This page exists so that nobody has to take the article on trust. Each quotation below was read in the source named, at the place named. Full citations are in the article's Sources and in its literature review.
What kind of document it is
"The 'sons' are peoples or countries. The genealogical pattern is only the form of presentation; it is not meant to indicate descent. Only Japheth is a person"
Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (1984), p. 504.
"the table of the nations is unique and has no parallel either inside or outside the Old Testament."
Westermann, p. 501.
"So here 'sons of' or 'fathered' might well be referring to a people's political or geographical affiliation, not its genealogical links. Nevertheless, while the terminology of this chapter does not demand that all the names be personal eponyms, the phrases 'sons of' and 'fathered' do express the idea that all mankind known to Israel is descended from a single stock."
Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (1987), p. 215.
"This Table of Nations, then, traces affiliation of tribes to show relationships, on the basis of some original physical connections."
Allen Ross, Creation and Blessing (1988), p. 229.
"Such verbal atlases, but not expressed genealogically, are known in Babylonian lists from third-millennium Mesopotamia, in Ebla (for north Syria), in Egypt in the Execration Texts (early second millennium, for Levant and Nubia), and in the great topographical lists"
K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), pp. 430-431.
"As such, the Table stands out as a pioneering effort among the ethnographic attempts of the ancient world."
E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible (1964), p. 71.
The date horizon
"(As for) Gyges, the king of the land Lydia — a region on the opposite shore of the sea, a remote place, the mention of whose name none of the kings, my ancestors, had (ever) heard"
Ashurbanipal, Prism A ii 95, in Novotny and Jeffers, RINAP 5/1 (2018), Ashurbanipal 011.
"The troops of the Urarṭian king have been utterly defeated on his expedition against the Cimmerians; eleven of his governors have been eliminated [with] their troops"
Crown prince Sennacherib to Sargon II, SAA 1 31, about 715-714 BC. The first mention of Gomer.
"1,000 camels of Gindibuʾ of the land of the Arabs"
Shalmaneser III, Kurkh Monolith ii 94, 853 BC. The first mention of the Arabs, whom the Table omits.
"This situation would suggest a second update in the first millennium, whether just once about the seventh century or in two subphases (IIIa, IIIb) in the tenth and seventh centuries respectively. It is premature to choose dogmatically, given the limits of our existing sources."
Kitchen (2003), p. 436.
"The Table of Nations with early roots had its first form in the early second millennium, its full form in the late second, and was finally updated in the early first (a text history like that of the patriarchal narratives)."
Kitchen (2003), p. 447.
"One could argue that Moses used the old skeleton list and added the material about Nimrod, the founding of the great empires, the Canaanite boundaries, and the cliché list of tribes. This hypothesis would explain the difference in style ... but would not require a late date for the compilation."
Ross (1988), p. 33, note 12.
"The sons of Japheth however, the nations of the far north, have nothing at all to do with a genealogy of the sons of Noah; this is not possible because they only became known to Israel in the 7th century (the greater number of these names occur also in Ezekiel)."
Westermann, p. 503.
"The Japhethite group as recorded by P is not later than the seventh century b.c., since it was known to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, directly or indirectly."
Speiser, p. 71.
"Accumulating evidence therefore points to a date of c. 1500 B.C. or earlier for the compilation of the 'Table of Nations'."
D. J. Wiseman, "Genesis 10: Some Archaeological Considerations" (1955), p. 14.
"The majority of scholars prefer a first-millennium date for the composition of this chapter, because some of the peoples listed here are not mentioned in extrabiblical texts until then"
Wenham, p. 214.
"What is interesting, also, are the omissions. For example, none of the later Ammon, Moab, or Edom got included, nor Midian nor Amalek ... Hostility might explain the former omissions, but not the latter."
Kitchen (2003), p. 438.
How it was read
"cols. 16-17 of the Genesis Apocryphon (or Jub. 8:11-9:15), in which 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."
Daniel Machiela, The Dead Sea Genesis Apocryphon (2009), p. 92.
"As for the rest, Ludieim, and Enemim, and Labim, who alone inhabited in Libya ..., Nedim and Phethrosim, and Chesloim, and Cephthorim, we know nothing of them besides their names."
Josephus, Antiquities 1.137, Whiston's translation.
"partim vero temporis vetustate ita mutata sunt, ut vix homines doctissimi antiquissimas historias perscrutantes, nec omnium, sed aliquarum ex istis origines gentium potuerunt reperire"
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 9.2.38: some names have so changed through the age of time that scarcely the most learned men, searching the most ancient histories, have been able to find the origins, not of all, but of some of these peoples.
"Hors et Hengist erant filii Guictglis, filii Guigta, filii Guechta, filii Woden, filii Frealaf, filii Fredulf, filii Finn, filii Fodepald, filii Geta, qui fuit, ut aiunt, filius dei. non ipse est deus deorum ... sed unus est ab idolis eorum"
Historia Brittonum 31, Mommsen's edition (1898), p. 171: Geta, who was, as they say, the son of a god, not the God of gods, but one of their idols.
"Manno tris filios adsignant, e quorum nominibus proximi Oceano Ingaevones, medii Herminones, ceteri Istaevones vocentur."
