Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, September 16, 2026
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Genealogy is so important in Genesis. Long lists of sons’ names, the lengths of life, sometimes the places they settled or random facts about them (“the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided” v25) which are usually indicative of clever wordplays, etc. Any of this information that was actually factual would have to have been handed down orally for more than a thousand years, which, of course, makes it seem awfully far-fetched. Of course Genesis isn’t a historical text, but it still makes me wonder about those who wrote it: where did they get these names? This tradition? Had any of it been written before the Babylonian Exile? When and by whom? Was it already a well-established oral tradition? Were there songs? Or did the writers have to come up with a lot of the material on their own and “fill in the blanks?”
In thinking back over my own ancestry—those parts of it I know—I can cobble together a short list of names, places, and maybe interesting facts (the first Fergus (Francis, by name) to immigrate to what is now the United States came from Ireland in the 1700s and fought in the Revolutionary War on the side of the Americans, for example.) But there are more holes in my knowledge of my ancestry than facts. For one thing, there are absolutely no records whatsoever before Francis Fergus, since the churches in which his family records were kept had been burned to the ground by the British at one time or another. Where he came from can only be speculated (he was Scottish by ancestry, and his family settled at some point in the Ulster Plantation, thus making him—and me—Scots Irish. At least I think so.) Does all this information really matter? I mean, it’s cool to think about where I’ve come from, and how far back my family goes. But, of course, it goes all the way back, as all of our genealogies do. We are, all of us—every single human being on earth!—related. If only we could find ways to acknowledged our relatedness, rather than dwelling on our differences.
Have I ever thought about how every single human being is related? How does that idea affect the way I think about those who appear different from me in some way?
