A Different Genre for Genesis 1

Faith & Science Conversation
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The Sumerian King List would be comparable in containing more than just a list of names, as well as the tremendously long times of rulership vis-a-vis the long lives of the patriarchs.

You may already be aware of these, but here are a couple of articles you may find helpful in your discussions with YEC believers. W.H. Green’s Primeval Chronology shows that the genealogies of Genesis cannot be used to construct any sort of chronological timeline. It was written in 1890. Meredith Kline’s Because It Had Not Rained, written in 1960, demonstrates that a literal understanding of the days of creation as 24-hr days is not consistent with Scripture. Both authors are conservative and arrive at their conclusions simply by comparing Scripture with Scripture.

Edit: Kline’s piece also has some thoughts on genre toward the end. Worth reading

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Thank you for the links, I’ve read Green but had not read Kline. Much appreciated.

To the part of my post that you quoted: I should not have said the Hebrew genealogy IS unique, but rather WAS unique. Of course innovation is copied and it doesn’t remain unique to this day. Gritting my teeth Thank. You. For. Correcting. Me. :wink:

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Kline was a great and thorough read, thank you for the link.

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Personally speaking, if I want to explain to a YEC believer, or anybody else, that “the genealogies of Genesis cannot be used to construct any sort of chronological timeline”, I like to move forward at least a century in terms of the best scholarship and take them through the clear evidence in the antediluvian numbers themselves (i.e., all of the ages in the Adam to Noah portion of the genealogy) that they can’t be actual “literal” ages of those patriarchs. I’m not referring to the absurd magnitude in many hundreds of years but because:

(1) The numbers reflect the sexegesimal number system used in Mesoptomia until around 2000 B.C.

(2) They have symbolic meanings with heavy reliance on multiples of 60 years and 60 months (which thereby spawns multiples of 5 years), for example, just to mention a few of the symbolic patterns going on there. Of course, the special nature of 60 as the basis for their base-60 number system and the fact that 60+60=120 explains why 120 years was considered the ideal age at death for a virtuous hero. This explains why both Moses and Joseph were assigned those ages. (Personally, I doubt that they ACTUALLY died at age 120. Perhaps they did, and most likely they were at least quite old, but we just can’t take the numbers from that era of those cultures as for-certain “literal” numbers. This is a good example of how the text doesn’t have to be “literal” in order to be true. If people in that culture understand someone dying at age 120 to indicate that they were a great hero and were wonderfully blessed by God to fulfill his purposes for them, we should accept the text on its own terms and understand it as communicating an important truth! (I think of it as a kind of “number idiom.” Of course, a “symbolic number” is more conventional nomenclature.)

(3) The fact that the final digit of all of the antediluvian ages is always from the set of digits {0,2,5,7,9} and never from the set {1,3,4,6,8} should be a huge red flag that something special is going on. If the Adam-through-Noah genealogy ages were actual ages, we would expect them to be randomly distributed but they aren’t. Indeed, the chances of all of those aforementioned numbers ending in a {0,2,5,7,9} and never in a {1,3,4,6,8} is about one in a billion. So that should be a huge red flag that these are numbers meant to communicate a symbolic message and not an actual age.

Come to think of it, I don’t see these facts mentioned a lot on forums, but I was reminded of them earlier today. I think I first recall them from the 1970’s when computers started crunching such numbers.

I’m curious, though. Are these views on the Adam-to-Noah ages generally accepted as explaining antediluvian longevity by most Biologos forum participants? I’m assuming that young earth proponents on this forum reject them but everybody else is at least open to them?? Just wondering.

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What you say makes sense to me. I haven’t spent much time studying the genealogies in depth. I’m just now trying to work out my view of the historical Adam. But symbolic numbers makes sense. Add to that gaps in the genealogies and you’ve made a real mess of any type of straightforward chronology (which must mean there isn’t any straightforward chronology).

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I hear you.

I also like the example of the genealogy of the Japanese imperial house given by @dscottjorgenson on a different thread:

It seems that as Westerners we have to come to terms with the awkward fact that “raw facts” are mostly a recent invention.

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@Socratic.Fanatic,

I think we’ve all bumped into proposals and assertions dealing with the “symbolism” of the ages of the patriarchs, but this is my first encounter with the {0,2,5,7,9} proposition.

Do you have a proposal for why those numbers are used? Or is it merely that Any limited number pattern is intended to flag the reader?

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There was a nice write up by Jim Stump a few years ago on the long life spans in Genesis: Long Life Spans in Genesis: Literal or Symbolic? - BioLogos

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@Christy

Hey… that sure hit the spot !!!

Here’s a coincidental observation!!!

“The first thing more careful observation reveals about these 30 numbers is that all of them end with the digits 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. You might not think that is too remarkable until you realize that it eliminates half of the possible numbers. It is like seeing a list of 30 numbers that are all even. We wouldn’t think that was a random distribution of numbers. In fact, the odds of getting all thirty numbers to end with just these “approved” digits in a random distribution of ages are about one in a hundred million.1 That should make us suspicious that Genesis 5 is merely giving a historical report. Something else must be going on here.”

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And another good link found in the linked article !!!

“One faculty member I talked to provided another example of the rhetorical use of numbers from his experience while he was in ministry in Indonesia. The Indonesians in his area would identify ages based on how much experience or wisdom the person was accorded by the community. Once, at age 35, he was introduced as being fifty. He objected and was told that the number identified his status as a wise person who should be listened to and heeded. It had nothing to do with his actual age.”

