When it comes to their ages, there is no doubt a disproportionate number of zeros. If there was tendency to round off someone’s age this may have been a reason. Even Noah’s age at 500 as identified with " and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth…" seems to be rounded off, at least as far as his three sons are concerned. Yet, there is no consistency about that either, since Methuselah ends with a 9, and others end with a 2 or 7. And interestingly, their ages coincide with death in the year of the flood. Either way, this type of rounding off, which would be a logical probability, does not negate the general overall ages, nor the distinct progression of a decrease in the ages of the patriarchs, right to the time of Jacob. Whatever symbolism might be attached to the last digit of the numbers, is clearly overridden by the the sequential reduction in general length of life after the flood.
Hey John,
Can you clarify a little bit with what you mean here? Are you saying that Noah could actually have been begetting children at say age 487 and have it rounded up to 500? Or that he was begetting children at 503 and be rounded down to 500? I have difficulty understanding why that would happen with Noah and not the others… hmmmm…
There have been a multitude of studies involving the Genesis 5 numbers. Most of it is very technical, involving a lot of math knowledge (some great insights, but overall, nothing hugely satisfactory). The reason why it’s a complex issue is because we don’t have just one manuscript: we have three. The Masoretic Text, Samaritan and Septuagint… all of which give slightly various accounts of the numbers involved.
The other complication is, as you say, these numbers are right around the time of the Bible’s major events: the flood.
-Tim
If you want to refute my numerological claims, you might be interested in a couple posts that I’ve posted on this site: “Proof of Numerology Part One” and “Proof of Numerology Part Two”. They are pretty lengthy however, so be forewarned.
-Tim
Tim,
It is straightforward to refute claims of long human lifetimes in the past with biology and recent experience. In the past 100 years, human lifetimes has increased dramatically due to advances in medicine namely infection control. Al is a living example of this (Happy Birthday Al) and the fact that he has a great great granddaughter shows this in action. Clearly human lifetime (and life expectancy) were much less in the past. Nowhere in recorded history do we have a great great granddaughter writing about their great great grandfather from personal experience. In addition, fossil records of ancient humans never show a human beings living longer life expediencies than today. No fossil records of centenarians, nor octogenarians. Further, it has been shown in numerous studies that the maximum age for humans is about 120 years. There is a genetic limit due to telemers in every cell. In addition in all species, maleness is always a condition that lowers life expectancy when compared to femaleness in the same species. (Ever notice all the long lifespan mentioned in the Bible are all males?) So biology has clearly shown that:
- males live shorter lives than females
- Humans have a achieved large increase in life expectancy only as societies modernized and the most increase in the last 100 years for medical and infectious disease control.
- Experiments and studies of life expectancy of humans rarely exceed 120 years as a maximum human life span.
Based on this, the claims of life spans exceeding 120 years, 600 years, and 900 years in the recent 5000 year past is blatantly false. The most obvious explanation of the excessive claimed lifetimes in the Bible is that they are wrong or a complete misinterpretation of an ancient text.
I believe we are both expressing the same conclusion (people did not live to be almost a thousand years old in the past) but in different ways.
For someone who regards the Bible as literal-historical narrative, where the longevity of patriarchs exceeds normal expectations dramatically, that particular person will be more convinced from arguments regarding the text itself.
It may be that humanity has a limited lifespan today due to our genetics… But for those that want to defend the idea of patriarchs living 10-12 times longer than normal, one could simply say that God supernaturally caused humanity to dwindle in age, until it got to where we are at now.
I’m not promoting that position, but it is a position many people have.
I’m not a scientist, so my argument is based more on my analysis of the numbers themselves from the biblical text.
-Tim
Too many acts of divine interventions actually makes its less likely to be true. Divine interventions should be rare. Further our genetic makeup has not changed enough in 5000 years to impact life expectancies to this degree. Life expectancies were shorter in the past due to disease, infections, famine. Infant mortality (not living past 1 year) may have been as high as 90%, 100,000 years ago.
Male lifespans in the Middle East 5000 years ago were not longer than today.
I’m not in disagreement with you here.
For the Christian divine intervention is a reality. But depending on your particular viewpoint, God’s divine intervention was either quite extravagant in the early chapters of Genesis, or what we are reading are more along the lines of symbols poignantly expressed by Hebraic authors in discussing the realities of God.
