Book review: From Adam to Noah: The Numbers Game

★★★

What do the ages of the first humans in the Bible mean? Could people really have lived that long? Leonard Timmons has found an ancient calendar hidden in these numbers, and feels this discovery is key to understanding the Bible.

Timmons’s calendar is constructed by charting, on a timeline, the births and deaths of the men between Adam and Noah, fudging a little here and there to create a few more meaningful points on the timeline, and then discovering that it breaks down into four portions of 364 years plus one 5-year portion. Turn that into days, and you have a 364-day year, plus a 5-day seasonal correction after four years (think of our leap day). 364, for calendar aficionados, is the Jubilees calendar from the Qumran texts, so-liked because it plays nice, dividing neatly into 52 seven-day weeks.

Timmons’s analysis is founded on arithmetic combinations of round numbers (such as 500 or 1000) and of the number seven. Lamech’s age at his death, 777 years, appears to be a clue. For example, 56 is a nice number because it is 7×7+7. 84 is an excellent number because it is 77+7. Seven is recognized as God’s number, a perfect number, the number of days in the week. Readers of Revelation are quite aware of how important seven, and in particular three sevens (777), are in Biblical thinking.

Timmons is correct that numerology was important to the ancients, often used as a means of Biblical enlightenment. Consider the 666 of Revelation, and the miraculous catch of 153 fish by Jesus’ disciples. Timmons takes a stab at solving both of these riddles, which might be a mistake on his part; while no convincing solutions to the second puzzle have been offered, making the 153 puzzle fair game for speculation, scholars are nearly unanimous and surely correct in solving the 666 puzzle. (See http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318.html and http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318_27.html ) In any case, I would not be surprised at all to discover that there is meaning in the ages of the earliest humans in the Bible. It’s far more likely that the numbers have some sort of meaning to the authors than that people actually lived that long! However, even after reading Timmons’s book, a hidden calendar code seems a bit too conspiratorial for my taste. Timmons may be on the right track with his “meaningful numbers,” but attributing the whole thing to a hidden calendar doesn’t feel right to me.

That is, however, the book’s premise: Not only is there a calendar hiding within the ages of the earliest humans, but it has been purposefully hidden. This is not just numerology, it’s a devised puzzle, and (in my opinion) an inelegant one. The authors were not content just to lay out a calendar; they carefully hid the calendar, purposefully confusing us, swapping the meaningful number 56 here and there with 65 (the reverse of its digits) to confuse us, doubling and halving numbers here and there to bewilder us.

So who imbedded these puzzles? Perhaps collators of the Bible while in Babylonian captivity, or shortly after they returned to Jerusalem? That sounds somewhat believable, but Timmons thinks not; he argues instead that the Bible should be thought of as an ancient educational textbook for the enlightened, a sort of test to divide good puzzle-readers from bad. The Bible is a book of riddles to help the initiate develop his talent for insight. We’re not just talking about the creation stories; the Bible’s authors have encapsulated hidden knowledge in its texts from Genesis to Revelation! An “insight school” that lasted a thousand years! (Timmons actually suggests thousands).

Timmons rejects the Documentary Hypothesis (which proposes that the Torah was written by at least four distinct authors, none of them Moses). I cannot help but think he commits another error by pitting his puzzle theory against the Documentary Hypothesis; it seems far more reasonable to me that the Documentary Hypothesis disproves the ancient textbook idea rather than vice-versa.

Anyway, the hidden calendar is not really the important thing. It’s just a discovery that should prompt us to read the Bible differently; to reveal to us the surprising intellect and understanding of its authors. Free now to explore a deeper meaning in the scriptures than a literal reading, Timmons next launches into his interpretation of the Bible’s themes; how the ancients thought of demons, angels, soul, spirit, faith, even God … and it’s nothing like what we thought they meant. This insight helps Timmons decode stories like the Flood and the Garden of Eden, and he provides two creative and fascinating interpretations. Even Jesus’ parables and Revelation’s mysteries are revealed.

I found the book to be an interesting fringe theory, and fun with numbers (right up my alley), but not something I found convincing. However, my feeling is that there is surely a 4- or even 5-star book idea here, that Timmons’s interpretations are ingenious, but that he overreaches by claiming them to be the correct interpretation … as if the Bible writers actually meant their stories to be read this way.