Like Superman, they had the advantage of being fictional characters and thus being unconstrained by the laws of physics.
Other than the signficant number forty, aren’t numerological connections in the early books of the Bible pretty speculative? I’m under the impression that the Israelites were pretty weak in mathematics before the Exile. And also that the Bible was mainly committed to writing during the Exile so mathematical references would most likely have been in the Babylonian counting system. That system used 10 as the number base for numbers up to fifty nine and then 60 as another base for numbers above that.
The “pattern” you have described seems to be based strictly on a base 10 counting system.
All these numbers come from text associated with the redactor who is considered an Aaronid priest of the Second Temple. Whether the redactor added the numbers or whether they were a part of the Book of Generations is something I don’t know.
I meant to add the redaction was around 450 BCE.
a. We know it’s a myth. The question is why invent that myth? This isn’t Dada. These stories were put forth as truth. What was the reason? Just saying, “it’s a myth,” doesn’t answer the question, it merely shows your lack of comprehension.
b. Besides, it may not be pure fiction; it could be an artifact of a society changing from measuring age by months to measuring age by years. The strangely early ages of fertility that gives us are not as hard to explain as lifespans suddenly shortening to a tenth their previous length.
c. Or, it could be a rather confused example of a forgotten ancient Near Eastern custom of exaggeration when dealing with the “mythic past.” For comparison, Plato’s tale of Atlantis could be derived from an actual disaster on Crete if you divide the distances & times by ten.
d. Arthur received Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, after he was grown up & important & stuff. It’s not the sword from the stone. Am I the only one who remembers Malory?
Glad you pointed that one out, the mistake annoys me as well. The sword in the stone was King Uther’s sword, which was not excalibur. Even the film Excalibur which follows Malory quite well doesn’t get that right.
I still contend that exagerating the achievments/powers of your ancient heros is done by every culture on earth. Any culture which considers longevity to be a virtue will naturally exagerate the ages of their mythical heros. What is left is the question as to why such particular ages were chosen for particular heros.
How did they live so long?
The same way the Greek gods were immortal, except those that died.
It’s science fiction. (Although I’m told that in before Dracula the term was just fiction)
I am very ignorant of the Bible - could the ages refer more to the longevity of the extended family/dynasty of each person, rather than the individual?
so… can you explain them?
When I was a kid I was told by one Bible school teacher that the great ages were so the people would live to testify to the Garden of Eden’s existence and the Flood and the greatness of God to people who came long after. (I believe that by the timelines you’ll find that Shem, ancestor of the Hebrews and ark veteran, either outlived or died well into the lifetime of Abraham and that there was once a story of Abraham seeking him out almost identical to the story of Gilgamesh/Utnapishtim.)
Makes as good a sense as any.
There are extrabiblical legends about the death of Methuseleh. One is that he was so beloved of heaven that God agreed not to destroy the world during his lifetime, and most others testify to his goodness. I noticed his death at the time of the Flood a long time ago also and looked this up to find out what the deal was (i.e. too coincidental he died the year of the Flood).
I always thought it was interesting that the Bible tells who the father/ancestor of those who make musical instruments was and who the father/ancestor of those who dwell in tents is, etc., and yet all of these peoples descendants were wiped out in the flood, save of course for Noah, who would thus be the father of everybody, so why specify?
In our culture an old geezer is just an old geezer, but in those days, an old guy was the guy to look up to; he had made it and supposedly had all the answers. Especially if he wasn’t a feeble old man, but still in charge and potent enough to be fathering kids.
So, I think the myth about the longivity was to make these patriarchs, and by proxy their teachings and doings, a sought after example. Their function is basically advertising: “follow Jahweh and live to be nine-hundred in such health and power that you’re still able to impregnate young chicks!” The reason the patriarchs finally stopped being hundreds of years old was that this idea got out of vogue and was replaced by: " follow Yahweh and smite thousands and thousands of enemies!"
In contrast, nowadays, we only follow the examples of guys who appear youthful.
Oh, and has anyone noticed that all the explanations about ozone don’t explain why there are no women who lived to be a thousand? Even Sarah lived a pitiful handfull of years compared to Abraham; there’s somewhere in the bible that after Sara’s death Abraham married again and fathered another generation of kids.
I susspect death during childbirth could be used to counter that objection.
When I asked this question of one scholar, he said, “the more important the person was, the more inflated his conquests/age/accomplishments, etc.” although there doesn’t seem to be a 1:1 correspondence.
I am going to assume that bone, fossil, or mummy records do not support such ages for any bibical contemporaries, but I would like to hear that from someone who knows.
