way. The statement that Shem begat Arphaxad two years after the Flood, and that Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad 500 years, means according to him that the family of Arphaxad began two years after the Flood, but remained for 500 years in Shem's family; the family of Shem therefore lasted all this time, till 502 years after the Flood it separated. I do not quote these suggestions because I believe them to be exegetically admissible, but only in order to show you that some Roman Catholic theologians do not think themselves bound by the narrative in Genesis to believe that the patriarchs reached an age of several hundred years. We must remember that the Holy Scriptures are reverenced in the Catholic Church as a record of revelation and not as a historical record, and if we may, I think unhesitatingly, assume that the question of the duration of each patriarch's life is in no way directly and necessarily connected with the religious truths of the Bible, and that from a religious point of view it is quite immaterial whether Shem lived 100 years or 500. We may, therefore, I think, assert without prejudice to the true doctrine of inspiration, that the author of Genesis has in the chapters in question correctly recorded what he found in tradition concerning the ancestors of his people; but that it need not be assumed that this tradition is strictly historical.2

Just as it has been urged that the lifetime of individuals was too long, it has often been asserted that the period which is said by the Old Testament

1 Annales de Philosophie chrétienne, 6 série, t. 5 (t. 85, 1873), p. 28. 2 Vol. i. p. 15.

to have elapsed between the creation of man and the birth of our Lord is too short. As the question of the antiquity of the human race has come very much to the front in recent geological inquiries, I cannot avoid a detailed discussion of the subject; I will begin with a few remarks on the chronology of the Old Testament in general.

With the exception of the Book of Maccabees, the Old Testament, as we know, has no date. It would have been easy to reckon the years from the exodus, or later, from the founding of the monarchy, but this never became the custom with the Old Testament writers, and we are therefore obliged to reconstruct the Old Testament chronology from the separate dates which they give us at intervals. In doing this I make use of the usual reckoning according to the years before the birth of our Lord.

In order to have a certain and undisputed basis to go upon, I will begin with Cyrus. He conquered Babylon in 537, and in the following year, that is 536, he restored the Jews to their own country; we need not notice other versions of this date, as the differences are very slight. The Babylonian rule over the Jews lasted seventy years, therefore it began in 606. This was the third year of the reign of Joachim, king of Judah. We have many chronological data in the Books of Kings for the next preceding centuries, as the length of the reign of each king of Judah or Israel is given. There is some difficulty in reckoning up these separate dates,' but I need not enter into this, as it is a question of at most a few decades. We may put

1 T. R. Tiele, Chronologie des A. T. p. 58. Bremen, 1859

the building of Solomon's temple in round numbers in the year 1000. It is said in the First Book of Kings vi. 1 that the building of the temple was begun in the year 480 after the exodus; therefore in round numbers the exodus must have occurred about the year 1500. Further, it is said in Ex. xii. 40 that the Israelites remained in Egypt 430 years; therefore Jacob and his sons must have gone down into Egypt about 1900. The length of time which elapsed between the Deluge and the beginning of the sojourn in Egypt may be gathered from Genesis. In the eleventh chapter we find a genealogical and chronological table, which goes from Shem, Noah's son, to Abraham: Arphaxad the son of Shem was born two years after the Deluge; Arphaxad was thirty-five years old when his son Salah was born, who was thirty years old when he begat his son Eber, etc. By adding up these figures we find that Terah, Abraham's father, was born 222 years after the Deluge. Of Terah, Genesis says (chap. xi. 26) that he was seventy years old when he begat Abraham, Nahor, and Haran. Of course the three sons were not begotten in the seventieth year of their father, but only the eldest of them. According to some, this was the one first mentioned, that is, Abraham; according to others, he is named first, not because he is the eldest, but because he is the most important for the history which follows: so that the date of his birth is not given here; but according to Gen. xii. 4 and Acts vii. 1, it is said to have occurred in the 130th year of his father's life.1 Therefore, according to one computation, Abraham was born 292

1 Cf. Tiele, Op. cit. p. 28.

years after the Deluge, according to the other 352. Isaac was born in Abraham's hundredth year, and Jacob in Isaac's sixtieth; the latter was 130 years old when he went down into Egypt; therefore there were between the Deluge and the going down into Egypt either 582 or 642 years, and the Deluge must have occurred between 2500 and 2600 B.C. In the fifth chapter of Genesis we find a similar genealogical and chronological table for the antediluvian age; by adding up the dates, we find that the time was 1651 years, so that the whole period before our Lord must have been about 4200 years.

Now have these chronological statements any authority? In other words, if we believe the Old Testament to be an inspired book, must we also believe that we have Divine authority for the chronology I have just set forth? The chronological statements in the Old Testament certainly do not belong to the things which God has revealed, but to those which the Biblical historians have recorded on the authority of tradition or of older records; and from a religious point of view the question as to the period that elapsed between the Deluge and the time of Abraham or Moses is of no more importance than the question of the age of the patriarchs. But even if we do not accept the theory of inspiration which I have mentioned, and assume that the Spirit of God prevented the Biblical historians from making any, even chronological, errors in using the materials before them, still two things are possible: first, the ordinary interpretation of the Biblical passages which give us the chronology may be incorrect; and secondly, the text may have been corrupted, and it might be possible

by another interpretation or by emendations of the text, or by both together, to obtain a different chronology. In all that belongs to what is revealed in Holy Scripture of the res fidei et morum, or is closely and necessarily connected with them, we know that the Church's interpretation is right, and that therefore no new interpretation of anything essential is admissible. But in matters only distantly connected with doctrine, such as purely historical, geographical, scientific, and also chronological statements, the Biblical expressions are not always so clear and unmistakeable, and thus they may be, and have been, differently interpreted; therefore as regards these points new interpretations may be considered. Thus formerly the well-known passage in Joshua was understood to mean that the sun moved round the earth; the progress of astronomy has taught us that the words were meant to give us the popular mode of expression, and that rightly interpreted they are perfectly correct, although they were misunderstood by former commentators. take a still later instance: Catholic exegetes are agreed as to the essential doctrinal meaning of all that the evangelists tell us of our Lord's public teaching; but with regard to the time that teaching lasted the Gospels are so ambiguous, that some exegetes put it at two years, others at three, others at four; and that recently a scholar has tried to show that we cannot from the Gospels conclusively disprove the assumption of a ministry of one year only. It must therefore

1 Vol. i. pp. 41 and 85.

Or to

2 Prof. J. F. J. Cassel, see Programm des Seminarium Theodorianum at Paderborn, 1851. See above, vol. i. p. 364.