An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis - Chapter Five

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This ludicrous chapter is the Bible’s first family tree, giving the bloodline of male succession from Adam to Noah. The women apparently don’t count. The most ridiculous feature is the ages to which the men of the ten generations presented live to. Adam makes it to 930. (Eve’s age is unstated). Jared lives to 962, and the oldest recorded man, Methuselah reaches the ripe old age of 989. Each man is still virile to an absurd age too, with Adam conceiving Seth at 130, while Lamech is a spritely 182 when he impregnates his wife with Noah. Some of the family names seem confused or highly coincidental. Enoch and Lamech are also referred to in the bloodlines of Cain in the preceding chapter. It may be that these were once common names though for Seth to name sons after descendants of a murderous brother seems rather distasteful. Most likely some writers got their bloodline lists confused here. We get no details of the lives of these sons (Noah excepted as he dominates the following chapters). They are just very old men, and though they had other offspring, only their first sons matter. Noah’s birth is greeted with a useless prophesy by hi s father Lamech who believes Noah will bring the family great comfort in their age of cursed soil and their hard work. Given that Noah is about to go away with only seven others in a floating zoo leaving everyone else on the planet to drown suggests Lamech’s prophesy was unfulfilled. This is actually the first prophesy given in the Bible and it proves to be useless within a very short time. The ages given are used by many young Earth Creationists in calculating the age of the Earth, and on the basis of this chapter they conclude that the Earth cannot have existed prior to 4004 BC. Fossil records, geology, dinosaurs, common sense, tree rings, carbon dating, history; skeptics like me, all be damned, after all this is the Bible they have it from. The oldest living person actually on social historic record was Jeanne Louise Calment who died in France aged 122 in France in 1997 (born in 1875). The last ten oldest people on Earth were all women. The oldest recorded man who ever lived was Jiroemom Kimuru of Japan who lived until he was 116. (dying in 2013). Biblical times were a period of Bronze Age people and as Lamech acknowledges, the farming was tough. This was an age of great drought and hardship. Most people would be lucky to live to see thirty let alone their 900th birthday. For a single family’s men to have such a longevity line one after the other is patently ridiculous. Arthur Chappell