Generations Come and Go

6096 words long.

Published on 2024-06-17

The Mystery of Matthew's Genealogy

In Ecclesiastes 1:4, Solomon declared, “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever." Those words compelled me to write this book. This is why.

About seven years ago, while reading Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, the idea showed up. I researched it, took notes, and proved to myself that the pattern I hoped to see in history was there. That pattern also had forty-two generations, but was not tightly tethered to Scripture like the frameworks for Psalm 119, Ecclesiastes and Job presented in this book. What stopped me from pursuing this idea further? Nowhere in the Bible could I see a hint that one should find such a structure hiding in its pages.

As I studied Job, I found many prophecies. On a lark, I slotted those prophecies into my old forty-two generation time grid and was shocked. Job had something to say to every generation from the creation on up to Jesus, plus a few for the end times. The ordering of the smaller set of prophesies I spotted then was not chronological. Thus I viewed Job as expressing a comprehensive view of history, but not an ordered, tightly structured one.

The results of that research became Appendix B in Job Rises. The generations in that appendix are 120 years long, not 119. The start and end years for each generation vary by a few decades compared to this book. Besides that, I still stand behind most observations made in that appendix. The only exceptions are a few events that moved forward or backward one generation, muddying the pattern. The new structure sharpens things.

This idea did not jump fully formed into my imagination, but grew and metamorphosed into its current form following years of study and tinkering. Part of the challenge is that religions have different ways of looking at time. Some see time as cyclical, others as linear. The Bible shows both, as Ecclesiastes 1 attests. Cycles within cycles lead to a single linear progression at the largest scale. Because of this scaling issue, it is hard to know at which level any given pattern sits. We cannot see the end from the beginning.

Thus we had Daniel’s and John’s empires, each lasting longer than the one before it. We had seven church ages, each longer than the previous. This stretching enables God to fit in additional smaller cycles as time goes on. It appears to widen out to infinity, permitting our earthly existence to go on forever. Is there a feature of history that unveils the opposite? Is there a correspondence between the earliest days and our current time that points to the end? Or after this forty-two generations will there be forty-two more?

No, the end draws near. Yes, there is in history a grand correspondence. A mirror. A chiasm. But to discover that correspondence, we need need to detect the characteristic frequency behind God’s dealings with man. When God’s voice thunders, like a singer in the heavenly choir, we need to match His pitch.

Autocorrelation

During college, I worked briefly at General Electric. There I learned a signal processing technique called pitch detection. Some people speak at a higher pitch than others. Deduce the pitch and you can distinguish one speaker from another, or track their emotional state. One autocorrelation algorithm for doing this – average squared mean difference – is simple.

First, pick a pitch (a frequency). This is your guess of the amount of time “t” between amplitude peaks of a recorded voice. A higher pitch has a shorter time period.

Second, run through a section of the recording and pick out two amplitude values, one at time “x” and a second at time “x + t”.

Third, subtract amplitude values and square the difference.

Fourth, add that square difference to a running total.

Fifth, advance to the next audio sample. Continue until you process all amplitude pairs.

Sixth, record the sum for “t”.

Seventh, pick another “t” and repeat.

Eighth, after you run through many values of “t”, choose the value of “t” with the smallest sum. The inverse of that period is your pitch.

What does autocorrelation have to do with acts of creation? First, it offers an approach different from ones employed earlier in this book. When studying Psalm 119, we correlated images from each stanza of the psalm to history. When studying Job, we compared images from each chapter to historical events. With autocorrelation, we compare history to history. It is easier: no tricky parables and metaphors to decipher. It is also harder: the Bible focuses our attention, whereas history is vast in the number of events available for comparison.

Second, if history consists in ever lengthening cycles of events, you will not find a characteristic frequency; there will be no definite pitch. Applying an autocorrelation algorithm to history can help us decide one way or the other. If there is a strong signal, it will identify its frequency. That will tell you how long each generation should be.

