I take much of the Bible literally. Some portions, particularly in the Revelation to John, are specifically stated to be "signs", that is, symbolic. Others that are in poetic form tend have symbolic sections. Theologians of all stripes argue endlessly over which portions are "most literal" or otherwise. But whether a section is best understood poetically or literally, the outline of action has moral and spiritual meaning for us. Being a number-oriented sort of guy, I return again and again to the puzzle of the great ages of the patriarchs before Moses.
Did people, or at least some people, really live nearly a thousand years, in the time before the great flood? Perhaps. I am not a "young earth creationist". I accept "the Gap" between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, as described by G.H. Pember in Earth's Earliest Ages. I understand that this century-old book is again being reprinted. Thus, whether the various lists of "begats" in Genesis actually add up to put Adam's creation at about 4000 BC, or are not as connected as they appear, I look to the stories to find lessons for today.
Most people who have heard of the Bible have heard of "the Fall." There are actually four Falls, and each led the LORD God to respond with a curse. The numbers in this chart indicate the effects of these curses.
The first Fall was when Adam and his wife ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Whether this story is literal or figurative is less important than the lesson embodied in the curses which followed. Only one of those is pertinent here, the curse on the ground (Genesis 3:17b-19):
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil will you eat of it all the days of your life.
And thorns and thistles will it bring forth for you,
And you will eat the herb of the field.
By the sweat of your face you will eat bread
Until you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.
The second Fall followed a few decades later, probably not more than 20-25 years. Cain and Abel were born, and when they were grown, Cain killed Abel. There is plenty of meaning in that story, but I am interested here in what follows. God reprimanded Cain, and then uttered this curse (Genesis 4:11-12a):
And now you are cursed from the ground,
Which has opened its mouth to receive
your brother's blood from your hand.
When you till the ground,
it will no longer yield its strength to you.
I cannot tell whether this curse was on Cain only, or Cain and his descendants, or on all the ground. Since Cain, who was a farmer, went on after this to build a city and set up a godless civilization (which led to the Flood), it is most likely that this curse pertained to Cain and his descendants. After Abel was killed and Cain left, Seth was born, and named "Seth" because he was the replacement for Abel.
Most likely, until the flood, for Seth's descendants the ground still "yielded its strength", supporting their great lifespans.
By the time of Noah, "violence filled the earth" (Genesis 6:11). This was the third Fall. The flood was an acted-out curse on everyone except Noah's family, safe in the Ark. It must also have reduced the fecundity of the ground, as evidenced by the life spans of the post-flood patriarchs after Shem (did you know Shem outlived Abraham?). There are three generations that lived between 400-500 years, and then four of the next five generations, including Abram's father Terah, lived more than 200 years.
What happened at the time of Peleg? The fourth Fall. "Peleg" means "divided". Until his father's generation there was one language, until the people presumed to build a great tower to "make a name for themselves" (Genesis 11:4). God confused their language and the people scattered, and the nations were divided, shortly before the birth or Peleg. The "tower of Babel" had been a declaration of independence from God, and the scattering was the curse. From that time idolatry became almost universal. I might consider that a further Fall, but it is part and parcel with the fourth Fall. Nonetheless, between the time of Abram and Moses we find a further shortening of life spans to the limit of 120 years. (Shortly before the Flood, when God said man's days would be 120 years (Genesis 6:3), it may have been with this in mind, or as He foresaw. Only one person, a French woman named Jeanne Calment, has lived more than 120 years in the modern era.)
God called out Abram to found a new nation that would follow Him. This nation, set up in the name of the grandson of Abram/Abraham, became Israel. Abraham lived about 4,000 years ago and Moses lived about 3,500 years ago. Although disease and violence kept average lifespan as low as 35-40 years for much of the time after Moses, small numbers of people lived into their seventies and even eighties. Only after the discovery of antibiotics and the establishment of good public health measures in most countries after about 1930 did average lifespan increase past sixty years and then to about eighty years, as it is today, at least in the more developed nations. But even now only a small number live beyond eighty years.
