Genesis 10: Where have you gone Sabteca?

After the flood, the children of Noah begin to spread out and inhabit the known world. Chapter 10 lists the names of the descendants of each son. These lists read like a who’s who from the ancient world. Based on the children’s names, we can deduce that Yafet’s descendants inhabited Europe, Cham’s descendants inhabited Africa and the Levant and Shem’s children inhabited the Middle East. What’s fascinating about this chapter is not the names that we recognize, but those we do not. The Torah includes well-known names like Egypt, Kush, and Ashkenaz, even Phut appears later in Jeremiah (46:9) and Ezekiel (47:10), but what about Sabteca, Anamim, and Arki? Were these names included because they meant something to contemporary readers? Were these city-states that have since been lost to history? Were these descendants that simply did not make an impact like their famous cousins? Or did the Torah include these names to flesh out the idea that major powers of the ancient world were all related? It is unclear what the answer is, and it provides some mystery to this rather dry chapter. Yisroel Friedman once pointed out to me that the world in chapter 10 is divided by region amongst the descendants of Noach’s sons. Africa and Canaan goes to Cham’s descendants and the Fertile Crescent/Middle East goes to Shem’s. But there’s an oddity. We meet Nimrod, the great warrior. A descendant of Cham who rules, and begets, the great empires that spring from the territory we think of as Shem’s. Babylon, Nineveh, Assyria, Shinar, Akkadia, etc. Gen. 10:8-12. Nimrod was offsides, an over-reacher who defied boundaries. An empire builder, a colonizer, a hegemon. He introduced the idea of great powers that supplanted the more local affiliations and tribal alliances. The thirst for power and expansion that gave us the most violent and disruptive wars of our history and that play out as we speak. Can’t everyone just play nice in their own sandbox?