Hi Merv, thank you for you thoughtful response, it’s much appreciated!
I must assure you that I too believe our God is a God of truth; not lies and deliberate omissions.
It is interesting that we both have world experience that has led us to vastly different conclusions about the origins controversy with regard to age of the Earth and evolution.
I think perhaps you may have misunderstood the thrust of what I said. It is certainly not that the scientists doing the analysis are thinking in terms of supporting the deep time evolutionary worldview, that to them is a given, it is the mechanics of the method that result in that being the case anyway, whether it is consciously known or not is to all intents and purposes irrelevant. The fact that all mineral samples are ALWAYS dated with their relative ground location in mind to refer against the ‘Index’ fossils for a ballpark age date, or at the very least, a maximum and minimum age, that ensures the old age paradigm boat is not rocked too violently.
For me the evidence for the veracity of the Biblical account in Genesis is overwhelming, finds such as:
The discovery of a preserved oil gland from a fossilized bird supposedly 48 million years old adds to the growing number of soft tissue finds. (See also “Turtle soft tissue find” below and creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue)
Researchers studying a bird from the fossil-rich Messel Pit in Germany concluded from tests on its uropygial gland—which provides oil for preening—that it was “an example of soft tissue surviving over the course of millions of years”. One of the team said:
“The discovery is one of the most astonishing examples of soft part preservation in animals. It is extremely rare for something like this to be preserved for such a long time.”
Based on their organic geochemical investigations, the researchers also encouraged others to likewise investigate fossils for soft tissues. Soft-tissue finds are exciting—and not unexpected—for creationists because such preservation better fits in with a world-wide catastrophic event such as Noah’s Flood about 4,500 years ago. On the other hand, evolutionists have not yet presented a plausible explanation for soft tissues surviving for their alleged millions of years.
O’Reilly, S. et al., Preservation of uropygial gland lipids in a 48-million-year-old bird, Proc.R.Soc.B. 284(1865):20171050, 2017 | doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1050.
Dr Mary Schweitzer has again been involved with a fossil soft-tissue find. Traces of pigment, beta-keratin, and muscle proteins have been found in a sea turtle ‘dated’ at 54 million years old. Schweitzer was the first to report soft tissues in dinosaur fossils (For more on that, see creation.com/dino-disquiet).
Dr Schweitzer was part of a team headed by paleontologist Johan Lindgren of Lund University (Sweden) that investigated a tiny 74-mm (3-inch) fossilized hatchling turtle from Jutland, Denmark. She said:
“The presence of eukaryotic melanin within a melanosome embedded in a keratin matrix rules out contamination by microbes, because microbes cannot make eukaryotic melanin or keratin. So we know that these hatchlings had the dark coloration common to modern sea turtles.”
Shell colour is vital for cold-blooded turtles as it allows them to absorb heat from sunlight. Compared with today’s hatchlings, there is no hint of significant change (‘evolution’) over the alleged millions of years since the fossil was formed.
Lindgren, J. et al., Biochemistry and adaptive colouration of an exceptionally preserved juvenile fossil sea turtle, Scientific Reports7:13324 | doi:10.1038/s41598-017-13187-5.
Peake, T., Keratin, pigment, proteins from 54 million-year-old sea turtle show survival trait evolution, news.ncsu.edu, October 2017.
to name just two of the many new finds of soft tissue inside bones claimed to have been reliably dated at tens to hundreds of millions of years is what I find difficult to comprehend how smart people who have scientific training can just dismiss these finds out of hand, disregarding the true and honest fact that empirical,reproducible, operational science clearly shows that preservation of the range of proteins found is not possible under any circumstances whatsoever. All proteins would be long gone in a tiny fraction of the time claimed, yet that glaring FACT is somehow ignored as being an inconvenient truth. The only obvious solution, (using Ockhams razor) is that the proteins are not very old, several thousand years , perhaps ten thousand years at most, but tens to hundreds of millions is frankly, beyond the pail.
Thank you for the link to one of our brothers in our Lord Jesus Christ, past posts, I’ll take a look at it when I get some spare time. I’m flat out at present trying to fireproof my wife and my little cabin in the bush of Eastern Australia before summer arrives on the 1st December.
When I was young, nearly everybody in the community was a Christian, and on Sunday mornings, it was hard to find a park near a Church in the morning, Unfortunately, things have drastically changed since the 1950’s, and now Churches are increasingly filled with little old men and women, some Pentecostal Churches have more youth in their congregations, but overall the trend is downhill. This situation has occurred simultaneously with the onslaught of evolutionary, deep time dogma that dominates the media, academia and most educational institutions. I know from watching this happen that it is the belief in evolution that has brought many to distrust the truth of the Bible, they obviously think, if Genesis can’t be trusted, what else can’t be trusted, the slippery slope to atheism is there and millions are sliding down it.
