How the Table of Nations Has Been Read

Summary

For two thousand years readers of Genesis 10 did one thing with it:  they matched its names to the peoples on their own map, kept the matches that still worked, and replaced the rest.  This article follows that process to the Middle Ages and then tests the young-earth uses of the chapter.  It is a child of The Table of Nations.  Its siblings take the names one by one, ask when the list was written, and test it against language, ancient DNA and geography.

The continent map is Greek, not biblical.  The Book of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon, both of the second century BC, gave Japheth Europe, Ham Africa and Shem Asia.  Genesis does not.  Daniel Machiela's verdict:  "Jubilees situates the progeny of Noah on a Hellenistic, Ionian world map".¹

Josephus was right where a name had stayed in use.  Of the 23 names in this article's table that he identifies, 11 survive, among them the Medes, the Ionians, Egypt and Kush;  5 fail, and the rest are partial, open or untestable.  Where a name had died out he matched its sound to a people of the Roman map, such as Gomer to the Galatians, who reached Anatolia only in 278 BC.²  Every identification that improves on him comes from Assyrian, Hittite, Egyptian and Amarna texts that no ancient reader had.

The medieval pedigrees link no people to Noah before the ninth century AD.  The Historia Brittonum, about 829-830, is the first text to hang the peoples of Europe on Japheth by name, and its three sons of Alanus are, on the usual reading, the three sons of Mannus that Tacitus recorded in AD 98.  The same book runs the Saxon line back through Woden and Geta to a pagan god, "one of their idols", and no further.³  On Kenneth Sisam's 1953 dating of the manuscripts, Bede in 731 and a Mercian manuscript of about 812 take the kings back to Woden,⁴ and the line to Noah first appears in the Chronicle of about 892.  The Irish and Icelandic lists copy the English and Welsh ones.  So Bill Cooper's claim that these pedigrees are independent of Genesis and verify it fails on the dates.⁵

The young-earth name matches rest on sound alone.  Arthur Custance, Henry Morris, Russell Grigg, Cooper and the Answers in Genesis writers are right where they repeat identifications resting on Assyrian and Egyptian texts.  Where they go beyond them, to Moscow, Tobolsk, Germany, Cumberland, China, Cathay and the Denisovans, no record carries the ancient people to the modern place, and several later names have known origins of their own.  Custance himself conceded "there is very little certainty about any of this".⁶  Cooper's claim that every name is found in the ancient records is contradicted by his own appendices, which say that the location of Gether's and Almodad's descendants "cannot now be determined".⁵  None of these claims has been withdrawn.

The snapshot reading meets the horizon.  Anthony Osgood read the Table as a picture of the nations at Babel and equated the Ubaid people with the Chaldeans.  The Chaldeans are first named in Assyrian inscriptions about 878 BC, and the Table's own Japhethite core is written in Assyrian forms of the eighth and seventh centuries.

Carter's 2024 position is the best young-earth reading on offer.  Robert Carter rejected the continent map as "entirely wrong", with the three lines "overlapping across most of their range".⁷  It drops the Greek map and the modern-nation matching.  Its cost is that it leaves little to test.

Verdict.  Reception adds no independent evidence for the Table, and the popular young-earth uses do not survive a check against the records.

Part 1: How it was read

For two thousand years readers of Genesis 10 did the same thing with it:  they matched its names to the peoples on their own map.  Each generation kept the matches that still worked and replaced the rest with the peoples of its own day.  The earliest surviving readers, the Book of Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, both of the second century BC, laid the Table over the Greek world map and gave Japheth Europe, Ham Africa and Shem Asia.  That scheme is not in Genesis.  Josephus, writing about AD 93, was right where a name had stayed in use to his day and wrong where it had died out.  The medieval pedigrees that tie the Franks, Britons, Saxons, Irish and Icelanders to Japheth are the same process carried to its end, and their links to Noah can be dated from the manuscripts:  none is older than the ninth century AD.  So reception adds no independent evidence for the Table.  Every identification that improves on Josephus comes from cuneiform and Egyptian texts recovered since the 1850s.

