How did people live to be 400 in bible times?

Question

How did people in bible time's live to be 400-500 years old?

Answer 1

I think it was reincarnation, The Bible does not say He was 300 years old.The Bible will say about Noah and His days were 921 and He had this many children, like that.Also in the bible God changed peoples names ,like Saul now you will be called Paul.Reincarnation.

Answer 2

When writing was first invented, it was used exclusively for business (the only written symbols we had were the easy ones--strokes for numbers and pictures for the products we wanted to trade). Eventually, every village involved in trade developed their own number system and way of counting.

Some time between 2200 and 1800 BC, scribes began trying to unify all the different number systems, and when they did, they misinterpreted a lot of the older systems. You can see this in the many Sumerian myths that state that people lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's very suspicious that, in the Sumerian Kings List, the first 8 generations of people all lived to be multiples of 3600! (The Babylonians were using a base-60 number system, and 60 x 60 = 3600.) Divide each number by 3600 and you might be very close to the actual number intended by the original writers.

I suppose the same thing might have happened in the Bible, but the error is different, since the Bible uses a base 10 system like ours. (The first 11 chapters of Genesis were written before 2000 BC, and the rest of the Bible was written after 1800 BC.)

One of the answers above states that there is no proof of longer life spans, and actually all evidence suggests that human beings actually DID live longer. After all, how can we possibly have human beings living 80-100 years in ancient times with absolutely no health care at all beyond blood-letting and herbal remedies? Claims in the Bible of more precise numbers after 1800 BC (those in Genesis 12-50) will seem more believable.

Check out this quote from a tablet using words for numbers ("hundred" rather than "100") that the Babylonians couldn't misinterpret:

"...in those days, the carefree youth of man lasted for 100 years and, following his upbringing, he lasted for another 100 years..."

You can see it in the first paragraph of "the Rulers of Lagash".

Answer 3

Less pollutions in the air. They eat only to nourish their body not to fill their stomach as if there is not going to be food the next time. They sleep early in the absence of night life. They do not have to worry about IRS running after their earnings. There are no books for people to know about their lives so they have to stay much longer to tell their stories. They do not have work regularly for eight hours a day, they only harvest what they need to eat. Their lives got shorter and shorter when civilization started for pleasing their leaders and then their leaders started to become greedy and asked many to work for them, they were the first one who got their lives short because they depended on the sweat of others and they forgot to stretch their bones. The slaves however got their lives shorter too from overwork if not from the whips of their taskmasters. And these generations have plenty of reasons to make lives shorter. It will take the whole R&S section to fill it up with. In some thoughts to consider, perhaps their ages were counted according to lunar cycles and not in the way we do it now.

Answer 4

A few possibilities:

1.The earth was shrouded with either a layer of water vapor or ice that blocked the UV rays from the sun. As a result, living beings lived longer at the cellular level. That layer of water vapor/ice somehow collapsed causing Noah's flood.

2. People needed to live a long time so they could have more experiences, because there just were not enough collective experiences for empathy.

3. Man was created to live for all time, but after the Fall, and creation was cursed, death was introduced, so people began to age, get sick and die.

4. They somehow counted years differently than we do today.

The fourth possibility seems the least likely to me.

Answer 5

Adam and his children might have lived as long as 940 years, i think someone was mentioned that lived longer than ADAM.
but if a genetically created being is designed to live eternally without death, but after eating some fruit with poison in it has his DNA altered to count down the time of years of life, than it would be very obvious that 3 and 4th generations later the same DNA would still have characterisitics of eternal life but genetically diminished. These peole had a legacy that was given to them by ADAM and EVE,
but God knows how to change the DNA and caused men to live shorter lives and placed that age about 120. Most people live today to about 70 to 80. probably because of much excess and unrighteousness.

Answer 6

They can live 400 years even now if someone like you and I write a story which will be passed over from generation to generation until a community calls it an 'epic' and gives birth to a new religion !

Answer 7

First off, Methuselah lived to be 900+. Healthier everything. Clean air & water, no pollution. All fresh food and veggies, honey but no sugar. The world hasn't been like that since, and never will again. I think God may have had something to do with their longleivity too, maybe because they were so few people, the ones that existed needed to be there longer, and reproduce longer.

Answer 8

It is amazing that people believe this. No one has ever lived to be much beyond 100, let alone 400 or 900. That is just nonsense, and there is no proof to support that claim.

Answer 9

theres a couple of thoughts on that subject.

first as man was closer to perfection the were able to live longer.

second when the bible says God devided the waters above and below he implaced a canopy of water above the earth(thats where the flood waters came from). with this canopy it shielded the eath from harmful radiation from the sun (uv rays etc.). thus allowing persons to live a lot longer before the flood.

Answer 10

How did Paul Bunyan get to be tall as a tree? How did Hercules get to be so strong? How did the Vikings get to ride the Valkries to Valhalla? Simple: when you tell a story, it gets exagerated and exagerated the more times it is told. fairy tales and myths often end up like that and the bible is no exception.