RE: Speaking of a 930 year old Adam
November 15, 2012 at 11:40 pm
(This post was last modified: November 15, 2012 at 11:41 pm by Darkstar.)
Five second google search, and: this, and this.
The author of the second page Wrote:
Faced with these superhuman ages, the faithful are often told or encouraged to accept the veracity of these life spans that far exceed modern man’s life expectancy and anything that the archaeological records have uncovered. Hence, in the search to “understand” and make the account “acceptable”, people have tried to reduce these hard to imagine life-spans to more mundane possibilities.
A lunar solution has been proposed and is heard by many as “the likeliest alternative”. This would mean that to attain the “real age”, as we today calculate someone’s life-span, i.e. by solar years, their ages need to be divided by 12. This would make Methuselah having lived to just under 81 years old. Suddenly, the impossible seems not only possible, but likely.
This therefore offers an appealing solution to the problem. However, as soon as one mystery seems solved, a new problem arises: the age at which these people fathered children. The eldest, Methuselah, waited until he was 187 years old to have a child, which in solar years would be 16 years. No real problem there. But the youngest dad, Mahalaleel, would have been just under five years old before he became a father – rather young – and apparently not an exception, for his father and grandfather had started roughly around the same time. And that makes the “most logical solution” once again harder to accept.
As mentioned, some have no problem with such superhuman life spans. For Martin Luther, these patriarchs had a better diet, sounder bodies, and experienced a less developed impact of sin on the physical creation, hence allowing them to live longer. Others have proposed that there was a different climate prevalent on Earth that would have allowed for these extended life spans.
For those who turn to the Bible for every answer, on this point, it does not provide an explanation as to why these patriarchs lived so long. As to a “less developed impact of sin”, the Fall happened during Adam’s lifetime, so why his descendents still lived long, does not seem to have a “logical” explanation. The Bible furthermore does not attribute anything special to these people – except a long life, and living before the Deluge.
When we take the Bible out of its isolation – something Christians seem to dread – various parallels become apparent. Few, it seems, have pointed out that in ancient Egypt – and ancient Sumeria – there are known lists of kings. Several of these begin with a series of kings that ruled before a flood or, in the case of Egypt, before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. Some of these deities lived even older than Methuselah, some to several thousands of years old. “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu(g). In Eridu(g), Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years." It seems that if Alulim had heard that Adam had died at the age of 930, he too would have said he died in his infancy.
A lot of ink has gone into the purpose of Genesis 5, with some noting that if anything, the list of patriarchs is out of place, functioning merely as a bridge between one narrative and the rest, largely there to fast-forward the story with a few millennia. The quickest method to fill this gap would indeed be to choose a small number of people, and attach long lives to them, so that the gap is quickly bridged. The Sumerian King List may have served as inspiration for this exercise. During their Babylonian captivity, the Jews will definitely have stumbled upon the Sumerian King List and they may have decided to incorporate this information into their own creation myths, though reform it either to conform to their calendar system, or for other purposes.
The Sumerians had a different system of counting, based on the number sixty. Some have tried to align Genesis 5 with the information of the Sumerian King List. The Jewish exegete Cassuto suggested that the figures in Genesis 5 (and 11) were "multiples of five with the addition of seven". An earlier attempt noted that the figures for the antediluvian patriarchs could be computed by 39 × 42 years and the period of time from creation to Abraham's entry into Canaan by 6 × 7 × 7 × 7, or 42 × 49 years.
In this interpretation, we are midway between a literal interpretation and the atheist viewpoint, which is that the Bible as a whole is a literary invention, and hence pure fiction. But if fiction, why not make it more believable, or at least give a moral or logical explanation why characters were inserted into the story that had hard-to-believe life-spans?
