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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
The genealogies and Ussher
Add up the ages in Genesis 5 and 11 and you get a date for Adam. Ussher did. Does the text intend it?
Genesis 5:1-32, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: can you add up the ages in the genealogies to get the age of humanity? Some family trees list every generation. Some jump to the one that matters. You cannot always tell which kind you are holding from a single line. Only the first kind can be added up, and the question is which kind Genesis 5 and 11 are.
Archbishop Ussher's famous date for creation came from two moves: a single literal week, and the genealogies treated as an unbroken father-to-son chain with no gaps. The second move can be checked against how the Bible's own genealogies work.
The formula is "A fathered B, and after fathering B lived x years." Kenneth Kitchen, quoted by Lennox, shows that such lists can record actual fatherhood or condense a longer series: in Matthew 1:8 Jehoram is called the father of Uzziah, which skips three generations. The pre-flood life spans run to the 900s.
Lennox follows Kitchen: on the internal evidence of Scripture the age of humanity is indeterminate, though whether it stretches far enough to fit current estimates is another matter. He keeps four ages distinct, the universe, the earth, life and humanity, and says the supernatural character of human creation matters more than its date.
In the IVP Bible Background Commentary, Walton and his co-authors say there is no satisfactory explanation of the long pre-flood life spans. They note that the Sumerian King List gives pre-flood reigns as long as 43,200 years, and that converted from the Sumerian base-sixty system to decimal, the numbers fall in the range of the Genesis ages. They also note that Enoch, seventh in the line and taken by God, parallels the seventh pre-flood sage Utuabzu, who ascended to heaven. Separately, Walton argues the presence of Adam in genealogies shows the authors treated him as a historical person, since ancient genealogies list real people.
The MacArthur Study Bible reads the ages as literal years and attributes them to a pre-flood water canopy that filtered ultraviolet light, and puts creation no earlier than about 10,000 years ago.
The gap reading has to explain why Genesis gives the father's age at the son's birth, which looks designed for counting. The literal reading has to explain the skipping that other biblical genealogies plainly do. The Sumerian King List comparison carries its own cost and should not be leaned on: it assumes a base-sixty count was carried into a base-ten text, while the same commentary notes the Hebrews used base ten as far back as writing goes, and the converted numbers only land in the general range of the Genesis ages. They do not match name for name or figure for figure. The MacArthur explanation of the long lives, a pre-flood water canopy filtering ultraviolet light, is likewise a scientific proposal the text does not state.
Not a dismissal of the genealogies. Walton uses them to argue for a historical Adam, and Lennox takes the people in them as real.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4, with K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003), as quoted there
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (IVP, 2000), on Genesis 5:3-32 and 5:21-24
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), proposition 11
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Genesis 1:1 and 5:5
