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William Adler

the state of civilization at that time.2 But any historian expecting to find in Genesis a
fleshed-out account of conditions in this remote stage in world history was bound to
come away disappointed. How did the earliest peoples govern themselves? How did
they measure time? When did they acquire literacy, write, and in what language?
Eusebius trained his own concerns about the sources on the vast discrepancies
in chronology. While tending to defer to the authority of the Septuagint, Eusebius,
a conscientious scholar, knew that its dating of pre-Abrahamic history exceeded the
chronology of Jewish and Samaritan scriptures by over 1200 years.3 Witnesses to the
Greek text of Genesis were themselves at odds on something as fundamental as the
date of the universal flood.4 To supplement Genesis’ skeletal narrative and to justify
the designation “universal”, the Christian chronicler might appeal to secular records.
But as Eusebius was keen to point out, reconciling Babylonian and Egyptian histories
with the witness of Genesis only deepened the confusion.5
These were some of the reasons why Eusebius’ treatment of pre-Abrahamic his-
tory was so guarded. In a silent nod to Origen, he chooses to read Genesis’ narrative
of events preceding the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise as an atemporal
allegory. Lying outside the realm of time and space, it described in the childlike lan-
guage of myth “an age better than our own, of a thrice-blessed life beloved of God”
and the subsequent fall of souls into bodies. The claims of some notwithstanding, it
was thus impossible to trace a continuous chronology of the world from the creation
of Adam, much less from the creation of the world.6 To resolve the wide chronological
disparities in the sources available to him, Eusebius offered a few conjectures. Perhaps,
he speculates, they arose from differences in primitive methods of time-reckoning.7 8
But suggestions like this were only provisional, falling short of the exacting stan-
dards of the tabular structure of the Canons, the second book of the Chronicle. In the
introduction to this book, Eusebius warns his readers that, at least for the purposes
of comparative chronology, events before the birth of Abraham were terra incognita.3
2 See Genesis 4,17 (on Cain’s founding of a city); Genesis 4, 21-22 (on the discovery of musical instru-
ments and metallurgy by Jubal and Tubal-cain, respectively); Genesis 10, i-n, 9 (on the beginnings of
nations and their dispersion after the flood). Because Genesis ascribed the earliest breakthroughs in
technology to Cain and his descendants, Byzantine chroniclers viewed their achievements with disap-
proval. Cain’s founding of a city, for example, was proof bo th of his knowledge of weights and measures,
and of his greed and rapacity. Once he gathered members of his household into a city, he also taught
them how to engage in warfare: see Flavius loscphus, AzzftyzMafcv ludaicae I 61-62; Georgius Syncellus,
Ecloga Chronographica 16 (p. 9,10-15 Mosshammer); Georgius Cedrenus, Historiarum compendium 7.2,
6-10 Tartaglia.
3 See Eusebius, Chronicon 38,7-45,28 Karst.
4 Some witnesses to the Septuagint text of Genesis 5, 25 assigned an additional 20 years to Methuselah’s
age when he fathered Lamech, thereby adding 20 years to the date of the flood (AM 2262 instead of
AM 2242). For discussion of the problem among Byzantine chronographers, see Georgius Syncellus,
Ecloga Chronographica 35-36 (p. 20, 7-25 Mosshammer).
5 Eusebius, Chronicon 4,11-6,13; 63, 23-65,1 Karst.
6 Eusebius, Chronicon 36, 6-39 Karst.
7 Eusebius, Chronicon 9,1-30; 64,16-65,1 Karst.
8 Eusebius, Hieronymi Chronicon praefatio 14, 20-15,7 Helm.