Old Testament: counting the years

[formerdatt]

I tried my commentaries and looking further in older posts to no avail. Can someone please help me with a simple explanation? I teach 4Th grade CCD. My kids asked me this morning "how somebody in the olden days could live 600 years". Instead of some lame explanation about biblical allegory or a lack of proper calendars, I postponed the answer until tomorrow. Any thoughts based on teaching of the church? I am no literalist but want to cause no harm either. Thanks!

[Rosarium]

There are several ways to answer that.

One is to ask "why can't they live 900 years"?

That is an important question; let them ponder it

The human body will die, no matter what. It ages (Senescence) and there is nothing we can do about it. Some things do not age, and live until something kills them (which eventually happens).

The state of the world has changed drastically. The state of the world in the past was very different. The atmosphere, the climate, etc. It was all different. Animals grew larger then. Gigantism is able to be induced by altering the environment (cool experiments were done with this, where under simulated environments organisms would indeed grow to be much larger than normal). Also, increased life spans go hand in hand with this (live longer, grow bigger).

Pre-Flood world had all sorts of megafauna in it. Now, the only large creatures are in the oceans, and the megafauna of land are actually much smaller than they once were. Moses for instance lives to be 120 years. The oldest people now can't get much far beyond that, no matter the medical advances. Pre-Flood, people lived much longer, which makes sense, if we see the Flood as being a global change and restructuring of the world, which it was. It explains the massive trauma the world has seen, evidence of which is visible plainly today. The mass extinctions are explained too. Also explained is the rarity of finding remains of the creatures of this time.

So the reason why man lived longer makes sense from a theological and biological view.

[formerdatt]

I like that, thank you! It appeals to their sense of child-like wonder (a good thing!) and ought to stimulate a lot of conversation.

[JonW]

I don't want to start a scientific debate on this, but doesn't this contradict the biological record we have of "early man"?  In other words, isn't there absolutely no scientific evidence that the ages in the great old ages in the Bible should be taken literally?  I know you mentioned that there would be no record.  Is that because of the flood?  But then how does one account for the record that does exist, which flatly contradicts both the idea that there is no record, and that "early man" or whatever lived longer than we do now?  Not starting a debate, just curious how we should look at this.  What does the Church say about the old ages in the Bible?  Thanks.

[Rosarium]

I don't want to start a scientific debate on this, but doesn't this contradict the biological record we have of "early man"? 

We don't have a biological record of early man. We have the remains of humans, but since their dating methods can make them 500 or 5 million years old, they aren't worth a lot. They usually use the area in which it was found to date, and they use the remains to date their area, so it is more about their assumptions.

Early man, which are not humans, are indistinguishable from apes. They use tiny fragments to paint a picture...largely from their imagination. A pig's tooth can become an entire pre-human society. Really.

In other words, isn't there absolutely no scientific evidence that the ages in the great old ages in the Bible should be taken literally?

There is no scientific evidence they aren't literal. Also, they have no real definition of "year" or real knowledge of what the earth was like then.

I know you mentioned that there would be no record.  Is that because of the flood?  But then how does one account for the record that does exist, which flatly contradicts both the idea that there is no record, and that "early man" or whatever lived longer than we do now?  Not starting a debate, just curious how we should look at this.  What does the Church say about the old ages in the Bible?  Thanks.

Science isn't so cut and dry. When they find remains, they cannot get answers set in stone (even if it is literally set in stone). The flood, as I mentioned, was not just a lot of rain, but an entire restructuring of the earth. Also, real studies on the earth show we do not know that much. Is oil renewable? Why are there mass graveyards? Why do the layers showing the history of life alternate a lot?

There are the remains of ancient komodo dragons in Australia. The scientific explanation was that they evolved millions of years ago from smaller reptiles. They just found out where they came from...from other komodo dragons which are indistinguishable from modern ones. They have not changed at all in these "milliions" of years although their range has changed.

Same thing with almost every animal. Over 99% of all species are extinct. So most extinct animals are not represented in a living form, however, many living animals (living fossils) exist from every time period. These mass extinctions are entirely logical. That they are the "ancestors" of modern animals is stupid, unless of course they are actually that creature in which case they are indistinguishable. It is funny that these "living fossils" are usually recent discoveries. That is because they find the remains of an animal they do now know. They create a myth about it. Then...someone inconveniently finds it in some place they never looked. I have a feeling ever animal is a living fossil, they just haven't found that specific species in the remains of the fossils. Which makes sense, as 99% of them are extinct. There are many animals which we have never seen there.

Remember that. Most of this "science" is their assumptions and worship of their creation myth. They fit into into their mythology, and make exceptions as it goes on.

[John92]

I tried my commentaries and looking further in older posts to no avail. Can someone please help me with a simple explanation? I teach 4Th grade CCD. My kids asked me this morning "how somebody in the olden days could live 600 years". Instead of some lame explanation about biblical allegory or a lack of proper calendars, I postponed the answer until tomorrow. Any thoughts based on teaching of the church? I am no literalist but want to cause no harm either. Thanks!

I guess there'd be two good paths to go down with this:

1.) God is omnipotent, case closed :D
2.) The numbers are allegorical, the meaning being pretty much lost on us today, though they would have meant something to the people to whom they were communicated.  You wouldn't be leading your students astray with this.  The Bible is literally true - absolutely, totally, 100% inerrant.  But there are *two* senses of "literally true": the "literal sense proper" and the "literal sense improper".  In the "literal sense improper" the sacred author was not intending to make a "statement-of-fact".  This view was held by St. Augustine, for one, and approved by multiple pre-VII Popes IIRC.  Now, naturally, we should always err on the side of "literal sense proper", or at least I think so.  It would seem that we're much more likely to be condemned for believing too little than for believing too much.  But in the case of, for example, the first chapter of Genesis, nearly everyone takes it as "literal sense improper" (including St. Augustine), and nearly everybody, including orthodox commentators, takes the same view toward the ages of the patriarchs.

The reason St. Augustine decided that Genesis 1 fell under the "literal sense improper" was that what was conveyed there contradicted what they knew about the universe at that time.  Since Scripture cannot go against reason, we're forced to either accept Genesis 1 as "literal sense improper" or find some way to reconcile its account with the structure of the universe as we know it today.  I don't think it'd be too far of a leap to do the same with the ages of the patriarchs.  In the days of the Church Fathers knowledge of medicine, etc, were very limited, so it didn't necessarily seem to bizarre for peoples living in the distant past to survive for centuries.  But nowadays, with what we know about human physiology and what we can learn from archaeology, such a view seems (at least for now) contradictory to reason and therefore we can interpret the ages as "literal sense improper."

Don't get me wrong, this idea can be easily abused, but, in moderation, no major theologian I know of has a problem with it.  If anything you might be not leading the children into error with this but helping them: they're much more likely to hold onto their faith if they don't think you have to believe Methuselah lived to be almost 1,000 years old.