pgwolv
Puritan Board Freshman
I recently finished The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, which was helpful in undoing some of the bias with which I had been educated while studying Genetics.
In Appendix II, titled "Genesis 11 and the Date of the Flood," the authors argue that Genesis 11 need not be interpreted as a strict chronology. One of the lines of argument is as follows:
In Appendix II, titled "Genesis 11 and the Date of the Flood," the authors argue that Genesis 11 need not be interpreted as a strict chronology. One of the lines of argument is as follows:
My questions are:(8) The Term “Begat” Sometimes Refers to Ancestral Relationships
Such terms as “begat” and “the son of,” which in English imply a father-son relationship, sometimes have a much wider connotation in the Bible. In Mat 1:8, we read that “Joram begat Uzziah,” but three generations are omitted. In 1Ch 26:24, we are told that “Shebuel the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, was ruler over the treasures” in the days of David. Here we have 400 years of generations skipped over between Shebuel and Gershom. But the most interesting case of all, in our opinion, is to be found in Exo 6:20. Here we read that “Amram took him Jochebed his father’s sister to wife; and she bare him Aaron and Moses: and the years of the life of Amram were a hundred and thirty and seven years.” Now anyone reading this statement as it stands by itself would be forced to conclude that Aaron and Moses were the actual sons of Amram and Jochebed; for the text clearly states that “she bare him Aaron and Moses,” and immediately following this we are given the number of the years that Amram lived, in a manner strikingly similar to that of the genealogy of Genesis 5. So it is with profound amazement that we turn to Num 3:17-19, Num 3:27-28, and discover that in the days of Moses, “the family of the Amramites,” together with the families of Amram’s three brothers (Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel), numbered 8,600! Unless we are willing to grant that the first cousins of Moses and Aaron had over 8,500 living male offspring, we must admit that Amram was an ancestor of Moses and Aaron, separated from them by a span of 300 years! In the light of this, it is significant that the names of the actual parents of Moses and Aaron are not recorded in the narrative of Exo 2:1-10.
- Has someone else argued for this gap between Amram and Moses, or is it unique to the authors?
- Is it exegetically possible to interpret Exo 6:20 in such a way?