Methuselah

Methuselah or Metushélach () is the oldest person whose age is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, given as 969 years. Extra-biblical tradition records that he died on the 11th of Cheshvan of the year 1656 (Anno Mundi, after Creation), 7 days before the beginning of the great Flood.Methuselah dying before the flood is based on the Masoretic Text of Genesis 5. He died after the flood based on the Genesis 5 numbers in the Lucianic Septuagint. According to Rashi on Gen. 7:4, The Holy One delayed the Flood specially because of the 7 days of mourning for the righteous Methuselah in his honour. Methuselah was son of Enoch and the grandfather of Noah.
The name Methuselah has become a general synonym for any living creature of great age.
==Methuselah in the Bible==
Methuselah is mentioned in one passage in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 5:21-27, as part of the genealogy linking Adam to Noah. The genealogy is repeated, without the chronology, at 1 Chronicles 1:3, and also appears at Luke 3:37.
(21) And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: (22) And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and Methuselah begat sons and daughters: (23) And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: (24) And Enoch walked with God: and he [was] not; for God took him. (25) And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech: (26) And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters: (27) And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.
The verses are available in three manuscript traditions, the Masoretic, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Torah. The three traditions do not agree with each other. The differences can be summarized as follows:Taken from the table in Gerald Hasel, "Genesis 5 and 11: Chronolgenealogies in the Biblical History of Beginnings
Text 	Age at son's birth	Remainder of life Methuselah	Age at death	Comment
Masoretic 	187 	782 	969 	Methuselah dies in 1656 AM, the year of the Flood
Septuagint (Alexandrinus)	187 	782 	969 	Methuselah dies in 2256 AM, six years before the Flood (2262 AM)
Septuagint (Vaticanus) 	167 	802 	969 	Methuselah dies in 2256 AM, fourteen years after the Flood (2242 AM)
Samaritan 	67 	653 	720 	Methuselah dies in the year of the Flood (1307 AM)
There have been numerous attempts to account for these differences - the most obvious being accidental corruption by copyists and translators. Some errors may be the result of mistaken attempts to correct previous errors. Gerhard Larsson has suggested that the rabbis who translated the Septuagint from Hebrew to Greek in Alexandria around the 3rd century BC, aware that the Egyptian historian Manetho makes no mention of a Deluge, lengthened the patriarchs' ages to push back the time of the flood to before the first Egyptian dynasty.Quoted in the website of the Institute for Biblical and Scientific Studies
==Extra-Biblical mentions==
Methuselah appears in two important Jewish works from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. In the Book of Enoch, where Enoch (as the narrator) tells Methuselah of the coming worldwide flood and of the future Messianic kingdom. The Book of Jubilees names Methuselah's mother and his wife - both are named Edna - and his daughter-in-law, Betenos, Lamech's wife.
The 17th century midrashic Sefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher"), Sefer Ha-Yashar: Or, the Book of Jasher (1887), Salt Lake City: J. Parry & Co. describes Methuselah with his grandson Noah attempting to persuade the people of the earth to return to godliness.(Jasher 5:7) All other very long-lived people died, and Methuselah was the only one of this class left. (Jasher 5:21) God planned to bring the flood after all the men who walked in the ways of the had died (besides Noah's nuclear family). (Jasher 4:20) Methuselah lived until the ark was built, but died before the flood, since God had promised he would not be killed with the unrighteous. (Jasher 5:21) The Sefer haYashar gives Methuselah's age at death as 960(Jasher 5:36) and does not synchronize his death with the flood.
==Interpretations==
The meaning of Methuselah's age has engendered considerable speculation, but no widely accepted conclusions. These speculations can be discussed under four categories and their combinations: literal, mistranslation, symbolic, and fictional interpretations.
===Literal===
Literal interpretations take Methuselah's 969 years to be exactly 969 solar years. This conflicts with evidence that a lifespan of centuries is not currently possible. Some literalists suggest allegedly naturalistic explanations: the patriarchs had a better diet, or a water vapor canopy protected the earth from radiation prior to the Flood.John C. Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry M. Morris, "The Genesis Flood" (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1961), 399-404 Others introduce theological causes: man was originally to have everlasting life, but sin was introduced into the world by Adam and Eve, its influence became greater with each generation, and God progressively shortened man's life.
===Mistranslation===
Some believe that Methuselah's extreme age is the result of an ancient mistranslation that converted "months" to "years", producing a more credible 969 lunar months, or 78½ years, but the same calculation applied to Enoch would have him fathering Methuselah at the age of 5.
===Symbolic===
Symbolic interpretations begin with the observation that the Biblical chronology routinely uses numbers for their symbolic value: for example, 10 symbolizes completion, 8 symbolizes the mundane world, and 7 the divine. So Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten-generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed.Abraham Malamat, “King Lists of the Old Babylonian Period and Biblical Genealogies,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 165. See also the discussion of "ten" in the Gen. genealogies in M. Abot section 5, Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 685. Duane A. Garrett also thinks this is deliberate, thus indicating redaction, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Bible, Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2000, p. 99.
===Fictional===
Among those who believe that all the numbers of Genesis 5, including Methuselah's age, have no meaning at all, Kenneth Kitchen calls them "pure myth",K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1966), 40 Yigal Levin believes they are intended simply to speed the reader from Adam to Noah,Yigal Levin, “Understanding Biblical Genealogies,” Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 9 (2001): 33 and Claus Westermann believes they are intended to create the impression of a distant past.Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, 354
==See also==
*Aging
*Longevity
*Longevity stories
*Maximum life span
*Genealogies of Genesis
* Methusaleh ben Enoch - Familypedia
==References==
==External links==
*
*Complete Bible Genealogy Family tree of Methuselah
*
Category:Old Testament
Category:Torah people
Category:Longevity myths