The conundrum of enormous Biblical lifespans might be solved

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updated feb 12, 2025 on Abe’s birthday     Drew and John: a look at lifespans…

“My 11 kids think I am older than Methuselah!   Hardly, kids: I’m not a day over 968!”

I finally received our family’s long anticipated copy of the new “Ignatius Catholic Study Bible-Old and New Testaments” and was curious on page 65 about the Gen 5:5 explanation/commentary on the Patriarchal genealogies:

“Gen 5:5 nine hundred and thirty years:  Adam’s age falls within the range of 777 (Lamech, 5:31) to 969 years (Mmethuselah,5:27) that characterizes the era before the flood. There is as yet no positive solution to the mystery of these enormous lifespans.” ~ new Ignatius study bible pg 65.

Give me a chance to help  out here!   I know I should leave it to the smart guys (AND ladies, of course)

Just how could Methuselah live 969 years, the longest life span of a human recorded in a legitimate civilization/culture? OK, I know, an ancient civilization’s Sumerian king claimed he lived 25,000 years, which coincidentally matches the astronomical length of the progression of the equinoxes over 25 millennia…But where are his and the Sumerians proof?  Last I heard, the Bible is the inspired Word of God and we should be careful about ignoring the truth in the revealed words.  Yes, we have perfect examples of round offs and estimates; the best one in this context is probably from 2 Peter 3:8:

 “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years* and a thousand years like one day. 9The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard “delay,” but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance 10But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out.”  Point is, God desires NONE should die eternally, giving us humans as much opportunity to discover His plans and realities, and is patient with us sinners.

Over my short 73 year lifetime, I have wondered why some of my beloved Catholic apologist colleagues are so quick to jump to alternatives to the real possibility that following Creation, and Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Eternal Eden Garden, humans lived LONG!! Very long lives.

Why are they so quickly pushing aside the so-called “literal” counting of years and recording same,  for the easier alternatives, in their minds:

From the Ignatius commentary, outlined are the alternatives and as the saying goes, all of us are entitled to our opinions, but each only to the singular truth. Problem is proving AND believing the proof. I want your permission to give my opinion, vetted over time, to what and why, the when within parameters  and the who already written. Believe it or not, after building the 553 sextillion mile wide universe, He could keep His beloved humans alive for a few more rides around the sun.

Referring to the recorded Genesis lifespans from Adam through Abraham and beyond, the alternative explanations include:

Alternative 1:  “The names of the Patriarchs with the associated years of life, are actually “clans” not individuals” who actually were born and died in specific years. Why this is weak as Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch (general editor & editor) comment in the new study bible, is there ARE specific, recognizable names throughout the genealogical “record”.   Obviously, no one used Jr. in the OT to confuse, but of course, “bar” was used for son of, a la Simon Bar Jonah sufficed to give distinct names.

To this, I would add that when Jesus mentioned a specific name, we should not call our Savior a deceiver;  chances are good that it refers to a specific human that lived in the past; it gives credibility to that person’s history at the turn of the millennium (1st one!) because God’s Son cited their existence.  Names like our first parents, Noah, Jonah, Abraham and others as only the eternal Son would know.

For example, Jesus refers back in time to Noah specifically, as well as Abraham.  In the biblical genealogical record, and I think God has a distinct purpose in doing so, the writers RECORD the fact Noah was actually 600 years old as the flood commenced (ok, better described the massive hydrological rearrangement of the earth; a flood is what happens when you break a kitchen pipe)and lived 350 years after.   Please don’t jump or rush to conclusions that his lifespan pre and post deluvian were just “approximate” generalizations.

And not as a rounding but actual birthday to birthday, season to season accounting. 

There is a reason God wanted us to focus on this major transitional point in earth history, meaning natural life and atmospheric characteristics pivoted around the flood.  Noah’s shipbuilding took 120 years, assisted one would believe by some of his sons.  But why be the only adult  Patriarch on earth born before and who lived after in the annals?   Look in alternative #3 for a reasonable conjecture.

Alternative 2: “others have proposed converting the “years” into “months”…as the commentary points out, some of  the children would still be children having children; no place in reality.  Really a non-starter.

Alternative #3: Those mentioned in Genesis, the Patriarchs, are actual names of people and their recorded years on earth, the birth of their offspring and their final ages, by Holy Spirit guided writers and recorded for all time. The commentary points out that ‘face value ages’ puts Adam less than 2000years before Abraham and makes the human race only abut 6000 years old.   My well thought out, educated answer:  So?!

