© Charles Chandler

 

Table 1 shows the estimated birthdates for each Patriarch, along with his age when he fathered the next one in line. The "Gen." column shows the ages given in Genesis, Adam through Noah coming from Genesis 5, and Shem through Terah coming from Genesis 11:10-26. The latter gives realistic ages for men to be having children, so they're taken at face value (shown as grey ages in Table 1), and the birthdates were found just by counting backwards from Abraham being born in 1420 bce, as derived in the article on The Historicity of the Patriarchs. Before Arpachshad, the ages of the fathers were first estimated with 30 years per generation, and then fine-tuned to synchronize with secular records. Specifically, Enosh's birthdate was set at 2030 bce, explained later in this article, and Shem's at 1770 bce, for reasons given in the article on Between Adam & Abraham. Between Enosh & Shem, the birthdates were simply interpolated, which worked out to 32.5 years per generation, which is realistic, and close to the average of 31.4 years per generation for Arpachshad through Nahor.