a. In that case he would have been 99 years old at the beginning of the flood (Gen. vii, 11; in Noah's 600th year, not when he was 600 years old), or 100 years old at its close (viii, 13).
b. On the contrary, Shem was not 100 years old till two years after the flood (Gen. xi, 10).
3. Nor was Ham the son there referred to, for
o. Shem himself, we have seen, was not born so early as when Noah was 500 years old.
b. Much less could Ham, who was younger than Shem (Gen. ix, 24), have been born so early.
4. It hence necessarily follows that Japheth was the son then born, and that he was the oldest of the three.
5. The three sons are not mentioned in the order of age, but of familiarity and importance to the Hebrews. Hence Ham, although the youngest, is named second. So likewise Arphaxad, although the first-born (Gen. xi, 10), is named third (x, 22). A precisely analogous case appears in the family of Terah (xi, 2G), where the second son, Abram, is named first, as bemg the most important, and the oldest, Haran, last, as having died early.
6. The efforts of commentators to evade the force of these considerations betray the weakness of their cause. They all proceed upon the unfounded assumption that the numbers in the texts above considered are merely vague statements ("round numbers"), and may there- fore be neglected in an exact calculation. Tliey espc-
ciall}' dwell upon the fact that all three sons are assigned to the same year (Noah's 500th), whereas that expres- sion evidently refers to the oldest, or the heir, only, as the foregoing comparisons show; in anj' other sense the assertion would be irrelevant or absurd.
(II.) Grammatical Considerations. — On this point most later commentators and translators seem content to fol- low implicitly the views of Rosenmliller {Schol. ad loc.) : " In this clause the word ?^l^^, ' the elder,' is ambiguous as to whether it should be joined with Japheth, thus in- dicating him as the senior, or with Shem. The former has seemed to many interpreters probable chiefly be- cause, inastnuch as Noah is said to have begotten the first of his sons who survived the flood in the one hun- dredth year before the flood (Gen. v, 32), and Shem is said to have lived his one hundredth year two years after the flood (xi, 10), therefore the latter could not have been the first-born. But since it is not at all like- ly that Noah begot in one and the same year the three sons mentioned in v, 32, it is credible that in that pas- sage round luimbers only are named, as often occurs, and that the five hundredth year is set down in the same connection instead of the five hundred and second, as that in which Noah began to be a father. Hence it does not appear from this passage that Japheth was the oldest son. ' On the contrary, since in the preceding con- text the sons of Noah are six times mentioned in such order that Shem is set in the first place, Ham in the second, and Japheth in the third (v, 32 ; vi, 10 ; vii, 13 ; ix, 16, 23; x, 1) — passages so clear as to admit of no doubt — it follows that in the present passage likewise the term 'the elder' is to be joined to ^nx, 'the brother of,' so as to make Shem the oldest. But there is also another grammatical reason. If the writer in this place had wished to say that Japheth was the oldest son of Noah, he would doubtless have written P"l5ij niD"")3, the older son of Noah; for hltt^, 'the elder,' thus placed nude, nowhere else occurs (with reference to a person's age), but is always joined either with 13, ' son,' or with PiN, ' brother.' All this has been fully set forth by J. F. Schelling in his monograph entitled Ueber die Geburts- folge der Sohne Noah, at the beginning of part xvii of his Repertorium Biblicm et Orientalis Literaturcc." These points, however, are not well taken ; for
1. It is not usual for the sacred writers to employ round numbers in chronological accounts. In tliis Cyclo- pcedia we have thoroughly examined every date in the Bible, and And no such instance. Each definite number is susceptible of explanation as being precisely correct, except a very few corruptions of the text. In this case, particularly, all the leading chronologers — from Usher, Jackson, Hales, and Clinton down to Browne and the author o( Palmoni — take the date as being exact. It is a superficial evasion of a difficulty to resort to this slur upon the accuracy of Scripture chronology.
2. The sacred writer might indeed have said, if he had chosen, " the brother of Japheth the elder son of Noah ;" but this is a tedious and awkward phrase, and would have been just as ambiguous as the one he has employed, its sense entirely depending upon the inter- punction.
3. 315 does occur in as " nude a form" as here in at least one passage (Ezek. xxi, 14 [Heb. 19]), as noticed below. It is true the adj. there does not refer to com- parative age, but that makes no difference in the gram- matical construction. The assertion that 3T3 does not occur (in the sense of age) without the addition of "ja or nx expressed is not true, as may be seen from (Jen. x\ix, 16; xliv, 2, and other instances where one of these nouns is merely implied, precisely as in the case before us. In fine, the adj. is not here "nude" or inde- pendent at all ; it regularly belongs to the second noun, " brother of the elder .lapheth."