"May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” (Gen. 9:27) as the tents were the possession of the wives, and Jewish ethnicity is traced by the maternal line, the people of Japheth are counted among the Jews' ancestors.
In Hebrew “his tent” is written as אָהֳלוֹ (ahalo), as in Genesis 31:25. As the Hebrew linguist Jeff Benner has noted,
"The tents of the Bedouin were not the property of the men, but instead the wives. In their culture, it is not “his tent,” it is “her tent.” Assuming this is not only true for the modern day nomads, but also the Hebrew nomads of the Bible, it would explain the spelling of אָהֳלֹה (ahaloh). The vowel pointings, which are the dots and dashes above and below the Hebrew letters, were invented only 1,000 years ago. So if we remove these vowel pointings we have the word אהלה (ahalah), which means “her tent.” Noah was not sleeping off his drunken stupor in “his tent,” because he did not own a tent. He was sleeping in “her tent,” the tent owned by his wife. Genesis 24:67 reads, “And Isaac brought her [Rebekah] into his mother Sarah's tent…”
Donald P. Cole observed that the tent was the possession of the wife during the year that he lived with the Bedouin. His research is documented in his book Nomads of the Nomads.
Related reading: A Tent for the Sun; Where Dwelleth Japheth
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