and Cham was similar in character, thus he was the father of Canaan in the spiritual as well as the biological sense. שלשה אלה בני נח, seeing that all of them were Noach’s sons, G’d blessed them all, even though one of them was wicked, when He said “be fruitful and multiply and fill the globe.” As a result of this blessing, באלה נפצה כל הארץ, the entire population of the earth traces its origin to one of these three sons of Noach.’