Adam and the Flood: A Genealogical Study



Dark Savant Ministries is interested in uncovering the truth about the dark, hidden enigmas of the scriptures, and the ultimate fate of Adam has been one such mystery that has fascinated us for years.
Adam was the progenitor of the human race, the only man who ever walked and talked with God, the one for whom woman was created, the one who named the creatures of the earth. This same Adam who was closer to God than any other human who came after him, also committed an act of disobedience which incurred the wrath of that same Almighty God and resulted in his being cast out of paradise for ever.
Adam, the original creation. Adam, the original sinner. Did he ever receive forgiveness for his sin? Did he spend the rest of his life living righteously before the Lord? Will we ever get to meet him in heaven? Or did the serpent accomplish his objective and set in motion a chain of events that now finds Adam lost and destined for Hell?
How would we be able to know, one way or the other, the final disposition of Adam's soul? If we could determine that Adam was alive at the time of the Flood of Noah, then we would know that Adam had turned his back on the Lord. At the time of the flood, the scriptures say that God only found one righteous man, and it was Noah, not Adam. So if Adam was alive at this time, then we would know that he perished in the flood and God found him to be evil in his sight.
Our mission is to determine the age of Adam, and also to determine the year in which the flood took place, in an endeavor to discover if God's original creation expired in the Deluge.
Follow us as we descend into the catacombs of shrouded scripture with the torch of truth blazing brightly, and we will emerge together with the truth in hand.

As always, the bible is our primary reference work. Everything we need to solve this mystery is contained in the book of Genesis, specifically Genesis chapter 5, and 9:28.

If we use the date of Adam's creation as our reference point in determining the age of the world, then God made Adam in the year 0000. The bible says in Genesis 5, that Adam lived for 930 years. Therefore in essence, Adam died in the year 0930.
So, if we can determine that the flood occurred in the year 0930, we have a pretty good case for saying Adam lived the rest of his life in rebellion against God.

The line of Adam continued through his son, Seth, who the bible says lived for 912 years. He was born when Adam was 130 years old. By adding the age of Seth to the age of Adam at the time of Seth's birth, we know that Seth died in the year 1042. The bible has kept records in this fashion up through Jacob, but for our purposes, it is only necessary to go as far as Noah.
We can condense the genealogical information contained in Genesis chapter 5, and 9:28, into the following table:

YEAR OF BIRTH NAME YEAR OF DEATH

0000.............................Adam..............0930
0130..............................Seth...............1042
0235.............................Enosh..............1140
0325.............................Kenan.............1235
0395...........................Mahalalel...........1290
0460..............................Jared..............1422
0622..............................Enoch.............0987 (*)
0687..........................Methuselah.........1656
0874............................Lamech.............1651
1056.............................Noah................2006

Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old, the year 1656.

(*) Enoch did not die; he was taken up to God and his heaven.

Thus, we have our answer. We see that the flood occurred in the year 1656, but that Adam died in the year 0930. Adam most definitely did NOT die in the flood of Noah.
Did he die as a saved or a lost soul? We will never know for sure in this life, but the fact that others lived to serve the Lord indicates that Adam taught his children how to live righteously. If Adam was instructing or preaching righteousness, it follows that he must have repented of his sin, and found communion with the Creator once again. If Adam was not instructing others in righteousness, who was? Who could have? It seems safe to say that Adam had repented and was explaining to others how to please the Lord.

A few interesting facts present themselves, apart from the question of Adam's salvation.

1) The direct line from Adam to Noah is a legacy of righteousness. Enoch was so loved by God that God did not allow him to die, but instead took him to heaven. Noah was the only righteous man found upon the face of the earth at a time when there was so much evil in the world that God regretted ever creating Man.

2) Everyone born up until Noah had the words of Adam as a testimony of the Lord. Lamech, Noah's father, was born in 0874, and lived through 56 years of Adam's preaching. So the world was evil because they wished to be. They weren't ignorant. They had the words of Adam, among others, to guide them. They CHOSE to disregard what they heard, choosing to live in the sin of the serpent.

