The Deaths of Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel and Yered
Four generations of Shet's line pass in turn: Enosh (1140), Kenan (1235), Mahalalel (1290) and Yered (1422)—the last who still remembered the old world.
Within some three hundred years four generations pass in a row. Enosh dies in AM 1140 aged 905; Kenan in 1235 aged 910; Mahalalel in 1290 aged 895; Yered in 1422 aged 962. All of them lived to see Noach: when he was born in 1056, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel and Yered were still alive. The man who would survive the Flood personally knew his great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather.
Yered is the last to go. After 1422, of the ten generations only Methuselah, Lemech and Noach remain—three men in the world whose memory reaches back to the beginning. It is precisely into this gap, between Yered's death and the Flood, that Genesis 6 places the final decay: the "sons of God", violence, "the earth was filled with corruption".
Read in sequence, these dates make a simple point. The Torah does not present the fall as a sudden catastrophe. It lists generations, each living nearly a thousand years and dying, and only after the last witnesses are gone does judgement arrive.
How we know
Sources
Tanakh
- Bereishit 5:11 — the date of Enosh’s death
- Bereishit 5:14 — the date of Keinan’s death
- Bereishit 5:17 — the date of Mehalalel’s death
- Bereishit 5:20 — the date of Yered’s death
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 22 — the descent of the generations and the “sons of Elohim”
- Seder Olam Rabbah 1 — the continuous count of dates
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.