The second century BC:  the Greek world map.  Jubilees retells Genesis, and in its chapters 8 and 9 Noah's sons divide the earth by lot and then share it among their own sons.  Japheth's sons get the north and west:  "the first portion came forth for Gomer to the east from the north side to the river Tina;  and in the north there came forth for Magog all the inner portions of the north ... And for Madai came forth as his portion that he should possess from the west of his two brothers to the islands, and to the coasts of the islands."⁸  The Tina is the Tanais, the river Don.  R. H. Charles, the editor, read Madai's lot as far out as the British Isles, and Tubal's and Meshech's as running from Thrace through Italy to Cadiz.⁸  The Genesis Apocryphon, a scroll from Qumran Cave 1 that Daniel Machiela dates to "an early to mid-second century BCE date of composition",¹ gives the same division:  "[And] Japheth divided among his sons.  First, he gave to Gomer (an area) in the north, until it reaches the Tina River.  And after him (he gave) to Magog, and after him to Madai, and after him to Javan;  all the islands that are alongside Lud".¹  Machiela sets this beside Genesis itself, which "hands out geographic information parsimoniously":  in the scroll and in Jubilees "it is unmistakably clear that each son is apportioned a different continent with sharply drawn borders:  Japheth receives Europe, Asia goes to Shem, and Ham ends up with Libya."¹  His verdict on the source of the scheme:  "Jubilees situates the progeny of Noah on a Hellenistic, Ionian world map".¹

The scheme broke at once on the Medes, who lived in Asia, inside Shem's continent.  Jubilees 10 repairs it with a story in which Madai asks Shem's sons for land, a way of "explaining why there is an area named Media within Shem's allotment".¹  That is the first recorded case of a reader bending the facts to fit a map he had imposed on the Table.  The continent map that young-earth writers inherited, and that Robert Carter of Creation Ministries International rejected in 2024 as "entirely wrong",⁷ begins here, in the second century BC.  Genesis 10 has no continents.

Josephus, about AD 93.  Antiquities 1.122-147 is the oldest surviving name-by-name identification, written for Greek readers.  Josephus gives each name the people of his own day:  "For Gomer founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians, [Galls,] but were then called Gomerites."²  He is candid where he has nothing.  Of seven sons of Mizraim:  "we know nothing of them besides their names."²  The table below sets his identifications and those of the readers who followed him against the modern ones from Genesis 10 Name by Name.  "Survives" judges each ancient identification against the modern one:  yes, region for the right area but the wrong people, no, open where the modern evidence is undecided, and untestable where there is no modern identification.

The table's sources are Josephus's Antiquities,² Charles's Jubilees and Machiela's Apocryphon, Hippolytus's Chronicle in Adolf Bauer's edition,⁹ and Isidore's Etymologies 9.2.¹⁰  Counting Josephus's 24 rows:  11 survive (Madai, Javan, Kittim, Cush, Mizraim, Put, Canaan, Elam, Asshur, Lud, Aram), 2 get the region right (Meshech, Togarmah), 5 fail (Gomer, Tubal, Ashkenaz, Elishah, the Joktanites), 2 are open (Tiras, Tarshish), 3 cannot be tested (Magog, Riphath, Arpachshad), and 1, the Caphtorim, he does not identify.  The tally is this article's own.  The pattern is plain.  Josephus is right where the name had stayed in use down to his day:  the Medes, the Ionians, Kition, Assyria, Lydia, Egypt, Kush.  He is wrong where the name had died out and he matched its sound to a people of the Roman map:  Gomer to the Galatians, who reached Anatolia only in 278 BC, Tubal to the Iberes, Elishah to the Aeolians.  The modern identifications that improve on him, the Cimmerians, Tabal, the Mushku, the Scythians, Tegarama and Alashiya, all come from Assyrian, Hittite, Egyptian and Amarna texts that no ancient reader had.

Hippolytus and Isidore.  Each later writer keeps Josephus's successes and adds sound-matches of his own.  Hippolytus of Rome, in AD 234, gives Japheth's line as "Gamer, from whom the Cappadocians;  Magog, from whom the Celts and Galatians;  Madai, from whom the Medes;  Iōuan, from whom the Hellenes and Ionians;  Thōbel, from whom the Thessalians;  Mosoch, from whom the Illyrians;  Thēras, from whom the Thracians;  Chatain, from whom the Macedonians".⁹  The Thessalians, Illyrians and Macedonians are new, and so are the Romans and Latins he derives from the Kitioi.  Isidore of Seville, writing in Visigothic Spain about 630, adds his own rulers and his own country:  "Magog, a quo arbitrantur Scythas et Gothos traxisse originem", Magog, from whom they think the Scythians and Goths drew their origin, and "Thubal, a quo Iberi, qui et Hispani", Tubal, from whom the Iberians, who are also the Spaniards.¹⁰  The Goths and the Spaniards are the step by which the Table entered the origin legends of medieval Europe.  Isidore also wrote the warning quoted in Genesis 10 Name by Name, that scarcely the most learned men could find the origins "not of all, but of some of these peoples."¹⁰

