Genesis Chapter Five Genealogy and the Strange Number Pattern

The problem: Skeptics use the patterns of years in the genealogies to dismiss the idea that these are actual events or accurate times. They imply that whoever wrote early Genesis manufactured the genealogies and their numbers to make some esoteric point, though I've never heard any reasonable explanations as to what that point might have been. One fellow I've been conversing with explained it like this when referring to the Genesis chapter five genealogy....

 Is it coincidence, that we have 29 numbers out 30 in the genealogy (exception = Methuselah, who died the year before the flood) which are multiples of 5 or seven plus a multiple of 5?
This means that all of the numbers end in 0,2,5,or 7, and none ends in 1,3,4,6,8 or 9. If the numbers were simply random ages, this would only occur with a probability of (0.4)^29 = 3 *10^-12;
i.e once in every three trillion genealogies.

He's referring to the numbers in the Masoretic text, but the Septuagint shows a similar pattern. With the exception of Methuselah the text shows a pattern which is extremely unlikely to occur by chance. Now when apologists present similar calculations to skeptics regarding the improbability of say, biogenesis via naturalistic means, or any one man fulfilling all of the prophecies which Christ did, I've noticed that they deny, dismiss, and find all sorts of empty excuses why our calculations mean nothing at all.

We want to be of more noble of spirit than those who try hard to not see truth, because our relationship to truth should be different once we have been saved. Our witness is that both the Living Word of God, who is Christ in whom we believe, and the written word, the Scriptures which speak of Him and reflect His glory, are true. I would not say that I am a "fundamentalist" per se, because that term has become hi-jacked by people who have different sins to repent of than the ones I have. Such as trying to make scripture fit to certain cultural norms as well as a very forced over-simplification in method of interpretation that scripture itself does not support. Call me a "neo-fundamentalist" if you like. My point is, just because those who are without faith dismiss and deny our valid numerical objections as, for example, "argument from incredulity" does not mean that we should stoop to that level. Are we not redeemed? Do we not live in the Truth, which is a Person? The fact is, this pattern of numbers is highly unusual. They don't appear as "random ages".

I would also say to those who put great stock in what has become known as "Critical Biblical Scholarship" that they need not adopt the naturalist premises which have infected today's seminaries in order to do "Critical Scholarship". I offer what is below as a modest example of how one can do a bit of "Critical Biblical Scholarship" without the dreadful premise that scripture isn't what Christ said that it is.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that these numbers can be used to calculate times per the method of Bishop Ussher. It is my position that the narrative part of the text shows that Ussher's methods will derive dates that are too young. I don't want to get distracted by that now, but I don't want people who can't accept Ussher's dating to "turn off their ability to hear" what I am about to write because they can't accept some other assumptions about the text. Some people will have that same reaction to the idea that there were people who lived over five hundred years. That too is a separate issue which I discuss in my book. I ask that you suspend disbelief on those points, if you have any, in order to evaluate my hypothesis regarding the pattern of years in this genealogy.

First, I am adherent of a modified version of the Tablet Theory. It must be modified because critics have raised a couple of valid (and some invalid IMHO) critiques of the original theory. The modifications address those issues, though so far as I know those who believe they are experts have not evaluated the modified version (and thus I conclude they have no reasonable grounds to dismiss it). Moses didn't write early Genesis from a blank scroll. Rather, he had tablets passed down from his ancestors like Abraham, which told their stories. These accounts were ancient even in Abraham's day, though some portions, like the table of nations and the genealogies, were always understood to be a work in progress which were to be updated from time to time. The tablets were not in Hebrew, which has a later origin than the earliest accounts in Genesis. Moses had to translate them, perhaps from a language that most of his countrymen could no longer understand.

Is there a reasonable explanation why all of the dates would be in multiples of five, or multiples of five plus seven (please don't get hung up on the exception of Methusualah)? There is. Let's start with some things that we know.

1. The ancient Babylonians (with whom the ancestors of the Hebrews interacted strongly) like many other ancient cultures, had twelve thirty-day months in their year. So they had 360-day years. (Edit, or maybe not. At least at first. The Vedics started with a 360 day year which had 12 months of 30 days even as early as 7,000 B.C. It seems like the Babylonians emphasized lunar cycles, which would result in a 354 day lunar year. They added months every so often similar to what is described below to re-align the cycles of the sun and moon. Before their system was formalized, the number of days in the added months seems to have not been set, but was made what was needed to re-align the observations).

