Adam and Eve and those 900 Years

Just to make sure that everyone reading this starts at the same point, Adam and Eve were supposed to have been about 900 years old when they died. During a quiet time this got me thinking – how can humans, even the humans that were meant to have walked this Earth first possibly live to 900 years old?

It’s said that the human being is meant to live about 70 years. Sure you get some living longer, especially in this day and age but so far to live over 100 years old is the exception and not the norm. A human that’s over 100 years old is normally pretty frail as well so getting to 900 seems a bit of a stretch.

But I think I have a possible explanation, at least in my mind anyway.

Imagine you’re the first humans on Earth. You’re supposedly living in the fertile crescent and it’s a fairly temperate place to live. How much difference is there between winter and summer? There are no watches and Gregory hasn’t yet invented his calendar. The other issue is that the Chinese and their astronomers haven’t been invented yet either. There will be only two indications of time that you will be aware of – the first is obviously day and night and the only other that I can think of is the moon.

Every 28 days this shining disc in the sky waxes and wanes and every 28 days there will be a full moon where for a few nights the scary darkness is illuminated and isn’t quite so scary. That moon thing sure would be important and you would get used to knowing when it comes out and how long it would be until it comes again. I’m sure the time it took between full moon’s had a special name, something like a cycle or something.

However at this point there probably isn’t any way for you to tell that the huge rock you’re on is circling the bright warm thing every 300 and something odd days. But that cool Moon thing – yeah! You’ll know all about that! So if we wanted to work out what was meant between a lunar cycle and a year, it could be pretty confusing.

 

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So I did a little bit of thinking to see how this held up. Working out how many times the moon would have orbited the Earth i that time, which is once every 28 days, so thirteen times a year. Assuming Adam and Eve lived to 70 – guess what? They would have seen a full moon 910 times.

Now I don’t want to be hung drawn and quartered for heresy or anything, I’m not saying this is how it was – but it’s a bit of a coincidence. So often we’re told thing that we take as fact. I’m not trying to prove or disprove God, this is merely an exercise in thinking outside of what we’re told and putting myself in their shoes.

Time in many senses is not easily perceivable. Without watches and the gadgets we have today time could only be measure in the crudest of ways and this is what we would all face without it. Day and night would be the smallest measure we could know about working out a year without a calendar and a lot of spare time (which you don’t have when you’re trying to survive) would be pretty damn hard. Counting 900 of them might have got a little boring too!

Simon 🙂