Fun With Genealogy: Genesis 5:1-32

When I say "fun" in this post, I'm being a little sarcastic. There are a lot of sections of the Bible filled with this sort of detail. In addition to who begat whom, there are lists of how many cubits long something should be, or how many omers it should hold, or how many shekels it should weigh. There are lists of what kind of structures you should build and what the building materials should be, and what the rituals of worship are, and what the priests should wear when conducting them.

There is a theory of who wrote the first five books of the Bible called the documentary hypothesis which suggests that these sections come from what scholars call P or the priestly source.

While these details were important for the priestly writers of ancient times, they are really tedious for modern readers and I'm going to skim over them in this study so we can focus on the major stories.

There are several points I'd like to pause and take a look at. The first is verses 1-2 which say . . .

This is the family tree of the human race: When God created the human race, he made it godlike, with a nature akin to God. He created both male and female and blessed them, the whole human race.

This reaffirms the idea we saw in Genesis 1, that all humans, male and female, are equally made in the image of God. It also reminds us that the blessings of God aren't just for one group of people, but for the whole human race.

Another interesting feature of this section is the amazing lifespans that the genealogy lists.

Adam - 930 years
Seth - 912 years
Enosh - 905 years
Kenan - 910 years
Mahalalel - 895 years
Jared - 962 years
Enoch - 365 years (then vanished into thin air)
Methuselah - 969 years
Lamech - 777 years

Looking as this list, it's natural to ask whether these men really lived so long. Biblical literalists says that they did, and come up with elaborate theories to explain how this is possible. A few have said that there must have been a mistranslation somewhere and that the word "years" should really read "months." This gives more realistic ages, but creates other problems, such as making Mahalalel only 5 years old when he became a father.

A more likely explanation can be found by looking at the ages listed for the kings of other ancient Near eastern people. The Persian epic poem Shahnameh lists kings who reigned for as long as 1000 years and the Sumerian King's List talks about men who ruled for as long as 72,000 years. Saying that a great ruler or ancestor lived for an impossibly long time was simply a way of showing respect in the ancient world. It seems to have been a custom that the writers of the Bible also followed.