NOAH HAD MORE THAN ONE WIFE??

I had never before caught this in Moses 8:

11 And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy-seven years, and he died.

12 And Noah was four hundred and fifty years old, and begat Japheth; and forty-two years afterward he begat Shem of her who was the mother of Japheth, and when he was five hundred years old he begat Ham.

 13 And Noah and his sons hearkened unto the Lord, and gave heed, and they were called the sons of God.

 Verse 12 makes note of the fact that Japheth and Shem were of the same mother.  It does not say specifically whose mother Ham was.  Did the mother of the other two die in child birth or leave Moses or some other end, so that there was another wife who bore Ham?  Or was there polygamy in those days (other than Cain and other people who may have deviated from the norm?)?  We know that there were only 8 humans on the ark - so if there was another mother, she did not make it on the ark.

Very interesting.  I note that Joseph Smith declared the descendants of Japheth to be the Asiatics and those of Shem to be the Semitic peoples (Middle Eastern).

Ham married Egyptus whose descendants became the Africans and those further south of the Ark landing spot.  Incidentally, that was a great landing spot - right in the middle of everything, geographically speaking, in order for the greatest dispersion to occur quickly in order to re-populate and fill the earth.

If the landing zone had been in the mountains of England or France - it would have taken forever with water on one side.  I am picturing a curve on natural population growth and dispersion I have seen previously - too lazy to look it up for you.  With a bound on that dispersion, the curve is heavily skewed.

If you have not been following the earlier posts in the blog - the ark was found in the "mountains of Ararat".  I grew up having watched those mis-leading documentaries on them finding timbers on the glaciers of the volcanic peak Ararat.  Wrong answer.  It was always in the "mountains of Ararat" - ie; the foothills of that volcanic peak.  Sure enough, Ron Wyatt found it (proven to my satisfaction, at least).  He also found the Ark of the Covenant to my satisfaction.  Really - its in the archives.  All you have to do is look it up if you really have the intellectual curiosity to do so.