Genesis 5:32 “And Noah lived five hundred years, and Noah fathered three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
Genesis 6:10 “Noah fathered three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
The firstborn son gets a lot of attention in the Bible. You would think that a list of someone’s children would be in chronological order. That’s not always the case. People of distinction or importance sometimes move to the top of the list. Such is the case with Noah’s son. Shem gets top billing because it is through his lineage that Abraham is born and ultimately the Messiah.
These two verses about Noah’s sons are also curious because they don’t mention the age of Noah when any of his sons are born. The genealogy coming up in chapter 11 doesn’t mention Noah either but begins the list with Shem. Oddly, Noah’s age is missing in the text, but maybe it was more important to note that Noah had three sons when called to build the ark. Undoubtedly, Noah’s sons helped build the ark, but do you suppose there were others?
Let’s start with Noah’s sons. Chapters six and seven show that Noah had three sons by the time he was 500 years old and that he was 600 years old when the flood began. In chapter 10, we see the descendants of Noah’s sons beginning with Japheth and ending with Shem. Could that be the birth order? In the genealogy of Shem in chapter 11, the text says that Shem was 100 years old when he fathered Arpachshad during the second year after the flood. I take that to mean that less than two years had passed since they disembarked from the ark. We’ll learn later that the flood lasted for over a year. For easy math, we’ll say that the time adds up to three years. That makes Noah 603 when his grandson is born to Shem at the age of 100. Noah was around 503 years old when Shem was born, and Shem wouldn’t have been alive when God told Noah to build the ark.
Whoops! Noah couldn’t have had three sons before he was 500 if he was 503 when Shem was born. Let’s look at Genesis 5:32 again. It says, “And Noah lived five hundred years.” The Hebrew phrase translated into “and Noah lived” actually means “it came to be.” Maybe you’ve read a different translation than what I’ve shared from the LXX, and you already have this figured out. Many translations have the verse rendered as, “After Noah was 500 years old.” If you look at Genesis 5:32 on BibleHub, you can see that almost half of the Bible versions have it written that Noah had children after he was 500 years old. Problem solved.
But what about Ham and Japheth? Genesis 10:21 says that Shem is the brother of Japheth, the greater, meaning that Japheth is older than Shem. Genesis 9:24 calls Ham Noah’s younger son. That would make Japheth the oldest son and possibly born when Noah was 500 years old. The question remains, is Ham the middle child or the youngest? The Hebrew word in 9:24 could mean younger or youngest. The middle child would be younger than Japheth, so both are possibilities. There’s just no way to know. We can determine from the text, Japheth is the oldest, and Shem was born when Noah was 503 years old.
That brings up another curiosity. I learned God called Noah to build the ark when he was 500 years old and that it took Noah 100 years to complete the task. After Noah’s age, chapter six describes the sons of God and Nephilim and the human wrongdoing on the earth. The chapter finishes with God telling Noah about His plan to destroy the world and all that is in it, saving only Noah and his family. God makes it clear in Genesis 6:18 Noah is to enter the ark with his wife and his sons and his sons’ wives. If this calling happened when Noah was 500, then he would have only had one child at the time. Was God prophesying to Noah in telling him he would have more sons and that they all would have wives when the deluge came? Or did the calling come years after Noah was 500, and his sons were already grown and married? Noah quite possibly built the ark in a lot less than 100 years. But, again, the text doesn’t mention when the calling took place.
Earlier, I questioned whether others helped build the ark. The text is quiet on this point also and leans toward Noah doing all of the work. That would be physically impossible, so we can safely say that Noah’s son’s helped in the endeavor. But what about other relatives?
I’ll provide an Excel sheet that contains the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies in another post. I’ll also include it in pdf format if you don’t want to download an Excel file with formulas contained within. This file has the years from both the LXX and the HM for comparison. On the far right of the sheet, I’ve provided a column of the men from Adam to Lamech that shows how many years before the flood they would have died. You’ll notice that everyone in Adam’s genealogy, with the exception of Methuselah and Lamech, were dead long before the flood regardless of the text source. Lamech was Noah’s father and died either 35 years or 5 years before the flood, and Methuselah, Noah’s grandfather, died either 6 years before the flood, or the year the deluge began. God sent the flood to wipe out the wicked, but both of these men died before the judgment came. They could have helped build the ark as the last of the righteous ones on earth, and then passed to escape God’s wrath. That’s total speculation, but it is interesting that they both died before the flood.
Next, we’ll talk about things from the flood account.