In the Beginning

by Isaac Asimov

  However, the ages given for the time of the birth of the oldest son would then become absurdly low and the ages of later descendants who live for shorter and shorter periods of time become hard to interpret.

  The most likely explanation rests with the Sumerian king-lists. For each of the early kings there is given the number of years he reigned, and these are invariably in the tens of thousands of years. Two are described as reigning 64,800 years each.

  The writers of the P-document would not accept that. They were willing to believe extended lifetimes, but within limits. All the descendants of Adam, as well as Adam himself, are carefully given life-spans of less than a thousand years. The P-document, in short, is being conservative.

  The life-spans of these descendants of Adam are an important factor in calculating the traditional year in which the Creation took place. The result (so often given as 4004 B.C.), while useless for the creation of Earth or the birth of humanity, is a fairly reasonable estimate for the beginning of the Sumerian civilization.

  6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:

  7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:

  8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

  9 And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: 178

  178. Cainan (or Kenan, as the name is given in the Revised Standard Version) could be the P-document’s version of the J-document’s Cain.

  10 And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:

  11 And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.

  12 And Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel: 179

  179. Mahalaleel could be the P-document’s version of the J-document’s Mehujael.

  13 And Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years, and begat sons and daughters:

  14 And all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and he died.

  15 And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared: 180

  180. Jared could be the P-document’s version of the J-document’s Irad.

  16 And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters:

  17 And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.

  18 And Jared lived on hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch: 181

  181. Here is a name that is identical on both the J-document list and the P-document list. Both list Enoch as a descendant of Adam.

  19 And Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

  20 And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.

  21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: 182

  182. Methuselah could be the P-document’s version of the J-document’s Methusael.

  22 And Enoch walked with God 183 after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

  183. The phrase “walked with God,” or variants thereof, is used in the Bible to mean that a person is pious and lives a virtuous life, fulfilling God’s commandments.

  23 And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years: 184

  184. Enoch’s lifetime of 365 years is very short compared to those of the others named in this chapter, less than half that of any of them, in fact.

  The figure 365 gives rise to some speculation that Enoch figured as part of a solar myth; that he may have been a version of a sun-god and had been sanitized by P-document monotheism.

  That’s only a guess, of course. The Babylonian (and Israelite) year, based on the lunar calendar, was made up of either twelve or thirteen lunar months and might be either 354 or 383 days long (though, on the average, they were 365 days long). Thus, 365 might not have the easy significance to the Biblical writers that it has to us. The number may be a coincidence.

  24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.185

  185. Whereas of the other people mentioned in this chapter it is said, uniformly, “and he died,” for Enoch only is it said “he was not; for God took him.” This makes it seem as though the Biblical account would have it that Enoch did not die, but was taken alive to Heaven.

  The Jews in later times believed so and assumed that in Heaven he learned the workings of the Universe and came to know the future.

  In the second century B.C., and thereafter, various books of a mystical nature were written and were said to have been authored by Enoch. These books expanded on various Biblical legends and foretold the manner of the ending of the world.

  At least one of those books was sufficiently well known to be mentioned in the New Testament. Thus, in the one-chapter book of Jude, the fourteenth verse reads: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these—” and then quotes from the book in the next two and a half verses.

  This notion of having been taken to Heaven alive may be a remnant of sun-god myth or of someone being deified, taken to Heaven, and becoming a sun-god. Enoch, as Jude points out, is the seventh generation, starting with Adam (at least in the P-document). In the list of early Sumerian kings, the seventh is En-men-dur-Anna, who is also described as being the guardian of divine mysteries and as knowing what was to come. What’s more, he was king of Sippar, where Shamash, the Sumerian sun-god, was particularly worshipped. However, the writers of the P-document were too careful to remove all traces of polytheism for us to be sure how far the parallelism extends.

  25 And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech: 186

  186. Here again we have a name, Lamech, in the P-document list that is identical with one in the J-document list. What’s more, Lamech is the son of Methuselah in the P-document list and of Methusael in the J-document list.

  26 And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:

  27 And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: 187 and he died.

  187. Methuselah, having attained the age of 969 years, achieved a record age for any of the people mentioned in the P-document list; and, indeed, for any person mentioned in the Bible. Hence, the well-known phrase, “as old as Methuselah.”