The medieval pedigrees.  The Historia Brittonum, a Latin history of the Britons that dates itself to the fourth year of a King Merfyn, about 829-830,³ is the first text to hang the peoples of Europe on Japheth by name.  Its chapter 17:  "tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem in tres partes post diluvium.  Sem in Asia, Cham in Africa, Iafeth in Europa dilataverunt terminos suos.  primus homo venit ad Europam de genere Iafeth Alanus cum tribus filiis suis", the three sons of Noah divided the world into three parts after the Flood, Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa, Japheth in Europe, and the first man of Japheth's race to come to Europe was Alanus with his three sons.³  The three sons are Hessitio, Armenon and Negue, and their sons are the nations of the migration period:  Hessitio's are "Francus, Romanus, Britto, Albanus", Armenon's "Gothus, Valagothus, Gebidus, Burgundus, Longobardus", and Negue's "Vandalus, Saxo, Boguarus".³  Those three sons are older than the Bible link.  Tacitus, in AD 98, recorded that the Germans gave their ancestor Mannus three sons:  "Manno tris filios adsignant, e quorum nominibus proximi Oceano Ingaevones, medii Herminones, ceteri Istaevones vocentur."¹¹  Istaevones, Herminones, Ingaevones;  Hessitio, Armenon, Negue.  The match of names and order is this article's own reading, and it is the usual one.  The oldest European "genealogy to Japheth" is a Roman ethnography of the Germans with a biblical head put on it.  The head itself is a string of names from Alanus back through "Iovan, filii Iafeth, filii Noe" to Adam,³ and the editor, Theodor Mommsen, noted that for the Hebrew-looking part of that chain "earum rerum periti nullum reperire potuerunt", experts in such matters have been unable to find any source.³

The same book stops the English kings well short of Noah.  Its chapter 31 traces Hengist and Horsa back to "Woden ... filii Geta, qui fuit, ut aiunt, filius dei.  non ipse est deus deorum ... sed unus est ab idolis eorum":  Geta, who was, as they say, the son of a god, not the God of gods, but one of their idols.³  In 830, then, the Saxon line ran to a pagan god and no further.

The Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, the "Book of the Taking of Ireland", compiled in the eleventh century, traces the Gaels from Japheth's son Magog.  Its own editor, R. A. S. Macalister, called its framework "an artificial composition ... This production was a slavish copy, we might almost say a parody, of the Biblical story of the Children of Israel."¹²  It copies the Historia Brittonum's Alanus list outright, with Alanus as "Elinus":  "Elinus son of Dohe had three sons, Airmen, Negna, Isacon."¹²  And the borrowing ran both ways:  Macalister found a misread Irish word in the Historia that shows "Nennius had a written text in the Irish language at his elbow."¹²  Shared names in two texts that copied each other are one witness, not two.

The Anglo-Saxon pedigrees were dated stage by stage by Kenneth Sisam in 1953, from the manuscripts.  The oldest collections, Bede in 731 and a Mercian manuscript of about 812, take the kings of Northumbria, Mercia, Lindsey, Kent and East Anglia "all going back to Woden and Frealaf, and the Lindsey list still farther back to Geat."⁴  The line beyond Geat through Sceaf to Noah and Adam appears first in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annal for 855, which survives only in the version issued about 892:  "Since the 855 annal is known to us only from the version circulated in 892, there is no evidence that it existed in exactly the same form before that date."⁴  Asser's Life of King Alfred, "completed in 893", gives the same line "from Alfred to Adam".⁴  Later copies of the Chronicle, made about 1000 and 1050, make Sceaf a son of Noah born in the Ark:  "Bedwig Sceafing id est filius Noe se wæs geboren on þære Earce Noes", Bedwig son of Sceaf, that is, the son of Noah, he was born in Noah's Ark.⁴  Sisam's summary:  "Analysis of the pedigree of Æthelwulf has shown it to be a late and artificial composition, developed by well-marked stages in such a way that, as a rule, the remotest names represent the latest accretions."⁴

The Icelandic list is the last step.  Snorri Sturluson, a Christian who died in 1241, opened his Prose Edda with Genesis:  "IN the beginning God created heaven and earth and all those things which are in them".¹³  He traced Odin from Thor, whom he made the son of a daughter of Priam of Troy,¹³ through "his son Magi, his son Seskef, his son Bedvig, his son Athra ... his son Fríallaf (whom we call Fridleifr);  his son was he who is named Vóden, whom we call Odin".¹³  From Seskef to Vóden, those are the West Saxon names of the Chronicle in the same order.  And Seskef is not a name at all.  Sisam:  from the English sentence "se Scef wæs Noes sunu and he wæs innan þære Earce geboren", the Norse copyists "produced the name Sescef, as Sievers noted".  "Evidently they knew no tradition of Sceaf."⁴  Se is the English word "the".

