Gullwind

That works okay for their life spans, but look at when they had kids.

Adam had Seth when he was 10 (130/13), but that's all right because he was created as an adult. ( )

Seth had Enosh at the age of 8 (105/13). Theoretically possible, but not terribly realistic.

Enosh would have had Kenan when he was almost 7 (90/13).

Kenan would have had Mahalalel when he was a little over five (70/13) who would have become the father of Jared when he was five (65/13).

In other words, Kenan would have been a grandfather at the ripe age of ten.

The Evil One

Alas, there are plenty of ages in Genesis that fail to match reality by this view either, because they are intermediate between the high numbers and realistic numbers.

Just one example Abraham died at the age of 175 -- now, was he impossibly old (175 solar years) or impossibly young (175 lunar months ie just under 14 years old)?

You might also want to ponder how Abraham managed to impregnate Sarah at the age of 100 lunar months (just under 8 years old).

Even if there weren't any such annoying intermediate dates, you would still have to explain why exactly the same phrasing means "years" in the later chapters of Genesis, but "lunar months" in the earlier chapters of Genesis ... with no apparent point of transition.

That's quite apart from the absurdity of arguing that the ancients "didn't have a clear understanding of a year" in the first place. The movement of the sun's rising and setting points, and the turn of the seasons in sync with same, must be the most salient natural cycle there is after night and day.


[ETA: you also said "really old people ... elsewhere" -- the first king on the Sumerian kings list is Alulim, king of Eridu. He ruled (allegedly) for 28,800 years -- or, according to your proposal, 2,215 years. "Reasonably aged", eh?

The SKL also has the same intermediate-and-short-numbers-lower-down-the-list issue that you find in Genesis.

Gullwind - we cross-posted, apologies, though I don't think extra examples can hurt!]

Coragyps

And West Virginia hadn't even been invented yet!

mung bean

Does IIDB have any West Virginian members?

Sauron

Ahem.

I live in Seattle but my family is from West Virginia.:devil:

mung bean

Quick, someone report Coragyps to Teh Smiters. :rolling:

JEST2ASK

(Per the Bible KJV) Noah was 500 years old when he had sons (Gen 5:32) The fllod waters came when he was 600 ... Methuselah was 187 when he Begat Lamech ... Lamech was 182 when he begat Noah ... Methuselah died when he was 969 the same year Noah entered into the ark ...

While I find this thread most interesting ... there are some things I wonder about ...

Adam (per the bible) lived to be 930 why did not his great grandson several times removed mention / acknowledge his passing ... I mean come on this was the very first man surely someone in all those generations should have visted him and remarked on it at some point. :huh:

In Genesis 4 the offspring of Cain build cities, start living in tents, introduce music at least the playing of the harp and flute, start working in metals, start forms of agriculture ... how was this knowledge transmitted to the linage of the later son Seth who was Noah's ancestor? aDave mentions something about tablets being passed down!

Were only those specified in the bible long-lived or did all humans have extended life spans before the flood? Did females also enjoy this benifit?
What about animals as the expulsion from Eden also seemingly changed animals as well?

The Evil One

afdave believes (from my memory of his last few threads) that all humans were superhealthy, superfertile, and superlonglived from Adam through to Noah and beyond, and that this declined gradually over time as deleterious mutations accumaulated and the species genome decayed.

He has not specified whether animals were longlived.

Calilasseia

Yet since in another thread, Dave attributes our allegedly decrepit, tumbledown genomes that are going to doom us (and all eukaryotes) to extinction as a result of "The Curse" and "The Fall", what I'd like to know is why this "Curse" and "Fall", which supposedly materialised from the moment Adam and Eve ate the wrong fruit, didn't start wrecking the genomes of all these millennarian supermen, and only started to take effect (if Dave's assorted pontifications are to be believed, which they probably aren't by any life form capable of banging the rocks together¹) once all this begetting of assorted crusty old gits with weird names like Mahalalael and Enosh (this latter one sounding like a combination cyber-café and fast food joint) is over and done with.

So as long as the human race was comprised mainly of blokes with weird names and unkempt beards (along with their long suffering womenfolk who were kept pumping out kids for 500 years at a stretch) the "Curse" was put on hold? The moment we started giving each other names that didn't sound like an attempt to pronounce 'Vladivostok' by a Glaswegian drunk, on the other hand, wham, we're all knackered and falling to bits. Does this strike anyone else here as being just a teensy bit absurd?


¹ Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, attributed to a newsreader on Ursa Minor Beta.

mung bean

So did you choose a convoluted user name in the hope of protecting your genome?