I pray that the body of Christ be united in this battle for the hearts and minds of the lost.
I don’t know if you realise this, but every form of measurement works like that.
If I want to measure the width of a piece of wire, I will use a micrometer.
If I want to measure the distance from London to Aberdeen, I will use a GPS device, or the odometer in my car.
If I want to measure the size of a bacterium, I will use an electron microscope.
If I want to measure the size of my desk, I will use a tape measure.
If I want to measure the size of my bedroom, I need to have some idea whether a 3 metre tape measure will suffice or whether I should spend extra on a 5 metre or 10 metre one.
Of course you need to start off with a ball park estimate of size in mind when you measure things! This isn’t circular reasoning at all; it’s iterative reasoning. It’s narrowing things down. It’s going from “about two metres” to “150 centimetres ± 1 millimetre.” In the same way, radiometric dating is simply a case of going from “somewhere in the Cretaceous” to “74.85 ±0.13 million years precisely.” It’s about reducing the likelihood that you’ll end up with over-range or under-range errors on your equipment and have to re-do the measurement, possibly at the cost of several hundred dollars. Radiometric dating, as I said, is expensive.
By young earthist logic, the fact that I am using a tape measure rather than an electron microscope to measure the size of my desk is “circular reasoning” and “thinking in terms of supporting the deep time evolutionary worldview.”
Having nearly gotten a degree in geology I have to disagree. The Himalayas alone make that impossible. It is known from laboratory work how fast rocks and the minerals that make them up can bend/deform without breaking, and by those measures the Himalayas are at the very least hundreds of thousands of years old. The same is true of all the mountain ranges built by uplift.
No, it isn’t: The types of rock are extremely different, and what the “Little Grand Canyon” formed on the lower slopes of St. Helens actually demonstrates is that the actual Grand Canyon, if formed from swiftly-deposited sediments, should be several hundred miles wide, which it isn’t. FOr that matter, Spirit Lake and its trees show how polystrate trees actually formed: those trees settled to the lake bottom upright, and are slowly being covered by sediment, but because of the temperature and mineral content of the lake they are not decaying – they could continue that way for a few thousand years until Mt. St. Helens erupts again.
Where are all the research papers? My physics professors would have loved to have found flaws in the radiometric dating procedures – and it’s plural because it’s not just one method, it’s multiple methods that reinforce each other as well as being confirmed by other methods. If there were flaws in the difference methods there would be a flood of papers in the journals; scientists love nothing better than to point out flaws in other people’s work.
That’s also untrue. My favorite example is one I learned about in a course called “Human Ecology” long ago: A ranger in (IIRC) Colorado had as part of his job taking samples of water from a stream that had as a tributary a creek that seeped through an old gold mine, leaching arsenic and putting it into the stream. The short version is that he started with samples with bacteria that barely tolerated being in water with arsenic and ended up with bacteria that actually metabolized arsenic: that required new information or the bacteria would have been metabolizing it from the start! And that new information was the ‘culprit’ was further established when he went back to samples from before they started metabolizing it and the second time the mutation didn’t happen.
[I know I wrote a longer version of this recently but I don’t remember which thread it was in; if anyone knows or can find it, holler!]
Quite easily: there are two causes of physical death – or rather there are two causes of the condition that leads to physical death, which is mortality. The first is being created as a living creature that does not have a spirit inspired by God, and the second is being a creature with such a spirit who has fallen into sin.
He never says that. You have to distinguish between what the text actually says and what it has been treated as saying. All that Jesus’ quotes of the Old Testament do is show that He regarded them as authoritative, not that He considered them historical.
The thing is, ancient people didn’t look to historical or scientific accuracy to decide if something was true, they looked to the source. The Jews considered scripture authoritative because it came from God, regardless of whether any of it was “historically true”.
This also is incorrect: we have samples of atmosphere going back to at least 50,000 years ago from both Greenland and Antarctica.
Yes, if someone is dishonest. But there are ways of assessing leaching whether in or out, and adjusting for that. It’s done in many university geology courses as a lab exercise.
Someone else here probably knows more about it, but I believe that the Ar-Ar dating method is ‘immune’ to this problem.
You realize that you’re talking about millions of Christians in that set, right?
Also incorrect. My geology professors would have loved to find some specimen that threw accepted dates into question! (Christian and atheists both)
First, that’s not the guy’s real name; but more importantly, he’s lying. What he deliberately does not mention is that in order to have accelerated radioactive decay rates across the whole Earth the planet would have to be transformed into a dense cloud of plasma.
And he would have to show evidence for such things occurring! You don’t get to claim errors in measurement just out of the blue – in fact doing so was a quick way to an F on a paper for a geology class when I was in university courses.
