We must return briefly to the locus of the text for the Javanite children. Immediately following the line mentioning Javan’s four sons, we are given the wording “From these, the islands of the nations separated in their lands, each one to his language, according to their families in their nations.” This line fits with the picture of Greeks as multi-ethnic speakers of various Greek, or even non Greek, related dialects such as Arzawan Luwian. However the wording in this text translated in most copies of English render the Hebrew word “אִיֵּ֤י” as either ‘islands’ or ‘archipelago’. While some erroneous translations of the Torah into English would insist upon the word island, even for Jewish sources, there is no indication this term translates to island.
According to Strong, in his “Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible”, the term should rather be translated to “coast”, or alternatively “coastland” given contextual implications where the term can be applied to both instances.1 When more accurately translated to “coast” this term can be used for anything as diverse as Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece proper, Miletus, Troy, Ephesus, Magna Graecia, the Pontic Sea and even as far as Corsica and Sardinia. Under this context, “coastal Japhethites” begins to make a lot more sense for a designation of Javan’s descendants. The Torah clearly identifies these ‘sons of Javan’ as being coastal seafarers, who journey far and wide leaving their mark where they travel.
We can therefore presume that Javan, plus his four sons, represents the wider Greek world. Javan are the Ionians, who lead the Greek coalitions and form the basis of later Koine spoken by all other Greeks. The proto-Greek Mycenaeans, who develop into the Achaeans, are the Kittim. Elishah are the Aeolians. Dodanim are the Dorians. Tarshish are variously the west isle Greeks of Sardinia, Sicily, France and Spain or alternatively some memory of Minoan/Nuragic settlers of these islands, who like Tarshish would have been heavy traders and introduced Phoenicians to their dye.
Ultimately the lesson we can take away from this picture of the Greek world is that oftentimes ethnicity, language, tribe, or culture take a backseat to a shared ethnogenesis and historical background. None of these terms exist in the region, and are modern developmental lenses used to categorize groups. A “family” can be made up of adoptive sons who may share none of the “parents” genetics, but still grouped inside a broader shared cultural tradition of “Greek”. A “nation” can incorporate people of many genetic backgrounds, and it is only through a modern lens where we get the idea that the Torah’s Table of Nations should be read as anything “genetic”, “tribal”, or “racial”. How the Minyans, Pelasgians, Eteocypriots, Mysians, Thracians, Phrygians, Macedonians are more all morphed into a shared identity is not necessarily important, but rather we find a model for how nation’s form their own identity.
Oftentimes these identities go through phases of centralization and decentralization, and tribes and groups split off only to reunify as we see with the Javanites coming to be known all as “Greeks” or Hellens today based on this descent from a single shared cofounder. Like the ‘Jews’, Greeks are not a race of people, or a subset of a race, but a set of shared databases of characteristics that operate as a unifying point for a group of people. The Christian Greeks of Anatolia who became Turkish Muslims and remain so to this day do not consider themselves “Greek” regardless of their past genetic make up. In this same way, Jews do not view any set of genetic or ethnic characteristics as critical to being Jewish. A Jew can be anyone; the only thing that matters is if they accepted the Torah in its entirety at Sinai. This shared tradition of Torah, both written and oral, is what identifies us as Jews, and as we will see in the coming ‘nations’ in the table, these identities become increasingly complex.