From the Narrow Desert

Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories came up in my attempt to describe my recurring dream of break-dancing frogs. Our parents read us those stories countless times when we were kids, and one line from them became a family catchphrase. In Frog and Toad Together, Frog and Toad bake some cookies that are so delicious that they lack the will power to stop eating them. They try various ways of forcing themselves to stop, such as putting the cookies high up out of their reach, but nothing works. In the end, Frog takes the cookies outside and shouts, "Hey birds, here are cookies!" Birds come and eat up all the cookies, and Frog comments that now that the temptation is gone, he and Toad "have lots and lots of will power."

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great (Rev. 19:17-18).

He shouted in a loud voice, "HEY BIRDS, HERE ARE COOKIES!"

Birds came from everywhere.

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head: And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days: Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee (Gen. 40:17-19).

Yesterday I read the following in Tomberg’s Lazarus, Come Forth!

The name ELOHIM is the name of God as the One who completed the work of the creation of the world in six days. In the first chapter of Genesis it appears thirty-two times, while the name YAHVEH ELOHIM is mentioned for the first time in the second chapter of Genesis (Gen. 2:4).

And, a bit later:

For this reason the Cabbala speaks of thirty-two paths of wisdom, which is grounded in the fact that the name ELOHIM appears thirty-two times in the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis.

My reaction on reading this was that “the first chapter” is an arbitrary and unnatural division, and that the seventh day of creation, in Chapter 2 but still part of the first (Elohim) creation story, includes two or three more instances of Elohim (three, it turns out, now that I’ve looked it up).

Several hours later, I did a bit of random browsing on /pol/ and followed a link to this old post from April, about the symbolism used by the occult elite. It had a link to a page about the meaning of the numbers 33 and 34 in the Bible, which I followed out of curiosity because I have two correspondents each of whom is synchronistically interested in one of those two numbers. However, the link redirected to this page, which is about 33 only. Included on the page was this claim:

The divine name of God, Elohim (Strong's Concordance #H430), is initially mentioned in the first verse of Genesis 1. Elohim appears 33 times in Genesis' story of creation.

This contradicts Tomberg; if there are 32 instances of Elohim in Chapter 1, there must be 35 in the whole first Creation story (and of course many more if all the instances of Yahweh Elohim in the second Creation story are included). My guess was that the discrepancy was due to the fact that the Septuagint probably adds an extra Elohim when it has God say that the firmament is good, which he does not say in the Masoretic text. But aren’t both the Vulgate used by Tomberg and the modern translations presumably used by some random Bible study website based on the Masoretic text?

I’ve just checked, and the Masoretic text has Elohim 32 times in Chapter 1 and 35 times in the whole first Creation story. (The God count in the KJV is the same.) The Vulgate omits many of these, with Deus only 26 times in Chapter 1 and 28 times in the whole story. The Septuagint has Theos 33 times in Chapter 1 and 36 times in the whole story. But the Bible study website specifically says Elohim (Hebrew) and cites Strong’s Hebrew Concordance. How could they have gotten 33?

Anyway, I don’t really care enough to probe this any further. I just wanted to note the extraordinary coincidence of running into this very specific idea — counting how many times Elohim is used in Genesis 1 — twice in one day.

As a young child, I had heard Ave Maria set to music, and I was aware that Catholics and football players prayed "Hail Mary," but for a surprisingly long time (maybe until I was 11 or 12?) I never made the connection between the two. Having been raised without any knowledge of Latin, I didn't know what ave meant, but I thought of it as likely meaning "grandmother" (because of Esperanto avo, "grandfather," which I correctly guessed was probably derived from Latin) or perhaps having something to do with birds (the class Aves). The relevance of birds was obscure, so I tended toward the former interpretation: Ave Maria probably meant something like "Grandmother Mary" -- as God's children might well address the woman called the "Mother of God." I never guessed that it simply meant "hail"!

Borrowed with an unspelled /h/ from Punic *ḥawe ("live!", 2sg. imp.), cognate to Hebrew חוה‎ ("Eve"), and as avō from Punic *ḥawū (2pl. imp.), from Semitic root ḥ-w-y (live).

And it came to pass after I had seen the tree [of life], I said unto the Spirit: I behold thou hast shown unto me the tree which is precious above all.

