The numbers in the Genesis 5 genealogies

My fascination with the antediluvian world described in the first several chapters of Genesis goes back to my earliest childhood.

My mother used to refer to the refrigerator humorously as the "methuselator," and when I asked her why, she told me it was a reference to Methuselah, who was in the Bible and had lived for 969 years. Although I was only six or seven at the time, my reaction to this information was to start reading the Bible from the beginning, for the express purpose of finding out about Methuselah. After just a few chapters, I thought I had found him: "And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael." This surely was the name my mother had mentioned! I read on, prepared to learn all about him: ". . . and Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah." And that was it! Methusael was begotten, and begat, and nothing else was said about him -- in particular, not one word about his supposed longevity. I felt cheated, and my Bible-reading project came to an abrupt end.

Several months later, though, since everyone seemed to be insisting that the Bible did say Methuselah lived for 969 years, I decided to give it another try, thinking the narrative might return to him at some later point. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for in the very next chapter.

[21] And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

[22] And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

[23] And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

[24] And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

[25] And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech.

[26] And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:

[27] And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

Still not much in the way of biographical detail, but at least it included the magic number 969. I also noticed that, while this Methuselah was apparently a different person from the impostor Methusael, both their names and their genealogies were strangely similar. Here was another Enoch, another Lamech -- in fact, nearly every name in the Genesis 5 genealogy turned out to have its counterpart in Genesis 4. I became very interested in this, going so far as to learn how to write the names in Hebrew so as to better appreciate their similarity, and I often used to write out the two genealogies on scraps of paper and draw lines connecting each Cainite name to its Sethite echo. I took great satisfaction in knowing this "secret" about the Bible -- and never mind that I knew virtually nothing about the whole rest of the book! People would ask from time to time how my Bible-reading was coming along, and after a while I starting saying that I was in the middle of Exodus, because it seemed like I ought to be saying that by that time, but in fact I was just reading and rereading and picking apart the first 10 chapters of Genesis. Later, in my early teens, I branched out into apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature, gobbling up every far-fetched thing that had ever been written about, or attributed to, such characters as Adam, Noah, and particularly Enoch.

I say all this by way of a prologue, to explain how it is that I have given much more time and attention to the flyover chapters of the Old Testament -- "the begats" -- than any normal person would do.

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Genesis 5 gives the line of descent from Adam to Noah, with details of how long each person lived before and after begetting his successor, as well as the total length of his life. Thus, there are three numbers given for each person. For example, we are told that "Adam lived 130 years, and begat a son . . . and called his name Seth. And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were 800 years: and he begat sons and daughters: And all the days that Adam lived were 930 years: and he died." I will summarize this as "Adam: 130 + 800 = 930."

Here are the numbers for the 10 generations from Adam to Noah, as given in Genesis 5:3-32 and 9:29.

• Adam: 130 + 800 = 930
• Seth: 105 + 807 = 912
• Enos: 90 + 815 = 905
• Cainan: 70 + 840 = 910
• Mahalaleel: 65 + 830 = 895
• Jared: 162 + 800 = 962
• Enoch: 65 + 300 = 365
• Methuselah: 187 + 782 = 969
• Lamech: 182 + 595 = 777
• Noah: 500 + 450 = 950

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Obviously the thing that jumps out at the reader is the extreme longevity attributed to these people. With the exception of sponges and corals, we have no evidence of any animal of any species ever living even 600 years, to say nothing of 900 -- and this includes "biologically immortal" (non-aging) species such as some turtles, sharks, jellyfish, and sea urchins. Even if you don't age, the chance of escaping death by accident or disease every single year for 900-some consecutive years must be extremely low. Of the 10 people in our data set, 7 lived to be 900. A 70% chance of reaching 900 corresponds to an annual risk of death of about 1 in 2,500 -- which is approximately the current figure for British women in the 25-34 age range. (Men in the same age range have about double the female mortality rate.) In other words, only people who were biologically immortal and lived lives as safe as that of the average British woman of the 21st century, could be expected to live as long as the antediluvian patriarchs are reported to have lived. That level of safety seems extremely unrealistic for the ancient world, especially at a time when "the earth was filled with violence" (Genesis 6:11).

Note also that this extreme longevity was apparently accompanied by delayed sexual maturity, as no one is reported to have begotten a son before the age of 65.

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One possible way of dealing with these unbelievable numbers is to assume that the word "year" originally meant some much shorter period of time. (Someone, either Plutarch or Vico if memory serves, has proposed that people originally reckoned in "years" that were only one month long, only gradually increasing the nominal year to anything approaching an astronomically appropriate duration.)

Unfortunately, though, no possible length of the "year" can make the numbers in Genesis 5 biologically normal. The youngest age at which anyone fathered a son is 65, and the latest age of death is 969. If we divide these numbers by 4 (for a three-month "year"), 65 becomes a believable 16, but Methuselah still lives for 242 years. If we halve the numbers again, bringing Methuselah's lifespan down to a remarkable but biologically possible 121, then we have Mahalaleel and Enoch fathering children at the age of eight.

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Another approach is to take the numbers at face value but to reinterpret the names to which those numbers pertain as referring to something other than individual human beings. This is Swedenborg's tack in Arcana Cœlestia, where Seth and Enos and the others are made to refer to a succession of religious movements or "churches." So might we say, figuratively, that Judaism begat Christianity -- or, more figuratively still: Moses begat Jesus, and Jesus begat Peter, and Peter begat Luther and his brethren. If the genealogies are referring to something non-biological, longevity is not an issue.

