Ussher and the genealogy problem

In 1650 James Ussher published a multi-volume work entitled (in Latin) Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origin of the world. Surveying all the historical evidence then known, he Ussher dated the Israelite Exodus out of Egypt to 1491 BC. He then used the ages at which the patriarchs in the biblical genealogies begot their descendants to calculate back to the Deluge, and thence to Creation. He concluded that the Earth was created in 4004 BC.

In his day a chronology which dated the Deluge to 2348 BC and the Creation to 4004 BC was not unreasonable. The city-states and great dynastic successions that ruled Mesopotamia long before the Assyrians had not yet been discovered. Similarly, almost nothing was known about the history of ancient Egypt. The preceding Stone Age and the geological periods before the earliest traces of man were not even conceived of. Ussher did not have to defy what was known about the world when assuming that the genealogies which linked Adam to Abraham were complete. Today, to maintain that the world was created in 4004 BC is to bury one’s head in archaeological and geological sand.

Ussher is often cited as standing on the opposite side from modern scientists, who invoke various dating methods to justify much longer spans of time. In this view the bishop represents religious fundamentalism and scientists, post-medieval enlightenment. The truth is that Ussher, a contemporary of Isaac Newton and the founders of the Royal Society, was addressing a question of historical science. He sought to quantify the age of the Earth much as others sought to measure its physical quantities, consulting in the process all the extra-biblical evidence available to a scholar. He was pursuing a peculiarly modern agenda.

By contrast, the Israelites themselves were no more interested in the precise age of the Earth than in giving a precise value to the hours of the day. Neither they nor any other ancient people had a system of absolute dating, except insofar as they occasionally dated events by reference to the Exodus. Our system of dividing time into BC and AD goes back no further than the 6th century and was not widely used until the Renais- sance. If an Egyptian, Babylonian or Israelite wanted to date an event, he dated it by reference to the reign of whichever king was on the throne rather than any universally agreed fixed point. Priests kept lists of their country’s kings. Some lists recorded lengths of reign and went back to the very first dynasties, but the priests were not historians in any modern sense and their lists had no chronological function. Most omitted the names of certain kings for one reason or another, and none, so far as we know, indicated when two or more dynasties reigned at the same time. The same is true of the genealogies: they could omit generations without hint of a hiatus.

all that we can legitimately conclude is that at the age of 30 Peleg became the ancestor of Reu. It is immaterial that the text specifies Peleg’s age when he ‘begot’ Reu. The genealogy at this point could be complete, or the detail of the age could be merely a leftover from a time when it was complete, in the same way as obsolete place-names in Genesis were subsequently updated (e.g. Gen 28:19). In the first centuries after the Deluge the recording of the patriarchs’ ages at paternity might well have had the additional function of placing them in absolute time. As generations accumulated, however, continuing to remember every generation would have become increasingly impractical; the generations would have had to be pared.

It has long been recognised that, in most societies where kinship is the primary means of social and political control, genealogies are likely to be foreshortened.  Such genealogies tend to remain approximately the same length over time, but their components change constantly; relevance and utility are the guiding principles. The classic African example of the process of this ‘structural amnesia’ is that of the Tiv [tribe]. After the Tiv genealogies were recorded in the early colonial period, the British naturally expected the details to remain constant, with additions as time passed. The Tiv, however, claimed, as time passed, that the earlier genealogies were incorrect; indeed, from their own perspective they were.

The Chronology of Oral Tradition: The Quest for a Chimera, 1974

In practice, genealogies were repeatedly abridged, and the length remained fairly constant at around ten generations, the same length as those preserved in Genesis 5 and 11. What the persistence of the age at paternity does seem to evidence in the latter is the tradition’s authenticity, of its going back to a time when mankind could place generations chronologically in relation to an absolute beginning, whether the Creation, as with the Genesis 5 genealogy, or the Deluge, as with the Genesis 11 genealogy. Long after the chronological elements had ceased to function, the formula ‘X lived thirty years, and begot Y; and X lived after he begot Y z years, and begot other sons and daughters’ persisted in deference to that primeval tradition.

After both Shem (who, even at 600, seems to have died prematurely) and Eber there is a sudden drop, followed by a plateau where there is no significant falling trend, and a smaller drop occurs after Serug (assuming that Nahor also died prematurely). These abrupt decreases suggest that it is precisely here that we have temporal gaps.

Thus there appear to be four genealogies involved, one from Adam down to Shem, another from Arphaxad to Eber, a third from Peleg to Serug, and a fourth from Nahor onwards. That there should have been a gap after Shem is readily understandable, since, for all people groups, the most significant forefather after the Deluge would have been the first. Thereafter, the period down to the time when they began to settle in new lands beyond Africa was almost a complete blank. Eber, as well as being the name of an individual, was the name of a land next to Assyria (Numbers 24:24), so-named because, after Shem, its inhabitants regarded Eber as their forefather. The first people to settle the area with any degree of permanence would not have arrived until after the Palaeolithic, many generations after Shem. Arphaxad was probably Eber’s grand- father, and in Genesis 10:22 we find his name associated with other eponymous settlers of Mesopotamia. Peleg, according to 10:25, was the forefather in whose days the earth was divided, a reference to the confusion of language. As an inhabitant of Mesopotamia, he would have seen at first hand the effect of that event upon his own and neighbouring regions. The confusion of language occurred at the end of the Uruk IV period, c. 3200 BC, many generations after Eber. Finally, working back from the Exodus, we can date Terah to around 2000 BC. Evidently there was a substantial gap in the sequence from Peleg to Terah, probably after Serug.

Ethnically, Abraham and his descendants defined themselves as Hebrews, descendants of Eber. Eber was the head of the group that first put down roots in the country. As the Table of Nations shows, lands and colonies were frequently named after the forefathers who settled the lands or founded the colonies, and tribal identity was closely connected with these forefathers. It was the first generations that defined the tribe, so that the maintenance of a continuous subsequent genealogy would have been unnecessary. Hundreds, even thousands, of years later, one could have had a sufficient sense of one’s own kinship within the tribe simply by knowing the first three founding generations, in this case, Arphaxad, Shelah and Eber, and one’s own father and grandfather, Terah and Nahor. Similarly, the Israelites defined their ethnic identity by their founding forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (renamed Israel). They became ‘the sons of Israel’, a subgroup of ‘the sons of Eber’. The Hebrews added the three generations beginning with Peleg to their genealogy only because the confusion of language was such an exceptional event, and language had much to do with ethnic identity (Genesis 10:31).

The purpose of the early genealogies was to define, in relation to one’s immediate family and tribe, who a person was. For a long time they had a purely oral existence. With their insertion into a written narrative they served two additional purposes. The first was to provide a bridge, across a span of time not otherwise described, between the primeval history of mankind and the story of the Israelite nation yet to unfold. The second was to sketch, in general terms, the route by which the tradition concerning the primeval world had been handed down – not, obviously, over billions of years, but over a period short enough for the events to be collectively remembered. The genealogies served to authenticate the narrative.