From Adam to Noah

Every time I read the genealogy from Adam to Noah in Genesis 5, my head starts to hurt. Between the names, ages and everything else, I can't keep it straight, and every time I've sat down and tried to graph it out, I just end up with a huge mess on my hands. Today, however, it came to me. View this chart and I'll make some comments:

From Read Your Bible.

Everything (and shoot, everyONE) on the chart is relative to Adam. The three colored bars tell us three things:

Blue--what year relative to Adam's creation a person was born (i.e., Seth was born 130 years after Adam)

Red--the year a person sired a child in the lineage of Christ (i.e., Seth did that 105 years after his birth)

Green--how many years a person lived afterward (Seth lived 807 years after he sired Enosh)

That solid black line shows one pretty compelling fact that I've never fully realized before--Adam was ALIVE at the same time as all these folks, and just missed the birth of Noah (the TENTH generation) by about 100 years. Think about that--when we begin the account of Noah in Genesis 6, Adam hadn't been dead for thousands of years--he was a witness to the SAME CORRUPT WORLD that Noah lived in.

One other little fact--the chart doesn't clearly depict it, but add the year of Methuselah's birth (677) to his age (187+782, or 969), and you'll see he died 1,646 years after the birth of Adam. As we'll see in Monday's reading, Noah was 600 when the flood began, and since he was born 1,046 after the birth of Adam, the flood began 1,646 years after the birth of Adam...the same year Methuselah died.

Scott

P.S.--if you're still rubbing your eyes over the chart, hit this link and see a different chart that tells the same story.

http://www.biblestudy.org/maps/large-chart-life-span-patriarchs-from-adam-to-noah.html