Genesis 5:32

"And Noah was five hundred years old; and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth."

"Shem" means fame; and, although he stands ahead of his brothers in this list, he was not the oldest[15], but he received this pre-eminence because he was the head of the Messianic line. This whole chapter is designed especially with the ancestry of the Lord Jesus Christ constantly in view. Of course, Noah could have had many other sons and daughters, but these three sons are specifically mentioned because of their importance. Shem was the head of Messiah's line, and Ham and Japheth, along with Shem, constituted a new point of departure for the human race, a new beginning after the great Flood, becoming the ancestors of the whole post-diluvian human family. Ham is from the root [~hamam], meaning "to be hot," perhaps carrying the thought, "hot blooded, sexually."[16] It also might have applied prophetically to the temperature of the dwelling place of Ham's posterity - Africa. Japheth means "to make wide or spread abroad," and would also appear to be prophetic of the enlarged borders of Japheth and the spreading of his posterity all over the earth. Some scholars get fairness of complexion out of the name, a characteristic of European races.

This chapter is preliminary to the account of the Deluge which was God's punishment upon rebellious mankind, but significantly, God was preparing a new beginning already present in the posterity of Noah.

The significance of the two divergent lines of the Cainites and the Sethites will appear at once in the following chapter. The Cainites grew progressively worse and worse, resulting in the judicial hardening of the entire race. The corruption could not be contained in the line of the Cainites but through their intermarriage with the Sethites, practically the whole of humanity came to be in total rebellion against Almighty God. When such a condition has prevailed some three different times already in the history of mankind, God always intervened. In this the first instance of it, that intervention took the form of the wholesale destruction of the race with only a remnant (the family of Noah) preserved as the seed of a new beginning. The Book of Genesis will soon recount a second instance in the widespread debauchery and hardening of mankind in the days of Abraham. (See the introduction to Genesis 12.) The third instance came in the rejection of the Messiah by Jews and Gentiles alike. God's intervention on that third occasion was the First Advent of Christ, a mission of mercy. There is yet to be a fourth and final hardening of mankind near the end times; and God's answer to that will be the Second Advent of Christ, not a mission of mercy at all, but a mission of judgment and destruction.