HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Sumerian King List ≅ Enoch (the seventh antediluvian)

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the seventh-figure / solar parallel is well-grounded mainstream scholarship; "the seventh king creates the solar calendar" is an imprecise conflation, and the base-60 decoding of the Genesis 5 ages is genuinely contested · advanced by Fr. Stephen De Young

Related arguments: the book of Enoch — see also the canonicity of 1 Enoch · the Watcher legend as a paraenetic exemplum, and (across the aisle) the Jude–Enoch "open canon" argument on the Old Testament canon.

Related doctrines: the antediluvian sage and his heavenly knowledge — see also, on the Pillars of Seth, the argument that the pillars-of-Seth legend is a displaced Enoch tradition (Josephus assigns Seth's line the very astronomer-scribe role this Enmeduranki parallel gives Enoch).

This one tests a new strand from the 2026 Tucker Carlson interview — not in the blog or the Lord of Spirits episode — and the research shows the core is stronger than its delivery: the Enoch ↔ seventh-antediluvian-king parallel is a near-consensus in the academic literature, while one clause of De Young's retelling ("creates the solar calendar") states more than the cuneiform record will bear, and the base-60 reading he floats is a real but unsettled hypothesis.

The claim

De Young argues that the patriarchal ages of Genesis 5 are not naïve literalism but encode a pattern shared with the Mesopotamian king-lists, partly through Babylonian base-60 mathematics:

if you look at those ages as sets of 60 there are … certain things encoded about the different kings and the different generations … nobody's totally cracked the code in Genesis.

His worked example identifies Enoch with the seventh antediluvian king of the Sumerian King List:

the seventh king in the [Sumerian King] list is the one who creates the solar calendar … And if you look at Genesis and the Epistle of Jude … he refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam … in the genealogies of Seth in Genesis, he lives for 365 years. So you have … the solar-calendar year as his age. He's the seventh person. The seventh person in the Sumerian Kings list creates the solar calendar.

— Tucker Carlson Show, "Young giants" (2026), YouTube. Two assertions are bundled here: (a) Enoch, "the seventh from Adam" (Jude 14) who lives 365 years, maps onto the seventh antediluvian king, associated with the sun and the calendar; and (b) the Genesis 5 lifespans are sexagesimally "encoded."

Who advances it

De Young is downstream of mainstream critical scholarship, not floating an apologetic novelty. The Enoch ↔ Enmeduranki comparison is one of the most discussed parallels in the study of the Enochic literature, treated at book length by James VanderKam (Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, 1984) and Helge Kvanvig (Roots of Apocalyptic, 1988), and adopted by John J. Collins, Andrei Orlov, and Amar Annus.¹ The base-60 reading of the Genesis ages is the separate work of Dwight W. Young and others.⁵ So the lineage is academic Assyriology / Enoch studies → De Young; he is popularizing a genuine scholarly tradition, not inventing the link.

The evidence for

The seventh-figure parallel is real and multiply attested:

• Position. Enoch is seventh in the Sethite line of Genesis 5 (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch) — "the seventh from Adam" (Jude 14). The seventh antediluvian king is Enmeduranki (Enmeduranna) of Sippar; Berossus lists him seventh as Euedoranchos of Pautibiblon, and he appears seventh on cuneiform copies of the King List as well.²
• Solar tie. Sippar was the cult city of Shamash, the sun-god; Enmeduranki was his long-haired priest and protégé. Enoch's lifespan of 365 years matches the solar year, and the Enochic Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 72–82) makes Enoch the revealer of the heavenly calendar.¹
• Revealed heavenly knowledge / ascent. A Neo-Assyrian text from Nineveh (ed. W. G. Lambert) describes Shamash and Adad taking Enmeduranki up, seating him before the gods, and granting him the secrets of divination — "the tablet of the gods," the liver, oil-on-water omens — making him founder of the bārû guild of diviners.³ The motif is doubled in the parallel list of antediluvian sages (apkallu): the seventh, Utuabzu, "ascended to heaven" — which Borger (1974) connected directly to Enoch, who "walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Gen 5:24).⁴
• The list as a whole. Both Genesis 5 and the King List run to ten antediluvian figures ending in the flood hero (Noah / Ziusudra–Xisuthros), with extravagant lifespans/reigns — a structural match older than the Enoch detail.¹

On the central point — that the seventh patriarch is patterned on the seventh antediluvian king, a solar figure who receives heavenly knowledge — De Young is in step with the scholarly consensus.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The seventh-from-Adam ↔ seventh-king correspondence, the Sippar/Shamash solar association, the 365-year lifespan as a solar signal, and the shared ten-figure antediluvian frame are all genuine and rest on first-rank scholarship (VanderKam, Kvanvig, Collins, Orlov; the Lambert text; Borger on Utuabzu). This is among De Young's better-grounded parallels, not a stretch.

Where the framing is imprecise or outruns the evidence — chiefly one clause:

1. "The seventh king … creates the solar calendar." This is the load-bearing overstatement. What the cuneiform record actually credits to Enmeduranki is divination — extispicy (liver-reading) and lecanomancy (oil-on-water omens), the bārû arts — not the invention of a calendar.³ The calendar role belongs to Enoch (the Astronomical Book), and De Young retrojects it onto the Mesopotamian king, then reports it as if the King List itself says the seventh king founded the calendar. The solar association (Sippar = the sun-god's city) is real; "creates the solar calendar" is a conflation of Enoch's function with Enmeduranki's, presented as a single datum.

2. "365 … the solar-calendar year as his age." A small precision issue. Enoch lives 365 years (the solar year), but the schematic calendar Enoch reveals in 1 Enoch is 364 days, not 365.¹ The "365 = solar year" point stands on its own; it should not be elided with the Enochic 364-day calendar as though they were the same number.

3. "The seventh king in the list." Defensible but smoothed. The extant King List recensions vary in the number and order of antediluvian kings (eight to ten across copies), and Berossus even reverses two of them. The clean "seventh" is firmest in Berossus and in the seven-apkallu list; Enmeduranki does sit seventh on King List copies, but "the seventh king in the list" states a stable slot that the textual tradition only mostly supports.²

4. The base-60 "encoding" of the Genesis 5 ages. A real but contested hypothesis. Several scholars — Dwight W. Young most rigorously, with Barnouin and Cassuto before him — have argued the ages were generated from sexagesimal terms and squares rather than recording literal lifespans.⁵ But there is no agreed solution: the competing decode schemes do not converge, and the whole approach has serious critics. Here De Young's own hedge — "nobody's totally cracked the code" — is appropriately cautious, and is the right register for this strand. The fault would be in any firmer reader who took the sexagesimal reading as settled; De Young does not.

Assessment

Sound. Trust the core: the seventh-from-Adam patriarch patterned on the seventh antediluvian king of Sippar — a solar figure (365 years) who receives heavenly knowledge and is "taken" — is a genuine, near-consensus parallel resting on VanderKam, Kvanvig, the Lambert text, and Borger on the ascending seventh sage. What should be flagged on De Young's page is the one imprecise clause, "the seventh king creates the solar calendar": Enmeduranki is remembered as the founder of divination, not of a calendar — that role is Enoch's, retrojected — and the Enochic calendar is 364 days against Enoch's 365-year life. The base-60 reading of the Genesis ages is real scholarship but genuinely unsettled, and on that point De Young rightly says no one has cracked it. Stated carefully, the parallel is one of the stronger ANE arguments for reading Genesis 5 against a Mesopotamian backdrop; the single overstatement is a conflation of two figures' roles, not a factual error about either.

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