the tribes that are native to North and South America are not found in the “table of nations” that make up the decendants of the sons of Noah
So which of Noah’s sons is the ancestor of the Native Americans?
Hi rhamiel,
If, one believes the words of the Scriptures, then we know that all peoples of the earth came from either Noah, Shem, Ham or Japheth and their wives. They all came from Adam. As has been shown in the above chart (post #5) the descendants of these families migrated around the earth. This migration would have begun from the place that we're not actually sure of, as to exact location, that is called in the Scriptures Mt. Ararat. It does seem that it would pretty obviously be in the middle east somewhere.
Somehow, through that migration process, some men and women came to pretty much all the land masses on the face of the earth except for maybe Antarctica. The exact path or timeline of this migratory process is unknown to us. Mankind has always, especially the male of the species, had a wandering nature. It seems that as families grew there was always someone who wanted to find out what was over the next mountain or just beyond the horizon and set off to go see. With this nature, it is certainly not impossible to show that man had wandered pretty much all of the known land masses within the first 1,000 years after the flood. 1,000 years is a looooong time as relates to human kind and familial wandering.
In the text of Genesis, we find that the sons of Israel went down to Egypt three times in a fairly short span of time. That's a straight line distance of 200-300 miles. Of course, that all depends on where exactly in the promised land Israel had settled with his family and where exactly they went in the land of Egypt. Abraham also went to Egypt and so I think a reasonable argument can be made that wandering a few hundred miles to establish a home wouldn't be unthinkable. A thousand years would be about 40-50 generations and if only one family out of those generations moved 200 miles away from their inlaws, then you could cover the earth pretty quickly. If several families in each generation moved 200 miles away in different directions, then you could cover the earth even more quickly. The average time for a person to walk 200 miles, walking only six hours/day, would be about 9 days. So, the sons of Israel and Abraham could have made it to Egypt in about 9 days. That's certainly not an onerous task for people in that time when walking or riding a beast of burden was pretty much the regular mode of transportation.
While historians like to tell us that families were more tribal in the past, and for the most part they may have been, that wouldn't preclude a few dozen people of each generation moving away from their tribe to establish their own land and their own freedom. Their own place, so to speak. The Genesis account also tells us that Cain went into the land of Nod and there built a city. This would indicate that a lot of his family hung around the area where Cain settled and built up a population that would be seen as a city in those days, but some may well have also set off just as their father did to establish their own little place in the sun. Keep in mind that 'building a city' in those days likely wasn't including the construction of multi-storied office and apartment buildings as we think of a city today. You could likely just have a couple of hundred people building their homes in an area and it would be labeled a city.
However it happened, we know that it did happen. The Scriptures are fairly clear that the flood killed every living creature upon the land and so civilizations thereafter, if one believes that account, would have had to have been started from the descendants of Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth. That over the next few hundred years, those clans and families spread out all over the earth just as God instructed them to do.
Now, some will tell you that such a scenario is impossible, but I'm confident that it really isn't. I base a large part of that confidence on the fact that, well, here we are. Our nation was begun through English and Dutch settlers coming to this country in the late 1400's. At that time, as far as we know, there were no people other than the native tribes who had already been here. They were relatively small tribes and each had their own culture. Now today, a mere 500 years afterwards, look what our nation has become. Now, that's certainly not to say that hundreds of thousands or millions of people migrated as we see so much of today. It could merely be one father with a wife and a couple of children simply saying, 'Hey, let's pack up our bedrolls and have mom make a few sweet breads and such to carry us over for a few days and go find some quiet place where we can settle.' They might then set out to walk for 10-12 days until they found a spot they felt suitable for settling down. I think that people in that day were much more able to live off the land than we are today. They likely didn't see it as some burdensome task to set out and walkabout for a few days to find a place to establish their new home. Just as today, some people like living in the city and some people like living out on some 100 acre ranch.
Trust me, a lot can happen in 1,000 years.
God bless,
In Christ, ted