Under this interpretation, though, the very precision of the numbers -- particularly of the death dates -- becomes hard to explain. Some religions can point to a specific date at which they were founded, but who can pretend to give the specific year in which a particular religion died? When did Greek paganism die, for example? Would you say, "Homer lived after he begat Plato 1,239 years, and begat sons and daughters; and all the days of Homer were 2,073 years, and he died"? If not, what other numbers would you give in place of the ones I have used? Obviously, the whole exercise is ridiculous. We can probably say that the religion of Homer had died out by the end of the ninth century, but it's meaningless to try to get much more specific than that.

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How about the most obvious option -- literalism? Is it impossible that the antediluvians really were fantastically long-lived -- either because human biology was different then, or because the antediluvian civilization was a technically advanced one ("Atlantis"), or both?

Well, yes, I do think literalism is impossible in this case. No matter how much "pseudo" science and history one is willing to entertain, the fact remains that the numbers as we have them are mathematically impossible. To see why I say that, let's compare Noah's pedigree with those of two well-documented historical figures: King George VI of the United Kingdom and Zaifeng, Prince-Regent of the Qing Dynasty. (Only royalty can offer the necessary ten-generation genealogies.) I have calculated numbers for these two pedigrees corresponding to those given in Genesis 5. (For simplicity, I have used years only, not taking into account what month or day anyone was born or died.)

• Ernest I: 57 + 17 = 74
• Johann Ernest IV: 39 + 32 = 71
• Francis Josias: 27 + 40 = 67
• Ernest Frederick: 26 + 50 = 76
• Francis: 34 + 22 = 56
• Ernest I: 35 + 25 = 60
• Albert: 22 + 20 = 42
• Edward VII: 24 + 45 = 69
• George V: 30 + 41 = 71
• George VI: 31 + 26 = 57

and

• Nurhaci: 33 + 34 = 67
• Hong Taiji: 46 + 5 = 51
• Shunzhi: 16 + 7 = 23
• Kangxi: 24 + 44 = 68
• Yongzheng: 33 + 24 = 57
• Qianlong: 49 + 39 = 88
• Jiaqing: 22 + 38 = 60
• Daoguang: 58 + 10 = 68
• Yixuan: 43 + 8 = 51
• Zaifeng: 23 + 45 = 68

We now have three different genealogies to look at -- two of which are incontestably real -- and from each of them we have extracted 30 numbers. Now, for real genealogies, we would expect the details of these numbers to be more-or-less random. Obviously, the large-scale patterns -- that people tend to beget sons in their 20s or 30s, and die in their 60s or 70s -- are not random, but the smaller-scale details -- for example, whether a person lives an odd or an even number of years -- should be. If a purported genealogy had, for example, an overwhelming preponderance of odd numbers, we could say with confidence that the numbers were wrong.

So let's look at the 30 numbers in George VI's genealogy. How many of them should be even? About half, or 15. In fact, that is almost exactly what we find: 16 even numbers and 14 odd. How many should be divisible by 3? About 10 -- and, sure enough, precisely 10 of them are divisible by 3. About 7.5 of them should be divisible by 4; in fact, 6 of them are. As we continue through various other factors, there are no surprises, nothing to indicate that this is anything other than a naturally-occurring set of numbers.

Now let's do the same sort of sanity-checking for the other genealogies, checking all the factors from 2 to 15, and plot the results. This is what we get:

So the Noah numbers are fake, an impossibly high percentage of them being divisible by 5 (70%, where we would expect only 20%) and by 10 (43%, where we would expect 10%).

The fact that it is 5 and 10 that are the offending factors suggests the possibility that these are approximate numbers. We do, when giving an approximate age, tend to round to the nearest multiple of 5. For example, we might say that someone was "about 45" or "about 50," but probably not "about 46." I have two reasons for rejecting this explanation. First, the data set includes numbers such as 807 and 182 which are obviously not approximate. Second, if you do the math and calculate in which year each event took place (something I have of course done many times), you will find that Methuselah died in the same year that the Flood took place -- suggesting either that he died in the Flood, or that the Flood was delayed until the last of Noah's righteous ancestors had died. Nowhere is it said that Methuselah died in the year of the Flood -- you have to figure it out by adding up the begats -- but the fact is there in the data and is clearly not a coincidence. "Adding up the begats" wouldn't work if the numbers were only approximate.

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So where did the numbers come from? Well, it appears that someone just made them up. But what could motivate such an invention? Why would a legendary list of ancestors need numbers associated with it at all? The Cainite genealogy in Genesis 4 manages just fine without any need for bogus numbers. Were they just added for the sake of verisimilitude, to make the genealogy seem more concrete and real? But that suggests a level of conscious fraud which we would be reluctant to attribute to the writers of sacred books.

There are a few hints that the numbers themselves might be symbolic. For example, Enoch lives 365 years -- the same as the number of days in a year. Lamech (the son of Methuselah) lives for 777 years -- a fact which ties him to the other Lamech (the son of Methusael), who was the seventh from Adam and who is quoted as saying, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold." What these numbers meant to the ancients is by no means certain, but it seems likely that they meant something and were chosen for that reason.

(Incidentally, Joseph Smith includes a version of this genealogy in his Book of Moses. All the numbers are the same except for Enoch's. Where Genesis has 65 + 300 = 365, Smith gives 65 + 365 = 430. I have no idea what motivated this slight and seemingly irrelevant modification, but it is interesting to note that even in changing the numbers he preserved the obviously significant number 365.)