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Genealogy and Times: From Creation to Christ

The three surviving manuscript traditions put creation as much as 1,466 years apart. The gap is patterned: a hundred years per patriarch, repeated down the list, which somebody introduced deliberately. Which somebody, and in which direction, is the question this page works through.

Jesus's genealogy is recorded twice (Matthew 1, Luke 3), and Luke's runs all the way back to Adam. Genesis 5 and 11:10-26 are the only places in the Old Testament that give a father's age at his heir's birth generation after generation. Both are read here in all three witnesses. Those are the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew that underlies most English Bibles; the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars around the third century BC and the version the New Testament writers most often quote; and the Samaritan Pentateuch, preserved independently of both. The reasoning here feeds docs/data/genealogy's structured files.

The genealogy is a real chronological record, precise enough to argue over and capable of being wrong in transmission. It is also a theologically shaped document, tracking a single promised line (Genesis 3:15's "seed of the woman") through named individuals whose names themselves carry meaning.

In one sentence: Genesis 5 and 11 give a real chronology whose Masoretic numbers hold up best of the three witnesses, and the line they count carries God's promise by name from Adam to His Son Jesus, so you can trust the God who kept it one generation at a time to keep His promises to you.

Study outline

  • How Genesis gives this data — the fathering-age formula of Genesis 5 and 11, and where it stops.
  • The three witnesses — the Masoretic, Septuagint and Samaritan numbers side by side, and the patterns in how they differ.
  • Case studies — the second Cainan, Methuselah's death and the Flood, and Terah's age at Abram's departure.
  • Word studies — which of the Genesis 5 names hold up in the lexicon.
  • Toward a most probable timeline — why the site follows the Masoretic numbers, and the dates that result, and what stays open.
  • What this means for prophecy and Christ — Matthew's and Luke's genealogies, and the promise carried through named people.
  • Annex: dating choices and open work — the two data choices behind the dates, and the open items still tracked.

How Genesis gives this data

Genesis 5 (Adam to Noah) and Genesis 11:10-26 (Shem to Terah) share a distinctive formula, repeated once per patriarch: he lived [age], and fathered [heir]; he lived [years] more after fathering [heir], and had other sons and daughters; all his days were [total]. That formula is what makes three-way manuscript comparison possible at all. Nowhere else in Scripture is this much chronological data given about this many consecutive individuals. It also stops cold after Terah: Genesis 11:26 gives his age, but from Abraham onward the text gives ages at specific named events (Abraham 100 at Isaac's birth, Genesis 21:5; Isaac 60 at Jacob's, Genesis 25:26). That is a change in genre. The rest of this study's method compares an "age at heir's birth" figure across manuscripts. It cannot apply past Terah, because Genesis stops giving one.

The three witnesses

  • The Masoretic Text (MT) — the one this site's own zadok_year numbering already assumes (see The Zadok Calendar for the calendar side of that convention).
  • The Septuagint (LXX), in the Brenton edition, whose Genesis 5 and 11 numbers diverge from MT's in a patterned way (below).
  • The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) — the least commonly consulted of the three: it smooths the Terah puzzle MT and LXX read with Acts 7:4, and it corroborates MT's Methuselah result by an entirely different set of numbers (both below).

All figures below were queried directly from this repo's references/build/bible-text.db (morphhb-wlc for MT, ebible-grcbrent for LXX, scrollmapper-SP for SP) and cross-checked by computer against each tradition's own stated total (age at heir's birth + years after = total lifespan; see references/build/genealogy_chronology.py, which fails loudly if a figure doesn't add up). Every number here passed that check.