-Tim
Yes, and you don’t see a problem with that? Clearly the OT has more non-plausible stories than the NT. Could it be because the OT was written 600 years before the NT and Babylonian society was not as advanced as Roman society 600 years later? Tales of divine intervention were common place. The human mind has always look for an agent to explain things. A divine agent that could explain how how things moved, how plants grew. The Sun needed an agent to move across the sky - a divine agent. Look at Greek mythology, the tales of King Authur, as society advances the miracles get more mystical, more rarity, more specialize divine intervention and more a tuned to the human condition at the time.
No, it doesn’t bother me.
The OT and the NT are two very different animals. They are not written in the same fashion.
I will give you one such example. In the Old Testament there are two talking-animal episodes: Eve’s serpent in Genesis 3 and Balaam’s donkey in Numbers 22. In both cases, Eve nor Balaam, elicit any sort of surprise at all at how strange it is they are having an intelligent back-to-back conversation with an animal. This gives me trigger warnings that what I’m reading is not meant to be taken literally (as in physically happening). But in the New Testament we start to get something different. When Mary confronts Joseph about being conceived by the Holy Spirit, Joseph doesn’t buy her story. He doesn’t say, “So you were conceived by the Holy Spirit, and not by another man? Sounds plausible.” Being the good guy that he is, he tries to divorce her discreetly. It’s only after he has a dream (hence a divine intervention) about an angel who tells him that what she says is true does he believe her.
While it’s true that what happens in the Old Testament are oftentimes much more supernatural, the attitudes in the New Testament regard what’s happening in their time period as miraculous. Such as the multitude of miraculous healing’s by Jesus. There is also the case of the Samaritan woman in John 4. It goes like this:
v15 - v19 “The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.” He *said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus *said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.”The woman *said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.”
Then in later verses…
v27 - v30 “At this point His disciples came, and they were amazed that He had been speaking with a woman, yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why do You speak with her?” So the woman left her water pot, and went into the city and *said to the men,“Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is it?” They went out of the city, and were coming to Him.”
and…
v39-v42 "From that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all the things that I have done.”So when the Samaritans came to Jesus, they were asking Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. Many more believed because of His word; and they were saying to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is indeed the Savior of the world.”
There is the case of Doubting Thomas who hears that Jesus has risen… but he needs empirical proof that this is so. So Jesus comes to him and says touch my side, and touch the holes in my hands. See that I am truly in front of you.
The same is the case with the resurrection… people elicit surprise and shock… and at other times disbelief until they see it with their own eyes. This is an all around different attitude than what you have in the Old Testament. You also see in the early writings of the Church, such as that of Polycarp, Irenaeus, etc., that the stories didn’t “grow overtime” as one would say “the legends of Robin Hood” get exaggerated and grow over time.
Peter Enns who wrote a book I just finished “The Bible Tells Me So” argues that much, if not all, of the Old Testament was written during Israel’s Monarchy period and during the Babylonian Exile. I’m not going to list the arguments here, but his reasoning makes sense to me. You have stories in the very early books that seem to reflect that reality, such as “the younger brother that gets favored over the older brother” meant to reflect the “younger” kingdom that was the remnant of what was left after the exile… while the “older” kingdom got taken over.
Whether we are talking about Babylon, or Rome that came later, we are still talking about the Jews that either lived in the time of Babylon or in the time of Rome. It’s my view that the Hebrews had a greater understanding of God than their neighbors. For instance, in many religions of the day they explained the chaos of nature by simply having a pantheon of Gods controlling over each “realm”… and when something chaotic happened they explained that the gods were having conflict. In the Judeo-Christian worldview they explained that there was One god that was in control of everything. That what you “worship” as gods, are simply the creation of the “one god”. For instance, in most ancient cultures they divinised the Sun as supreme. Not only as a god, but often THEE God… the one that gave life. Like Aristotle, the Egyptians, Aztecs etc. But in Genesis 1 something surprising happens. The description of the sun, moon and stars have been demoted. We read that they are simply “great lights” in the heaven. “The greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.”. We don’t even see the word “sun” or “moon”… some authors have noted that the same word for “sun” and “moon” in the Hebrew, was also used to say the Sun God and Moon God, so the author of Genesis 1 went out of their way to use different terminology, so as not to confuse their audience. Not only that but the “great lights” aren’t even created at first… but on Day 4. This “de-divination” of the sun and moon was radical in their time. In Genesis 1 we also read that male and female are given equal status, as being created “in the Image of God”… also counter intuitive at the time.
