The Long Lives Before the Flood

Pick one ribbon and follow it. On pp. 24–25, find the place where Jared’s leaves his father’s, at “3544 B.C. 460 A.M.,” and slide your finger to the right. It passes pillar after pillar and is still running when the spread runs out. Genesis gives Jared 962 years, and Adams has turned that number into a length you can feel under your hand. His ribbon does not come to its end until pp. 32–33.

This stretch is Genesis 5 drawn in color, one ribbon to a life. Each begins where it branches from the father’s, with the year written twice, back from Christ and forward from Creation, and each big name carries the length of the life: CAINAN 910, MAHALALEEL 895, JARED 962. Read them upward from Enos and you hear the steady beat of the chapter. He lived, he begat, he lived on, and he died. Near the top Adams frames a title of his own over all of it, The Patriarchal Age, running from Creation to 1491 B.C.

Under each ribbon hang short hooks of color, and beside them, every time, Adams writes the verse: “And begat sons and daughters.” Genesis follows one named son in each generation, the son the line runs through, and he gets a ribbon. His brothers and sisters get hooks. They were real people, and Scripture does not keep their names. A chapter that looks like a list of single men turns out to be a chapter of large families.

Now the move that makes this stretch worth the effort. Put a finger on the red line just right of pillar 6 and run it down the page. Every ribbon you cross belongs to a man alive in that year: Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel and Jared, with Enoch soon to be born. Along Adam’s ribbon Adams spells out what that means, “and with JARED 470 yrs. and with ENOCH 308 yrs.” The first man lived to know his descendants six generations down.

Two cautions will save you some confusion. Under the stream the same men return on the thin line of Christ, CAINAN 70, MAHALALEEL 65, JARED 162, and those small numbers are ages at a son’s birth. And at the right edge the names CAINAN, ENOS, SETH and ADAM appear again; they are not new men, only the same ribbons labeled a second time as they run on.

Why do these long lives matter to a reader of the Bible? Genesis 4 says that in the days of Enos “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.” The men who prayed could still hear from Adam himself what had been lost in Eden and what God had promised there. The stack of overlapping ribbons shows you how that promise traveled, from one long life into the next. At the top right a new ribbon is rising at “3382 B.C. 622 A.M.” It is Enoch’s, and it will not end the way the others do.