We are going to jump away from Abram and we want to step back in Genesis 10. What we are going to do here is see the birth line and the sanctification line of those people who filled in the gap between Noah and Abraham. God was careful to put in His Book every person or every family head that He sanctified so that we would have the line unbroken between Seth all the way to Jesus Christ.
How do we know God chose to set Shem apart either before or after the Flood? We will go forward into time until we reach a descendant of Adam and Eve that we know positively that God set apart. We know that person was Seth, until we come to another person that He has set apart, which we just read of in Genesis 12. That was Abram. Then we trace Abram's family lineage to its roots. That person in Genesis 10:21 was Seth. Now we know for sure that Abraham was of the Seth-Noah-Shem-line of descendants from Eve.
God was well aware what was going on in His purpose. He made deliberate choices among the families of people available to Him. He had a plan and it was working out.
He is the man after whom all the Hebrew people are named.
These men had other children, but God does not name them. He only names the ones that continued the line from Seth, to Noah, to Shem, and beyond.
Now we are all the way to the father of the faithful that God set apart, Abram. Abram had two sons.
I am only going to go into this briefly but on the other hand it is fairly important to understand because it shows God's hand directly moving people about on earth and choosing families for His purposes. It was God who directly divided the descendants of Shem through Eber. Eber is the great grandson of Shem, and the father of the Hebrew people and because of what God is doing here is why He named these people so clearly.
Eber had two sons, one named Peleg and the other Joktan. Now God continued the Hebrew line through both Peleg and Joktan, but spiritually the line through Peleg became the more important and this is because it was to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to whom God revealed Himself and they descended from Eber through Peleg.
Regarding the ancestry of Joktan, this is something interesting to pick up and to know. They continued on as Hebrews, the descendants of Joktan were Hebrews because they were born in to the Eber line, but like the Gentiles they were denied the blessings for the time being, the blessing meaning God's revelation of Himself. He just set them aside for the time being. The issue as to why is one of these mysteries for which there is no answer. The situation regarding Peleg and Joktan, is similar to why did God choose Jacob and not Esau. We just do not know. He just chose to go in that direction.
However, there are some people who believe that Japheth was the oldest, because in Genesis 10:21 it seems to say Japheth the elder. But Hebrew scholars tell us that the construction is pointing to Shem being the eldest. Who knows? The Hebrew is ambiguous, really. It is hard to say.
