A Hasmonean Edition of MT Genesis?: The Implications of the Editions of the Chronology in Genesis 5

Many biblical scholars have endorsed the view that the MT chronology provides evidence for a Hasmonean edition of the Hebrew Bible. A review of the scholarship and the biblical texts shows that there is no warrant for such a view. The chronological details that provide the support for this view – which come down to three ancestors in the MT chronology of Genesis 5 – are explicable as the result of scribal revisions motivated by a local exegetical problem. The other editions of the Genesis 5 chronology (in SP and LXX) are parallel solutions to the same problem – ancestors who outlive the flood – a paradox that arguably derives from the compositional history of the P source. The chronological revisions in Genesis derive not from Hasmonean eschatology but from impossible numbers in P.