The Genesis King Lists

Alice C. Linsley


James Ussher, the 17th century Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, developed a chronology using the Genesis genealogies to calculate the age of the Earth. His scheme is generally accepted by Young Earth Creationists who hold that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. One wonders how this can be when there is substantial evidence of kingdom building by rulers in the R1b Haplogroup as early as 10,000 years ago. Further, modern humans had already widely dispersed across the Earth by 80,000 years ago, long before the time of Noah (BC 2490-2415).

Ussher meant well, but he failed to understand that the so-called genealogies are not generational lists of the first humans on Earth, but rather they are king lists. Some of these "mighty men of old" ruled simultaneously, some ruled for short periods, and others ruled for longer than a generation (40 years).

Most of the rulers had two wives from whom were born two first born sons. Ussher failed to take this complication into consideration, which is another reason his chronology should not be used to determine the age of the Earth.

There are, in fact, various versions of the king lists, depending on the group of people being ruled. Some are traced through the cousin/niece bride who named her first-born son after her father. This name is often referred to as "the throne name." These pertain only to the proper heir of the ruler, that is ,the son born to his first wife. Usually this wife is a half sister, as was Sarah to Abraham.

Other lists provide the names of the first born sons of the half-sister wives. Examples include Lamech, Enoch, Esau and Joktan.

Some lists are telescopic to provide a wider picture whereby a famous ruler is shown to be the direct descendant of a great common ancestor. Noah and Eber are examples. Telescopic lists leave out some names.

The Genesis king lists are usually organized in depths of ten rulers.  For example, Genesis chapter 11 lists ten kings from Noah to Abraham. Genesis 4 and 5 attempts to place Noah as the tenth ruler from Adam, but analysis of the kinship pattern of Genesis 4-5 reveals that Adam is not the name that heads this list. The name is Enoch or Nok.

Now that the marriage pattern of these rulers has been identified, we see why the Genesis genealogies cannot be used to determine the age of the Earth. However, the marriage and ascendancy pattern of these archaic rulers foreshadows the marriage and ascendancy of Jesus, the Christ. The righteous rulers among them hoped for the resurrection of the body from the grave. In the archaic world, the ruler was regarded as the mediator between the Creator and the people. If God turned His face away from the ruler, the people suffered from want and war. If the ruler found favor with God, the people experienced abundance and peace. The divinely appointed ruler was expected to intercede for his people before God in life and in death. The ruler's resurrection meant that he could lead his people beyond the grave to immortality.

In Genesis 4-5 we read about rulers whose existence can be verified through archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, and molecular genetics (DNA studies). Clearly, these are not the first people on the Earth. THey are for the most part, rulers of the Late Holocene Wet Period and the Neolithic Period. 

The Genesis king lists cannot be used to verify the historicity of Adam and Eve. That is not the purpose of the king lists, nor the intention of the Genesis origin narratives. Further, Adam is represented in two distinct ways in the Bible: as the first Father created by God at the beginning of human existence, and as the founding father of the red people whose point of origin was the region of Lake Chad and the Upper Nile. 

The intermarriage of ruling houses

Using what we know about the kinship pattern of these rulers, we are able to reconstruct a picture of Cain and Seth's relationship to two ruling houses of ancient Africa: the House of Seti (Seth) and the House of Enoch.

Cain married Seth's sister, a daughter of Enoch. Seth married Cain's sister, a daughter of Enoch. In other words, Cain and Seth married half-sisters.  Cain and Seth and their half-sister brides were the offspring of Enoch by his two wives.  So the name that belongs at the head of the Genesis 4-5 king lists is not Adam, but Enoch. The African form of Enoch is Nok.

Using what we know about the marriage pattern of these rulers, it is also possible to trace the Genesis 4-5 lists back to Enoch's father-in-law, Seth or Seti. Cain's brother Seth was named by his mother, Enoch's cousin bride, after her father Seti the Nubian.