In the Old Testament God is described in a multitude of ways… but the main picture you see is a god that is “up there somewhere in the heavens”. In the New Testament we see a turning point. God is now on earth, dwelling among us. And he comes in the form of a lowly human, living a very normal life. He performs miracles (typically in the form of miraculous healing), telling prophecies, truths. Gets crucified by the Romans (contrary to what people were expecting a Messiah to do… which is rather take back the land, and the monarchy in David’s day). Then is resurrected on the third day and appears to His followers.
I read somewhere on this site that you find Peter Enns refreshing. You might enjoy his book then called “The Bible Tells Me So”… if not that’s cool, too. I just think he has some interesting thoughts.
-Tim
We don’t know how many people lived as long as the patriarchs did. Scripture doesn’t say, and we have no other evidence. The idea that telemeres have changed since the time of the flood, at least for the patriarch line, is an interesting one, and may provide a reason why the ages of the patriarchs began to decline, not abruptly, but gradually after the flood.
It’s interesting that lifespans a few hundred years ago tended to be much shorter, although we should keep in mind that short lifespans had much to do with infants and children dying. Once a person became mature, he had a better chance of achieving an older age. My grandmother died at 96, and my father is now 92 (taking no pills and no medicine and living at home), and a number of world war I vets died in their nineties. On the other hand, my grandfather died at about 60. Interesting though how few people actually live to more than 100, although more and more are doing so. It seems that genetics still has not recovered the 120 year lifespan, but rather it is more often sustained by medicine providing sometimes extraordinary means.
The present increase in average human lifespan is not so terribly dramatic, since at most it is a doubling, and this is mostly due not to an inherent increase in lifespan, but rather a reduction of premature death from disease, wars and famine.
The body naturally replenishes itself, but only to the limit of the telemeres, as Patrick has pointed out. In cases where telomeres are less, then lifespans are shorter. There is no inherent law preventing more telemeres, but presently, we have the numbers we do, and it limits our lifespan.
Timothy, I don’t want to refute your numerology. I merely say that numerology is not a satisfactory explanation for the gradual reduction of lifespan after the flood, to the eventual approximate 120 year age that was promised by God at the time of the flood.
Hey John.
I appreciate your straightforward-ness in expressing your views. I know that we may often disagree, but I’m happy that we can still express out differing points of view in a gracious manner 
Concerning Genesis 6:3 where it says “My spirit shall not always strive with man for he is also flesh; yet shall his days be 120.”
I have difficulty understanding this verse as talking about a “limit to man’s age” given the context of where it’s placed in chapter 6. The chapter is talking about “the sons of God” procreating with “the daughters of men”. It’s talking about the great wickedness of humanity on the earth and how God wishes to start anew with Noah and his family. It seems more likely to me to be talking about a “countdown to the flood”.
One of the reasons is because it says “for he is also flesh (mortal in other words)”. It seems halfway redundant to say man is “also mortal” when in the previous chapters ---- 4-5 — it mentions 10 people who have already died. Abel got killed by his brother, Lamech’s victim, and the 8 patriarchs from Adam-Lamech (excluding Enoch) who have lived and died.
When I look up “the decline of ages in the Bible” on Google, 95% of people say what you say about the decrease in longevity being a supernatural thing, or some sorta scientific phenomenon like radiation, that caused the decrease in ages.
It’s clear in the Bible that there is a decline. But it’s also very clear to me that apparent numerology is being incorporated in the Bible. This numerology seems to take place very heavily before the flood happens, and continue on through out the rest of Genesis and onto other books as well (but not as strongly). Does the numerology counter the gradual decline (or vica-versa)…? It’s hard for me to say and I don’t have crystal clear answers. What I can say is that neither can be ignored…
St. Jerome made the following observation: “I’m reading about Methuselah and I see no description of him being old. I read further on down to Noah, and still no mention of him being old. It’s only when I reach Abraham that I see a person who is old.”
