What Does Genesis 10:18 Mean?

The Arvadites, Zemarites, and Hamathites were also among Canaan's descendants. The distribution of Canaanite peoples spread across what is today Lebanon and western Syria. Arvad was a coastal island city (modern Arwad), Zemar was a town in the region of Lebanon, and Hamath was a significant city-state on the Orontes River that would later become one of the boundary markers of the Promised Land in its ideal extent. The northern boundary of the land promised to Israel ran to "the entrance to Hamath."

The fact that the northern boundary of the Promised Land is defined by a Canaanite city speaks to the relationship between the genealogical categories of the Table of Nations and the political geography of the Promised Land. The land God promised to Abraham was not empty; it was full of specific peoples with specific names, all of whom appear in the genealogical register of Genesis 10. The conquest of Canaan was not the displacement of nameless peoples but the movement of one part of Noah's family through the territory of another part.

Later the Canaanite clans scattered and the borders of Canaan reached from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha. The geographic spread of Canaan's descendants at their maximum extent maps the territory that will later be designated as the inheritance of Israel. The land's history is woven into its genealogy, and both reach back to the same origins in Noah's family and the divine commission to fill the earth.