This is true, but suppose the desperate need for billions of years is not what really happened!!   (Jewish tradition puts us in year 5785 via their lunar/chabad calendar)  After all, the chicken or egg first question is similar to when the need for billions came up: to please the atheistic evolutionists who just won’t accept the fact we have hyperevolution throughout the world TODAY! Every reader has witnessed this, though by another name.

Alternative#4:

“…Perhaps the best hypothesis and one that would help to explain both the biblical and Near Eastern data, is that giving primeval figures extremely long lives was a way of conceptualizing the great antiquity of mankind.  In other words, this may be simply a literary technique used to assert the remarkable age of the human race itself.”

I’m sorry my fellow sojourners of faith, this last can use the copyrighted name of a game my 11 kids have often played:  Balderdash!

Trent (Death Cookie) Horn, Fr $2 Mike Schmidt and even my distant relative, Scott Hahn might be willing to settle and move on quickly, using a rather double spoken explanation, but I don’t believe this is fair to those seeking the unvarnished truth…or even to themselves in their respective ministries.

Yes, I love these smart guys and fellow Catholic apologists, but the beauty of our Faith is we are still seeking better knowledge of salvation history or BC~AD His Story. New truths arrive often when you least expect it, like the modern Eucharistic miracles happening in diverse places.

Smart guys! One definition of a “conundrum” is: ‘ a paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma. ‘

As my work over decades regarding God’s incredible gifts to us humans, like with Our Lady of Guadalupe’s star studded tilma, that observatory photo shoot on cactus fiber almost 500 years old; or Giza as a Catholic icon prompted in my life in the 90s by physicist John Zajac’s “Delicate Balance” tome of yesteryear.

Or especially, the many Eucharistic miracles over time we are still discovering, such as the glaringly obvious Shroud of Jerusalem, Edessa and Turin being ground zero for the Father’s expression of love for His Eucharistic Son, the Ultimate Gift.

You all know my favorite physicist~blind Jesuit (PB&J) Fr Robert Spitzer is “seeing”so many incredible discoveries these days regarding the Eucharistic miracle; I’m not even sure, as he’s delved into more modern transformational miracles of the Body~Blood~Soul~Divinity he even equates the burial cloth (recall the cinematic ‘floating down’ in Nicodemus’ owned grave, one Ash Wed Feb 24,2004: the unveiling of  “The Passion of the Christ”) as the Ultimate Eucharistic miracle.

With your forebearance, allow me to tackle the dilemma of alternative#3 above, the reality that people DID live excessively (by today’s standards) long easily recorded lives BEFORE the flood.  Sometimes we don’t always see God’s full truth at first glance…or first pass. But, I hope to show how important this part of Genesis truly is…relevance radioed to the four corners of the earth, it screams the incredible power, infinite in nature, of nature’s God.

First, let’s pull out and look at the original family birthing book for a hint:

