Bible Synapse
Was Ham or Japheth Noah’s youngest son?
Hard question · Genealogies · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
“And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
Ham sees his father’s nakedness; Noah wakes and knows “what his younger son had done unto him” (WEB, BSB: “youngest son”).
And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. …
“These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth”, whose descendants are then listed from Japheth first.
Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.
Shem is “the brother of Japheth the elder” (KJV); the WEB and BSB render it “the elder brother of Japheth”.
Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.
The objection
Genesis always lists Noah’s sons as “Shem, Ham, and Japheth”, which suggests that Japheth was the youngest. But Genesis 9:24 calls Ham Noah’s youngest son (the KJV has “younger son”). Critics ask which of them was the youngest.
The answer
Genesis never says that “Shem, Ham, and Japheth” is the order of their births. Lists in Genesis often put first the son through whom the story goes on, not the eldest: Shem stands first because Abraham and Israel descend from him (Genesis 11:10–26), just as Isaac is named before his elder brother Ishmael at Abraham’s burial (25:9) and Jacob sets Ephraim before Manasseh, the firstborn (48:14, 20). Genesis 10 shows the order is not fixed, for there the families are traced in the reverse order, Japheth, Ham, then Shem.
The text itself gives hints about the order of birth, and they fit Genesis 9:24. Noah began to have sons when he was five hundred (5:32), and the flood came when he was six hundred (7:6). Shem was a hundred “two years after the flood” (11:10), so he was born when Noah was about five hundred and two, and another son was probably older than he. The King James Version reads Genesis 10:21 as calling Japheth “the elder”, and John Gill, following the Hebrew accents, concluded from these verses that Japheth was the eldest, Shem the second and Ham the youngest. On that reading Genesis 9:24 says just what we should expect.
Other answers Christians give
‘The younger’, not ‘the youngest’
The Hebrew of Genesis 9:24, beno haqqatan, is literally ‘his little son’, and may mean either ‘younger’ or ‘youngest’; the KJV has “younger”. Keil and Delitzsch took it as comparative, with Ham younger than Shem, and read Genesis 10:21 as making Shem the elder brother of Japheth (as the WEB and BSB translate it). Then the usual order is the order of birth, and Genesis 9:24 does not call Ham the youngest of the three.
Canaan, the grandson
Some Jewish commentators, reported by Gill, thought that ‘his little son’ meant Noah’s grandson Canaan, the youngest son of Ham (Genesis 10:6), since it is Canaan whom Noah then curses (9:25). Grandsons are often called sons in Hebrew.
Still open
The Hebrew of both Genesis 9:24 and 10:21 can be read in more than one way, so the exact order of Noah’s sons is uncertain, and commentators who hold the Bible to be without error differ over it. On every reading the two verses can both be true.
From the classic commentators
Shem must be born when Noah was five hundred and two years old; and since he begot children, there must be one two years older than Shem, which can be no other than Japheth, since Ham is called his younger son, Genesis 9:24.John Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Genesis 10:21 (1746–1763)