Annotatio LXXXVIII

”And Shem lived, after he begot Arphaxad, etc.” — Genesis 11:11

The Septuagint, in the present genealogy of Shem, have a twofold error:¹ one in the number of the generations by which the genealogy is woven, the other in the number of the years by which the authors of these generations lived. The first [error] is that, whereas Moses numbers only nine generations from Shem to Abraham, the Septuagint reckon ten,² a Cainan generation being added immediately after Arphaxad the son of Shem, in this manner: “Shem lived, after he begot for himself Arphaxad, thirty-five years, and begot sons and daughters, and died; and Arphaxad lived a hundred and thirty-five years, and begot Cainan; and Arphaxad lived, after he begot Cainan, 430 years, and begot sons and daughters, and died; and Cainan lived a hundred and thirty years and begot Shelah; and Cainan lived, after he begot Shelah, 330 years, and begot sons and daughters, and died” — all of which are redundant, and the Hebrew truth entirely ignores, setting down that Arphaxad himself begot Shelah, and not Cainan. And this same error crept into the genealogy of our Savior, described in the third chapter of the Gospel according to Luke: who, as in other things, so also in this, followed the Septuagint edition, in his times most received throughout the whole world. Which indeed Jerome, greatly wondering at, says: “I especially marvel, and — on account of the slowness of [my] understanding, struck with most vehement stupor — I do not know how to search out by what reasoning, whereas in the Hebrew, from the Flood (that is, from Noah) up to Abraham ten generations are found, Luke himself (who, the Holy Spirit guiding his pen, could in no way write anything false) preferred to set down in the Gospel eleven generations, according to the Septuagint interpreters, Cainan being added.” Aloysius [Ludovico], Bishop of Verona, says it could have happened that the Holy Spirit, by some hidden reason, moved the mind of Moses to pass over the Cainan generation in the series of this genealogy — just as the Evangelist Matthew too wrapped up certain [names] in silence in the genealogy of the Savior.

The second error is in the enumeration of the years of the life of those contained in this genealogy: for the reckoning of the Seventy interpreters exceeds the Hebrew reckoning by nearly two hundred and eighty years,³ as appears in the three little columns written below — of which the first contains the reckoning of the years according to the Hebrew truth, the second the reckoning of the Septuagint, the third the difference of each reckoning according to the excess and defect of each number.

(In the third column, “Desunt” = the Septuagint falls short by that many years; “Redundant / Redund.” = the Septuagint exceeds by that many.)

To these generations, if you add the 460 years of the life of Cainan superadded by the Septuagint interpreters, the difference of the years of each reckoning is increased up to the number of 742 years. See book 6, where we wrote concerning the superadded generation of Cainan, Annotation 143; and book 7, heresy 4.