How Long Have Men Lived?
Posted 07-06-2015 at 06:21 PM by Fortoggie
TIME: We recently passed the longest day in the the year and then the halfway mark. Now we are leaning into the rest of 2015, most people have become so sensitive to time that they could close their eyes and tell you the time of day within a few minutes. We also know the day of the year and have a general sense of our place in history's great time machine. It wasn’t always that way; men began to wrestle with the details of time only about 4000 years ago and slowly over centuries learned to measure and divide it.
That drives me back to Genesis chapter 5 and re-think the stories of the Hebrews who were said to have lived… well all the way to 965 years of age. After 65 years of studying and teaching the bible I have come to believe that somebody got this wrong. Many scholars believe that it was in the translation, others that it was part of the hero telling that went on between the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Hebrews. [ Our people are so special that they lived 10 even 20 times longer than your people, they were so virile that they could make babies at 185 years of age.]
As modern people we should not be any more surprised at this than at doctors, who as recent as 150 years ago were putting mentally disturbed people in swings and turning them around and around trying to undo their craziness.
If we wanted to take Methuselah’s age and overlay it from today backwards, that would mean that he would have been born in the year 1050 A D, long before there was any history of this continent we live on; who would have been around to track his age, to know when he begat children?
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I Cor. 13:11
That drives me back to Genesis chapter 5 and re-think the stories of the Hebrews who were said to have lived… well all the way to 965 years of age. After 65 years of studying and teaching the bible I have come to believe that somebody got this wrong. Many scholars believe that it was in the translation, others that it was part of the hero telling that went on between the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Hebrews. [ Our people are so special that they lived 10 even 20 times longer than your people, they were so virile that they could make babies at 185 years of age.]
As modern people we should not be any more surprised at this than at doctors, who as recent as 150 years ago were putting mentally disturbed people in swings and turning them around and around trying to undo their craziness.
If we wanted to take Methuselah’s age and overlay it from today backwards, that would mean that he would have been born in the year 1050 A D, long before there was any history of this continent we live on; who would have been around to track his age, to know when he begat children?
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I Cor. 13:11
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