The Nubian Lineage of Kain and Seth          © 2010 Alice C. Linsley

Segment I:  The Cousin Bride’s Naming Prerogative and the Throne Name of Seth/Seti

The cousin bride’s first-born son rules in place of his maternal grandfather.  So Seth ruled over the territory of Seth the Elder who was Nubian/Kushite.

                  Seth/Seti (Nubian)

 ∆

|
                                    O   =   ∆  Enoch the Elder

                            |                                      

                             Seth the Younger  ∆   Gen. 5                                    

                                    

Segment II:  The Half-Sister Bride and the Throne Name of Enoch/Nok

The half-sister’s first-born son rules in place of his father. So Enosh ruled over the territory of his father Seth.

        Enoch/Nok  ∆  =  O  Half-sister bride

___|___

                        Kain   ∆         O  =   ∆   Seth   Gen. 5

                     |

                                                              ∆  Enosh/Enoch the Younger

Abraham's Kushite Ancestors

The connection of these rulers to ancient Kush is confirmed by Genesis 10:6-8 which tells us that Ham's son Kush had two first-born sons: Raamah and Nimrod, both Kushites.  Raamah's territory was in Arabia his two first-born sons were Dedan and Sheba.  Nimrod's territory was in the Tigris-Euphrates region. His first-born son by his cousin bride was Asshur the Younger, named after Shem's son, Asshur the Elder. 

The Kushites spread across the ancient Afro-Asiatic world. These rulers were great kingdom builders. Their royal lines continued to intermarry according to the pattern we have identified even after their languages morphed into Afro-Arabian (Dedanite) and Afro-Asiatic (Aramean).  Genesis 10:25 tells us that this division was evident in the time of Peleg, one of Eber's first-born sons. Eber's other first-born son was Joktan the Elder, after whom one of Abraham's sons by Keturah received his throne name (Gen. 25:1).

Genesis 25 calls Joktan the "father of Sheba and Dedan." Here the word "father" does not intended in the biological sense. In connecting Joktan, Sheba and Dedan, this writer recognizes that Joktan, Sheba, Dedan and Asshur were all Kushites.

Related reading: Was Noah Mesopotamian or Proto-Saharan?; The Marriage and Ascendancy Pattern of Abraham's Ancestors; The Age of the Earth and the Evidence of Human Occupation; The Spread of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion; Who Were the Kushites?; Nimrod, Afro-Asiatic Kingdom Builder; Peleg: Time of Division; The Migration of Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; Bishop Ussher Goofed; Decoding the Genesis King Lists

Comparing Cosmologies to Trace Origins

Hypostyle Hall of the main temple of Karnak aligned to the Milky Way

Alice C. Linsley


Using the kinship data presented in the king lists of Genesis 4, 5, 10, 11, 25 and 36, the pattern of intermarriage among Abraham's ruler-priest ancestors has been identified. (See The Marriage and Ascendancy Pattern of Abraham's People.)

The early Hebrew rulers had two wives who lived in separate settlements on a north-south axis. Abraham's half-sister wife Sarah resided in Hebron and Abraham's cousin wife lived to the south in Beersheba. This relates to the cosmology of the Horite and Sethite Hebrew who perceived of the Sun as the emblem of the High God. He rides the sun as his celestial boat or chariot, making his daily circuit from east to west. From the perspective of the person on earth, high noon marked the sacred center of the High God's journey. It is the time of no shadows to which James refers: "Every good and perfect gift descends from above, from The Father of lights with whom there is no change nor a shadow of variation." (James1:17)

Cosmology is the study of the origin and structure of the universe, its parts, elements, and laws. Among biblical populations, the arrangement of a home, a village, and a royal complex expressed the community's cosmological understanding. For example, the place of priority was at the sacred center. In the home, this was the hearth. In the palace, this was where the ruler was seated on his throne. In the temple, this was the inner sanctum. Temples were built with east-facing entrances because the Sun was the symbol of the Rising God whose light filled the temple each morning.The pillars of the temples were perceived to connect Heaven and Earth. The temporal sacred center was high noon.The spatial sacred center was the mountain top.