Genesis 5: Adam to Noah

Patriarch MT (age / after / total) LXX (age / after / total) SP (age / after / total)
Adam 130 / 800 / 930 230 / 700 / 930 130 / 800 / 930
Seth 105 / 807 / 912 205 / 707 / 912 105 / 807 / 912
Enosh 90 / 815 / 905 190 / 715 / 905 90 / 815 / 905
Cainan (Kenan) 70 / 840 / 910 170 / 740 / 910 70 / 840 / 910
Mahalalel 65 / 830 / 895 165 / 730 / 895 65 / 830 / 895
Jared 162 / 800 / 962 162 / 800 / 962 62 / 785 / 847
Enoch 65 / 300 / 365 (no death) 165 / 200 / 365 (no death) 65 / 300 / 365 (no death)
Methuselah 187 / 782 / 969 167 / 802 / 969 67 / 653 / 720
Lamech 182 / 595 / 777 188 / 565 / 753 53 / 600 / 653
Noah (age at Shem/Ham/Japheth) 500 500 500

For six of these nine (Adam through Mahalalel, and Enoch) LXX adds exactly 100 years to the age-at-heir-birth figure and subtracts the same 100 from years-after, so the total lifespan is identical across MT, LXX, and SP every time. A constant offset six times over, with the total kept each time, is a deliberate shift on someone's part. Copying errors do not produce it.

Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech break that pattern, each differently. Jared is untouched by the LXX shift (MT and LXX agree exactly) but SP shortens both his age and his total. Methuselah keeps his 969 total in MT and LXX, but LXX moves his fathering age down 20 years (167 for 187), and SP shortens the total itself. Lamech is the strangest: all three traditions give a different total (777 / 753 / 653), with no two agreeing against the third.

Genesis 11:10-26: Shem to Terah

Patriarch MT LXX SP
Shem 100 / 500 / 600 100 / 500 / 600 100 / 500 / 600
Arphaxad 35 / 403 / 438 135 / 400 / 535 135 / 303 / 438
(Cainan) — (absent) 130 / 330 / 460 — (absent)
Shelah 30 / 403 / 433 130 / 330 / 460 130 / 303 / 433
Eber 34 / 430 / 464 134 / 270 / 404 134 / 270 / 404
Peleg 30 / 209 / 239 130 / 209 / 339 130 / 109 / 239
Reu 32 / 207 / 239 132 / 207 / 339 132 / 107 / 239
Serug 30 / 200 / 230 130 / 200 / 330 130 / 100 / 230
Nahor 29 / 119 / 148 179 / 125 / 304 79 / 69 / 148
Terah 70 / 135 / 205 70 / 135 / 205 70 / 75 / 145

A different, equally consistent pattern runs from Arphaxad through Serug: SP takes LXX's higher age-at-heir-birth figure but keeps MT's total, by shortening years-after to compensate. Five patriarchs (Arphaxad, Shelah, Peleg, Reu, Serug) do this identically, which is an editorial signature. Eber breaks the run (SP just matches LXX outright, total included). Nahor breaks it a third way (three different ages, though SP's total still matches MT's). And Terah, the last, breaks it in the direction that matters most for everything downstream.

Case studies

The Cainan question

Luke 3:36 names a Cainan between Arphaxad and Shelah. MT and SP don't have him; LXX does, with his own full entry (130 years to Shelah's birth, 330 more after, 460 total, Genesis 11:13 LXX). This looks at first like Luke following the Greek tradition against the Hebrew. The manuscript evidence points the other direction.

The case for a later insertion

Luke's own text is contested. The two earliest witnesses to this verse omit Cainan: 𝔓⁷⁵, the oldest extant manuscript of Luke, from the early third century, and the fifth-century Codex Bezae. Every witness that has him is fourth-century or later, beginning with Codex Vaticanus. Andrew Steinmann's survey (JETS 60/4, 2017) lists the sources with no knowledge of Cainan in chronological order: the Samaritan Pentateuch (c. 100 BC), Josephus, Targum Onkelos, Theophilus of Antioch, Julius Africanus, Seder 'Olam Rabbah, 𝔓⁷⁵, Targum Neofiti, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and Codex Bezae.

The Samaritan silence. Seven fathering ages in Genesis 11 are disputed, and SP sides with LXX against MT in six of them (all but Nahor's). Its whole tendency in this passage is toward the Greek numbers, and it still has no Cainan.

The Septuagint contradicts itself. 1 Chronicles 1:24 runs Arphaxad straight to Shelah with no Cainan, in the Masoretic Text and in Brenton's Septuagint. A generation present in one Greek book and absent from the Greek parallel is a generation with a transmission problem.

The numbers give it away. LXX Genesis 11:12-13 gives Cainan 130 years before Shelah's birth and 330 after. Those are exactly the figures LXX gives Shelah before and after fathering Eber in the next two verses. Nowhere else in Genesis 5 or 11, in MT, LXX or SP, does a father share both numbers with his son. The entry reads as a duplicated block with the name swapped.

And the insertion has a trigger. Luke 3:37 names the antediluvian Cainan one line below. A copyist's eye skipping from Shelah to a line ending in Cainan inserts the name at 3:36 without effort. No comparable mechanism explains an accidental deletion from 𝔓⁷⁵ and Bezae.

The contested counter, and the working position

Against all that: NA28 and UBS still print Cainan at Luke 3:36 unbracketed, Helen Jacobus (JSP 18, 2009) has argued he was original to the Hebrew, and one recent paper questions the identification of the 𝔓⁷⁵ fragment itself. The question remains contested.

The working position here is that Cainan entered Luke by copying error in the third or fourth century and was then harmonized into the Greek Genesis. For the arithmetic that means the LXX chronology carries 130 years it should not, and the lxx variant in docs/data/genealogy/ inherits them.

Methuselah: the name, the number, and the Flood

Two readings of the name

Methuselah's name (מְתוּשֶׁלַח) is ambiguous at the lexical level: two readings, each built from an attested root. Read as m'tei ("men of") + shelach ("javelin," H7973), it's a plain warrior name with no theological freight. Read as mut ("die," H4191) + shalach ("send," H7971), it becomes a sentence-name: "his death shall send [it]." Both parse correctly; nothing in the lexicon settles which one the name-giver intended.

The arithmetic in each tradition

Arithmetic tips the scales toward the second reading. And the arithmetic has to be run separately in each tradition, because the three chains put Methuselah's death in three different places relative to the Flood. The Flood itself is fixed the same way in all of them: Noah is six hundred when it comes (Genesis 7:6, 7:11), so each tradition's Flood year is simply its own Noah's birth year plus 600.

Tradition Methuselah born dies Flood Result
MT AM 687 AM 1656 AM 1656 dies in the Flood year
SP AM 587 AM 1307 AM 1307 dies in the Flood year
LXX AM 1287 AM 2256 AM 2242 outlives the Flood by 14 years

Adding the seven fathering-ages from Adam down to Enoch puts Methuselah's birth at AM 687. His 969-year total carries him to AM 1656. That is the same year Noah turns 600. Nothing in that sum was arranged to produce the result. It falls out of figures given one verse at a time across Genesis 5. The longest life in the record ends in the year the judgment arrives.

SP reaches the same result by a different road. Its Jared fathers Enoch at 62 rather than 162, which pulls Methuselah's birth 100 years back to AM 587, and its Methuselah totals 720 rather than 969. Both ends move, and they move together: his death lands in AM 1307, again the Flood year. Two traditions that disagree about nearly every number in the chapter agree about this one relationship.

The Septuagint: Methuselah outlives the Flood

LXX alone breaks it, and by a specific 14 years. Its extra hundreds above Methuselah move his birth and the Flood together, so they change nothing here. The 14 comes from the two fathering ages after his birth: Methuselah fathers Lamech at 167 (MT 187) and Lamech fathers Noah at 188 (MT 182), a net 14 years less between Methuselah's birth and the Flood. His 969 years then carry him to AM 2256 against a Flood at AM 2242. A man whose name may mean "his death shall send [judgment]" then outlives that judgment by fourteen years. This is a long-noted problem, and it belongs to the Septuagint alone. It appears in the same tradition that carries the spurious Cainan discussed above. If the eschatological reading of the name is right, MT and SP both already agree with it, and the only witness that disagrees is the one with an independent transmission problem in the same chain.

