And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
As they journeyed from the east. The margin has 'eastward' (cf. Genesis 13:11), as indicating, not the course of the travelers, but the position of the writer in reference to Mesopotamia. Knobel renders it 'the countries that are in the East.' We prefer the rendering of the King James Version as the most literal and correct. Hitherto the whole human family had continued in their earliest postdiluvian settlement on the mountainous range of Armenia. But a detachment, perhaps the young and adventurous portion of them, gradually moved away from the primeval residence, and proceeded along the hilly country on the east of the Tigris, in a southward direction, until they had reached the province called by the geographers and historians of later times Susiana, or Elymais, when they altered their course, turning westward, and being attracted by the beauty and fertility of the Mesopotamian plain [Hebrew, biq`aah (H1237); Septuagint, pedion, a low wide plain, a level country], they resolved to make it the permanent center of their union and seat of their power.
That extensive region, which lay at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates had probably been the ultimate destination of the emigrating party; because if, as Wells and others suppose, it had been the native country of Noah, where he had formerly resided, and built his ark-Babylonia abounding in gopher wood-it may well be imagined that his descendants would cherish a strong desire to plant themselves again in that ancestral land. In the lapse of years the little party swelled into a tribe, and the tribe rose into the magnitude of a people.
The land of Shinar. Professor Rawlinson derives this name from sªneey, and Ar, or Nahr, naahar (H5102), a river-the country between the two rivers. But that is a purely conjectural derivation, on which no reliance can be placed. Sir H. Rawlinson is inclined to see the name Shinar preserved in Senkereh, and others in the Sinjar chain of mountains, which are in the interior of Mesopotamia. Nothing certain is known about this name, except that it seems to have been applied to the region by the early natives, and was continued among the descendants of Abraham (Daniel 1:2: cf. Isaiah 11:11; Zechariah 5:11, Septuagint). The country was called generally Chaldaea or Babylonia.