5. the Sea Peoples. The probable reference is to the migrants from the Greek islands (“Javan” is Ion, or Greece) who established a foothold in the coastal region of Palestine during the twelfth century B.C.E.

These are the sons of Japheth. These words do not occur in the Masoretic Text, but the scholarly consensus is that there is a scribal omission here, as this is part of the formula used in verse 20 and verse 31 to summarize the list of the descendants of each of Noah’s other two sons.

8. He was the first mighty man on earth. The Hebrew, which says literally, “he began to be a mighty man,” uses the same idiom that is invoked for Noah’s planting a vineyard. The implication, then, is that Nimrod, too, was the founder of an archetypal human occupation. The next verse suggests that this occupation is that of hunter, with his founding of a great Mesopotamian empire then introduced in verses 10–12 as an ancillary fact. Perhaps his prowess as hunter is put forth as evidence of the martial prowess that enabled him to conquer kingdoms, since the two skills are often associated in the ruling classes of older civilizations. Numerous Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs depict royal lion hunts or royal bull hunts. Nimrod has been conjecturally identified with the thirteenth-century B.C.E. Tukulti-Ninurta I, the first Assyrian conqueror of Babylonia.

10. all of them. This translation adopts a commonly accepted emendation wekhulanah, instead of the Masoretic Text’s wekhalneh, “and Calneh.”

24. Eber. He is the eponymous father of the Hebrews, ʿibrim. Whatever the actual original meanings of the names, there is a clear tendency in the Table to intimate exemplary meanings in the names of these mythic founders: elsewhere, “Eber” is explicitly linked with the term that means “from the other side” (of the river).

25. Peleg . . . in his days the earth split apart. The three consonants of the name Peleg, which as a common noun means “brook,” form the verbal root that means “to split.” It is a stronger verb than “divide,” the term used by most English translators. Rabbinic tradition construes the splitting here as a reference to the Tower of Babel, but it is at least as plausible to see it as an allusion to an entirely different epochal event of “division,” such as a cataclysmic earthquake.

32. branched out. Literally, the Hebrew verb means “separated.” The whole Table of Nations is devised to explain how the many separate nations came into being. The immediately following verse, which begins the tale of the Tower of Babel, announces a primeval unity of all people on earth. This seeming flat contradiction might reflect a characteristically biblical way of playing dialectically with alternative possibilities: humankind is many and divided, as a consequence of natural history; and, alternately, humankind was once one, as a consequence of having been made by the same Creator, but this God-given oneness was lost through man’s presumption in trying to overreach his place in the divine scheme.