Genesis: Chapter Five (From Adam to Noah)

In which Adam and his offspring have more offspring and they have some offspring, too, but most aren't even ten years old before they start having sex.

This chapter starts with a brief summary of the previous four chapters. It's as if everything up to this point has been a sort of prologue, a jumping-off point, for the rest of the story. The first verse is, "This is the written account of Adam's line," and then we start time travelling.

In five short verses, God creates man, both male and female, he blesses them, and then Adam lives for 130 years. At the lively young age of 130, Adam has a kid named Seth (no mention of proclamations of God's name like at the end of Chapter Four). Adam then lives for another 800 years and finally dies at the too-young age of 930.

Now, I've heard a theory (corroborated by a Ministry of God's Pure Word) that in Biblical times, one year was measured in cycles of the moon. This means that twelve Biblical years are the equivalent of one Gregorian year, give or take. That puts Adam at about 77 years old at the time of his death, which makes more sense than 930. I will nitpick briefly about how this should have been translated properly to modern English. There. I'm done.

Seth lives for 105 years (no, that's 8, almost 9) before he "became the father of Enosh" (5:6).

What the - ? Seth was not even a teenager before he was impregnating women? I mean, it's scientifically possible for that to happen, but extremely unlikely. Male sexual maturity isn't usually reached until between the ages of 12 and 15.

Still, even accepting the slim chance of this action being within the fringe of the realm of possibility, this tells me that either the Bible lies and tells us that people lived to be 930 Gregorian years and that they're still sexually active at the age of 105, or that God condones adolescent sex (and presumably marriage). Seth is the guy who was lauded at birth, and God does not punish him for having a child at whatever age he has the child.

Anyway, the Bible goes on to say in 5:8 that Seth lived to be 912 years old (or maybe 76, depending on who you ask), and then he died.

Briefly, all year issues included, Seth's son Enosh made a baby at age 90 (or 7 and a half), and that kid was called Kenan. Enosh died at 905 (or 75). Kenan begat Mahalalel when he was 70 (Seriously? He was almost six years old when he did that?) and died when he was 910 (75, almost 76). Mahalalel begat Jared when he was 65 (5 years old?) and died when he was 895 (74). Jared produced offspring when he was 162 (an almost believable 13 years old), then died when he was 962 (80).

*Deep breath*

Jared's son Enoch followed through with it at 65 (another five-year-old) and died at 365 (only 30) because "he was no more, because God took him away." (5:24) His son Methuselah wasn't a father until he turned 187 (15, the oldest yet) and lived the longest of any before him, finally dying at 969 (80) years old. His son Lamech waited a little longer before having kids. He did it at 182 (still 15 in calculated Gregorian years, but a few months older than when his father did it), and died at 777 (64; a young death is what awaits more abstinent people).

But Lamech's son was Noah, and he's where this story ends, with a note about how he waited until he was 500 years old (41!!!) to have triplets, which he named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

This chapter is mostly just a history lesson that takes us to the next important event in Bible history, but I can't make heads or tails of the years. On the one hand, you could likely have people living to be nearly a thousand years old. To make that happen, you have to defy a long-running track record of people only even living to seventy or eighty commonly in the past few decades, what with the more recent advances in medical science. On the other hand, if you assume that one year in the Bible is the equivalent of one lunar cycle (28 days, roughly one month), you have a bunch of people impregnating women before an age when most people are even aware of what their sexual organs do.

My age calculations are not exact. I'm dividing the age given in the Bible by 12. That is, according to my calulations, one Bible year is the same as 0.083 Gregorian years. A more exact calculation would be to multiply by 0.076 (28 lunar days divided by 365 Gregorian days), which would actually yield smaller numbers than my near-accurate math. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here.

In short, you've got impossibly old people or children having sex. Both are highly unbelievable, and the latter is something that most people today would consider morally wrong. And yet students are told that they can't read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, while the Bible remains a staple for many families.

Chapter Six