Genesis Chapter 5 - What's going on with the numbers?

Welcome to 929 Chapters I'm your host David Z. Moster PhD and rabbi and today I have a very exciting topic for you what we're gonna be doing is getting under the hood of Genesis chapter 5 something usually reserved for PhD and doctorate of theology students in universities and seminaries but we're gonna be doing this today for the first time on YouTube this video is going to be broken up into four parts I'm gonna begin with a summary and outline of the chapter then I'm gonna give you my comment then we're gonna read some select verses in Hebrew and in English and then finally I'm going to leave you with a photo about the chapter so let's begin with a summary and outline of Genesis chapter 5 I broke this chapter into two parts an introduction in the first two verses and a genealogy in the rest of the chapter now I'd like to point out three interesting things about the introduction it begins with the words [Hebrew] "this is the book of the generations of Adam/man" this is important because the word "toldot" generations appears a number of times in the book of Genesis and there are actually 11 passages that have this phrase and many people like to break up the entire book of Genesis according to this phraseology that every time the word "toldot" appears it's a new section for more on this you can see the introduction to the book of Genesis the video here on youtube the second point I would like to make about the introduction is that this is the first time that the man is called by a name his name is אדם Adam whereas in the previous chapters he was called האדם the man and the ה at the beginning of the word in Hebrew means the word "the" in English the third point I would like to make is that for those reading the Hebrew text things all of a sudden get confusing because we now have a person named אדם and we also have the word for mankind אדם so it's not clear exactly who is being referred to at each point in the text however what is clear is that אדם probably mankind is created in the image of God and also has male and female - there's no mention of Eve here - and that these people were blessed by God himself that's the introduction verses 1 to 2 now let's take a look at the genealogy in verses 3 to 32 and this genealogy gives us the first 11 generations of mankind the first generation is Adam the second generation is Seth the third generation is Enosh the fourth generation is Kenan the fifth generation is Mahalalel the sixth generation is Jared the seventh generation is Enoch the eighth generation is Methuselah the ninth is Lamech the tenth is Noah the eleventh is Shem, Ham, and Japheth now there's more to this genealogy than just these names for example the seventh generation Enoch we are told that he walked with God and was no more which basically means that he died young but perhaps more importantly there are a number of numbers in this genealogy - many many many numbers -let's take a look at them, for each person we are told the years that they lived until their first child then we are told the years that they lived after their first child and then we are told the total lifespan so for example when it comes to Methuselah we are told that Methuselah lived 187 years until his first child then we are told that he lived 782 years after his first child and finally we are told that he lived 969 years in total so this is done for every single person in this chapter now this is already a lot of numbers however there are even some hidden numbers that lay behind the chapter that we're gonna even explore further in the comment but let me just point them out here: because we know how old Adam was when he first had a kid, and how old his son was when he first had a kid, and so on and so forth, we can calculate the year that every single person was born - the year from creation - next once we know the year the person was born we can calculate the year that a person died from creation, and finally since we know the year that Noah was born and that the flood took place in the six hundredth year of Noah's life we can calculate the year of the flood from creation. So for example our friend Methuselah we can tell that he was born in the year 687 of creation he died in the year 1656 of creation and that actually happened to be the year of Noah's Flood 1656 so Methuselah probably died in the flood itself so using these kinds of numbers we can find some hidden numbers that lay behind texts such as when the person was born when the person died and if that person died in the flood or not let's move on to part two the comment now we don't have the original text of Genesis 5 the closest thing we have are what we call textual witnesses now these are very very old versions of Genesis and these can give us a snapshot of what the book of Genesis looked like in the Second Temple period a few centuries before the Common Era now we're going to deal with three witnesses today the first one is the Masoretic text, MT for short, this is the standard versions that we all use today the second one is the Samaritan Pentateuch SP for short and this is the version used by a group of people known as the Samaritans the third witness is the Septuagint LXX for short, LXX is a Roman numeral for the number 70, and that's just a reference to the tradition that there were 72 Israelites that translated the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek, the Septuagint was the first translation of the Bible it was written in by the Jews of Alexandria and it's a translation into Greek now there's a reason we're going to be looking at these three witnesses, they are very different from each other, now all the people in the genealogy are the same, the order