10:15 Sidon. The city of Sidon, chief city of the Phoenicians, still exists today.

10:15 Heth. Heth is the ancestor of the Hittites, prominent in both the Bible and secular history, ruling a great empire in Asia Minor for over eight hundred years. When the Hittite empire finally crumbled, many of its people migrated east. The Hittites are identified in Egyptian inscriptions as the “Kheta.” In the cuneiform inscriptions in Babylonia, this name is identified as “Khittae,” which may have been modified eventually to “Cathay,” a synonym for China. Archaeologists have noted similarities between the Mongols and Hittites.

10:17 Sinite. The other nine sons of Canaan were the Canaanite tribes that inhabited the land when the Israelites entered it. The Amorites are identified in the tablets as the Amurru. The Sinites may be connected in ethnology with the wilderness of Sin and Mount Sinai in the south, and with the Assyrian god “Sin,” and even with Sinim (Isaiah 49:12) and the people of secular history called “Sinae,” or Chinese.

10:18 spread abroad. This statement becomes especially significant if, as intimated above, the descendants of Canaan include the Mongol peoples, who eventually spread not only throughout most of Asia but also across the Bering Strait into North and South America, becoming the American Indians.

10:20 in their nations. The division of the original population into “nations” was both “after their tongues” and “after their families,” suggesting that each family living at Babel was given a distinctive tongue at the dispersion.