The Men Who Carried Shem's Line After the Flood Had No Famous Stories

The names come in a rush in the table of nations: Shem begat Arphaxad, and Arphaxad begat Shelah, and Shelah begat Eber, and Eber begat Peleg. Four generations in four verses. Most readers pass through them the way you pass through a quiet hallway between two rooms. Nothing happens there. Nobody stops.

The Book of Jubilees stops.

Arphaxad, the text says, was born two years after the flood. His father Shem had built a city close to his father Noah on the mountain, and he called the city after the name of his wife. The world was young again, barely started over. Arphaxad grew up in that settlement, in the shadow of Mount Lubar, within sight of the ark that had saved everyone he knew. This was a man whose earliest memories included the smell of burnt offering from Noah's altar and the sound of the covenant being spoken aloud by God.

In the thirtieth jubilee, in the second week, in the first year, Arphaxad took a wife named Melka, daughter of Madai son of Japheth. There was a marriage across the line between Shem and Japheth, two sons of the same father, one generation out from the flood. In the fourth year, a son was born, and Arphaxad called him Shelah, saying: truly I have been sent. The name is a word meaning mission, or sending. Even in the naming of a child, the generation after the flood was still trying to understand what they had been put back on the earth to do.

Shelah grew up and took a wife, Muak, the daughter of Kesed his father's brother. The marriages in these generations are tight, within the extended family, the same pattern that characterized the antediluvian world. In the four hundred and fourth year, Shelah died, at the age of four hundred and thirty years. Four hundred and thirty years. He saw the whole first arc of the post-flood world. He watched his son Eber name a child Peleg because in those days the children of Noah began to divide the earth among themselves.

The Book of Jubilees records one strange moment about Arphaxad that has the quality of a suppressed story. There was something Arphaxad wrote down and kept secret. He wrote it and said nothing regarding it, because he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it. The text does not say what this secret was. The silence around it is complete. Something was written, something was hidden, someone was afraid of Noah's anger. And then the Book of Jubilees moves on.

Eber, Shelah's son, inherited the line and named his son Peleg because of the dividing of the earth, and the tradition attached to Eber something far beyond what the genealogy suggests. The Legends of the Jews records that Jacob spent fourteen hidden years studying with Shem and Eber before going to his uncle Laban. Shem and Eber were still alive in Jacob's day, according to the long antediluvian lifespans the tradition preserves, and they had become the keepers of an academy where the pre-Sinai transmission was maintained.

When Rebekah suffered through her agonizing pregnancy and did not know what was happening inside her, she went to inquire of the Lord, and the tradition says she went to the house of Shem and Eber to ask. Two ancient men, descendants of Noah, carrying a tradition that predated the flood, still alive and still teaching in the time of the third patriarch.

Arphaxad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg. Four men who appear in the table of nations and disappear again. But the line they held was the line that carried the transmission from Noah to Abraham, from the altar on Mount Lubar to the altar at Moriah. The Book of Jubilees knows their wives' names, their children's names, the years they were born and the years they died. It knows the secret that Arphaxad wrote down and hid. It does not forget a single generation of the chain, even the quiet ones, even the ones with no famous stories. The chain required them all.

What the tradition preserved in the Legends of the Jews about Eber and the patriarchs suggests that the school of Shem and Eber was one of the most important institutions in pre-Sinai Judaism, a place where the oral and written transmission of Enoch's tablets was kept alive through centuries when the surrounding world was building towers and worshipping idols and forgetting the flood entirely. The children of Shem did not forget. Arphaxad and Shelah and Eber kept what was given to them. And Peleg, born the year the nations divided the earth, carried his name as both a wound and a witness: the world was broken into its pieces, but the line continued, one quiet generation at a time, waiting for Abraham.