In Genesis, Shem is the first-listed of Noah’s three sons.
Genesis 6:10 names Noah’s sons as Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Shem is listed first, and later genealogical material in Genesis traces a line from him to Abraham. The name therefore has an important place in the biblical genealogies that follow the Flood story.
The phrase “eldest listed” is deliberate because the ordering of the sons and the chronology of their births involve passages that readers interpret in different ways. Genesis 10:21 contains wording that can be translated in more than one way concerning Shem’s relationship to Japheth. The unambiguous fact for this question is that Shem appears first in Genesis’s standard list of Noah’s sons.
Shem is also the traditional source of the term “Semitic” in older scholarship, although modern linguistic classification uses more precise terminology. The answer is not Ham, Japheth, or Canaan, who appears later in the family genealogy.