Terah and Abram: a puzzle two different ways

The tension here is inside the text of Genesis itself, and MT and SP resolve it in two structurally different ways.

Two resolutions: the Masoretic 205 and the Samaritan 145

Genesis 11:26 states Terah was 70 when he fathered Abram (named first, alongside Nahor and Haran; birth order not stated). But Genesis 12:4 has Abram leaving Haran at 75, and Acts 7:4 is explicit that this happened after Terah's death. Under MT/LXX's stated 205-year total for Terah (born zadok year 1878 on MT's own numbers), the plain "70 at Abram" reading puts Abram's departure at 1948+75=2023, a full 60 years before Terah dies in 2083. That is a real contradiction with Acts 7:4. It is why the standard harmonization reinterprets Genesis 11:26: Abram is listed first for his covenant importance and was the youngest of the three sons, born when Terah was 130. Run it again: 1878+130=2008, +75=2083, exactly Terah's death year.

SP's total for Terah is 145. Run the plain 70-year reading Genesis 11:26 states outright, with no assumption about birth order, and 70 + 75 = 145. Terah's death and Abram's departure land on the same year with no harmonizing move at all. MT's resolution reads past the plain sense of one verse to save the numbers; SP's numbers already match it.

Contested: the study Bibles and this site's reading

Which is original is contested, and the study Bibles lean the other way from this site. The NLT footnotes Genesis 11:32 "Some ancient versions read 145 years; compare 11:26 and 12:4" (NLT Life Application Study Bible). The ESV Study Bible suggests Stephen "was following an alternative text (represented today in the Samaritan Pentateuch)", and the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible says the 205 "may be due to a mistake by an early copyist." This site reads the same fit as the mark of a harmonizing scribe, because a reading that removes a difficulty this neatly is what a scribe produces, and follows the Masoretic 205; see Following the Masoretic numbers below.

Word studies: what the names actually say

Popular teaching sometimes strings the Genesis 5 names into a sentence. Seth (appointed), Enosh (mortal man), Kenan (sorrow), Mahalalel (the Blessed God), Jared (shall come down), Enoch (teaching), Methuselah (his death shall bring), Lamech (the despairing), Noah (rest/comfort). Read together, that gives something like: Man is appointed mortal sorrow, but the Blessed God shall come down, teaching that his death shall bring the despairing rest. Whether it holds is a question for the lexicon, name by name.

From this repo's TWOT root data (references/build/twot_lookup.py):

Name Verdict What's actually attested
Seth Solid "Appointed" — Genesis 4:25 states the wordplay itself; not reconstructed
Enosh Solid "Mortal man" — frailty-connoting, distinct from adam/ish, but inferred from usage elsewhere, not an in-text gloss
Kenan Speculative No TWOT root for the name at all; "sorrow" rests on an unconfirmed link to a different root
Mahalalel Solid "Praise of God" — transparent theophoric compound
Jared Solid "Descent" — direct nominal form of "to come down"
Enoch Solid, imprecise popularly "Dedicated/initiated" (same root as Proverbs 22:6) — "teaching" is a loose paraphrase
Methuselah Ambiguous, both real See above — not one solid reading and one invented one
Lamech Unknown No TWOT root exists; standard lexicons mark the derivation uncertain
Noah Solid, needs precision Genesis 5:29's own wordplay uses nacham ("comfort"), not nuach ("rest") — a real double sound-play, not a simple derivation

So six of the nine names hold up on their own lexical merits. One, Methuselah, is a motivated ambiguity. Two, Kenan and Lamech, have no lexical footing for the reading the popular chain wants from them. The pattern survives: six solid, theologically resonant names out of nine (appointed, [frail] man, praise of God, shall come down, dedicated, comfort) is a feature of the text. But claiming a complete nine-word sentence requires filling two gaps with unattested glosses.

