I find myself staying at my folks house a lot these days and while I’m there I read the Bible every night before going to bed. (Ain’t I a good son?) As I am going along I am struck by many things that I think the Dopers could help me understand. So this is the first of what I expect will be many Bible related questions.
In Genesis everyone seems to live to a very old age, and the Bible seems to make a big deal out of exactly how long each of the main characters lived. There is no clue as to why this was so or why or when people started dying at normal ages. What’s the significance of these very long lives?
It’s an exaggeration, to drive home the point that some people (just like now) live to be really really old. They might say “Joe lived to be 6 bazillion yers old” whereas we might say “Joe is older than dirt”. It’s like a fish story. My fish are bigger, my old guy is older. Also, there was not a very good system of keeping records or vital statistics in those days, so you could never be sure when the Really Really Old Guy was really born.
I remember some theory that went along the lines of there being a misunderstanding when to different documents were merged to form one and that the ages listed make more sense in months, but let’s check that out…:
Adam - 930 ‘years’/12 = 77.5 fathered Seth at ‘130 years’, which, converted the same way, would be a month or so short of his 11th birthday… hmmmm, no matter…
Seth - ‘912 years’/12 = 76 - fathered Enosh at ‘105 years’/12 = 8 years and 9 months. Double hmmmm…
Enosh - ‘905 years’/12 = 75 years and five months - fathered Kenan at ‘90 years’/12 = 7 and a half - unlikely.
Doesn’t really work, does it? Enoch and Mahalalel would become fathers at 5 and a half.
God does limit man to 120 years in Genesis 6. Strangely, this happens before we hear about Noah, who was apparently 599 when the flood waters began to fall.
In any case, from a purely literary perspective it is certainly useful as a rhetorical device. It sets the mood well for a epic myth.
“Grampa tell us about Noah again!”
“Oookay. Now a long, long, long time ago, back when men were men and women were women, and everyone lived to at least 900 years old…”
At one time I had a copy of a research paper by a theological student on the length of life vs. the chronology of the Bible. From ‘the beginning,’ 5,000 BC life span decreased to approximately 33 years, about the same as the age of Jesus when crucified.
Since then it has increased to somewhere in the '20s. IIRC he used Ushers chronology of the Bible.
I read of a theory (I think it was in one of Isaac Asimov’s science articles) that the first calendars were lunar. It may be the ancients counted by months, which the later writers/editors of the Bible confused with years. Thus, Methuselah’s 969 years may have actually been 969 months, or between 74 and 80 years. Not impossible, but certainly impressive when the average life-span was half that.
My first thought on looking at the thread (and it was from Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, IIRC). However, Mangetout addressed it. But I wonder – we are talking lunar time here – so what if one used the 27.5-day lunar month rather than the 30-day quasi-solar month – would the numbers work out better? (I own three copies of Excel, none of which will load on this computer, and I have no desire to punch numbers through a calculator to check this out. Someone with a good spreadsheet, try re-rendering the numbers at 13-months-to-the-year values.
Worth noting, too, is that after Shem, the ages drop dramatically, though still remarkably long – implying that the Flood had something to do with the situation (God’s judgment and all).
That’s what I recall being taught in Sunday School many, many, many, many years ago. Someone asked the same question, and the accepted answer was Man 2.0 had a faster expiration date. Kinda links in with the “They were giants in those days” riff.
I’m not promoting any of these answers as truth, just offering some differing explanations to the OP.
One theory argues that at first, there were so few humans that they had to live longer in order to have larger families and preserve knowledge, as in pre-literate times the elders were the books, the repositories of culture. Take that for what it’s worth, as the author of the site admits he’s speculating (obviously).
This site claims that man became a carnivore after the Great Flood, thus greatly shortening his life span. Another attempt to explain posits that the Flood created a genetic bottleneck that bred out of the human race this longevity gene that was possessed by the elders of the human race previously. The article toys with several genetic or evolutionary explanations for the ages given in Genesis in an attempt to justify their accuracy with science.
I have also heard theories that mankind was closer to God and more righteous then, and as mankind moved away from God, they lived shorter and shorter lives.
A far more likely explanation than any of the above is given here. The author says that, like the Sumerians and Babylonians, the Hebrews “knew that many more than ten generations had elapsed during these periods. To bridge over the enormous gaps in time, therefore, both of them assigned tremendous ages to the few names that they possessed.”
My dad had a theory about both the long lives and the flood. He theorized that people lived longer because the Earth was in a different kind of orbit/rotation/axis. Maybe a “year” wasn’t really a year, climate was different, etc… He theorized that something caused the Earths orbit/rotation/axis to change, changing the climate and the way date/time was kept (because of different positions of the moon, different sunset times, etc.). The great flood being one of the climate changes. The living conditions of Earth being changed,
people began to not live as long. The Earth being in a different orbit/rotation/axis, calendars and dates were kept differently than before, also affecting a persons age.
