Adam and His Kin 3-9
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
These chapters cover life after the Fall up until the Flood. Vivid pictures are painted of the lives of the patriarchs. For our purposes, I just want to point out some of the time spans. I know for myself, when I read the Bible chronology, I don’t tend to think in sweeping segments of time. Because it is crammed in to so small a space, my mind compresses the time involved. I will not go through the entire geneology, but just highlight a few of the better known patriarchs for you.
We started with the premise of roughly 106 lifetimes between Adam’s creation and now. I’ve already pointed out that Adam had lived almost 2 lifetimes before his third child, Seth, was born. Although Adam and Eve had other children, we only know 3 by name: Cain, Abel and Seth. Cain murdered Abel, and moved away from the area of the Garden of Eden. Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old.
When Adam was 687 and Seth was 557, Methuselah was born. Methuselah was the son of Enoch, who “walked with God and was no more, for God took him.” When Methuselah was 369 years old, his grand-son Noah was born. Methuselah died at 969 years of age, just before the flood. So we can do some simple math and find that the flood occurred approximately 1656 years after creation.
In lifetimes: about 22. To put a little perspective on the length of patriarchal life spans, only 10 generations were recorded, inclusive of Adam and Noah from creation to flood, and Adam was still living when Noah’s father was born. Adam lived 930 years, almost an eon, almost 12.5 lifetimes.
We’ll stop here for now. I’ll be back on Wednesday, hopefully before midnight.
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