  28 And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son:

  29 And he called his name Noah, 188 saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.189

  188. Noah is the Hebrew for “rest” or “comfort.”

  189. This verse, with the use of “Lord” and the reference to the curse that accompanied the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, is clearly an intrusion of a bit of J-document into a P-document chapter.

  Noah is the first person, after Cain and Abel, concerning whom important events are described, so it might have seemed to the Biblical editors that dismissing him in the dry statistical manner of the P-document was insufficient. The J-document verse was added to give some personality to the matter.

  If we take the ages at which the various people in the P-document list had their sons and add them up, it turns out that Adam was 874 years old at the time Lamech was born, and he died when Lamech was fifty-six years old. Adam was the first of the people on the list to die—not surprisingly, perhaps. Even Enoch was only 252 years old when Lamech was born, and he outlived Adam by fifty-seven years.

  Noah was born 126 years after Adam died and sixty-nine years after Enoch had been taken up to Heaven. Lamech might have felt that with Adam there died the curse that had been placed upon the earth for Adam’s sin and that Enoch’s piety might have neutralized the sin in any case. Noah, as the first person named in the list to be born after the death of the original sinner and of the pious man, might have been expected to live in a better time.

  30 And Lamech lived after h
e begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and daughters:

  31 And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: 190 and he died.

  190. Lamech also had a rather short life by the standards of this chapter. One possible explanation is that Lamech in the J-document list talked of Cain having been avenged sevenfold while he himself would be avenged seventy-seven fold. It might be that that old song, which was too primitive to be included in the P-document, nevertheless supplied numbers for its numbers-conscious writers.

  Lamech died when Noah was 595 years old. Methuselah’s stretched-out lifetime meant that he outlived his son, Lamech, by five years and died when Noah was six hundred.

  The people mentioned in the Book of Genesis are generally termed “patriarchs” (from Greek words meaning “father-rulers”) because so many of them were the ancestral heads of tribes or nations. Because of the extended age of almost all the patriarchs, the word has come to mean any particularly old man. Those who have been mentioned in chapters 2 through 5 of Genesis, having lived before the Flood, are called “antediluvian” (“before the Flood”) patriarchs. Hence, the word “antediluvian” has come to mean “very ancient,” usually in an unfavorable sense.

  32 And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.191

  191. Here the P-document is not as precise as it usually is. It is impossible to tell whether the three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, were triplets or whether all three had been born before Noah’s five hundredth birthday and were of indeterminate age—at least not from this verse.

  It is usually supposed, however, that these three sons were born singly and probably in rapid succession, but at a time when Noah was about five hundred years old. The order in which they are named is taken to signify the order in which they were born, so that Shem is the oldest.

  This is the first time in the P-document that a patriarch is described as having more than one son who is given a name. There is a reason for that.

  A catastrophe is soon to come that will destroy all human beings but Noah and his family. That means that all humanity, according to the Biblical tale, must trace its descent from Noah. All human beings who lived before Noah, except for Noah’s direct ancestors, have no descendants and are therefore unimportant and need not be named.

  The Bible views humanity, however, as being descended from Noah in three large groups, one from each of his sons, since they survived the catastrophe with him. Each of the sons must therefore be named.

  Chapter 6

  1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

  2 That the sons of God 192 saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

  192. There now follows an eight-verse portion of the J-document that carries its own story past the song of Lamech and describes the steadily increasing moral corruption of the world.

  The passage seems to describe forbidden unions that indicate unbridled sexuality and vice, but it is not clear where the fault lay. The expression “sons of God” seems to refer to divine beings. The impression one gets is that God presided over a divine court filled with godlike beings inferior to himself. This is polytheism, of course, with God merely the chief God of innumerable others.

  Because this relic of polytheism in the early legends was inadmissible to later commentators, it was suggested that the “sons of God” were the males of the line of Seth (or possibly men of the upper classes) and the “daughters of men” were the females of the line of Cain (or women of the lower classes), but neither seems likely. In the Book of job, we see, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord …” (Job 1:6), and there the phrase is clearly used to describe divine beings such as angels. There is no dispute about that.

  If the sons of God were divine and enforced their will on helpless human women, would Earth have to suffer for that? To avoid that, there are suggestions by some commentators that the “daughters of men.” by means of their lascivious wiles and in order to satisfy their wicked sexual cravings, deliberately seduced the virtuous sons of God. (The real trouble, probably, is that the Biblical editors used an inappropriate portion of the J-document in their effort to find something that would justify the Flood.)