2. A lunar month varies in time by a few hours, but averages out to be 29.53 days.

3. A lunar year then, with twelve lunar cycles, would be approximately 354 days in length, with a fraction of a day remaining. Later some cultures made the year consist of six months of 29 days each and six months of 30 days each in recognition of this fact. This is a 354 day "lunar year".

4. A solar year is 364.2422 days.

5. The Hebrews considered that both the Sun and the Moon were given to regulate times and seasons and years.

6. Ancient cultures experimented with all sorts of systems to reconcile these time measuring systems.

***** EDIT: I am such a dunce. I do my thinking backwards, making things harder than they have to be. Instead of reconciling the text and the observations with something I constructed from scratch, I should have first done decent historical research about what the ancients did. If I had, I would have found they got to the same place I did, though maybe not by the same route I used.

Clearly, I am not a good historical scholar. But I have still resolved this issue when no one else did simply because most of the ones who are really good at it are presently using their gifts to try and convince people that early Genesis isn't historical narrative in any real sense. That's their focus. They are outdoing one another devising ways to, in their own estimation, poke holes in the narrative. That is now a crowded niche and the low-hanging fruit there has long since been plucked. I am trying to find ways to reconcile the text to a real and literal historical narrative, like Christ and the apostles thought it was, even if that requires people to see that what the narrative is saying is somewhat different than what they thought it was saying. So in evolutionary terms I am "exploiting an under-used niche" which means I can survive even without being very good at it. Hopefully, in time some of those real scholars crowded into the naysayer niche will get tired of fighting for share in a over-exploited area and start grabbing all this low-hanging fruit I am enjoying in the area of confirming that the text has historicity, but outside the traditional understanding of it.

Reading what I wrote immediately below will give you a good idea of how natural counting times in groups of five and seven years would be to them generally. I have added a section below (after some more study) which describes more precisely how I think this system was formed, and why it would be very natural to count time in groups of five year blocks, with an occasional seven year block thrown in.
*********END EDIT***

So these six facts together point to some problems the ancients had in tracking time. The 360 day years were nice and even and roughly correct. They were also a good "middle ground" between a lunar year and a true solar year. But they needed adjustments because each actual solar year was 4.24 days longer. If you failed to adjust then soon your Winter months would drift over into Summer months and vice versa. It wouldn't take long. In just ten years you would be 42.4 days, over a month, behind in your calendar in order to catch up to where the earth was in actual solar years. Or see it vice-versa if you like. The point is, an adjustment had to be made from time to time to keep the normative year in line with the movement of earth and Sun.

In terms of lunar years the problem is worse, because they are approximately 354 days long. So if you wanted to reconcile lunar years to your 360 day calendar you had to make another adjustment. That is just one issue. Matching them up with the actual solar year requires finding another 4.24 days somewhere.

One way to solve the problem of reconciling your 360 day calendar with a roughly 354 day lunar calendar is to group the 360 day "years" in batches of five. Each year your 360-day calendar ran six days ahead of your lunar calendar. But five time six is thirty, which is close to the 29.53 average lunar cycle. So every five 360-day years the two calendars could be lined up again with a small adjustment.

Let's call five 360-day cycles of time a "quin", Latin for "five". At the end of the quin your lunar cycle would be back in synch with the 360 day calendar, though every other quin you might have to declare the synchronization month to have only 29 days to line it up more closely.

It is difficult to believe that none of those near eastern cultures, who watched the sky with great skill, failed to notice this synchronization and had a term for it. This hypothesis has predictive power in that I postulate that such a term existed and may be found in the historical record. Perhaps that term, which I am calling "quin" here, became a unit of measure for large amounts of time- like the lifespan of long-lived patriarchs. So when Moses got his records, they did not say "Noah lived 500 years..." but they said "Noah lived 100 quin" which he translated into the proper number of years because they no longer used that system of calculation. The unit would mean nothing to the children of Israel.

