Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Chronicles 1.

I have written this before, but I struggle with writing anything about the passages of genealogies.  For the most part, genealogies just do not interest me very much.  Sometimes I get fascinated by looking at my own in order to see how I may be related to someone else, or even how two other people are related to each other.  Which brings us to what I think is the main point of this genealogy being here: to show the people of Israel how they were related to the peoples living around them.  To a degree, this served to explain the similarities and differences between the peoples around the Israelites: “These people are very different from you because their ancestors separated from your ancestors a long time ago, while these people are not as different from you because they shared a common ancestor with you more recently.”  Now I want to write about the first thing which stood out to me today.  The writer tells us that Peleg was named that because in his time the earth was divided.   Some sources I have found say that the Hebrew word translated as “earth” can also be translated as “nations”.    Those sources, and some others, also suggest that perhaps the passage means that the division of languages which occurred at the Tower of Babel happened during Peleg’s lifetime.  However, that raises the question as to why it is important that the earth was divided in Peleg’s lifetime?  Wouldn’t that have also been his brother Joktan’s lifetime? And at least some of the other people mentioned here?  The answer to that question is that Peleg was Abraham’s ancestor.  Tracking back the ancestors of the Israelites, it was in Peleg’s time that the “earth” was divided.  So, those whose common ancestor was before Peleg might not be any more different from each other than anybody whose common ancestor was contemporary with Peleg.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.