SHEM shĕm (שֵׁ֖ם; LXX Σημ, meaning uncertain; name, son, have been suggested.) Eldest son of Noah (Gen 5:32; 1 Chron 1:4; Luke 3:36).

Shem is the ancestor of the peoples known as the Semites, and in the classificatory sense, of those speaking Sem. languages. He and his wife were two of the eight persons who escaped from the Flood in the ark (Gen 7:13). Two years after leaving the ark, at the age of 100, he became the father of Arpachshad (11:10), in the line of descent of the Messiah (Luke 3:36). Other sons and daughters were born during his 600-year life.

The “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10 gives additional details concerning Shem’s descendants (vv. 21-31). Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram are identified in the earlier Bible geographies as ancestral to the lands of Persia, Assyria, Chaldea, Lydia, and Syria, respectively. An uncertainty attached to Lud, as another Lud appears in connection with Egypt, but these later people are regarded as Hamitic. The classical writers, and some later scholars, as Delitzsch, prefer an identification of Arpachshad with an area in the Armenian foothills, NE of Assyria. 1 Chronicles 1:17 adds four additional sons of Shem—Uz, Hul, Gether, and Meshech although Genesis 10:23 identifies these as sons of Aram, and it may be that the Chronicles passage is simply referring to them in the general sense of descendants of Shem. In the development of the ethnic relationships of the family of Shem, it must be remembered that not all his descendants may have spoken Sem. languages and dialects. Hence the apparent discrepancies between the genealogical data of Genesis 10, and the historical affinities among the peoples of the Near E may be more imagined than real.

Samuel Kramer advanced the theory, actually not new, that the name šēm was derived from šumer, hence ancestral to the early population of southern Mesopotamia, but this had only limited acceptance. Historically, the earliest home of the Semites, or the families of the five sons of Shem, must have been in the foothills and valleys of Armenia. From this nuclear region, reconstruction of migrations indicates that their descendants moved outward in the various directions required by their settlement identifications. Arpachshad may have remained longest in the original settlement area, then worked his way southward along the eastern side of the Zagros range of mountains, finally to journey westward to the plain of Shinar (Gen 11:2). Childe uses archeological data to show that the Semites prob. had earlier contact with Egypt, and carried cultural affinities from there into Sumeria.

Bibliography G. Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East (1953), 147, 155, 167, 168; S. Kramer, Analecta Biblica XII (1959), 203, 204; G. Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (1964), 201-203.