Everything so far hones us into a series of dates, and ranges of dates that could be said to operate in some sort of Kabbalistic system. How this system would be counted, and the eras it describes leaves much room for debate, but we can say by 10,000 BCE we have nearly all of the pieces necessary to put the puzzle described in the opening sections of Bereshis. As of writing this January 1st 2024, the Hebrew year is AM 5784, going back 5784 years from today arrives at -3760 BCE as the date for the world's creation and Adam - and Eve’s - birth.
Now, don’t get hung up on any idea. Don’t overthink hidden decades, or the nonlinearity of time. There is flexibility in everything, and points we are unable to understand at the present time, but there will come a day when the Seder Olam (Order of the World) will unify perspectives. We must take the certifications of what we know as they present themselves because truth can only come through the Way of Torah.
Between the dates of Adam and Noah’s birth, not a single major figure would have a birthday corresponding to a round number (a number ending in zero) or anything with a 5 at the end in the Gregorian calendar system, nor any major event even happening on a round number date across the entire Torah. Even stranger, with the exception of the three events related to Adam’s life - his birth, his son Seth’s birth, and Adam’s death - and with the additional exception of a handful of seemingly random events, rarely births, almost no dates on the Hebrew calendar system line up with a round number, and rarely a five.
Two takeaways from this seemingly random point. First, if time really was only relative to human existence and the creation of the world - being outside God’s unity - then any temporal events, or dates, are merely experienced outside how we process time. Second, this illusion of randomness in the correlation of dates points to a more actualized, functional version of dating history. Most events are random because humanity triggers them through free-will, and it is the periods between dating that are more important than the timing of an event. Similar to how in the ancient world birthdays were simply not important, and it was more the phases of one's life that were the center of attention. There is not going to be a grander correlation to the events, even if we could see how they all sync up in a more divine formulation. Going forward the ‘near’ randomness must be accounted for and our dating methods need to stay loose.
Starting with the Rabbinically agreed upon dating of 3760 BCE as the ‘genesis’ of the world, and birth of Adam, then Seth would have been born exactly 130 years later either in 3631 BCE, or possibly 3630 BCE depending on how dates are calculated. While again seemingly not important, only 130 years later is oddly not far off the normal ‘limitation’ for a human lifespan of 120 year's, plus the number of ten. This would apparently date all the events of Cain and Abel’s rivalry prior to the birth of Seth, and force a dating around 3630 BCE for the emergence of what we can call “Sethian Humans” - a subspecies of the species Homo Sapien, which would mean Homo Sapien Sapiens.
Until about 12,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers1 squarely lining up with the transition date of 10760 BCE - another 7000 years after 3760. In Judaism there is a Kabbalistic concept known as Adam Kadmon, the primordial, genderless (androgynous) man. Within Kabbalistic circles the traditional view is Adam Kadmon as a divine, spiritual, anthropomorphic version of Adam HaRishon, the first physical man. I would actually further delineate these ideas with a physical version of Adam Kadmon manifesting as the first genderless man before the miracle of God removing the female soul from the male soul sometime around 3760 BCE. If the distance between Adam’s birth as a singular human, before the birth of Eve, splitting of genders and them having children is viewed as two separate events, we can push the ‘primordial man’ further back to this 10760 BCE dating.
Make no mistake this doesn’t explain millions of years of time, but again don’t misunderstand the Torah for having given a fixed dating to the ‘universes’ creation; nothing like this exists outside of the Rabbinic literature. All of the sources never contradict the possibility that there was an evolution of species, with many previous archaic human species differing from the species of Adam.
There are further Kabbalistic calculations of the age of the universe tentatively focused on the number 42 (in reference to the 42 letter name of God) multiplied by 1000 “divine year's” where a single divine year is equal to 365 (the days in a year) multiplied again by 1000 giving us a date of 15.33 billion years old. Tracing the history of this claim is critical, but based on the attribution to Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco, and the Talmudic sage Nahunya ben Hakane, I have a couple suspicions how this calculation developed which helps explain its provenance within Rabbinic Judaism.
