Brent Pollard
Within Genesis’ genealogies—a section we often skim—one verse has sparked debate for two millennia. Genesis 10.25 (NASB 1995) mentions Peleg: “for in his days the earth was divided.” Five words. No explanation. No footnote from Moses. Just a cryptic remark tucked between a father’s name and a son’s. Peleg’s father was Eber—the ancestor from whom the Hebrews take their name (Genesis 10.21; 11.16–19). The name Peleg comes from the Hebrew palag, meaning “to split” or “to divide.” The parallel account in 1 Chronicles 1.19 repeats the same statement, and Luke 3.35 places Peleg in the lineage of Jesus Christ.
So what was divided? The question matters—not because our salvation hinges on the answer, but because the Bible never wastes words.
The Oldest and Most Widely Accepted Interpretation
The most enduring interpretation—and the one with the deepest roots in Jewish and Christian scholarship—is that the “earth” in Genesis 10.25 refers to its people, not its geology. The pseudepigraphical book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) and the Biblical Antiquities of Philo (circa A.D. 70) both understand the division as a scattering of peoples rather than a fracturing of landmasses. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus agreed, as did the Seder Olam Rabbah, a rabbinical chronology dating to the second century A.D. Among Christian commentators, Keil and Delitzsch argue that erets (“earth”) here functions as a metonym for the world’s population, much as we might say “the whole world watched” when we mean its inhabitants.
Under this reading, the division is the aftermath of the Tower of Babel. God confused the languages of humanity (Genesis 11.1–9), and humans responded by fracturing into distinct linguistic, ethnic, and political groups. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 catalogs exactly this kind of division: the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth spreading across the ancient world, each “according to their languages, by their lands, by their nations” (Genesis 10.31, NASB 1995). Peleg’s name memorializes the era in which that scattering occurred.
A More Recent Theory: The Splitting of Continents
In the nineteenth century, commentator Adam Clarke proposed that Genesis 10.25 refers to a physical separation—the breakup of continents and islands from a single landmass. In 1858, French geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini cited this very verse to argue that the continents once fit together, decades before Alfred Wegener formalized the hypothesis in 1912. The sixteenth-century commentator Seforno suggested an environmental shift in Peleg’s generation that halved human lifespans, implying a cataclysm of enormous scale.
More recently, some creationist scholars, like Dr. Bernard Northrup, have argued from Hebrew philology that palag almost always denotes division by water—canals, channels, or ocean-spanning rifts. They point to Psalm 1.3, where the same root describes “streams of water,” and Job 38.25, where it describes a “channel for the flood.” If palag inherently conveys the sense of water-based division, then Genesis 10.25 may describe a literal geological event—perhaps the breakup of a supercontinent or catastrophic post-Flood sea-level changes.
However, even some young-earth creationists have expressed caution. A rapid breakup of the earth’s lithosphere would have produced geological violence rivaling the Global Flood itself. Within our own fellowship, Dr. Dave Miller of Apologetics Press has written that Moses’ comment about Peleg “most likely does not refer to the Earth’s continental division.”
A Third Possibility: Irrigation and Infrastructure
A less prominent interpretation attributes Peleg’s name to the digging of irrigation canals in Mesopotamia. Cyril Graham, a nineteenth-century English diplomat who traveled extensively in the Transjordan, argued that Peleg’s naming commemorated the first cutting of canals between the Tigris and Euphrates. While this reading aligns with the water-related sense of palag, it lacks meaningful biblical support and reduces a significant genealogical marker to a footnote on civil engineering.
So Which Interpretation Should We Accept?
Because the central question concerns what exactly Genesis 10.25 means by ‘the earth was divided,’ it is important to weigh the evidence for each interpretation. The principle taught by Fee and Stuart in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth applies here: novel interpretations are usually wrong. With the majority of ancient Jewish and Christian scholarship pointing toward the division of peoples—not continents—and Genesis 10.25 appearing so close to the Tower of Babel account, the best-supported argument is that the division in Peleg’s day refers to the scattering of humanity. The text presents division as a pivotal event, tying Peleg’s era directly to Babel and making this interpretation central to understanding the passage’s significance.
Still, an honest reader senses a tension. On the third day of creation, God divided the dry land (erets) from the waters (Genesis 1.9–10). There, earth isn’t a metaphor for humanity; it’s literal ground. Reading erets as “people” in Genesis 10.25 requires accepting a shift in meaning that the text doesn’t explicitly signal. The metaphorical reading is plausible, but consistency may favor a literal sense.
A Name Worth Remembering
This question is a matter of opinion, not doctrine. Nothing in Genesis 10.25 affects the plan of salvation or the gospel’s terms. Where Scripture is clear, so should we be. Where it invites wonder, we can wonder—and should not impose our conclusions. What we can say confidently is: God, who names the stars (Psalm 147.4) and counts our hairs (Matthew 10.30), placed a man named “Division” in Jesus’s genealogy. However, the earth was divided in Peleg’s day; it was not random. It was Providence. Every division God allows, He intends to heal. In Christ, there is “neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3.28, NASB 1995); one day, “every tongue will confess” Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2.10–11, NASB 1995). Peleg’s divisions are temporary. God’s Kingdom is not.
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