People have argued that the 120 years mentioned in Genesis 6:3 was really meant to be the time period between the proclamation for destruction and the coming Deluge. In other words the generation had 120 years to turn around from their bad ways. Noah was referred to as a Preacher of Righteousness in 2 Peter 2:5. Noah could have preached the coming end of that systems of things for 120 years.

The 120 years has also been suggested as a proclamation for the limiting of the human lifespan. The Jewish Historian Flavious Josephus made that claim in his interpretation of Hebrew the legend. If God wanted to kill a few million rebels he could have sent one angel to do the exterminating, just as in 2 Kings 19:35. It seems the Deluge was the most dramatic of God's executions. He went out of his way to damage his own creation for the extermination of a few million people. It's possible that the Flood was really meant to reduce the life span of humanity because there was a few more thousand years to go before the Last Day, hich is known as Armageddon. God had said that the badness of man was great in the earth (in the antediluvian world) and that every imagination of thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Gen. 6:5). This statement made by God may have implied that he wanted to limit the lifespan because corrupt leaders would have ruled too long.

Here is the King James version of Genesis 6:3
"And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years."

Here are a few reasons, because for one the atmosphere was ritcher, cleaner and not polluted, that is why insects like dragon flies grew over 3feet in length and why dinosaurs were so big.

Also because the right food was about and man was vegetarian untill after Noah's flood which then man became king over the animals and meat eaters and the earth's climate changed to seasons which had an effect on life on earth and mans life expectancy.

Pff, God is really evil then. Man had become corrupted in Happeh Vegetarian Land, then God decides to flood the world to make everything alright again. So he does that and everyone but a few dies.

Then suddenly he does a 180 and people can eat whatever they want cause God sure as hell wont provide, f**k human longevity and f**k the poor dinosaurs (what did they do wrong???).

Noah must have been mighty pissed off!

Longevity reduction may have been the main motivation for the Deluge but the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, may have been the conduct of the 200 rebel angels living on the earth at the time. God could have sent a few angels to kill the corrupt humans, but then the 200 rebel angels would have tried to stop them. Michael could have matched the power of Satan, but Satan would have been able to neutralize the lesser angels. Daniel 10:12-13 describes how the angel Gabriel was resisted by the Prince of Persia, a fallen angel, and so Gabriel needed the assistance from a more powerful angel called Michael. Spirit creatures were created with different abilities so that they could perform a task predetermined by God. Some of the more powerful angels could have rebelled and so a war on earth might have resulted if God didn't bring on the Flood. The rebel angels may not have believed that God would go so far as to destroy his own creation to disrupt their rulership. There is no mention of the fallen angels being able to take human wives after the flood, which would imply they no longer had the power to materialized anymore. It would seem as if the physical laws of the preflood world were changed so much that the fallen angels didn't know how to adapt to the new environment for materialization. All other spirit materializations recorded in the bible were minimal and never were related to fallen spirits. The ones recorded in the scriptures were the three angels that visited Abraham, the angel that wrestled with Jacob and the materialization of Jesus before he ascended to heaven. There might be others but I can't remember them now.

The Answer. That's Right. The Answer

This really has been a mind-expanding thread, full of ingenious answers to the OP question. Some of them were fascinating to read. Others were hilarious.

Now here's the correct answer.


1. Between the rivers

Originally posted by Byrd
In the Sumerian king lists, some are shown to be living 900,000 years or so.

Sumeria was in Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Mesopotamia was also the place where the ancestors of the Jewish people arose; the Bible tells us Abraham came from 'Ur of the Chaldees', which was in Mesopotamia. Those long-lived Biblical patriarchs you good folk have been discussing were all Mesopotamian. Even Adam was; according to Biblical report, the Garden of Eden, where he was inspired with life, was in Mesopotamia.


2. The numbers game

Now the Sumerians, to whose 'king list' Byrd refers, had been civilized longer than just about anybody -- around nine thousand years, longer even than the ancient Egyptians. This was the place where writing was invented and where Hammurabi, the granddaddy of all bookkeepers, kept his records. Over the millennia, different city-states and empires arose in Mesopotamia. Power and ideas were passed from declining and dying states to emerging ones. Often these ideas mutated or diversified in the process of transfer.

Arithmetic, a fairly early invention, was one of the ideas that got mutated slightly in transfer. The way it mutated holds the answer to the OP question.


3. All our bases are belong to you

The common-or-garden arithmetic we use every day makes use of a 'base' of 10. What this means is that we use a set of ten digits (1 to 9 plus 0), and when we want to write a number that is more than nine, we use the same digits to refer to multiples of ten -- tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on. When we want to write the number of miles in a marathon, we write

26

where the 2 stands for 'two times ten' and the 6 stands for one times six. Whenever we see the figure 26, we know exactly how much it stands for: the number of miles that are in a marathon, or the age at which Keats died of tuberculosis.

But now, suppose we change our 'base' from 10 to, say, 6. We then have only six digits (1 to 5 plus 0) with which to write down any quantity we can think of. To write down the number of miles in a marathon, we would write, not '26' but

42

where '4' means 'four times six' (twenty-four) and '2' just means two (twenty-four plus two equals twenty-six). The actual number stays the same (the number of miles in a marathon) but the figure is different. Confused? No need to be. It's simple arithmetic, no big trick to it.

It becomes a little harder to deal with (for us decimal habituees) when you start using bases higher than ten. You have to have invent new digits. Perhaps you decide to use A for 11, B for 12 and so on, but whatever you decide, it's messy. I wouldn't even bring it up, except that this is exactly what some ancient Mesopotamians did, some of the time: they used base 60 arithmetic. They had a basic set of sixty digits. At other periods of history, ancient Mesopotamian cultures used ordinary base ten arithmetic, the same as we do.


