Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
From Shem to Abram
Genesis 11:10-26
10 This is the history of the generations of Shem: Shem was one hundred years old when he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood. · WEB
A second arithmetical genealogy narrows the world's nations to one household, and the numbers fall by half and half again.
This is the history of the generations of Shem. The section formula opens the book's fifth division, and it does the same work as chapter five: ten generations, each with a figure attached, moving from a known man to the man the rest of the book is about.
The placement is the argument. The chapter has just scattered the human race into nations and languages; the very next paragraph begins narrowing again, and it will not stop until it reaches a single childless couple in Haran. The movement of the whole book is here in miniature — outward to all the families of the earth, then inward to one, so that through the one the outward movement can begin again on different terms.
The list is shorter in its notices than chapter five and it is missing one thing. There is no refrain. The eightfold then he died that tolled through the generations of Adam is not repeated here — each entry gives the age at fatherhood, the years afterward, and the further sons and daughters, and simply stops. The omission is not an oversight in a writer this consistent; the deaths are still implied, but the chapter's rhythm has changed from a verdict being executed to a line being traced.
What the numbers do show is a collapse. Shem lives six hundred years. Two generations later the totals are in the four hundreds, then the two hundreds, and Terah dies at two hundred and five. From the nine centuries of the pre-flood world to Abraham's hundred and seventy-five is a steady decline across ten generations, and it continues afterward to Moses' hundred and twenty and then to the ordinary span. The book records the curve without explaining it, and a curve is not the shape a legend produces; an invented tradition of long-lived ancestors tends to keep them long-lived.
One name in the list carries the note from the previous chapter — Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided Genesis 10:25 — which quietly ties the genealogy to the scattering it follows.
And the last entry is the hinge of the Old Testament: Terah lived seventy years, and became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Eleven chapters have covered the creation of the world, the fall, a murder, a flood and the dispersal of every nation. Everything from here to the end of the book — thirty-nine chapters — concerns this man and three generations after him.
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