of the generations are the same, but the major difference comes to those numbers, and as we just saw there are a lot of numbers in Genesis chapter 5, so let's take a look at one example our friend Methuselah according to the Masoretic text Methuselah lived 187 years when he had his first child according to Samaritan Pentateuch he was age 67 when he first had a child and according to the Septuagint he was 167 when he first had a child, now the second years of Methuselah's life according to the Masoretic text he was 782 according the Samaritan Pentateuch he was 653 and according to Septuagint he was 802 and then for the total years of his life the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint end up at 969 but they got there in different ways, and the Samaritan Pentateuch has him living at 720 years, now let's look at what the year of his death, the year of his death according to the Masoretic Text was 1656 - the year of the flood, according the Samaritan Pentateuch 1307 - the year of the flood of the Samaritan Pentateuch, and according to Septuagint the year 2256 which is about the year of the flood in the Septuagint. We can see that there were major differences between each and every version. Now, rather than going through each of these numbers individually which would take a very very long time what I'm going to do here today is try and show you the logic behind each of these three witnesses what makes the Masoretic Text unique what makes the Samaritan Pentateuch unique and what makes the Septuagint unique so let's begin with the Masoretic Text, the earliest versions we have of the Masoretic Text are the Aleppo Codex shown here from the Year 930 or the Leningrad Codex shown here from the year 1008 of the Common Era these are only the full versions or almost full versions of the Masoretic text but the Masoretic text can even be found in texts from the Judaean Desert meaning not in Qumran where the Dead Sea scrolls were found but near Qumran and these come from the first few centuries before the Common Era one of these places is the well-known fortress of Masada and what we're looking at here is from the Dead Sea Scrolls digital library it's a version of the Masoretic Text what we call the proto Masoretic text and it was found at Masada and this is from the Book of Leviticus so we have parts of the Masoretic Text from very ancient sources but the first complete versions of the Masoretic text come from the Middle Ages let's take a look at the Masoretic Text, according to this text the flood occurs in the year 1656, nobody outlives the flood hence Methuselah dies in year 1656, Methuselah not Adam is the longest living person, and there is no order to the ages of the generations that basically means that just because you lived in an early generation doesn't mean you're gonna live longer than a person in a later generation, so if we look at this chart we can actually see that there's fluctuation, the first few generations get shorter and shorter and once we get to Jared and Methuselah we start living longer, Enoch as we mentioned his life got cut short, so there's no order to these ages, now let's move on to the Samaritan Pentateuch just like the Masoretic text the earliest complete text of the Samaritan Pentateuch come from the Middle Ages the 9th to 13th centuries but just like the Masoretic text we can find a proto-Samaritan text found in the Dead Sea Scrolls what we're looking at here is a nice circular version of Exodus that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls it's called 4QpaleoExodus [4Q22] and this is a proto-Samaritan text, meaning it agrees with the Samaritan version that came later now you might be wondering why is this text a circle and the reason is that it's a patch there's a hole in the original scroll and what somebody did was cover it up with a patch and then fill in the missing words so let's take a look at the Samaritan Pentateuch version of Genesis chapter 5 the flood was in the year 1307, 349 years before the Masoretic Text's flood, that's more than a third of a millennium earlier, nobody outlives the flood hence Jared Methuselah and Lamech died in the year 1307 - big coincidence all these people are dying at the year of the flood - there is an order to the ages in the Samaritan Pentateuch, it's that every single generation for the most part starts living less and less than the previous generations and this really is a build-up to the next chapter when Yahweh is going to say that man should not live more than a hundred and twenty years, there's going to be an age limit to mankind and what this basically means that Adam is the longest living person at 930 years and not Methuselah, so this is the Samaritan Pentateuch version of Genesis chapter 5, let's move on to the Septuagint, the most early manuscripts come from the 3rd to 5th century such as the Codex Vaticanus seen here but we also have even earlier snippets found in the Dead Sea Scrolls such as here we have a piece of Septuagint on the Book of Leviticus and you can see how it's written in Greek, according to the Septuagint the flood occurs in year 2242 which is 586 years after the Masoretic Text and 935 years after the Samaritan Pentateuch, that's almost a thousand-year difference in when the flood took place, the general system of the Septuagint is that it takes the first years of a person's life found in the Masoretic text or sometimes a Samaritan Pentateuch and adds a hundred years to it, this is why the flood is so late, if you're adding a hundred years into every generation over time that equals about a thousand years, there is no pattern to the ages in the Septuagint just like the Masoretic Text and in the Septuagint nobody lives past the flood save for some