Genesis 10 is known to Bible scholars as the “Table of Nations.” The chapter is a biblical explanation of what happened in the centuries after Noah and his family disembarked the ark, having survived the flood. The Table of Nations describes how the descendants of Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—repopulated the earth, forming the nations known in the rest of the Old Testament story. In terms of the unfolding narrative of Genesis, the chapter is a precursor to the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1–9), where the nations were divided and dispersed by God.
There’s an obvious problem with the Table of Nations—or for those who let the Bible be what it is, an obvious disconnect between the world of the biblical writers and the world we know today. The Table of Nations shows no knowledge whatsoever of the geography belonging to North America, South America, Australia, China, India, and Scandinavia. The same is true of the knowledge of earth’s geography in the New Testament (cf. Acts 2). The known world in biblical times covered a fraction of the size of the globe we know today.
This is no surprise if we let the Bible be what it is. The biblical “world” is composed of seventy nations that are situated in what we now call the ancient Near East (or modern Middle East) on the land masses that surround the Mediterranean Sea. There is no hint in the Scriptures of any land mass beyond this region.
We can learn a lesson from other’s misguided attempts to make the Bible into something it isn’t with respect to the true size of the world. Once Europeans achieved the ability to cross the Atlantic and circumnavigate the world, people immediately questioned where these other countries and people came from. Most Europeans, well familiar with the Bible, presumed these people must have come from Adam. But how did the descendants of Noah produce these peoples?
All sorts of strange proposals were offered in answer to these questions. Those efforts in turn produced theories of race, including the theory that non-European (nonwhite) races came from subhumans or humans separate from and inferior to Adam. The rest is history. Europeans believed that embracing these explanations, which are inherently flawed and racist, was necessary to preserve biblical authority. Despite their absence in the Table of Nations, the Bible had to speak to the discovery of these new lands and peoples. These interpretive gymnastics institutionalized racial ideas that the Bible never endorses.