Hey Cuz…
We Are All Kin—Reflections from Genesis 10
As much as I yearned to see how others lived and leave the south when I was young, I missed the experience of running into family - family I grew up with, family I didn’t know I had, family of friends so close they might as well be family. Genesis 10 makes me wonder if we don’t all have some intuitive yearning to have our kinship affirmed.
Genesis 10 is the kind of chapter many skip. A long list of names, the so-called “Table of Nations,” it reads like a spiritual phone book. But what if this ancient genealogy is more than an inventory of ancestors? What if it’s a meditation on human belonging?
There is no great battle here, no exile, no flood. Just families. Lineages flowing from Noah’s sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—branching out into the regions and nations of the known world. The implication? Every nation, every tribe, every people finds a place on this map. It’s a literary declaration that we all come from the same soil, that no one is “other” in essence. We are all kin.
This idea of essential oneness echoes in other traditions. Thomas Merton’s famous moment on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky comes to mind. “I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts...the person that each one is in God’s eyes,” he wrote, realizing in a flash that he was “one with all people.” Albert Camus expressed something similar, if a bit sideways: “I rebel—therefore we are.” Camus's humanism wasn’t distant from divine wisdom - and I’d love to have seen how he would have evolved if he had lived longer. But just this quote points to how knowing that we belong to each other is holy - even if we have to at first push our own ridiculous ego to a limit so we can see this from the edges. The Bible, too, gives us perspectives of this both/and of the individual and the whole.
Genesis 10, often overlooked, dares us to look past modern borders and ancient grievances and see a shared spiritual ancestry. Its theological beauty lies in its insistence that every person matters. That God's creative breath did not choose just one tribe or language to carry the divine image. We are one human family—diverse, yes, but united in origin.
Perhaps that’s why this chapter matters now. In a time when we are so tempted to divide, to classify, to “other”—this long list of names says, “No. You’re all part of the story.” Or as they might say in Fayette County, “Come on Cuz, you’re one of us.”