What Jerome is saying is that in the genealogies there is no “pizzazz” or “flair” made about the great ages of the patriarchs. It’s only when you reach Abraham that the Bible puts great emphasis on a person who is old (and Abraham is no where near as old as Adam or Methuselah was). Abraham and Sarah even make astounding comments about how miraculous it is that God tells him that they will bear children “in their old age”. This “surprise” and “shock” is not expressed when it talks about Noah bearing children at 500, nor at Methuselah who dies at 969.
One might wonder why that is…
-Tim
Good point Tim about the lack of shock about Noah having children at age 500, etc. But I don’t think the lack of shock or surprise can be a definitive characteristic of the validity of something spectacular in scripture. When Jesus or Peter did miracles, eventually everyone was just hoping to touch their garment or stand in their shadow in order to be healed; I’m sure they were not shocked or surprised at the miracles by that time. By the time of Abraham, things had changed quite a bit from the earlier patriarchs, and when you haven’t had children from the age of 30 to 60, it becomes more likely to think you won’t have them when you get older. Keep in mind that Abraham died at 175, and still had more children, so it wasn’t just his old age, but the context of Sarah’s age and barren-ness.
I want to say that if at times you do not sense graciousness in my speech, I apologize, and I want to assure you that I try to be as gracious as I can, although sometimes I quickly get caught up in the immediacy of a response. So be assured that I am gracious, and appreciate your comments, even when I am not so obvious in that.
I’ve thought about the 120 days, studied various commentaries on their perspectives, studied the scripture and its context, made a sermon that included this point, and have become convinced that the 120 days must refer to the decline in age of people. It would be odd to give Noah’s age as 500, indicate that he got sons, indicate that God talked to him about the flood, and then for some unknown reason, go back to identify 120 years until the flood, which happened in Noah’s 600 (identified) year. The numbers do not correspond, the sequence is not clarified. If the prophecy was for 120 years, then the flood was 20 years or more too early, which would be an interesting message/lesson indeed.
Why? Where they smarter than the Inuits in Alaska at the time? Or the aborigines in Australia at the time? God wasn’t revealing himself to these people too?
Thanks I will look at it. In a similar vane, I would suggest “A universe from nothing” by Larry Krauss.
When I said neighbors, I meant people that the Hebrews were most likely interacting with. Not a group of people that lived halfway across the world.
You mention Inuits and Aborigines a lot, and I’m not sure why. It’s not my responsibility to know how everyone in the world, collectively, was being handled by God. You are asking questions I (nor those that have come before me) can’t answer. It’s between God and them (the Inuits, Aborigines, Aztecs etc.) what ultimately happens… I am not a bridge nor a referee in this case.
When I said greater understanding I didn’t mean more intelligence… in the sense that they could perform more complex math problems, or build greater, more impressive structures. Understanding and general intelligence are not the same thing. I am judging purely from what I’ve read of the writings and how the Greeks / Romans etc. differed in terms of morality with the Hebrews. At the end of the day, it really just comes down to Jesus.
If I run across the book by Lawrence Krauss, I’ll see if I can get it. Science isn’t my primary area of interest, however.
-Tim
Because at the time 3500 years ago each group had a large population of people in the farthest places possible from present day Israel. God seems like he missed a lot of people back then going just to the Israelites.
But why didn’t he to write an inspired text in their native language and culture? Isn’t it puzzling to you that a small group of Isrealites handed down stories remarkably similar to neighboring groups whereas the rest of the world (and there were around 25 million people around at the time) got nothing - no divine intervention at all?
True, then why study the OT?
It’s true what you say that eventually people got “used” to the miracles of Jesus. But before that took place there was a lot of genuine surprise. The Samaritan Woman in John 4 is very surprised by Jesus, who is a stranger, tell her private things about her life that Jesus shouldn’t know about, and she proceeds to to brag about him to her neighbors. Joseph doesn’t buy Mary’s story that she was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and it takes an angel in a dream to convince him otherwise. Many of the disciples show incredulity that Jesus has risen from the dead, and doubting Thomas isn’t convinced until he feels Jesus’ side and the nail holes in his hands. To me this is evidence of the miraculous… and it’s much more apparent when people, in the drama of the event, elicit shock and surprise.