And he said unto me: What desirest thou?

And I said unto him: To know the interpretation thereof . . .

And it came to pass that he said unto me: Look! . . . And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white.

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me . . . And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God . . . Knowest thou the meaning of the tree . . . ?

I had just read this in Valentin Tomberg’s Lazarus Come Forth:

Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine . . . also saw no other possibility than either to stop short at Genesis without further thought, or to form thoughts about it—and to think about Genesis other than “platonically” is hardly possible.

Of what use is a lot of disparate information if we cannot generalise it in some fashion? Having progressed from comparative studies which understood meaning as genesis . . .

On October 1, I started reading the Old Testament a chapter a day; thus today, October 30, at around two or three in the afternoon, I read Genesis 30. This includes the "mandrake episode":

And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah.

Then Rachel said to Leah, "Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes."

And she said unto her, "Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son's mandrakes also?"

And Rachel said, "Therefore he shall lie with thee to night for thy son's mandrakes."

And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, "Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son's mandrakes."

And he lay with her that night (vv. 14-16).

Turn around, bright eyes

And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.

I had been reading Berger's Sealed Book because it had the endorsement of the highly intelligent John P. Pratt, but by the time I posted "Noah's eyes," I had already concluded that the book was very obviously fraudulent. Nevertheless, when I read that bit about how "his eyes were different," it rang true.

Well, it turns out that Noah's "different eyes" are a legitimately ancient tradition, found in a fragment from the Book of Noah which has come down to us as part of the Enoch literature. (This is presumably Berger's source, since he is obviously familiar with the Book of Enoch.)

And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness.

And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. And he said unto him: 'I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels, and I fear that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth. And now, my father, I am here to petition thee and implore thee that thou mayest go to Enoch, our father, and learn from him the truth, for his dwelling-place is amongst the angels.'

Nothing seems more likely than that Noah's "bright" (blue/white) eyes should have been progressively exaggerated over time until they became eyes that lit up the whole house like the sun when he opened them.

With seven each of creatures clean,

of unclean two. And here is seen

how mercy doth prevail in Heaven:

Though man's an unclean creature, seven

the Lord permitted to embark

along with me into the ark.

My wife, my sons, my sons' three wives:

He saved their five-too-many lives!

Read the scriptures, fast and pray,

Go to church, and don't be gay.

Every time I go through the Bible fast (omitting the first comma from the couplet), I make new connections.

And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass (Gen. 41:32).

And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign (Ex. 4:8).

Prophetic dreams . . . the hand of Moses, "leprous as snow" . . . It reminds me that I still haven't resolved this:

I'm sure that "Hand of the King" reference in the Bidenette meme also has some significance. Last night, between dreaming and waking, the White Hand of Saruman came to mind and seemed to be connected to lots and lots of things in the contemporary world. I can't remember any of the links, though -- if there were ever any real links to begin with; it was a dream. Perhaps something will come back to me.

All that has come back to me since then is that the dream involved connecting Q with the White Hand -- because (I thought in the dream) the Hebrew letters Kaph and Qoph originally represented the two hands. I forget which was the right and which was the left. I thought of Kaph as a red hand -- the pierced palm of Christ -- and Qoph as a white one. There were lots and lots of other connections, too -- but, as Nebuchadnezzar said, "The thing is gone from me."

Kaph is the palm, but Qoph never represented a hand at all. It has been variously interpreted as a needle, a monkey, the sun on the horizon, the back of the head, and the nape of the neck. Neck, Bert!

From time to time, maybe once every five or six years, I go through the entire Bible as quickly as possible -- so quickly that I wouldn't really call it reading the Bible, but it serves to sort of refresh my memory and reinforce my mental concept of the Bible-as-a-whole. Since I now have an app ("Gospel Library" from CJCLDS) that will read the Scriptures to me aloud, I thought I'd try that this time around. It's much slower, of course, in terms of words per minute, but it allows me to spend more minutes a day "reading," so perhaps it will all balance out. Anyway, for the past few days, whenever I'm doing housework or anything else that doesn't engage my brain overmuch, the Bible is playing in the background. It's still in Genesis.

