The ages and relationships of the patriarchs, given in Genesis and shown Figure 13, allow one to estimate the time of Adam’s creation at slightly more than 6,000 years ago. What uncertainties are involved?
a. These ages are based on the Hebrew (Masoretic) text, used in almost all English translations. The corresponding numbers in the Samaritan and Greek (Septuagint) texts place Adam’s creation about 6,200 and 7,300 years ago, respectively. Which text is closest to the original is uncertain. If one uses the Septuagint, then Methuselah died 14 years after the flood—a logical impossibility, since he was not on the Ark. (Some sources say that the name Methuselah means, “When he is dead, it shall be sent.” According to the numbers in Figure 13 (the Masoretic text), the flood began in the year Methuselah died.)
b. Fractions of a year should be added or subtracted, because each patriarch was probably not born on his father’s day. Also “became the father of” or “begot” may have referred to the time of conception, not the time of birth.
c. Some ages in all three texts have evidently been rounded, because too many numbers end in zero or five. Rounding 15 or so ages in Genesis probably would not inject more than 20 years of total error. This rounding might have been intended to absorb the fractions of the year mentioned in b above.
d. Disagreements exist concerning Terah’s age when Abraham was born. Some argue that Terah was 70 years, not the favored 130 years shown in this chart.1
e. Luke 3:36 lists Cainan as the son of Arpachshad and the father of Shelah. In Genesis, Cainan’s name occurs only in recent copies of the Septuagint—not the oldest. Nor is Cainan in the oldest known copy of Luke. Therefore, a copyist probably added Cainan’s name inadvertently, perhaps taking it from Luke 3:37.
f. Most students of the subject place the death of Joseph (Jacob’s son) between 1606 B.C. and 1690 B.C. An error in this date will add a corresponding error to the year of Adam’s creation.
Theistic evolutionists often raise two objections to the chronological information in Genesis.
a. Some say, pointing to Cainan, that the genealogies contain gaps. However, the possibility of gaps is irrelevant to the year of Adam’s creation. Even if many generations existed between two consecutive patriarchs on this chart, the time between their births is fixed by Genesis, no matter how many generations might be missing. (For example, Enosh was born 105 years after Seth’s birth.) The writer or compiler of this information had a careful, systematic, and mathematical way of linking the chronology into one continuous family record—in contrast to other genealogies in the Bible.
b. Others have said that the long ages of the preflood patriarchs resulted from lunar months being incorrectly counted as years. If so, Mahalaleel and Enoch were 5 years old when they had children.
This chart contains other interesting details.
a. Noah’s son Shem, born before the flood, nearly outlived Abraham. Surprisingly, many people think of Noah and Shem as relatively ancient (or imaginary) but accept Abraham as historically recent. Noah died only two years before Abraham was born.
b. Notice the continuous chain of overlapping life spans of Adam, Methuselah, Shem, and Abraham or Isaac.
c. Enoch’s time on earth was cut short, but not by death. [See Hebrews 11: 5.]
d. Notice the systematic change in life spans after the flood, as explained in "Before the Flood, Why Did People Live for about 900 Years?" on pages 525–528.
Genesis 5 says that each of the first 9 patriarchs had “other sons and daughters” besides the son in the patriarchal line. Simply stated, each family had at least 5 children: 3 sons and 2 daughters. But what must have been the average number of children for there to have been a better than 50-50 chance that all 9 families had at least 3 sons and 2 daughters? Statistically, all 9 families would probably have had at least 3 sons and 2 daughters if each family had 10 or more children. (Conversely, all 9 families would probably not have had 3 sons and 2 daughters if each family had 9 children or less.)
Had preflood families averaged 10 or more children and if death rates were typical of what we have seen in the last few thousand years, the world’s population would have exceeded today’s population of 7 billion people. However, as you will see in "Why Have So Few Human Fossils Been Found?" on page 515, there are historic and biblical reasons for concluding that before the flood average family size decreased substantially and death rates increased.