Pondering Peleg and the partions of the earth

Opening my Bible to First Chronicles, I began perusing the listing of the generations of mankind. Mostly my eyes glaze over when confronted with these tables, but there are narrative fragments in there like Nimrod (1.10), Archar (2.7) and the infamous Jabez (3.9-10) that hint at broader stories not more explicitly told to us in the Bible. One of these is the “story” of Peleg, descendant of Shem, son of Noah:

The sons of Shem: Elam, Ashur, Arphaxad, Lud and Aram. The sons of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether and Meshek. Arphaxad was the father of Shelah, and Shelah the father of Eber. Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided; his brother was named Joktan. Joktan was the father of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, Obal, Abimael, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah and Jobab. All these were sons of Joktan. (1.17-27, TNIV)

Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah and Abram (that is, Abraham).

So Peleg falls nearly halfway between Shem, the son of Noah, and Abram. Footnotes indicate his name means “division”, as suggested in the text. But what exactly was divided about the earth? The vast majority of translations I looked at have no more than what’s been provided above.

However, the New Jerusalem Bible contains the added information that “it was in his time that the earth was divided into districts.” Okay, so we have some sense of regions of influence or common characteristics being established. The NLT goes even further: “The first was named Peleg (which means “division”), for during his lifetime the people of the world were divided into different language groups.”

There’s a definite echo of Genesis 11 (the story of Babel) and, looking back at the texts, in fact, Peleg and his brother, Joktan, are the last generation of Shem’s descendants listed in Gen. 10, immediately before Babel. Certainly the division of the world by language was the primary outcome of Babel - families were divided and countries were formed with new language relationships (that’s one way for God to assure genetic diversity!).

That would probably be enough to confirm the NLT’s expansion of the Chronicler’s text; however, I was also reading in the Book of Judith (Apocrypha) and came across the following summary of Abram’s family history:

Then Achior, the leader of all the Ammonites, said to [Holophernes, the Assyrian commander-in-chief], ‘My lord, if you will allow your servant to speak, I will tell you the truth about this nation [Israel] that lives in the hill-country near here; and no lie shall pass my lips. They are descended from the Chaldaeans; and at one time they settled in Mesopotamia, because they refused to worship the gods their fathers had worshipped in Chaldaea. They abandoned the ways of their ancestors and worshipped the God of Heaven, the god whom they now acknowledged. When the Chaldaeans drove them out from the presence of their gods, they fled to Mesopotamia, where they lived for a long time. Then their god told them to leave their new home and go on to Canaan. They settled there and acquired great wealth in gold, silver and livestock. (5.5-9, NEB)

We know that the Chaldaeans were the dominant tribe of Babylonia and existed with a number of other tribes (source). Presumably “Mesopotamia” means Harran, where Abram first settled after leaving Ur. According to the genealogy recorded in Genesis 11, there were approximately 400 years from the birth of Shem to the birth of Abraham, a time period during which all of the ancestral family (Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah) were still alive. Shem lived for 600 years, 502 years after the flood - that means that Shem was still living when Abram was born! (This, of course, assumes that we read the genealogy literally and not as a stylized history of many more generations that populated the earth.)

The text in Judith is explicit that the fathers worshiped other gods in Chaldaea - this is after the flood (again, reading the text literally in terms of global flood), so “their fathers” has to refer to the ancestral line quoted above. The question is whether the “abandonment of the gods of their fathers” as recorded in Judith refers to God’s calling of Abram or instead perhaps to the Babel episode and Peleg’s “division” from the rest of the world.

That is, could a remnant of Babel, led by Peleg, have chosen to worship the God who “scattered men all over the face of the earth” (Gen 11.9)? And was this the division that his name refers to? Keeping in mind that Peleg’s father’s name, Eber, is the traditional root of the word, “Hebrew”, is it possible that Eber named his son after a split in the family? How likely is it that the predominant worship of other gods would have been established in 100 years after the flood (Arphaxad to Peleg)? Are there implications of Abram already having known the “God of Heaven” at the time of his call in Gen 11.12? Certainly the Bible text assumes some familiarity, as Abram’s first response isn’t “who are you?!” Or at least it’s not recorded as such…