How long after Adam and Eve was the law of Moses given?

Answer 1

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The first books of The Bible give us very detailed information about exactly how long each of the ancestral figures lived from Joshua all the way back to Adam. We can list the people back from Moses to Adam, count the years assigned to each biblical ancestor, and also check to ensure that the biblical lifespans were the result of natural chance, or were arrived at by other means.

After the Patriarchs, the great Hebrew leaders were Joseph, Levi, Moses and Joshua. The priestly tribe of Levites was said to be descended from Levi, great grandfather of Moses who, along with Joshua, fulfilled the covenant that God gave to the Patriarchs. We find a fascination with elegant series and the number 17 in their lives.

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Joshua

110

5x5 + 5x17

Moses

120

7x5 + 5x17

Levi

137

7x5 + 6x17

Joseph

110

5x5 + 5x17

In each case, the age assigned to these leaders can be broken down to the sum of two numbers, the first a multiple of 5 (either 7x5 or 5x5), and the second a multiple of 17 (either 6x17 or 5x17). Patterns do exist in random sets of numbers, but not such consistent and elegant patterns. If these great Israelite leaders could have died at any random age between 100 and 150 years, there would be less than 1 chance in 6 million that these four persons would have died at exactly these ages, even accepting that humans could live to such improbably great ages. We could greatly reduce the odds by allowing, for example, Levi to die at either 137, 120 or 110 years, and so on, but the odds would remain so high as to rule out chance. So, these ages were assigned by numerology, not nature, and must not be regarded as historical information. The lifespans of Joseph and Joshua are shown in order to show how elegant the biblical numerology was, but they are not in the ancestry of Moses.

We saw that 17 was an important number in early Hebrew numerology, and this continues with the Patriarchs, the most important Old Testament characters, and they share a very special pattern befitting their roles. If each of the Patriarchs could, by chance, have died in any year over a range of, say, one hundred years, there would be just one chance in one million that all three of them would have died on exactly the right year for the following configuration to work in the way it does:

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Jacob

147

(7x7) x 3

Isaac

180

(6x6) x 5

Abraham

175

(5x5) x 7

Examining these supposed lifespans, we find that:

• Each lifespan involves a perfect square (7, 6 and 5) in a numeric series,
• The third factor also forms a series (3, 5, 7)
• In each case the sum of the factors is 17.

We can then look at each of the remaining ancestors, back to Adam:

Name

Lifespan

Pattern

Terah

205

7x5 + 10x17

Nahor

148

7x9 + 5x17

Serug

230

12x5 + 10x17

Reu

239

7x5 + 12x17

Peleg

239

7x5 + 12x17

Eber

464

7x8 + 24x17

Shelah

433

7x6 + 23x17

Arphaxad

438

5x6 + 24x17

Shem

600Note 1

Noah

950

13x9 + 49x17 [7x7x17]

Lamech

777

7x9 + 42x17 [7x6x17]

Methuselah

969

Note 2

Enoch

962

Note 2

Jared

895

Note 2

Mahalalel

895

5x9 + 50x17

Cainan

910

6x10 + 50x17

Enos

905

8x9 + 49x17

Seth

912

5x9 + 51x17

Adam

930

7x9 + 51x17 [3x17x17]

Note 1: Shem is a special case, because he became a father at 100 and died at exactly 600 years. This simple combination is just as unlikely to result from numerology as from nature. It may be that in the course of transcription, the original values became lost, and the values of 100 and 600 were substituted after the original meanings of the patterns were lost.

Note 2: Methuselah is special because he was the Bible's oldest living human and because there is a different pattern in his life: he became a father at 187 (11x17) and died at 969 (57x17). There is only 1 chance in 289 that the oldest living man would become a father at a multiple of 17 and then die at a multiple of 17 years. The patterns for Jared and Enoch have not been decoded at this stage, but it is likely that another, quite special pattern was shared by Methuselah, his father and grandfather.

To say how long Moses lived after Adam, we add, not their lifespans, but the ages at which each person in the Old Testament genealogy became a father. While there is adequate detail in the Bible to list the ages of the biblical ancestors, there are important gaps and ambiguities in the ages at which fatherhood occurred. Moreover, the Bible often indicates that its characters became fathers long after people of the time would have already died, a physical impossibility if we reject the biblical ages. If these were real, historical people, they no doubt lived to an average of around fifty years, and probably became fathers by the time they were twenty years old.

From the creation of Adam to the death of Moses is listed in the Bible as around 2600 years. If we accept that the biblical ages were assigned by numerology, not nature and assign 20 years from each generation to the next, then only around 550 years had actually passed, unless we add additional generations.

Answer 2

According to tradition, the Law of Moses (the Torah) was given 2448 years after the Creation.