Today I was brewing some coffee and half-listening to Genesis, and I thought I heard this: "And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, he saw Cain, and with him four hundred men." And I thought, Wait, how could Jacob have seen Cain? Did it say Canaan? But it said "with him four hundred men," so it's obviously a person, not a place. I went over, paused the app, and checked what it was reading. Oh, of course.

And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came, and with him four hundred men (Gen. 33:1).

This counts as a synchronicity because of a recent post of mine that recounts a story of a 19th-century Mormon seeing Cain, and which also speculates that Cain may have been Esau's biological father.

On the road this morning, I found myself thinking about the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It's a work I've only read once, in translation (by Mark Musa, a translator whose Comedy did not earn my trust!), and that was a while back (2009). I guess what brought it to mind was recent speculations about the possible medium-term effects of the birdemic pecks. Although people don't usually put the Decameron in the post-apocalyptic genre, that's certainly where it belongs. The whole feel of the work, its Robinhoodish atmosphere of gay nihilism, is inseparable from its setting: a Europe which just lost a third of its population to the plague. A Steve Earle lyric came to mind.

When it all was over, the slate wiped clean with a touch,
There God stood, and he saw it was good,
And he said, "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust."

"God saw that it was good" reminded me of the meaning of the word Decameron -- "ten days," a word created by Boccaccio by analogy with Hexameron, "six days," a title used for various theological works on the six days of Creation.

I thought of the "ten days of darkness" the Q people had promised back at the beginning of the year.

Then I noticed a huge electronic billboard in front of me: a man making a kabuki "soy face" and holding some packages of frozen meat. Under it, the flashing words "買十送一哦！" -- "Buy ten, get one free!"

I'm not about to try to cobble these syncs into a prophecy. I'm just taking notes.

When it was decided that Adam needed a partner, God created the various beasts of the field and fowls of the air and brought them to him. Adam named them all, but no suitable partner was found. Finally God removed one of Adam's ribs and made it into a woman -- and Adam named her, too: "She shall be called Woman [ishshah], because she was taken out of Man [ish]" (Gen. 2:23).

Blue irises and white sclerae

This is from Mauricio Berger's Sealed Book of Mormon (Sealed Moses 4:3). Little things like this have a way of capturing my imagination.

And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.

In context, watcher refers to angels that were mating with human women, as recounted in the Book of Enoch and alluded to in Genesis 6. Noah's eyes were sufficiently "different" that his father, Lamech, feared he might not be fully human -- but of course all humans alive today are supposed to be the descendants of Noah, so "Noachian" eyes -- eyes of a type like those of the watchers, but unknown among antediluvian humans -- must be commonplace, perhaps even universal, among modern humans.

My first thought was that Noah must have had white sclerae. This trait is now so universal among humans that the sclera is commonly called the "white of the eye" -- but our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have black sclerae (darker than the iris), and so our distant ancestors may well have had all-dark eyes as well. Interestingly, bonobos have sclerae which, while not as white as our own, are lighter than the iris. Among gorillas and orangutans, sclera color varies from individual to individual, much like iris color in some human populations, and may be either lighter or darker than the iris.

Another obvious possibility is that Noah had "blue eyes" -- meaning blue irises. When we think of "eye color," we think of the iris, taking it for granted that the sclera is always white. Among monkeys and apes generally, though, it is sclera color that is variable, while irises are almost universally brown. I am open to correction by any primatologists among my readers, but I believe it is correct to say that (excluding albinos from consideration) no other monkey or ape has blue eyes; certain lemurs are our closest blue-eyed relatives, and blue eyes in lemurs are genetically different from those in humans and apparently evolved independently. It seems quite likely, then, that early humans were all brown-eyed, and that blue eyes appeared later.

If we are all descended from blue-eyed Noah, though, why do so few of us (8 to 10%) have blue eyes? Well, Noah was apparently a mutant, so we can assume that neither his wife nor any of his three daughters-in-law had any blue-eye genes. Since blue eyes are recessive, all of his children and grandchildren would have been brown-eyed. His great-grandchildren (assuming they were the product of cousin-marriages among his grandchildren) would have been 6.25% blue-eyed -- reasonably close to the modern percentage.

