Who was the father of Salah?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Genesis 10:24 and 11:12 in the Masoretic Hebrew make Arphaxad the direct father of Salah (Shelah): 'Arphaxad begat Salah.' Luke 3:35-36, tracing Jesus' ancestry backward, inserts a generation: 'Sala, which was the son of Cainan, which was the son of Arphaxad.' Luke thus places a second Cainan between Arphaxad and Salah whom the Hebrew genealogy does not know. (A first Cainan/Kenan appears legitimately in the antediluvian line at Gen 5:9, son of Enosh; the dispute concerns the second, postdiluvian Cainan.)

The apologetic case, advanced by Gleason Archer and others, is that Luke faithfully followed the Septuagint, and the LXX of Genesis does in fact contain this second Cainan. This is empirically correct and important: the major LXX manuscripts read a Kainan between Arphaxad and Sala at Genesis 10:24 and again in the chronological genealogy of 11:12-13, assigning him a 130-year span. Luke was therefore not inventing the name; he reproduced a Greek Vorlage that already carried it. The harmonization that 'Luke and the LXX simply preserve a generation the MT dropped' is a real textual possibility, not special pleading, and deserves to be stated at full strength.

The weight of the text-critical evidence, however, runs against the originality of the second Cainan. It is absent from the Masoretic Hebrew and absent from the Samaritan Pentateuch, as well as from Josephus's genealogical reckoning. The Qumran evidence is best stated cautiously: the relevant portions of Genesis 10-11 are poorly preserved among the Qumran Genesis fragments, so they furnish at most weak and indirect support rather than a clear positive witness against the second Cainan — the decisive Hebrew testimony is the MT-plus-Samaritan agreement. Within the LXX tradition itself the name is suspected of being a secondary intrusion, likely arising from the symmetrical structuring of the postdiluvian list (giving it ten generations to match the antediluvian ten), or from a copyist's eye duplicating an entry within the formulaic 'X lived N years and begat Y' pattern — a mechanism akin to dittography or homoeoteleuton in stereotyped lines. The same schematizing impulse is visible in the book of Jubilees, which reworks the postdiluvian generations to fit its own chronological frame, and reflects the broader tendency of LXX Genesis chronology toward systematized, schematic figures. Emanuel Tov classes the LXX postdiluvian chronology among its systematic harmonizing and schematizing expansions; Ronald Hendel's critical edition of Genesis 1-11 treats the second Cainan as a secondary plus in the Greek tradition.

A further textual wrinkle concerns Luke's own transmission. The earliest substantial witness to Luke 3, P75 (Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV), does in fact contain the second Cainan, so the papyrus is regularly cited as evidence for Cainan being in Luke. The name is, however, omitted in Codex Bezae (D), whose genealogy is arranged differently. The scholarly question of whether Cainan was original to Luke therefore does not turn on P75; it turns on the argument that Luke 3:36 may have been conformed to the LXX in the course of transmission, an option discussed in I. Howard Marshall's NIGTC and elsewhere. Even if Cainan is original to Luke, that only strengthens the contradiction rather than dissolving it.

This leaves the apologist on the horns of a dilemma. Either (a) Luke accurately recorded the LXX, in which case an inspired New Testament genealogy transmits a name that the best Hebrew and Samaritan evidence shows was a secondary scribal addition — Scripture canonizing a textual error; or (b) the MT and Samaritan Pentateuch are both defective and the LXX uniquely preserved the original Cainan — a position virtually no text critic holds, since it would require positing independent loss of the same name across otherwise-divergent Hebrew traditions. Either way, Luke 3:36 stands in direct conflict with the Hebrew text of Genesis on a basic question of paternity. The LXX defense does not dissolve the contradiction; it relocates it, identifying which textual stream carries the discrepancy.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine contradiction rooted in a scribal expansion in the Septuagint tradition that Luke (or Luke's transmission) inherited; harmonizable only by abandoning the priority of the Hebrew text.