Read with Me
Genesis 11:10-26 (HCSB)
These are the family records of Shem. Shem lived 100 years and fathered Arpachshad two years after the flood. After he fathered Arpachshad, Shem lived 500 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Arpachshad lived 35 years and fathered Shelah. After he fathered Shelah, Arpachshad lived 403 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Shelah lived 30 years and fathered Eber. After he fathered Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Eber lived 34 years and fathered Peleg. After he fathered Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Peleg lived 30 years and fathered Reu. After he fathered Reu, Peleg lived 209 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Reu lived 32 years and fathered Serug. After he fathered Serug, Reu lived 207 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Serug lived 30 years and fathered Nahor. After he fathered Nahor, Serug lived 200 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Nahor lived 29 years and fathered Terah. After he fathered Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and fathered other sons and daughters. Terah lived 70 years and fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
Listen with Me
After giving a general account in Genesis 10 of the descendants of all three of the sons of Noah and of their spread across the globe, and after revealing why they spread out in Genesis 11:1-9, Moses now turns his focus to the line leading directly from Noah’s son, Shem, to Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew nation.
As in the other genealogies in Genesis, precise ages are given for father when the son that carries the lineage forward was born as well as for the total number of years that person in the lineage lived. The son listed as next in line for each generation is not necessarily the firstborn son, he is just the son through whose line Abraham was born.
It is also noticeable that the lifespans of the people listed in the genealogies began to decrease markedly after the flood. Whereas Noah lived for 350 years after the flood, a total of 950 years (Genesis 9:28-29), Shem lived for 500 years after the flood (he was still alive at the time that Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers), for a total of only 600 years. After him, total lifespans dropped to less than 500 years in the very next generation, and by the time of Abraham, the maximum lifespan was only slightly more than 200 years. This decrease in lifespans, if plotted on a graph, falls onto a decay curve that is numerically consistent.
Many scholars have tried to determine the cause of the decrease in lifespans and have posited increased violence or an increase in diseases. But no explanation is found in the text itself – just the cold, hard fact that the long lives of those who lived before the flood rapidly faded away in the post-flood world.
It is safe to say that the post-flood world was far different from the world before it was completely destroyed and reconfigured during the flood. Not only was the climate far different, with the far northern and southern regions experiencing the lingering cold and greatly increased snowpack that we now call an “Ice Age”, but after the scattering from Babel, people exited in smaller, isolated groups that had to rebuild societal and technological structures. So, life became much harsher than the cooperative lifestyle that was lived in the preflood world, or even in the post-flood, pre-Babel world.
In addition, the inbreeding that resulted from people living in severely isolated groups caused some genetic problems to move from recessive to dominant within the various people groups, and some vulnerabilities toward certain diseases arose within groups. This would also result in increasingly shorter lifespans as time went on, with some groups experiencing this shortening of lifespan at a more rapid pace than others.
Pray with Me
Father, with so many people believing in billions of years and extremely slow changes over vast amounts of time, it is hard to imagine how quickly these kinds of changes can happen, even over the course of just a few hundred years. But we can see that that is the case even today if we simply compare what we can do, how we live, and even how long we live, to the 1500’s. And I imagine that, with the isolated groups and the harsh post-flood conditions that would have impacted many generations, those changes would be accelerated even further. But even with all that going on, this genealogical record demonstrates clearly that You were moving Your plan for the redemption of mankind forward, one person, one generation at a time, waiting for the right person to be born so that You could reveal Yourself to him. Thank You, Lord, for helping us to see and understand. Amen.