4. Swapping bases

Knowing that ancient Mesopotamian societies alternated between base 10 and base 60 arithmetic, we can see quite clearly how those amazing age tallies in the early Old Testament and the Sumerian King Lists were generated.

It goes like this.

• Somewhere in Sumeria, a king dies. A scribe records the length of his reign on a clay tablet: 'King Ashur reigned for 13 years'. He's using base 10 arithmetic.
  
• A few generations later, in another part of Mesopotamia where they use base 60 arithmetic, another scribe copies out what was written by the first on another tablet: 'King Ashur reigned for 13 years.' But in this society, '13' doesn't mean thirteen; it means sixty-three, and that's what he writes down in the script of his era, not knowing he's made a mistake by not converting the base from 10 to 60 at the same time. So now King Ashur appears to have ruled not for thirteen but for sixty-three years.
  
• A couple more generations, a couple more base swaps and he's lived for 3,603 years. Methuselah eat your heart out.

And there you have it. It's nowhere near as exciting as variable planetary spin, the Finger of God and some of the other theories posted here, but this, I fear, is the real explanation for the apparently extraordinary longevity of Methuselah and his fellow-patriarchs. They were bookkeeping errors, the lot of them.

[edit on 8-10-2007 by Astyanax]

Astyanax has the most believable theory.

*clap clap*

Originally posted by harrisjohns
No, but many of them are allegorical, and if you look at Genesis the creation events outlined happen in almost exactly the same order as accepted by science today (just over a much shorter timescale!) which indicates to me that the ancients knew more than we give them credit for.

Think about that. Really think about that.

How hard was it for htem to realise:
Without light, things won't grow.
Without water, you won't live.
Things won't grow without water.

Need I go on?

A child, about roughly the age of 10 knows those things. Any group of people, Nomads, etcetera, would realise that:
Plants need: Water + Light
Animals need: Animals + Water + Plants.
Humans need: Water + Plants + Animals

Really not hard to work out an order is it?

They also lived so long because people didn't date things how we do now. A year, or what is counted as a year, differs from society to society, generation to generation. It differs between groups of people and it isn't a constant. Some of them used seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Thus 100 years would be 25. 400 years would be 100.

Of course, what if they worked off of a luna system? Where as 1 month is 1 year when translated in correctly. Thus 900 would be roughly 70ish years. I can go on and on and give examples of why they might be that age. There's nothing that says Adam lived for XXX years. Each year was 365 days and XX hours. Thus one can assume, he didn't live what we call a year at least not 900 of them.

Originally posted by penginkun

Originally posted by GriBiT
I've always been intersted in the long life spans spoke about in the bible. Life spans of 100's of years. Over 900 in the case of Adam. Then they slowly decrease over time. After "Noas flood" they decreased even more until they reached the average age that we have now (70 years give or take).

Kent Hovind has a theory about this which I find pretty interesting, however dubious I am of his credibility. He (and others, actually) believes that prior to the flood the earth was covered by a mantle of water high in the atmosphere. The temperature was always a certain degree, and the earth was protected from solar radiation. The atmophere was more dense as well, and everything had a tendancy to grow larger and live longer.

He says that humans grew to be at least 12 feet tall

He said 2-3 meters thats 6-9 feet not 12 feet use your head

I have given some thought to this subject and if they did live longer, it is possible that our galaxy and maybe our solar system could have been moving through the universe much faster than it is today. The faster you go the more time slows down. You age slower while driving in a car etc...

a year is the amount of time it takes our planet to go around the sun

ancient civilisations had the same number of days as we do. they invented the system of time counting that we currently use.

so time hasn't slowed down or up because we would have noticed and even if it did its all relative. In a universe where a minute is sixty seconds and you write that down as such the value won't change if the seconds get shorter

its all relative

Great discussion. Especially great response "Astyanax".

from what I can ascertain hes either a late generation God from Babylonia or hes an assyriologist/sumerologist

There's another theory that the rotation and orbit of Earth is now different as the result of a collision, or near collision, with another planet. This event supposedly caused the "flood", and by altering the year, led to a situation where years went by much slower.

I think there was a book about this that I read some years ago. "When Worlds Collide" ???? "Worlds in Collision" ????? Something along those lines. I read it about 20 years ago, so I can't be sure of the tittle.

it was worlds in collision by Emmanuel Velikovsky
heres what wiki has to say about it

The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were irreconcilable with Newtonian celestial mechanics, requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform to the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum (Bauer 1984:70). Velikovsky conceded that the behavior of the planets in his theories are not consistent with Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation. He proposed that electromagnetic forces could be the cause of the movement of the planets, although such forces between astronomical bodies is essentially zero (Friedlander 1995:11-12).

Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940s — and they had regarded the physics within it as egregious.

Carl Sagan wrote that the high surface temperature of Venus was known prior to Velikovsky, and that Velikovsky misunderstood the mechanism for this heat. [10] Velikovsky believed that Venus was heated by its close encounter with the Earth and Mars. He also did not understand the greenhouse effect on Venus, which had earlier been elucidated by astronomer Rupert Wildt. Ultimately, Venus is hot due to its proximity to the sun; it does not emit more heat than it receives from the sun, and any heat produced by its celestial movements would have long dissipated. Sagan concludes: "(1) the temperature in question was never specified [by Velikovsky]; (2) the mechanism proposed for providing this temperature is grossly inadequate; (3) the surface of the planet does not cool off with time as advertised; and (4) the idea of a high surface temperature on Venus was published in the dominant astronomical journal of its time and with an essentially correct argument ten years before the publication of Worlds in Collison" (p. 118).

and anyway, at the same time these people were claiming their kings lived hundreds of years they were also faithfully recording celestial events.

guess what they didn't mention ?