Explaining Noah's Age to A Biblical Literalist

  • Thread starter Thread starter Le_Chiot_Noir
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
L

Le_Chiot_Noir

Guest
My question is how?

I take my breaks at work with a good friend of mine who is a ‘non-denominational, but-sort-of Baptist’, a good, noble man who loves to read Scripture, but a little simple in his thinking and his ways. We get into discussions about the differences in our respective religions sometimes (I am a devout Catholic, and working on being a better-educated one), but it is mostly just an exchange of information than debate.

Tonight though, he was talking about one of the subjects we sometimes hit that make me make funny faces to myself (one of them is his take on evolution). He was sharing to me his reflections on the Noah story (good), and we talked about the parallels with present times (also good), but then he started talking about how amazing it was that a man over a hundred years old could do all that work making the ark (WOAH!).

I wasn’t really all THAT surprised that he thought this way, given past indications, and I was careful not to refute any numerical values and kept the discussion strictly within the realm of moral edification and wonder at God’s work in human history, but it got me to thinking about how I’d explain it to someone who asked.

Not just Noah, but Genesis is full of pretty wacky numbers for the ages of the patriarchs (300 years old, 500 years, etc). Do these numbers simply mean they lived ripe, long ages? Or that it was a whole generation of Noah’s bloodline, just conveniently lumped under one name (which doesn’t make sense, I know, but my mind wanders when trying to figure things out)?

What does the Church say about these numbers?
 
Le_Chiot_Noir said:
My question is how?

I take my breaks at work with a good friend of mine who is a ‘non-denominational, but-sort-of Baptist’, a good, noble man who loves to read Scripture, but a little simple in his thinking and his ways. We get into discussions about the differences in our respective religions sometimes (I am a devout Catholic, and working on being a better-educated one), but it is mostly just an exchange of information than debate.

Tonight though, he was talking about one of the subjects we sometimes hit that make me make funny faces to myself (one of them is his take on evolution). He was sharing to me his reflections on the Noah story (good), and we talked about the parallels with present times (also good), but then he started talking about how amazing it was that a man over a hundred years old could do all that work making the ark (WOAH!).

I wasn’t really all THAT surprised that he thought this way, given past indications, and I was careful not to refute any numerical values and kept the discussion strictly within the realm of moral edification and wonder at God’s work in human history, but it got me to thinking about how I’d explain it to someone who asked.

Not just Noah, but Genesis is full of pretty wacky numbers for the ages of the patriarchs (300 years old, 500 years, etc). Do these numbers simply mean they lived ripe, long ages? Or that it was a whole generation of Noah’s bloodline, just conveniently lumped under one name (which doesn’t make sense, I know, but my mind wanders when trying to figure things out)?

What does the Church say about these numbers?
Click to expand...
I don’t think the Church prescribes a view on this. Some believe these ages to be literal and explanable by the fact that the earth’s atmosphere, for example, before the great flood was different and supported much older ages. By analogy, dinosours grew much, much larger than animals today - is therefore so hard to believe that men lived much, much longer than they did today? Methusala (the oldest person in the Bible) is said to have lived 969 years. Some view the ages as intended to reflect qualitative length (i.e., very old).

I personally don’t have a problem beleiving in these literal ages - any more then believing that Moses parted the red sea (I believe he did) or that Jonah literally was swallowed by a fish (I believe he was, and Jesus own words suggest he believed it as well - and he should know :-)). But even on these events, there are some who believe in them as allegories as illustrative of a principle. A danger of the allegorical approach (other than when the context clearly suggests allegory or analogy) is that its a slippery slope - some could/do then apply that same reasoning to the miracles of Jesus and some even to the resurrection. The latter being a heracy quashed by the Church in the earliest years of Church history.
 
Le_Chiot_Noir said:
My question is how?

I take my breaks at work with a good friend of mine who is a ‘non-denominational, but-sort-of Baptist’, a good, noble man who loves to read Scripture, but a little simple in his thinking and his ways. We get into discussions about the differences in our respective religions sometimes (I am a devout Catholic, and working on being a better-educated one), but it is mostly just an exchange of information than debate.

Tonight though, he was talking about one of the subjects we sometimes hit that make me make funny faces to myself (one of them is his take on evolution). He was sharing to me his reflections on the Noah story (good), and we talked about the parallels with present times (also good), but then he started talking about how amazing it was that a man over a hundred years old could do all that work making the ark (WOAH!).

