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When we read the Bible, many of us often find wading through some of the genealogies in the Old Testament to be boring and tedious.  But believe it or not, there are some amazing discoveries in them that await the careful reader.

In Genesis 5 a genealogy of ten names begins with Adam and goes to Noah. Each name in the Bible of course has a specific meaning, as names do today. As Chuck Missler points out, to get to the proper meaning, a study of the original roots making up the name is needed, and sometimes this is not provided by a standard lexicon or concordance.[1]

When these ten names in Genesis 5 are studied in this way, something remarkable emerges. The ten names are, in order, Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah. Adam, of course, means “man.” In his book Cosmic Codes Missler lists the root meanings of the other names in the genealogy: Seth means “appointed,” Enosh means “mortal,” Cainan (or Kenan) means “sorrow,” Mahalaleel means “the Blessed God,” Jared means “shall come down,” Enoch means “teaching” or “commencement,” Methuselah means “His death shall bring,” Lamech means “despairing,” and finally Noah means “rest” or “comfort.” Now put these meanings in a sentence(s) in the order the names appear in the genealogy: “Man is appointed mortal sorrow. The Blessed God shall come down teaching that His death shall bring the despairing comfort.”[2]

Does that sound like the Christian gospel? Would the Jewish writers have been conscious of this as they were recording this genealogy thousands of years before? No, what you have here is prophetic evidence for the author being God Himself, who “can see the end from the beginning.”  If the names had any different meanings or were in another order, the message would not be there or would be garbled.

This is just one of many evidences for a divine imprint of design that involves prophetic types, messages, and foreshadowings.  Many of these are listed and discussed in Chapter Eleven of The Bible Can Be Proven.  The design of the Scriptures is truly awesome.