Forefather Forefather Peleg (Phalek)

CRITICAL IMAGE NOTE: both images have been removed from this card — visual inspection showed them to be photographs of: (1) a contemporary man in a checkered shirt (clearly a person living in recent decades) and (2) a bearded Victorian-era gentleman in a 19th-century sepia photograph/engraving. Neither can possibly depict a pre-Abrahamic biblical patriarch who lived centuries before Abraham and millennia before the invention of photography — blatant database contamination.

DATE CLARIFICATION: Peleg has no, and never had, an individual personal feast day. He is commemorated only collectively, within the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers — a movable feast on the 2nd Sunday before the Nativity of Christ (falling between Dec 11–17 O.S. / Dec 24–30 N.S. depending on the year).

Peleg (Church Slavonic: Falek) is a biblical patriarch named in Genesis 10:25 and 11:16–19, and in Christ's genealogy in Luke 3:35. He was the son of Eber, great-great-grandson of Shem, and a fifth-generation descendant of Noah. Genesis records that Eber had two sons, and "the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided" — patristic commentary links this either to the confusion of tongues and dispersal of nations after the Tower of Babel, or to the geographic division of the earth among Noah's descendants.

Peleg was the father of Reu and an ancestor of Abraham, six generations later. In Orthodox tradition he is venerated among the Forefathers — Old Testament righteous ones who awaited the Messiah. He has no individual iconography, no separate feast day, and no biographical material beyond the brief genealogical notice.