Fear No Fear

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

“These are the families of the sons of Noah, by their generations, according to their nations. The nations divided from these in the earth after the flood.”
(Genesis 10:32)

Everyone you see in this world came from these four men: Shem, Ham, Japheth, Canaan. Really it’s three since Ham is Canaan’s father, but he is put in a slightly different category because of his ungodly and immoral history (Ham raped his mother and she gave birth to Canaan). From this small group of people, all the peoples of the world came. All the nations of the world came. This was humanity’s second chance. Unfortunately, right from the start they did not all hold to the Lord. They did not return the love of God. In spite of being saved from a world-wide cataclysm, they did not all stick with Him. They went their own way. They re-made the events of the past into legends and myths that served their desires. They chose to walk away from God and pick other things to worship – and then created histories for them. So many of the world’s religions are similar to Judaism (and Christianity after it) is NOT because the Jews and Christians were influenced by the thoughts, teachings, and mythologies of the world’s religions. It is because the world’s religions broke away from the truth and mixed that truth in with their lies and made up stories. Everyone shared the same initial knowledge pool. They knew the same God. But not everyone held to it. Not everyone stuck to the truth, regardless of what they felt (it only took them about 300 years to rebel and wilfully reject God as a group). Not everyone trusted God. But none of us have an excuse (Romans 1:20). They knew who He was. They intentionally turned away. He still dealt with them. Still revealed His glory to them. They still had that knowledge inside them. As do we all. We have one Maker. He saved us from a Flood. His rainbow is proof we don’t need to fear another. He is there to be discovered. He IS God.

The sage Chizkuni writes: ‘אלה משפחות בני נח, “these are the families of Noach’s sons;” in this paragraph we find 70 descendants; 14 descendants of Yephet; 30 of Cham, and 26 of Shem. These are the founding fathers of the famous “70 nations” of the earth. All the nations that stem from them bear the names of these founding fathers. For instance: We read already in Genesis 4,17 when the first city was built by Kayin for his son, that he named the city after his son. Compare Psalms: 49,12 בשמותם עלי אדמות, “after the names of those who had been famous on earth.”’

The sage Radak writes: ‘אלה..אחר המבול, what does the deluge have to do with this, seeing the people were not dispersed until after they built the Tower? The meaning of this verse is that all these families of Noach’s children were born after the deluge, only to be scattered all over the globe, something which occurred after the building of the Tower.’