And any paper claiming such would not be accepted for publishing unless he could substantiate those assumptions.
No, it hasn’t, it’s been corroborated by multiple independent methods.
It’s evident you’[re just cutting and pasting from YEC sites, so I’m not going to bother reading farther. I’ll just end by saying that any site that will cite ‘Woodmorappie’ cannot be trusted because they are citing someone known to lie.
The girdled rocks, among others. You did not understand what is unusual about them, or did not halfway think about it, and they belie the hackneyed appeal to ‘Noah’s flood’ and a hand wave. The tumultuous global flood of YECish imagination would have rounded them all over, not just the vertical surfaces.
Should have known you’d pounce on that one! ‘Woodmorappe’ flat out lies via cherry-picking material from his sources at a rate which if converted to rpms would rival my ceiling fan in the summer.
This reminds me of the time when I learned about isochron dating.
I had heard all about the Three Basic Assumptions of radiometric dating. Constant radioactive decay rates may have seemed solid enough to me, but not knowing the initial conditions or about contamination or leakage seemed like a doozy. How blind must “evolutionist” worldviews be if they were overlooking problems that obvious? This must be the kind of thing that Romans 1:20-23 talks about, I thought.
So when I found myself in a Bible study group on those very verses in Cambridge, being led by a geology student, I asked him about it.
He looked at me and said, “I’ve read those young earth claims. They are a joke.” I’ll never forget the way he emphasised the word “joke.” He went on: “They take, like, two shells off of a beach somewhere and make extraordinary wide sweeping conclusions based on just that. It’s laughable.” – His emphasis of the word “laughable” was similarly unforgettable.
I sat staring at his lecture notes for ten whole minutes in stunned silence. Here he was, telling me all about a radiometric dating technique that does not make the assumptions that young earthists were telling me that radiometric dating makes. By taking multiple samples and plotting a graph, you can determine the age of a rock formation without having to know anything about the original composition. And you can tell whether or not there has been any contamination or leakage because if there has, then the points won’t lie on a straight line.
I learned two things that day. First of all, that young earthists weren’t coming clean. Rather than telling me about how radiometric dating actually worked in practice in the 1990s, they were debunking an over-simplified version of the technique that had been superseded in the 1960s. In other words, they were debunking a straw man. But more importantly, I learned something else.
If you, as a non-expert, think that you know enough about a procedure to be able to tell that it is flawed, you can be absolutely certain that experts who have been studying the technique in detail since before you were born know all about those flaws as well and have either found ways to work round them, or else determined through further rigorous study that they are not serious enough to affect the integrity of the results.
Ha! That’s funny because YECs always disallow good evidence. I already did submit some but you dismissed one out of hand with a ‘cursory look’ and you did not comprehend about the rocks in the Atacama.
How about the Hawaiian Islands and the seamount chain? I wish it were amusing that YECs always avoid addressing that exceedingly powerful elapsed time clock.
Coming from the side of the study of the text (in Hebrew, along with studies of the culture and worldview back then of course) I have to say that the Bible makes no claim about the age of the Earth, and that there is no way of making a realistic estimate. At best, an estimate of when Adam got booted from the Garden might be attempted (assuming one thinks that’s historical).
Ponder this: back even before Galileo first heard of a lens serious Hebrew scholars put their knowledge to work and concluded from the opening of Genesis that:
the universe began very small, smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. inconceivably small)
the universe was filled with fluid and expanded unimaginably rapidly, until the fluid was thin enough for light to shine
the Earth is also uncountably old, and the six days were divine days because only God was present to measure them – only at the end of day six did time start as measured by humans
In my experience it only causes those to stumble who are erroneously taught that the truth of the whole Bible depends on Genesis being 100% scientifically and historically accurate instead of being taught to rest their faith on Jesus. When someone is taught that Genesis has to be true as measured by science, it is quite logical for them to leave the faith when they find out that it just isn’t so.
But it isn’t “not consistent with scripture”: it’s just not consistent with a scientific materialist interpretation of scripture.
I’ve asked many YECs this, but here I go again: can you show me where in the scriptures the idea is set forth that they aim to be 100% scientifically and historically correct?
During and after my education in biology, I saw and read evidence demonstrating the old age of fossils as well as indirect messages about common ancestors in the genomes. Although I originally leaned towards YEC type interpretations, I had to conclude that the evidence for the old age of the world AND life are overwhelming. Any claims that the world is younger than 100’000 years, or even younger than millions of years, do not stand against the evidence. Maybe that is the reason why many previous supporters of YEC have turned to OEC (Old Earth Creation) after learning the evidence.
