SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE XI

The Age of Man - The Biblical Genealogies

Last week we looked at some of the evidence used by paleontologists to establish the commonly-accepted age of two to three million years for the human race on earth. This week, we want to look at the Biblical evidence for the age of man, focusing particularly on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11.

THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS - THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACE

It is important from the beginning to recognize what is at stake in this discussion. We have already noted that the question of the age of man is far more crucial theologically than that of the age of the earth. The main reason lies not only in the importance of affirming the authority of Scripture in our reading of the Biblical genealogies, but also in the implications of the teachings of the early chapters of Genesis for our understanding of sin and redemption. We already saw last week that evolutionists scoff at the idea of the unity of the human race, despite the genetic evidence uncovered in recent years. They have no time for a literal Adam and Eve. Yet when the Bible teaches that the entire race is united, both in God's image and in bearing the imputed sin of Adam, it presupposes a literal First Family. To deny the literal existence of Adam and Eve, an original couple from whom the entire human race is descended, is to undermine both the doctrine of original sin and that of the federal headship of Christ over His people as taught by Paul in Romans 5.

THE GENEALOGIES AS CHRONOLOGICAL INDICATORS

The most famous attempt to use the Biblical genealogies in order to calculate chronology was that of Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who in the seventeenth century calculated that creation occurred in the year 4004 B.C. He began with a generally accepted date for Abraham (about 2000 B.C.), then simply used the numbers in the genealogies and worked backwards. A slightly later contemporary of Ussher, John Lightfoot, actually taught that creation had occurred on October 23rd, 4004 B.C., at 9:00 in the morning - Greenwich Mean Time! Ussher's dates were included in Bibles for several hundred years following his studies - including the enormously influential Scofield Reference Bible, which popularized both Ussher's dates and the Gap Theory in our own country. Most scholars today, however, believe that the genealogies cannot be used for calculating purposes, at least not in any specific or detailed way.

GENEALOGICAL DISCONTINUITIES

The groundbreaking work in this area was done by William Henry Green, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary back in the latter years of the nineteenth century, when Princeton was still evangelical. He demonstrated conclusively that the Biblical genealogies were not intended to be complete records of every generation, but rather were selective, including only those ancestors considered to be important, and structured, often following a predesigned mathematical pattern.

A few examples should suffice, though many could be given. To begin with, the genealogy of Jesus given in Matthew 1:1-17 clearly reveals these characteristics. Not only does the first verse summarize the genealogy that follows by giving the three most crucial names, but verse 8 leaves out the names of three kings of Judah (Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah) between Joram and Uzziah. The intended mathematical structure is given explicitly in verse 17 - could this have been to put Jesus at the head of the seventh seven? The omissions are not errors, nor are they attempts to deceive, but they do tell us something about the Jewish practice in constructing genealogies.

That the same thing is going on in Genesis 5 and 11 is clear. A comparison of Luke 3:36 and Genesis 11:12 shows that the earlier genealogy omits the name of Cainan (though the name does appear in the Septuagint version), showing that some selectivity was at work. Furthermore, the mathematical structure appears in that both Genesis genealogies contain ten names, the last of which has three sons.

Whatever the purpose of the genealogies, then, it was not to permit calculation of the age of the human race. The old joke, "How did Methuselah die?" simply will not work (the answer was "He drowned" because calculations based on the genealogies and assuming them to be complete and consecutive would lead to the conclusion that Methuselah died in the Flood, or at least in the year of the Flood). The most likely explanation is that the genealogies were intended to teach both the unity of the human race and the universality of the sin of man and its resultant curse; after all, the great refrain of the genealogies is "... and he died."

DID PEOPLE REALLY LIVE ALMOST A THOUSAND YEARS?

Modern scientists simply write off the ages given for the antediluvian patriarchs as being beyond belief. If we take the authority of Scripture seriously, however, we must also take these ages seriously. It should be noted that other ancient records show even longer lifespans for the ancients. The king lists of Sumer and the old Babylonian civilization include men who lived tens of thousands of years. Is the genealogy of Genesis 5 simply a more conservative version of one of these ancient myths of the god-kings? In fact, there is evidence which indicates that the Sumerian and Babylonian records may be corruptions of an earlier list which is faithfully recorded in Genesis. The early civilizations of Mesopotamia used a sexigesimal number system (base 60, as opposed to our decimal system - base 10). By the time the records were set down, however, they had switched to a decimal system, but were still using the old sexigesimal symbols. If the numbers on the old cuneiform records are read as sexigesimal rather than decimal, however, they bear a remarkable resemblance (as do the names, in fact) to those given in Genesis 5. If, indeed, one assumes that the scribes in the declining days of Ur wrote down an old sexigesimal record under the assumption that its numbers were in the decimal system (i.e., they made a mistake in reading their own ancient records), what they left behind corroborates the account of Genesis 5 to a remarkable degree.

In addition, the decline in lifespan after the Flood corresponds closely to what scientists have shown would occur when an organism was exposed to a dramatically increased amount of radioactivity. If, in fact, the Flood involved the collapse of a water canopy surrounding the earth, the increase in cosmic radiation penetrating the atmosphere, combined with the watering down of the genetic pool through increased population, would contribute to a significant decrease in the average lifespan.

CONCLUSIONS

Some Christians choose to deal with inconvenient scientific evidence by placing it into a supposed gap between the first two verses of Genesis. This is far too facile to be satisfying, and lacks one shred of concrete Biblical support. Other Christians accept the scientific evidence at face value, but then are forced to relegate the Genesis account of the creation of man to the realm of myth of allegory. In addition, the doctrine of original sin must be jettisoned, but few who have gone so far seem to regret its loss.

While we may not be able to use the Biblical genealogies to establish a specific date for creation or a concrete age for the human race, we must affirm that the Biblical account, while leaving room for perhaps as much as twenty thousand years of human history, certainly cannot accommodate two or three million years without reducing the genealogies of Genesis, and some basic Biblical doctrine along with them, to meaninglessness.