What is a reasonable age to father a child. We could say 18 as early enough today. Could 187 mean 18 years and 7 months?
What about 15 as more reasonable in a time when people associated adulthood with the adult body?
Or maybe 13 as is the tradition of Jews at their bar mitzva? Can there be some calculation from this age to a time to be a father?
If we fold in other information about ancient times such as Golbekli Tepi and Jericho, being thousands of years old, we find out that people were living long before the time given by these ages. Could it be that these names were just some of the more prominent patriarchs?
Is it feasible that with the flood some records were lost? If people rely on memory then some information is lost
Keep in mind that you’re responding to a post I wrote 16 years ago.
You can try to massage the numbers any way you like to make them seem plausible, but as best I can tell, the writers were trying to describe a few thousand years of history but keep the number of named characters to a manageable amount, and since genealogy was considered important and you feel compelled to name every person from Adam to Noah, you’re compelled to make those characters extremely long-lived.
In other words, your choice is ten very long-lived persons, or a hundred-ish normal-lifespan people, all of whom have to be named to give your scripture authority.
There’s, almost certainly, no factual reason that can be given - just reasonable guesses. Whatever the reason was has almost certainly been lost to time.
A lunar year is 354 days. 1000 lunar years is 969 solar years. Methuselah’s age, I would assume, comes from legend that he lived 1000 years, among a people who used a lunar calendar.
If you look at things like the Ussher chronology and how it was calculated,
or the lists of ancestors of Jesus leading back to King David, it will become apparent that when you’re presented with random tidbits of information that have to be resolved with one another - and neither realism nor verifiability is a priority - you’ll end up with a variety of leaps of logic and faith.
So, again, it’s just a guess but I think the safe answer is that when you have a variety of legends and Chronicles that all need to be worked together, your average priest of yore would do what he needed to, to make the puzzle pieces fit together - whether it made sense or not.
Methuselah’s age, for example, was probably set in stone. Other numbers were adjusted to make it all fit together.
As a matter of fact, the Midrash (Jewish oral tradition) says that Methuselah died immediately before the flood. The seven days mentioned in Genesis 7:4 were G-d delaying the flood as a mourning period for him.
It’s saying that they lived that long, possibly because the world was a more hospitable environment for human life before the flood.
Eve ate the cherry from the magical tree, unleashing evil upon the world. Noah saved the seed of humanity/animalia to be re-established in a world cleansed of evil. Lifespans became shorter because, as they say, only the good die young.
Basically an early example of fanwanking.
Long life has frequently been equated with genetic or moral superiority in fantasy fiction. The Dúnedain in the Tolkienverse were descended from the extremely long-lived Men of Númenor and retained extra-long life despite genetic dilution with ordinary folk.
The worldwide flood that killed all humans except those on the ark never happened. Noah never built an ark because Noah never existed. None of the ancestors in his genealogy ever existed. The Garden of Eden never housed Adam or Eve and men don’t have a missing rib bone.
So why the extended ages? Writers in the ancient world had the common delusion that they were living in a lesser time, that giants once roamed the earth and the Golden Age was past, never to be recovered. They made the lost world bigger and greater than the dusty cities they saw around them. Even contemporaries did this. Herodotus gave the size of the Persian army at Thermopylae at one to two million, Simonides made it three million, numbers we would find unsustainable today.
No records of imaginary people can be lost. The patriarchs are creatures of legend and story. Earlier mythologies from Sumer and Babylon also talk about extremely long-lived men and great floods, almost certainly known to the writers of the Torah. Yet for some baffling reason, few people today insist that they were real characters out of history who really lived those extended lives.
François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and Baron Munchausen were heirs to the same tradition and their giants need to be read in the same way. No floods necessary.
Explaining an improbable event (incredibly long lives) by using an even more improbable event (a flood for which there is little to no evidence) doesn’t seem like a step forward to me.
I think we are looking at a mashup of different traditions. The very early people in the bible had extraordinary lifespans because they were extraordinary, and lived in extraordinary times.
I think the narratives of the patriarchs (which start with Abraham, for this purpose) is a separate tradition, and:
My bat mitzvah portion was from this section of the Bible, and the research that i did to write my Torah exposition suggested that at some point a word that used to mean “seasons” got translated into “years”. (There being two seasons, wet and dry, in each year in that area.) That’s what i told the congregation when i was thirteen, and i still think it’s highly plausible.
The exegesis I read explained that the ages of the ancients reflected their closeness to God and to the edenic past.In the Bible numbers are very often metaphors or allusions. In this case an illustration of how far we humans have fallen from grace. Their long lives represent a contrast to typical lifespans at the time of the story-tellers (these stories were orally transmitted for centuries before they came to be written down). God talked directly to the prophets and judges, miracles were enormous events like the parting of the Red Sea and fiery chariots descending from the sky. Life was much more saturated with divine intervention than it became later. The Hebrew Scriptures are linear, there is progression and it is generally earthward, closer to how we experience reality now.
Trying to figure out how these numbers could somehow be historical puts you in the much the same boat as fundamentalists who show themselves to be fools, trying to make the Bible be science or history as we know it. It’s not science nor history, never was meant to be, any more than the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Kalevala. It is a different thing entirely. But I know what you people will say next, so I’ll be bowing out here.
I would argue that parts of the Bible were in fact intended as history. I’m not saying they were necessarily reliable history: For one thing, they’re probably quite biased in favor of the authors and their nation. But then again, that still happens with modern histories. And they’ve probably lost or corrupted some details, just from imperfect transcriptions and (in the oral history phase) imperfect memory.
That said, the parts of the Bible that were intended as history are not the same parts as the parts that were intended as myth, or prophecy, or law, or life advice.
Well, the bible parts were never really intended to be read by people. They were kept in the thing at the place, where they could be studied by the clerics who would disseminate doctrine and dogma to the unwashed. There were some definite upsides to this.
One thing that stands out to me – all these guys living hundreds of years, hale and hearty to the end…How come they seem to have only one or two or so children each in all that time?
I think that’s mostly because the lesser children, most of all daughters and bastards 
, just weren’t mentioned. They are called patriarchs for a reason.
The same reason lists of kings don’t mention the hundreds of relatives. What matters is that they are descended from the right person who was descended from the right person and so on.
Besides, no fiction ever works that way. If you’re reading a mystery novels with a half a dozen suspects, does the author need to mention every single relative they have or have had in history? No. The people who need to be mentioned are mentioned and not the rest of humanity.
Yes, absolutely.
You appear to be conflating European medieval Christianity with texts developed some thousands of years previous to the birth of Christ. The ancient Hebrews did not have clerics, doctrine, or dogma. They were a collection of tribes who told stories from memory, and eventually these stories were written down.
Have you read any of the Hebrew scriptures?
“After he had So-and-So, he lived another 400 years and had other sons and daughters. Overall, he lived 920 years, and then he died.” The basic form is in there several times.
What @ekedolphin pointed out. The intent of the genealogies in Genesis Chapter 5 is merely to tell the direct line that led to Noah, but there were plenty of others. Similarly the ones in Genesis 11, leading to Abraham (well, Abram, at the time).