Generations of Noah Nations is substantially the same as that in the Hebrew text, but with the following differences: In the First Epistle of Peter, 3:20, Saint Peter noted that eight righteous persons were saved from the Great Flood, referring to Noah's family members. The Genesis flood narrative tells how Noah and his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, together with their wives, were saved from the Deluge to repopulate the Earth. The 1st-century Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, in "Antiquities of the Jews" Book 1, chapter 6, was among the first of many who attempted to assign known ethnicities to some of the names
Japheth ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible, leading scholars to suppose that the history is a late composition, attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction to that book and to the Torah. Japheth (in Hebrew, Yaphet) is a transliteration of the Greek Iapetos, the ancestor of the Hellenic peoples. His sons and grandsons associate him with the geographic area of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia - Ionia/Javan, Rhodes/Rodanim, Cyprus/Kittim, and other points in the region of Greece and Asia Minor - approximating to one of the three kingdoms into which the generals of Alexander the Great divided his empire