Shem

Genesis 11:10 - This is the account of Shem. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad.

This is, in part, an update to my Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth post of a few days ago.

Since Shem was 100 years old 2 years after the Flood, that means he was 98 when the Flood occurred. He (and likely Ham and Japheth) would have easily been old enough before the Flood to have helped with preparations. Shem was born when Noah was 502. That left plenty of time for Shem to mature, get married, and do what he could to prepare for the disaster.

I wonder how the conversation(s) went when Noah had to tell his family what God had told him about the future. Did they think he was crazy at first? A lot of other people must have, including any other close relatives he may have had.

I wonder if he ran into any legal problems during construction of the ark. Or how about when all the animals -- including the wild ones -- started gathering at Noah's place?

Were Shem and his brothers workers or foremen? I really can't see the 4 (or 8, including the women) of them doing all this by themselves, even if they did have 70-80 years to get the job done. (I'm calculating based on Shem's teenage years.)

Was ark-building the only job the boys ever had? Noah was a farmer, a "man of the soil," so food may not have been a problem. Did they make enough profit from farming to pay for the building of the ark? How big of a farm did Noah have? Did he have hired hands there to take care of as well?

Since he was a farmer, he probably at least had enough acreage on which to build the ark and didn't need money to rent space for that.