Shem

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Shem is the eldest of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, named alongside his brothers Ham and Japheth as survivors of the Flood and, in the genealogy that follows, presented as the ancestor of one of the great divisions of humanity. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 traces the peoples of the earth back to the three brothers; from Shem descend the lines that the text associates with the lands stretching from Mesopotamia toward Arabia — Elam, Asshur, Aram, and, through Eber, the line that runs to Abraham. The very word Semite is drawn from his name, coined by eighteenth-century scholars to group the languages they took to share that descent.

In the narrative itself Shem is given little to do. He appears in the Flood account, in the awkward episode where he and Japheth cover their drunken father without looking on him, and as a name in the long chains of begettings that carry the story from Noah toward the patriarchs. What weight he carries is genealogical: he is the channel through which the biblical line of promise is held to pass. The Genesis text is the firm ground here; the surrounding chronologies, with their long-lived antediluvian and post-diluvian ancestors, belong to the schematic time-reckoning of the priestly tradition rather than to anything a historian dates.

Later interpreters made more of him. A strand of rabbinic tradition identified Shem with Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king of Salem who blesses Abraham, and spoke of a “house of study of Shem and Eber” where the patriarchs were schooled — readings that turn a bare name into a keeper of righteousness across the generations after the Flood. The pseudepigraphic literature gathered around Noah and his sons, much of it preoccupied with the secrets that survived the deluge, supplied a setting in which such figures could carry hidden knowledge.

From there the name travels into Western esoteric speculation, where genealogies of an ancient and pure wisdom, passed from before the Flood through the survivors and on toward Egypt and the sages, sometimes give Shem a station along the chain. These are constructions of much later writers, reading the patriarch as a link in a transmission the Genesis text never describes; they are best read as the way a recurring idea — that true knowledge is old, and was preserved through catastrophe by a faithful few — attaches itself to whatever names lie nearest the beginning. What the scriptural Shem actually does is smaller and stranger than any of it: he keeps a line going, and is mostly silent while he does.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912), on the pseudepigraphic Noah literature

→ Related: Japheth · Seth · Lot