Using this analogy, what are the amplitude differences? They would be comparisons between historical events. If the key events in two generations match well, the “distance” between them is small. For example, if one generation saw the beginning of slavery and another its abolition, or both generations had a big plague, that would be a match.

A Cosmic Chiasm

If history is cyclic, the autocorrelation function described earlier would detect that. If instead we apply our matches by mirroring across a central time, we can detect if there is a single pattern that spans all of time, a linear pattern. We can detect a chiasm. Recall that in a chiasm, the first section matches the last, the second matches the next to last, and so forth.

Why a chiasm? Because that is what we see in Matthew:

Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David,

fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon,

and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

- Matthew 1:17, NIV

A. Abraham

B. David

B’. Jeconiah (sent into exile)

A’. Jesus

How do Jesus and Abraham match? Abraham offered his son as a sacrifice, but God told him to stop; He would provide the sacrifice, and presently a ram showed up. Jesus would be that lamb.

How do David and Jeconiah match? David began life full of faith, but later committed adultery and murder. Jeconiah began life weak in faith. God pronounced a curse on him that he would die young and have no descendants sit on the throne. He went into exile, but there he humbled himself. The enemy king treated him kindly and he lived long. One of his grandchildren, Zerubbabel, became not king, but governor of Judea. God showed clemency. At the end of Jeconiah’s line comes Joseph, adoptive father of Jesus.

The peculiar thing about the genealogy is that it repeats the number fourteen three times. Three times fourteen is forty-two, but in the direct line from Abraham to Jesus, only forty-one are named! Should we count Jeconiah twice because he was a changed man? Should we count Mary, because Joseph was only Jesus’ legal father, by adoption, not his biological father? Or should we count Jesus twice, coming once as a mortal in humility (like Jeconiah in exile), but a second time as a conquering king, like David?

I chose the latter. That gives us forty names of sinful men needing a savior from Abraham to Joseph, followed by one savior who battled sin and death on the cross, followed by a conqueror bringing peace to his subjects at the end of time. The first forty-one happen inside normal time, while the last ushers in eternity. (Alternately, the Church is his spiritual offspring, his 42nd generation.)

Why is that breakdown important? Some chiasms have a dual center where two parts match, while others have a single center, a part with no match. If our chiasm has an odd number of parts (forty-one), it will have a unique center. If an even number of parts (forty-two), then a dual center. Job Rises argued for a chiasm with forty-one parts. Does that decision also need to be revisited?

The Optimal Solution

How do we know we have chosen the optimal starting years for our generations, the values that give the truest interpretation? Four things could ruin our chiasm:

• We placed the wrong events and generation at the center. This will completely break the symmetry.
• We chose the wrong number of generations (steps) for the chiasm. This will cause the timeline to stop short of Christ’s return or overshoot it.
• We chose the wrong length for a generation. Ditto for the consequences.
• God didn’t plan history to follow that pattern.

When I began this research, Matthew 1 was all I had to go on for counting the number of generations. Genesis 6:3 (where God says he will shorten the maximum human lifespan to 120 years) was all I had for picking the length of generations. After drawing on Ecclesiastes, Psalm 119 and Revelation 2-3 for additional evidence, I improved the time grid by shifting the date of creation and changing the period to 119 years. Could we do better?

Let’s assume a few things as given and see what happens if we vary the length of each generation.

• Assume our chronology is correct, so that generation 3 starts in 2361 BC (after the flood). This insulates us from errors in the date for creation.
• Assume the number of generations is correct (42), with the first two occurring before 2361 BC and the 42nd happening after the “end of times”. That leaves thirty-nine to play with.
• Assume history won’t exceed 7,000 years.
• Assume Jesus was born “in the end times”, meaning no earlier than the midpoint of history.
• Assume that Jesus has not yet come again!

Generation Count: In your Dreams

Assuming what you hope to prove is dirty pool, or in Latin, petitio principii. Instead of begging the question, I will beg for your indulgence. Earlier chapters offered a numerological defense of forty-two plus a reference to Matthew’s genealogy which is not obviously prophetic. There is one methodical prophecy that can be adduced as support, where forty-two elements are explicitly identified with years. In this prophecy, as with Matthew, the forty-two symbols are divided in three groups. The matter is life and death and touches on slavery and freedom, increasing its relevance. The prophecy is Pharaoh’s dream.