I also assume that the various writers had a limited outlook, and didn’t know how preposterous such ages really were. After all, they claimed that there were monsters, giants and various supernatural beings then, too, and we don’t take most of those as reliable eyewitness accounts.
I am curious…do other religious or semi-historical documents in other societies describe their patriarchs as similarly long-lived, or is this just a jewish tradition?
Or biblical or booblical contemporaries, even.
Tack-on to my earlier post:
Noah himself was still alive when Abra(ha)m was born. It’s not known for certain how old A’s father Terah was when he was born, but presumably he was younger than 70 because Nahor, presumed to be Abra(ha)m’s younger brother, was born when he was 70, which would put A’s birth at around 1948 A.C. (After Creation). Noah did not die until 2005, when A would have been a young adult by anybody’s reckoning.* Shem lived until 2158 AC, surviving his son Arphaxad by 60 years and his and actually survived great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson (patrilineal) Abraham by about 35 years (and surviving Arphaxad, son of Shem, by about 60 years).
Something I’ve thought was interesting in the begattings is the similarity of names in two sections. From Genesis 4:
From Genesis 5 comes the generations of Cain’s brother Seth (I’ve deleted some of the years and stuff):
So from the first genealogy:
Methujael begat Methusael who begat Lamech, who had two wives, uttered an odd statement to his wives repeated for no apparent reason, and had a daughter named Naamah.
From the second genealogy, Methusael begat Lamech, who begat Noah, and while her name is not given in the Bible Noah’s wife is traditionally known as Naamah. Also a lot of the other names in both short genealogies are extremely similar, especially in the absence of vowels (Irad and Jared, Enosh and Enoch [plus there’s an Enoch in both], Methujael and Mahalalel) and again there’s the “father of them that [do so and so]” when it’s referring to a line that was wiped out save for Seth’s descendant Noah and his sons and grandchildren.
Was this two versions of the same genealogy? Was this the same Lamech and (Noah/Naamah)? Are there existing theories on the similarities?
*While it’s true that dividing the really ancient patriarch’s ages by 12 doesn’t work, by the time you get to Abraham and on through well into the OT (by the end of which ages are “normal”) dividing them by two works quite nicely. This makes Abraham and Sarah approximately 50 and 45 when Isaac was born, an age at which a couple would have given up any hope of a son, but at the same time an age when one is (no pun intended) quite conceivable. It means that instead of the standard equal division of 40/40/40, Moses was 20 years old when he killed an overseer (which sounds like the act of a rebellious young buck), spent 20 years wondering the wilderness and settling down and raising a family (the age when most men settle down and take a wife), and then 20 years wandering it again with the Israelites (a “more reasonable” period of time for a migration).
Now I’m not saying that there’s truth in all these (though I suspect at least some of the names and perhaps an event or two mentioned may have had some basis in fact) but it does sound like somebody could have taken real people and doubled the ages to make it believable, or perhaps there was a translation error in which dry/wet seasons were counted as 2 years instead of 1, etc…
Or not.
Sure. Small populations -> More nutrition per person -> Early onset of puberty. Not a problem.
The problem is that there are both a gradual descent of age ranges from Shem to Joshua, & a serious overlap of lifespans. So, there’s not a clear break between month-ages (if that’s what they are) & year-ages, you get weirdness like Shem outliving lots of his descendants, & you get ages which appear too big to be year-ages & too small to be month-ages if lifespans remained constant. So, in any case, the version of the text we have assumes a loss of lifespan post-flood. There’s a line in Genesis about man “only having 120 years” which some take to be God shortening human lifespans out of disgust–maybe.
Early onset of puberty accounting for Enoch and Mahalalel becoming fathers at 65 months; that’s less than five and a half years old!? Too much of a stretch.
To reiterate:
If you divide both ages by 12, you get Enoch and Mahalalel becoming fathers at a little over age 5; Kenan waiting until a few months before his sixth birthday and Enosh waiting until the ripe old age of seven and a half before he gets his end away.
If you divide age at death by 12, but not age at fatherhood, you get folks like Lamech becoming a father at age 182; that’s 118 years after his own death at age (777/12=) 64
Attempts to explain the phenomenon by dividing by 12 (months, not years) have always failed in the past. And there is nothing in archaeological records that would confirm these large ages. They are usually understood by scholars to be of some literary significance that is lost on us today, aside from the notion that, in the Golden Past, people lived longer than they do in our (degenerate) generation.
The idea of the more important people living longer is not uniform with the ancient Genesis text, but does appear in Exodus, with Moses (120) bracketed by Joseph (110) and Joshua (110.) (This corrects my earlier memory failure.) Moses is more important, so lives longest.
:smack: Must…check…text…before…blithely saying it works…