Methuselah and those really old dudes

[DavidFilmer]

In ancient days, the Bible suggests that men lived a REALLY long time. Consider Genesis Chapter 5, which lists many VERY long lived dudes, including Methuselah, who lived a remarkable 969 years (and he probably drank and smoked).

These days, with the marvels of modern medicine and nutrition and such, it's very rare for anyone to live to 110. Future generations might push that a decade or two, but 969 years!?!?!?!?!

How are we to understand the lifespans mentioned in Genesis 5?

[Seeker]

I've heard two theories. One is that the large numbers of years are used comparitively and to show that they lived a long time because they loved God.  This assumes an allegorical interpretation of Genesis.

The other theory is that the earth was a very different place before the flood.  The atmosphere was saturated with oxygen and humans not only lived a long time, but grew to be 12 feet tall (around 4 meters tall) and were vegetarians.  The idea is that it never rained before the flood and that the cloud cover created a green house-hyperbaric chamber effect which allowed everything to grow big and live a long time compared to today.

After the flood, God allowed humans to eat the flesh of animals and the atmospheric pressure became what it is today.  This is a Creationist's view that helps answer your question.  It's a theory.

[tklein1014]

The other theory is that the earth was a very different place before the flood. The atmosphere was saturated with oxygen and humans not only lived a long time, but grew to be 12 feet tall (around 4 meters tall) and were vegetarians. The idea is that it never rained before the flood and that the cloud cover created a green house-hyperbaric chamber effect which allowed everything to grow big and live a long time compared to today.

I've also heard a similar theory.  Not to change the subject, but I find it interesting that there is also a creationist explaination for dinosaurs in here.  Since humans evidently lived longer lives before the flood, it is logical to assume that the entire animal kingdom had longer lifespans as well.  Reptiles grow their whole lives & never stop, the older they are, the bigger they are.  If they were living 100's of years like humans evidently were, they would have never stopped growing in those 100's of years, so that's where we get these giant dinosaur skeletons.  It also explains why the dinosaurs became extinct so suddenly.  The flood happened, then they stopped living so long & growing so big.  Another theory that's out there...  Cool, huh?

Tina

[Melody]

What I've always understood by this, is that they measured time differently from us.

We know that as time progresses, men have found more scientific ways to measure time (specifically wrt years). At those stages they probably were measuring a year to be a lot shorter than what we know it to be now.

I like Seeker's allegorical interpretation , but I think some 'bad' guys in the Old Testament also lived years that we couldn't possible in this day & age (will verify & re-post).

Tina, the dino thing was Cool indeed   ! However it would assume that creation starts off tiny & keeps growing bigger with the passage of time. Dino baby skeletons don't suggest that. Also in terms of today, humans reach a certain height etc (varying but not greatly) and then stop growing after perhaps a certain age (which again varies but not greatly). It's not like my 80 yr old Grandma towers over me or such  

David, thx for a truly interesting topic!!

Blessings,

Melody

[tklein1014]

Also in terms of today, humans reach a certain height etc (varying but not greatly) and then stop growing after perhaps a certain age (which again varies but not greatly). It's not like my 80 yr old Grandma towers over me or such

I don't think it's a good analogy to compare humans (or other animal types/species) to reptiles, because reptiles never stop growing until they die, whereas mammals, birds, etc. all have a certain point in life where they stop growing.

To put it into today's perspective, all baby alligators start out the same size, but they aren't all the same size when they die.  Some grow bigger because they live longer.  Some don't get as big because they don't live as long.  I hope this makes sense.  I'm not a biologist, but I think this is true of all reptiles.  Correct me if I'm wrong...

Tina

[Rev. Eric]

Concering the extremely long life spans in Genesis, the first thing to note is that the average age recorded decreases over time.  In Genesis 5 we see Adam living to be nearly 1000 and the same is seen with his immediate descendants. Noah lived to be 950 (Gn 9:29) but his son Shem (through whom the Semitic race is traced) lived only to be about 600.  So here we see a dramatic shift after the Great Flood.

