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Adam lived 930 years - "And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died."
(Genesis 5:5)
Seth lived 912 years - "And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died."
(Genesis 5:8)
Methuselah lived 969 years - "And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died. (Genesis 5:27)
Did people in the Old Testament really live as long as the Bible states, or were biblical years different from ours? The Bible is not alone in claiming life spans much longer than we can imagine. Ancient Mesopotamian records contain some corroborative evidence. Stories from the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian cultures declare that their most ancient kings lived thousands of years each. The "Weld-Blundell Prism " for example, written about 2170 B. C., speaks of eight pre-flood rulers each reigning for several thousand years. See Footnote
One school of thought claims that the ancient calendar made the year a month, or one lunar period. Others assert that a year equals one growing season of three or four months. One group says that a year in the bible was actually three months from Adam till Abraham, eight months till Joseph's time, and twelve months thereafter.
No scriptural evidence has been presented for any of these 'theories' and nothing in the Bible indicates that pre-flood years were significantly shorter than ours. References to agriculture indicate that the ancients counted years similarly to the way we do. Some early Mesopotamian records (circa 1500 B. C.) indicate a calendar of twelve months, each month 30 days long. We have no record of any ancient society counting a shorter year. The Mesopotamians were fully aware that their twelve 30-day months fell short of a year by a little more than five days. With variations from one society to another, the ancients typically celebrated a set of festival days every few years or so to make up the difference.
If we accept the idea that one-year actually equaled one month of our time, Enoch would have been five years old when his son Methuselah was born! The age of all the patriarchs at the birth of their children would be equally ridiculous.
After the fall, the genetic line of Adam and his descendants was very pure, so their health would have been incredible. Living that long would not have been a problem. Also, some theologians think that there was a canopy of water that engulfed the entire earth and that it was released at the time of the flood.
"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened," (Gen 7:11).
This would account for the fossil record, which indicates subtropical vegetation all over the earth at some time in earth's past. In such a moist atmosphere growth would have been greatly stimulated (for both man and animals), the oxygen content could have been much higher than present day conditions, man could have been stronger with greater endurance tending to longevity. No rain is recorded in the Bible until after the flood which seems to support this idea. This is, however, a theory but it is evident from the Bible that after the flood the lifespan of people was greatly reduced. "Then the LORD said,
"My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years," (Genesis 6:3).
IPS Note: This verse is often taken to refer to man's life span inasmuch as prior to this man often lived several hundred years however, the individual's life span was now limited by God to a hundred and twenty years. God made this statement immediately after saying that the sons of God were attracted to the daughters of men and took wives from among them.
However, considering the context, this is quite certainly a reference to how long the entire human race was going to be allowed to live before God put an end to the then prevalent conditions... It was a period of grace.
At the end of the set number of years the cataclysmic flood came. See The Days Of Noah - Part I ./days_of_noah.html
In any case as said immediately below man's years were not limited to 120 years but their ages gradually declined. This is borne out by Akkadian records. 3,000 years ago, Sumerian scribes carved a list of kings into clay. Before the Great Flood — eight rulers, each reigning for tens of thousands of years. After the Flood — the numbers drop. Fast. Systematically. Along a precise declining curve that appears in every single one of the twenty-plus copies of this document found across Mesopotamia. See Footnote I
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This all seems to explain why there is a steady progression of declining ages of men as their distance from the Creation increases. Adam lived 930 years, his son Seth lived 912 years. Lamech, his son, lived 777 years. Noah (Lamech’s son) lived 950 years. Shem, his son, lived 600 years. Shem's son (Arphaxad) lived 438 years. Arphaxad's son Salah lived 403 years. Skipping a few generations to Abraham the count goes down to 175 years. A few generations later Moses lived 120 years, which is not an unknown age for people to live to in our own time.
Also Adam was commanded by God to limit his diet to vegetables (Genesis 1:29) but Noah was permitted (after the flood) to eat meat (Genesis 9:2-3). A diet, which includes meat introduces a sufficient concentration of heavy elements into the body as to prove life-threatening after a few hundred years, but is negligible as a health threat up to the age of 120 (except in cases of extreme industrial pollution).
Copyright © 2006 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Footnote I - The Akkadian King Who Lived 900 Years — What They Found.
3,000 years ago, Sumerian scribes carved a list of kings into clay. Before the Great Flood — eight rulers, each reigning for tens of thousands of years. After the Flood — the numbers drop. Fast. Systematically. Along a precise declining curve that appears in every single one of the twenty-plus copies of this document found across Mesopotamia.
The standard explanation is symbolism. Large numbers meant great kings. But symbolism doesn't require a system. Symbolism doesn't need to be mathematically consistent across twenty independent copies from different cities over several centuries.
The Weld-Blundell Prism sits in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The same declining structure appears in the Book of Genesis. A Babylonian priest named Berossus recorded the same pattern for a Greek audience in 300 BCE. Three traditions. Three sets of numbers. One structure.
No peer-reviewed study has ever tested whether this decline is compatible with known biological models of lifespan reduction. Not because the test failed. Because the test was never run.
In The Names of The Kings
"Of the 29 kings having an archaeological corroboration, every single name is transliterated in the Hebrew Masoretic text exactly as it appears on the archaeological artifact-- syllable for syllable, consonant for consonant, 29 kings, every single name. Additionally, we find that the chronological order of these kings is precise. In other words, every name in the Hebrew Masoretic text, some of which go back to the book of Genesis and before the time of Hammurabi, appears in its correct order, with the correct spelling, in the correct time, as attested by the archaeological artifacts and period literature.
In fact, the only historical literature of antiquity that has demonstrated unerring accuracy with regard to archaeological verification is the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Majority Greek text of the New Testament.
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