This still leaves the mystery of why an occasional "7" would be added to these numbers. The mystery could be resolved simply by continuing our same train of thought. The "quin" might be enough for reconciling the lunar calendar to the 360-day calendar, but another measure was needed in order to adjust it to the actual solar cycle. Each solar year, the 360-day year would fall 4.2422 days further behind. At what point would it fall a month behind? You guessed it. 7 X 4.2422 days  = 29.695 days. If every seven years they added a month into their calendar, it would "slow down" their 360-day calendar and give actual solar years a chance to "catch up", restoring the months to their proper seasons. I will call this unit of time a "septa", Greek for "seven".

Similar to the situation with the "quin" and the lunar calendar, you would occasionally have to adjust whether this once-every-seven-years added month had 29 or 30 days. Alternating evenly between 30 and 29 day months would add on average 29.5 days of "catching up" to where the Sun is in space, but what about that last approximately 0.2 days? Every seventh year your extra month would lose the difference between 29.5 and the actual number of "extra" solar days in seven years, 29.695 days as shown above. An easy rough solution would be to start with a thirty day month and then track your septas by fives. Every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you start over and have another 30-day month instead of alternating. So instead of 30-29-30-29-30 and then back to 29 you would start the sequence over and have 30-29-30-29-30 and then repeat the sequence starting with another 30. This would get you to 29.6 days, which is very close to the actual value, and we are using a span of years which is also divisible by five (35).

If you wanted to get even closer to the actual solar year, in addition to having back-to-back 30 day bonus months every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you would also add a bonus day on the bonus month of the seventh septa, or every 49 years, giving you a period of three septas in a row in which your bonus month is thirty days in length (years 35, 42, and 49). Doing these things would keep a 360-day calendar lined up with both the solar year and the lunar calendar with remarkable precision.

Does the length of time "49 years" ring a bell with anyone? Seven sevens? It should. What about the multiples of three? The third "bonus month" in a row to have thirty days comes on the 49th year - the end of which starts the year of Jubilee.

The critics are correct that the numbers are not random. But that doesn't mean the genealogies were made up either, not even for some "special purpose" that they can't fathom. Moses simply had documents that had genealogies measured in something like "quins" and "septas". The Egyptians had a 365 day year. It wasn't how his people looked at time anymore. He converted the units in his text to years. The reason the life spans were divisible by five is that he originally got them in a unit that was approximate to five of the units he was using, that's all. And if someone lived or became a father a little past a quin but not quite half-way into the quin, they described that by using a "septa". So someone who had a son at 77 might have been said to have began having sons after "fourteen quins and a septa". This is like the "cubit and a span" measure which was used to indicate things a little longer than a cubit. A quin would be like a cubit and a septa would be used like a "cubit and a span".

***********
UPDATE 4/8/20 So all of that between the asterisks was my first take on it. When I dove into the history a little more I found out there was indeed a 30-year cycle. Here is a link describing the Islamic calendar which has roots which go all the way back to the classic Babylonian calendar, as does the Hebrew calendar. It has a "30 year cycle" much like I described above except they formed it with a 19 year cycle added to an 11 year cycle. The Vedic calendar is actually closer to my results. That's because they started where I did, even before there was a "Babylon", with twelve thirty day months in their years. They also had a stage where there was a thirty year cycle composed of five year increments, just as I described. This far predated the classic Babylonian system. See the abstract here for details. In my book I do briefly postulate a connection between the descendants of Adam and the ancestors of the Vedic peoples. But as you will see there is also a more direct explanation.

A typical description of the classic (500 B. C.) Babylonian calendar and the system they used to align their lunar and solar years is as follows..

"The Babylonian system that came to prevail throughout the Near East consisted of 12 basic months: Nisanu, Ayaru, Simanu, Du'uzu, Abu, Ululu, Tashritu, Arakhsamna, Kislimu, Tebetu, Shabatu, and Adaru. Every 19 solar years, or 235 lunar months, marked an entire luni-solar cycle, which required intercalation in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19. In all but the seventeenth year, the added month was called Adaru II, but on the seventeenth year it was Ululu II."

