Live Long and Prosper!
The Genealogy of Adam
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
Since we are about to read The Genealogy of Adam, and since I like to discuss general topics (when I can) on the free Sunday posts so everyone can read them, this is the obvious day to settle in for a long post about the Sumerian King List. Speiser (in the Anchor Bible commentary) explains:
The original center of dissemination [of the Genesis 5 genealogy] was manifestly in Mesopotamia. For it is there that we find a firmly embedded tradition about successive antediluvian rulers, a tradition which is attested as early as the end of the third millennium (cf. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List), and as late as the third century B.C. (in the Greek work on Babylonian history by the Babylonian priest Berossus). The number of rulers (including the hero of the Flood) vacillates between nine and ten (sometimes less), and their respective reigns run from 18,600 to nearly 65,000 years.
The great Thorkild Jacobsen (about whom I’ve written in the past) wrote the book on this subject; you can look at it yourself here, courtesy of (what used to be called) the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. For ease of presentation, I’ll show you the list as prepared by John Walton in his Zondervan commentary:
Alulim 28,800 years
Alalgar 36,000 years
Enmenluanna 43,200 years
Enmengalanna 28,800 years
Dumuzi 36,000 years
Ensipazianna 28,800 years
Enmeduranna 21,000 years
Uburtutu 18,600 years
We have guys right now, of course, who would be happy to rule even for 18,600 years, if not longer. Whether they would be willing to be called Uburtutu is a different question. These names, I presume, sounded normal to the Sumerians, though they seem very strange to us. One of them, however, should actually be familiar to some of you.
That’s Dumuzi, better known nowadays by the Hebrew version of his name: Tammuz. We are very much in the world of mythology here, since Dumuzi is often understood to have been married to the goddess Inanna/Ishtar. See the article on Tammuz in the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible for more on Dumuzi.
Walton adds this gem:
In a piece designated "The Rulers of Lagash," the writer comments on what life was like when people were so long-lived: "In those days a child spent a hundred years in diapers; after he had grown up he spent a hundred years without being given any task to do."
I have to admit I could not help thinking of Mel Brooks, as The 2,000-Year-Old Man, explaining to Carl Reiner, “I breast-fed for 200 years.”
More critical for our current project are the lines that follow this part of the list (taken here from ANET):
These are five cities, eight kings ruled them for 241,000 years. (Then) the Flood swept over (the earth). After the Flood had swept over (the earth) (and) when kingship was lowered (again) from heaven, kingship was (first) in Kish. In Kish, Ga[…]ur became king and ruled 1,200 years …
It’s this next part of the list where the ages fall mostly into the range of the Genesis 5 family members — though none of them lived as much as 1,000 years and a couple of the Sumerian post-Flood kings do. The pre-Flood Sumerian kings whom you see in the list above are all living 20 to 40 times longer than their post-Flood counterparts, and also than our pre-Flood Adam to Noah generations.
There is plenty more to say about this; those who want that much more should turn to pp. 252–272 (!) of Cassuto’s English commentary. For now, let’s look at Nahum Sarna’s much shorter comment:
The combined total of the years reigned by the ten antediluvian kings in the list of Berossus comes to 432,000; that of the Sumerian King List adds up to 241,200. By way of contrast, in Genesis the years from Adam to the Flood number 1,656. What the specific figures represent individually and collectively, whether they are invested with symbolic meaning or are the constituents of some comprehensive schematization, is presently unknown. If any such exists, it has not yet yielded its secret. The matter is further complicated by the variations in the numbers found in the Samaritan recension and in the Septuagint version of the Torah.
The lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph will be another order of magnitude shorter than those of the ten generations from Adam to Noah.
The biblical names aren’t Sumerian at all, but clearly there was something in the ancient Near Eastern air that these two texts share. The three obvious points are:
In ancient times, people (or at least the greatest of them) lived extraordinarily long lives.
Then there was a Flood.
After the Flood, lifespans were just a tenth of what they had been.
It’s a reminder, always worth having, that the Bible didn’t just drop from heaven. Even if it did “drop from heaven,” it didn’t just do that, not in a vacuum. It’s written in the Hebrew of its day, and for the kind of people who would have been able to read in that time — people who knew what was going on in the world. It will be forever until this column gets to Exodus 21, but scholars of the cuneiform law codes can see clearly that some of the biblical laws are adapted from earlier Mesopotamian ones. The Bible didn’t have to re-invent the wheel.
The question, then, is why the ancient Near East had stories of people who lived far, far longer than a normal human lifespan. Jewish tradition — which of course knew nothing about Sumeria — has a name for this: ירידת הדורות yeridat ha-dorot ‘the decline of the generations’. Everything we can do, they (in the old days) could do better. It’s parallel to, and perhaps overlaps, the notion of a primordial Paradise: an Arcadia, if you will (since the Greeks had that idea too).
The two ideas come together in Genesis. Adam, though dismissed from Xanadu Park (the Bible’s Arcadia) will live for almost 1,000 years. We’ll see that in the paragraph we’ll continue reading next time.