Sheshbazzar

It seems reasonable. The Hebrew word שנים -'shaneh'eem'- meaning 'repetitions' or 'cycles' of periods of time usually rendered as 'years'. However the length of these 'shaneh' cycles is never specified, only the implication that they are of equal length, which as you suggest might well have originally have been counted in months or 'moons' just like with primitive Native American time calculation. And would work reasonably well for explaining these seemingly long lifetimes.

....Except, it runs into problems when giving the ages at the 'begetting' dates of offspring. Using the same measures would have Adam 'beget' Seth at 11 years old, and Seth begetting Enosh at 9 years old, and Cainan begetting Mahalaleel when he was 6 years old, And Mahalaleel would by such calculation have been only about 5 and a half years old when he begat Jared.

So really, even within the same verses, no matter what time repetitions we would assign to them, they come out as being quite preposterous.
Personally, as a confessed Hebrew, I certainly wish this was not so, but it is. And there is nothing I can do about it except to accept that these age numbers do not accurately reflect the actual lengths of these mythical Patriarch's lives.
It is Hebrew mythology. Nothing particularly bad about that as all ancient peoples had their mythological 'beginnings' stories.


eta. FSOA Following your implication that the Masoretic text was one hundred years short on the ages, I redid these calculations adding 100 shan'eem to the ages of the above Patriarch's and came up with Adam begetting Seth at age 20, Seth begetting Enosh at age 18, Cainan begetting Mahalaleel at around his 15th birthday, And Mahalaleel aged 13 years and 9 months when he begat Jared.
Not quite as preposterous, but also apparently not supported by any extant texts.




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Horatio Parker

Thanks for checking; I was relying on memory.

Apparently there are various ideas of what constitutes a Great Year. The figure 4868 is Artistarchus'.

steve_bnk

When I read it I saw the lives spans a fabrication to fill in times for geneology that was passed down orally.

I remember it looking like a pattern.

Sarpedon

It was a common belief in ancient times (right up to the rennaissance, really) that mankind was diminishing over time. Not only did the ancients live longer, they thought, but were smarter, more moral, stronger, even taller in stature. Virtually all mythology I've read accepts this as a given.

Take the Iliad, where the characters repeatedly hurl rocks at each other which are described as so big that 'it would have taken several men to lift, as such men are these days, but Achilles (or Ajax or Diomedes or Hector, etc) lifted it with ease.'

Genesis is par for the course.

outhouse

the oral tradition from Mesopotamia all had hero's with long lives, these Israelite scribes could not make their heros any less potent so to speak.

and they had no reason to question the mythology of the past.

outhouse

Moses is fiction as the ages of people are.

Israel started roughly 1200 BC so the only way some of these legends are older then 500 years is through oral tradition and from other cultures.

steve_bnk

Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound....nore powerful than a locomotive...faster than a speeding bullet.

It's Superman...fighting for truth, justice, and the Judeo-Christian way. Larger than life is as old as fireside story telling.

aeebee50

You are always talking about food. If you were here or close, I would take you out to eat.

Guest46854

Re: steve bnk-
It is apparent they had their own supermen characters.
Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Wonder Women, etc... but alas no dinos.

outhouse

and fireside story telling is much of the first five books

when some of these legends were recorded 1000 BC the only origination were from other cultures with a Israelite spin redacted at lated dates as collections of early legends were copied and passed on