What About Extra-Biblical Tables Of Nations And Genealogies That Go Back To Noah?
Biblical Authority Ministries, January 28, 2026 (Donate)
Genesis 10 gives an outline of family groups that left Babel. These people moved throughout the world and populated virtually every continent. (Was Antarctica ever settled in the past? At this point, I am unaware.) Here is the Table of Nations from the Bible:
Table 1 Bible’s Table of Nations
Historians such as Josephus (1st century), Snorri Sturlusonor (13th century), James Anderson (1732), Nennius (9th century), and many others have commented on various cultures and their genealogical records in the past and the origins of various peoples.[1]
Though there are many to pick from, a few examples of tables of nations should show that historians, especially prior to evolutionary re-writing of history which is common in the past 150 years, even unbeknownst to themselves sometimes, were offering a great confirmation of Genesis.
Josephus, who was surely drawing from Genesis, completed his table nations nearly 2,000 years ago. A discussion of this is detailed in Chapter 17, but here it is in graphic form. So, let’s start here:
Table 2 Josephus’ Table of Nations
Some genealogies connect prominent modern houses and royal lines with the Table of Nations listed in the Bible.[2] Anglo-Saxon chronologies feature six royal houses that go back to Noah.[3] In these genealogies, Noah is found on the top of the lists in many of these documents, some of which feature variant spellings such as Noe or Noa.
One
historian discovered a relationship between the ancient name of Sceaf (Seskef,
Scef) and the biblical Japheth.[4] This seems
reasonable, as Japheth has traditionally been seen as the ancestor of the
European nations—and many people came out of Babel with multiple names due to multiple
languages. Some of the European genealogies researched have a variant of Sceaf
with the exception of Irish genealogies, which still used the name Japheth.[5]
One table of European nations by historian Nennius is given below:
Table 4 Nennius’s Table of Nations; Permission granted from New Wine Press.
An eighth century Roman historian, Nennius, developed a table of nations of the lineages of many of the European people groups from Noah’s son Japheth: Gauls, Goths, Bavarians, Saxons, and Romans. Nennius’s table of nations is reproduced in Table 3.[6]
Though it repeats the Goths in two different areas, Nennius’s chart bears strong similarities to the history that Josephus recorded, as well as the Bible’s Table of Nations. However, there are clearly enough differences to show that it was neither a copy from the biblical text nor from the Jewish historian Josephus.[7]
Chinese records also describe Nuah with three sons, Lo Han, Lo Shen, and Jahphu, according to the Miautso people of China.[8] Although original documents of ancient sources sometimes no longer exist and one has to rely on quotes from other ancient books, it is interesting how in many places we find similarities to the Table of Nations given in the Bible.
Another questionable table of nations appears in the book of Jasher (or Jashar). For those familiar with the book of Jasher, it is mentioned twice in the Old Testament.
So the sun stood
still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies. Is
this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of
heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day (Joshua 10:13).
And he told them to teach the children of Judah the Song of the Bow; indeed it is written in the Book of Jasher (2 Samuel 1:18).
It was assumed that this book has been lost to history. Yet, there are three copies floating around today. So what is the story?
As it turns out, these copies are later books, not the one that is mentioned in Scripture. One book is a collection of legends from creation to the conquest of Joshua (and was written in Hebrew). It is believed by most scholars that this book did not exist until about 1625.
Another book of Jasher is supposed to be an 18th century translation of a book by Alcuin from the 8th century. Of course, there is a science fiction book by this title as well. So what we can learn from this book of Jasher is not what is reference material to what is stated in Scripture, but instead what people believed or researched within the past millennium. Essentially, we can only know what the author believed when this was written.
After researching the book of Jasher from the 17th century, we find a record of genealogies as well. It is not merely a copy of the Bible or of Josephus or of anything else directly referenced in this volume either. This is known because there is information here not given in any of the other references and vice versa; the other references give information not mentioned here. Here is what we have:
Table 4 Ham in Jasher
Table 5 Shem in Jasher
Table 6 Japheth in Jasher
Some of this makes sense too. I have been able to trace the Turks in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) to Noah’s great grandson Togarmah’s descendants migrating into part of modern-day Turkey. Later, they conquered the whole of Asia Minor and had the Turkish Empire, which was quite powerful. The Bible simply gives his name (Togarmah), but where did the name “Turk” come from? Was it a variation of Togarmah? If the author of Jasher is somewhat correct, then this is now explained by one of the ten sons of Togarmah (Tugarma). One of his sons was Tarki.
