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How Do We Understand the Huge Lifespans in Biblical Genesis?

How Do We Understand the Huge Lifespans in Biblical Genesis?

Last updated on: August 5, 2026 at 1:50 pm by Richard Ostling

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How Do We Understand the Huge Lifespans in Biblical Genesis? 2026-08-05T13:50:38-04:00 Richard Ostling

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Humanity shown in ancient Egyptian carving / Andrés Dallimonti @ unsplash.com

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Age-old questions about the Bible are continually raised anew, and this is a good example, pursued yet again in a June 29 online article. Author John Walton is a well-known evangelical who taught Old Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois and before that at the Moody Bible Institute. In retirement, he now writes as the senior Bible scholar with BioLogos, a Christian organization that discusses intersections between Scripture and science (see https://biologos.org/).

Long lifespans are reported at various points in the Bible, but attention focuses especially on chapter 5 in the Book of Genesis, just before Noah’s Flood. Walton says the information there “astounds” modern readers. It records that the first human, Adam, lived 930 years, followed by Seth (912), Enosh (905), Kenan (910), Mahalalel (895), Jared (962), Enoch (only 365), and Lamech (777).

Longest of all was Methuselah, reaching 969 years. This number is exploited by the sinister drug dealer in the Gershwins’ opera “Porgy and Bess” to undermine faith in the Bible during his famous song “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Long after the primordial days in Genesis, the Bible itself defines humanity’s customary lifespan as 70 or 80 years (Psalm 90:10).

Fanciful?

Walton says there are three basic ways to interpret Genesis 5. First, some see the narrative as merely “fanciful and not to be believed,” often asserting these people never even existed, which he says is not an option “for those of us who hold the Bible in high esteem.”

Second, longstanding tradition accepts these ages as literally true. A 1937 Orthodox Jewish compendium by J. H. Hertz, Britain’s chief rabbi, observed, “The idea that men in primeval times lived extraordinarily long lives is common to the traditions of most ancient peoples.” David Lieberman’s “The Eternal Torah,” a 1979 commentary, thought long ages may have resulted from “the perfection of the natural environment and diet” in primeval times. He notes that the patriarch Jacob expressed “knowledge that his ancestors did indeed live longer lives” (Genesis 47:9).

With Protestants, a typical conservative view occurs in the ”Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties” (1982) by Gleason L. Archer. He proposed that even after the Fall and expulsion from Eden, “it would seem that conditions for longevity were still far more favorable” but somehow changed after the Flood, and “there may well have been a virtual absence of disease.”

Notorious

Another prominent conservative, Walter Kaiser of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, admitted this matter is “notoriously difficult,” yet concluded the long ages must be accurate. He said proposals offered to make them “more palatable” conflict with other evidence. Examples are theories that the names were of tribal groups rather than individuals, or that the “years” should be understood as months, or that some unknown numbering system was involved.

Walton follows the third approach, arguing that careful consideration of what the biblical author intended to convey in context weighs against literalism.

To begin, “the Bible offers no direct explanations for why people live so long.” That leaves interpreters to realize that “ancient peoples did not think about genealogies the way we do.” Long lives “that gradually reduce over time” are likewise seen in writings from neighboring Sumeria (the land later called Babylon) with “rhetorical use of numbers that were considered meaningful.” In an important text rediscovered in 1922, some 3,700 years after it was written, Sumerian kings are given remarkable lifespans of 18,600 to 43,200 years. The Bible’s numbers appear quite modest by comparison.

Walton thinks Sumerians were portraying humanity’s earliest phase “as an ideal time” in contrast to the conditions they currently faced. Dramatic elevation of an ancestor was used to legitimize high status, employed “for purposes of power and prestige.” We should “think about numbers in the genealogies not on the basis of what they mean (their numerical value) but how they mean (their rhetorical use). That is, that they are used to communicate ideas figuratively.” The long lifespan may be intended to extend honor to an individual and very remote ancestors “are given greater honor.”

His blunt conclusion: We “do not have to find an explanation for why they lived so long – they didn’t.”

“Trustworthy”

Numbers for Methuselah and company are the sort of issue that skeptics have repeatedly employed to attack Scripture, but Walton insists “the Bible’s trustworthiness is based on the claims it is making,” which “must be determined from the literary intentions and conventions of the ancient authors who wrote them. We cannot simply assume that they thought and wrote with the same purposes as we do.”

Walton is prodding fellow evangelicals to reconsider the literal interpretation. Broadly speaking, he agrees with the consensus among present-day “mainline” Protestant and Catholic experts that these numbers were originally meant to be symbols or literary devices of some sort.

Catholic exegete Eugene Maly thought “the general decrease in ages probably indicates the further estrangement from God,” since the Bible attributes long life to faithfulness, as in Proverbs 10:27: “The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short.” Paulist Father Lawrence Boadt thought differently, that these numbers were meant to show “the reader literarily how divine blessing still ruled the earth” in primeval times despite the Fall and expulsion from paradise in Eden.

A prominent Protestant scholar, Walter Brueggemann, wrote that family trees, as in Genesis 5, are “notoriously difficult to interpret.” For one thing, modern scholarship concludes that they can skip many generations so that, contra past efforts, they cannot be used to fix chronology and time spans. (“Father” and “son” language is not necessarily literal and, depending on the context, can mean simply “ancestor” and “descendant.”)

If these specific and much-debated numbers were symbols, then what did they symbolize? Brueggemann said “if we knew more, we would likely discover that the genealogy is an index of extended traditional materials about each of these names,” possibly linked with astronomy. But by the time Genesis 5 was written, “the names seem largely to have lost their specific traditional content and are only ciphers, the key to which is largely missing.” Mysteries remain.

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