I wasn’t really all THAT surprised that he thought this way, given past indications, and I was careful not to refute any numerical values and kept the discussion strictly within the realm of moral edification and wonder at God’s work in human history, but it got me to thinking about how I’d explain it to someone who asked.

Not just Noah, but Genesis is full of pretty wacky numbers for the ages of the patriarchs (300 years old, 500 years, etc). Do these numbers simply mean they lived ripe, long ages? Or that it was a whole generation of Noah’s bloodline, just conveniently lumped under one name (which doesn’t make sense, I know, but my mind wanders when trying to figure things out)?

What does the Church say about these numbers?
Click to expand...
Catholics interpret the Bible in the literal sense. Check out Catholics and the Bible at Bible Christian Society. The talk on Catholics and the Bible will answer your question. It is a free mp3 and you can also look at the notes that go along with it.

Hope this helps and God bless,
ZP
 
Old ages in the Bible are not as strange as they seem. God created Adam and Eve, they had bodily immortality, infused knowledge and preternatural gifts.

Having been created by God their genes were not yet mutated. Why is it surprising that they would live longer than us?
 
actually if you read the books of Ann Catherine Emmerich, you will read that man use to actually live up to 900 some years,
though it says most did not get that far, but it is not an absurd idea at all, and it would explain a heck of alot.
the thing about Ann Catherine Emmerich’s books is, none of it’s writings contradict anything in the bible at all,
although you do not have to believe it, because it is not church doctrine, but it is also not wrong if you did believe it,

and actually in the books of Ann Catherine Emmerich, it says that mans age limit is now 120 years, and i think just recently(or maybe it was awhile ago)
scientists said that after tests and studies(or whatever it is they do) they came to the conclusion that man can only live to the age of 120,
i just found that very intriguing…
 
ziapueblo said:
Catholics interpret the Bible in the literal sense. Check out Catholics and the Bible at Bible Christian Society. The talk on Catholics and the Bible will answer your question. It is a free mp3 and you can also look at the notes that go along with it.

Hope this helps and God bless,
ZP
Click to expand...
I don’t think that’s true, because not all books in the Bible were meant to be taken in the literal sense. We take the spiritual truths from them in the literal sense, but some of them were simply not intended to be an historical account. The Gospels are obviously meant to convey history (even though the parables within the Gospels were probably not referring to singular events), but can we say the same is true for the Song of Songs?

Lucky for us, we have His Church to sort it all out for us 👍
 
We almost really have no other choice then to take these ages literally. If he was 600 years old when the flood came then he would have been 480 when he started work on that sucker. If we think that years equal months then that would have meant the anti-deluvian Fathers would have had children when they were 5 or so. The firmament (watery atmosphere) did wonders for people’s health and ages. Just compare Gen 5 and Gen 10 I believe. Before the flood people lived anywhere from 750-950 years, however, after the flood ages were dramatically cut to below the 100 year mark.
 
Noah may have been 600 some years old or maybe the Old Testament writer was trying to say that he lived to be really old.
 
If the Sons of God really did attain the ages described, and these were not merely metaphorical, they obviously aged slowly as well, since they were having children when they were over 100 years old. It’s certainly a great and praiseworthy thing that Noah was able to construct the ark as God ordained, and his neighbors probably opposed him in this, and there were certainly many struggles he had to face in its building, but I don’t think his age was an issue.
 
Thanks for all the replies, I was most particularly surprised at how many had no trouble with taking the ages literally; even my girlfriend asked me why it was so hard to believe.

I suppose I’ve limited my own understanding then, if I cannot seem to get past my hangup on incredible age. I have yet to listen to the provided audio material on Catholics and Scripture, but I will reflect on it in the meantime, and pray for discernment on the matter for a better understanding and relationship with the Word.

It’s no stumbling block or anything; just an interesting thought exercise, and an educational query.
 
I have a link that’s not Catholic but it was theorizing about what the earth was like before the flood, water above. I’ve never been all the way through it yet and haven’t even been back to it for a long time… because got to keep my priorities straight, the job hunt.

But the link; Rightly-Dividing Geology and the Book of Genesis Beyond the “Gap Theory” of Christian Creationism

His theory basically in a nutshell that longer life spans would’ve been possible with the way the world was before the flood. There’s a lot more there, I think he even gets into how the continents fit together like you could imagine them all as one land mass at one time.

I hope I’m not out of line posting it, wasn’t back to the Catholic Church yet when I found it and still seems plausible to me.

I am open to correction btw if I need it.
 