Cooper's use of the pedigrees.  Bill Cooper, in After the Flood (1995), makes these pedigrees his second proof of Genesis 10, after the names.  In his words, the Saxon record is "another historical account that is quite independent of the Genesis record, but which it nevertheless verifies to a considerable degree."⁵  He argues that "the early Saxons identified Sceaf as a son of Noah, and not a distant descendant of his, and it is equally clear that Japheth is here being referred to",⁵ that "the lineage of Woden himself had also been preserved, and that this was traced back to Noah and Japheth, Japheth being known to the pagan Saxons as Sceaf",⁵ and that because "the Icelandic list does not go back to Noah", it lies "right outside the pale of 'pious' forgeries".⁵  The manuscript dates answer each point.

1. The early Saxons. The sentences Cooper quotes for Sceaf as Noah's son come from Chronicle manuscripts copied about 1000 and 1050 and from a regnal list of Edgar's reign, 959-975. None is early and none is pagan. The first Saxon pedigree that names Noah is the Chronicle of about 892. Before about 830 no English pedigree reaches past a pagan god.
2. Sceaf is Japheth. No text says so. The Chronicle's Sceaf is born in the Ark, which Japheth was not, and Asser writes "Seth". Sisam allows only that "the possibility that the last four letters of his name have something to do with the error Seth cannot be excluded".⁴ Cooper is right that Sceaf is not how a monk would spell Japheth. Sceaf is an old Germanic hero-name, the one behind Scyld Scefing, Scyld son of Sceaf, in Beowulf. That is evidence that Christian compilers took the remotest pagan name in the list and tied it to Noah. It is not evidence that pagans remembered Japheth.
3. Independent Celtic lines. The Irish pedigree copies the Historia Brittonum, and the Historia used an Irish written source.
4. The Icelandic list. It is Snorri's, of the early thirteenth century, and it opens with Genesis 1 and Noah. It goes back to Troy rather than Noah because Snorri chose a classical ancestry for Odin, and its Seskef is a misreading of the English words "se Scef". The settlement of Iceland in the 870s says nothing about the date of a thirteenth-century book.
5. Pagan guardians who would not allow tampering. The manuscripts show the tampering: in Sisam's words, "Beyond Cerdic all is fiction or error, and if the names themselves are old, they were not attached to the ancestry of the West Saxon kings by old tradition."⁴

Sisam also named the source of the biblical part of the line:  "The Biblical names show the artificial character of this lengthened pedigree and the crudeness of the connexions that passed muster ... William of Malmesbury has noted their source in Luke iii. 36-38".⁴  Cooper quotes that sentence and argues with it, but not with the manuscript dates on which Sisam's stages rest.  He knows the Historia Brittonum's Geta passage:  "Nennius tells us that he was one of the false gods whom the pagan Saxons worshipped".⁵  He does not draw from it that in about 830 the Saxon line ran to that god and no further.  On the Alanus line he reports the Historia's own claim correctly:  "Nennius tells us that he found the above record in 'the ancient books of our elders'".⁵  Chapter 17 opens "Aliud experimentum inveni de isto Bruto ex veteribus libris veterum nostrorum", I found another account of this Brutus in the old books of our elders, gives the Alanus line down to Britto, and closes "hanc peritiam inveni ex traditione veterum", I found this knowledge from the tradition of the elders.³  Old books in a library of about 830 are not a pagan record, though:  the three sons of Alanus are Tacitus's sons of Mannus, and the biblical head of the line has no known source.

No young-earth correction of Cooper's argument was found.  Creation Ministries International's obituary of Cooper in 2021 says that his book "provided evidence that the history of the European people could be traced back to the biblical account of Noah and the Flood.  Many biblical creationists found this book a real eye-opener."¹⁴  Mike Gascoigne's "Forgotten history" in CMI's journal in 2002 builds on it:  "This book gives the creationist argument, not from science, but from history".¹⁵  The genealogy argument has stood in the young-earth literature for thirty years without a check against the dates Sisam published in 1953.  On those dates it fails.

Part 2: The young-earth uses

Young-earth writers have used Genesis 10 in three ways.  The first matches its names to modern nations:  Arthur Custance in 1975, Henry Morris in 1976, Russell Grigg in 1998, Bill Cooper in 1990 and 1995, and Bodie Hodge and Troy Lacey of Answers in Genesis from 2013.  The second reads the chapter as a snapshot of the world at Babel and maps its names onto the cultures that archaeologists dig up:  Anthony Osgood in 1988.  The third sets it beside the genetic trees:  Robert Carter, Stephen Lee and John Sanford in 2018, and Carter alone in 2022 and 2024.  Where the name-matchers repeat the identifications that rest on Assyrian and Egyptian texts, they are right.  Where they go beyond those texts, to Moscow, Tobolsk, Germany, Cumberland, China, Cathay and the Denisovans, every match rests on a likeness of sound, with no record that carries the ancient people to the modern place, and several contradict the known origin of the later name.  None of these claims has been withdrawn in the young-earth sources found for this article.  The one correction on record is Carter's 2024 rejection of the popular continent map.  It is the most careful young-earth statement on the chapter, and it is also the one that makes the fewest claims a test could check.  Cooper's second argument, from the royal pedigrees of medieval Europe, is examined in Part 1.

