Genesis Chapter 5
We certainly believe that the account found in the text from Genesis 2:4 through to the end of chapter 4 is a true account, and represents historical events, but that it is a detailed parable of those events, and not a journalistic chronicle. It is a representation of the account of the creation of the Adamic man which capped off the creative process of Yahweh God described in Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 through 28, and subsequent events leading up to the death of Abel, and then the subsequent birth of Seth here in Genesis chapter 5.
There were certainly not multiple creations of Adamic man. Rather, Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 5:1 converge, and the narrative which proceeds from here is much closer to being a historical chronicle, although it is written in a very concise manner.
Genesis 5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
The same word for "man" which is found in Genesis 1:26-28 was also rendered as "Adam" by the King James translators here in Genesis chapter 5 and elsewhere, but it is the exact same form of the same Hebrew word adam in both places. Therefore it is also evident that the descendants of Cain do not qualify for the designation of adam, evidently because they were bastards, a corruption of angel-kind and adam-kind which had occurred once again in Genesis Chapter 6.
It is evident that the first laws of the Bible are "kind after kind" and "everything after its kind", and Cain is the first violation of that law recorded in Genesis itself. It is with the descendants of Seth that "men began to call upon the name of Yahweh" (Genesis 4:26), and therefore it is also evident that comparatively, the nature of Cain's descendants precludes them from seeking after God, and only after material things.
It is explicitly mentioned of Seth at the end of Genesis Chapter 4, that he was a replacement for Abel. Here it is mentioned in Genesis 5:3 that Seth is after the image and likeness of Adam. Therefore from these expressions we can note not only the importance of racial homogeneity, but also observe that Cain did not meet the specifications. Cain was never a candidate for Adam's inheritance, since Seth was a replacement for Abel. Arguments that Cain was disqualified for murdering Abel are disingenuous, because even if that were true, Seth would have been a replacement for Cain, and not Abel. So Cain could not have been a legitimate heir in the first place.
Genesis 5:22: Enoch walked with God. The apocryphal Book of Enoch as we know it was certainly not written by Enoch in its entirety, and some of it has very likely been corrupted, yet parts of it are certainly very ancient, and those parts are quoted in the gospels directly by both Jude and Peter, and often alluded to in the letters of Paul and elsewhere. Surely the apostles considered at least a core portion of what we now know as the Book of Enoch to be Scriptural. Those very parts shed much light on the events described in Genesis 3 and in Genesis 6. Much of this is described in The Problem With Genesis 6:1-4, found here at Christogenea.org.
The ages of the patriarchs in Genesis chapter 5 and later, and especially most of their ages when they had sired their firstborn sons, from which we may reckon a chronology, had at an early time been corrupted in the Jewish copies of Scripture which had ultimately been the source for the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew text upon which the Old Testament published in most modern Bibles has been translated.
This is apparent when comparing the writings of Flavius Josephus to the Greek text of Genesis in the Septuagint, as those two sources mostly agree, and are contrary to the Masoretic Text. So here at Christogenea we have developed our Genesis Chronology based on the text of the Septuagint, and it is very agreeable to ancient history known from archaeological inscriptions, and to subsequent Scriptures, whereas the chronology which may be determined from the Masoretic text is not agreeable at all. However while we have not provided a comparison here, we do have a comparison in charts formulated by Clifton Emahiser, and presented in his article, Patriarchal Chronology. There are several charts presented there which demonstrate the differences in the two chronologies, and their consequences.
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