An exercise in biblical inspiration: Did Adam live 900 years?

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Wingz said:
The way lifespans dropped and the God saying that He would shorten the lifespans of man suggests that (if the ages were literal) there was a genetic cause.

Surprisingly, aging mortality is passed down through genetics through cells called telomeres.

These cells aid in cell division. But each time they divide they become shorter. The shorter the cells are the more susceptible a person is to disease, cancer, alzheimers, etc. The shorter the telomeres the higher the chance of death.

The length of a persons telomeres are determined through genetics. There is also an enzyme which can decrease the shortening of telomeres and therefore slow aging however it can also promote the growth of cancer cells.

So if the ages were literal it might be genetically possible although I don’t know if there is a limit to human age and there are probably tons of other factors in aging.
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Source? I’m heard something similar before, and this subject greatly interests me.

Thanks & God Bless
 
Wingz said:
Even if there was a mistranslation a year being a lunar moth would not work out.

For the age of Adams death it would mean he was actually 75 not 900 which is ok until you find out the ages they had children.

Adam had Seth at 130 years old. So Adam would have been 10 years old when he had Seth if years were equal to lunar months.

Mahalalel had Jared at 65 years old biblically so if you count by lunar months. This would mean Mahalel had Jared at the age of 5.

It works out for Adams age of death but does not seem to work for when they had children.
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Yeap… all very true.
 
Yes. At least that is what was proposed. The numbers are not literal. They are meant to convey something else. Sort of how we might today refer to someone as a giant. Certainly he or she is not a giant but has great stature.
 
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catholic1seeks said:
Look to what I said above ^

The Church teaches Mary is a Virgin.
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This was proclaimed a dogma and thus is true!! The debate on some of the Marian dogmas took centuries, millennia. It touches upon the magisterium of the church.
 
pretty sure that the point of writing that adam lived 900 years was to explain why humans don’t live past 120 years. it’s just a literary technique to show that sin limits life
 
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Man, I shouldn’t have deleted the posts I just made… but they were related to Sumerian texts. They don’t have these concerns about sin the way the Jews did. How do you explain their use of long lifespans?

And before you might say they’re different cultures, they’re really not. Abraham originally came from the the same region. And I can list one Sumerian hero who was more than likely the same Nimrod mentioned in the Bible: Enmerkar, who was said to reign 420 or 900 years, depending on the text.


And his tale is so close to the scriptures that it even has an account similar to the Tower of Babel:

Once upon a time there was no snake, there was no scorpion,
There was no hyena, there was no lion,
There was no wild dog, no wolf,
There was no fear, no terror,
Man had no rival.
In those days, the lands of Subur and Hamazi,
Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the decrees of princeship,
Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,
The land Martu, resting in security,
The whole universe, the people in unison
To Enlil in one tongue spoke.

…

Then Enki, the lord of abundance whose commands are trustworthy,
The lord of wisdom, who understands the land,
The leader of the gods,
Endowed with wisdom, the lord of Eridu
Changed the speech in their mouths, brought contention into it,
Into the speech of man that until then had been one. -Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 2100 BC
 
“legendary king”

he didn’t live for 900 years…it’s just legend
 
He isn’t anything, in comparison to some of their kings, who lived thousands of years. lol. “Legend” is relative.
 
lol

the oldest person who ever lived was 122. that’s the only verifiable source we have
 
Well, before you say these were silly people who liked fairy tales or exaggerated, they were surprisingly keen on some things.

Like this Sumerian illustration… it looks like remarkably close to the Solar System. They weren’t too simple-minded at least.

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just because they had an understanding of astrological patterns doesn’t mean that everything else they believed in was true. the greeks made many strides in philosophy but the greeks believed in half goat half human satyrs.
 
According to them, they never made any “strides”. It’s nothing like the Greeks. They said they were taught by gods. This isn’t too far off from the Jewish legends in Enoch…except there it says they were fallen angels (the same mentioned in Genesis). The same book of Enoch quoted in New Testament Jude.

