Do you agree with our religion teacher?

Question

So it says in the Bible for example that Adam lived 866 years (approximately) And he said that it means like 86 and 600 means 60 so on. What do you think?

Answer 1

I think he's trying to rationalize the big numbers in the bible so that he can take it literally.

Don't believe him.

Answer 2

Well It really means 866 because back in the days of the bible they didn't measure time the same way that we do today. So if it says adam lived 866 years he probably only live to be like 80-100 not literally 866 years.

Answer 3

he may be saying that the original sources on which the Bible stories were based could have been mistrnslated millenia ago, especially when the average person back then probably couldn't even count to a thousand anyway.

I think it might be equivalent to our saying, "I ate like 500 M & M's at the movie theater!" We get the point, you ate a lot of M & M'S. No one is going to go back and challenge you to prove there were really 500 of them in the bag. We just get your point that you ate a whole bunch.

Anyone who thinks the Bible could be literally true is grasping at straws. It is a book of faith, not fact.

IMHO Adam and Eve in the garden is a great story which has to do with the beginning of agriculture rreplacing foraging as the basis for the food supply. Think about the need for a story that explains to everyone (for instance in the middle of a huge drought or crop failure, which is typically when they would be questioning their faith, not when everything is going great!): How did we get into this predicament in the first place?? Especially if there are other tribes that are surviving the bad times while foraging. So the priests say, "Hey we are the chosen ones but we got kicked out of the Garden and now we live by the sweat of our labors. We can't go back because God kicked us out & I can tell you exactly why he did it and what happened next."

To my mind you had better have a pretty exact and believable account of everything that happened and how you got where you are and why it's not the priests' fault that they couldn't predict the rainfalls and the weather any better or see the disaster coming.

Please don't think that I am saying the priests wer lying or making things up. They probably had the story crafted as well as they could based on the true facts: the women wanted to eat the fruit of the trees that they grew instead of trusting the Almighty to provide foraged food. Eventually everyone settled into communities based on fields of crops and orchards of trees, and herding of livestock and no one knew anymore how to find wild foods to subsist on.

Answer 4

then where did the tribe come from that Cain was banished to? When someone asks this question the answer is "well Adam lived 866 years many generations were born by that time"
If you throw out the 866 number, there goes one ridiculous story from the bible, but then it leaves too much else unexplained. The best thing to do is not to try to make sense of it at all

Answer 5

Lives were a lot longer then. The Bible says what they did during some of the times. As man sinned more and more, lives shortened.
Back 500 years ago the ave. person was lucky to live to 30. Most were married by the time they were 12, to give the children to be born a chance to live with parents. Lives were very dirty then. Even in castles, straw was over all the floors and people just went to the bathroom where they were. To many illness were made. Read your history books too.
History is Fact. Not something to distort.

Answer 6

People are always trying to figure out God and put him on a human plane.The environment was perfect,the earth was surrounded by a thick water canopy so sunlight didn't play an aging part.After Adam sinned and now faced death,his ancestors lived fewer and fewer years as you can see in Genesis 5.By the time of Noah the age went from 900 years to 600.After the flood,now we have direct sunlight (helps atrophy) and a larger ,dumber population.More pollution,lots of sin,so God says now man's years will be approximately 120 years. By the time of King David,he laments men live 70 years ,if they are lucky a little longer.
So you see everything God has had written makes perfect sense and we don't need to make up silly scenarios.

Answer 7

If the bible states that Adam lived 866 years, then that is how long Adam lived. The bible is the truth as it was written through men chosen by God.

Answer 8

866 means 866. People did live for a longer time.....but the sin of Adam & Eve took care of that!

Answer 9

The ages of the patriarchs in genesis in the bible when added and compared to the babylonian cosmology it coincides with the wobble of the earth through the fazes of the zodiac.
It sounds nuts but look up the number and the research for yourself here is the first site there are more. I think you will find it interesting.
432 or 432,000 It is a number that coincides with the earths position an societys that depended on agriculture study the stars from stone henge to the mayans to the babylonians to the preists who at the time of writing Genesis were in exhile in babylon.
Knowledge is very valuable and it was encoded in the bible.

Answer 10

When Genesis says "When Mahalalel was 65 he begat Jared" (and lived 830 more years) or "When Enoch had lived 65 years he begat Methuseleh" (and lived hundreds of more years), then by your religion teacher's logic that means they became fathers when they were six years old. I think your teacher means well, but he's wrong.

I don't believe in the literal truth of Genesis or that people used to live for centuries, but the ancients did know the difference in 800 and 80. It was very common to give incredible lifespans to people in ancient mythologies; one Sumerian king is said to have ruled for 20,000 years, for example.
The best theory among OT scholars (and one that's at least 2000 years old) is that by attributing these lifespans they were able to make it possible to claim Abraham heard the stories of the flood from his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc.)grandfather Shem (who was still alive when Abraham was born using the Bible's numbers) and that because Seth (the son of Adam and Eve) was alive when Noah was born, Noah heard the stories of creation from him, and thus these accounts were firsthand rather than (as they almost certainly were) a sand of truth in a beach of legends and myths.
It's also known that even by the time of Jesus, well educated Jews didn't take these numbers and ages too seriously. Fundamentalism didn't come along until many centuries later.

Answer 11

I agree with blackmule's answer about it being what ever it says it is, the whole bible is true, it is God's living Word, however Adam lived to be 930, not 866. †