In some cases, the name of a descendant became the name of a language or people. For example, in the Bible, the Anakim were people named for descendants of Arba through his son Anak, and the Jews (named for Judah) became a name for the Israelites. So Turk may have that same connotation.
The Uzbek Turks (living in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan) may well be named for Zebuc, which sounds strikingly similar to Uzbek, as would the Oguzes or Oguz Turks to Ongal. It is this latter ancestral group that gave rise to Osman I, who founded the Ottoman Turk Empire that lasted for about six centuries (late A.D. 1200s to the 1800s).
Another example is the names of the children of Asshur. The Bible simply gives the name Asshur (Assyria). Jasher fills in the names of Asshur’s sons. This makes sense since Nimrod conquered and built up four of these places (Genesis 10:11–12) that were in Asshur’s lands (Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, and Resen). So did these cities take the names of Asshur’s sons or Nimrod’s sons? In light of the Bible, I would lean in the direction of Nimrod’s sons, but simply that they were in the land allotted for Asshur, but the Scripture is not clear. In this book of Jasher, they attribute them to Asshur.[9] Regardless, there was a mix of these two people groups in these four places.
There is much to learn, and it could be a book in and of itself to find and record various Tables of Nations found throughout the world. In truth, the book Royal Genealogies by James Anderson has a number of these tables. The research was done for the Prince of Great Britain, Fredrick Lewis, in 1732. This volume, unlike Jasher, is a much more reliable source. The few listed here and many others that can be tracked down are a great confirmation of the truthfulness of the Scriptures.
Recommended Reading:
Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham's son in law, has been an apologist since 1998 helping out in various churches and running an apologetics website. He spent 21 years working at Answers in Genesis as a speaker, writer, and researcher as well as a founding news anchor for Answers News. He was also head of the Oversight Council.
Bodie launched Biblical Authority Ministries in 2015 as a personal website and it was organized officially in 2025 as a 501(c)(3). He has spoken on multiple continents and hosts of US states in churches, colleges, and universities. He is married with four children.
Mr. Hodge earned a Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). Then he taught at SIUC for a couple of years as a Visiting Instructor teaching all levels of undergraduate engineering and running a materials lab and a CAD lab. He did research on advanced ceramic materials to develop a new method of production of titanium diboride with a grant from Lockheed Martin. He worked as a Test Engineer for Caterpillar, Inc., prior to entering full-time ministry.
His love of science was coupled with a love of history, philosophy, and theology. For about one year of his life, Bodie was editing and updating a theological, historical, and scientific dictionary/encyclopedia for AI use and training. Mr. Hodge has over 25 years of experience in writing, speaking and researching in these fields. Originally at Answers in Genesis; Edited; Republished by permission.
[1]
Nennius, Historia Brittonum, edited in the 10th century by Mark the
Hermit, with English version by the Rev. W. Gunn, rector of Irstead, Norfolk,
printed in London, 1819; Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius
Josephus the Jewish Historian (~100 A.D.), trans. William Whiston (~1850
A.D.) (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2008).
[2]
For a number of these, see Anderson, Royal
Genealogies.
[3]
Bill Cooper, After the Flood (Chichester, England: New Wine Press,
1995), p. 84–86.
[4]
Ibid., p. 92–96.
[5]
Ibid., p. 108.
[6]
Ibid., p. 49.
[7]
Ibid., chapter 3.
[8]
Edgar Traux, “Genesis According to the Miao People,” Impact, April 1991;
available online at www.icr.org/article/341/.
[9]
Some have thought these names attributed to Nimrod in the Table of Nations were
not sons at all, but that Nimrod simply built these cities. But then we are
stuck with two predicaments. How can a city, which is made up of people, exist
without progeny? And how could they come out with a new language as indicated
in Genesis 10? It makes sense that these cities were named for sons, which was
the common way of doing it.
