He wasn’t. According to the bible, that was not an usual age to live to in that time. Methusalah (Hmm, I’m spelling that wrong I think) lived to be just under 1000.
Like Christians, some Jews are Biblical literalists while others are not.
I wasn’t accusing you of starting a debate, I was just trying to head off the thread veering into discussion of conflicts between belief systems and science. That way lies Great Debates. 
Most people who have done the exercise have basically agreed on the stretch between the Creation and Solomon, as nicely summarised above by cmkeller. As his post recognises, it’s the later stages - and particularly the stuff relating to his footnotes 3 and 4 - where people have diverged from each other.
The disagreements get worse if we include Orthodox Christians. This is because the Septuagint gives different numbers in the early stages than the Hebrew text numbers quoted by cmkeller. The two generally agree on the quoted lifespans of the Patriarchs, but many of the ages for the begetting are systematically each a century older in the Septuagint. Those numbers have almost invariably been ignored in the Jewish and non-Orthodox traditions, but do mean that Orthodox Christians traditionally push their biblically-derived date of Creation back as far as 5586 BCE.
According to the Bible, it’s about 6,000 years old.
Ussher’s calculations are as good as any, and was a decent scholarly analysis of Biblical text.
The general range (say, up to 10,000 years) given by the Bible was unquestioned until modern science revealed it to be ridiculously far off. At the point assorted re-interpretations were applied so as to not render the Biblical age nonsense. No one relying on the Bible itself would (or did) interpret the age of the earth to be anything older than several thousand years.
“The Bible doesn’t say” is a silly wiggle-room argument advanced to protect the inerrancy of Scripture. While it may be technically correct, it implies that the Bible allows for the earth to be 4.6 billion years old. It does not, and the assorted contortions to make it seem so are foolish.
[Moderating]
Pedant, haven’t you seen my comments in this thread? It has already been stated that the information in the Bible is in conflict with the scientific understanding of the age of the Earth. It is unnecessary to belabor this point further here. If you want to debate this question, or make comments on the foolishness other interpretations, please feel free to open a thread in Great Debates.
Thank you for your attention.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator