RE: I plan to live forever
October 10, 2010 at 7:53 am
(This post was last modified: October 10, 2010 at 7:53 am by fr0d0.)
Wikipedia has some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah
Mistranslation
Some believe that Methuselah's extreme age is the result of an ancient mistranslation that converted "months" to "years", producing a more credible 969 lunar months, or 78½ years, but the same calculation applied to Enoch would have him fathering Methuselah at the age of 5 using numbers from the Masoretic Text. Using the Septuagint numbers, Enoch's 165 months in a ten month calendar would be 16½ years, and Methuselah's 969 would be 96.9.
Symbolic
Symbolic interpretations begin with the observation that the Biblical chronology routinely uses numbers for their symbolic value: for example, 10 symbolizes completion, 8 symbolizes the mundane world, and 7 the divine. So Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten-generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed.
I'd go with these rather than the literal interpretation.
Mistranslation
Some believe that Methuselah's extreme age is the result of an ancient mistranslation that converted "months" to "years", producing a more credible 969 lunar months, or 78½ years, but the same calculation applied to Enoch would have him fathering Methuselah at the age of 5 using numbers from the Masoretic Text. Using the Septuagint numbers, Enoch's 165 months in a ten month calendar would be 16½ years, and Methuselah's 969 would be 96.9.
Symbolic
Symbolic interpretations begin with the observation that the Biblical chronology routinely uses numbers for their symbolic value: for example, 10 symbolizes completion, 8 symbolizes the mundane world, and 7 the divine. So Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten-generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed.
I'd go with these rather than the literal interpretation.