Nahunya’s primary disciple was Rabbi Ishmael; together this pair of sages are the sort of ‘proto-Kabbalists’ and two of the foremost Talmudic experts in mysticism. Given that Nahunya authored Ana BeKoach - an incredibly important Jewish liturgical poem containing the secret 42 letter name of God - it's safe to say based on Kiddushin 71a:13 that Nahunya was initiated into this secret tradition. Some believe Nahunya was integral in authoring the Bahir - arguably the second most important Jewish mystical text after the Sefer Yetzirah - which would account for his deep mystical wisdom.
It is very probable that through these sources Rabbi Yizhak of Acco - himself a disciple of the great Ramban and easily one of the more critical Kabbalistic sources for verifying the ancient provenance of mystical texts - was able to reverse engineer this dating of the world from an encoded reading of either Ana BeKoach or the Bahir - likely a combination of both given the Bahir’s critical link in processing mystical Hebrew letters. Other Kabbalists like Bahya ben Asher also believe the world was billions of years old.2
However, there is an even more important and often overlooked text called the Sefer HaTemunah that was probably redacted in the medieval era, but is attributed to Rabbi Nahunya. It is here where the concept of “cosmic sh’mita” is expounded upon. We learn from the Gemara that the universe will last for 6000 years, and in the final 1000 years there will be a Sabbatical millennium of rest.3 This is critical to the idea of the Messiah within Judaism and forms the basis of nearly all messianic views. Sefer HaTemunah takes this idea and claims this is only one of the cosmic sh’mita cycles, and correlates the total number of cycles to the Jubilee which also contains seven sh’mita sabbath cycles. According to this, the universe would be no older than 49,000 year's assuming a Jubilee is the end point of this calculation.
There are numerous debates about which sh’mita we are currently in, but the Sefer HaTemunah itself implies we are in the second sh’mita. However, many religious Jews would be familiar with the notion that we are in the “fourth sh’mita”, an often repeated claim within the Haredi community. Another 13th century Kabbalistic text called Sefer Livnas HaSapir references this sh’mita from Sefer HaTemunah, claiming that a mystical reading of the text is necessary to realize we are in the sixth sh’mita cycle, making the age of the universe 42,000 years old.4
While one might think the Sefer HaTemunah places the age of the universe at a measly 42,000 years, both the Ramak at the end of Shiur Komah and the Ari in Likutey Torah (both of these figures being the central Kabbalistic thinkers in Judaism) claim that the Sefer HaTemunah is simply incorrect when it describes our current sh’mita and believe these “sh’mita” are spiritual cycles, irrelevant to the age of the universe. Rabbi Yitzchak of Acco also synchronizes the views of these two Kabbalists and the Sefer HaTemunah by claiming the 42,000 years are not being counted in human time, but in divine time.
What is interesting here is the obvious 42000 divided by 42 - the 42 letter name of God - is equal to 1000 giving us the earlier calculation of 42 x 1000. However, this “1000” is counted in ‘divine years’ which according to Rabbi Yitzhak are 365,250 total human years - obviously the 365 days in a year (with an addition 1/4th) multiplied by 1000. When you take these numbers and multiply them together, we get 15,340,500,000 billion years old. The point of this long diversion being less focused on the actual dating here, but the well held belief by most Kabbalists that the world was simply not 6000~ years old, regardless of the true age.
Before 10760 BCE there were absolutely other species of Homo - not necessarily “Human” or “Mankind” which are different concepts - walking the earth, such as the mentioned Neanderthals and Denisovans. What else is out there, we are unsure, but both of these groups extensively interbred with human populations5; many of these finds come from a sort of crossroad of all three peoples at Denisova Cave.6 Neanderthals were known to take long voyages across the frozen mountains to reach Denisova Cave, showing an interlinked network of families, and knowledge that would preclude populations knowing where to head.7 The research into these populations also suggests up to two other contributing genetic populations in the human genome which could easily line up to a faint Nephilim, or Giant bloodline lingering around inside us all.
Many estimates put the total Neanderthal source population at no more than 12000 and no less than 3000 total individuals making it an extremely small number by modern standards. The youngest estimates put Neanderthal fossils around the year ~32,000 BCE, not far off our 10760 number. Even finding those fossils would pose a challenge, and many of the sites being located on the coasts before sea rise would have wiped out many of the central hubs and travel routes of these people. Given that what officially, scientifically constitutes a Neanderthal might not at all line up with “bloodline Cainites” it’s possible many of the interbred populations were essentially Neanderthal in their genes, and it was only over the course of thousands of years that amount dropped to a number where you could say the ‘last Neanderthal man’ was wiped out.
