Ask a Scholar: Noah's Age

Logically, the debate over the existence of God is independent of the question of the literal truthfulness of the scriptures of any particular religion or of any particular passage within such scriptures. Whether God exists is a separate issue from whether a particular text that claims to speak in his name is reliable. Of course, what exactly we mean by terms like "truthfulness" and "reliable" is also a complicated matter; we should not assume that those terms meant the same thing in the ancient Near East that they mean today (and they mean many different things today).

In the case of Noah's lifespan of 950 years (reported in Genesis 9:29) and the similar longevities given for other early figures (especially those who lived before the Flood), the student of ancient Near Eastern literature can productively cite the Sumerian King List, a much older text, as a parallel. In it, some of the early kings rule, for example, for 36,000 years. Later figures, however, rule for periods that seem more reasonable to us. In the Bible, too, the great longevities of the early figures give way as the narrative proceeds. Whereas Adam (the first figure in Genesis) lives for 930 years, Joseph (the last figure in that book) lives for 110; much later, King David dies at 70 (which Psalm 90:10 gives as the normal human lifespan). Most likely, the longevities of the early figures of Genesis reflect the widespread notion that reality in primordial times was of a radically different character from what it has become.

There is no good reason to think that "year" in such texts refers to something substantially less than what we mean by the term. When, for example, Abraham finds it unlikely that he at 100 and his wife Sarah at 90 will have a child (Genesis 17:17), he surely did not imagine a much lower figure than those terms denote today. The main point of the passage seems to be to underscore the miraculousness of the gift of that very special child (Isaac), born to an aged father and mother (the latter barren as well). If we try to argue that the years presupposed in this text are actually a much shorter unit of time, the miracle disappears, along with the main point of the passage.  Since miracles are exceptions to the natural order, and thus improbable, it is hard to know how to assess whether any given miracle-story is accurate as literal reportage. Whether the miracles reported in the Bible happened (or happen today—a somewhat different question) cannot be determined by the study of the text alone. That question gets us into very large and contentious areas of philosophy and theology. So, those "religious debates" to which the questioner refers will not, I strongly suspect, be ending any time soon.

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