Chronology

When I was younger, I was a dogmatic Young Earth Creationist. I was convinced that if you weren't a Young Earth Creationist, then you really weren't believing what God had said. Indeed, I thought you were probably compromising with the world, trying to claim to be a Christian while at the same time denying the biblical account of creation.

These days I'd describe myself as a literal six-day Creationist who thinks it probably happened a lot more than 10,000 years ago. So an Old Earth Creationist, as opposed to a Theistic Evolutionist.

There is this idea that someday we'll get to Heaven, and we'll ask God all sorts of questions. I don't think that's really how it works (or how it's going to work). But if it works that way, if someday I get a chance to ask God all sorts of questions, mine will almost certainly focus on the first twelve chapters of Genesis. Was there a pre-Edenic creation in the gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2? Were the Nephilim the children of fallen angels who intermarried with humans (Genesis 6:1–4, Jude 1:6)? How big was Nimrod's kingdom (Genesis 10:8-12)? When was Job? I'm not saying I understand the rest of Scripture, but I am most intrigued by the first twelve chapters.

(I confess I really want Ezekiel 28:12–15 to be a glimpse into the Edenic and pre-Edenic earth. But there are pretty strong arguments in the other direction too. Apparently Kelly makes a strong case in In the Beginning – it's in my queue, but I haven't started it yet.)

What I find fascinating about the question of Young Earth vs. Old Earth is that both positions seem abundantly obvious to their adherents. If you hold an Old Earth view, there is no shortage of Young Earth proponents to patiently explain to you that you really must not have paid attention to Genesis. If you hold to a Young Earth view, there are equally convinced (but not, in my experience, as vocal) people who think you probably haven't paid attention to Genesis either.

So I'd like to look at those two arguments and see if we can see some larger principles hiding in there.

In my early twenties, I spent a lot of time on a Macintosh Performa building a spreadsheet to work out a chronology based on biblical genealogies. So I had a column for the person's name, one of his father's age when he was born, one for how long he lived, one for the Bible reference, etc. It went something like this: 

1. Adam was 130 when Seth was born (Genesis 5:3) 
2. Seth was 105 when Enosh was born (Genesis 5:6)
3. Enosh was 90 when Cainan was born (Genesis 5:9)

And it kept going well past the Flood (in Noah's 600th year (Genesis 9:28–29) or 1,656), all the way to Jacob. Things get tough in Jacob's life, the chronology just sort of trails off. But from Joseph you can cheat a little, knowing the Captivity was 430 years (Genesis 15:13; Exodus 12:40; Galatians 3:17). I can't recall working through the numbers past Moses, though.

If you go through that exercise, there are some surprising results. For one thing, Abram is actually an adult before Shem dies. So it's possible Abraham and Shem could have known each other.

Another interesting result is that lifespans drop off drastically in the first couple generations after the Flood. It's quite dramatic if you graph them.

If you had asked me at that time, I would have been excited to share all my findings with you, perhaps boring you with charts and graphs. Young Earth Me (YEM) was pretty excited by all this.

But over time, I began to wonder if YEM was barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn't describe myself as Old Earth Me (OEM) quite yet, but several things happened to move me in that direction.

Possibly the first was a conversation I had with an older brother who was going on about William Kelly's defense of the Gap Theory, I think it's in In the Beginning. When I was in school and first ran across the Gap Theory, it was presented as a kookie conspiracy theory developed by Victorians with over-active imaginations who were making concessions to Darwin. But when it turned out William Kelly was one of those "crazy Victorians," I had to give it some more thought. Because William Kelly might well be a kook, but also he's possibly the greatest expositor of Scripture in the last several centuries.

Something else happened, which is really the whole point of my story. Eventually I began to realize that the verses that didn't contain ages and "begats" contained a whole lot of relevant information as well. There are explicit verses, there are implicit verses too.

Here's an example from Exodus 6:16–20: Levi's son is Kohath, Kohath's son is Amram, Amram's sons are Aaron and Moses. So Levi is Moses' grandfather, Jacob is his great-grandfather. In other words, Moses is only the third generation after Levi, the fourth after Jacob. 

But when Moses numbers the Levites at Sinai, there are 22,000 (Numbers 3:14–39). If we recall that Moses is 80 years old at the time, we might reasonably say that the "current" generation is the fourth or fifth generation from Levi. Is it reasonable to think that Levi's three sons produce 22,000 [male] Levites in five generations? That seems... excessive. Levi had three sons, Kohath had four, Amram had two, and Moses had two. It takes far more than four generations to get to 22,000 if those are typical numbers.

That's not even taking into account the difficulty of having only three generations span 430 years of captivity in Egypt. Levi lived to be 137 (Exodus 6:16), Kohath lived to be 133 (Exodus 6:18), Amram lived to be 137 (Exodus 6:20). Moses was 80 when he stood before Pharaoh (Exodus 7:7). If we add up those numbers, we get 137 + 130 + 137 + 80 = 484 years. That's longer than the 430 years we need, but only if we don't think too hard. 

We don't think that Kohath was born right as Levi was dying, or that Amram was born right as Kohath was dying. If we assume their children were born when they were 60 years old, then there are only 60 + 60 + 60 + 80 = 260 years accounted for. That's 170 years less than the 430 we need. And 60 seems a little old to me. I'd expect it to be closer to 30. (I chose 60 so the numbers would work out for Amram to die before the Exodus.)

So it seems to me that there are probably more generations there than the four that are explicitly named. It seems entirely likely there are gaps in the genealogy.

I realize that biblical chronology is complex, and there are people for whom this sort of thing is a life work. I'm not attempting to make myself sound like some sort of expert. My point is that I've read through the Pentatuech many times, and I'm struck every time by the notion that the genealogies don't account for all the time the narrative arc suggests.

So in the end, I've come to realize that if I allow the genealogies to act as a sort of a chronology of the Pentatuech, I end up at a Young Earth position. But if I pay attention to the rest of the text, I end up at an Old Earth position. And that's my whole point: there are two equally obvious, but completely opposite positions the are both based on Scripture.

Now let's try and get some sort of useful application.

When the Lord Jesus was confronted by the Sadducees about the resurrection (Matthew 22:23–32), He rebuked them for not seeing a statement about the resurrection in Exodus 3:6. When He was confronted by the Pharisees, He questioned why they hadn't thought about the odd relationship between Messiah and David, that Messiah is both David's son and David's Lord (Matthew 22:41–46, quoting Psalm 110:1).

The Lord Jesus took the Jewish leaders to task for not understanding nuances of Scripture that most of us wouldn't ever notice on our own. He took them to task for not understanding the implicit teaching in Scripture.

I grew up in a Christian home. There has never been a time in my life when the Bible wasn't very much part of it. And sometimes it seems to me that I have a pretty good handle on what it says. Sometimes, I confess, I think and act and talk like there's not much in there I don't already know about. But there are times when I'm brought face-to-face with my own ignorance of what it says.

I didn't just wake up one day and decide to try out Old Earth Creationism: there came a day when I realized there were more clues in the text than those in the genealogies. When I was adding up the ages next to the "begats" in those genealogies, I thought I was being thorough; but when I really read what the text was saying, I realized I had missed a whole lot.

The Young Earth position was so obvious to me, that I didn't even think about the statements that didn't seem to add up. I was so caught up with the explicit statements, I missed the implicit ones. Now I look through the Pentatuech and the Old Earth position seems just as obvious.

And I suppose that's my point: we can get some strange ideas when we're not careful with everything God has said. Yes, it's possible to read things into the text that just aren't there. But it's equally dangerous to ignore what's staring us right in the face, because we think we already have the answers.