manuscripts with Methuselah living 14 years past the flood but those are probably a mistake so we have three ancient witnesses to Genesis chapter 5 they all have different numbers what are we supposed to do? There are really two options you could take, the first option is to choose one text and say that it is the best, some people prefer the Masoretic Text because it's clunky, there's no rhyme or reason to the ages, it doesn't really seem so ordered which sounds like a real genuine genealogy, others take the exact opposite approach and say no the Samaritan Pentateuch version is to be preferred because the biblical authors liked order and it is very ordered, a lot of people died in the year of the flood, there's order to the generations, people start living less and less, so this text is to be preferred and no one that I've yet seen actually prefers the Septuagint probably because it's so clearly based on the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch just with some changes the next approach is to reconstruct a new text this was the approach of Ralph W. Klein in a brilliant article named "Archaic Chronologies and the Textual History of the Old Testament" this came out in 1974 and still great today what Klein did is he looked at every number individually and looked among the three witnesses to see which number is to be preferred let's look at for example our friend Methuselah the first years of Methuselah's life, according to the Masoretic text it was 187 years, according to the Samaritan Pentateuch it was 67 years, and according to the Septuagint it was 167 years, so which one is right? so Klein noticed that the Septuagint always adds a hundred years to the Masoretic text, so the 167 here in the Septuagint that means the Masoretic text should be 67, but it's not, however the Samaritan Pentateuch is 67 so in this instance Klein feels that the original number was 67 the Samaritan Pentateuch kept it the Septuagint added 100 and for a reason to be explained below the Masoretic text added 120 so in this case the original number was 67 so what Klein does is he shows how one two or even three of the text were making changes so this leads to a fourth reconstructed original version of Genesis 5 and let's take a look how Klein reconstructs according to Klein the flood occurred in the year 1342, there is no order to the ages, Methuselah is the longest living person, and finally and most importantly the last three generations Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech, these three people outlive the flood, Methuselah for more than two centuries, so according to Klein the original version of Genesis 5 had three people outliving the flood this is a major problem and later scribes are going to try and fix this and they're gonna take one of two approaches, the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint made the flood appear later, and if you make the flood much later then nobody is going to survive [past it], the Samaritan Pentateuch took the exact opposite approach, the Samaritan Pentateuch said keep the flood where it is just make the people live shorter lives, and that's why everyone was dying in the year 1307, they were dying the year of the flood, so you might be wondering I've shown you three ancient textual witnesses and I've shown you a fourth hypothetical reconstruction so what do I think? how do I understand Genesis chapter 5? in order to answer this I think there are three main points we have to go through, the first one is that every text was making changes to the numbers, they weren't making changes to the names they weren't making changes to the orders, they were making changes to the numbers and the numbers alone, the second point is that the difference is between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch primarily concerned the last three generations, meaning the three generations just before the flood, finally since we are dealing with a problem of numbers and the generations just before the flood it makes sense that the numbers were changed because of the flood, so I agree with Klein but I'm not sure about his exact numbers especially for Lamech because there probably was some textual mistakes there that we can't really uncover, but for the most part I think Klein has a brilliant approach to Genesis chapter 5, it's one of my favorite articles in biblical studies and what it shows is how we can use the three ancient textual witnesses and try to come at an original pre- Masoretic Text, pre-Samaritan Pentateuch, pre-Septuagint text of Genesis chapter 5. Now if you like this kind of study and you're interested, this is called textual criticism, I highly recommend a book by Emanuel Tov called Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, this is an unpaid plug for this book you can get it on Amazon and I'll have a link below and what this does is it shows you how to compare and contrast the different textual witnesses of the Hebrew Bible. Okay that does it for our comment today let's move on to the verses, today we'll be reading verses 23 and 24 [Hebrew] and all the days of Enoch were [Hebrew] 365 years [Hebrew] and Enoch walked with God [Hebrew] and he was no more [Hebrew] because God took him that does it for the verses we're reading inside today let's move on to part 4 the picture and the public domain photo that I chose to relate to this chapter relates to the 24th verse Enoch walked with God then he was no more because God took him and here we see two people walking together okay that does it for Genesis chapter 5 if you enjoyed this video please like below subscribe also make sure to follow me on facebook on Twitter on Instagram and even on academia.edu and I look forward to seeing you for Genesis chapter 6