Thus far I have been trying to guess the nature of "Noachian" eyes by thinking of ways (some) human eyes differ from those of our nearest relatives, but we are also told that Noah's eyes were like those of a watcher. Are there any hints in old books as to what the watchers' eyes looked like? Nothing in the Bible or Book of Enoch comes to mind, but aren't the Greek gods -- heavenly beings that came down, mated with human women, and begat the "mighty men which are of old" -- likely the same beings as the watchers? And we know from Homer that Athena, at least, had distinctive eyes. Her stock epithet is γλαυκῶπις -- which could be calling her eyes either "bright, gleaming" or "blue-green, blue-gray." I do not believe Homer gives any of his human characters eyes of this sort. Athena's epithet leads us back to the two possibilities I have already discussed: Athena's eyes may have been blue or gray, or they may have been unusually "bright" because her sclerae were white rather than black.

⁂

Why bother writing a post like this, about what Noah's eyes might have been like if a certain obviously bogus book were actually true? Because -- and I am quite confident in saying this -- if I don't, no one else will!

God only knows, God makes his plan

The information's unavailable to the mortal man

. . .

Slip slidin' away, slip slidin' away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you're slip slidin' away

-- Paul Simon

Genesis 1:1 as a triangle

The fourth starhex number, 37 × 73 = 2701

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

The Helaman text arranged in a triangle

The fifth starhex number, 61 × 121 = 7381

A recent post by S. K. Orr (well, "recent" by my slow-thinking standards, anyway) has had the effect of eliciting some firm intuitions about prayer and getting me thinking about how best to understand them. The post is quite short and well worth reading in its entirety, but here are the essential bits.

For the past couple of years, I have daily passed a man on a bicycle on the way to work. . . . And for at least a year now, I have said a prayer for the bicyclist every time I pass him. As I near him, I lift one hand and usually whisper something like “Protect him, Father,” or “Bless him in his day, Father.” . . .

Sometimes in these quiet hours, I wonder what the bicyclist would say if he knew a stranger says a prayer for him every morning when briefly passing by. And I wonder if any stranger has ever prayed for me for no other reason than seeing me and feeling the nudge to do so. I like to think that someone, at some point, has done so. It is not for me to say whether or not I have been spared harm on a particular day because some unseen watcher lifted a hand and whispered some holy words on my behalf.

I am not a prayerful person, but this post convinced me that I need to be. Mr. Orr's daily prayers for the bicyclist are undeniably good and important; it remains only to understand why and how -- and, of course, to "go and do thou likewise."

The post touched on a lot of "problematic" issues regarding prayer and confirmed that, problematic or not, they are real and must be dealt with. Here I will lay out some of those problems, and the conclusions I have come to after dwelling on them for a few months.


God sometimes does, because he has been asked, things that he would not have done if he had not been asked.

Orr speculates that he may "have been spared harm on a particular day because some unseen watcher" prayed for him, and implies that his own prayers may have caused the bicyclist to be spared particular harms that would have befallen him otherwise -- that, despite God's goodness and his love for the bicyclist, he would not have protected him to the same degree had he not been specifically asked to do so.

I think we pretty much have to believe this. It hardly makes sense to ask God for specific things unless we believe that our asking affects the probability of those things happening -- unless we believe that we can sometimes change God's mind and persuade him to do something he would not otherwise have done.

But it seems strange that a loving God who is willing and able to help and protect us, and who "knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him," would make his help and protection conditional on being asked -- and asked by anybody, apparently, even a perfect stranger.

If God would help me only if I asked him to do so, that would be understandable in terms of his respecting my freedom and giving me ultimate control over my own life. One thinks of the famous line from the Apocalypse: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him" (Revelation 3:20) -- which presumably means that God will become active in a given person's life only if that person invites him to do so. If, on the other hand, God may also intervene in my life because someone else invited him to do so -- which is what the efficacy of petitionary prayer for a third party implies -- then it's as if he stands at the door, knocks, and waits for anyone, even a random passerby on the street, to open the door. If he doesn't need my permission to intervene in my life, why does he need anyone else's? If he is willing to come in without being invited in by the homeowner, why not without being invited by anyone at all?

(To be clear, I assume that God does often intervene without being asked, but we are here considering those cases in which petitionary prayer has made a difference -- cases in which God intervenes because he was asked and would not have done so otherwise.)


