Catholic Commentary
The Descendants of Ham (Part 2)
16the Arvadite, the Zemarite, and the Hamathite.
1 Chronicles 1:16 names the final three sons of Canaan: the Arvadite, Zemarite, and Hamathite, representing maritime and territorial peoples of ancient Syria and Phoenicia. The Chronicler includes these descendants of Ham to establish Israel's place within universal human history and to emphasize God's sovereignty over all nations and lands.
God names the edges of the world—not as enemies, but as peoples he remembers and holds within his universal family.
The Typological Sense
The closing of the Hamitic list with peoples on the geographical margins of the known world foreshadows the universal mission announced in the New Testament. Just as the Table of Nations ends at the farthest coasts and borders, so the Great Commission extends to "the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8). What was once the outer boundary of Israel's promised land becomes, in Christ, the inner boundary of a new and universal covenant people.
Catholic tradition reads genealogical passages not as dead letters but as living theology. St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVI), treats the Table of Nations as a divinely ordered map of the human family, arguing that even the most obscure peoples are held within God's providential plan. He sees in the dispersion of nations not merely a punishment for Babel but a preparation: God scatters humanity so that, in the fullness of time, Christ may gather it. The Arvadite, the Zemarite, and the Hamathite, in Augustine's framework, are wayfarers in the City of Man who have an open, if unrecognized, orientation toward the City of God.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God created man in his own image… He created them male and female" (CCC 355) and that from one ancestor God made all peoples (cf. Acts 17:26; CCC 360). The genealogical lists of Chronicles are a scriptural witness to this truth of universal human solidarity. No people — however small, obscure, or historically insignificant — falls outside the scope of God's creative love.
Furthermore, the presence of Canaan's descendants as the geographical frame of the Promised Land carries a sacramental logic recognized by patristic exegetes: the land is not simply real estate but a type of the Kingdom, and its borders — marked by Hamathite territory to the north — suggest that the Kingdom of God, like the land, will encompass even those who once stood outside the covenant. Pope John Paul II, in Redemptoris Missio (§12), affirms that "the Kingdom of God is meant for all peoples," an insight already encoded in these ancient boundary-names.
It is tempting to skip over verses like this one — a list of ancient, unpronounceable peoples who seem to have nothing to say to a twenty-first century Catholic. But the spiritual discipline of reading these names slowly is itself formative. Each name represents a people God created, a culture God sustained, a history God did not abandon. The Arvadites and Zemarites had no Torah, no Temple, no prophets — and yet they exist in God's Word, named, remembered, not forgotten.
For the contemporary Catholic, this is an invitation to resist the tribalism that tempts every age, including our own. The Church teaches that every human being, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or religion, bears the image of God (CCC 1700). When we encounter the stranger, the immigrant, the person from a culture utterly different from our own, we are encountering someone who — like the Arvadite or the Hamathite — is named and known by God before we ever knew them. The genealogy trains us to look at human diversity not with anxiety but with reverent wonder: all of this came from one family, and all of it is held in one Providence.
Commentary
Verse 16 in Detail
The verse names the final three sons of Canaan (cf. Gen 10:18): the Arvadite, the Zemarite, and the Hamathite. The Chronicler is drawing almost verbatim from Genesis 10:16–18, but his purpose is not merely antiquarian. Writing after the Babylonian exile, he is reconstituting Israel's identity by anchoring it within the universal sweep of human history that begins with Adam (1 Chr 1:1) and Noah's sons.
The Arvadite corresponds to Arwad (modern Ruad Island, off the coast of Syria), a Phoenician city-state of considerable maritime and commercial importance in the ancient Near East. Ezekiel 27:8 identifies the men of Arwad as skilled oarsmen in the navy of Tyre, illustrating their seafaring prowess. Their position at the far northern edge of Canaan's territory gave them symbolic weight as boundary-markers of the promised land.
The Zemarite is associated with Sumur (or Simyra), a coastal settlement in northern Phoenicia, attested in Egyptian and Akkadian sources. The Zemarites were a people of the maritime fringe, largely absorbed into the broader Phoenician cultural sphere. Their obscurity by the time of the Chronicler is itself significant: peoples who were once powerful forces in Canaan's world had faded, while Israel — the smallest and most unlikely of peoples — endured.
The Hamathite refers to the inhabitants of Hamath, a major city on the Orontes River in central Syria, which served as the traditional northern boundary of Israel's ideal territorial extent ("from the entrance of Hamath to the Wadi of Egypt," cf. Num 34:8; 1 Kgs 8:65). Hamath was both a geopolitical landmark and a theological symbol: it marked the outer edge of the land God had promised, the horizon of the covenant inheritance. The fact that it descended from Ham — and specifically from Canaan — reminds the Israelite reader that the full extent of the promised land was, in God's sovereign design, to be reclaimed from Hamitic peoples.
The Genealogy as Theological Map
The Chronicler's genealogical prologue (1 Chr 1–9) functions as a kind of theological cartography. By placing these Hamitic peoples within the universal family of Adam and Noah, the Chronicler makes two simultaneous claims: first, that all nations have a common origin and dignity in God's creative act; second, that within this universal humanity, God has made a particular election — the line of Shem through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — which does not negate the others but gives meaning to the whole. The Arvadite, Zemarite, and Hamathite are not enemies to be despised but peoples whose very existence testifies to the breadth of God's creative providence and the scope of his redemptive intention.