What Does Genesis 10:17 Mean?

The Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, these were among the descendants of Canaan. The Hivites are significant in the Genesis narrative: they are the Shechemites who interacted with Jacob's daughter Dinah in chapter 34, and they are the Gibeonites who deceived Joshua into making a peace treaty in the book of Joshua. The Arkites are associated with the town of Arqa in modern Lebanon. The Sinites have been associated with a town in the same northern region.

The genealogy here moves from the major political powers, the Hittites, the Amorites, to smaller city-state and tribal identities. This granularity suggests that the Table of Nations was not a theoretical construct but an attempt at actual ethnographic comprehensiveness. The compilers knew these peoples as real entities with specific territories and political identities, and they placed them all within the genealogical framework that connected them to Noah's family.

The Hivites' role in two significant narrative episodes, the crisis at Shechem and the Gibeonite deception, demonstrates the ongoing relevance of the Table of Nations for reading the rest of Scripture. When these groups appear again in the story of Israel, the reader who has absorbed chapter 10 knows something about them that the characters in those later stories sometimes forget: they are family, complicated and fallen and subject to their own choices, but not aliens. The proper treatment of them is governed by what God thinks of them, which the Table of Nations establishes is not contempt.