Shem's immediate descendants had life spans of about 400 and then they drop to 200 (see Gn 11:10-26).  Finally we see that Terah, the father of Abraham, had a life span of 205 years, while Abraham lived 175 years (Gn 25:7).  After that, life spans decrease to what we would consider normal.

So not only is the extreme life spans of the ancients worth noting, the gradual decline in human life spans is worth noting also.

One explanation I heard for this concerns how Adam and Eve came to be.  They were created by the very hand of God, allowing them to be as close to perfection as creatures can be.  Their long ages stemmed from this fact.  But over time through each generation, this perfection became "watered down" so to speak, until it leveled out to the life spans that we, today, deem as normal.

Another explanation is that the life spans recorded in Genesis are symbolic.  Because the wages of sin is death, the author of Genesis illustrated the problem of the gradual increase of evil in the world by showing gradually decreasing life spans.  He gave the most ancient of humans incredibly long life spans to make the reader think, "Wow, look how old these guys lived!"  But then the reader notices that while the problem of evil grew in the world, the life span of people became greatly pruned.  This was to alarm the reader into realizing the grave problem of evil (if you'll pardon the expression).  Consider all this in light of Proverbs 10:27, "The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short."

To back up this second theory, note the fact that Abraham fathered Issac at the age of 100, which was roughly half his life span, and yet the bible says that Issac was born in Abraham's "old age" (see Gn 21:1-5).  If Abraham was to live to be 175, and if his father Terah lived to be over 200, why refer to the age of 100 as "old"?  At most he would be considered middle-aged at 100, but only if the recorded life spans were to be understood as literal.  Because the author called him old, that seems to suggest that Abraham did not literally live 175 years.

But with Jesus we see that the quality of time on earth is better than quantity.  After all, God only decided to hang around on earth as a human for 33 years.

God bless,
-Rev. Eric

[Melody]

I don't think it's a good analogy to compare humans (or other animal types/species) to reptiles

Tina, you're quite right! Sorry for the wrong analogy!

Rev. Eric, as usual, I learn a lot from reading your posts, thank you.

Blessings,

Melody

[trmichels]

Here are some other possibilities from my book Genesis:

The Length of a Biblical Year

There is now very good evidence that a year on earth was not always 365 days long. The calendar year of the ancient inhabitants of Tiahuanaco, South America contained 291.2 days. They may have had 10 lunar months of 29 days. Prior to Biblical patriarch Peleg's time (when the earth was divided) the Hindu, Persian, Chaldean, Assyrian, Chinese, Greek, Roman and Mayan calendars all had 360 days. Around 700 BC the Chaldean, Hebrew, Selucid, Syrian, Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese calendars changed to 365 days. In 701 BC Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, added 5 days per to the 360 day calendar. His Jewish contemporary King Hezekiah reorganized the Jewish calendar by adding a month (Adar II) during each Jewish leap year; which was the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th year of a 19 year cycle. Between 300 BC and 500 BC the Mayans developed what is referred to as the "long count" calendar of 365 days; which meant that their previous calendar probably had fewer days. The Biblical calendar, from Genesis to the New Testament, uses a 360 day year.

Again we must ask ourselves some questions. How many days were in a solar year when God created the earth? How is it that such widely separated cultures as the ancient Babylonians/Chaldeans, the Egyptians and the Mayans all appear to have had knowledge of the study of astronomy, and where did this knowledge come from? The answer to this last question may be because these people are all related to each other through Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their knowledge of astronomy and use of astrology may have come from the Nephilim, the fallen angels of earth, who we will learn more about later.

Did The Patriarchs Really Live That Long?

Although the lengths of the lives of the patriarchs in the Bible seem quite long, they are short in comparison to the lengths of the rulers listed on the Weld Prism of World History, which is stone inscribed with hieroglyphics believed to have come from Sumeria around 2000 BC. It lists 10 kings, among them Alalgar and Dumuzi, who each ruled 36,000 years. One of the questions I had to ask myself while reading the Bible was, "Can the list of names of the patriarchs, and the lengths of their lives really be true? While I cannot say I found the answer to my question I did find some interesting things during my research.