  3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not al ways strive with man, for that he also is flesh: 193 yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.194

  193. This is not clear in the King James. The Revised Standard Version has it read, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh.”

  Perhaps God is reminding himself that man is mortal and that individual sinners have only a limited time in which to weary him with their corruption. Perhaps he is finding excuses for human beings. They are only flesh and therefore weak and bound to sin. The casing of flesh is an imperfect receptacle for the holy spirit.

  194. If the interpretation of the first part of the verse is God’s self-reminder that man is mortal, then the remainder of the verse is a punishment for human corruption. The mortality of man is emphasized.

  Whereas hitherto, individual sinners might weary God with their corruption for nearly a thousand years, now human beings would be confined to a life-span of merely an eighth of that, and would live no more than 120 years. And, as a matter of fact, from this point on, the reported life-spans of the patriarchs after Noah begin to shrink.

  As it happens, the maximum life-span of human beings is (as I said earlier) not far short of 120 years.

  On the other hand, the more usual interpretation of the verse is not one of punishment but of mercy, in line with the thought that in the first part of the verse, God is finding excuses for humanity. The verse is interpreted to mean that God will withhold punishment for another 120 years, just in case there is repentance and human beings change their ways.

  4 There were giants in the earth in those days; 195 and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.196

  195. The Hebrew word, here translated as “giants” in the King James, is Nephilim. There is no clear reason to think that giants is what is meant or that huge physical size is a necessary characteristic. The word is thought to refer to mighty warriors, or to what the Greeks called “heroes,” without particular reference to unusual size. The Revised Standard Version evades the issue by leaving the Hebrew word untranslated and having the verse read, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days.”

  To be sure, in one sense there were indeed giants in the earth “in those days.” Long before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, dinosaurs tramped on the Earth seventy and more million years ago. Some weighed as much as ninety tons. After the dinosaurs died out, there were large mammals, the largest (living about twenty million years ago) being the Baluchitherium, which attained a weight of about twenty-two tons. There were flightless birds, such as the Aepyornis of Madagascar, that weighed up to half a ton and that may not have died out till 1650.

  Closer to the human family tree, there was Giganto-pithecus, the largest primate that ever lived. It resembled a giant gorilla, nine feet tall (if it were to stand upright) and weighing some six hundred pounds. It became extinct about three million years ago.

  All of these giants, however, are modern discoveries. It passes belief that this Biblical verse could be referring to them.

  196. It is very common for legends to speak of great men of renown in the past and to view them as heroes of a greater mold than that to be seen among contemporaries. The past always appears in glorious colors. Homer, writing about 800 B.C., keeps disparaging his contemporaries and telling them how much stronger and more heroic their ancestors were.

  In many sets of primitive legends, the great men of the past were viewed as the mixed offspring of the gods and human beings.

  Achilles was the son of the sea nymph
Thetis; Hercules was the son of Zeus; Aeneas was the son of Aphrodite; Romulus was the son of Mars; and so on. This type of belief is mirrored in this verse of the Bible. It is a bit of a familiar hero-tale of the polytheistic past used by the Biblical editors to emphasize the moral corruption of the times.

  That these men of renown of the past were viewed as of supernormal size is natural in view of the exaggerated tales of their deeds. Then, too, there was the natural wonder felt by barbarian invaders at the sight of the works of the civilizations they replaced. Thus, when the Dorian Greeks invaded the Peloponnesus, they were struck with astonishment at the thick walls of towns such as Mycenae and Tiryns, which had been strongholds of the defeated Mycenaean civilization. Unable to grasp what cooperation and technology could accomplish, the Dorians decided that the walls could only have been built by giants.

  In the same way, the invading Israelites in 1200 B.C. viewed the elaborate fortifications of the Canaanite cities with awe; they, too, felt they were fighting giants. The spies sent to report on the Canaanites said, “And there we saw the giants … and were in our own sight as grasshoppers …” (Numbers 13:33). This must be viewed, however, as metaphor and as dramatic exaggeration.

  5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

  6 And it repented 197 the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

  197. The word “repented” makes it sound as though God had decided he had made a mistake. The Revised Standard Version uses the word “sorry” instead, in parallelism with the word “grieved” later in the verse. Even so, it is clear that God was viewing humanity as an experiment that had failed. In later ages, the concept of God grew more grandiose, and he was viewed as omniscient and incapable of making a mistake. The God of the early legends, however, was a little more human than that.