Abraham and Shem Were Afraid of Each Other After the War

The Two Who Stood Out Like Islands

After the battle against the four kings, after Abraham had defeated Kedorlaomer of Elam and his allies, rescued his nephew Lot, and declined the King of Sodom's offer of the spoils, God came to Abraham with a reassurance: Fear not, Abram (Genesis 15:1). The reassurance pointed to something. Reassurances are given to people who are actually afraid.

The question the rabbis pressed was: afraid of what? Abraham had just won a battle against four kings with a force of three hundred eighteen trained men. He had negotiated with Pharaoh. He had survived famine and exile. He was not easily frightened. And God came to him with comfort.

Rabbi Berekhya, in Bereshit Rabbah, the foundational Palestinian midrash on Genesis compiled roughly in the 5th century CE, identified the source of Abraham's fear: he was afraid of Shem.

Why Abraham Feared Shem and Why Shem Feared Abraham

The fear ran in both directions, and the reason for each side was exact. Abraham had defeated Kedorlaomer, king of Elam. Elam was a son of Shem (Genesis 10:22). Abraham, in winning his battle, had killed or routed the descendants of Shem's own line. He feared that Shem would hold him accountable for the loss. He feared the resentment of a man who had reason to view Abraham's military victory as a family catastrophe.

Shem, in turn, feared that Abraham harbored ill feelings toward him for the wickedness of his descendants. Canaan was also among Shem's descendants, and the Canaanites had not distinguished themselves morally. Shem had fathered a line that had produced both high learning and deep corruption, and he was not certain how Abraham calculated that balance. The Isaiah verse that Bereshit Rabbah cited captured both sides: the islands saw and feared, the ends of the earth trembled (Isaiah 41:5). Just as islands stand out distinct in the sea, so did Abraham and Shem stand out in the world, and just as islands visible to each other across water feel the distance between them, these two great men felt the uncertainty that distance creates.

The Meeting Between Them

What the midrash describes next is not a confrontation. It is a transmission. The two men who had been separately afraid of each other met, and what passed between them was knowledge.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the early medieval midrash compiled in the Land of Israel around the 8th or 9th century CE, preserved the account of what Shem held and what he shared. After the flood, Noah had given his son Shem the secret of intercalation, the mathematical knowledge required to align the lunar calendar with the solar year by periodically adding an extra month. The calendar was not a simple matter of watching the moon. It required the knowledge of when the seasons were drifting, how to measure the drift, and when to add the corrective month to bring the year back into alignment.

This knowledge came from observing the celestial bodies across time. The sun marked the days; the moon marked the months; their cycles were, as Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer quoted, a promise that they shall not cease. But the alignment required a priest-mathematician who could work with both cycles simultaneously and know when they needed adjustment. Shem had been called a priest in Genesis 14:18, where he appeared as Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God. It was this priestly knowledge of time that Noah had transmitted to Shem, and that Shem now transmitted to Abraham.

What the Calendar Carried

The meeting between Abraham and Shem was thus a meeting between two people who had independently arrived at a relationship with God, and it produced a transmission of the most practical sacred knowledge: how to track time in a way that kept the sacred calendar from drifting away from the seasons. Without intercalation, Passover would gradually shift away from spring. Sukkot would move away from the fall harvest. The sacred calendar and the agricultural year would lose their alignment, and the commandments tied to specific seasons would become untethered from the natural world they were meant to sanctify.

The fear the two men had carried about each other dissolved in the transmission. Shem did not hold Abraham's military victory against him. Abraham did not hold Shem's wicked descendants against him. Between them they contained both the ancient knowledge of the flood survivors and the emerging covenant of the patriarchs, and the meeting was where those two streams of sacred knowledge joined.