Arthur Custance, 1975.  Custance held the gap theory rather than a young earth, but his Noah's Three Sons is the book the young-earth writers repeat.  His thesis:  "the tenth chapter of Genesis, the Table of Nations, is a statement about the origins of the present world population, and of how these descendants of the three brothers spread out over the earth."⁶  His method follows consonants through later names.  For Gomer:  "The middle consonant of the word GoMeR can readily be replaced by a W or a U, so that G-M-R can become G-W-R, or G-U-R.  It is possible that the ancient site known as Tepe Gawra is a recollection of one of these forms.  A further change may take place in the substitution of L for the terminal R ... We thus have the following series:  G-M-R becoming G-U-R, becoming G-U-L.  The final form is to be observed as the more familiar Gaul".⁶  Then Cumberland, "so that Gomer-land becomes Cumber-land",⁶ and Germany, which may preserve "Gomer in slightly inverted form".⁶  For Ashkenaz, a lake "now known as Lake Iznik — a broken-down form of Ashkenaz, in which an inversion has taken place."⁶  For Meshech and Tubal, Moscow and Tobolsk.⁶  For the Sinites, China:  "We are referring specifically to Heth, a son of Canaan, and the Sinites, a tribe presumably descended from Sin, a brother of Heth ... He may further have had his name preserved in the modern term 'China.'"⁶

Custance deserves two things said for him.  He gets the Assyrian core right:  "Meshech is found on the Assyrians monuments in the form of 'Muskaa' ... In the Assyrian inscriptions, the word Tubal occurs as Tubla".⁶  And he says plainly how weak his northern chain is:  "As stated at the outset, there is very little certainty about any of this but such fragments as we do have point in the same general direction".⁶  His readers have dropped the caveat and kept the conclusion.

The method itself is the problem.  If M may become W, U or B, R may become L, and letters may change places, a three-consonant name will match a great many later words by chance.  What separates a real survival from a chance match is a record that shows the name passing from one people to the next, as the Cimmerians pass from Sennacherib's letters to Esarhaddon's prism to Herodotus.  Custance supplies no such record for any of his European or Asian names, and the later names have known origins of their own:

• Lake Iznik takes its name from the town of Iznik on its shore, ancient Nicaea. The 1911 Britannica gives the source of the Turkish name: "NICAEA, or Nice [mod. Isnick, i.e. εἰς Νικαίαν]", that is, "to Nicaea".¹⁶ Custance names Nicaea in the same sentence: the lake lies "near Nicea".⁶
• Tepe Gawra is a modern local name. Its excavator, E. A. Speiser, wrote that the mound "was named by neighboring villagers Tepe Gawra, 'The Great Mound;' the Arabs of Mosul know it by the less colorful designation of Tell Ali Beg, after a former owner of the site."¹⁷
• Cumberland is the land of the Cumbri, the Britons of the north-west, and its name is medieval: "In 875 the kingdom of the Cumbri is referred to, but without any indication of its extent, and the first mention of Cumberland to denote a geographical area occurs in 945".¹⁸ That is more than a thousand years after the Cimmerians leave the record.
• Moscow is first recorded in AD 1147: "The Russian annals first mention Moscow in 1147 as a place where Yuri Dolgoruki, prince of Suzdal, met Svyatoslav of Syeversk and his allies."¹⁹ Its Russian name, Moskva, is in Max Vasmer's words "название реки и города", the name of the river and the city.²⁰ Tobolsk stands "on the right bank of the Irtysh, near its confluence with the Tobol", and "was founded in 1587 by Cossacks".²¹ The Mushku and Tabal of the Assyrian annals are Anatolian peoples of the twelfth to seventh centuries BC. Moscow lies about 1,900 km north of their country and Tobolsk about 3,200 km north-east of it, their first records come about 1,800 years after the last Assyrian mention, and no record links them.
• China is not from the Sinites. The history of China in the 1911 Britannica gives the usual derivation with a caution: "The name of Chin has been supposed (doubtfully) to be derived from the dynasty of Tsʽin, which a little more than two centuries before the Christian era enjoyed a vigorous existence, uniting all the Chinese provinces under its authority". It also judges that "Whether the Sinim of the prophet Isaiah should be interpreted of the Chinese is probably not susceptible of any decision".²² On either view the name is Asian. The Sinites are the people of Siyannu, a small town-state beside Ugarit on the Syrian coast, named in the Ugarit archives and in Tiglath-pileser III's annals (Genesis 10 Name by Name).
• The Saxons, whom Custance derives from Ashkenaz by way of Sachsen, take their name, in Walter Skeat's etymological dictionary, from Old English "Seaxan, Saxons; because armed with a short sword", from "seax, a knife, lit. 'cutter'".²³
• Hellas, which Custance and Morris both derive from Elishah, is in Homer a district of Achilles' realm, named with Phthia and Trachis: "all those again that inhabited Pelasgian Argos, and dwelt in Alos and Alope and Trachis, and that held Phthia and Hellas, the land of fair women".²⁴ Only later does the name cover all the Greeks.