Then Pharaoh said to Joseph,

“In my dream I was standing on the bank of the Nile,

when out of the river there came up seven cows,

fat and sleek, and they grazed among the reeds.

After them, seven other cows came up—scrawny and

very ugly and lean. I had never seen such ugly cows

in all the land of Egypt. The lean, ugly cows

ate up the seven fat cows that came up first.

But even after they ate them, no one could tell

that they had done so; they looked just as ugly

as before. Then I woke up.

“In my dream I saw seven heads of grain,

full and good, growing on a single stalk.

After them, seven other heads sprouted—

withered and thin and scorched by the east wind.

The thin heads of grain swallowed up the

seven good heads. I told this to the magicians,

but none of them could explain it to me.”

- Genesis 41:17-24

In the narrative, the dreams are described once as they happened, then told to the magicians without being repeated in the text, then told in detail to Joseph, who recaps them with the interpretation. Thus the two dreams are repeated in the text three times. (Each telling is different. Joseph summarizes, including fewer details than the initial account, whereas when Pharaoh speaks, he includes more details than the initial account. We analyze Pharaoh’s account.)

Then Joseph said to Pharaoh,

“The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same.

God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do."

- Genesis 41:25

In the space of minutes, Joseph rises from prison inmate to second in charge of all Egypt, in charge of storing up grain from an expected seven years of plenty to provide for the nation during the famine to follow. During those years Joseph had two sons and named one Ephraim, “because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.” (Genesis 41:52)

The circumstances connect tightly to our harvest pattern: harvest, famine, and the blessing of a wife and children. Seven sleek and fat cows are named three times, as are seven gaunt and sickly cows, another three times, for forty- two cows in all. In Joseph’s interpretation, each cow stands for one year, with seven years of plenty followed by seven years of want.

Could those cows (and the parallel heads of grain) also stand for forty-two generations? Instead of one event repeated three times, could they speak of one long sequence? Does anything about the phrasing add additional details beyond just a number to connect cows and sheaves with the history of the world?

Before we tackle that question, let’s ask another. Is this singular calculation of counting cows a convincing way to get to forty-two? A closer look shows that the number appears throughout Joseph’s story by reference to its prime factors of two, three and seven (42 = 2 x 3 x 7).

Joseph interprets dreams on three occasions, in Genesis chapters 37, 40 and 41. Each time, there are two dreams. The first time, they are Joseph’s dreams, the second time, the dreams of the cupbearer and baker to Pharaoh, and the third time, of Pharaoh himself. This sequence of dreams shows a progression. In all of them you see the number two: two dreams. In the second pair of dreams, the number three appears: one servant will be restored (the cupbearer) and the other executed (the baker) in three days’ time. Three also is a factor in the third set of dreams: they are repeated three times and have other features related to three which we will see shortly. Finally, the third pair of dreams adds the number seven, for the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine.

The first pair of dreams alienates Joseph from his brothers, when he prophesies that they will bow down to him. The second set helps the cupbearer, but the man forgets Joseph, who sees no immediate benefit and remains in prison. Only with the complete set of two, three and seven in Pharaoh’s dreams do we see Joseph’s fortunes turn around.

The details of Pharaoh’s dreams contribute to the idea that forty-two is important. The healthy cows are “fat and sleek”: two adjectives are used. When Pharaoh describes the sickly cows to Joseph he uses three adjectives: “scrawny and very ugly and lean”. Then there is the number of each type of cow: seven.

This counting of adjectives would seem a stretch, until you compare it to the second dream, about the heads of grain. Again, when Pharaoh describes them to Joseph, the healthy grain is called “full and good”, while the unhealthy grain is “withered and thin and scorched by the east wind”. Both cows and grain are described first with two and then with three adjectives for the good and bad respectively.

