Why Shem Got There First

Three sons stood outside their father's tent. One of them had already been inside.

Ham had seen Noah lying drunk and uncovered, and rather than covering him, had gone to tell his brothers. The exact nature of what Ham did, or saw, or understood, has been debated across centuries of commentary. But on the simplest level, the tradition is clear: he looked when he should have turned away, and he spoke when he should have been silent.

Shem and Japheth walked in backward, a garment held between them, and covered their father without once looking at him. They saw nothing. That is the point of walking backward. You cannot unsee what you have already seen, but you can refuse to look in the first place.

When Noah woke and understood what had happened, he blessed his two sons and cursed the descendant of Ham. But the tradition preserved by Ginzberg's Legends, drawing on Talmudic sources from tractates Sanhedrin and Megillah and on the book of Jubilees, records a further distinction that the plain text of Genesis does not make. Among the two brothers who covered their father, one of them moved first.

Shem got there first. Japheth joined him after the deed was already underway. Both sons earned praise. But the one who initiated the act of kindness, who did not wait for someone else to begin it, who did not look to see what his brother would do before deciding what he himself would do, received a larger portion of the reward.

The descendants of Shem, the midrashic tradition says, received the tallit (טַלִּית), the prayer shawl worn in worship as a garment of dignity and holiness. The descendants of Japheth received only the toga. It is a distinction between the sacred garment and the civic one, between a covering that marks you as standing before God and a covering that marks you as participating in the world of men. Both are forms of covering. One is holier than the other because of who moved first.

There is another honor given to Shem that the tradition handles carefully. Noah's blessing did not name Shem directly. He said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem. God's name was joined to Shem's name in a way that, the rabbis observed, was unusual for a living person. Normally God's name is attached to the dead, not the living. To have God's name joined to yours while you still walked the earth was a distinction reserved for the extraordinary.

The division of the earth among the three sons, recorded in a passage in Ginzberg drawn from Jubilees, took place in the year 1569 after the creation of the world, in the presence of an angel. Each son reached into Noah's bosom and drew a slip. Shem's slip described the middle of the earth as his inheritance. Noah rejoiced when he saw what had come to Shem, because the middle portion contained everything holy: the Temple's Holy of Holies, Mount Sinai, and Mount Zion, the navel of the earth. Three sacred places, all within the inheritance of the son who had moved first.

The book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, adds that Noah had known in prophecy that this was how the division would fall. He had spoken it before it happened. The Garden of Eden is the Holy of Holies, the dwelling of God. Mount Sinai is the center of the desert. Mount Zion is the center of the navel of the earth. These three, placed facing each other, form the sacred geography of Shem's inheritance.

Ham's descendants received the hot southern lands. Japheth's received the cold north. Shem's received the temperate middle, neither hot nor cold, the place where the sacred is always slightly closer than anywhere else. The son who did not look at what should not be seen received the inheritance of the one who sees everything.

There is something in this that the tradition refuses to let rest as mere reward and punishment. Shem's prior movement was not calculation. He did not cover his father in order to receive the land of the Temple. He moved because he was the kind of person who moves first when something must be done. The land was not a transaction. It was a revelation of what was already true about the person who received it. The sacred geography of the middle earth came to Shem because his nature had already oriented itself in that direction, toward covering rather than exposing, toward protecting rather than announcing. He got there first because he was already there.

The Talmud in tractate Megillah, compiled between the fourth and sixth centuries CE, records that the God's name is blessed in conjunction with Shem's name as a direct result of this moment of covering. God's blessing attached itself to Shem the way it attaches itself to a place that has witnessed an act of genuine holiness. The tent became a site of sacred memory because of what happened inside it, and Shem's name became permanently marked because of what he did not see when he walked in backward.