Story 17 Ham Restarts the Line of Caan, but God’s Calling is on Shem
The Table of Nations tells us how the human race grew and spread across the earth after Noah and the flood. After telling about Noah’s son Japheth, the Bible teaches about Ham’s sons. Remember, Ham was a man who rejected the ways of his godly father. His heart was bent towards rebellion and sin. The ways he chose were the ways of Satan. Because of his wicked behavior, Ham and his descendants were under Noah’s curse. The curse of their sin would show its spreading poison over time. From Ham’s descendants the Bible lists thirty nations or language groups.
Ham’s sons were named Cush, Mizraim, and Canaan. Cush was the father of a man named Nimrod. He was brilliantly famous as a great and mighty warrior. He was the founder of the great cities of the ancient world. Together they made up Nimrod’s mighty empire. Yet Nimrod was cut from the same sinful cloth as Cain and Lamech and Ham. His name means, “we shall rebel.” He built his empire on force and violence and his own will to power. It spread across whole regions, eating up the land and everyone in it.
It was Nimrod who first built the cities of Babylon and Nineveh. They would one day become the empires of Babylon and Assyria, and they would follow in Nimrod’s footsteps. One of the reasons Nimrod’s story is told in the Bible is because both of these nations would become great oppressors of God’s holy people,the nation of Israel. Assyria would one day destroy a whole section of God’s holy nation, the Northern Kingdom, forcing the people into captivity and slavery. Babylon would do the same to the Southern Kingdom. It would only be after Babylon was conquered by another nation that the Israelite people would be allowed to return to their land. The Bible taught that these cruel nations came from the line of Ham, a people whose father chose wickedness over the ways of God.
Mizraim would be the father of those who lived in the region that became Egypt. It would become a place of great idolatry. They would worship everything from the sun to the Nile River to their very own Pharaoh! Egypt, too, would become a great oppressor of God’s holy people, the nation of Israel. But God would do a mighty work to free his people from their tyrannical king.
Another a group that came from the line of Mizraimwas the Philistines. These people would come across the sea to Israel to attack them and take their land. In the famous story when David fights against Goliath, it was to defeat the Philistine army.
Ham’s son Canaan would settle in the land that God would promise to Israel. They would become the great enemies of God’s holy people. They would live in the land for hundreds of years in horrific rebellion, idolatry, and moral filth against the Lord. Sodom and Gomorrah were in the land of Canaan, and their sin was so violently wicked that God would utterly wipe them out. But it wasn’t just Sodom and Gomorrah. The whole land would become contaminated with the toxic pollution of sin, so much so that the Bible says the land would end up vomiting them out in disgust! That was a poetic way to say that God would use the nation of Israel to judge them for their sin and remove them from the land.
The Table of Nations teaches many things. As an Israelite read through the list of Ham’s descendants, it would have been like reading through the record of all their nation’s greatest enemies. The line of Ham produced the great violators of God’s way. They were idol worshippers who forcefully imposed their immorality on the other nations of the world. They did not simply wish to live in their own private sins, they pushed and forced their wickedness and idolatry on others, enslaving them and brutally punishing those who did not join them.
These stories tell us about things that happened in ancient history. But part of the reason God put them in the Bible is because they teach us why the world is the way it is now. The reason we have sin and suffering and shame now are the same reasons there was sin and suffering and shame in the past. Our situation on planet earth now comes from what happened in the past. Through these stories, God is teaching us how to understand our world. The violence and brokenness and lack of love in this world started with separation from God in the Garden. As whole sections of the human race rejected the perfect, holy ways of the LORD, they brought greater and greater wickedness and pollution of sin onto the earth. Everyone bears the pain of this. Every life is marked with hardship. And right now many, many people across the world live in terrible conditions of loss, hunger, and degradation because of the systems of wickedness and oppression that are set in their governments and their cultures.
This is important for us to understand because it is God’s truth. It is also important for us to understand because if we wish to be a part of God’s bright, holy transforming work of good against the powers of evil, we have to understand why the evil is there. We have to know the enemy of God’s perfect goodness so that we know how to join the LORD and his holy angels in the battle against him.
The wicked nations and cultures that rose up from the line of Caan did exactly the opposite of what God created the nation of Israel to be. Israel would be his nation of priests, and God would use them to bring his bright and holy presence into the midst of a dark and cursed world. This nation would come from Noah’s son Shem, or the Semite people.