Evidence for a global flood does not exist. There are plenty of evidence for regional floods but no geological evidence telling that the whole globe would have been under water simultaneously. I have read YEC theories about how waters could have covered the whole globe and how the rock layers formed during and after the flood. None of those hypotheses could stand detailed inspection. For example, some needed changes would have produced enormous amounts of heat but one YEC hypothesis claims that the global flood was followed by ice age. When one type of needed change produces enough of energy to turn the Earth into a glowing globe and another part of the explanation demands that the ice age started simultaneously, there is obviously an internal conflict in the theory.
My observation was that the same mislead claims circulated in different books, written in different languages. My interpretation about that is that someone made a claim, then others read the claim, liked it and the message spread around the globe without critical evaluation. I can understand that. Most of us do not have expertise to evaluate the claims ourselves so we depend on what is told to us. Christians trust some other Christians they know, more than various scientists and experts. When a person we trust tells that this is ‘the correct interpretation of Bible’ or ‘a proof for my interpretation’, we accept it if we do not have good reasons to suspect that it is not true. So, if someone reads from a trusted source a claim that sounds good, that claim is accepted and told to others. When the mislead claim is repeated in many books and talks, it somehow turns into ‘the truth’.
The scientific explanations are also something we read or hear from others and then believe or do not believe. A major difference is that all scientific claims need to be justified in a way that other experts and readers can evaluate. It does not matter if the person suggesting something or the reader is a Christian, a Muslim, an agnostic or an atheist, the strength of the evidence for the hypothesis is what matters. If a hypothesis has sufficiently strong support, it will stand a critical evaluation by other experts and after that, is published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. Anyone can then read from the publication the justification why the claim is likely to be true. Unfortunately, the hypotheses created by YEC researchers have not survived critical peer review and are therefore not published in mainstream science journals. For example, if the evidence for the young age of fossils or the global flood would be so convincing that a non-Christian reviewer could accept the evidence, the evidence and conclusions could be published in ‘normal’ scientific publications. Has not happened so far.
I’m sorry you feel that way, as far as I am aware, the finer details of exactly what occurred in creation week are beyond the realm of empirical science. Sure, we can make educated guesses about those details, but they would only be guesses. I’m certainly not avoiding good science. Science is not able to be of any help in this matter that happened way back at the beginning of time.
I do not think I am being magnanimous, though I have no problem with your take that I am, I truly believe that regarding the origins debate no matter what view you take, salvation is a gift to all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus and believe that He is the Son of God, who came to save the lost of this world. Who am I or anyone else to put a stumbling block in the path of anyone for whom Christ died be they an evolutionist, or a creationist, it doesn’t matter, we are all brothers and sisters in our Lord and Saviour.
If you believe it with your whole heart, there is no sin, either origins position is valid for the one who believes it, I am sure our Lord and Saviour has no issue with us. We can debate till the cows come home, but in the end, for those already saved it makes no difference. But to those that are not saved, the matter of dischord in the Church regarding the origins debate likely does have the potential to be a salvation issue if those souls not as yet saved, see the dischord and turn away.
I know nothing about “hunting witches” or dismantling of the US constitutional democracy, but I do know that I am not alone throughout the world with regard to my conviction that the Earth is as old as the genealogies in Genesis clearly testify. And six thousand years is actually a very long time! The constant bombardment of millions of years, desensitises people. A million years is an almost incomprehensible length of time. The fact that many varied types of proteins have been found in bones purportedly tens - hundreds of millions of years old must be addressed by those that adhere to the ‘deep time’ paradigm.
A straightforward reading of the biblical genealogies according to the reliable Masoretic text shows that Adam was created about 4000 BC, and this was on the 6th day of creation. The existing copies of the Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch are not as reliable, but at most could only stretch this date out to about 5400 BC. There is no justifiable reason to believe in gaps within the chronogenealogies of Genesis, as the arguments presented for such views are denied by contextual, linguistic and historical analysis.
Which text should be used?
CMI
The chronogenealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 can be used to date creation and the Flood, as James Ussher did in the 1650s.