Le_Chiot_Noir said:
Thanks for all the replies, I was most particularly surprised at how many had no trouble with taking the ages literally; even my girlfriend asked me why it was so hard to believe.

I suppose I’ve limited my own understanding then, if I cannot seem to get past my hangup on incredible age. I have yet to listen to the provided audio material on Catholics and Scripture, but I will reflect on it in the meantime, and pray for discernment on the matter for a better understanding and relationship with the Word.

It’s no stumbling block or anything; just an interesting thought exercise, and an educational query.
Click to expand...
There’s an unusual number of biblical literalists on this board because there are a large number of converts from protestantism. While there’s nothing un-catholic about their take on Genesis, it’s not really mainstream Catholicism.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to your question of what the old ages mean. But I agree with you that they probably aren’t historical facts.
 
Another thought on the topic…

Their Calendar was not the same as ours during the times the books of the Bible were written. Only recently in the Earth’s history did our Calendar have 12 months (It originally had 10).

I’m not educated enough to tell you what the Calendar they used was like, but I am curious now so I will try and find out on google or something. If anyone else knows more feel free to piggy back this post. I’d like to know myself 🙂
 
Well I know the Jews used a lunisolar calendar of 12-13 months (some years they had to add ‘leap months’ to keep it in line with the seasons); it’s still used today to calculate the dates of Jewish holidays.

Whether they used this calendar in the days of Noah and Enoch and whatnot is another matter. It seems likely to me that Moses at least used something similar (if not the same), because the Torah makes references to calculating dates and such that seem to imply a luni-solar calendar with the various cycles incorporated.
 
I think we ought to be more concerned about what calendar they used during the days the books were written, because that is most likely what was used to describe the ages in the bible. It seems unlikely to me that the authors of the books themselves would even have known how the ancient peoples from the stories marked time…
 
Jack_245814 said:
Well I know the Jews used a lunisolar calendar of 12-13 months (some years they had to add ‘leap months’ to keep it in line with the seasons); it’s still used today to calculate the dates of Jewish holidays.

Whether they used this calendar in the days of Noah and Enoch and whatnot is another matter. It seems likely to me that Moses at least used something similar (if not the same), because the Torah makes references to calculating dates and such that seem to imply a luni-solar calendar with the various cycles incorporated.
Click to expand...
For myself, based on the fact that Adam and Eve were originally created to be immortal, I don’t have any trouble with the idea that the early generations lived for a really long time; after all, diseases and addictions weren’t really around that much, yet, so the only thing really impacting their health would have been if they got injured in war or while out hunting, and whether they had enough to eat.

I think it’s cool to think of the fact that Methuselah knew Adam and Eve, and also Noah, in person. 🙂
 
This was that site’s theory;
Before we discuss the atmospheric chain reaction that was triggered by the Fountains of the Deep, and the complexity of the “Windows of Heaven” component of the flood model (Genesis 7:11-12), we need to consider one of the most notable post-flood effects. Specifically, that according to the Bible, following the flood the life-spans of mankind dropped almost exponentially following the flood. Obviously, something in the Earth’s post-flood environment was very different than before Noah’s flood, because before the flood man lived to be just short of 1,000 years old. Below is a Life Span graph showing the ages of 23 men of the Bible from Adam to Joseph.
Click to expand...
The page this is quoted from and the rest of that page is More on the ‘Windows of Heaven’ of Noah’s Flood

If it’s wrong posting this tell me and I’ll drop the topic.
 
further on down that page;
In researching the cause of these greatly expanded pre-flood age-spans, my first inclination was that this must be somehow connected with the functioning of the human pituitary gland. But what was different after the flood that could cause the aging process to accelerate? I considered increased amounts of solar and cosmic radiation in the post-flood world as a possibility, but the existence of C14 in organics dating from the times of Adam and even before him ruled out cosmic radiation. I considered the possibility that perhaps the atmosphere of the Earth back in those days may have filtered out some other form of solar radiation. This could have been part of the answer but did not seem to be enough by itself.
Click to expand...
Then recently, while reading an article about Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy for treating injuries, the answer came in a bolt of inspiration: Much of the reason men lived longer in pre-flood days was because the Earth’s atmospheric pressure was considerably higher back then, and man was originally made to thrive in a higher-pressure atmospheric environment.
Click to expand...
To me it made sense… yes, I did study the Bible more, really get into it away from the Catholic Church and been back since last year so if I’m still approaching all wrong, I apoligize.

Besides, creation tells us the first day was the sun up and then sunset… unless the earth didn’t rotate at the same speed it does now.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top