Comparing cosmologies can help to clarify the worldviews of the biblical populations, and can serve as a way to trace points of origin. This also relates to the celestial totems claimed by various Hebrew clans.

Related reading: Hebrew Rulers With Two Wives; Cosmologies of the Ancient Near East; The Wives' Settlements Marked the Territory's Borders

Derrida and Biblical Anthropology

Alice C. Linsley

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a North African, multi-lingual Jew who developed a strategy by which he critiqued Western thought in literature, myth and philosophy. He criticized conventional interpretations of texts, legends and myths.

He pioneered the movement known as Deconstructionism in the mid-1960s. In his analysis he employs these interesting descriptors: logocentrism, phallogocentrism, the metaphysics of presence, and ontotheology.

Logocentrism emphasizes the primacy of speech/debate in the Western philosophical tradition. This is a variation of "Phonocentrism," the belief that uttered sounds and speech are inherently superior to written language. Phonocentricists maintain that spoken language is the primary and most fundamental method of communication and writing is a derived method of capturing speech.

Phallogocentrism points to the tendency for the male version of the story to dominate in conventional interpretations.

Ontotheology was Derrida’s term for approaching “the center” to which we inevitably must return. Here we encounter Truth/Reality/God/Truth/Logos. Derrida said, “It would be possible to show that all the terms related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence, ... essence, existence, substance, subject, ... transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, god, man, and so forth.”

Deconstruction dismantles the underlying assumptions upon which a metaphysical argument is based. Derrida’s method involves exploration of contradictions, oppositions, and reversals, and represents dialectical reasoning with a binary framework. 

Derrida ascribes to objects a less substantial existence than the shadow they cast, or their trace. His reversals are a strategic intervention within the bounded Western philosophical system whereby he attempts to break out of that system.

Deconstruction's literary aspect involves finding hidden meanings in the text using imagination or “invention” (Derrida’s term). The philosophical aspect concerns the “metaphysics of presence." Here Derrida borrows from the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who maintained that Western philosophy has consistently granted “privilege” to presence itself. That is to say, something is because it can be, and something can be because it is. We might add that "something isn't" is also about metaphysical presence. Such a statement observes or marks negative space. Derrida argues that metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards. Metaphysics necessarily explores binary oppositions and reveals a hierarchy whereby one of the opposites is perceived to be superior in some way to the other.

 
While Derrida loved word play and poked fun at conventional interpretations, he was never far from Plato when speaking of an absolute or constant metaphysical presence. While language is unstable and meaning has reversals, Derrida demonstrated that these are often two sides of the same linguistic coin. In a sense, Derrida was bringing Western philosophy back to its more ancient Semitic roots. (The oldest known Semitic language is Ancient Akkadian, the language known to Abraham the Hebrew.) The early Hebrew would have recognized that the sacred center is where we find God. For them the sacred spatial center was the mountain top where God and man often communed, and the sacred temporal center was high noon, a time of no shadows (James 1:17). However, for Derrida the center is a function, not God. It is the place to which we must continually return to find the threads of meaning.

 
Derrida believed that Western philosophy had lost the dialect between the binary opposites, consistently granting privilege to one side and marginalizing or ignoring its binary opposite. Studying Western philosophy, one would have to agree. Aristotle has won the day, and Plato has been exiled from the picture. Unlike the Semitic way of thinking which is characterized by "both-and" reasoning, Western thought tends to be characterized by "either-or" reasoning. That is evident in the way Western Christians have been divided on the relationship of faith and works.

However, Derrida did not embrace relativism. He believed that there is a presence or trace that we may regard as fixed. In this, he draws on Plato’s thought. His reversals are a strategic intervention within a constipated Western philosophical system. As Derrida suggested: "Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition, and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes" (Metaphysics).