There are three main ancient texts of the Old Testament:
The Masoretic Text used by modern Hebrew Bibles and which is the basis behind most English Old Testaments [OT]. It is named after specialist copiers of the Bible called Masoretes (‘transmitters’), who standardized the text and added vowel points to aid pronunciation to the text, which previously had only consonants. The Masoretes did not standardize the vowel points until the 7th or 8th century AD .1
The Septuagint (LXX) was a Greek translation of the OT. The name comes from the Latin septuaginta (70), because according to legend, 72 rabbis (six from each of the 12 tribes) were responsible for the translation in Alexandria in c. 250 BC. In reality, it was composed over decades, beginning in the 3rd century BC. The multiple translators mean that it is uneven in accuracy. The Pentateuch is considered to be reasonably reliable, while other sections are less accurate. The LXX was in widespread use by Jews outside Israel in New Testament [NT] times. This explains why it was commonly (but far from exclusively) cited in the NT—if not, then people like the noble Bereans of Acts 17:11 might have checked the Apostles’ teachings by the OT and said, ‘That’s not how we find it in our Bible.’2
The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) is a Hebrew version dating from the 1st century BC. After the Assyrians deported many of the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, they imported colonists to the area centred around Samaria. The Samaritans were mixed descendants of these colonists and Jews. They had their own system of worship centred at Mount Gerizim (John 4:20–21), and based only on the Law of Moses, or Pentateuch, which was slightly different from the one used by the mainstream Jews. The SP differs from the Masoretic Text in about 6000 places. In about 2000 of these cases, it agrees with the LXX against the MT.
As shown in table 1, these three give different ages for the patriarchs at the birth of the next one in line and their deaths, but they all agree within less than 1,400 total years for the chronology from creation to Abraham. Biblical chronology should be based on the Masoretic Text, because the other texts show evidence of editing.3 For example, The Septuagint chronologies are demonstrably inflated, as they contain the (obvious) error that Methuselah lived 14 years after the Flood.
Date of creation
We can define the year of the creation of the world as AM 1 (AM = Anno Mundi = year of the world). Adam died in AM 930, Noah was born in AM 1056, and the Flood occurred 600 years later, which was in AM 1656. Abraham was born when Terah was 130, 352 years after the Flood, in AM 2008. This narrows down the possible range for the date of creation. The only reason for the uncertainty is the dating of Abraham, and that depends on the dates of the sojourn in Egypt and the dates of the Israelite monarchy. Once this is known, the other dates follow mathematically.
The late Dr Gerhard Hasel, who was professor of Old Testament and Biblical Theology at Andrews University, calculated from the Masoretic Text that Abraham was born in about 2170 BC. Thus, the Flood occurred at 2522 BCand creation at 4178 BC.4 Dr Hasel rightly assumed that there were no gaps in the genealogies, as will be justified below.
James Barr, then regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, wrote in 1984:
‘ … probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: … the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story.’5
Barr, consistent with his neo-orthodox views, does not believe Genesis, but he understood what the Hebrew so clearly taught. It was only the perceived need to harmonize with the alleged age of the earth which led him and people like him to think anything different—it was nothing to do with the text itself.
Long-ager Davis Young points out:
‘The church fathers also suggested that the world was less than six thousand years old at the time of Christ because of the chronology of the genealogical accounts of Genesis 5 and 11 and other chronological information in Scripture.’6
The Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37/38–c. 100), in his Antiquities of the Jews, also presents a chronology that has no hint of any gaps. This is significant since this indicates that the Jews of his time never saw any. The names and ages in his writings show that Josephus mostly used the LXX.
‘This calamity [Flood] began in the 600th year of Noah’s government [age] … Now he [Moses] says that this flood began on the 27th [17th] day of the forementioned month [Nisan]; and this was 2,656 [1,656]7 years from Adam, the first man; and the time is written down in our sacred books, those who then lived having noted down, with great accuracy, both the births and dates of illustrious men.
‘For indeed Seth was born when Adam was in his 230th year, who lived 930 years. Seth begat Enos in his 205th year, who, when he had lived 912 years, delivered the government to Cainan his son, whom he had in his 190th year; he lived 905 years. Cainan, when he lived 910 years, had his son Malaleel, who was born in his 170th year. This Malaleel, having lived 895 years, died, leaving his son Jared, whom he begat when he was in his 165th year. He lived 962 years; and then his son Enoch succeeded him, who was born when his father was 162 years old. Now he, when he had lived 365 years, departed, and went to God; whence it is that they have not written down his death. Now Methuselah, the son of Enoch, who was born to him when he was 165 years old, had Lamech for his son when he was 187 years of age, to whom he delivered the government, which he had retained for 969 years. Now Lamech, when he had governed 777 years, appointed Noah his son to be ruler of the people, who was born to Lamech when he was 182 years old, and retained the government for 950 years. These years collected together make up the sum before set down; but let no one enquire into the deaths of these men, for they extended their lives along together with their children and grandchildren, but let him have regard for their births only. … 8
‘I will now treat of the Hebrews. The son of Phaleg, whose father was Heber, was Ragau, whose son was Serug, to whom was born Nahor; his son was Terah, who was the father of Abraham, who accordingly was the tenth from Noah, and was born in the 290th year after the Deluge; for Terah begat Abram in his 70th year.9 Nahor begat Haran [sic—Terah?] when he was 120 years old; Nahor was born to Serug in his 132nd year; Ragau had Serug at 130; at the same age also Phaleg had Ragau; Heber begat Phaleg in his 134th year; he himself being begotten by Sala when he was 130 years old whom Arphaxad had for his son at the 135th year of his age, Arphaxad was the son of Shem, and born 12 years after the Deluge.’10,16,17
This comes from ‘Book 1, containing the interval of 3,831 years: From the creation to the death of Isaac.’ Once more, this rules out any gaps or long creation days.
