gstafleu

The calendar system in question is probably the "Mythic Calendar System," MCS, which for some strange reason isn't followed anymore these days. The early part of the Sumerian King List uses it. As you can see, they generally have Noah beat!

Gerard Stafleu

Fortuna

I have also read this one, but as another poster pointed out, it can hardly be rationalized because in application it would also men fathering children at very young ages. That poster says ;

And of course, that is far too old. It is doubtful that anyone lived that long in the early bronze ages. I would think that one would be lucky to live to be 50 years oldin those times. and of course, application to a younger ceiling only makes matters worse.

Thereis a hint here. It would seem that the Sumerians also list some very long ages for their kings in the Sumerian King List. In fact, most of these are consider longer than those we find in the Torah. According to one web site;

Thus it would seem that writers outside of the Torah/Biblical (Sumerians) writers also assigned these long life spans to their kings and patriarchs.

My guess (and it is just a guess) is that they may have done this out of some sense to give to their Kings/Patriarchs the godlike qualities of long lifespans. Tell the peasantry that their kings have such long lifspans along with tales of their heroic adventures would tend to make the peasantry believe that their leaders did have god-like qualities. Perhaps this prevented the peasants from revolts and uprisings.

The truth is probably that even kings in those days barely made 50. Peasants were probably lucky to make 35.

Derec

One interesting hypothesis I have heard (from Robert M. Price) is that the Genesis pre-Flood timeline is a corrupted adaptation from the pre-Flood portion of the Sumerian King List. The idea goes that there is a word for a5 year period that the priests that came across it misinterpreted as being "week", resulting in shorter timespans in Genesis. However, the Wikipedia article talks about time being measured in units of 3600 years and 600 years, so I do not know what to think about that really.

xrey

I remember that one of my Sunday school teachers made a similar argument. It seemed silly at the time. After all, if we were to believe that a woman can be made from the rib of a man, and that the sun can stop in the sky, then living for 900 years isn't such a stretch.

gstafleu

This apparently comes from a paper by Julius Oppert, The Dates of Genesis (1877). If you add the number of years in the king list of Berossos, you get 432,000. The biblical patriarchs add up to 1656.

Now the number of seven day weeks, as used in the Jewish calendar, in 1656 years is 86,4000. For the Babylonian (Sumerian) version, we start by taking a year as a day and then make "weeks" of five (as was Babylonian usage) of these year-days each. Guess what, we get another 86,400 weeks!

Gerard Stafleu