3) Interestingly enough, Noah himself never heard Adam's words. Adam had already passed on by the time Noah was born, and yet his legacy lived on, and Noah learned to serve the Lord through the others Adam's words had reached.

4) Obviously, Adam and Noah were not able to influence everyone to serve the Lord. Satan was also in the world, working to cause the allegiances of Man to be transferred from God to him. In fact, the work of Adam and Noah was completely defeated by the Evil One. This is a lesson we would do well to remember. Ultimately, we can only be responsible for our own salvation. When you think of all the great preachers this world has had (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Gideon, Daniel, Elijah, Elisha, Peter, Paul, and even Jesus himself) even they were not able to convert this world for God to the extent that Satan converted the world (all but one man) for himself. When working with others, we should remember this, and not get discouraged when we fail to reach everyone.

5) The oldest man who ever lived, Methuselah, died in the year 1656, the year of the flood. We had been looking to see if Adam had perished in the flood, but instead we find that it looks as if Methuselah did. Coincidence, you think? Here at Dark Savant Ministries, we put very little stock in coincidence. While it's possible that Methuselah died before the flood, it is still unlikely that he served the Lord. God found only one man who still served him. That man was Noah. When God searched throughout the earth for righteousness, he did so before the flood, before the ark was built, and before he even instructed Noah to build it. We don't know how long it took Noah and his sons to build the ark, but some say it took as long as 120 years, based on Genesis 6:3. Let's say it did take 120 years. If so, then Noah was 480 years old at the time God decided to wipe out the earth. That would make the year 1536. We could then say that anyone dying between 1536 and 1656 died as sinners. This would mean that Noah's father, and grandfather (Lamech and Methuselah) did not serve the Lord. Even if it only took Noah and his sons one year to build the ark, it would still mean that when the Lord searched throughout the earth to find righteousness, he would have considered Methuselah and found him wanting. If it took Noah five or six years to build the ark, then his father, Lamech, would also have been found unfavorable in the sight of God. We have a very good case for saying that we know what it was that finally killed the oldest man who ever lived: The Flood. Wonder how long he would have lived if it hadn't been for the flood. Would he have died in the ark? (I don't think God would have allowed that, since the flood and the ark were symbols of baptism and salvation. A death on board the ark would have messed up that pattern of salvation. Noah and his family were SAVED through water. You wouldn't be able to say that if Methuselah had died aboard.) Would he have died soon after disembarking? Or would he have lived for another hundred years? It's interesting to think about.

6) When you realize that Noah's father and grandfather were most likely not serving the Lord, it is all the more amazing to see Noah living in such a way as to be blameless before the Lord. Someone had to instruct him in the ways of righteousness, and it wasn't Adam. There must have been something about Noah that caused him to have a love for God, even when his own father, grandfather, and the rest of the world did not. Little wonder then, that he is listed among the "Heroes of Faith" in Hebrews chapter 11.


As a final comment, we can use the genealogical records of the bible to help us in determining the age of the world. By following the same pattern as we did before, we can reckon the age of the earth up to the time of Jacob.
From Adam to Noah: Genesis 5, and 9:28.
From Shem to Abram: Genesis 11:10 - 32.
From Abram to Jesus: Matthew 1:1-16.

