Adam Was Still Alive When Noah's Father Was Born

Genesis 5 reads like a list of names, and most readers skim it. Add up its numbers, though, and something odd appears. In the Hebrew text Adam lives long enough to see Noah's father born, and the two of them share 56 years on earth.

The chart below draws all ten generations, Adam to Noah, on one line of years.

How to read the chart

Each bar is one life. It starts in the year that person was born and ends in the year they died, counted in years after Creation, so Adam is born in year 0. The small notch in each bar marks the year the next son in the line was born, and the dotted line drops from that notch to the son's own bar.

The line labelled “The Flood” marks the year it came. Genesis 7:6 puts it in Noah's 600th year:

“Now Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters came upon the earth.”

(Genesis 7:6, BSB)

Hover, tap or tab to any name to see everyone alive at the same time. The switch above the chart changes the numbers to the Greek or Samaritan text, which is where the debate starts.

Five things the numbers show

1. Adam was alive when Lamech was born

Genesis 5 gives each father's age when his son was born. Add them up from Adam down: 130 + 105 + 90 + 70 + 65 + 162 + 65 + 187 = 874. Lamech, Noah's father, is born in year 874. Adam lived 930 years (5:5), so 930 − 874 = 56. For 56 years the first man and Noah's father were alive together.

2. Noah just missed Adam

Lamech was 182 when Noah was born (5:28-29), so Noah arrives in year 1056. That is 126 years after Adam died. Seth, Adam's son, died in year 1042, which means Noah missed him by only 14 years.

3. Three lives reach from Adam to Noah

Methuselah is born in year 687. He shares 243 years with Adam (930 − 687) and 600 years with Noah (1656 − 1056). Adam, Methuselah, Noah: Three overlapping lives cover everything from Eden to the ark.

4. Methuselah dies in the year of the Flood

Methuselah lived 969 years, the longest life in the Bible:

“So Methuselah lived a total of 969 years, and then he died.”

(Genesis 5:27, BSB)

687 + 969 = 1656, and Noah's 600th year is 1056 + 600 = 1656. The same year. Genesis says when he died, not how. Reading him as a victim of the Flood is a guess readers add.

5. Noah's father did not live to see it

Lamech lived 777 years (5:31), so he died in year 1651, five years before the Flood. Only one bar breaks the pattern of long lives ending in death. Enoch's 365 years end differently:

“Enoch walked with God, and then he was no more, because God had taken him away.”

(Genesis 5:24, BSB)

He is the only man in the chapter whose entry does not close with “and then he died.”

Why the versions disagree

Genesis 5 survives in three ancient forms, and they do not agree on the numbers. In the Hebrew (Masoretic) text, which most English Bibles follow, the Flood comes in year 1656. In the Samaritan Pentateuch it comes in 1307, and Jared, Methuselah and Lamech all die that same year. In the Greek Septuagint it comes in 2242, because nearly every father is 100 years older when his son is born.

The Greek also has a Methuselah puzzle. The standard printed text makes him 167 when Lamech is born, and then he outlives the Flood by 14 years even though he is not on the ark. Codex Alexandrinus reads 187, which pushes the Flood to 2262 and has him die six years before it. Scholars disagree over which reading came first.

Scholars generally read these as deliberate edits, not copying slips. One reconstruction says an earlier text had some ancestors outliving the Flood, and each tradition fixed that in its own way: The Samaritan shortened lives, the Hebrew raised some ages at fatherhood, and the Greek raised nearly all of them. Gordon Wenham finds no agreement on which text is original, except that the Greek looks secondary.

How people read the long lifespans

Some read the ages as real years of real lives. On this view people lived far longer before the Flood, and Genesis 11 records the decline after it, from Shem's 600 years down to Abraham's 175. Wenham notes the Flood story counts months in a way that implies years of about 360 days, which rules out the idea that the “years” were really months.

Others read the numbers as schematic or honorific. Umberto Cassuto noticed that the Hebrew figures are built from multiples of five, sometimes with seven or fourteen added (182 is 175 + 7). Enoch's 365 matches the days of a year, and Lamech's 777 echoes the “seventy-sevenfold” of Genesis 4:24.

A third approach starts with Israel's neighbours. The Sumerian King List gives eight kings before its flood a combined 241,200 years, with one king, Alulim, reigning 28,800. Beside those figures, the ages in Genesis look modest.

The family that remembered Eden

Whatever a reader makes of the numbers, the list looks different once it is drawn. Adam and Noah stop being two ages of the world and become one family. The man who walked out of Eden was still alive to see the father of the man who would build the ark. On the Hebrew count, the whole world before the Flood fits inside three overlapping lives.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (public domain), Genesis 4:24, 5:3-32, 7:6, 9:28-29, 11:10-26. Every Hebrew (Masoretic) number on the chart.
• L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (1851), Genesis 5, with the Codex Alexandrinus notes on 5:25-26. CCEL, checked against the Greek text at Ellopos.
• Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Word, 1987), “Excursus: The Ages of the Antediluvians”. Flood years in each text, the Samaritan figures, Klein's reconstruction, Cassuto and Barnouin on the numbers, the 360-day year, and the Sumerian King List.
• John D. Davis, “Antediluvian Patriarchs”, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1939). Online.
• Ronald Hendel, “A Hasmonean Edition of MT Genesis?”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 1 (2012).
• “Genealogies of Genesis”, Wikipedia, used as a cross-check of the three tables.
• Intertextual.bible, Genesis 5:26-29, Hebrew and Samaritan compared.
• “Sumerian King List”, World History Encyclopedia.