Henry Morris, 1976.  The Genesis Record, by the founder of the Institute for Creation Research, gives the method in one sentence:  "Allowing for the gradual modifications in form that always occur in such names with the passage of time ... we can trace most of these names and recognize them as ancestors of the Indo-European peoples."²⁵  Morris starts from the right place for Gomer, "generally identified (by Herodotus, Plutarch, and other ancient writers) with the district of Cimmeria, north of the Black Sea", and then moves west:  "One branch of the descendants of Gomer eventually moved westward, with the name probably being preserved both in Germany and Cambria (Wales)."²⁵  He is right about Elishah's Alashiya, "people apparently from Cyprus".²⁵  His other links are Custance's, stated more firmly:  "Meshech clearly is preserved in the name Muskovi (the former name of Russia) and Moscow.  Tubal is known in the Assyrian monuments as the Tibareni, and probably has been preserved in the modern Russian city of Tobolsk.  In Ezekiel 38:2 they are associated with 'Rosh,' a name from which modern 'Russia' was derived."²⁵  And for the peoples of East Asia:  "The evidence is tenuous but, of all the names in the Table of Nations, it does seem that two sons of Canaan, Heth (Hittites = Khittae = Cathay) and Sin (Sinites = Sinim = China), are the most likely to have become ancestors of the Oriental peoples ... it is reasonable to conclude that the Mongoloid peoples (and therefore also the American Indians) have come mostly from the Hamitic line."²⁵

Morris calls the China link "tenuous" and the Moscow link "clear", and the evidence for each is the same:  a likeness of sound.  Three of his links fail on the later name.  Cathay, in the 1911 Britannica, "is derived from Khitai, or Khitat, the name which was properly that of the kingdom established by the Khitan conquerors in the northern provinces of China about A.D. 907", not from the Hittites.²⁶  Russia, in the same work, "is certainly derived, through Rossiya, from Slavonic Rus or Ros ..., a name first given to the Scandinavians who founded a principality on the Dnieper in the 9th century".²⁷  And Ezekiel's rosh may not be a people at all.  It is the ordinary Hebrew word for "head" or "chief", and the King James Version reads it so in Ezekiel 38:2:  "Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal".  Brown, Driver and Briggs take it instead as the name of a people, Rôsh, the Septuagint's Ρως, and call it "not identified".²⁸  On either reading nothing ties it to the Rus', a name that reaches Russia only in the ninth century AD.  Herodotus's Tibareni are usually taken as the Tabal, which Genesis 10 Name by Name dates to 837 BC in central Anatolia;  Tobolsk is in western Siberia.

Russell Grigg, 1998.  Grigg's article in CMI's Creation magazine, still on the ministry's website, gives a modern nation for each of Noah's sixteen grandsons and is the most widely read version of the list.  "Meshech, the name of the next grandson, is the ancient name for Moscow.  Moscow is both the capital of Russia, and the region that surrounds the city.  To this day, one section, the Meshchera Lowland, still carries the name of Meshech, virtually unchanged by the ages."²⁹  And:  "For many centuries France was called Gaul, after the descendants of Gomer."²⁹  These are Custance's matches, stated as facts.  Grigg also writes that Tiglath-pileser I named the Tabali about 1100 BC;  his annals name the Mushku, and no Tabal appears before 837 (Genesis 10 Name by Name).²⁹  Josephus made the same kind of link in the first century, Gomer to the Galatians, a Celtic people who reached Anatolia only in 278 BC (Part 1).  A match by sound is as old as the reading of the chapter, and it has never been better than a match by sound.

