Nine Hundred and Seventy Four Generations Before Adam?

It was recently brought to my attention (thank you J.D. Everett) that there is some indirect support in the Talmud for the idea that Adam was not the first man. This is intriguing because part of the Christ-centered model is that Adam's biblical role is not to be the sole father of humanity, but to bring the line of Messiah- he is a figure of Christ (Romans 5:14). To be sure this connection is more tenuous than that suggested by the Two Powers Theology which was a significant minority position of first century Jews, but it is another data point which suggests that the Christ Centered Model for Genesis dove-tails nicely with ideas which have long been on the periphery of theological debate.

The Talmud is a book of ancient Jewish commentary on what Christians call the "Old Testament", I don't consider the Talmud authoritative. It is people commenting on scripture, not scripture itself. Still, I find it interesting that ideas which can be connected with the Christ-centered model from Early Genesis the Revealed Cosmology have been to some extent a part of the conversation for a long time. In this case the idea is that the Torah was given "1,000 generations" prior to its compilation by Moses. Moses is only twenty-six generations from Adam.

The basis for the contention of these rabbis is found in the 105th Psalm. They translate it a little differently than I have seen it in English Bibles. For example the NIV has verses eight and nine saying...

8 He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he made, for a thousand generations,
9 the covenant he made with Abraham, the oath he swore to Isaac.

Their translation of verse eight reads....

He remembered His covenant forever, the word He had commanded to the thousandth generation,

And on the face of it their translation makes more sense than the NIV. Otherwise if taken literally it implies that God's promise to Abraham is limited to 1,000 generations. This doesn't seem to line up well with the attributes or character of God. Thus the Jewish rabbis translated the verse like they did. Since they viewed the giving of the Torah as the written delivery of that promise, and Moses - in the 26th generation from Adam - compiled the Torah, they reasoned that there must have been 974 generations prior to Adam.

Here is an example of their commentary on the issue...

"R. Joshua b. Levi also said: "When Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels spoke before the Holy One, blessed be He: 'Sovereign of the Universe! What business has one born of woman amongst us?' 'He has come to receive the Torah,' answered He to them. Said they to Him, 'That secret treasure, which has been hidden by Thee for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created."

This is described by Shabbat as being done "before the world was created". That's time before the beginning and leads to some other logical and scriptural problems. If there was no creation and no people, how does it even make sense to measure time at all, much less time in "generations"? Note: this idea is not the same thing as I am saying when I point out that a close look at the text show that there was an unspecified amount of time before the first day.

Some of these scholars thought that the previous people were on a different "plane of existence" and with the creation of Adam there was also a new plane of existence created. I would argue that the Garden of Eden was the new plane of existence and after the Fall it was lost to Adam and Eve, forcing them into the same environment as the rest of mankind. Others thought the souls of the previous 974 generations pre-existed creation but were inserted into the world after it was created. See for example this quote from Chagiga 13b-14b:

"It is taught: R. Simeon the Pious said: These are the nine hundred and seventy four generations who pressed themselves forward to be created before the world was created, but were not created: the Holy One, blessed be He, arose and planted them in every generation, and it is they who are the insolent of each generation. "

All kinds of "odd" ideas were suggested by the commentators as to who the 974 generations were that in their view existed, yet did not exist. Modern Jewish scholars continue to try and reconcile the paradoxes in the text. Here is one that, after reviewing some of the more bizarre speculations, suggests, along with other speculations with which I disagree, that there were people before Adam:

The question is, if Adam had progeny who did not possess a Divine soul, could he have had ancestors who also were similarly spiritually challenged?12 

When the Torah describes a part of Adam's core as the dust of the earth, could this refer to people who "existed yet never existed"? Could it describe an existence that may have had a physical effect on this world but no spiritual effect? Could Adam have physically had a mother while spiritually the breath of God served as an impetus for a new world?13

That is not at all what I teach at all about the "host" created on earth (Gen. 2:1), but I do think they were there. His view of Genesis 6:1-3, like the Christ-centered model, recognizes that there were two groups of humans being discussed, but in my view gets things muddled after that. The commonality is that it recognizes in the text that there were other people walking around which were not the offspring of Adam and Eve:

The introduction to the flood story includes a description the forced relations between the sons of Elohim and the daughters of man-Adam: powerful brutes taking innocent, refined women. The result was the flood, and the eradication of the brutal species. The only survivors are Noach and his descendants. These verses clearly outline the strained co-existence of two types of people. Were these other "men" descendants of Adam, or vestiges of an earlier world?

 My point is not to endorse any particular part of the Jewish speculation on the problem as being correct. My point is that they realized there was a problem. In their view, the text pointed to, in some sense, 974 generations occurring prior to the formation of Adam. They tried to reconcile that with their belief that creation was only six thousand years old, but they never quite developed a clean resolution to the paradox. The Christ-Centered Model does so, without the potentially racist implications about the "brutal species" (which is all of us due to sin).

A generation according to scripture is most often forty years, but seventy years and one-hundred years are also used to describe a generation. The latter figure is a generation connected to a promise and thus might be more reasonable to connect to this verse about God's promise. Regardless of the lack of coherence of their proposed solutions to the paradox, there is a long history to suggest the Jewish people recognized in their scriptures the possibility of generations before Adam. The solution to the paradox is to adopt the Christ-centered model of Early Genesis which places Adam as a figure of Christ for the "host" of humanity created before him. Though by now he is likely to be found somewhere in the family tree of all of us (a view called "Genealogical Adam"), he is the father of the line of Messiah, not all of humanity.

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