Shem Built a City and Japheth Went to the Sea

The Morning After the Ark Settled

When Noah stepped out onto the earth that the flood had cleaned and the mountain of Lubar held the ark behind him, the first thing he did was build an altar. Then he stayed. He did not go down to the lowlands and claim territory. He stayed on the mountain with his sons around him, and his sons built near him, and the world's new geography began not with empires or conquest but with three families on a mountain building houses for the women they had married.

Shem built his city close to Noah's city on the slope of the mountain. He named it after his wife, Sedeqetelebab. Noah had named his own city after his wife on the same slope. Two cities on the same mountain, a father and his eldest son side by side, the new world measured in the distance between a father's door and a son's door.

Three Cities Named for Women

The Book of Jubilees records the household geography of the mountain with the care of a family chronicler. A third city was built to the south and named Naelatamak. A fourth, Adataness, to the west. Four cities near the mountain of the ark, and the names they carried were women's names, domestic names, the names of wives who had survived the flood inside a wooden box and come out on the other side onto a mountain that needed to be inhabited.

This is how the new world began. Not with a king claiming territory or an army marking borders. Four cities named for women on a mountain in the Ararat range, with Noah at the center and his sons around him, waiting for the earth to dry enough to plant.

The Sons of Shem Fanning Out

Shem's sons were named and listed and each became a nation. Elam. Asshur. Arpachshad, born two years after the flood. Lud. Aram. The names became peoples, became territories, became the backdrop of the Torah's geography. The sons of Japheth spread differently: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, Tiras. Cold north, the sea coasts, the islands.

Madai presented a problem. He did not want his portion. The land assigned to him, in the vast northern territories of Japheth's inheritance, was not to his liking. He came to Noah and to Shem his father-in-law and he asked for a different lot, a better piece of the earth than what had fallen to him. The Book of Jubilees records his petition: he sought a dwelling near his father-in-law Shem, closer to the sacred center, away from the cold northern share his grandfather Japheth had received.

They gave him a portion. The region near Persia and the Bactrian lands, close enough to Shem's territory to satisfy him. He went there and his descendants settled it. The table of nations was not quite as clean as the original lots had made it look. Human preferences pushed against divine assignments, and the tradition bent slightly to accommodate a grandson who wanted to live near his wife's family.

Japheth Heading for the Sea

Japheth took the north and the islands and the sea. His portion was vast and cold and distant from the sacred center that Shem had received. He went, as the lot directed, into the lands that stretched toward the coasts and the great northern territories. His sons became the peoples that lived far from Jerusalem and far from Sinai, the nations that the Torah would encounter at the edges of the world rather than at its center.

Shem stayed on the mountain a while longer, building close to his father, naming things after the women in his household, watching his sons spread out toward the horizons that the lots had assigned them. He was the patient son, the one who covered his father, the one who built near rather than away. The navel of the earth was in his portion and he would reach it eventually, through the chain of his descendants, through Arphaxad and Shelah and Eber and the long line that ended at Abraham.