The Bible states that all the people of earth (except Noah and his family), were destroyed in the Great Flood. Again we must realize that the "entire World" to the people of the Middle East probably meant only the area of the Middle East, not the World as we know it today. To determine if any of the people listed in the Bible lived through the flood, and to find out if the story of the flood was possible, I placed a line at the time of the flood. To my surprise none of the people listed before the flood survived. Methuselah, the longest-lived man, and the only named person still alive at the time of the flood did not live past the year of the flood. In fact, he died the year of the flood. If the Bible is just a story (as some experts and theologians suggest) then someone performed very meticulous calculations to get this correct, and it never got corrupted through all the translations of the Bible. How did this happen? Did someone do this just to make a good story?

According to the dates of the Bible, Adam died only 126 years before the birth of Noah. Could the years listed be correct? Let's use some currently accepted dates, and two different Biblical events, to find out. Scientists believe Abraham and the Hebrews first passed through the land of Canaan about 1850 BC. According to the Biblical genealogy Abraham first went to Palestine 2,023 years after Adam was created. Adding 1,850 years from the scientific date of 2,023 would make Adam's creation 3,873 years BC; very close to 4,000 years.

Now lets look at the time when the Israelites took control of the land of Palestine. According to the Bible, Jacob's birth was 2,148 years after Adam. He arrived in Egypt when he was 130 years old (Gn. 47:9), 2,278 years after Adam. The Israelites remained in Egypt 430 years (Ex. 12:40), until 2,708 years after the creation of Adam, then they wandered in the desert for 40 years before entering Palestine, 2,748 years after Adam. Scientists believe Joshua entered Canaan about 1200 BC. If we add 1,200 years to 2,748 years we come up with 3,948 years, or about 4,000 years after Adam was created.

When we combine current scientific belief with Biblical genealogies concerning these two different events, using the creation of Adam as a starting point, there is only a 75-year difference in the two calculations. It appears that the time frames of the Biblical genealogies are quite reliable, at least in some aspects. In 2000 AD the Hebrew year was 5760, which is only 173 years different from my calculations taken from the Bible.
 

Neandertal Man
Quote from Johan M.G. van der Dennen:

"Fuhlrott took the finds (of Neandertal man, TR ) to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, and after a preliminary announcement by Schaaffhausen, the pair presented the Neanderthaler ('Neanderthal Man') to the world at a meeting of the local natural history society in June 1857.

This was the first evidence of a distinct (and now extinct) species or subspecies of human, Homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis, that lived during the later part of the Pleistocene epoch, more familiarly known as the Ice Age, some 200,000 to 30,000 years ago. Sites at which (by now abundant) Neandert(h)al fossils have been found are distributed in Europe and western Asia from the Atlantic in the west to Uzbekistan in the east, and from Wales in the north to Gibraltar and the Levant in the south.

Most palaeoanthropologists, according to Stringer & Gamble (1993, p. 65) accept that the Neandert(h)als evolved from European middle Pleistocene ancestors who were either a late form of Homo erectus or a descendant of that species. This would be either Homo heidelbergensis or 'archaic' Homo sapiens."

I pulled this quote from the Koinonia newslettera at www.khouse.org:

"The Neanderthals possessed the hyoid bone, which is necessary for human speech. They have been found with tools and weapons, cave drawings, evidences of burial, and even a musical instrument. In fact, the finger holes of the Neanderthal flute found in Slovenia in 1995 were spaced according to the diatonic scale - do re me fa so la ti do - which argues that its maker possessed both intelligence and a musical ear. The Neanderthal image is having to be revamped as scientists realize that while they were thicker boned and more physically powerful than we are today, these humans were also intelligent, creative, and spiritually aware people.

In fact, Dr. Jack Cuozzo, a New Jersey orthodontist who has studied several of the Neanderthal skulls firsthand, argues that based on his experience of studying bone growth, the Neanderthals may have simply lived extremely long lives - perhaps 400-500 years rather than our typical 80."

My questions are, could these Neandertals be the half-human offspring of the Nephilim (Fallen Angels) or could they be the long-lived ancestors of Homo sapiens mentioned as the Patriarchs in the Bible? Could they be evidence of a First Earth Age, before The Flood?


Thoughts to ponder, and to ask God when we get to Heaven,

T.R.