Noah + 3 (Gen 5:32)

The Genealogy of Adam

³² Noah lived 500 years וַֽיְהִי־נֹ֕חַ בֶּן־חֲמֵ֥שׁ מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה

We come, at last, to Ancestor #10, and with him some questions about the “original” text that I’ve touched on just briefly in this column. Later in today’s post we’ll spend some more time discussing those questions.

What we read about ancestors #1–9 is this:

^‎1 The Genealogy of Adam

³ Adam lived 130 years and he fathered … Seth.

⁶ Seth lived 105 years and fathered Enosh.

⁹ Enosh lived 90 years and fathered Cainan.

¹² Cainan lived 70 years and fathered Mahalalel.

¹⁵ Mahalalel lived 65 years and fathered Jéred.

¹⁸ Jéred lived 162 years and fathered Enoch.

²¹ Enoch lived 65 years and fathered Methuselah.

²⁵ Methuselah lived 187 years and fathered Lemekh.

²⁸ Lemekh lived 182 years and fathered … ²⁹ … Noaḥ.

Those ellipses remind us that the apparent standard introduction to each paragraph of The Genealogy of Adam — where So-and-so lives X years and fathers [YOUR NAME HERE] — has been altered in paragraphs 1 and 9. In Paragraph 1, where the pattern has not yet been established, the difference might have been original. Nonetheless, it gave us the impression that it had been changed to integrate the Genealogy into its new place in something larger.

Once we got to Paragraph 9, it was quite obvious that most of v. 29 was forging a new, deliberate link between the Genealogy and Version 2 of the Creation story. What should we expect to find in Paragraph 10?

It begins just like all the others did: So-and-so lives X years, at which point we have reached the etnaḥta that divides almost every biblical verse into two parts. The rest of the first verse of each paragraph goes like this: “and fathered Enosh” (or whatever the kid’s name was). V. 32 goes on in a way that gave medieval Christians “the sense of an ending,” leading them to take it as the last verse of a chapter.