Even if we want the same things as yesterday, we still need to ask for them again today.

After hearing "Bless him this day, Father" every day for a couple of years, God surely must have figured out that Mr. Orr wants him to bless the cyclist every day, making further prayers of that sort unnecessary. But somehow, saying "Bless him this day" every day -- rather than saying "Bless him every day" once -- is the right way to do it. In most areas, repetitiveness tends to make things meaningless, but in the case of prayer -- despite the warnings against "vain repetitions" in some of the Gospels -- repetitiveness lies very close to its heart.

And just as it is right to pray for a particular day, it is right to pray for a particular person -- "Protect him, Father," not "Protect everyone who needs protecting."


God sometimes influences us to ask him for particular things.

"I wonder if any stranger has ever prayed for me for no other reason than seeing me and feeling the nudge to do so." The one doing the nudging in such a case would presumably be God himself -- which is pretty strange, if you think about it.

"Hey, that person could use some help. Why don't you ask me to help him?"

"Okay. Would you please help him?"

"Sure!"

Wouldn't that be a very strange conversation if it took place between two human beings? Why do we accept it as a normal way of interacting with God? It really makes sense only if the first person cannot act unless the second person asks him to. I hope it will be understood that no blasphemy is intended when I say that it reminds me of nothing so much as certain versions of the legend of Faust, where the devil can only do what Faust commands and is therefore always trying to persuade him to command particular things. In a Faustian context, that makes sense, but this is God we're talking about.


Prayer is expanded agency, serving as training for theosis.

It occurs to me that most of the philosophical problems associated with efficacious petitionary prayer are the same problems that are associated with ordinary human agency.

Why would God intervene in a person's life because I asked him to? If intervening is the best thing to do, God ought to do it whether I ask him to or not; if it is not the best thing to do, he ought not to do it even if asked. But we might with equal justice ask, Why would God allow me myself to intervene in anyone else's life? -- or, for that matter, to make decisions about my own life? If God knows best, why does he allow anything of importance to be decided by anyone else? Suppose I see a homeless man and, instead of asking God to bless him, I just give him a twenty. Will the effect of that gift ultimately be good or bad? Only God knows, and therefore (so the logic goes) God ought to be the one to decide, and ought accordingly either to force me to give or prevent me from doing so. But God respects our agency, or free will, and cares more about preserving that than he does about seeing to it that the Best Possible Thing is done.

In the gift of petitionary prayer, God has given us what we might think of as a sort of expanded agency, subject to "parental controls." If he granted each and every one of us unlimited magical power, so that we could literally do whatever we wanted, the result would obviously be disastrous, so he grants us direct and absolute control only over a few things -- but he also gives us the potential ability, through the medium of prayer, to "do" anything that God himself can do. We are far too ignorant, immature, and irresponsible to be given free rein with this kind of power, but we are encouraged to try out hand at it, as it were -- to ponder how we think the divine power might best be used, to put these proposals to God, and -- sometimes -- to see those proposals carried out.

By encouraging us to pray and ask him to do things, God is quite literally encouraging us to play God -- in the same sense in which little children play, and are encouraged to play, at being adults. To engage in petitionary prayer is to put oneself in God's position, decide what you think he ought to do, and then say to God, in effect, "If I were you, I'd so such-and-such." How jaw-droppingly presumptuous is that? And yet it's something God actively encourages, even commands, us to do. One thinks of the story (in Genesis 18) of Abraham, negotiating with God over the destruction of the cities of the plain: "That be far from thee to do after this manner . . . Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham seems to have been well aware that he was rushing in where angels fear to tread -- "Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes" -- but he proceeded nonetheless. And he was called the Friend of God.

All of this makes sense if we assume that the primary purpose of prayer -- as of everything else in this life -- is educational. And what we are being educated for is theosis, becoming Gods. That is why God expects us, through prayer, to take an interest and an active role in how the divine powers are used and even, as ridiculous as it may seem, to give him our requests and recommendations. Probably the vast majority of those recommendations will be rejected, or implemented only in part, but that's all part of the learning process. "The servant knoweth not what his lord doeth -- but I have called you friends" (John 15:15).