Bill Cooper, 1990 and 1995.  Cooper set himself a fair test:  "If the names of the individuals, families, peoples and tribes listed in the Table of Nations were genuine, then those same names should appear also in the records of other nations of the Middle East ... I allowed for the fact that a good proportion of these names would not appear."⁵  His 1990 journal series announced the result in advance:  "This portion of Genesis in particular is fully corroborated by an overwhelming richness of documentary (and other) historical evidence so vast that it is unique in recorded history!"³⁰  The 1995 book made it total:  "every one of their names is found in the records of the early surrounding nations of the Middle East".⁵  Genesis 10 Name by Name checked that claim against the names.  Cooper's own appendices say that the location of Gether's and Almodad's descendants "cannot now be determined" and that of the Casluhim is "uncertain";⁵ his 1990 notice on the Anamim says "Secular records are apparently silent concerning this people";³⁰ and Kitchen, the most conservative reference work, counts 39 names with no certain attestation.³¹  Genesis 10 Name by Name also found three plain errors of fact:  Cooper puts the Cimmerians on the Caspian and has the Elamites drive them out, dates the Scythians' Assyrian records to the sixth century when they are of the seventh, and credits Sargon II with a text that is a later copy about Sargon of Akkad.  Cooper got the standard identifications right, and he got Togarmah right where Answers in Genesis did not.  His headline claim is contradicted by his own book.  It has not been corrected in the young-earth literature:  CMI's 2021 obituary still presents the book as evidence that "the history of the European people could be traced back to the biblical account of Noah and the Flood."¹⁴

Bodie Hodge and Troy Lacey, Answers in Genesis, 2013-2019.  Hodge's book Tower of Babel (2013) is known to this article only through Lacey's summary of it, so its own wording is not quoted here.  Lacey:  "In his book Tower of Babel, author Bodie Hodge gathered several genealogies, maps, and histories and compared them to Genesis 10 (called the Table of Nations) and Genesis 11.  He attempted to equate the biblical names mentioned with tribes, peoples, nations, and places of ancient and modern countries".³²  On that basis Lacey reads the ancient DNA of Bronze Age Europe as post-Babel migration:  "It appears from biblical and historical records that Europe was primarily settled by descendants of Japheth".³²  In 2019 he went further, making the Denisovans the descendants of Togarmah (Genesis 10 Name by Name), and added:  "Quite probably, some of Togarmah's tribe intermarried with Hamitic tribes, likely the Sinites, and this group would have splintered off in Afghanistan or Pakistan and spread southward toward Southeast Asia and Melanesia."³³  Every attested Togarmah is in eastern Anatolia, and the Sinites are a town by Ugarit.  The route from Anatolia to Melanesia is drawn to fit the genetic result, which is the reverse of a test.

Anthony Osgood, 1988.  Osgood is the one young-earth writer who uses the Table as an archaeological map, and he states the one-off reading in its strongest form:  "I believe we can assume that what is given here in the Table of the Nations is a photo start of the broad families, nations and the language groups at the time of Babel immediately after the confusion of languages, the groups from which the nuclear nations came on the face of the earth, the first primary basic nations, and languages."³⁴  He counts the groups:  "The very earliest cultures after Babel should number a possible 12 Japhethites, 9 Shemites and 25 Hamite groups, a total of up to 46 initial cultures and languages scattering across the face of the earth."³⁴  Then he assigns cultures to names.  The Halaf culture of northern Mesopotamia is Aram:  "the early Halaf people in the north were contemporary with the early Al Ubaid people in the south, here equated with a contemporaneity of the Aramites with the Chaldeans."³⁴  The Ubaid culture of the south is Arpachshad and the Chaldeans:  "as it was known as Ur of the Chaldees, this allows us to equate the Chaldees with the Al Ubaid people."³⁴

Osgood's model is priced in the Neolithic article, Part 6:  it puts the whole Ubaid period, which radiocarbon spreads over nearly three thousand years, between Babel and Abraham.  Two points belong here.  First, the snapshot reading is the one-off reading in When Was the Table of Nations Written?, and the Table's own Japhethite core, written in Assyrian forms of the eighth and seventh centuries, tells against it.  Second, Osgood's equation of the Ubaid people with the Chaldeans rests on the phrase "Ur of the Chaldees" in Genesis 11.  The Chaldeans are first named in Assyrian inscriptions about 878 BC (When Was the Table of Nations Written?).  "Ur of the Chaldees" is then itself an updated name, the city called after the people who held the region a thousand years after Abraham, which is the updating model When Was the Table of Nations Written? adopts.  It cannot also be evidence that the Chaldeans built Ur.  His 46 founding languages are tested against the language families in Testing the Table of Nations and in the sibling article on language origins.

