Methuselah and those REALLY old dudes

[Wildgraywolf]

Moses, a Hebrew, had an Egyptian education; is it possible those ages - those numbers held meaning for the Hebrews and/or Egyptians? A Meaning that escapes us today?

 

[DavidFilmer]

ceasar:

well there’s a ton of speculation on this subject…he would be in the more perfect state of the human gene pool…and its my belief that over that last 6000 years it has degraded…

This is a good point. I asked Father Eric (not a participant in this forum) this same question and he responded as follows:

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.

 

[Steve_Andersen]

Catholic Dude:

I have asked a few dentist why we have wisdom teeth, …

Clearly they come from a time before dentists, fluoridated water, and oral hygiene so our teeth naturally fell out and it was probably a good thing to have a back-up pair.

It wasn’t too long ago that dental care was merely tooth extraction. My Dad was born in the 1920’s and he had a lot of bridge work even as a young man.

It is not uncommon for creation/origin stories to talk about long lived ancestors.

In pre technological times the life expectancy was very low because of the high child mortality. The population would have lots of children and very few old folks. A vigorous (and lucky) man in his 60s could have easily already outlived his children and even great grand children.

 

[JessicaCeleste]

Taken from: The Catholic Bible: Personal Study Edition, Jean Marie Hiesberger, General Editor, Oxford University Press,1995

“The genealogies of Genesis 4-5 with the enormous ages of the patriarchs are not intended to be taken literally. A sumerian list of kings who lived bbefore the time of the flood ascribes even more astounding ages to its monarchs. The list bridges the time gap between the creation accounts and the story of the flood, and they show that human beings have indeed multiplied as God ordered. Lists like these were a device used by ancient people to speculate on how long the world has existed.” (pg RG 40)

~Jess

 

[Catholic_Dude]

So the way it looks to me, whoever said “only the good die young” must have never read the Bible.

 

[ceasar]

bogeyjlg:

Didn’t it later on say that God shortened our lifespan to 120 years at most?

120 years is when god was going to destroy the earth with water…took noah that long to build the ark and get all the animals in…man is ordained to live 70 yrs. and beyond that is a manner of his own strength…

Ceasar

 

[DaveBj]

I try to do a “birthday ride” on or near my birthday, in which I ride a number of miles equal to my age in years. Imagine how fit I’d have to be to do that and have been living back then.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the fact that they were only a few generations removed from creation, meaning that all the genetic problems we have now hadn’t worked their way into our DNA yet.

I read an interesting observation recently in a sci-fi mag–yes, the average lifespan is increasing, but not because the upper ceiling is increasing. Rather, it is increasing because more and more people are living into their 80s and 90s and crossing over the century mark.

If deaths in utero (natural and violent) were taken into account, the average lifespan would come way down. I don’t have the source at hand, but I have read that 25% of all conceptions spontaneously abort, and that’s not even taken into account the travesty of legal medical abortion.

DaveBj

Edit: I googled it quickly, and just on the first Matching Sites page the figures ran from 15% to 75%