To demonstrate that the quotes of Barr and Josephus are not merely the fallacy of Argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority), following is some exegetical evidence for the tightness of the chronology.
Grammar
Progressive creationist Hugh Ross points to some biblical genealogies that have gaps to claim that the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies are largely incomplete.11 He also claims:
‘The words translated into English say this: “When X had lived Y years, he became the father of Z.” Someone reading the same passage in Hebrew would see a second possibility: “When X had lived Y years, he became the father of a family line that included or culminated in Z”.’12
However, none of his examples of gaps in genealogies (Matt. 1:8–9 vs. 1 Chr. 3:10–12) mention the age of the father at the birth of the next name in the line, so they are irrelevant to the issue of the Genesis genealogies, which do. Also, Matthew’s genealogy was clearly intended to be incomplete, expressly stated to be three groups of 14 names (Matthew 1:17). This is in turn probably due to the fact that the Hebrew letters for the name David, a key figure in the narrative, add up to 14. In Genesis 5 and 11, there is no such intention. So the Genesis 5 and 11 lists are sometimes correctly called chronogenealogies, because they include both time and personal information. Hasel explained the difference:
‘As far as the genealogy in Matthew is concerned, the schematization is apparent and can be supported by comparison with genealogical data in the OT. Can the same be demonstrated for Genesis 5 and 11? Is there a ten-plus-ten scheme in Genesis 5 and 11? A simple counting of patriarchs in Genesis 5 and 11 reveals that there is no schematic ten-ten sequence. In Genesis 5 there is a line of ten patriarchs from Adam to Noah who had three sons, but in Genesis 11:26 the line of patriarchs consists of only nine members from Shem to Terah who “became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran” (Genesis 11:26, New American Standard Bible). If Abraham is to be counted as the tenth patriarch in Genesis 11, then consistency requires that Shem is counted as the eleventh patriarch in Genesis 5, because each genealogy concludes with a patriarch for whom three sons are mentioned. It appears that a comparison of Genesis 5:32 and 11:26 reveals that there are no grounds to count one of the three sons in one instance and not in the other, when in fact the formula is the same. Thus, if one counts in Genesis 5 ten patriarchs, consistency demands the counting of nine patriarchs in Genesis 11, or, vice versa, if one counts eleven in Genesis 5, then one needs to count ten in Genesis 11. The figures 10/9 to 11/10 respectively can hardly qualify as an intentional arrangement or a symmetry. In short, the alleged “symmetry of ten generations before the Flood and ten generations after the Flood” [Refs.] is non-existent in the Hebrew text. Thus the analogy with the three series of fourteen generations in Matthew 1:1–17 is a non sequitur [it does not follow].’13
Ross also points out that the Hebrew word ’ab (father) can mean grandfather or ancestor, while ben (son) can mean grandson or descendant.14 But Ross again errs by unwarranted adoption of an expanded semantic field.14 I.e. the fact that these words can have these meanings in some contexts does not mean they can have these meanings in any context. The Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies say that X also ‘begat sons and daughters’, implying that Z is likewise a son of X in this specific context.
And even if we grant that Z is a descendant of X, Z is always preceded by the accusative particle את (’et), which is not translated but marks Z as the direct object of the verb ‘begat’ (ויולד wayyôled). This means that the begetting of Z by X still occurred when X was Y years old, regardless of whether Z was a son or a more distant descendant. The Hebrew grammar provides further support—wayyôled is the hiphil waw-consecutive imperfect form of the Hebrew verb *yalad—*the hiphil stem communicates the subject participating in action that causes an event, e.g. Seth as the begetter of Enosh. Hasel pointed out:
‘The repeated phrase “and he fathered PN [personal name]” (*wayyôled ’et-*PN) appears fifteen times in the OT—all of them in Genesis 5 and 11. In two additional instances the names of three sons are provided (Genesis 5:32; 11:26). The same verbal form as in this phrase (i.e. wayyôled) is employed another sixteen times in the phrase “and he fathered (other) sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:4,7,10, etc.; 11:11,13,17, etc.). Remaining usages of this verbal form in the Hiphil in the book of Genesis reveal that the expression “and he fathered” (wayyôled) is used in the sense of a direct physical offspring (Genesis 5:3; 6:10). A direct physical offspring is evident in each of the remaining usages of the Hiphil of wayyôled, “and he fathered”, in the OT (Judges 11:1; 1 Chronicles 8:9; 14:3; 2 Chronicles 11:21; 13:21; 24:3). The same expression reappears twice in the genealogies in 1 Chronicles where the wording “and Abraham fathered Isaac” (1 Chronicles 1:34; cf. 5:37 [6:11]) rules out that the named son is but a distant descendant of the patriarch instead of a direct physical offspring. Thus the phrase “and he fathered PN” in Genesis 5 and 11 cannot mean Adam “begat an ancestor of Seth.” The view that Seth and any named son in Genesis 5 and 11 is but a distant descendant falters in view of the evidence of the Hebrew language used.’15
Where can the ‘gaps’ be inserted?
