Sarah is highlighted in the text. Perhaps she represents more than merely the wife of a patriarch, and we should remember that she is her own person.
Sons were also born to Shem, whose older brother was[a] Japheth; Shem was the ancestor of all the sons of Eber.
Genesis 10:21 (NIV)
[a] Or Shem, the older brother of
Bible translation is difficult.
Who is older, Shem or Japheth?
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
Genesis 7:11 (NIV)
I find it interesting that after discussions about “approximate years” and “outrageous ages” of the men listed in the genealogy of Genesis 5 (suggesting that the dates are vague approximations or merely symbols of “very long times”), we are presented with this extremely specific day of the flood.
There is reason for this. They look here:
Pharaoh asked him, “How old are you?”
And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers.”
Genesis 47:8-9 (NIV)
With Adam, the Hebrew language descdribes his age as 900, and 30 years.
But for everyone else in the list of ages, the 10s and 100s are reversed: Seth lived 12, and 900 years. Enosh lived 5 and 900.
One rabbinical teaching is that when an age is written 100s and then 10s, it means the last years of their lives were good and productive. Perhaps closer to God. So we seem to be told that God has redeemed Adam.
That doesn’t mean the rest are not redeemed, but specifically that God has compassion on Adam, the first of the lineage to die from the curse (from dust, to dust).