Toward a most probable timeline

Following the Masoretic numbers

Since 2026-09-28 this site follows the Masoretic Text for every number in Genesis 5 and 11, Terah included. The full case, with the confidence each part carries, is in The Flood and the King Lists. In brief:

  • Scripture's own test. Only the eight in the ark survive the Flood (Genesis 7:23; 1 Peter 3:20). The Septuagint as printed keeps Methuselah alive fourteen years past it, so it cannot be the original there. The Masoretic arithmetic lands his death in the Flood year exactly.
  • Scribal habits. Andrew Steinmann's collation of every variant in Genesis (JETS 64/1, 2021) finds the fewest secondary readings in the Masoretic and the most in the Septuagint, with the Samaritan and Greek sharing enough secondary readings to mark them as one text type. When those two agree against the Hebrew they count once.
  • The patterns. The Septuagint's +100 in Genesis 5 keeps every total unchanged, and the Samaritan has Jared, Methuselah and Lamech all die in its Flood year. Both look like editors solving problems. So does the shared +100 in Genesis 11, which thins out the crowd of long-lived ancestors the Hebrew leaves around Abraham.
  • Terah. The Samaritan 145 reconciles Genesis 11:26 with Acts 7:4, which is the same harmonizing habit at work. The Masoretic 205 already satisfies Acts 7:4 once Abram, named first for his importance, is read as born when Terah was 130 (above).

Deriving the Gregorian dates

Zadok year 0 is Adam's creation, so each variant is anchored on one downstream point, the Exodus, and its creation date falls out of its own chain length.

Computed results (references/build/genealogy_chronology.py, anchored on the Exodus at 1446 BC, Terah to Abram per Acts 7:4, Abram's call to the Exodus per Galatians 3:17):

Variant Creation Flood (zadok / Gregorian) Terah's death (zadok / Gregorian)
MT 3959 BC 1656 / 2303 BC 2083 / 1876 BC
LXX 5425 BC 2242 / 3183 BC 3549 / 1876 BC
SP 4200 BC 1307 / 2893 BC 2324 / 1876 BC

The gap between MT's and LXX's Flood dates is 880 years: the Septuagint puts the Flood before Egypt's First Dynasty (c. 3100 BC), where the Masoretic puts it some eight centuries after. That holds only for the Septuagint as printed. Without the second Cainan, which the Cainan question above treats as an insertion, its Flood falls at 3053 BC, level with Egypt's First Dynasty, and with the Göttingen Septuagint's 79 for Nahor at 2953 BC, after it. The Flood and the King Lists weighs the three texts. "The biblical timeline" is not a single settled number even before archaeology enters the picture. All three variants agree on Terah's death because they share the anchor and the chain from Terah forward; they diverge only above him.

Where year 0 sits

Scripture supplies the intervals for a creation epoch without supplying the epoch itself. Converting a Zadok year to BC/AD therefore takes a choice, and five candidates have been weighed on this site. They span 84 years:

Reading Exodus anchor Nahor Creation AD 2026 Year 6000
This site 1446 BC 29 3959 BC AM 5984 AD 2042
Ussher 1491 BC 29 4004 BC AM 6029 AD 1997
Nahor 79 1446 BC 79 4009 BC AM 6034 AD 1992
Nahor 79, temple at 961 BC 1441 BC 79 4004 BC AM 6029 AD 1997
dsscalendar.org — — 3925 BC AM 5951 AD 2075

