shem

Shem is named alongside his brothers Ham and Japheth as one of Noah's three sons, and with his wife he was among the eight people who rode out the flood in the ark and stepped back onto dry ground afterward. The Bible almost always lists him first of the three brothers, though the family lists were not written to record birth order and a couple of verses genuinely leave the order of the brothers' ages unclear.

Shem also has a specific role right after the flood. When their father Noah lay drunk and exposed in his tent, Shem and Japheth walked in backward and covered him without looking, in contrast to their brother Ham. Noah's words afterward include a blessing tied to Shem by name: "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem." That phrase quietly ties this one man's descendants to a special claim on the LORD, ahead of anything said yet about Abraham or Israel.

The rest of Shem's occurrences come from genealogy. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 lists him as ancestor of peoples including Elam, Asshur, Lud, and Aram, and singles him out as "the father of all the children of Eber." Genesis 11 then narrows that wide family tree down to one line, tracing father to son from Shem through Arphaxad and on to Abraham, and 1 Chronicles repeats the same line at the start of Israel's own family record. Genealogically, Shem is less a character than a hinge: everything that follows in the Bible's story of Abraham's family runs back through him.

His own name happens to be spelled and pronounced exactly like the everyday Hebrew word for שֵׁם, "name." A Hebrew reader hearing his name spoken was also hearing the ordinary word for a name, a coincidence worth noticing given how much weight Genesis puts on a name surviving through descendants, which is precisely what happens with his own line.