Bible history

Genealogy of the Patriarchs

Blackwood’s Comprehensive Aids to the Study of the Bible · Vol. I, p. 31

Showing Which Were Contemporary with Each Other.

Transcriber’s note Grid printed sideways (page rotated 180° in the scan). Each row is an event (a patriarch's creation, birth, death or translation, plus the Deluge) in chronological order, with the Year of the World and Before Christ dates. The 22 "Aged" columns, under the spanning heading "These columns show which of the Patriarchs were contemporary with each other, and for how long a period", give the age of every patriarch living at that event, so the filled cells form a diagonal band down the page. In print, cells before a patriarch's birth (and on his own birth row) hold a vertical dotted filler, shown here as empty; cells after his death print "...", kept as printed. The Shem "Born" row prints Methuselah 869 and Lamech 682 (arithmetic gives 871 and 684); transcribed as printed.

Note.—This tabular view is interesting and instructive in several particulars. It shows that Noah might have received the account of creation through six equal channels with equal directness, thus: from Adam through Enos only, or from Cainan or Mahalaleel, or Jared or Methuselah, or Lamech, his own father. Lamech was fifty-six years contemporary with Adam, and ninety-three years with Shem; and Shem, again, was contemporary for several years both with Abraham and Isaac. The communication from Adam to Abraham and Isaac is only through Lamech and Shem.

All the generations from Adam to the flood were eleven. Of all these, Adam was contemporary with eight; Seth, with nine; Enos, ten; Cainan, ten; Mahalaleel, ten; Jared, ten; Enoch, nine; Methuselah, eleven; Lamech, eleven; Noah, eight; Shem and brothers, four. Thus, there were never less than nine contemporary generations from Adam to the flood, which would give, in one lineal descent, eighty-one different channels through which the account might be transmitted.

Who ever imagined, without making the comparison, that Shem lived to witness all the glorious things transacted between God and Abraham? Who would have supposed that Abraham and Isaac lived with those who, for one hundred years of their early life, witnessed and assisted in the building of the ark; who were borne triumphantly in it through the swelling flood, saw the opening heavens, felt the heaving earth when its deep foundations were broken up, and heard the groan of a perishing world? Yet such was the fact. Noah was contemporary with every generation after him down to Abraham, and Shem down to Jacob.

These narrations bring the account to the time when minute and particular history commences, and when the art of inscribing upon papyrus, and probably upon parchment, was understood. The participators in the awful scenes of the flood lived to see the Pharaohs, the pyramids and obelisks of Egypt, and probably to have those scenes stereotyped on monuments and in hieroglyphics which have come down to us; so that we have the account, in a manner, second-handed from Shem.