Actually...the Bible does give us a break...beginning in Chapter 5 of Genesis...Beginning then almost everything is begetting and living to a ripe old age -- all of which we can readily understand...But even then it does raise a few questions.

There is..of course...the dating problem...No...no...I’m not having a dating problem!...Don’t send me any dates!...I’ve had entirely too many blind dates...lame dates...and dysfunctional dates!...I don’t need any more...

Rather the dating problem is the chronological problem...which stems from the lineage of Adam to Noah...First of all...these guys are living almost a thousand years each...At the same time they are having their first-born sons at a relatively early age...and thereafter hanging around begetting nameless offspring...And then...of course we have to somehow reconcile the dating from the Sumerian texts with that of the Bible.

The extent of the problem can be understood if one takes the biblical lineage literally and dates Adam...and the creation of the world from the time of Abraham c. 2055 or 2123 B.C.E....Then according to this “logic” Adam's birthday was sometime around 4004 B.C.E...??


There are several interesting implications...One is that Adam and his entire lineage were still alive when Noah’s father was born...Also the average age of the patriarch at the birth of his first-born son was 117.33 years...In other words...it takes them a while to get into the begetting thing...apparently a serious lack of marriage or sex counselors in that bygone era...Meanwhile their average lifetime is 912.22 years...not counting Enoch...who’s a special case...

There are also some problems...According to the Bible...Shem...Noah’s eldest son...was born when Noah was 500...The flood occurred in Noah’s 600th year...and subsequently Shem begot Arphaxad (his eldest son) when Shem was 100...but 2 years after the flood...Inasmuch as 100 + 2 does not equal 100...there is a certain slack in the mathematical integrity...Somewhere...I just have to find it!... :)