If the two is God the Son, then this is the mercy of good blessings up front. Three is the judgment of God that waits until the mercy has been exhausted. Finally, seven is the wisdom of the Holy Spirit that combines the mercy and judgment into a plan that can save the people through the famine.

Now let’s look at history to see if we have more than numerical symbolism to stand on. The first inclination is to see if history had seven bright generations followed by seven dark ones, repeated thrice. Oh dear: history doesn’t look that way at all! It is the other way around. Bad generations are followed by good.

• 1-7 (4020-1766 BC) – Fall, Flood, Babel, Sodom & Gomorrah, Job
• 8-14 (1766-933 BC) – Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon
• 15-21 (933-100 BC) – Civil war, Assyria, Babylonian Exile, Four Beasts
• 22-28 (100 BC-733 AD) – Jesus, Paul, Constantine, Battle of Tours
• 29-35 (733-1566 AD) – Schism, Black Plague, Fall of Constantinople
• 36-42 (1566 AD - ?) – Great Awakening, World Missions, Abolition

The bolded events indicate that the high points in God’s plan to redeem the world occur in the second, fourth and sixth groupings of seven generations. Why is this inverted from the progression in the dreams? Egypt was a beast. When times are good for beasts, they are bad for God’s people. The first seven generations culminated in Egypt, a powerful and pagan beast. The third seven saw five more beasts arise: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome overran the Holy Land. Then the fifth seven during the Dark Ages produced new empires, like the Islamic Caliphates and the Mongols.

Joseph lived at the beginning of the eighth generation, at the head of a good “week” of generations that culminated in the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem and the reigns of David and Solomon. In the fourth “week”, Jesus lived and died and rose again and the church arose to conquer the Roman Empire. Then in the current “week”, following the Protestant Reformation, the church spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, abolished slavery and made its mark.

If you take it all in, the pattern fits. History has progressed in six stages, alternating between good times for tyranny (the years of plentiful harvests) and good times for freedom, the times of suffering. Egypt used its grain surplus to subjugate the starving, who sold all they had and became slaves just to live. However, those who have the faith of Job prosper more from suffering than from plenty. During the years of famine, when Joseph saw his chance to get revenge on his treacherous brothers, his heart changed and he forgave them instead. In the same way, Job forgave his persecutors and Jesus forgave the whole world.

What does this mean for our day? The church will suffer, the church will be purified, and the church will overcome. We live in a time of sick cows and shriveled grain, the true condition of the hearts of all who do not know God. We must believe that God’s storehouse of love is full or else we will never be able to meet such desperate need.

Thus we have good justification for thinking that forty- two is the number of generations in God’s eternal plan. However, recall that Solomon’s clock started ticking during his life. Should not the starting point of some of Joseph’s prophesies likewise be anchored when he lived? He was born near the beginning of a favorable week, near the start of the eighth generation. He had his early dreams at age seventeen, which would make it ca 1733 BC.

It is believed that Joseph was thirty years old when he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and became vizier of Egypt, ca 1720 BC. Our peculiar prophetic end date of 2280 AD falls exactly 4000 years from this date. That is forty centuries and forty is associated with suffering. Also, Joseph was reunited with his father after the second year of famine passed, at the age of forty. Lastly, when Jacob died, they spent forty days embalming him, according to Egyptian practice. These numbers will drive you mad trying to decipher them!

What happens if you count forty centuries from the Creation? According to Bishop Ussher, Christ was born exactly 4,000 years from the Creation. In the revised chronology used in this book, Christ was born 4,000 years after another event. Adam and Eve were created with no genetic defects, so it is likely that Cain and Abel were born one and two years after the Creation, respectively. When do people have the most trouble with their emotions? As teenagers. Thus it is likely that Cain slew Abel when he was sixteen, putting that sacrifice exactly 4,000 years before Jesus was born.

So we have a type of Christ’s sacrifice (Abel’s death) falling 4,000 years before Christ’s birth and another type of savior, Joseph, becoming a type of savior 4,000 years before the end of the era in 2280 AD. Thus we have symmetric events placed forty centuries from the beginning and the end of history.

