The long lifespans of Genesis 5

The genealogy in Genesis 5 has people living hundreds of years. Are these literal? Or represent a span of time between individuals who weren’t strictly parent and child? Is it a modification of the Mesopotamian kings list? Are the numbers symbolic? Lots of options have been proposed.

The chart above comes from K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, vol. 1A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 302–303. Matthews points out that preserving these numbers is a difficult tasks for scribes (why I don’t know but then like most people I don’t read Hebrew). The three major OT text versions covering Genesis, the Masoretic, Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch have wildly different numbers in them.

It has been observed that the MT text through Genesis has the total ages of the patriarchs comes to 12,600 – which given the later significance of the number 1,260 in the Bible seems unlikely to be an accident (see this blog). 

Carol Hill makes the interesting suggestion that the numbers reflection Babylonian/Mesopotamian numbering (which was a base 60 system and also featured the number 5 and 7 as significant numbers). She suggests the system was meaning rather than maths based but over time the figures and their meanings – carried possibly by Abraham from Mesopotamia – became lost as the Israelites transitioned to an Egyptian number system with preferred numbers now being 7, 12 and 40.  [See Carol A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers of Genesis,” Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith 55, no. 4 (2003): 239–51].

Given there is uncertainty about the preservation of the ages in the genealogies through the textual history, and the real possibility of a change in number counting systems further muddying the waters it might be sensible to not insist too loudly on Methuselah actually living 969 years.