Here is our chart:


YEAR OF BIRTH NAME YEAR OF DEATH

0000.............................Adam..............0930
0130..............................Seth...............1042
0235.............................Enosh..............1140
0325.............................Kenan.............1235
0395...........................Mahalalel...........1290
0460..............................Jared..............1422
0622..............................Enoch.............0987 (*)
0687..........................Methuselah.........1656
0874............................Lamech.............1651
1056.............................Noah................2006
1558............................Shem................2158
1658.........................Arphaxad............2096
1693..........................Shelah................2126
1723.............................Èber................2187
1757............................Peleg................1996
1787.............................Reu..................2326
2119............................Serug................2349
2149...........................Nahor................2297
2178............................Terah................2383
2248...........................Abram................2423
2348............................Isaac.................2528
2408............................Jacob................2555 (**)

(*) Enoch did not die; he was taken up to God and his heaven
(**) Taken from Genesis 47:28

If the bible had continued in this manner until the birth of Jesus, it would be very easy to determine the age of the world. However, it becomes difficult to determine the dates of birth and death for the next 38 people, using the bible as our only reference work.
This is where history can help us. If we can find a contemporary of Jacob's from history, then we can calculate the age of the world, at least from the creation of Adam.
Jacob had a son named Joseph, who became the Prime Minister of Egypt under a certain Pharoh. Jacob lived to meet this Pharoh while Joseph was his second in command. History tells us that this Pharoh was most likely Sesostris II.
Actually, there is quite a lot of debate over exactly which Pharoh this was. Cases can be made for Sesostris II, or Thothmes III, or Apopis, or another one or two, but our purpose here is not to determine the identity of this pharoh beyond the shadow of a doubt. For our purposes, the date need not be exact. All we need to know is the approximate period.
According to Harold Camping, Joseph was instituted as Prime Minister of Egypt in 1886 B.C. According to Dr. Bryant G. Wood, of the "Associates for Biblical Research", Jacob and his family arrived in Egypt around 1880 B.C. ("The Sons of Jacob: New Evidence for the Presence of the Israelites in Egypt").
There is enough evidence to suggest that the events of Joseph and his brothers occurred sometime around 1880 B.C.
Therefore, we can see that Jacob would have been a contemporary of Sesostris II, who ruled from 1897 B.C. until 1878 B.C.
Since Sesostris III ruled from 1878 B.C. to 1843 B.C., it would appear that Joseph (given the date of his inauguration as 1886 B.C.) was given his position of second-in-command by Sesostris II, and that Joseph's rule extended into the reign of his son, Sesostris III.
So we can say that Jacob, who we know died in the year 2555 (by our reckoning, based on Adam being created in the year 0000), would have intersected the life of Sesostris II, Pharoh of Egypt. Since we know Sesostris II died in the year 1878 B.C., we can take 1878 and add it to 2555 to come up with 4433.
Now we don't know if Jacob died before or after Sesostris II, but we know they were contemporaries. The exact date does not matter. Jacob was alive sometime around 1900 B.C. We know that approximately 1900 years of history went by from the death of Jacob to the birth of Christ. We also know that there were 2555 years of history preceding Jacob. We also know that there have been approximately 2000 more years from the birth of Christ until today. When you add up these three numbers, you have the approximate age of the earth, from the creation of Adam.
That number is 6455. God created the world in 6 days, so you can add six days to this number. What we see then, is that this world is only 6 ½ thousand years old.
Not millions of years or billions of years, as evolutionists would have us believe. Six and a half thousand years.

In conclusion:

We see that Adam did not die in the Flood of Noah, and that it appears that he served the Lord the rest of his days.
We saw that Noah was blameless before the Lord, serving him when no one else on earth would.
We saw that Noah's father and grandfather died in their sins, with Methuselah perishing in the flood.
We discovered that this world is only 6 ½ thousand years old, as opposed to being hundreds of billions.

So we emerge from the catacombs back into the sunlight, having exposed the truth for what it is. Having gone in search of one truth, we unexpectedly discovered several. The Word of God is always exciting and alive, instilling in us a sense of adventure every time we delve into its depths for truth. Scriptures that we have read a hundred times sometimes suddenly gleam with an unexpected sparkle, revealing a new facet that we never knew existed before. Digging for the treasure of God's Word is always a rewarding experience, even when you dig in places that you wouldn't normally expect to find anything, such as the genealogies of Genesis and Matthew that we explored here.


In Christ,

Chad J. McCoy
Dark Savant Ministries

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