Annotatio LXVIII

”And Seth lived, after he begot Enos.” — Genesis 5:7

The Septuagint interpreters, since they are found corrupt in many places, are especially faulty in this fifth chapter, and most of all depraved concerning the reckoning of the years which the illustrious men lived from Adam up to the Flood: in which they entirely depart from the most true reckoning of the Hebrew context, as appears in the table set below.¹ In it, in the first place, is set the reckoning of the years according to the Hebrew truth; in the second, the reckoning of the years of the Seventy interpreters; in the third, the difference of the years — according to the excess and defect of each reckoning.

(In the difference column, “Desunt / Def.” = the Septuagint falls short by that many years; “Superant / Super.” = the Septuagint exceeds by that many.)

(In the two Enoch rows the original swaps the labels: the Septuagint in fact exceeds by 100 before Methuselah’s birth (65 → 165) and falls short by 100 after it (300 → 200); the printed “Def.” and “Super.” are transposed.)

Two errors emerged from this depraved enumeration of the Seventy interpreters.² The former of these — as Jerome noted in the Hebrew Questions — is this: that from this reckoning it is manifestly proved that Methuselah lived fourteen years after the Flood,³ whereas Moses writes that only eight souls (among whom he was not) were saved in the ark. Which matter gave birth to that question, famous among the ancients — “On the years of Methuselah” — and ventilated by the disputation of all the churches. The second error is the diversity — not to say the falsity — of the chronography of the Greek Fathers, namely of Julius Africanus, Origen, and Eusebius: who, in reckoning the years from the beginning of the world up to the birth of Abraham, count 3314 years; but, on the contrary, Philo and the rest of the Jews, according to the Hebrew truth of divine Scripture, compute from the founding of the world to the birth of Abraham 1955 years — so that the reckoning of the Greeks exceeds the Hebrew reckoning by one thousand two hundred and thirty-six years.⁴ Augustine, in book 15 of The City of God, chapter 13, judges that this depravation happened in the codices of the Septuagint by the fault of those who first copied them out from the Library of Ptolemy. But, that you may more clearly know how varied and manifold a diversity of reckonings the Greek corruption of the numbers has given birth to for us, it has pleased [me] here to add, from diverse chronographers, the calculation of the years from the founding of the world up to the happy nativity of Christ, arranged according to the series of the numbers [in ascending order].⁵