My fascination with the antediluvian world described in the first several chapters of Genesis goes back to my earliest childhood.

My mother used to refer to the refrigerator humorously as the "methuselator," and when I asked her why, she told me it was a reference to Methuselah, who was in the Bible and had lived for 969 years. Although I was only six or seven at the time, my reaction to this information was to start reading the Bible from the beginning, for the express purpose of finding out about Methuselah. After just a few chapters, I thought I had found him: "And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael." This surely was the name my mother had mentioned! I read on, prepared to learn all about him: ". . . and Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah." And that was it! Methusael was begotten, and begat, and nothing else was said about him -- in particular, not one word about his supposed longevity. I felt cheated, and my Bible-reading project came to an abrupt end.

Several months later, though, since everyone seemed to be insisting that the Bible did say Methuselah lived for 969 years, I decided to give it another try, thinking the narrative might return to him at some later point. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for in the very next chapter.

[21] And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

[22] And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

[23] And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

[24] And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

[25] And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech.

[26] And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:

[27] And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

Still not much in the way of biographical detail, but at least it included the magic number 969. I also noticed that, while this Methuselah was apparently a different person from the impostor Methusael, both their names and their genealogies were strangely similar. Here was another Enoch, another Lamech -- in fact, nearly every name in the Genesis 5 genealogy turned out to have its counterpart in Genesis 4. I became very interested in this, going so far as to learn how to write the names in Hebrew so as to better appreciate their similarity, and I often used to write out the two genealogies on scraps of paper and draw lines connecting each Cainite name to its Sethite echo. I took great satisfaction in knowing this "secret" about the Bible -- and never mind that I knew virtually nothing about the whole rest of the book! People would ask from time to time how my Bible-reading was coming along, and after a while I starting saying that I was in the middle of Exodus, because it seemed like I ought to be saying that by that time, but in fact I was just reading and rereading and picking apart the first 10 chapters of Genesis. Later, in my early teens, I branched out into apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature, gobbling up every far-fetched thing that had ever been written about, or attributed to, such characters as Adam, Noah, and particularly Enoch.

I say all this by way of a prologue, to explain how it is that I have given much more time and attention to the flyover chapters of the Old Testament -- "the begats" -- than any normal person would do.


Genesis 5 gives the line of descent from Adam to Noah, with details of how long each person lived before and after begetting his successor, as well as the total length of his life. Thus, there are three numbers given for each person. For example, we are told that "Adam lived 130 years, and begat a son . . . and called his name Seth. And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were 800 years: and he begat sons and daughters: And all the days that Adam lived were 930 years: and he died." I will summarize this as "Adam: 130 + 800 = 930."

Here are the numbers for the 10 generations from Adam to Noah, as given in Genesis 5:3-32 and 9:29.

• Adam: 130 + 800 = 930
• Seth: 105 + 807 = 912
• Enos: 90 + 815 = 905
• Cainan: 70 + 840 = 910
• Mahalaleel: 65 + 830 = 895
• Jared: 162 + 800 = 962
• Enoch: 65 + 300 = 365
• Methuselah: 187 + 782 = 969
• Lamech: 182 + 595 = 777
• Noah: 500 + 450 = 950

Obviously the thing that jumps out at the reader is the extreme longevity attributed to these people. With the exception of sponges and corals, we have no evidence of any animal of any species ever living even 600 years, to say nothing of 900 -- and this includes "biologically immortal" (non-aging) species such as some turtles, sharks, jellyfish, and sea urchins. Even if you don't age, the chance of escaping death by accident or disease every single year for 900-some consecutive years must be extremely low. Of the 10 people in our data set, 7 lived to be 900. A 70% chance of reaching 900 corresponds to an annual risk of death of about 1 in 2,500 -- which is approximately the current figure for British women in the 25-34 age range. (Men in the same age range have about double the female mortality rate.) In other words, only people who were biologically immortal and lived lives as safe as that of the average British woman of the 21st century, could be expected to live as long as the antediluvian patriarchs are reported to have lived. That level of safety seems extremely unrealistic for the ancient world, especially at a time when "the earth was filled with violence" (Genesis 6:11).

Note also that this extreme longevity was apparently accompanied by delayed sexual maturity, as no one is reported to have begotten a son before the age of 65.

