Could Abraham have met Noah? Did they overlap?

It depends entirely on which manuscript tradition you use — and the two oldest witnesses give opposite answers.

The Hebrew Bible's two most ancient texts, the Masoretic Text (MT) and the Greek Septuagint (LXX), both record the patriarchal ages from Genesis 5 and 11. But their numbers disagree by about 100 years per patriarch — and that difference completely changes the timeline.

If you follow the Masoretic Text, the answer is yes, they could have met. Working through the ages, Noah dies in the year 2006 from creation. Abraham is born in 1948. That puts Noah alive until Abraham is 58 years old. And Shem — the son of Noah who actually walked off the ark — doesn't die until 2156, which is 33 years after Abraham's death. On the MT's numbers, Abraham and Shem were contemporaries for his entire life.

"Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. So all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years, and he died." — Genesis 9:28–29

If you follow the Septuagint, the answer is no. The LXX's longer begetting ages push Noah's death to 2592 AM and Abraham's birth to 3314 AM. That's a gap of 722 years — no overlap, no possibility of meeting.

The pattern of disagreement is too systematic to be coincidence. For the six pre-flood patriarchs from Adam to Enoch, the LXX begetting age is exactly 100 years higher than the MT in each case. The same +100 pattern holds for six of the eight post-flood patriarchs. In both traditions the total lifespans are usually preserved — the 100 years gets added to one column and subtracted from the other. And then the LXX adds an entire extra generation, Cainan, that the MT doesn't have.

Someone changed the numbers deliberately. The full study traces the external evidence for which tradition changed them — and what the motivation likely was.

Read the full study on the patriarchal chronology