We have the same thing with generations. At the end of forty generations we will begin the time of war, then reach the time of peace. Counting backwards from eternity, after forty generations elapse, the forty-first generation has war (the flood) followed in the forty-second by peace (Eden). Counting back forty generations from 2280 AD, you reach Noah. Recall that the rain at the beginning of the flood lasted forty days and forty nights, and forty also popped up in the story of the raven that Noah sent out from the ark to see if it was safe to exit. Noah then sent out a dove three times, with seven days between each attempt.

Thus the story of Noah begins the definition of important numbers related to time: seven, forty, one hundred twenty, and one hundred nineteen (as explained in an earlier chapter). Since Noah’s new life after the flood began after the first two generations ended, adding forty gives forty- two.

Returning to Joseph, it is not surprising that multiple significant numbers spring from his life: forty-two for the elements of the dreams versus forty years old when he was reunited with his father, forty days for embalming Jacob, and forty centuries remaining until the end of the era in 2280 AD.

One last observation ties together both forty-two and one hundred nineteen. It springs from Joseph’s dreams.

Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers,

they hated him all the more. He said to them,

“Listen to this dream I had:

We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field

when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright,

while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down

to it.”

His brothers said to him,

“Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?”

And they hated him all the more because of his dream a

nd what he had said.

Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers.

“Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time

the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down

to me.”

When he told his father as well as his brothers,

his father rebuked him and said,

“What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I

and your brothers actually come and bow down to

the ground before you?”

His brothers were jealous of him, but his father

kept the matter in mind.

- Genesis 37:5-11, NIV

When do you think Joseph’s brothers first bowed down to him in fulfillment of his childhood dream? In Genesis chapter forty-two! In two other chapters they bow to him again. Yet Jacob was right! He and Joseph’s mother Rachel never bowed down to Joseph. Regarding Rachel, she died before the family reunion. Regarding Jacob, we have the touching scene where he blesses his grandchildren:

Now Israel’s eyes were failing because of old age,

and he could hardly see. So Joseph brought his sons

close to him, and his father kissed them and embraced them.

Israel said to Joseph,

“I never expected to see your face again, and now

God has allowed me to see your children too.”

Then Joseph removed them from Israel’s knees and

bowed down with his face to the ground.

- Genesis 48:10-12, NIV

It is Joseph who finally learned humility and respect and bowed down to his father! But if Jacob and Rachel did not bow, who are the sun and the moon? And if they are not the sun and moon of Joseph’s second dream, might the eleven stars be something besides his brothers?

In the story of Creation, in Ecclesiastes, and in many other prophecies, what are the sun, moon and stars? They represent time. The interpretation is not certain, but here is a possible association. Jewish scholars argue about how long Joseph was in prison, with common views being ten or eleven years. Thus it is plausible that the time of the sun was Joseph’s first year serving Potiphar, when he had the favor of his master. Then the second year was spoiled by the moon, Potiphar’s wife, who lusted after him and slandered him into prison. After that came eleven years in prison until he was freed. Those years bowed down to him because though they seemed to harm him, they positioned him for a great destiny. Alternately, you could reverse the years. There were eleven years from Joseph’s dreams until the dreams of the cupbearer and baker, then two more years until Pharaoh’s dreams.

Two other numbers from this story are significant. He was sold into slavery in Egypt at age seventeen and Jacob began his sojourn into Egypt with seventy people (according to the count in Genesis 46:27). One way to factor seventy is: 70 = 7 x 10. If you take these numbers as bookends, you have 17, 7 and 10. Amazing! 119 = 17 x 7. The length of our characteristic generation appears.