Keep in mind, that not everything in the Bible is in strict chronological order. Simply because something is on “the next page” doesn’t mean it’s the very next thing that happens, time-wise.
Consider this. In Genesis 10 it says the following:
verse 5: “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.”
verse 20 “These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.”
verse 31 " These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations."
Yet in the very next chapter, Genesis 11, verse 1 it says “And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech”
So what’s going on here? In Genesis 10 it says there was a multitude of languages everywhere, and then in Genesis 11 it says there was only 1 language. If we are reading both of these statements to be true, then logically Genesis 11:1-9 precedes Genesis 10 chronologically. Now if I was writing the Bible it’d make more sense to me to put those 9 verses somewhere before Genesis 10 or somewhere in the middle. But I didn’t write the Bible … so I can’t do that.
It doesn’t indicate in Genesis 5 that God talked to him about the flood. All it says was that Noah was 500 hundred years old, and he begat three children, and Lamech’s “birth comment” when he had Noah. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me that these chapters “overlap” since obviously that’s what going on in Genesis 10 and Genesis 11. Genesis 5 is a genealogy, starting with Adam, and climaxing in Noah. That’s it’s purpose. Genesis 6 is talking about the “daughters of men” procreating with the “sons of God”, the violence that ended up being in the earth, and then God finding grace in Noah. In the midst of that we have verse 3 that says “his days shall be 120 years”, and then God’s plan with Noah and his family to build a boat, etc.
It seems rather ambiguous to me to say that “his days shall be 120 years” referring to each individual man’s longevity, when it doesn’t even happen right away. But takes at least a 1,000 years to become a reality… and even now we have rare cases of people living a couple years after 120. The context of the chapter makes more sense to me, to be referring to a countdown.
It’s easy to forget about characters such as Shem, Eber, and Serug, when we start reading Genesis 12 and beyond. But if you put the patriarchs together, like a jigsaw puzzle, (that many people have spent a lot of time on) you find that at the time of Abraham’s calling you will see that Abraham’s great-great-great-great grandfather Eber, his great-great-great-great-great grandfather Selah, his great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Arphaxad, and even SHEM (that’s seven greats), one generation removed from the Flood, are all of them, still alive at this point. And what’s even more amazing is that by the time Abraham dies, Shem, Salah, and Eber, all of them, still outlives him.
Reading it in this context it makes little to no sense why Abraham is regarding as being “so old” when Shem is still living at this point (at almost 600 years old). There is no inkling in the rest of Genesis 12-50 that these people are still living… nor is their any Scripture that portrays elderly Abraham taking care of his even more elderly ancestors.
So in summary, the reason I don’t take these numbers “literally” is not so much that they are “extravagantly old” but because they feel artificial the more and more closely I analyze them. Which is the whole reason I wrote down my two posts: Proof of Numerology 1 and 2, and compared them with my own genealogy.
I like what J. Vernon McGee says, “There are two ways to read Scripture. Either with a telescope or a microscope. Might I suggest to you, that you at first read the Bible with a telescope… and ask your self ‘what does the Bible put emphasis on?’ and ‘what is the big picture?’. After you do this you can whip out your magnifying glass and microscope and start looking at the details.”
In other words analyze the “forest” before looking at the “trees”. The Book of Genesis can easily be split into 2 broad categories, based on subject matter and timescale.
The first category is Genesis 1-11. This talks about Universal Origins: the human condition, sin, grace, judgement, repentance, blood feuds, etc. This takes up roughly 2,000 years of history. Genesis 12-50 is Israel’s Origins: Abraham and his progeny, the beginnings of the covenant, etc. This takes up roughly 350 years of history. This means after reading the first eleven chapters of Genesis you are already halfway through the Old Testament (time-wise). You are zooming through at roughly 180 years per chapter, and then in Abraham’s story it slows down to about 9 years per chapter.
One way to look at the decline is simply as a transition period. Going from one era (the pre-flood days) to the next era (the post-flood days).