 
This reversal of the subordinated term of an opposition is no small aspect of deconstruction's strategy. Derrida's argument is that in examining a binary opposition and reversals, deconstruction brings to light traces of meaning that cannot be said to be present, but which have metaphysical existence. This is not a new idea or even a new approach to meaning. It is consistent with the mystical approaches of the Semitic peoples, and we must remember that Derrida was a North African Arabic-speaking Jew. In a real sense, Derrida’s contribution to Western Philosophy has been to re-introduce the Semitic interpretive approach to meaning.

The value of deconstruction for Biblical Anthropology is its insistence that details matter. Close reading is required to gain understanding. Deconstruction requires detailed reading of a text, parsing of terminology, and language “freeplay” if there is to be valuable criticism.

Deconstruction also involves paying attention to the subordinate voices, which in the Bible are the voices of women. One of Derrida's favorite terms was “supplementarity.” He was correct in his assertion that what is conceived as the marginal object does define the central object of consideration. The social structure of the early Hebrew cannot be understood without gaining a clear picture of the roles, authority, and contributions of Hebrew women. 

Derrida encouraged attention to reversals. These might be reversals of gender roles, reversals of numbers, or reversal of cardinal points.

For example, in 1 Kings 7:23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4:1-4 we find the association of the number one with north and the number three with south. Here we read that the altar in Solomon’s temple was to rest on 12 oxen: 3 facing north, 3 facing west, 3 facing south, and 3 facing east. We note that north heads the list, having the position of priority. Then comes west and then south, and finally east.

3↑ 3←3↓ 3→ 

Deconstruction uncovers an apparent system that assigned numbers and gender virtues to the north, south, east, and west. The number one is assigned to north, and north is associated with the heavens, God’s eternal throne.

When the number 3 is associated with south, fertility, productivity, and peace reign. It is that state of heaven coming down (the advent of God, Messiah's Incarnation). This is evident in the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. The city has twelve gates and sits on twelve foundation stones (Rev. 21:12-14). Three gates face east, three face north, three face south, and three face west. We may illustrate this as follows

3→ 3↑ 3↓ 3← Notice that the third position faces south.

Notice that there has been a reversal of directions when compared with the “bronze sea” in Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 7:23-26).

3↑ 3←3↓ 3→ 

What are we to make of this? Truely this is something to ponder.

 

After Abraham consulted the prophet (moreh) under the great oak at Mare, he headed south to Beersheba where he took his second wife, Keturah, his patrilineal cousin. Genesis 21:33 tells us that, “Abraham planted a tamar tree at Beersheba, and there he called on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God.” 

The tamar palm was a feminine symbol among Abraham’s people. It represented the female reproductive organ, and feminine virtues. The tamar palm was the feminine counterpart of the oak tree. The male prophet sat under the Oak at Mamre on an east-west axis, but Deborah sat under a tamar between Bethel and Ramah, on a north-south axis.

What are we to make of this? Again, we have something to ponder, and it appears to speak of something shaped like this +. 

Derrida showed great sensitivity to gender reversals such as this and found that they rendered meaning mostly unobserved by Western philosophers, theologians, and Bible commentators. Long before Derrida, people recognized a binary feature in the order of creation: male-female, light-dark, heaven-earth, etc. Derrida explored this extensively and noted that when a gender role reversal takes place n narratives, the "other" becomes the dominant voice. Normally, the dominant voice is that of the Male Principle, but when the reversal takes place, the Female Principle is in action. There are examples of this in the Bible. For Derrida these alternative interpretations were the rich outflow of deconstruction. 

Related reading: Divide Opinion as Derrida Did; Derrida's Hostility to Phonocentrism; Derrida's Style of Writing; Levi-Strauss and Derrida on Binary Oppositions; Gender Reversal and Sacred Mystery; Circumcision and Binary Distinctions; BIBLICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Orthodoxy Requires Binary Reasoning; Ethics Forum: Binary Reasoning Informs Christian Morality and Ethics