After the flood, Noah’s descendants spread and repopulated the earth with each establishing various nations of people. The people in those various areas not only called themselves by the name of the man who was their common ancestor, but the land was also called by his name. In some cases, major cities and/or rivers were named after him. For thousands of years, those names stood for many years and in some cases, they stand to this present day.
Sometimes, the various nations came to worship their ancestors, and if they did, they would often name their god after the man who was the ancestor of all of them. It is not difficult to imagine how ancestor worship gained a hold over them. As we have seen, those first generations after the flood lived to be very old. If a man outlived all his children, his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren, it is easy to see that his descendants might get the idea that he was never going to die. If this was the perception, it is also easy to see how they might imagine that he was really a god. Rather than naming their god after him, they would claim him as their god. We shall see that the names of many of the pagan gods are traceable to the grandsons of Noah.
The names of those nations that were preserved in the Hebrew language for a few thousand years correspond exactly with the names of those sixteen grandsons of Noah. After being a prominent language, it was replaced by other languages in the majority of those areas until it was revived centuries later as a spoken language. We shall see that those names continued for thousands of years, usually with very little change. Being fixed in the Hebrew language, it was preserved for all ages.
Genesis 10 gives the names of those ancestors and clues as to the locations to which they spread. This chapter offers an index to identify them and the nations that sprang from them. We will look at each one of them in a summary fashion to discover some of the information that will be adequate to show the connection to Noah’s descendants.