“This is the record of the descendants of Adam.”    Sounds a lot like a family history book, with birthdays of our kids, and other events in human lives.
“…When God created human beings, He made them in the likeness of God;
2 he created them male and female. When they were created, he blessed them and named them humankind.
 Adam was one hundred and thirty years old when he begot a son in his likeness, after his image; and he named him Seth.
4Adam lived eight hundred years after he begot Seth, and he had other sons and daughters.
5The whole lifetime of Adam was nine hundred and thirty years; then he died….”
By this time, you might think God/the Bible is just rounding off, up and down, the number of years people lived on this six sextillion ton ball of joy mentioned in the Genesis, in the beginning.  Fair, if the scholars based their wisdom on 130, 800, 930 years.
And all we know, so far, is the first two immaculately conceived humans, Adam and Eve, had a born son named Seth. We also know of the first born Cain and his brother Abel, whom he jealously murdered.  But God’s genealogist chose to follow Seth, not Cain’s lineage.
Recall, whether you date the project Earth as billions of years or a “day as a thousand years” 7 days, 6000 years old, we have data on how the singular human race was populated:
Adam had “…other sons and daughters.”   Ya think?  We learn bigamy was not illicit in the early stages when Noah’s (a person Jesus called out later) dad, Lamech takes two wives, (Gen 4:19).
The point is, God allowed the patriarchs to have more than one wife, something that Joseph Smith echoed, at least in the Brigham Young segment of Mormonism.  Honestly, since like Muhammad, Mr Smith was creating his own Hinduesque religion, the excuse was preserving the species or hyperbuilding the number of Muslims and Mormons needed a boost.  And it is reasonable to assert the most impactful two women were Hagar and Sarai, who both bore sons who each had 12 sons.
But since Jesus’ famous discourse on marriage and divorce years later, having one wife became the norm.  Not in Utah or the middle east, apparently.
But when you get to verse 4 of Genesis 5, there is a redundancy which helps to prove one race, one human race came from the original male and female who were conceived immaculate.  The words “…and he had other sons and daughters…” are repeated verbatim in Gen 5, verses 4,7,10,13,16,19,22,26 and verse 30. Ten (that perfect number) times it is mentioned the founders of the human existence had other sons and daughters.  Other males and females.
Different dads, same result: lots of kids of both genders, male and female, boys and girls.   And unlike the animals, where millions of bison, billions of insects including trillions of cockroaches and termites were spoken into existence, God decided His favored human home sapiens sapiens would come into the world one, maybe two or three at a time.  Keeping the same components, what we call deoxyribonucleic acid today.  DNA.   Our silly culture acts like there are a dozen first couples and different races, yet we ALL are descendants of Adam and Eve and the intermediary Mr and Mrs Noah.
OK, you got me octomom had eight, but thanks more to advanced (or is it primitive) technological reproductive progress than love.
The largest new testament family is on record; but any of the patriarchs but Enoch probably had more.   If only we could find Jared or Enos or? family birthing books to verify.
In fact, in the 18th century, the woman who bore the most humans (69 kids) delivered 27 times, with single births, twins, trips and quads mixed in.  Yet, she might be the modern champion yet we don’t have exact numbers of how many kids each patriarch (AND matriarch of necessity) brought into the world.   None of them!!
Certainly more than 69 for many, if not the  majority of them.
This graphic will help get a fix on the “dilemma”; it is much more colorful than the ones I did decades ago.  Pardon the Protestant flavor young earth flavor but…
Interesting things to glean from the colorful graphic:
1)  Methuselah, the oldest man on earth and Lamech died just as the flood began.  Note the “date of Flood” line.  Thus, ALL the Patriarchs except Noah had died before the flood.
2) Shem was born before the flood and his descendants are the ones recorded.
3)  We do NOT have 20 generations of even numbers, just a few with zeroes.  Plenty of odd numbers in the batch.  To me, this gives credence to the fact their ages were recorded, adding that if they were exaggerations why the birth dates based on the fathers’ ages at the time?   Specific recordings, no different than what we do in modern times with our baby and birth books.
4) You may notice that before the flood, the lengths of lives were gynormous: 777, 800s and 9s, capped by 969.  Could it be the closer to the beginning of human life on earth, the more “pure” or less degraded cells became over time.   This should bolster the vapor canopy theories.  Why?  NO rainbow before the flood; no rainbow indicates no rain prior to God’s watery judgement!
And, if you plot the lifespans, you will see the pattern:  lives no longer lasted close to a millennium due to certain factors in nature.
 One excellent theory is the earth was covered by water vapor (today the largest “greenhouse gas” is vapor 3-4%) prior to the flood, and people lived long times because the sun could not focus direct sunlight on humans: it was filtered.   The book “The Waters Above” is a seminal read on this:  the flood was not just a spring shower but a megamammoth change in the earth with waters from above AND below, realignment of the continents (See Pangea).  AND the disappearance of the worldwide vapor canopy, exposing life to direct sunlight and cosmic, X and other rays from above.
Proof?  How about undigested ferns in the stomachs of Wooly Mammoths in Siberia, indicating an instantaneous deep freeze occurred coincident with the worldwide flood. First off, what are tropical ferns doing in the ice lands of Russia?  And only a quick freeze explains the rest.
Noah was the 10th generation.   After his death, notice how quickly  the lifespans of mankind dropped from the 400s, to the 200s and settling much lower than Adam’s 950.  By Abraham’s generation it had “‘bottomed” to his recorded 175.  There was a major biochemical change coincident with God closing up Noah’s family and the animals and we Catholics have a long history of great scientists to dig out the truth.
Honestly, believing God just symbolized ages and spans misses the obvious teleological lesson that something changed, something dramatic a REAL climate change took place.   And a little math analysis shows the “proof” that mankind no longer lived almost a millennium as near the beginning, but part of the drama leaving the Garden led to much shortened lifespans. Without sin, we all could still be in the immortal mode, but sin DID enter Creation.  The sun was already seeing the earth over 365.242 days.  NOT 365 1/4: 365.242 24 hour days.
I love all my 11 kids; but on a family outing, I pitched this idea that humans did live extended lifetimes long ago and he would NOT have it.  Some of the proof is anecdotal, other parts from research and logic. But similar to  the commentary in the Ignatius bible, grasping the idea people walked the earth for centuries just doesn’t sit right with folks.  Matt is a smart computer whiz but no room in his universe for long lives, it seems.
Remember, the Ignatius commentary says:
“There is as yet no positive solution to the mystery of these enormous lifespans.” ~ new Ignatius study bible pg 65.

