A Brief History of Old Testament Times (Part 1)
Creation, Sin, Expulsion from the Garden, Cain and Abel, Enoch, Noah and the
Nearly half of the time covered by the Old Testament is before the flood. We tend to lose sight of that because not much is written about the Antediluvian times (Ante = before, Diluvian = the flood). It is covered in a few brief chapters in Genesis. We learn from Hebrews 11 that three of the men who lived during this time pleased God with their faith.
The rest of this portion of scripture seems to be endless genealogies. There are a few things that we can learn from them. Unlike later genealogies, they give ages, ages of when a son was born and ages of death. String them together, and you can see the passage of time. Plug them into an Excel sheet and generate a graph. I did it for you if you don’t have the time.
You’ll find unlike the people of our time, there was a tremendous amount of overlap between the lifetimes of these men. It is rare for us to have seen our great grandparents. But Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson be born. That would have been Noah’s father, Lamech. That means the story of creation did not have to pass through eight or nine generations to Noah. His father could have heard it directly from Adam. In any event, it would not have become a myth while the person to whom it happened was still living.
The genealogy in Genesis 11 covers the descendants of Shem, the son of Noah, in the same manner, giving ages of the birth of a son as well as the age of death. Shem, who was already 98 years old when the flood came, lived to be 600. That means that he was still alive when Jacob and Esau were born! While they probably never met Shem, he was still living proof of the flood during their lifetimes.
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