-Tim
The Old Testament is roughly three-fourths of the entire Bible. You can’t ignore it, nor can you throw it out. Much of the New Testament would be incomprehensible without the OT (Jesus, the son of David?.. who’s David?) (The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? who are those guys?). Plus you have many biblical passages that point to Jesus. When Jesus comes along, we are now informed to look at the OT “through the lens of Christ”.
When I said, “at the end of the day, it really just comes down to Jesus” I wasn’t meaning that the Old Testament has nothing to say. Far from it. I was just saying that Jesus has the last say on things. Because he is the fulfillment.
Not all groups were literate or had a written language… but that’s beside the point. You’re pointing out the parallels in the stories of the Hebrews to other cultures (I agree their are parallels). But you are ignoring the differences, of which their are many.
Like I said previously, it’s not my job to know the exact details of how God governs the Universe. You are asking a lot of deep philosophical questions that I can’t answer. It’s almost like asking “why did God create the universe at all?” … I could speculate, and mull it around in my head… (perhaps God wanted a relationship with other beings?) but I don’t think, at the end of the day, I would come up with an answer that is 100% satisfactory. The message of God is trust, faith, mercy, grace, judgement etc. … it’s not my duty to know the “ins and outs”, but to trust in Him.
You say God seemed like he missed a lot of people (maybe God has different plans for different people, living in different times, for different reasons… lot of variables here!). The Bible says the Hebrews were the “chosen people”… now that doesn’t mean he didn’t care about the rest of the earth. Far from it. It’s just that he had particular missions for that particular people.
It’s when you get into the New Testament that God says, “Spread the gospel and the good news to all nations, all kindred, all tongues… etc.”
-Tim
Genesis 6:10-12 seems to give the same sequence as Genesis 5:32 - 6:3. The sequence is repeated twice. It is also interesting that Shem was born when Noah was 502 years old, before the apparent narrative of God’s displeasure and his command to build the ark. You are right that not every single passage follows the previous; sometimes a passage is a summation of several past events, or an elaboration of one event of several already mentioned. However, in this case what I have said seems to be the most reasonable. Not that it is of incredibly great significance, other than to highlight a prophecy God made to Noah. But even if God had not made this prophecy, the general decline of ages of the patriarchs would still be evident… and it would be a significant decline, not abrupt, but gradual, but unmistakeable.
As I said before, it was not so much Abraham’s age at issue, as Sarah’s barrenness. Most of Abraham’s ancestors were having children (sons) by the age of thirty or fourty. That is the relevance of “too old”. While it might take a few years to have children, not having children for seventy years while married, would make Sarah seem too old now to have children, beyond expectancy, beyond possibility.
I’m re-reading these passages, and now I’m actually more confused than I was previously. Verse 1 of Chapter 6 says “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them…” Did men (in the general sense) begin to multiply before or after Noah had three sons? The “when” seems to imply something that happened near the beginning, before Noah was even born… so it confuses me how Noah could be tied up in these passages since he was the 10th generation from Adam.
So this is a problem for seeing the 120 years as necessarily a countdown if the passage is referring to something that happened near the beginning. But it’s also a problem in how Noah could be involved in this as well…
Hmmm… I’ll have to think about it some more.
I agree that the gradual decline is un-mistakeable and not abrupt. And you could be right that Gen. 6:3 is talking about an age-limit for humanity. Even so I don’t think that people living several hundreds to a millennium is the only available option on the table. As I said before, if numerology is involved, and the ages aren’t pertaining to “real ages”, then it would follow that the same concept can also apply to a gradual decline — most of which takes place in Genesis 11 — as a form of transition from one part of the narrative to the next.
I see your point here, John. It’s talking about barrenness of Sarah. Even so, I would wonder why it was not considered a miracle for Noah to bear children at 500, nor Shem to have born children at 100 (which as I’ve said previously, Shem is still alive at this point, and even outlives Noah).
God tells Noah in Genesis 15:15 “And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age.” And again in Genesis 25:8 “Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.”
Shem is 3 times as old as Noah, at this point in time, and miraculously outlives his 8 times-great grandson… why is he not considered “good and old”…? Even the phrase “visiting thy father’s in peace” is halfway strange, seeing how many of his fathers are still living at this time: Serug, Eber, Shem etc.
-Tim