He set the boundaries of the nations by the number of God’s angels. –Deuteronomy 32:8

The Orthodox Christian Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev writes in his book A Chronicle from the Beginning: From the Creation of the World to the Exodus about the Table of the Nations in Chapter 10 of Genesis, which refers to 72 nations among the descendants of Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth after the Flood. (This number could be related to the 70– really 72– translators of the Greek Septuagint in the effect of spreading the Scripture to all nations, and to the Seventy Apostles sent out into the world by our Lord Jesus Christ. Seventy-two is a number rounded off as related to Creation with the Seventh Day of Rest, when Christ descended into Hades, multiplied by 10 representing the law of God fully realized in Christianity, and thus completeness, plus the glimmering of the Day of Resurrection in the additional fraction of two (analogous to how Blessed Theophylact discussed a type of biblical measurement, the cubit and hands breath referenced in the vision to Ezekiel of the New Jerusalem). Also, 72 equals six times 12: Six as the number of the days of Creation of the world, times 12 representing the 12 tribes– many of which were lost among the nations of the Gentiles– and the 12 apostles, most of whom were martyred in evangelizing the Gentiles.)

“All nations came forth from the hand of the One Creator,” Priest-Martyr Daniel reminds us of the listing of nations in Genesis 10. Indeed, the Apostle Paul at the Areopagus in Athens proclaimed that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 14: 26-27).

Priest-Martyr Daniel indicates that, as taught by the Apostle Paul, “the division into nations is not a chance phenomenon, nor is it merely a curse. The purpose of this dispersion was an attempt to find God by feel (that is, by groping about in the dark). For example, Greek philosophy, Lao Tsu in China, and many other people did indeed find traces of the Lord, and thereby paved the way for the preaching of the Gospel…. But even when the nations did not come to the knowledge of God, their fates served the purposes of Providence. Some built empires and laid roads for the spreading of the gospel; others served as avenging scourges for apostates and the ungodly; of still others God made examples, showing His long-suffering and justice.”

In Part 7, Chapters 5-11 of his exegetical book based in Church Tradition, he presents an Orthodox view of the emergence of paganism among many of the nations, as “men fell away from their Creator and converted to worship the elements of the world.” The Table of Nations describes the descendants of Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—as progenitors of various peoples after the Flood. The destruction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) is often seen as the catalyst for the dispersion of nations. Medieval Christian interpretations and Jewish traditions such as those in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews associated Japheth with populations that spread to Europe and parts of Asia. For example, the descendants of Japheth’s sons listed in Genesis 10 (Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras) are linked to regions like Europe (such as Javan with Greece, Gomer with Germanic or Celtic peoples) and parts of Asia (such as Madai with the Medes, Tubal and Meshech with regions in Anatolia or Central Asia). But this would have been a gradual ethnographic and geographic dispersion across centuries rather than a single event. The curse on Ham’s son Canaan and his descendants, discussed in details in another article on this site linked here, involved what was seen as the ancestor of the Canaanites including the purported founder of Babylon, and does not preclude individual or community salvation within any of the descendants, as seen in the salvation of Nineveh at the time of Jonah, although the inhabitants of Nineveh were seen as descended from the cursed Canaan. It thus did not have the false racial meanings given to it by Protestants during the Enlightenment and afterward to justify modern slavery and colonialism using pseudo-scientific views of race.

According to Tradition, as noted in Deuteronomy 32:8, each nation like each Orthodox Christian had an angel special to her. As the Archangel Michael was considered special to Israel, the Church, so those countries in the modern world without a particular record in Old Testament Scripture but with an Orthodox Christian mission may find their special angel in the Holy Chief Commander of the bodiless hosts. The Church herself is indicated in Scripture to be a race or nation, beyond any human sense, for as the Apostle Paul indicated, there is “neither Greek nor Jew” in Christ, although as he also noted, the nations are for the salvation of people through their local Churches as fractals of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Orthodox Church. Glory to God!