"And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal, taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon…” - 1 Enoch VIII
 
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This is why I deleted those above posts. I really didn’t want to mention any of this, but it’s kind of hard not to, once you start talking about Genesis. It’s part of a whole body of literature and wasn’t created in some vacuum… especially a vacuum that people only look at with a modern lens.

But these old texts are kind of stumbling blocks. I don’t put my full trust in them, but I throw them out there anyways, just to give some context. Food for thought at least.
 
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straykat said:
I see. Maybe you’re right. I’ll have to think about it more. Kind of conflicts with my notions of what they represent, but I could very well be wrong. I think of the Tree of Life as granting eternal life (mostly from it referenced in Revelation), but it could simply be life, period. I think it was the road for Adam and Eve to grow closer to God, but they chose the road that separated them (Knowledge of Good and Evil), which I kind of see as the birth of the ego and the false notion of Self and “I am” (lowercase “I am”, as opposed to God, the true I AM). My thoughts on all of this get a bit wonky, I admit… so I won’t waste too much of your time with it 🙂
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Right, according to St Thomas the human body can’t go on forever in the state Adam was in. It was energized and regenerated by the soul in a way ours aren’t and the tree of life prolonged life. But it couldn’t go on indefinitely. As you mentioned it wasn’t eternal life. they really were immortal in the sense that their intended end wasn’t death. Their earthly life was not meant to end in death but it couldn’t last forever unless they fulfilled their end. How long? Who knows? The Patriarchs lived a short life compared I would imagine. Maybe not. Maybe like Enoch it was only supposed to take 365 years to complete a human life and for it to end.

About the ego and the serpent. You know how ego perceives it’s self at the center of everything. No matter what’s going on the ego thinks it’s all about him/her.
Did you see the ego in the serpent?

Gen 2:16
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat** of every tree of the garden;** 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,

Gen 3:3
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

It’s like when God said not to eat from the tree the serpent was in, the serpent heard God say 'you shall not eat from any tree in the garden" 😄
 
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Here is an interesting thing that I got from here almost 10 years ago. The poster believed it proved that Genesis was not inspired. Can you imagine? The thinking was that it proved that the author used the math to prevent the text from being corrupted. It’s pretty cool. I don’t think the author had an inkling of this.

If you count the weeks from creation week to the day of the flood, it equals 86,400 weeks. From creation to the very day it began began to flood, 86,400 weeks passed.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day.

The weeks are counted by using the age of the father when the son was born. Noah’s age and then Genesis gives the number of days within the year by giving the date. “in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” That equals 45 days or 6.48 weeks.

The calculation.

Adam 130 years whern Seth is born
Seth 105 when Enosh is born
Enosh 90 when Kenan was born
Kenan 70 Mahalel was born
Mahalel 65 when Jared is born
Jared 162 when Enoch is born
Enoch 65 when Methusaleh was born
Methusaleh 187 when Lamech was born
Lamech 182 when Noah was born
Noah was 600 years old when the flood began.

Gen 7:11 " In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

Total years from creation to flood = 1656 years

1656 AT 52.17 weeks per year = 86,393.52 weeks

Noah is 600 yrs old at the time of flood, it’s anywhere within the 45th day of that year.

45.36/7 day week =6.48 weeks).86,393.52 + 6.48 = 86,400 weeks from creation to destruction.
“on the precise day named”

There are 86,400 seconds in a 24 hour cycle.
 
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If the Bible is the Word of God as we believe it should not have errors.

There might be some mistranslations but those can be fixed by looking back at the original Hebrew text. Other than that the Bible is the word of God.
 
I for one have no difficulty at all with the nine-hundred years.

There is no compelling reason to treat them as myth, other than, “The human body as now known does not live so long, therefore it must be myth.” Not convincing.

Textually, the lifetimes gradually tailed off after the Flood. Presumably something happened to human life to eliminate the long lives after it.

If we accept that A&E would have kept their bodies forever without the Fall, why the difficulty with them holding onto them somewhat longer than we do even after it?

ICXC NIKA
 
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