empiricalDeity

I am interested to know if there is any reasons given for people to live in the book of Genesis so many hundreds of years. is there any allogories or metaphors for such a long age? Any hidden meanings? Or is it just because it's folklore?

GenesisNemesis

I don't see why it would be a "secular" explanation. Try "naturalistic". Anyways, I think it's because people back then thought the world was once a "better" place (I'm not saying perfect), so then we must've lived longer, too. I don't believe one bit of it, though.

arricchio

Beyond that the Book of Genesis is full of bullshit, I don't think any explanation is necessary, secular or otherwise.

deadman_932

Hmmm..well, here's a few possibles:
(1) Great age has cachet. Leaders can often be hidden from the vast majority of a culture and share names in a lineage. So "Binky the Great" who lived 200 years might actually be grandfather through grandson, etc. This gives considerable mystical weight to the notion of an invincible leader hundreds of years old, and favored by god.
(2) People writing histories long after the fact...may lie.
(3) Linguistic terms like eons, ages, "many" years, etc. can simply be so open-ended or mistranslated as to allow for claims of great age.
(4) Mythic or semi-mythical characteristics can be attributed to an ancestor because it's just a good story and it enhances social cohesion, group identification.

The possibilities are pretty extensive/overlapping, really. I'm sure you can think up some others. Cheers!

Sven

One finds similar long ages for kings in cultures nearby (even longer ones, up to several tens of thousands of years). For more, see here:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=213244

(just ignore afdave's blather)

Daisy

Asimov supposes that the age of each ruler given is actually the age that tribe ruled.

Chili

The Thousand Year Reign is ours to behold and it is in this awareness that our Royal Banquet takes place wherein, yes, we are entertained by those who got us thusfar in life. They actually were the efficient cause for the way we were in a deterministic world from which we here find release = know thyself and be free. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm#scholastic

The invitation to this banquet is made by virtue of our apology to those we held captive prior to the crucifixion of our persona (this would be the three days underground prior to our resurrection into the upper room = to vacate the conscious mind and move into the subconscious mind where this banquet takes place. Noteworthy here is that the temptations in the desert take place in the lower house while the banquet goes on in the upper house).

So their age is determined by the apology made to those in their own netherword that was illuminated by the brilliance of their Beatific Vision wherein they could see their own soul nature (lineage) by which they were predestined.

Cheerful Charlie

Baloney nonsense long lives of kings was popular in earlier cultures' mythologies. The biblical writers just followed the general trend of mythology in that part of the world. Monkey see, monkey do.

CC

spamandham

The figures are legendary. The ancient Hebrew were not the only culture to assign great lifespans to their legendary figures.

Roger Pearse

Numerals in ancient texts suffer a number of problems, and are easily corrupted. For the ante-diluvians, it isn't actually clear that the original text read 'years'.

The reason to suppose is this the list of ante-diluvian kings given in Berossus, quoted by Alexander Polyhistor and in turn quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea in the Chronicle. The lengths of their reigns are given in 'sars'. These might have the value of 3600 years each, giving fantastically long reigns; or lunar sars of 18 and a bit years; or, well, who knows? But other writers then perform the calculation they thing appropriate, and so we can end up talking as if Berossus recorded a reign of 36,000 years, when in fact the text read '10 sars'.

All this by way of caution.

But in antiquity there was no commitment in the church to reading the text as history rather than folk-lore, since a similar uncertainty was present in Judaism at that time.

All the best,

Roger Pearse