Frequently Asked Questions
Below are the questions this site is most often asked, answered in brief. Each answer links to the page where the argument is set out in full.
Cain and the people east of Eden
Was the Garden of Eden a real place?
Real, but on this site’s reading not a place in our world. Its exact site lies in the ancient world, the world of the garden, and it is not a place we can pin to a modern map. Genesis itself signals as much: one river flows out of Eden and divides into four that run off to separate lands, which no real river does; real rivers gather and join as they descend to the sea. Yet two of the four are named the Tigris and the Euphrates, names from our own world. We read the shared names as a signpost that the two worlds run in parallel, our rivers corresponding to, and named after, their counterparts in the world of the garden. And the parallel allows a modest inference: if Nod lay east of Eden’s rivers, then the land Cain entered in our world lies east of where our Tigris and Euphrates meet, in the Khuzestan plain and the Zagros foothills of south-west Iran, and that is where the map sets him. It is not a confident pinpoint, and we do not offer it as one.
Full argument: Cain and the Cainites →
Who was Cain’s wife?
One of the people of our world, not a daughter of Adam and Eve. Genesis 4 never mentions a sister, and Cain’s fear that “whoever finds me will kill me” assumes a populated world. On this site’s account, Cain crossed into our world around 5000 BC and married among people who had received God’s image a century or so earlier. He came from the world of the garden, where lives ran past nine hundred years; she was born in ours, where they do not.
Full argument: Who Were the People Cain Met? →
What was the mark of Cain?
Genesis withholds what the mark was and gives only its purpose: “so that no one who found him would kill him” (Genesis 4:15). With Abel dead and Seth unborn, the only people related to Cain were his parents; a protective mark makes sense only if the world Cain was entering held strangers, real enough and dangerous enough to need warding off.
Full argument: Who Were the People Cain Met? →
Were there humans before Adam and Eve?
It depends on which sense of “human” you mean. Beings with fully human bodies, yes: they had lived in our world for tens of thousands of years before Adam. Humans in God’s image, no: on this site’s proposal the image was bestowed around 5100 BC, at the time of Adam’s sin, when God gave a soul, in a single moment, to every being with a human body then alive. So by the time Cain crossed into our world, everyone he could meet, marry, or fear was a human in God’s image, as every person has been since.
Full argument: Who Were the People Cain Met? →
The long lifespans
Are the long lifespans in Genesis literal or symbolic?
The site reads them as real figures. Genesis 5 does the arithmetic itself, giving each man’s age at fathering, then the years he lived afterwards, then the total, which is how a text treats ordinary numbers. Outside the genealogies the narrative keeps using them: standing before Pharaoh, Jacob says his years “do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers” (Genesis 47:9). Genesis 6:3 announces that human life will be cut to a hundred and twenty years, and that is what then happens. And the ages have a shape. Plotted out, they fall steeply after the flood, then more gently each generation, levelling off at the seventy or eighty years people still live. A writer choosing numbers for their symbolism chooses each one for what it means. Nothing in that would produce a series sliding down to the span we actually have.
Full argument: Why Did They Live 900 Years? →
Why did the first humans live so long?
Taking the numbers as real, this site’s answer is that up until the time of the flood, all Adam’s descendants apart from Cain’s line lived in a different world to ours. Genesis curses the ground twice, for Adam in Genesis 3 and for Cain in Genesis 4, and this site reads those as two places rather than one. The long lives of Genesis 5 belong to the first. Ours carries both curses, and life in it is shorter. After the flood the ages fall steeply, then more gently each generation, through Abraham at 175 and Isaac at 180 to Moses at 120, levelling off at the seventy or eighty years people still live.
Full argument: Why Did They Live 900 Years? →
Dating Adam
How old is the earth according to the Bible?
The genealogies date Adam, not the earth. What Genesis 5 and 11 supply is the age of each man when the next in line was born, which is exactly what a timeline needs and an odd thing to record otherwise. Add those figures and work back from dates fixed in secular history, and you reach Adam’s creation at approximately 5159 BC. Gaps in the list would not change that: if Seth was 205 when Enosh was born, 205 years separate them whether Enosh was son or grandson. But none of this dates the earth, and this site makes no young-earth claim. The timeline behind the map runs back to the beginning of the universe.
Full argument: How We Date Adam →
When was Adam created?
Approximately 5159 BC on this site’s reckoning, reached by counting back from a date historians widely agree on. The Kurkh Monolith names Ahab at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC, fixed by the Assyrian Eponym Canon and a solar eclipse in 763 BC. The reign lengths in Kings then give Solomon’s fourth year at 966 BC, the Exodus at about 1266 BC, and Abraham’s birth at about 1771 BC. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 reach Adam from there.
Full argument: How We Date Adam →
The timeline from Adam to Jesus
How many years from Adam to Jesus?