Another problem is where the gaps could be plausibly inserted. There are a number of places where a gap is explicitly ruled out:
Seth: Seth is definitely a direct son of Adam and Eve, and seen as a replacement for Abel, killed by Cain (Genesis 4:25).
Enosh: must be a son of Seth, because Seth named him (Gen. 4:26).
Enoch: Jude 14 says Enoch was seventh from Adam, which indicates straightforward father-son relationships from Adam to Enoch.
Noah: Lamech named him, so Lamech must be his father, not just an ancestor (Gen. 5:29).
Shem, Ham and Japheth were definitely ordinary sons of Noah, since they accompanied him on the Ark.
Arphaxad was plainly a son of Shem, because he was born two years after the Flood (Gen. 11:10).
Abram, Haran and Nahor were Terah’s ordinary sons, since they journeyed together from Ur of the Chaldees (Gen. 11:31).
Methuselah: Enoch, a pre-Flood prophet (Jude 14), gave his son a name meaning ‘when he dies it shall be sent’, and the Masoretic chronology without any gaps would place his death in the year of the Flood.
Some commentaries claim that Methuselah means ‘man of the spear’, but the Hebrew Christian scholar Dr Arnold Fruchtenbaum argues:
‘[T]he name Methuselah could mean one of two things. Therefore, it will either mean “man of the spear” or “when he dies it shall be sent”. The debate is not over the second part of the word which, in Hebrew, is shalach; and shalach means “to send”. While the concept of sending is the primary meaning of shalach, it has a secondary meaning of being thrown or cast forth in a context where the sending is with heavy force or speed. On that basis, some would conclude that shalach would mean either “missile” or “dart” or “spear”. However, that is a derived meaning because the primary meaning of shalach is “to send”, as any lexicon shows.
‘Ultimately, how one deals with shalach depends on how you deal with the first part of the word, which has the two Hebrew letters spelling mat. Based upon the root, then the meaning would indeed be “man”. Hence, commentaries conclude that it means “man of the spear” or “man of the dart”. However, the use of the term “spear” or “dart” is not the meaning of shalach in any lexicon that I know of. It is simply a derived meaning going from sending to throwing to trying to make a specific object. If mat was intended to mean man, if one was to keep it strictly literal, it would not mean “man of the spear” or “man of the dart”, but “a man sent”.
‘The second option for mat is that it comes from the root that means “to die”. Furthermore, the letter “vav” between mat and shalach gives it a verbal force. That is why I prefer to take it strictly literally, using the root “to die” and literally it would mean “he dies it shall be sent”.
‘I prefer that translation of the name, “when he dies it shall be sent”, for two reasons. The first reason is that I find it fitting the Hebrew parsing of the name much better. Secondly, it is better in the wider context since, if we follow the chronology of Genesis, the same year he died was the year of the flood. I do not think this was purely coincidental.’18
The number of missing generations would need to be huge
It’s important to note that those who wish to extend the times between creation, the Flood and Abraham to fit their geological interpretations need far more than just a few missing names. Normally, people want to push the Flood right back, and since the Genesis 11 chronologies are the ones that link the Flood to Abraham, these are the ones that must be ‘expanded’. Ross ‘dates’ the Flood to ‘between twenty thousand and thirty thousand years ago’.19 But since the Genesis 11 people had sons at age 35 or less, to add even 10,000 years would take over 250 missing generations! One must wonder how a genealogy could miss out all these without any trace. And since many of the names that are mentioned include no trace of any deeds or sayings by them, why would the writer bother to mention these when so many others had been omitted?
Is Cainan a gap?20,21
Ross also points out that Luke 3:36 has the extra name Cainan, which is not mentioned in Genesis 11:12.14 He uses this to claim, in effect, here’s one proven gap, so there’s nothing to prevent unlimited multiplication of gaps.