Sorry scholars, I just can’t buy this as easily as you excuse its possibility.  Proofs of the need and possibilities of long lifespans:

1 Applying modern biology and reproduction to Adam’s time.  If Adam and Eve lived say 80 years and her childbearing span was maybe 35 years or so, how could we get to a billion, let alone 9 billion?  Yes, I know geometric acceleration but in the beginning, long lifespans were essential to the survival of the species (not the Darwinian natural selection and fittest survival beliefs but common sense recorded birthyears of our predecessors).

Ironically, just as today the modern world is desperate to have more children in 50 countries approaching extinction, Mesopotamia, the early earth humans needed to have children so their children could have children.  If this is correct, you could probably run into your great great great great great grandma at the local watering hole on occasion.  

2 God designed His cellular microverse His way, not our limited ways.  What’s to say that atmospheric conditions as mankind began to populate the earth, was perfect to sustain long 900+ lifespans?  Do you have the Mesopotamian News, or the Garden section of the Eden Gazette to prove differently? NO!

3 God became “unhappy” with mankind, thus the ark and flood events led to a remodeled earth, maybe a bit of Pangea and a touch of the water vapor canopy disappearing forever.   Why?   To, for the first time, systematically and atmospherically limit the time each human would live on the earth.

4 As a reminder,  He recorded just how good it was to live on an advanced earth that changed drastically after Noah’s time.   The air was pure, the water clean, so little damaging rays from beyond the atmosphere was striking human cells, before the building of the SeaShip Noah.   With a little help from our out of the box thinking scientists, maybe the world WAS much more advanced before the flood, after being expelled from Eden’s Garden.

5 Water vapor theory, comprising 3-4% of the atmosphere today, might have been 97-98% before God’s judgement using water: the best conditions for lives to be long in duration.   The main exception to the megaspans before the flood and the devolving lifetimes after, was the 365 years of Enoch.  As tradition and the Scriptures/Torah point out, Enoch was “pleasing to God” and he was taken off the planet much earlier than most of his kinsmen.

6  From dirt to man to woman to dust to dust: “Given enough time, scientists might just catch up to the Bible.

Recent scientific research provides compelling evidence that all humans share a common ancestry, tracing back to one man and one woman. Studies on Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam suggest that every living person descends from a single maternal and paternal ancestor.
Scientists have also discovered that human genetic diversity is unexpectedly low, indicating a significant population bottleneck in the past. This finding aligns with historical records and ancient flood accounts, which describe humanity being reduced to a small group before repopulating the Earth.
Additionally, research confirms that the human body is composed of elements such as oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus-the same elements found in the Earth’s crust, which aligns with the Genesis account of creation.”

In layman’s terms, the 8 survivors, Mr and Mrs Noah and sons and wives~were the remnant geneological and genetic diversity “patients” beginning anew the process that scientists attribute to some cause for gene diversity at low levels in our generation.

7 Supplemental: the Giza connection, a hypothesis.  Why would our beloved Father, infinitely precise in so much that focuses on salvation history, toss a bunch of random odd numbered life spans, more typical clues for us to discern and decipher and call them rounding errors?  Stretching plausibility farther than a toffee pull on a summer day?

I don’t think He did. Today, even the most challenged Down child is 99.9% “perfect”; no one on earth could create a 50 trillion celled human, wind it up for 80 years (today’s life expectancy) and watch from above, without precision of designp, humanufacture and birth, born free to find and follow the Eternal God!

What we call “enormous lifespans” are a second, maybe a minute at this point in Middle Eternity to the eternal, never not existing Supreme Being, our God in 3 personages.   And we mere puny homo sapiens are not so “sapiens” it seems.  None of us can truly understand both ALWAYS existing and NEVER ending; in each of these, our minds, though sentient, cannot grasp the ways of God. Isaiah 55My Daily Inspiration Bible Verses

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways—oracle of the LORD.
9For as the heavens are higher than the earth,so are my ways higher than your ways,my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

8 Tribute to CreatorGod’s precise omnipotence and omniscience: Recently, Fr Know It ALL! Simon was fishing for a book title on one of his excellent shows; it was regarding the precision of all the ranges necessary for life to exist on earth, to sustain this carbon based life forms we call “male” and “female”. Just more proof God could easily have ages and lifespans RECORDED to teach humanity a good lesson.