A little over 5,150 years, on this site’s chronology. The count is anchored in secular history: the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC, fixed by the Assyrian Eponym Canon, gives Solomon’s fourth year at 966 BC; the Exodus follows at about 1266 BC and Abraham’s birth at about 1771 BC; and the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, taken with the Septuagint’s fathering ages, run back nineteen generations from Abraham to Adam’s creation at approximately 5159 BC. That is about 1,550 years earlier than timelines built on the Hebrew Masoretic numbers, and the choice between those two sets of figures is argued, not assumed.
Full argument: Calculating the Timeline’s Key Dates →
Why do the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible give different ages in Genesis?
In the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic Text differ, usually by exactly 100 years in a patriarch’s age at fathering his son, and the differences compound: around 1,550 years in the date of Adam’s creation, and around 950 years in the date of the flood. One tradition altered the other’s figures, and the question is which. This site argues the Hebrew text was shortened rather than the Greek inflated, for three reasons. Nahor’s age drops by only 50 years (79 in the Septuagint’s best manuscripts, against the Hebrew’s 29) where every other change is 100, which is exactly what a deflating scribe must do when subtracting 100 would go negative. Jared, Methuselah and Lamech are left untouched in both traditions, because shortening their ages would have made Methuselah or Lamech outlive the flood. And the early external witnesses, Demetrius the Chronographer, Eupolemus, Pseudo-Philo and Josephus, reflect the Septuagint’s figures rather than the Masoretic ones.
Full argument: Calculating the Timeline’s Key Dates →
The flood
When was Noah’s flood?
About 2900 BC on this site’s reckoning; the calculated figure is 2903 BC. That places the flood within the Early Dynastic period of Sumer, and it sets up a run of alignments: Peleg’s lifetime spans roughly 2372 to 2033 BC, within which Ur-Nammu built his great ziggurats, and Sumerian collapsed as a living language when Ur fell around 2004 BC. The date rests on the Septuagint’s genealogy figures; choosing the Hebrew Masoretic numbers instead would shift the flood by about 950 years.
Full argument: Calculating the Timeline’s Key Dates →
Was Noah’s flood global or local?
On this site’s reading, neither, because both assume the flood happened in our world. Genesis says the earth itself was destroyed: “I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth” (Genesis 6:13). That is a strange thing to say about our own world, which plainly carried on, and a natural thing to say about a world that no longer exists. We propose the flood drowned the ancient world, the world of Adam through Noah, whole and entire, while ours was never destroyed. A global flood of our world runs hard against geology and the spread of animals; a local flood makes the ark pointless, since the animals would have survived anyway. Two worlds rather than one lets the words of Genesis stand as written. It is a reading, not a proof, and the site says so plainly.
Full argument: The Flood That Ended a World →
Babel and the first language
Was the Tower of Babel real?
This site reads it as a real event late in the third millennium BC, on a plain in Shinar, in the land we know as Sumer. Ur-Nammu was raising the greatest ziggurats Mesopotamia had seen, from 2112 to 2094 BC, at about the time and place the account describes; Genesis 10:25 says the earth was divided in the days of Peleg, whose lifetime on this timeline spans roughly 2372 to 2033 BC; and when Ur fell around 2004 BC, Sumerian abruptly died as a living language, in what the historian Georges Roux calls a linguistic revolution. This is offered as an exercise in plausibility rather than proof: a case that Genesis 11, read as history, fits the ancient world we actually find.
Full argument: Was Sumerian the Language of Babel? →
What language did they speak at Babel?
We propose it was Sumerian. On this site’s reading the “one language” of Genesis 11 was carried into our world from the ancient world, by Cain around 5000 BC and by Noah’s family around 2900 BC, and it can be named in our own history. Sumerian is the right language in the right place at the right time: ziggurats rise where and when the account describes; the one ancient parallel to the story, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, is Sumerian; the oldest flood accounts are Sumerian; and Sumerian itself is an isolate with no known relatives and no descendants, standing exposed on an open plain, which is exactly the kind of anomaly this reading predicts. This does not mean every modern language descends from Babel: on this site’s account, our world was already full of peoples and languages long before it. It is offered as plausibility, not proof.
Full argument: Was Sumerian the Language of Babel? →
The numbers of the exodus
How many Israelites left Egypt in the exodus?
Numbers records 603,550 fighting men. Taken as a head-count of individuals, that implies a nation of two million or more, a column stretching some 400 kilometres if it marched ten abreast. We propose it was never a head-count: the figures count commands rather than men. Exodus 18 has Moses appoint leaders over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, and the register entered each command at its nominal size, so that a leader of a thousand was entered as a thousand even if the men actually under him numbered eighty. Ancient records show the same gap between title and strength: an Alalakh census assigns as few as three men to a “commander of ten”. That is how a far smaller army comes to be written down as 603,550. The text itself seems to know the difference: twenty-two of the twenty-four tribal totals end in round hundreds, while the separate count of firstborn by name comes out at the jagged 22,273.