• Ernest I: 57 + 17 = 74
• Johann Ernest IV: 39 + 32 = 71
• Francis Josias: 27 + 40 = 67
• Ernest Frederick: 26 + 50 = 76
• Francis: 34 + 22 = 56
• Ernest I: 35 + 25 = 60
• Albert: 22 + 20 = 42
• Edward VII: 24 + 45 = 69
• George V: 30 + 41 = 71
• George VI: 31 + 26 = 57

• Nurhaci: 33 + 34 = 67
• Hong Taiji: 46 + 5 = 51
• Shunzhi: 16 + 7 = 23
• Kangxi: 24 + 44 = 68
• Yongzheng: 33 + 24 = 57
• Qianlong: 49 + 39 = 88
• Jiaqing: 22 + 38 = 60
• Daoguang: 58 + 10 = 68
• Yixuan: 43 + 8 = 51
• Zaifeng: 23 + 45 = 68

We now have three different genealogies to look at -- two of which are incontestably real -- and from each of them we have extracted 30 numbers. Now, for real genealogies, we would expect the details of these numbers to be more-or-less random. Obviously, the large-scale patterns -- that people tend to beget sons in their 20s or 30s, and die in their 60s or 70s -- are not random, but the smaller-scale details -- for example, whether a person lives an odd or an even number of years -- should be. If a purported genealogy had, for example, an overwhelming preponderance of odd numbers, we could say with confidence that the numbers were wrong.

So let's look at the 30 numbers in George VI's genealogy. How many of them should be even? About half, or 15. In fact, that is almost exactly what we find: 16 even numbers and 14 odd. How many should be divisible by 3? About 10 -- and, sure enough, precisely 10 of them are divisible by 3. About 7.5 of them should be divisible by 4; in fact, 6 of them are. As we continue through various other factors, there are no surprises, nothing to indicate that this is anything other than a naturally-occurring set of numbers.

Now let's do the same sort of sanity-checking for the other genealogies, checking all the factors from 2 to 15, and plot the results. This is what we get:


So the Noah numbers are fake, an impossibly high percentage of them being divisible by 5 (70%, where we would expect only 20%) and by 10 (43%, where we would expect 10%).

The fact that it is 5 and 10 that are the offending factors suggests the possibility that these are approximate numbers. We do, when giving an approximate age, tend to round to the nearest multiple of 5. For example, we might say that someone was "about 45" or "about 50," but probably not "about 46." I have two reasons for rejecting this explanation. First, the data set includes numbers such as 807 and 182 which are obviously not approximate. Second, if you do the math and calculate in which year each event took place (something I have of course done many times), you will find that Methuselah died in the same year that the Flood took place -- suggesting either that he died in the Flood, or that the Flood was delayed until the last of Noah's righteous ancestors had died. Nowhere is it said that Methuselah died in the year of the Flood -- you have to figure it out by adding up the begats -- but the fact is there in the data and is clearly not a coincidence. "Adding up the begats" wouldn't work if the numbers were only approximate.


So where did the numbers come from? Well, it appears that someone just made them up. But what could motivate such an invention? Why would a legendary list of ancestors need numbers associated with it at all? The Cainite genealogy in Genesis 4 manages just fine without any need for bogus numbers. Were they just added for the sake of verisimilitude, to make the genealogy seem more concrete and real? But that suggests a level of conscious fraud which we would be reluctant to attribute to the writers of sacred books.

There are a few hints that the numbers themselves might be symbolic. For example, Enoch lives 365 years -- the same as the number of days in a year. Lamech (the son of Methuselah) lives for 777 years -- a fact which ties him to the other Lamech (the son of Methusael), who was the seventh from Adam and who is quoted as saying, "If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold." What these numbers meant to the ancients is by no means certain, but it seems likely that they meant something and were chosen for that reason.

(Incidentally, Joseph Smith includes a version of this genealogy in his Book of Moses. All the numbers are the same except for Enoch's. Where Genesis has 65 + 300 = 365, Smith gives 65 + 365 = 430. I have no idea what motivated this slight and seemingly irrelevant modification, but it is interesting to note that even in changing the numbers he preserved the obviously significant number 365.)