Seder Olama timeline of Jewish history

The Birth of Chanoch (Enoch)

Yered, aged 162, fathers Chanoch — the seventh generation from Adam and the only one of whom it is said, «and Chanoch walked with God».

Chanoch is born in AM 622, seventh from Adam. In the flat list of Genesis 5 his entry breaks the pattern twice. First, instead of «and he lived» it says «and Chanoch walked with God» — a phrase later used only of Noach. Second, his lifespan, 365 years, is strikingly short where his neighbours live past nine hundred.

The number matches the days of the solar year, and the sages do not treat that as coincidence. Later literature turned Chanoch into an almost mythic figure, but the Torah itself is spare: he walked with God, fathered Methuselah, walked with God another three hundred years, had sons and daughters — «and he was no more, for God took him». No death, no burial. In AM 987 he simply leaves the list of the living, the only such case in the whole era from Adam to the Flood.

📜Sources

Genesis 5:18–24: Yered was 162, so Chanoch was born in AM 622 and lived 365 years.

👤People and places

Enoch

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