Who was Shem in the Bible? Noah’s son, and Abraham’s ancestor nine generations back

Shem was the son of Noah who walked out of the ark, and the ancestor of Abraham: Genesis 11:10–26 runs eight names from Shem down to Terah, Abraham’s father, so Abraham is Shem’s descendant in the ninth generation.

That is the answer. The reason the question deserves an article is what the numbers in that chapter do once you add them up: on the plain reading, Shem is still alive when Abraham is born, when Isaac is born, and when Jacob is born — and he outlives Abraham.

Who was Shem in the Bible?

Shem was one of Noah’s three sons, the one through whom Genesis traces the line to Abraham — and so the ancestor of Israel. He is named before his brothers every time the three are listed:

“And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”Genesis 5:32, KJV

He goes into the ark with his wife, his parents and his two brothers (Genesis 7:13), and he comes out of it into an emptied world. The next thing Genesis records about him is an act of tact: when Noah lies drunk and uncovered in his tent, Shem and Japheth walk in backwards with a garment and cover him without looking. Ham had looked, and told. Noah wakes, and blesses:

“And he said, Blessed [be] the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”Genesis 9:26, KJV

“God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”Genesis 9:27, KJV

It is the only blessing in the Bible that names God by one of the sons: “the LORD God of Shem.” Everything that follows in Genesis — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve tribes — happens inside that phrase.

Was Shem the eldest? The editions differ. The King James Version’s Genesis 10:21 calls him “the brother of Japheth the elder,” which can be read either way; the Spanish Reina-Valera and the Chinese Union Version both make Shem the older brother. Genesis 5:32 lists him first, and that is all the text settles.

The sons of Shem

Genesis 10, the “table of nations,” gives Shem five sons, and the names are the names of peoples and places the rest of the Bible keeps meeting:

“The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram.”Genesis 10:22, KJV

Elam is Persia’s neighbor, Asshur is Assyria, Aram is Syria — and the modern word “Semitic,” for the family of languages Hebrew and Arabic belong to, is Shem’s name with a Latin ending. But the verse before the list points at a different son, and at a word:

“Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were [children] born.”Genesis 10:21, KJV

Eber is Shem’s great-grandson, and “the children of Eber” is the usual explanation of where the word Hebrew comes from. The first man the Bible calls one is Abraham:

“And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew; for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner: and these [were] confederate with Abram.”Genesis 14:13, KJV

One more son of Eber gets a sentence of his own, for his name:

“And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one [was] Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name [was] Joktan.”Genesis 10:25, KJV

Peleg means “division.” The next chapter tells the story of Babel, and the line to Abraham runs through him.

From Shem to Abraham: the eight names between them

Genesis 11 slows down and counts. Each man’s age at his son’s birth, then how long he lived after it, ten times over:

“These [are] the generations of Shem: Shem [was] an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:”Genesis 11:10, KJV

Then Arphaxad at 35 begets Salah; Salah at 30, Eber; Eber at 34, Peleg; Peleg at 30, Reu; Reu at 32, Serug; Serug at 30, Nahor; Nahor at 29, Terah (Genesis 11:12–24). And Terah:

“And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran.”Genesis 11:26, KJV

Chronicles gives the same line with every number stripped out, which makes it easy to count:

“Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abram; the same [is] Abraham.”1 Chronicles 1:24–27, KJV

Nine steps from Shem to Abraham: Shem, then Arphaxad, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor and Terah, then Abram. Abraham is Shem’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, if you want it in one word — the ninth generation, with eight men between them. Luke, tracing Jesus back to Adam, walks the same ladder upward and adds a rung:

“Which was [the son] of Cainan, which was [the son] of Arphaxad, which was [the son] of Sem, which was [the son] of Noe, which was [the son] of Lamech,”Luke 3:36, KJV

Luke’s Cainan, between Arphaxad and Sala, is not in Genesis 11 or 1 Chronicles 1 as the Hebrew text and the KJV give them; he is in the ancient Greek edition of Genesis that Luke’s readers used. So the count is nine generations by Genesis and ten by Luke, and the article chooses neither. Spellings also move between books: Genesis’s Salah is Chronicles’s Shelah, and the Genealogy Notes page on this site uses the Chronicles form.

The part that almost never gets told: Shem outlived Abraham

Add the numbers up. Genesis gives Shem’s whole life:

“And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.”Genesis 11:11, KJV

A hundred years at Arphaxad’s birth, two years after the flood, and five hundred more: Shem dies 502 years after the flood. Now walk down the ladder. Arphaxad is born in year 2 after the flood; add 35, 30, 34, 30, 32, 30 and 29, and Terah is born in year 222; add Terah’s seventy, and Abram is born in year 292. And Abraham’s own span:

“And these [are] the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years.”Genesis 25:7, KJV

Abraham dies 467 years after the flood. Shem dies 502 years after it — thirty-five years later. On these numbers Shem is 390 when Abraham is born, is alive when Isaac is born to a hundred-year-old Abraham, and is alive when Jacob and Esau are born sixty years after that. And Eber, the man the Hebrews are named for, lives longer still: born in year 67, he lives 34 years and then 430 more, to year 531 — after Shem, after Abraham. The man who came off the ark and the man who was called out of Ur could, on the text’s own arithmetic, have met.

This is arithmetic on one edition’s numbers, and it should be stated as that. Two things move it. First, Genesis 11:26 can be read as giving Terah’s age at the birth of hisfirst son rather than at Abram’s; Genesis 11:32 and 12:4, with Acts 7:4, let Abram be born when Terah was 130, which puts Abraham’s death in year 527 — then Shem dies twenty-five years before him, and Eber still after. Second, the ancient Greek edition of Genesis gives larger ages for most of these men, and on its numbers the overlap disappears altogether. The King James Version prints the Hebrew numbers, and those are the ones added up here.

Trace it yourself

On the map, Shem sits between Noah and Abraham, and the link to Abraham is drawn as a dashed amber “Ancestor” edge: the eight men of Genesis 11 appear in scripture only to connect the line, so the map leaves them out to stay readable and lists them on the Genealogy Notes page instead. From Abraham the line continues through Sarah and Isaac — and sideways to Abraham’s nephew, whose story is the Lot article. The “Trace line of Jesus” button follows the whole spine from Adam, through Shem, to the end.

Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob are all among the 104 figures on the free map; no account is needed to trace any of them.

Trace Shem to Abraham on the map