Do we have any warrant to multiply 17 by 7? What happens if we multiply 17 x 70? Taking Joseph’s 17th birthday of 1733 BC as -1733:

-1733 + (17 x 70) = -543 => 543 BC

The Babylonian captivity ended in 537 BC and Cyrus’s edict permitting the Jews to return to Judah and rebuild was broadcast in 539 BC. The error bars for our dates for events in Joseph’s life exceed four years, so this agreement is good. The timing of Joseph’s dream (when he began Israel’s exile in Egypt), his age and the number of men entering exile in Egypt with Jacob combine to form a prophecy of when the next exile would end. Furthermore, that prophecy uses a unit related to the generational scheme, the generation length (119) and an accurate count of generations (10).

Why should we accept that there is a prophecy of the later Babylonian captivity when the earlier Egyptian captivity was just about to begin? It is because the dreams come in pairs that look alike but aren’t. The cupbearer was saved but the baker was impaled. Joseph’s first dream was about his brothers, but his second dream was not about his dominating his family; it was about sovereignty over time. Which brings us to the third pair. Pharaoh’s dreams were both about the coming famine, and both predicted seven years of plenty and poverty, but they were directed at different peoples. The dream about grain concerned Egypt, who was growing the grain, but the dream about cattle was about the children of Israel (aka Jacob). The story makes a special point about describing the Hebrew people as herdsmen and the Egyptians as being disgusted by such people (Genesis 46:34). The famine would affect both and bring them together for a time.

So after all these dreams, we are primed to expect a double meaning when we get to the final supernatural communication in Genesis:

And God spoke to Israel in a vision at night and said,

“Jacob! Jacob!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

“I am God, the God of your father,” he said.

“Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will

make you into a great nation there. I will go

down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you

back again. And Joseph’s own hand will close your eyes.”

- Genesis 46:2-4, NIV

God reassured Jacob that it was safe to enter Egypt, for He would safely bring his descendants back out of Egypt. Did you notice how God called Jacob’s name twice? Only seven times in Scripture does God address a person by calling their name twice and it always indicates a significant change in identity and responsibility. (The others are Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Martha, Peter, and Saul.) That is our clue that this is a two-fold message. God would bring His people out of captivity a second time.

With the matter of the number of generations settled, we can move on to additional support for the generation length of 119 years.

Generation length

Simple arithmetic shows that if generations are 112 years long, the “end of times” would have fallen in 2007. We are still here and Christ has not yet returned; that is too short.

More arithmetic shows us that if generations last 137 years, history will exceed 7,000 years. That is too long.

Further calculations show that for Jesus to be born on or after the midpoint of history, the length must be less than 128 years. This leaves us with a range for generation lengths from 113 to 127 years.

My initial choice for analysis was 120 years, which exhibited a strong pattern. When I repeated it for 119 years, the pattern was stronger. With autocorrelation, if you are near the optimal “pitch”, movement toward the optimum will improve the metric, while movement away from it will worsen the metric. From this we can conclude that the correct value is in the range 113 to 119 years.

If you took the center point of history as a given and had your generations go backwards and forwards from that, then changing the length of generations would not affect the quality of the matches due to symmetry, but it would throw off the estimate for the “end of history”. However, our generations are anchored by the end of the flood. Each year added to the generation length shifts the midpoint of history by 39/2 = 19.5 years. Moving the midpoint has a strong effect on the autocorrelation. You lose an extra one sixth (19.5/119) of all matches for each additional year difference between your estimate of generation length and the true length. Given that 119 and 120 yield good results, this rules out 113 to 115 years. Thus the viable range is 116 to 119 years.

Based on concordance with the other prophetic clocks, 119 seems the best choice. However, repeating the analysis for 118 years would be fruitful. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The Midpoint of History

Having settled on 119 year long generations, what does that yield as the center point of history? It depends on whether we choose a chiasm with forty-one or forty-two steps. Which of those two possible center points yields the best pairs of matching historical events? Which tells a better story?

Forty-one steps. For this many steps, the center generation of history falls between 219 and 100 BC, during the time between the testaments. The center of that generation was 160 BC, five years after the cleansing and rededication of the temple in 165 BC (necessitated by its desecration by Antiochus IV in 167 BC). That event is commemorated as Hanukkah.