By a "19 year cycle" what they mean is that at the end of nineteen years the moon phases and sun all line up again. In other words, the cycle restarts every 20 years! And of course the 19 year cycle can be paired with an 11 year cycle to give a 30 year cycle anyway, and both 20 and 30 are evenly divisible by five. They "Babylonian system that came to prevail" after 500 B.C. didn't come from nowhere. It had precedent.

Did you notice in the 19 year cycle above the years that they added months are either separated by two years or three years? The differences in the years from the start are either 2 or 3. Year "3" is of course "3", from year three to year six is "3". From year six to year eight is "2". From year eight to year 11 is "3". From year eleven to year 14 is three. From year 14 to year 17 is three, but from year seventeen to year nineteen is "2". So 3-3-2-3-3-3-2, and then you start another cycle. Seven cycles of two or three, or four five year periods (at the end of the 19th year).

This arrangement suggests a predecessor to this system in which the years in which months were added on were on a recurring 2-3 basis. That is, the second year a short "month" was added with a number of days decided by the observations and three years later another longer month was added to the calendar. So for example, each year the lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year. The first year they would let this slide, but the second year they would add a "short month". Then they would wait three years and add a "long month". To line them up the short month would have to be on average a bit over 22 days long. That is seven or eight days shorter than the other months. The long months on average would have to be about 33 days long. That is three or four days longer than the average. Once in a while you could make the added months a day or two longer to even things out.

That would be fine until you had more complex societies and it got more important to have the months close to the same length. Imagine contracts for leases or loans at interest when the months changed in length so much! It was fine for rural societies and planting crops, but not for mass commerce.

To get from a system like this to the classic Babylonian system which came later, instead of alternating the "2 years then 3 years" pattern you would need to "add more threes". You couldn't just add a month every three years, because that would result in a month that was consistently long. But alternating them evenly would leave you with months that were excessively short or long. But to get close to a 29 or 30 day month you would have to have a cycle where you divided by three more often than you divided by two. I propose that this became the basis for the Babylonian system. The original 2-3 cycle of five years was integrated into a longer cycle where the ratio of 2s and 3s was such as to allow the added months to be close in size to the other months, while keeping up with events in the sky. That meant a ratio of two "2s" and five "3s" in the 19 year cycle.

I am back to my original conclusion, though I got there by a slightly different route. It would be the most natural thing in the world for people in that region in 4,000 B.C. (around the time I think Noah lived) to compile a genealogy of long-lived persons with life-spans expressed in five-year cycles. The years in-between five year cycles would be imprecise, with a month added in years two and five, but the length of those added months would vary widely between them. The five year cycles consisted of a two year part and a three year part that was overall more consistent in length than individual years.

This would also explain the occasional use of a seven added to the multiples of five. Eight out of twenty-nine (neglecting the death of Methuselah) numbers in the Genesis five genealogy end in "7" or "2". This is 27.5% in the limited sample that we have.

I propose that if a patriarch made it to the three-year part of the cycle they went ahead and gave him credit for living to that "quinn", or five year period. We might do the same when we say that a man died in "1980" whether he died in January or December of that year. That is still the year he died. If a patriarch did not make it to the three year part of the cycle, it was said that he died in the two-year part of it, which was added to the previous five year cycle. This Moses translated as seven years.

What this would mean is that if a man died in any of the last three years of a given five-year cycle, or the last three of the following cycle, he would get credit for five or ten more years respectively. But if he died during the first two years of the second cycle, he would be given credit for seven years, the preceding five year cycle plus the first two years of the next. So the ratio of numbers ending with a seven in a table of such numbers would be on average 2/8. That is to say, 25% of the time the number for the life event would have a seven added onto the multiple of five. That fits very closely with the observed rate of 27.5% and thus I conclude the hypothesis is confirmed.

***************END OF UPDATE*********

I don't doubt that the names and numbers of the genealogies have meanings on many levels, because God is just that amazing. But that doesn't mean they were made up. That doesn't mean they aren't also history. It surely doesn't mean that Bible scholars should devote their considerable powers to spend all day imagining new ways to convince the masses that Genesis is all bunk as an accurate record of history. At best, that's a terrible waste, of any gifts they might have. And its so unnecessary. No matter what you have been told, the scriptures can be true, even as history. It may not be giving the narrative that many think it is, but it can be a true one none the less. The Christ-Centered model explains how...

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