I'am 70 and my ass is worn-out......I bet you they didn't have Viagra in those days, can you imagine two 500 year old engaged in sex, I would hate to think about it......Mom and Dad please we don't need any more brothers and sisters, hell our baby brother age is 200.. Don't you think enough is enough, we only live in a two bed room shotgun shack and one out door toilet.
How long did people like Methuselah really live?
by dubstepped 35 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Simon
The question should really be: "did the character called Methuselah really live?"
Was he just a character in a book? Why not, most of the rest were.
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Saethydd
From what I could find, there are theories that perhaps they counted years in shorter durations than the current calendar, but some point to similar lengths of months, though maybe not as many months per year. Does anyone really know?
The issue with this theory is that people are mentioned having children around 50-100, meaning by that count they would be between 4-9 years old.
It is claimed that some of these old time counters did not grasp the "0" concept, well here they added one, 96.9 years is not far fetched, what is a zero among friends anyway?,
Same problem exists for this explanation, 5-10-year-olds aren't exactly the right age to father their firstborn.
My personal theory is that it was all made based on the Mesopotamian myth that men lived longer before the global flood that is recorded the epic of Gilgamesh.
Back in the day we were taught that man's longevity was due to the canopy of water around the Earth which filtered out harmful cosmic rays, which is what eventually kills us.
This bubble of water is what fell during the flood. The protection was gone. Immediately after the flood, men's life span reduced dramatically.
I think maybe the dinosaurs died in the flood too.
That canopy of water would actually have been more hostile to life on earth, in fact, that is included in an informative video by Aron-Ra on the meteorological implications of the Noachian Flood.
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James Mixon
A trick question I found. "How did the oldest man(Methuselah) in the Bible die before his father?? Geneses 5:21-27....
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sparrowdown
As Maxwell Smart would say Methuselah was the second oldest man that ever lived.
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schnell
Isn't it funny how God told man to be fruitful and become many, and yet the patriarchs had heirs only very late in life?
Isn't it just a little funny?
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schnell
It is claimed that some of these old time counters did not grasp the "0" concept, well here they added one, 96.9 years is not far fetched, what is a zero among friends anyway?,
I would like to point out, in addition to the problem of sexual maturity that someone else mentioned, that if you're dividing all the ages by 10, what you're implying is that Adam was created just shy of 166 years before a global flood. Humankind, in that model, is less than 4700 years old.
Nope. I mean, I get that it's a myth, but even as a myth... Just nope.
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OnTheWayOut
I believe that the writer of Genesis tried to bolster the thought found in Psalm 90:10 (both Genesis and that Psalm alledged to be written by Moses who supposedly lived over 120 years) that our lives can only reach 70 to 80 years unless God blessed us with extra life. And then the writer shows that God did that for the men of their fictional history. That way, such men could be viewed as "larger than life." But because it was fiction that could not be matched in the days of the reader, those lives were shown to be getting shorter and shorter.
There is no way the stories are based on real people counting years in a different manner. Everyone knows what a year is- going thru one summer and one winter, or going from one fall harvest to the next fall harvest.
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Juan Viejo2
I asked this very question to a somewhat notable Catholic theologian that I met right after I left the Witnesses. It was after a christening at a large Catholic Church in central California. He was in the area to give a series of lectures on Catholic/Christian/Jewish history vs. secular history.
After we introduced ourselves, he asked me if I was a Catholic. My response was, "Well, my mother was a Catholic most of her life, but then she converted to Jehovah's Witness and the rest of the immediate family followed. I left for good when I was about 22, but I married a Catholic girl."
"Oh, so you are a Catholic by marriage?" he asked. I replied that I never became a Catholic; my wife converted from being a Catholic to a Jehovah's Witness. We're divorced now. She eventually went back to being a Catholic."
He asked me if I was still a "believer," and if not, why not. I told him that I was agnostic about god, but felt the Bible had no real credibility. When he asked me for an example, I mentioned Genesis. "The earth, sun, moon, animals, plants, humans, etc. all created in 6 24-hour days? A flood that topped Mt. Everest in less than 40 days, but drained away in just a few months? And where did all that water go?"
"Well," he replied, "time periods in the Bible can not be taken literally. Early manuscripts indicated that every early civilization only had one time piece - the sun. It came up and it went down. The next day it came up. The concept of weeks, months and years is really a much later development. So early writings speak of seasons based on the stages of the moon, so they may have considered each full transition of the moon as their 'year.' Calendars are a relatively late development and did not really appear until numbers and writing became universal. Early humans simply did not think in terms of numbers and letters - they thought in terms of day and night, warm and cold, etc."
He admitted that much of Christian belief was based on "faith, not facts." "You'll go crazy if you try to convert every word in any Bible into absolute fact. Most of it was not even written until about 500 years before Jesus."
I had a lot of respect for what he had to say. He had that little twinkle in his eye that told me that his belief was tied more to his job than his actual beliefs, but he likely truly believed in God and Jesus. I guessed that he was a reasonable man who knew more than he was willing to divulge. But those few minutes made an impression on me that still makes up a part of my own philosphy. But the point was that he apparently did not believe that a Biblical "year" was the same as a modern "year."
So if you take some of those old patriarchs and change their life spans from years into months, then someone who lived to be 950 years old would have actually been around 80 - a far more reasonable number of years.
JV
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schnell
If you divide the ages by 12, then Adam was created 138 years before the flood.
It's irredeemable nonsense if taken literally.