Lest the Samaritans (rebellious descendants of the tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel) think their religion vindicated, they suffered a similar fate. In 125 BC, John Hyrcanus destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerazim. Fifteen years later, his sons destroyed its replacement.

This was the lowest point in the history of the world. No new prophets had spoken for about 250 years (since the death of Malachi). The messiah would not come for another 165 years. The world was dark indeed, with only a few guttering candles on a menorah holding back eternal night.

Forty-two steps. For this count, the center of history falls at the boundary between the 21st and 22nd generations, in 100 BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s birth. Antipater, father of Herod the Great, rescued Caesar in Alexandria, thereby gaining Rome’s favor. Antipater rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Roman general Pompey earlier in this generation. Then his son, Herod the Great, became king of Judaea and built the second temple in Jerusalem.

The book of 2 Maccabees was written near the year 100 BC. Some Christians (such as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches) accept it as canonical, while most Protestants do not. This book is remarkable because it contains in chapter 7 one of the earliest direct and unambiguous expressions of faith in a physical bodily resurrection. According to Henry Morris of ICR, only three religions believe in a bodily resurrection: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Meanwhile, in 97 BC, Rome passed a law outlawing human sacrifice. This put them in a pickle. The Romans believed they were successful because they pleased the gods, but some of those gods required human sacrifice to be placated. Therefore they created a special category of “ritual killing” that they supposed met with their gods’ approval but was not human sacrifice. The distinction shows how deceitful is the human heart. And the Romans considered themselves superior to other peoples because of this!

Combine these events from the last century BC, and you have a new king of Judaea, a rebuilt wall in Jerusalem, a new temple, a prohibition against human sacrifice, a recognition that sometimes a person has to die to placate God, and a faith in the resurrection from the dead. But who would be such an acceptable sacrifice that this resurrection could be purchased? King Herod and the Caesars were no paragons of virtue. Who could be the righteous king that would set the world right? That would be the man born near the end of this 22nd generation: Jesus Christ.

Choose your Ending

Some authors write interactive books where the reader makes a few key decisions and chooses their own ending. We have two midpoints: one dark and one light. Which story is God intending to tell? (Hint: I think He already chose the ending.)

For the dark midpoint, Matthew’s genealogy carries us via overlapping generations from Abraham to the savior, a “short” period of time. That span of forty-two generations is short to show that God is abounding in love. God wanted to send a savior as fast as possible. This new pattern of forty-two longer, scarcely overlapping generations is long to show that God is slow to anger. It runs from Adam to the second coming, to the judgment day. God wanted to give humanity as much time as possible to repent. The two genealogies – one real and one conceptual – tell two halves of one story.

For the bright midpoint, it is all about love. The short genealogy from Abraham to Jesus is about how long it took to prepare a savior for Israel. The long genealogy from Adam to the Second coming is about how long it will take to take the Gospel message to the world. Judgment is unavoidable and present in both stories, but judgment is not the goal. Finding lost sheep and carrying them home is the goal. The tale ends with a banquet in heaven, not a billet in hell.

The Appendix in Job Rises settled on the dark midpoint and a forty-one generation, single-centered chiasm. Why? Several prominent connections between generations only appear if you structure things so. This time around I repeated the analysis for a forty-two generation chiasm. This produced other striking connections that only appear when you structure history that way. Arrrrgh! How do you decide?

I reflected on Job, reread the seven seals of Revelation (with fresh insights to be covered in a few chapters) and chose love.

That opened my mind to see a second pattern. In Matthew’s genealogy, out of forty-one names, he focused on just four: Abraham (#1), David (#14), Jehoiachin (#28), and Jesus (#41 and #42, since he is coming again). In my forty-one generation pattern, generations one and forty- one match and generations fourteen and twenty-eight match. As it turns out, generations seven and thirty-five also matched well. Those are the main matches that go away if you switch to a forty-two generation pattern.

Those pairs of generations form a seven-part spiritual clock. If we accept two patterns for history, a forty-two generation chiasm and this seven-part pattern, we can tell two stories, not one.

Let’s tell those stories.

Next: Two Patterns in History