Here is the question I have been pondering: What if the ground still "yielded its strength," and other limits to human life, apparently established by God, were removed? What if people could confidently expect to live a comparatively healthy life about ten times as long as we are used to?
Firstly, the ground would need to yield its strength in a superlative way, because nearly everyone who was born in the past 900-1,000 years would still be alive!
In my family tree, the most distant ancestor I care to keep track of is Edward I king of England, born in 1239. Were he alive today he'd be 781 years old, and could expect to live another century or two. He is 23 generations back. Would he still be king? Would his living so long (along with billions of others) be a good thing?
One other aspect to the lists of "begats" in Genesis is that most of the men had children starting at about age 100. Were that to continue until now, the descendants of Edward I living today would be not 23 generations removed, but about eight. That could still pose a problem if some of them were too impatient to wait for the "old king" (or maybe his father or grandfather) do die of "natural causes", and led a patricidal coup.
But let's look at Edward. His engineers developed the first large trebuchet, or counterweight catapult. It was capable of throwing stone missiles weighing 200-400 pounds, which could break through castle walls. That's why he was called The Hammer of Scotland (and he took on Wales, also). He was a brute, and I suspect none of us would find him a pleasant companion. However, longer generation times might mean slower cultural changes. We might also be brutes, and get along with him just fine.
All this makes me wonder, how many people would there be? Without getting long about it, I find that from 1300 to 1800 AD world population rose from a third of a billion to about a billion. Generation times probably averaged 25 years. If we roughly count half a billion times twenty generations, that's about ten billion people born in those five centuries. Since 1800, the number of people born is another thirty billion. If all of them were still alive, that's forty billion. If only half of them were alive, that's twenty billion. Either way, the earth has to produce a lot of food for such a population!
I considered, what would life be like for a couple who marry at about age 30 and expect to live another 800-900 years? Would there still be menopause for the woman at age 50, or would women be like female birds, that may slow down a bit, but seem to remain fertile as long as they live? A small bird such as an American robin can live 12-14 years, although there are lots of predators out there and few live past age three or four. Humans have few predators besides bacteria and viruses; what if robins were the same?
We recently had a brood of robins raised on our kitchen window sill, so I looked into their lives. In our area robins first breed at age one and raise two or three broods each summer. Each brood averages four chicks. The eggs incubate two weeks and the chicks spend another two weeks in the nest. They receive follow-up help for another week, then the parents fly off and start another nest. Now stretch the ten years of a long-lived robin couple to a thousand years, a factor of 100:
At age 100, a couple marries and has four children. The five weeks a robin couple cares for their eggs and chicks stretches to 500 weeks, or ten years. For humans, we like to hang onto our kids for about twenty years instead, and space them a year or two apart. That's OK. At age 125, the nest is empty, and a couple might relocate for new horizons, and start another "clutch". After the third batch of kids is grown and gone, the couple is about 175-180. They take a break, just as robins take a winter break until the next spring. Proportionally, let's assume this couple takes off 50-80 years. That's time enough for travel, learning some new skills, maybe attaining new hobbies like making pianos or painting murals. Around the age of 250, it's time for another round or three of childrearing.
Let's suppose this cycle repeats about every 150 years until they get too old after the sixth set of three "clutches" of about four kids, and are ready for the long sleep, being around 900 years old. Their children, if all are still living, number about 72. Of course, there are hundreds of grand- and great-grandchildren and so forth.
That kind of fecundity would soon lead to a population not of billions, but perhaps trillions! Even if habitats were built to cover the oceans, it isn't possible to fit more than five trillion people, with only one square meter each. Nobody could go anywhere! There's nowhere to grow food. I conclude that couples would need to stop after one or two "families" were raised, and just enjoy themselves for the next 700 years or so. That takes very, very effective conception control (or an innocuous way to end the sex drive).
These are just a few considerations I have. It seems the way things work now is actually pretty good. I may return to the subject…
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