Peleg: the son of Eber and father of Reu in the family line that runs from Noah's son Shem down to Abraham, a name that sounds exactly like the Hebrew word for splitting something off.
Peleg is a person, not an idea. He turns up only in family records: once when his birth is announced, four times in the running list of fathers and sons that leads from Shem to Abraham, and twice more when Chronicles repeats that list. Nothing else is said about his life. What makes him worth an entry is his name.
The name is an ordinary Hebrew word. Spelled letter for letter, it is the common noun for a channel of flowing water split off from a larger river (פֶּלֶג), and it belongs to a family of words about splitting and dividing. Genesis makes the connection out loud: the boy was called Peleg "because in his days the earth was divided," using the matching verb for splitting (פָּלַג). A Hebrew reader hears the name and its explanation chime together. An English reader hears a name and then a sentence about division, with nothing linking them.
Where the announcement sits also matters. Peleg's birth is reported at the turning point of the list of nations, immediately before the story of Babel, and his line is picked up again immediately after it. That placement is why the short phrase "the earth was divided" has been argued over for two thousand years. The readings on offer are:
- the scattering of peoples and their languages at Babel, which is the reading most scholars take
- the age when hand-dug irrigation channels first carved up farmland, a picture drawn from the way the same word family works in the languages around Israel
- an orderly parceling out of territory among Noah's descendants
- the split within Eber's own household between Peleg's branch and his brother Joktan's
The wordplay, rather than any one of these answers, is what the naming sentence is built on. It is the same technique that ties Noah's name to comfort and Babel's to babble. Quite possibly the name began life as a plain word about watered, divided land and was then given fresh meaning by the storyteller who set it just before Babel.
What "in his days the earth was divided" refers to, and therefore what the name Peleg commemorates.
- majorityThe dividing is the scattering of peoples and languages at Babel, so the naming clause looks ahead to Genesis 11:1-9. Speiser reads the verb as "was dispersed" rather than "was divided" and treats the clause as an insertion anticipating that account.; G. von Rad, Genesis (Old Testament Library; rev. ed., 1972), on Gen 10:25; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC 1, 1987), on Gen 10:25; N. M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), on Gen 10:25; K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (New American Commentary, 1996), on Gen 10:25; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT, 1990), 345; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, trans. J. J. Scullion (1984), 526-27; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1, 1964), on Gen 10:25
- minorityThe name preserves an older agricultural and geographical sense, tied to the Akkadian word for a branch canal, so the dividing is the carving up of land by irrigation channels in a Mesopotamian setting. Fouts judges this philologically more attractive than the Babel reading while granting that tradition carries fewer difficulties.; J. Skinner, Genesis (ICC, 1910), 220; D. M. Fouts, "Peleg in Gen 10:25," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41/1 (1998): 17-21
- minorityThe dividing is not Babel at all but an orderly allotment of territory among Noah's descendants (Ibn Ezra), or the split between the Peleg and Joktan branches narrated in Genesis 10:25-30 (Sailhamer). Cassuto treats "in his days" chiefly as a chronological marker locating the Babel event within Peleg's lifetime, without committing to what divided.; Abraham Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Genesis, on Gen 10:25; J. H. Sailhamer, Genesis, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, on Gen 10:25; U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis II: From Noah to Abraham, trans. I. Abrahams (1992), 221, 225