Before the Flood
The Scattering
The Patriarchs
The Flood

Hover or tap any life on the chart below to read who they were, what their name means, how long they lived, and whose lives their own overlapped. Or press Highlight the chain of memory to see how few living hands carried the story from Adam to Abraham.

A note on the chronology — how these numbers were reached, and where faithful students differ

The lengths of these lives are not estimates. They are read directly from Genesis 5 and 11, which give, for each man in the line, the age at which he fathered the next and the total years of his life. From those two figures every birth and death year on this chart is calculated. The relative positions — the overlaps, the gaps, the moment Methuselah dies — are therefore as exact as the text itself. Only the absolute dates (the circa BC figures) are approximate.

#### Anno Mundi, not a fixed BC date

The chart counts years from Creation (Anno Mundi, “in the year of the world”), because that is what the text actually supplies — relative spans, not calendar dates. The companion Old Testament Timeline places Creation around 4000 BC and the Flood around 2350 BC in the Ussher-style framework, read with a deliberate “circa,” and we follow the same restraint here. One caution when setting the two side by side: that timeline dates the patriarchs by reckoning backward from the Exodus (1446 BC), which places Abraham a century or two earlier than a count anchored at Creation would. In this early stretch the two honest methods simply diverge — which is exactly why every absolute date here wears a “circa,” while the spans and overlaps, drawn straight from the text, do not.

#### Why three text traditions disagree

The Hebrew Masoretic Text (which the NASB follows) is used here. The Greek Septuagint generally adds about a hundred years to many of the fathering-ages, which stretches the span from Creation to Abraham by well over a thousand years; the Samaritan Pentateuch differs again. The Septuagint also inserts a second Cainan between Arpachshad and Shelah — the very name that appears in Luke’s genealogy of Christ (Luke 3:36), which is worth weighing rather than waving away. A faithful chart names the difficulty instead of hiding it; a future version of this page may let you switch traditions and watch the timeline stretch.

#### Was Noah alive when Abraham was born?

On the figures used here, Noah dies just two years before Abraham is born — they miss each other. But this depends on a real question: Genesis 11:26 says Terah was seventy when he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran, yet Acts 7:4 (with Genesis 11:32 and 12:4) implies Abram was born when Terah was a hundred and thirty. We follow the Acts reading, as the Old Testament Timeline does. On the other reading, Abram is born earlier — and Noah’s life would overlap his. The chart marks the figure; the reader may weigh the text.

#### Gaps, or no gaps?

Some hold that these genealogies are complete and continuous, yielding a strict chronology; others hold that Hebrew genealogies can skip generations (“X fathered Y” sometimes meaning a later descendant), so the list need not be read as an unbroken clock. Scripture does not settle the question for us in so many words. The chart presents the figures plainly; it does not insist they forbid every gap.