" He also told the story of a woman who, when he inquired about her age reported that she was forty. Two years later, he came back and she said she was fifty. He asked how that could be, since she was forty just two years ago, and she explained that this was a measure of her status and respect in the community. The numbers had rhetorical value, not quantification value."

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If you’re interested, I think this is the article that first highlighted the connection between base-60 Sumerian math and the length of reigns on the king list. The article covers your first two points. For example, the author says “in ancient Egypt the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actually an epitaph commemorating a life that had been lived selflessly and had resulted in outstanding social and moral benefits for others (cf. Gen 50:26; Josh 24:29). It was thus a poetic tribute and bore no necessary relation to the individual’s actual lifespan.”

Since you asked, I do not personally believe that the great ages of the patriarchs in Genesis reflect actual life spans.

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It’s also worth noting the artificial arrangement of the genealogies themselves. In both Genesis 5 and 11, for instance, we find 10 patriarchs, and both genealogies end with the birth of three sons. This is similar to Matthew’s arrangement of Jesus’ genealogy into three sets of 14 generations. Was Matthew “wrong,” or did he have some greater purpose in mind when he composed his work?

Back to @nobodyyouknow’s thoughts on genre. He is correct in the sense that Genesis, by including the genealogies, is unique among origin stories in the ANE. Other origin myths do not try to connect their stories with the “real world” inhabited by actual people. I think that one of the purposes of the genealogies in Genesis is to show the continuity between our origins and our actual, everyday lives in this world. God does not exist and act only in some mythical realm inhabited by the gods; he is intimately involved in both the flow of history and our daily lives.

I’ll let you take it from here…

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I love the thoughts you’re presenting here. It got me thinking how interesting it is that genealogy, generation, and genesis all come from the same root if you go back to Greek or farther (from Greek -genes “born of, produced by,” which is from the same source as genos “birth,” genea “race, family,” from PIE *gene-“to produce, give birth, beget,”)

…and from that same PIE root by way of German comes the words kin and kind, as well!

The Hebrew is different, of course, though interesting in its own right from what I can tell from three minutes of Internet research! :laughing:

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Three minutes of Internet research entitles you to your own blog! Get after it!

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Lawyers are frequently reminded that it is not whether someone is guilty or not that matters … it’s what can be proved!

So even if a lawyer is absolutely convinced that his/her client is innocent and was out of the country … if all the evidence indicates that the client was in the country, but was in another city, the lawyer is wise to argue what the evidence shows instead of what might be technically true.

The point?

If, as Mr. Somebody proposes, YECs are more likely to be convinced

by Genesis presented as “chaotic genealogies”, than

by Genesis presented as “figuratively styled histories” (or some other genre that YECs generally reject),

Conclusion:
. . . it would be in the interests of The Work, for even the figuratively minded Evolution supporters to go with the Genealogy Genre proposal!

You are progressively convincing me, @nobodyyouknow !

George Brooks

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Just off the top of my head, I would calculate the chances as about one in 9 billion. But I would happily defer to any of the scientists here who would be far more adept with the numbers. I’m probably figuring it wrong. I was thinking in terms of (0.5)^30 but I’m probably missing something.

That fits my own experience on the mission field! I really appreciate these anecdotes from various articles.

Thank you for that article from 1993. I’m definitely going to read it.

I’m not sure when the base-60 numbers and the set of {0,2,5,7,9} digits were first noticed and published. I remember it coming up with my Hebrew professor in the 1970’s. He was a Jewish rabbi who gave us the impression that these were observations which go way back in the rabbinical literature. But I may have misunderstood him. I also think the digits may have come out of the Anderson-Forbes computer project of the 1970’s.

I so appreciate all of your responses. This has been most helpful.

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I couldn’t say for certain, either. The '93 article was the first mention that I could find in my 3-min. time limit before having to start a blog.

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I’ve sometimes posted a summary of the base-60 and non-random distribution of the digits arguments on YEC websites and asked them why the Genesis genealogies couldn’t be symbolic. To my surprise–apparently because I posted a simple explanation of why this demonstrated that the ages weren’t to be understood as actual ages of the Patriarchs—I got no replies! I really thought I would get hammered. But everybody went silent and ignored the post. I never knew what to make of that. Were they genuinely forced to think about the possibility that they had been wrong about 900+ years old Patriarchs? I don’t know.

They were even silent at the AIG Facebook page when I brought it up. (However, my post did get me banished from the AIG page within a few hours. So apparently the moderators didn’t like it. Yet, they didn’t delete my post! I don’t know what to think of that.)

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Most Bible commentaries I have looked at see the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 accounts as having different sources. Either they are viewed as accounts of two separate creation events, or as synoptic accounts of the same event, but told with distinct emphases, goals, and influences. The title of this thread is “A Different Genre for Genesis 1” but the discussion has centered on the relationship between the introduction of the Genesis 2 text and the rest of Genesis. So I remain unconvinced that the Genesis 1 text has anything to do with genealogies.

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Ever sincere I had a Hebrew exegesis course in Genesis, I’ve assumed that Genesis 2 is about a specific ERETZ, the land where God planted a garden and placed the humans he created. That’s why it says that that ERETZ had no rain and (originally) was nothing but wilderness with no man to tend to it (and perhaps help with the irrigation?)

I’m not saying that Genesis 1 is not about an ERETZ also, but it is clear from the text that these are two different stories. (I’ve assumed that both “creation accounts” were oral traditions which the Genesis author(s) decided to incorporate. Of course, the JEDP hypothesis divides them by authors.)

As to genealogies, I am baffled as to how Genesis 1 has anything to do with genealogies. Is there perhaps confusion over the fact that “the generations of” can be a kind of idiom for “the history of” a particular family according to some cultures?