Two parameters separate the first four. The Exodus anchor is where the derived chain gets pinned to a Gregorian year. 1491 BC is Ussher's own figure, reached before the Assyrian synchronism existed. 1446 BC follows from 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years, counted back from Solomon's fourth year, itself fixed by the astronomically dated eclipse of 763 BC. That is the date this site uses. Ussher reached 1491 BC from a temple date of 1012 BC, which he got by adding the kings' reigns end to end, against the 966 BC the Assyrian synchronisms fix (Why Not 4004 BC?). The Nahor column is his age at Terah's birth. The Masoretic 29 stands against 79 in both the Samaritan Pentateuch and LXX Codex Alexandrinus, with Theophilus of Antioch at 75. That agreement counts as one witness: the Samaritan and Greek descend from one text type, and 79 is the Masoretic 29 plus 50 with the years after reduced by 50 to keep its total, the same compensating shift the Samaritan makes for Shelah through Serug (Andrew Steinmann, JETS 64/1, 2021). The site keeps 29.

The fourth reading reaches Ussher's 4004 BC while also taking the Nahor 79 reading, but only by moving Solomon's fourth year from 966 to 961 BC. That is inside the spread of Israelite regnal chronology. It is still a five-year adjustment made to land on a number chosen in advance, so any correspondence it preserves is an artifact of the adjustment. It is recorded so the option is visible.

The Exodus is AM 2513 on the Masoretic chain. Walking the genealogy from Adam to Terah, then to Abram by Acts 7:4, then to the Exodus by Galatians 3:17, gives that figure. Subtracting it from each epoch puts the Exodus at 1491 BC on Ussher's, 1446 BC on this site's, and 1412 BC on dsscalendar.org's. 1412 BC corresponds to no standard reckoning I have been able to trace.

These figures count Adam's creation year as AM 0. dsscalendar.org counts it as AM 1 instead, and its published week boundaries make the mapping exact: week 1 runs 1-700 AM = 3925-3226 BC, week 6 runs 3501-4200 AM = 425 BC-AD 275, and week 10 runs 6301-7000 AM = AD 2376-3075. So on its reckoning AD 2026 is AM 5951, and year 6000 falls in AD 2075. And the conversion is not a plain subtraction, because there is no year zero between 1 BC and AD 1: on this site's epoch AM 3958 is 1 BC, AM 3959 is AD 1, and AD 2026 is AM 5984. The Zadok Calendar describes the 364-day calendar the count is named for.

What this means for prophecy and Christ

Two genealogies, two different jobs

Two genealogies of Jesus survive (Matthew 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38), and they're doing visibly different jobs. Matthew's is explicitly structured, "fourteen generations" three times over (Matthew 1:17), and to hit that count it compresses the king-list of Judah, skipping three known kings between Joram and Uzziah (compare Matthew 1:8 with 1 Chronicles 3:11-12). Ancient genealogies routinely telescoped names for a structuring purpose without being understood as lying about lineage. It also means Matthew's list, unlike Genesis 5 and 11, makes a royal and covenantal argument (this is David's heir) and supplies no year count. Luke's list runs the other direction, all the way back past Abraham to "the son of Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). That ending is the argument. Luke is setting up the same connection Paul makes explicitly. Jesus is the second Adam, undoing in obedience what the first Adam did in disobedience (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45). The genealogy exists, in Luke's hands, to make a theological claim stick to a real, traceable human line. It works because that line is real.

The promise carried through named people

That is the frame the chronological work sits inside. The line from Adam to Christ is tracked because of a promise. Genesis 3:15 said the woman's seed would come, and would matter. That promise runs through actual named people, whose own names turn out, more often than not, to be saying something true about what is coming. Seth, appointed, in place of a murdered brother. Enoch, dedicated, taken without dying, a preview that death isn't the last word for those who walk with God (Hebrews 11:5). Noah, comfort, the one who carries the appointed line through judgment. Methuselah's own name may or may not have predicted the Flood by its own arithmetic. The pattern around him does, on a larger scale, what the whole genealogy does. It is a record of real people, shaped by its author, tracking a promise. Twenty-some centuries after its last recorded chapter, that promise is still being kept.