Robert Carter, 2018 to 2024.  Carter, CMI's geneticist, is the young-earth writer who has thought hardest about what Genesis 10 predicts, and his position has moved.  In 2018, with Lee and Sanford, he refused the simplest genetic mapping:  "We cannot assume there should be 16 branches for the chrY tree, for example, just because Noah had 16 grandsons (actually, many of the names in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 are plural, indicting [indicating] people groups rather than named individuals).  Population dynamics are complex."³⁵  In the same paper he called the Table "a one-off documentation of the early post-Flood world".³⁵  In 2022, reviewing Nathaniel Jeanson's Traced, which assigns Y-chromosome lineages to Table peoples, he objected:  "Many will disagree with his quest to assign Y chromosomes to specific people groups.  For example, is it possible to identify the 'Persian' Y chromosome?"³⁶  He also faulted Jeanson's choices because they restrict "Japheth's descendants to the Middle East", against "the tenor of the Table of Nations regarding Japheth".³⁶  Jeanson's own mappings are known to this article only through that review.  In 2024 Carter wrote that the Table "is also a record of Y chromosome descent",⁷ rejected the popular continent map as "entirely wrong", with the three lines "overlapping across most of their range",⁷ and ended:  "In the end, we should be cautious when trying to peg Y chromosome lineages to a map and when trying to correlate ancient place names with the scant details given to us in the Table of Nations.  This does not mean it cannot be done."⁷

Carter's 2024 position is the best young-earth reading on offer, for two reasons.  It drops the continent map, which Part 1 traced to the Greek geography of the second century BC rather than to Genesis.  And it drops the name-to-modern-nation matching, warning against correlating "ancient place names with the scant details" of the text.  Its cost is that it leaves little to test.  If the three lines overlap across most of their range and the Table is far from complete, no distribution of Y-chromosome lineages could contradict it.  Testing the Table of Nations sets the ancient-DNA results beside it anyway.  The two young-earth geneticists also disagree with each other:  Jeanson maps lineages to Table peoples, and Carter says that cannot yet be done.  Neither position is a dating claim, so the disagreement does not move the young-earth date of the dispersion in either direction.

Objections and responses

"Cooper is a straw man;  serious creationists do not rely on him."  Carter's 2024 article does reject the continent map that Cooper's European chapters assume, and Carter, Lee and Sanford decline to map the Y-chromosome tree onto Noah's grandsons (Part 2).  But Cooper is not marginal.  CMI's 2021 obituary presents After the Flood as evidence that European history "could be traced back to the biblical account of Noah and the Flood",¹⁴ CMI's journal published an article building on it in 2002, Grigg's widely read Creation article draws on it, and Carter's 2024 article cites Cooper's journal series.  None has corrected its two headline claims.

Issues and unanswered questions

• Etymologies to be sourced. The origins of the names Iznik, Tepe Gawra, Cumberland, Moscow, Tobolsk, China, Saxon, Hellas, Cathay and Russia, and the meaning of Ezekiel's rosh, are stated in Part 2 from standard knowledge without a source read for this article. Each carries a marker for a dictionary or gazetteer citation.

Verdict

Every reader of Genesis 10 from the second century BC to the thirteenth century AD did the same thing:  matched its names to the peoples on his own map.  Jubilees put the Table on the Greek map of three continents, Josephus kept the names still in use and guessed the rest by sound, and the medieval pedigrees tied the nations of Europe to Japheth no earlier than the ninth century AD.  Reception therefore adds no independent evidence for the Table.  Every identification that improves on Josephus comes from cuneiform and Egyptian texts recovered since the 1850s.

The popular young-earth uses repeat the same process.  Their matches with Moscow, Tobolsk, Germany, China and the Denisovans rest on sound.  Cooper's two headline claims, that every name is found in the ancient records and that the European pedigrees independently confirm Genesis, fail on his own appendices and on the dates of the manuscripts, and neither has been corrected in the young-earth literature.  Carter's 2024 position is the most careful:  the lines overlap, the continent map is "entirely wrong", and matching lineages and place names to the Table calls for caution.  It is also the reading with the least left to test.

Companion pages

• The literature: every source consulted for the Table of Nations articles, what it shows, and which way it cuts.
• Quotations: the key quotations behind the Table of Nations articles, each with its locator.
• The Table of Nations: what kind of document Genesis 10 is, and the verdict on every test.
• Genesis 10 Name by Name: every name, its identification, its earliest attestation outside the Bible, and its confidence grade.
• When Was the Table of Nations Written?: the horizon of first attestations, the peoples the list leaves out, each scholar's date, and the updating model.
• Testing the Table of Nations: the language families, the ancient genomes, and the Levantine map.

Sources