The theories of “finely tuned” universe abound: The fine-tuned universe is the hypothesis that, because “life as we know it” could not exist if the constants of nature – such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant and others – had been even slightly different, the universe must be tuned specifically for life.~wiki

9  Direct references to longer lifespans.   Job, when his fortunes and families (7 boys and 3 girls) were restored, he lived 140 MORE  years.  No exaggeration, no brag, just facts.   We are told Noah took 120 years just to build the first ocean going ship loaded with the zoo; and Jesus referred to him by NAME! So many more examples. It’s funny how we can rejoice at the married couple, ages 106 and 102 who’ve been married for 80 some years, but can’t give God and the Holy Spirit credit for logging hundreds of years accurately. I don’t mock God.  Neither should you.

10   Genesis begins with “…When God created human beings, He made them in the likeness of God”    What is God like?   Built to live FOREVER.  At creation, God designed and created Adam and Eve, not to live 80 years but forever in Eden.   Just because we screwed up as humans, doesn’t mean that God failed.  I believe two factors came into play outside Eden: our lifespans were limited to 969 years at most before the flood.  But major environmental factors came into play when the world was REMODELED, totally reformed, at the time of Noah.

Why? One of the better theories/interpretation is something changed when the FIRST rains came.  In the book “The Waters Above”, 3 inches thick and full of theorems, the author posits there was a worldwide water vapor “canopy” that helped us NOT deteriorate (no sun screen chemicals in Eden) due to cosmic, X- and gamma rays, solar radiation unfiltered hitting our bodies.    No rains, no clouds, NO RAINBOW!

Once the massive hydro~reformation of our earth occurred, our bodies were constantly subjected to cellular deterioration, plus the genetic degeneration the farther we got from living forever in Eden.  The canopy loss coupled with God’s anger that mankind wouldn’t go beyond 120 years on earth, makes the intense decrease of life spans AFTER Noah reasonable.  No longer was humanity protected from the intensity of the elements.

So, how about changing:

“There is as yet no positive solution to the mystery of these enormous lifespans.” ~ new Ignatius study bible pg 65.”    Maybe there’s time to upgrade this commentary before the next printing of this excellent bible. 

After all, we must strive for truth and accuracy in our journey to the Father through His Son, with the Holy Spirit, Three in One.   I’ll leave that to my distant relative, Scott, the amazing Fr. $2 Mike and of course the Chic Chick Publications smart guy Trent.

~~~~~~~~~errata for future study~~~~~~~~

The Middle of Eternity Conjecture

Fr Simon grasping for a book on the universe’s precision design and build.

Patrick talks about harmonizing the bible with nature

say 7 billion years old    universe btwn 13-15 billion years old

“billions of years before Adam and Eve was created.”   sin and death was a human event

independent labs around the world

2)  dinosaurs existed during time of Adam and Eve.   not symbolic way but literally true over days   age of earth only 6000 meaning the dinosaurs existed all the

“free to understand either way”

civilizations around Egypt Mesopotamia

Tigris and Euphrates  in modern day Iraq    suggests GofEden mayhave been in Iraq       Mes    s turkey and syria down toward Iran   those who migrated east

 

 

bibliography   The Waters Above   The Delicate Balance

 

————————-notes and errata

 

GRAND CANYON PROVES THE GENESIS FLOOD
Geologists from around the world descend upon the Grand Canyon to see the layers of rocks. Only a few places on earth reveal such a sequence of rock layers, and here is what has been discovered.
1. All of the horizontal layers contain marine fossils such as corals and clams. Marine fossils are found on every continent in the world.
2. There is a layer formation that has been found across the United States called the Coconino Sandstone or “the bathtub ring” in other states it’s also referred to as Cedar Hills Sandstone, Duncan Sandstone, and the Glorietta Sandstone.
3. The Tapeats Sandstone, one of the lowest layers of the Grand Canyon, appears to form a single sandstone body that blankets across North America, extending from California on the west northward to Montana, covering much of North Dakota, and across the Midwest to New England. The same formation in southern Israel is called the Nabatean Sandstone of Petra.
4. The Redwall limestone in the Grand Canyon is grey limestone stained red from the iron oxide in the above layer. This same limestone can be found in much of North America, England, and in the Himalaya Mountains.
During the Genesis Flood, there was catastrophic flooding across the earth. These tidal waves and tsunamis killed marine creatures and poured onto the land. Subsequently, tsunamis laid down more layers of fossils containing sediments. The Flood continued for months. The Grand Canyon reveals the violent worldwide flood that once was; it is a monument to the Genesis Flood.
credit goes to the rightful owner.
YOU ARE NOT A MISTAKE
Did you know that when a baby’s hands are developing, they are initially flat plates until skin cells between fingers undergo programmed cell death, allowing the formation of five separate digits arranged in the unique human hand pattern! Who programmed that to happen? Not evolution, a mindless process.

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