In the dry names, which are enumerated in Genesis v. and Genesis iv.  Buttmann recognised the remains of an historical connection once woven together out of primitive stories.  These narratives were evidently mythological:  their original contents are destroyed both in Genesis v. (Q) and in Genesis iv. (JE), but only the list of the Jehovist now bears the appearance of a ruin.  In the other the fragments have been used for a careful new building in which they no longer look like fragments.  Here they are made to serve as the pillars of a chronology which descends from Adam to Moses, computing the period from the one to the other as 2666 years.  These 2666 years represent 26 2/3 generations of a hundred years each:  namely, 1-20 Adam to Abraham, 21 Isaac, 22 Jacob, 23 Levi, 24 Kohath, 25 Amram, 26 Aaron; the last 2/3 of a generation is Eleazar, who was a man of mature years at the time of the Exodus. 2

************************************** 2.  So Noldeke in the Jahrbb. fuer protest.  Theol., 1875, p. 344.  Genesis xv. 13-16 expressly states that the generation is reckoned as 100 years in this period. **************************************

Such a chronology is totally at variance with the simplicity of the legend. 1 It is also evident, that if even in the case of the

************************************* 1.  “Exact chronological dates are a sure sign of later working up of old poetical legends.”  Buttmann, I. p. 181. *************************************

historical books the systematic chronology is no older than the period of the exile, that of the Pentateuch must be of still later origin.  For the historical period there were certain fixed points for chronology to lay hold of; it cannot have begun with the patriarchs and gone on to the kings, it must have begun with the kings and then gone higher up to the patriarchs; it must have begun at the lower end, where alone it had any firm ground to stand on.  The belief that the men of the early world lived to a great age is no doubt old, but the settled chronology, based on the years in which each patriarch begat his son, is an artifice in which we manifestly see the doctrinaire treatment of history which was coming into vogue for later periods, attempting to lay hold of the earliest legends as well.  Only when the living contents of the legend had completely disappeared could its skeleton be used as a framework of chronology.

Buttmann has also shown that the elements of the ten-membered genealogy of Q (Genesis v.) and of the seven-membered of JE (Genesis iv.) are identical.  In Q, Noah comes after Lamech at the end, and at the beginning Adam Cain is doubled and becomes Adam Seth Enos Cainan.  Adam and Enos being synonymous, this amounts to Adam Seth Adam Cainan:  that is to say Adam Seth are prefixed, and the series begins anew with Enos Cainan, just as in JE.  The Priestly Code itself offers a remarkable testimony to the superior originality