Tacitus, Germania 2, AD 98. The three sons behind the Historia Brittonum's Hessitio, Armenon and Negue.
"This production was a slavish copy, we might almost say a parody, of the Biblical story of the Children of Israel."
R. A. S. Macalister on the Lebor Gabála Érenn (1938), pp. xxx-xxxi.
"To sum up. 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."
Kenneth Sisam, "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies" (1953), p. 179 of the 1990 reprint.
"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."
Sisam, p. 180 of the reprint.
The young-earth writers, in their own words
"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."
Arthur Custance, Noah's Three Sons (1975), Part II, abstract.
"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"
Custance, Part II chapter 2, on Meshech and Russia.
"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."
Henry Morris, The Genesis Record (1976), p. 248.
"throughout the entire Table of Nations, whether we talk about the descendants of Shem, Ham or Japheth, every one of their names is found in the records of the early surrounding nations of the Middle East, even the many obscure names of certain remote Arab tribes"
Bill Cooper, After the Flood (1995), p. 41.
"another historical account that is quite independent of the Genesis record, but which it nevertheless verifies to a considerable degree."
Cooper, p. 96, on the Saxon royal pedigrees.
"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"
Anthony Osgood, "A Better Model for the Stone Age, Part 2" (1988), section "Family groups according to the records of Genesis 10 and 11".
"The Table of Nations (Genesis 10) was a one-off documentation of the early post-Flood world, with about 4,0000 years of history since."
Robert Carter, Stephen Lee and John Sanford (2018), p. 147. The misprint "4,0000" is theirs.
"When first learning about the Table of Nations, many people conclude that Japheth settled Europe, Ham settled Africa, and Shem stuck around in the Middle East (figure 4). Problem is, this is entirely wrong!"
Robert Carter, "Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree?" (2024).
"Thus, when we say, "the Philistines came from Ham", what we mean is that the men in leadership carried his Y chromosome."
Carter, "Who were the Philistines?" (2023), note 2.
Language
"it so happened that most of the groups involved were of Indo-European stock, so that the list becomes ethnogeographic and ethnolinguistic in effect, as is actually indicated in vs. 5."
Speiser, pp. 65-66, on Japheth.
"the modern principle of classification is strictly linguistic, whereas the Bible employs several criteria concurrently, which cannot lead to uniform results."
Speiser, p. 71.
"Phoenician is a member of the Semitic language family, specifically the Northwest Semitic branch of Central Semitic. Within Northwest Semitic it is a Canaanite language, the closest relatives of which are Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite."
Hackett, "Phoenician and Punic", in Woodard, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (2004), p. 365.
"Older names of the Afro-Asiatic family, still used by some scholars, include Hamito-Semitic and Semito-Hamitic, names that have generally been abandoned because they imply a subgroup of 'Hamitic' languages (i.e., of all languages in the family apart from the Semitic languages) that is not indicated by any isoglosses."
Huehnergard, "Afro-Asiatic", in Woodard (2004), p. 138.
"The trouble with linguistic evidence in this instance is that it really appears too late in history to be decisive."
Custance, Part II chapter 1.
Ancient DNA
"We find that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European-related admixture. This genetic signal is no longer detectible in the later Iron Age population."
Michal Feldman et al., Science Advances (2019), abstract.
"This suggests that the archaeological and historical category of "Canaanites" correlates with shared ancestry"
Lily Agranat-Tamir et al., Cell (2020), Discussion.
"We show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar"
Iosif Lazaridis et al., Nature (2017), abstract.
"A critical question raised by our results is how and when Canaanite-Phoenician culture and language were adopted by people without any detectable Levantine ancestry."
Harald Ringbauer et al., Nature (2025), Discussion.
"languages can be replaced with little or no genetic change, and populations can migrate and mix with little or no linguistic change."
Lazaridis et al., Science (2022), section "The Indo-Hittite hypothesis in the light of genetic data".
"C14-dated Bronze-to-Iron Age individuals from Armenia admixed 52.2±8.0 generations (1460±224 years) prior to their average date of 1119BCE, or ~2579BCE (mid-3rd millennium BCE), assuming a generation length of 28 years"
Lazaridis et al. (2022), caption to Figure 5F.
"the populations at the four corners of the quadrangle had differentiation of F ST =0.08-0.15, comparable to the value of 0.09-0.13 seen between present-day West Eurasians and East Asians (Han)"
Lazaridis et al., Nature (2016).
Geography
"From a Levantine (and even Egyptian) point of view, the groups and places under Japhet are entirely northern, in location or origin — northeast, north, northwest — in Anatolia/northwestern Iran, and the Aegean/eastern Mediterranean (and beyond)."
Kitchen (2003), p. 436.
"At the wharf of Agade he made moor ships from Meluhha, ships from Magan, (and) ships from Tilmun."
Sargon of Akkad, in A. Leo Oppenheim's translation, ANET (1969), p. 268.
"J. Simons, and others, object: 'A further difficulty is that the map of the world would be extended considerably by this one name.'"
Westermann, p. 507, on Tarshish as Tartessos.