How did Adam live so long?

Answer 1

Well, back in The Bible days, people lived longer than people do now. But, in one point of the Old Testament, God punished the world and decided that the age should be lowered.

Answer:

This was the beginning of creation. Man, the earth and everything in it was at its zenith.

"And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good..." (Gen.1:31).

This "good" [in its inspired and widest sense] is translated throughout the KJV in a variety of ways: "beautiful, best, better, bountiful, cheerful, at ease, fine, gracious, joyful, kindly, kindness, loving, merry, pleasant, pleaseth, pleasure, precious, prosperity, ready, sweet, wealth...".

This was before man was introduced to "sin."

Adam, Eve and the first generations of their children were as physically perfect as any succeeding generations of man were ever going to be... before their sins [spiritual and physical] would take its toll with the passing of time.

Inherent physical and mental degeneration -- the passing on of degenerative diseases, birth defects, unhealthy [physical and spiritual] parental teachings, religious beliefs and lifestyles, satanic influences of an unseen nature, etc., would eventually reduce man's life expectancy from living for centuries... to mere decades.

The whole world has been "winding down" since creation... since man learned sin from the god of this world. And man's inherited health issues and other sins of his fathers has been winding down with it. Man's sins have polluted himself... and the earth that sustains him.

The nature of sin is "death." And, behold, death is "not very good." It shortens and takes life away.

Answer 2

A:Christians who take the Bible very literally have offered a variety of attempted explanations for the great ages of early biblical characters like Methuselah, none of them very satisfactory. One of the most common such explanations is that the first humans had such perfect DNA that they could live almost forever, but that the DNA degraded after some generations, until humans could no longer live astonishing lifespans. That is pseudo-science and is not taken seriously by real scientists, who say that all the evidence available to them proves that early man lived for even shorter lifespans than we do today. These explanations assume that no one ever died of disease, accident or misadventure.

It is useful to look at the biblical lifespan for Methuselah in terms of numerology. First of all, the number 17 was important in Genesis genealogies, from Adam all the way down to the legendary Patriarchs. For Methuselah, the formula was simple, reflecting his status as the oldest man: he had his first child at the age of 187, which is 11 X 17, and died at 969, which is 57 X 17. The statistical chance of the oldest person in the Bible having his first child at an exact multiple of 17 and then of dying at an exact multiple of 17 are somewhat remote, confirming that this part of the story arose out of the spiritual meaning of the number 17, not history.

Answer 3

A:

On the biblical evidence, Methuselah lived to the astonishing age of 969 years and then died the same year as Noah's Flood. This seems so impossible that we need only look more carefully at the age he is supposed to have achieved in the Bible and see whether there is a literary reason for this age. Many of the ages of the ancestors portrayed in the Book of Genesis involve numerology, using patterns involving the magic number 17. In cases where numerology was used in determining the age to which a person lived, we should regard the age as not really historical.

Methuselah had his first son at the age of 187, which is 11 X 17, and died a the age of 969, which is 57 X 17. That the oldest living person in the Bible would have the two most significant events in his life based on the number 17 is most improbable, demonstrating what we already knew - people have never lived to such great ages. The story of Methuselah's great age is only a myth.