This extra Cainan appears in most Greek manuscripts of Luke and the LXX of Genesis 11. But the name was probably not in the original autographs, as shown by the following textual evidence:
The extra Cainan in Genesis 11 is found only in manuscripts of the LXX that were written long after Luke’s Gospel. The oldest LXX manuscripts do not have this extra Cainan.
The earliest known extant copy of Luke omits the extra Cainan. This is the 102-page (originally 144) papyrus codex of the Bodmer Collection labeled P75 (dated between AD 175 and 22522).
Josephus often used the LXX as his source, but did not mention the second Cainan (see above).
Julius Africanus (c. AD 180–c. 250) was ‘the first Christian historian known to have produced a universal chronology.’ In his chronology, written in c. AD 220, he also followed the LXX ages but once again omitted this mysterious Cainan.
Now that the extra Cainan is shown not to have been in the original manuscripts, it is helpful to try to plausibly reconstruct how the error crept into the copies.
Note that the Greek New Testament was originally written without punctuation or spaces between words. So Luke 3:35–38 would have been originally written as in Figure 1a. In this manuscript, TOYKAINAN (the son of Cainan) could have been on the end of the third line.
But suppose an early copyist of Luke’s Gospel was copying the first line, but his eyes glanced at the end of the third line at TOYKAINAN. Then he would have written it on the first line as well (Figure 1b).
In English, keeping the same line formatting, and with italics indicating words added by the translators which were understood in the Greek, the passage makes sense (Figure 1c).
So if a copyist of Luke’s Gospel is responsible for the error, why is it in the LXX as well? As shown, it is not in the earlier copies, so must have been added later, by a copyist who wanted to bring it in line with Luke. And further supporting evidence comes from the fact that the ages of ‘Cainan’ at the birth of his son and at his death are identical to the dates of Shelah, the next one in line. This is not surprising—the copyist is confronted with the extra name in Luke, but this provides no ages. So all the copyist can do to maintain the pattern is to repeat the ages of the next patriarch.
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is not affected in the least by the Cainan difference. As shown, it is not an error in the original autographs of Scripture, but one of the extremely few copyist’s errors in the manuscripts available today.
Figure 1. The above graphic shows how the name of Cainan may have been inserted into later versions of Luke 3:36.
Conclusion
A straightforward reading of the biblical genealogies from the reliable Masoretic Text shows that Adam was created about 4000 BC and that the Flood occurred around 2500 BC. Contextual, linguistic and historical analyses of the book of Genesis confirm that the chronogenealogies are a complete record with no gaps. Creationists who wish to push back the date of the Flood and Creation to fit their geological or archaeological theories have no grounds to do this based on the biblical record. They should rather look to their scientific theories to see where the discrepancies lie.
Posted on homepage: 7 October 2023
References
Archer, G.L., Jr, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, p. 40, 1982. Return to text.
Gleason Archer makes this point (Ref. 1). Return to text.
Barr, J., Letter to David C.C. Watson, 1984. Return to text.
Young, D.A., Christianity and the Age of the Earth, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, p. 19, 1982. Return to text.
Bracketed dates refer to the Masoretic Text. Return to text.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews1(3):3–4; in: Whiston, W., tr., The Works of Josephus, p. 28, William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh, n.d.; numbers rendered into numerals. Return to text.
But see note ii, Table 1. Return to text.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 1(6):5, in Whiston, Ref. 8, p. 32. Return to text.
Ross, H., The Genesis Question, Navpress, Colorado Springs, 2nd Ed., p. 108–109, 2001. Return to text.
Ross, Ref. 11, p. 109. Return to text.
Hasel, Ref. 4. Return to text.
Carson, D.A., Exegetical Fallacies, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 2nd Ed., p. 60, 1996. Return to text.
Hasel, Ref. 6. Return to text.
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Books I–IV, Harvard Press, Cambridge, p. 73, 1930, Loeb Classical Library No. 242. Return to text.
Young, R., Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible, 1879; 8th Ed., Lutterworth Press, London, p. 210, 1939. Josephus calculated the creation date at 5555 BC, because he used mainly the inflated figures of the LXX (5508 or 5586 BC). Return to text.
Fruchtenbaum, A.G., personal communication, 7 November 2000. Return to text.
Ross, Ref. 11, p. 177. Return to text.
Sarfati, J., Cainan of Luke 3:36, Journal of Creation12(1):39–40, 1998. Return to text.
The ol Ken Ham “Where you there?” argument. When a CSI testifies at a murder trail is it valid to argue they don’t know what happened since “They weren’t there to see the murder”?
We can (and do) measure things. Measurements are not guesses, and no, they do not become guesses just because there are assumptions involved.
If you’re going to try to challenge scientific discoveries, you need to make sure you’re challenging what the scientists who made those discoveries actually have done in reality. Calling measurements guesses is not getting your facts straight.
