Genesis 5 and the Babylonian lists of early kings

Says Gen 5 traces ten generations from Adam to Noah. Each entry gives an age at a son’s birth, the remaining years and a total, and for all but Enoch “and then he died” (Gen 5:5).

Babylonian tradition also counted rulers before the Flood. In Rogers’s translation of Berossus, a Babylonian priest known through Josephus and Eusebius, the first king is Alorus, reigns are counted in sars (“A sar = 3,600 years”), and “Under him occurred the great flood. All these together make ten kings and one hundred and twenty sars.” King reads the Nippur copies of the Sumerian Dynastic List as beginning after the Flood; there Galumum rules nine hundred years and Barsalnunna twelve hundred. He equates two of Berossus’s kings with names in that list, Daonos with Etana and Ammenon with Enmenunna. Setting the list beside Gen 5, King writes, “The names in the two lists are not the same”, and places any echo “in the chronological and general setting”; whether such parallels suggest “cultural influence or independent origin” he leaves open. These are their views.

Uncertain Whether these lists bear on Gen 5 at all is open. Gen 5 records fathers who beget sons and die, not kings who reign; the likeness lies in a line of ten before the Flood and in very long spans of years. No dependence is claimed, no lean is taken on how the long lives are to be read, and this background does not fix the meaning of Gen 5.