Male Populations of Genesis

Genesis has several series of generations where we’re left to speculate how many people may have been in a given region – or on the planet as a whole. The following table shows the male population we can expect given a certain number of sons. By the way, be sure to check out the Genealogical Ages of Genesis for more of the same.

For example, assuming the ten generations from Adam to Noah are literal, what would the world population be at the time of the flood if each man had 5 sons. Or 7 sons. Or 10 sons. If 10 sons sounds outlandish, bear in mind that Jacob had 12 sons (and at least 1 daughter) and that Josephus says that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters. So if we were to, just for grins, say that each generation had an average of 7 sons (and 7 daughters) then in the 10th generation (Noah’s generation), we would have almost 300 million men (and 300 million women). The number of people alive would include at least the previous 2-3 generations (or more, if you’re considering the average lifespan of Noah’s time). So the number of people alive (both men and women), could easily be 659,103,312. Yes, it’s a wild guesstimate, but even if we factor in premature deaths from wars and disease, the table below shows that these numbers are not unfathomable.

Outlandish?

If that scenario sounds too outlandish, I would encourage you to re-think the situation.

Bear in mind that when given an agrarian culture, with plenty of fertile land and natural resources, and a clean gene pool, there’s no compelling reason to have few kids. In fact, the more kids a couple has, the better off they are (more kids = more hands = more workers = more profit), and there would be no incentive to not produce many children. Furthermore, pre-flood humans lived about 10x longer than we do today. If today’s females can give birth up to about 35 years of age, we can safely assume pre-flood females could give birth up till they were about 350 years old. So the next question we need to ask is how frequently did they give birth? Once every 3 years? Every 5 years? For grins, if a mom started giving birth at age 25 and birthed 1 child every 7 years, each couple would have roughly 50 children. If having 50 children sounds outlandish, bear in mind that Josephus wrote that Adam had 33 sons and 23 daughters. No, Josephus isn’t inspired, but in light of this reasoning, his statement isn’t as outlandish as it might sound. In fact, it’s quite reasonable! If 50 children per couple was anything close to the norm, then the “10 sons” column on the Generations page presents woefully low numbers.

This tabulation can also be applied to the population at the time of the Exodus. Although we’re told that the genealogy of the line of Christ had 4 generations during the 400 years of captivity, we’re not told how many generations the rest of the Israelites had. They started with 70 men (Ex 1), and were “very fruitful and multiplied” so that the land was teeming with them. Assuming each Israelite family had 7 sons, this table gives us a rough idea of what the population might have been at the time of the Exodus (Numbers says it was 600,000 men, but we don’t know if that also includes the Egyptians that left with them at the time of the Exodus).

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