In July I wrote a piece on the unnaturally great longevity not only of the antediluvians in Genesis, but of the Patriarchs and other leaders in Israel up to the time of Moses, and even Joshua. Incidentally I made at least one foolish error there, in calling Moses’s age of 120 an Egyptian ideal. In fact, that “perfect” age for Egyptians was 110, the age attributed both to Joseph, and to Joshua. If Moses’s age is symbolic, it represents some other model. If Joseph’s age isn’t symbolic, it corresponds remarkably to the ideal for an Egyptian leader.
I want to add some more points to that study now, to emphasise the dangers of trying to defend the “plain” meaning of Scripture and ending up pitting it against every other source of truth, as opposed to what we should be doing, which is to understand what kind of truth Scripture is telling us. This latter is not intuitive for our generation, because although the Bible demonstrates the universality of human experience of God over millennia, the cultural and literary world of the Bible is hugely different from ours. “The past is [indeed] a foreign country – they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley).
For example, that’s why, to take a different tack, I have problems with the way astrophysicist Hugh Ross, at Reasons to Believe, finds numerous features of Big Bang Cosmology in the Bible. I believe he is justified in saying that the Bible’s uniquely linear concept of the creation of space and time matches the still-solid science that our universe had a beginning (despite the James Webb telescope). But I find his suggestion that the Bible teaches an expanding universe to be open to question, at the very least. That is not because it’s impossible, but because unlike the fact of creation ex nihilo by the covenant God of Israel, there appears no theological advantage to the knowledge of cosmic expansion for even our own generation, let alone the hundreds before us. And the suggested texts are teaching something else more spiritually relevant.
In fact, I suggest that even the idea of an atemporal eternal universe “before” the Big Bang might be accommodated to orthodox faith (as Thomas Aquinas seems to have allowed), on one understanding of God’s creation as an eternal act (just as his begetting of the Son is eternal), Genesis 1:2ff being the creation of our perishable space-time against that background. I don’t believe that view myself, but since it retains the central truth of Yahweh as sole Creator, it frees us from having to deny some possible future evidence simply because we put all our eggs in one scientific basket.
To return to patriarchal longevity, though, literal interpretations seem to follow two main lines. The first is that human longevity universally began to degenerate gradually after the Fall. The second is that such a pattern was peculiar to the chosen line of Seth, as a mark (perhaps) of God’s favour. To the second we might add a subcategory – that God gave abnormally long lives only to great spiritual leaders like the Patriarchs, Moses or Joshua.
I suggest that the second possibility is excluded by the Bible itself. For a start, as I pointed out in The Generations of Heaven and Earth, long lives are attributed to the founders of all the scattered peoples in the Table of Nations in Genesis. If Abraham lived a supernaturally long time, so did the Canaanites. A second clue is the minor detail in Genesis 35, in which Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, dies after Jacob’s return from Laban. Since Rebekah had, traditionally, died during Jacob’s journey, at the age of 133, this presumably unrelated servant-woman from Haran, with her since her youth, must have been at least as old, or older.
I pointed out in the previous article that Moses, in the psalm attributed to his authorship, names the full human lifespan as 70, or 80 if you’re lucky. But additionally, one purpose of the 40 year wilderness sojourn was that the entire unfaithful generation of the Exodus, two excepted, should die out, suggesting not only a normal lifespan, but by our standards a short one.
This is where science should be allowed its legitimate voice. Based on forensic examination of skeletons dating back not only to the second and third millennia BC, but long before, average life expectancy tended to be in the twenties and thirties at birth. This gives a false impression to the uninitiated, because the results are skewed by massively high infant mortality. If you escaped death from disease or malnutrition in childhood, you stood a good chance of living into your forties or fifties. Living a full modern lifespan was possible (it is quite credible that someone reached 110 in Egypt), but old age was the exception, as it is in undeveloped societies now.
Now, it is possible to argue that the usual skeletal markers of age progressed more slowly in ancient times. But at least one marker, cementation annulation rings in teeth-roots, depends on counting annually laid-down deposits, akin to tree-rings. If the ancients really did live for centuries, we would expect to find more annual rings in their teeth, and we don’t.
Even more significantly, the usual literalist explanation that the effects of the fall gradually diminished human health is belied by the pervasive evidence of disease and high infant mortality itself, uniformly throughout human history from the palaeolithic onwards, and possibly worse with the onset of the city-life that corresponds with the early chapters of Genesis.
Archaeological documents also make it harder to believe in ancient longevity. For various reasons, estimating exact ages of death from, say, regnal chronicles is difficult. The common people didn’t get into records – and probably didn’t count their ages anyway. Nevertheless, apart from the cosmically lengthy reigns in the earliest Sumerian king-lists (which make even Methuselah’s passing seem prmature), records in the third and second millennia, the same period as the Bible’s narratives, show quite ordinary lengths of reigns, even when dynasties are not overthrown by war or rebellion.
Sargon of Akkad, for example, who lived several centuries before Abraham in the latter’s own homeland, reigned somewhere between 39 and 45 years. Rameses II, the pharaoh of the Exodus on the late dating, had the second longest reign in Egypt, of 66 years – four years short of that of our biologically unexceptional late queen. Pepi II is supposed to have reigned 94 years from the age of six, from 2281BC – again, centuries before the Patriarchs. There is some dispute about this period, but even if it is accepted, Pepi was a year younger than the late Queen Mother when he died – not 180 or anything like it.
I come back to what I wrote in July. If instead of fretting over what appears to deny both history and science, we recognise how the use of symbolic ages was probably second nature to the biblical authors, and their readers, then we might hope for further discoveries about the theological significance of biblical lifespans. That might come purely from study of the text, as with Nahum Sarna’s work, or from new archaeological sources.
But it will also encourage us to place the biblical chronology into history, based on estimates of the characters’ true biological ages rather than their literary ages. The Patriarchal narrative in Genesis 12-50, which covers just four generations of family history from Abraham in middle-age to Joseph in early middle-age, would represent the memories of, perhaps, 120 years. That’s a much tighter window to situate in history than the several centuries suggested by the text, understood literally. If the aim of literalism is to assert the truthfulness of Scripture, I would argue that that will be achieved more by confirming its congruence with historical evidence than by placing it in a sacred bubble and, consequently, attributing all science and history to the devil.
