Was Methuselah real or a myth?

Answer 1

The answer to this question hinges on one's view of The Bible in general and Genesis 1-11 in particular. The way one answers this will be correlated with whether one things Eden, Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah and the Great flood were real or myths. I commend the view that Methuselah was real and Genesis can be trusted. However, Genesis 1-11 must be understood rightly, especially regarding the two different physical worlds which Genesis implies (ours and the 'pre-flood world' of Methuselah). Let me outline how Genesis 1-11 should be understood:

Eden is in another place, unlocatable by later man and beyond our present experience. But it was not just Adam and Eve who inhabited an unlocatable place beyond our present experience. Rather, all of the ancient patriarchs, from Adam through to Noah, lived in a different physical world to ours. The whole account of Genesis 2:4-4:10 and Genesis 4:25-8:14 is set in this other physical universe. There were two 'miraculous' crossings from that world to ours. The first is the eviction of Cain from that world to ours, explicitly mentioned in Genesis 4:11-14 with implications described and explained in Genesis 4:15-24. The second is the miraculous translation of the ark of Noah from that world to ours, implied between Genesis 8:14 and Genesis 8:15. The implications of the 'translation' of the ark into our world are spelt out in Genesis 8:16-9:18.The physical world in which they lived - the 'pre-flood world' - is a different world from ours. It is different in that people could not cross over from that world to ours without God's special intervention. It is different in that the pre-flood world has been destroyed, so that no humans or land-based animals now live there. It is different in its geography and topology from our world, likely having no mountains. It is different in that Eden is there, with the tree of life in the garden in Eden, and with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil also there. Those things are not in our world. It is different in that there are most likely no rainbows in that world. It is different in that it was once a place where people could live forever in perfection. It is a place where humans did not evolve through a process of evolution through natural selection. Therefore it was a place where humans and animals did not show apparent signs of 'poor design' in their anatomy. It is a world where life has not always been overshadowed by death. It is a world that has never known carnivorous activity. It is a very different world to ours.

Yet it is the same world as our world. It has (or had) rivers with the same names as rivers in our world, in analagous places. A place in our world can be spoken of as being 'to the East' of a place in that world. It can be thought of as a parallel world. Only Cain and Noah (with Noah's family and the animals) have ever crossed over from that world to ours. At the time of the sin of Adam, around 4000 B.C., the 70 million or so pre-humans in our world were made human by God, all at the same time. In around 3900/3800 BC, Cain was cast out of the pre-flood world into our world, and married a woman from our world, not far from Mesopotamia. Cain's entrance into our world was key in the rise of civilization, which was initiated in Mesopotamia shortly after Cain's arrival. It was the pre-flood world which was flooded and completely destroyed, around 2300 BC, while our present world was not ever destroyed by a global flood. Noah's ark was miraculously translated from that world to our world, after the waters had abated in that world (between Genesis 8:14 and Genesis 8:15). For a short time in human history, the descendants of people from the pre-flood world lived much longer lives than the descendants of people from our world. For a short time, they lived these long life-spans alongside other people who had much shorter life expectancies.