If you think this theory is bizarre, consider that at the same time he professed to be a Biblical Literalist:eek::rolleyes:
I’d ask him more about this theory, but I ain’t digging him up…
If you take the Bible literally, the champion old guy of all time was Methuselah, who lived to be nearly 1000. Interestingly enough, he died the same year as the Flood, although presumably some months before it happened.
My guess as to the real significance of all this is that the person who wrote Genesis started with currently circulating legends about the Creation and the Flood. In order to allow a scenario in which it took only a few generations to cover vast periods of time, extremely long lives of individuals were stipulated. This would make readers or listeners feel closer in time to the events described, which would give them more meaning.
(Usual disclaimer: Maybe I didn’t understand what she said. All errors are mine anyway.)
Yet another possibility, suggested to me just now by Zyada (who is too sleepy to type it up), is that the age the Bible refers to is not the age of an individual but the age of a dynasty or a clan. The “many children” could refer to the population of the group.
(Disclaimer again.)
On the other hand, I’ve thought for a long time that the great ages could easily be explained by the exaggeration that often shows up as tales are passed on orally. The particular numbers could have simply been those that sounded good as the story was recited, or have been chosen for some numerological significance.
Genesis 6 sets the stage for the flood. When God said man’s days would be 120 years, He was not saying that from then on, people could only live 120 years. It was a prophecy that in 120 years’ time, man’s number was up and judgment was coming.
Jewish tradition (and also tons of Bible scholars) says it was about a week. God gave Noah just enough time to bury his grandfather so his body wouldn’t float around with the sinners when the flood came, and also so the family could mourn. (Noah’s dad died about 5 years before the flood.) At the very most, it was 7 weeks, because the book says the flood started the 17th day of the 2nd month of the year. As we’ve already established that granddad died in the same year as the flood, we’re looking at a very short amount of time.
Incidentally, the people of the day knew something would happen when Methuselah died because his name meant, roughly, “when he dies, judgment comes.” Of course they didn’t take it seriously considering they watched him live to be 969 years old, along with his idiot grandson building a boat for some silly thing called “rain” because there’s going to be something called a “flood.”
Noah was preparing for something that had never happened before in human history. Kinda like how Christians are waiting today for something that has never happened.
That would be about right. Bear in mind that according to the Fall narrative, in the beginning people weren’t intended to die. (In several ways, Genesis suggests that life as we see it is not life as it was designed to be.)
On the other hand, bear in mind that not much is said about how long the descendants of Cain lived; and they probably were understood as making up most of the human race.
I’d distrust the “explanations” offered for this. Many of them seem to fall into the category Isaac Asimov once described as “Let’s not get God mad.” That is, they’re after-the-fact constructions which ignore the religious point of the story, while holding rigidly to the verbal accuracy of every phrase. Personally, I don’t think that works well. You’d do better to approach the story as narrative; what sort of picture is this painting? What sort of a world does this describe?
The ages of people like Methuselah describe a world in which death (at least for humans) wasn’t part of the original plan. Due to human rebellion against God, that changed. But, in mercy, God didn’t make the change as abrupt as it could have been.
Hi, Abbie. I’m simply curious here for cites where I can read more about this stuff – I have never happened to run into the “week between Methuselah’s death and the Flood” thing, though I’ve run across several references to the fact that they work out to happening in the same year. (In fact, a couple of people commented that M. must have drowned in the Flood.) Likewise, while there are a host of symbolic names in the Bible, many of them given intentionally. I’d never seen that analysis of M.'s name.
This is not argumentation, but purely a request for more information through cites. Thanks!
Still doesn’t work, since at the core it is just another ‘scaling’ method like the years=months thing; unless you apply a different factor to the expressions regarding age at fatherhood to the factor you apply to age at death, there’s no way to scale down the ages to anything comparable to current lifespans without considering them young children when they became fathers.
You sound pretty sure about this. What are you basing this on? I don’t see how your interpretation follows from a plain reading of the text.
I don’t see how God’s “days will be numbered” is connected with any sort of judgement of the wickedness of man, like we see just before the flood. God seems to simply be saying that man is not meant to be immortal, so at 120 (from birth to natural death) God is cutting him off.
Before there was the modern understanding of biology and medical science, most people accepted the idea that if you died at an early age it was God’s judgement. So working backwards from this, people would assume that if someone was favored by God, He would demonstrate it by giving them an extra long life. So Adam living to 930 and Noah living to 599 was the OT way of saying “God loves me this much”.
Nowadays, we’ve put such superstition behind us and realize God demonstrates his favor by the size of bank accounts and the final scores of athletic competitions.
:rolleyes: