Why did people in the bible live so long?

Go to The Two babylons
by Reverend Alexander Hislop.

Go to sub section 1 The Child in Assyria.

After the flood of Noah's day, his sons and daughters-in-law dispersed and Ham went in to the valley of Shinar to set up house. Babylon.

The tales of Adam and Eve and Cain and Able, The Flood, morphed with the tellers religion.
The nomadic peoples of Shem and Japheth didn't write the accounts of their ancestor, Noah, but passed it down orally.

So, because you find the epic of gilgamesh BEFORE The Tenach or old testament, doesn't mean it PREDATES it!


Some other reasons for their longevity is the increased oxygen!
Before the vapor canopy was broken in the flood, there was a LOT more!

Also the increase in the cores' magnetism.
Japanese scientists have proven that plants grown in magnetized water grow
immensely.

Don't forget that sin causes death.

[edit on 6-12-2007 by Clearskies]

I always thought it was accepted that the long ages in the bible were due to the use of the lunar calendar. So a "year" was actually 29.5 days and 900 year old Adam would have been 73 (solar years).

Sorry if this has been mentioned but this is a very long thread and I haven't read it all through.

I watched a science documentary some years ago discussing telomeres or telomerase. This stuff (whatever it is) is supposedly at the end of animal/human chromosomes, kind of like the taped bit at the end of a shoe-lace. It shortens gradually as cells split and can progress aging as it runs down. Perhaps in olden times they had longer shoe-laces. .

Must have driven a lot of folk quite crazy if they were paupers or slaves for a few hundred years. Maybe we've evolved to live shorter lives' cos it's better for us?

reply to post by wigit

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Just a reminder that the correct answer to the OP question is still on page 16 of this thread.

reply to post by Astyanax

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Haha. Thanks for that. I believe you have the answer, but to tell you the truth, when I see a lot of numbers being discussed my brain goes into shutdown. I'll take your word for it, lol. I might have a read through another time when I feel I can handle the figures.

Ok look guys, i dunno if it's been said but here is my theory(because most of the rest that I read are rediculous):

I think that back in biblical times 6 months was considered a year. That would make Moses' 120 years a more reasonable 60 years of age. As for Adam and Eve living for like 900 years, thats just obviously a pure fabrication just as most of the rest of the bible is. I mean for cryin out loud they still thought the world was flat when they wrote the bible, torah, qu'ran.....they were obviously not enlightened about many of the things we know about today.

More water vapor in the air, less malignant rays in the atmosphere.

Lol, after reading this thread my husband and I are considering buying a portable hyperbaric chamber. Turns out that a lot of atheletes use these and they heal 70% faster, autistic children use them to get more oxygen to their brain, old people use them for aches and pain and more oxygen to their brain (lol), and the list goes on and on about the benefits.

STM

looong thread but
the answer is that the curse of death took a while to enact
..and the Bible account is fully trustworthy because God does not make mistakes - even when He uses men to record His thoughts

tired of the matrix and its lies ?
Read Johns account for The Way out
yrs
y

reply to post by GriBiT

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The truth is nobody knows, GriBit - certainly not anyone today (at least not as far as we can see).

But it is interesting that the subsequent, shortened life-span that God is said to have imposed on the human race corresponds exactly to the currently accepted optimal life span of a human being: 120 years.




[edit on 5-1-2008 by Vanitas]

reply to post by Astyanax

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As fascinating as this little dissertation is (I am not being sarcastic, perish the thought), it doesn't explain the fact that, in the same book, written by the same people, using the same reckoning system the "age" of mankind suddenly drops to a totally un-prodigious 120 years...
(Which incidentally, corresponds exactly to the supposedly optimal lifespan of humans, on which most gerontologists seem to agree nowadays - and, in fact, that does seem to be the current upper limit. The oldest humans die no later then in their 120s.)

science describes the beginning of the universe taking 100 000 0000 year process.
Genesis tells us 7 days, these people must have had some exagerration problem haha.
since time does not exist we have created it to record our events, making our lives more impatient and having compared everything through time we age more?
maybe

Well... I asked this very same question when I was 13 at a Catholic high school.

The answer?

'The air was cleaner back then'.

Yep. There's your answer

reply to post by offtheheezay

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The creative days were epochs, not literal 24hr periods. Besides, the part that says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" can span billions of years. The stars were already burning and the planets were already obiting before the first creative day started.

The six creative days (or epochs) were only meant for the earth's preparation for habitation.

They lived that long via the same process that Paul Bunyan had a giant blue ox. These guys are cultural heroes, so their traits are exaggerated. And in a culture where one of your more distinguishing traits was being an old guy and fatehring lots of kids, multi-century lifespans became a good way to hyperbole how great the guys were.

That's one for the books!

Well the fairly short answer is that the Hebrews borrowed the story from the Babylonians, who had themselves believed that human lifespans ran into the hundreds before the Great Flood (as in the epic of Gilgamesh and other texts).

And, helpfully, they explained it; in this 'pre-lapsarian' state people were spared illness and died only of natural causes at ripe old ages. Evidently they over-estimated what a ripe old age might have amounted to. After the Flood people were deemed not worthy of the privilege of being immune from sickness and lifespans became more what we're used to today.

That explanation doesn't feature in the Bible I guess because the writers didn't need that part of the story.

So there you are. Really the question is similar to watching a Hollywood movie about King Arthur and asking 'why were Californians so into chivalry and big round tables?'. But that's just where the movie was made, the story existed previously elsewhere.

You can hear about it in the course of this radio show as I did earlier today: THE LIBRARY AT NINEVEH - www.bbc.co.uk...

Here is a recent thread with a link to a scientific study addressing that very question.

I don't think it has been posted in this thread before; if it has been, I apologise.

reply to post by pineappleupsidedown

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Sorry it took me so long to reply to your post (4 years), Jewish Years are 14 months long being based on moon cycle as opposed to sun cycles, this was not taken in to account in translations of Biblical time, so 120 x 2 months divided by 12 is 20 plus 120 is 140 years. Man is supposed to live up to 140 modern years... Hope you find the Holy Spirit cause that is the only way you'll live that long. wrayski