Genesis 5 Part 6: Manipulated History

The penultimate theory before we move onto my take is to do with how the Bible came to us today.

In the 3rd Century BC, Ptolmey II Philadelphus (the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt) asked the Jews to translate their Scriptures into Greek. Ptolmey wanted a Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures to add to his Library at Alexandria.

He had already obtained the histories of the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The Babylonians charted their history back tens of thousands years. While the Egyptians took theirs back even further.

So when the 70 Jewish Rabbis began to translate the Scriptures into Greek, they wanted to obviously align their history with that of Egypt and Babylon. After all, they are both mentioned in the Biblical text. And if the dates and years were misaligned, it would raise questions over the validity of Biblical history.

So in response, they gave three digit life spans to the patriarchs in Genesis 5. This would push back their history and try and align it with the Egyptian and Babylonian histories.

Different Years Recorded

One issue with this theory is that these numbers appear in the other two versions of the Bible; the Masoretic and Samaritan texts.

Whereas the Greek Septuagint was the ‘go to’ Scriptures for the early Christians, the Masoretic was the text which the post-Jerusalem Jews adopted. After the Temple was destroyed in 70AD, much of the Scriptures were destroyed too. So the Masoretic version of the Bible was edited and compiled together between the 7th and 11th centuries AD and became the text used for the King James Old Testament.

The Samaritan text is a Pentateuch, or first 5 books of the Old Testament. The oldest copy is from the 12th Century AD, but academics believe the text was finalised in 120s BC.

In the above table, we can see the numbers vary between the Biblical texts. For example, Lamech begets Noah at 184 years old, 284 years old and 53 years old. Methuselah only lives to 720 years in the Samaritan text and Lamech dies at 777, 753 and 653, depending on the text.

It looks like the lifespan figures are broadly similar. But the main difference is amongst the ages at which their first child was born, especially between the Septuagint and the other two versions of the Bible. It appears they add an extra 100 years.

This theory would hold water if the numbers were radically different, especially for the older patriarchs. This would show the translators had manipulated the Greek Septuagint. But as they are broadly similar, I doubt they did this.

Years to Months

As we can see above in the columns linked to the Septuagint, the numbers assigned to the begets column is different by 100. I have a theory that the rabbi translators may have seen the long lifespans in months rather than years. So they are assuming the ages for ‘begetting’ and the total lifespan are actually in months and need converting to years to understand how long they actually lived. Once we convert the ages from months to years, the average age a patriarch who fathers a child is 20 years old and they live for a total of 70 years old.

However, if we adopt the same idea using the Masoretic text, we get this:

This is where this method falls down. Using months instead of years, we see that Enoch and Mahalalel fathered children at the age of 5 years old.

So did the Septuagint translators manipulate the patriarch’s ages at which they fathered children to make the geneology make sense? I am not sure whether they did or not, or whether this crept into the text over a period of time; long before the Rabbis began their translation work.

We have nearly gone through all the theories now. As you can see, they are varied, each having positives and negatives. Though none providing a comprehensive answer which links the names and ages.

The next post will look at how astronomy is connected to Genesis 5. And this will then set up my understanding of the geneaology.