However! Unlike with the Neanderthals, there actually were populations of Denisovans currently estimated to date to around 14000 BCE, with enough wiggle room we could discover a Denisovan hitting that 10760 BCE date for final extinction.8 Again, like with the Neanderthals, Denisovans could also have easily just technically continued, in a lineage sense, up until that point through mixing with human lineages. The duplication of Enoch and Lamech from Cain’s line could easily imply interbreeding of lines, and we are fairly sure Na’amah, daughter of Lamech on Cain’s side, was the wife of Noah.9 So through her, Cain’s bloodline would be passed onto the majority of the surviving Noahite population. Nothing about this contradicts the traditional understanding in Rabbinic Judaism, even if it contradicts other traditions.
There are a few possibilities here, and I wouldn’t be glued to any single answer. The very likelihood could be that neither Denisovans or Neanderthals represent Cain’s lineage, and the giants could be the group that shows up as “Neanderthal” in the records. However, I view this less likely given the actual closeness genetically between Neanderthals and ‘Humans’ making them easily the nearest genetic relative we shared on this planet.
What I suspect is more than likely, is an inversion of the understanding of Neanderthals and Denisovans that has emerged; essentially while the Denisovans were around possibly later than the Neanderthals, not all human populations share DNA with this group. However, all populations of humans share DNA with the Neanderthals, more than likely meaning this would actually be the the most probable, and most obvious, candidate for Cainites. Through a variety of mechanisms their genetics would have been infused into Noah’s, with the Canites and Sethites likely having already intermixed long before Noah’s birth - Noah could still be pure Sethite himself - and Noah’s wife Naamah further contributing to the genetic expression of Neanderthal in the human.
One extremely tenuous reality is research that suggests Human females and male Neanderthals were not very compatible, and had some trouble producing children.10 This fits with other evidence showing while we do share a minimum of 1% of our DNA with Neanderthals, we are actually missing chunks of Neanderthal DNA on our Y chromosomes, implying this interbreeding of genders was unlikely to succeed. It might have been this genetic incompatibility that prevented their populations outpacing the early human populations, and enabled human males to take captive Neanderthal female populations to strengthen their numbers, while the inverse was impossible. Noah could have had a Cainite (Neanderthal) wife, but the inverse would have meant they would never survive, with or without a Flood!
We could spend entire books discussing archaic populations, and Hominin lineages that might line up with Humans, but ultimately much of this is still an emerging discipline. I suspect over the years we will start seeing an increasing correlation between the most archaic populations and the most archaic understandings of Genesis. While exact figures are never likely, there is a very real possibility that the structural framework of Genesis encodes the crucial memories of our past that are necessary for unraveling our own existence.
With this background in mind, let us turn to looking at identifying actual groups that may correlate with some of these populations, and what they mean for the story of Mankind.
Little, Michael A.; Blumler, Mark A. (2015). "Hunter-Gatherers". In Muehlenbein, Michael P. (ed.). Basics in Human Evolution. Boston: Academic Press. pp. 323–335.
Dov Ginzburg, The Age of the Earth from Judaic Traditional Literature, Earth Sciences History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1984), pp. 169-173.
Sanhedrin 97a
The Age of the Universe: A Torah True Perspective by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan
Pennisi, E. (2013). "More Genomes from Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human Groups". Science. 340 (6134): 799.
Reich, D.; Green, R. E.; Kircher, M.; et al. (2010). "Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia" (PDF). Nature. 468 (7327): 1053–60.
Skov, L.; Macià, M. C.; Sveinbjörnsson, G.; et al. (2020). "The nature of Neanderthal introgression revealed by 27,566 Icelandic genomes". Nature. 582 (7810): 78–83.
Jacobs, G. S.; Hudjashov, G.; Saag, L.; Kusuma, P.; et al. (2019). "Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans". Cell. 177 (4): 1010–1021.e32.
Genesis Rabbah 23:3
Ann Gibbons, Neandertals and Moderns Made Imperfect Mates.Science 343,471-472 (2014).DOI:10.1126/science.343.6170.471