The shape of the claim is settled: a single traceable line, named generation by generation, carrying a promise from Eden to an empty tomb.

Annex: dating choices and open work

Two choices behind the numbers

Two figures behind these numbers are choices rather than manuscript readings, and both are now stated in docs/data/genealogy/index.json with their scriptural basis. Shem's birth is taken from Genesis 11:10 ("two years after the flood," Shem then 100) rather than from Genesis 5:32's summary that Noah fathered three sons after his 500th year; the two differ by 2 years and that slack propagates to every date below Shem. And the Samaritan variant alone reads Terah's 70 in Genesis 11:26 plainly, because its own 145-year total already puts Terah's death in Abram's 75th year; the Masoretic and Septuagint variants take Abram's birth at Terah 130.

What stays open

The manuscript question is settled for this site's purposes (above); the state file behind this study (references/study-state/genealogy-times.yml) records the decision. The Exodus anchor was settled on 2026-10-01: 1446 BC, from 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years counted back from Solomon's fourth year, which puts Masoretic creation at 3959 BC. Ussher's 1491 BC, and the 4004 BC epoch it produces, were used until then; docs/data/genealogy/index.json keeps both as tracked alternates. Why Not 4004 BC? traces where Ussher's forty-six years came from.

The Day is Near used dsscalendar.org's creation epoch (~3925 BC) until 2026-10-01; the site's year-6000 arithmetic now lives in A Day Is a Thousand Years, on this line.

The genealogical reasoning above was worked out without prophecy-events-times.md's external archaeological anchors (Qarqar, Sennacherib, the Babylonian and Persian records), so that anchor-based dating could not bias which manuscript readings looked more probable. Now that the genealogical case stands on its own, linking the two is the natural next step, tracked as open work in the state file. One check is where the Masoretic numbers land relative to Thiele's Qarqar-anchored chronology for the divided monarchy.

The span from the Exodus to Solomon's temple, where the genealogies stop and 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years take over, is the subject of a separate study, Four Hundred and Eighty Years.

  • Primary texts (queried directly via references/build/query.py against references/build/bible-text.db): morphhb-wlc (Westminster Leningrad Codex, MT), ebible-grcbrent (Brenton Septuagint, LXX), scrollmapper-SP (Samaritan Pentateuch)
  • TWOT root/Strong's/gloss data (twot_strongs_map.json), queried via references/build/twot_lookup.py, for every word study above
  • NLT Life Application Study Bible (Tyndale) — the textual note at Genesis 11:32 recording the 145-year reading for Terah and cross-referencing 11:26 and 12:4
  • ESV Study Bible (Crossway) and NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible (Zondervan), notes on Genesis 11:32 — both favour the Samaritan 145 for Terah
  • Andrew E. Steinmann, "Challenging the Authenticity of Cainan, Son of Arpachshad," JETS 60/4 (2017): 697–711, and "A Comparison of the Text of Genesis in Three Traditions: Masoretic Text, Samaritan Pentateuch, Septuagint," JETS 64/1 (2021): 25–43
  • Helen R. Jacobus, on Cainan as original to the Hebrew, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 18 (2009)
  • James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time — on the broader Second Temple textual environment these traditions come from
  • The Zadok Calendar, The Day is Near, and Prophecy Events and Times — this site's other chronology studies, including the dsscalendar.org epoch The Day is Near used until 2026-10-01 (noted above)
  • The Prophetic Timeline — these years plotted from creation to the Flood, with a row for each person; its Family tree view shows the same people by descent
  • docs/data/genealogy/index.json, antediluvian.json, patriarchal.json — the structured source data this study explains
  • references/build/genealogy_chronology.py — the validator/generator computing the table above from that source data
  • references/study-state/genealogy-times.yml — the full research trail, including items deferred rather than resolved in this draft