www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Scripture and Patristic Writings Pre-flood ages, centuries?

I stumbled on a Catholic forum that was discussing the ages of the ancient figures of the Old Testament, and somebody asked if the numbers (over 900 years) for those such as Adam, Methuselah, Noah, etc. were literally true or not. There was a lot of debate, with many who believed the numbers to be figurative accusing those who believed them to be accurate of being "sola scriptura Protestants".

So, I'm wondering what the thinking and consensus is in this neck of the woods.

For what it's worth, many Jews and Rabbis today do not take the primeval history found in The book of Genesis as literal accounts in which years are recorded as we would today.

That's what I have read.

It occurred to me that my education in this regard is still mostly of my earlier non-denominational, basically evangelical variety, with a literal 7-day creation, etc. While I have since been able to understand the Genesis account in a different perspective, I believe that I always clung to the idea that the early humans actually did live this long, for whatever variety of reasons.

And it then occurred to me that I was completely unaware of any thought in this regard from an Eastern point of view, or what nuances may exist in the Roman Church.

But there seems to be little interest on this forum for it.

Glory to Jesus Christ!


I've never heard anyone say that their ages were not literal. If you want a Roman answer on this, I can ask someone I know very well informed on Roman doctrine and thought.

But I understand the frustration when there seems to be little interest in a thread you start. I feel ya. But I'll come back to you with an answer soon God willing.

Kyrie eleison,

Manuel

It depends upon how one views scripture. Did God place the words into the mind of the author who faithfully wrote, word for word, exactly what God wanted written?
This is a medieval (sp?) conception of scripture in the west that many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants borrowed over as they took that from western chrsistendom.

Or is scripture both a work of God and man which recounts the work of God's enduring love to His people expressed through the reflection of the people at that time.

there is also the consideration that history was seen in a completely different way than we see history today (as a re-counting of facts, dates, etc.) History back those days focused on recounting truth in different ways, story (myth). That is, essentially, what tradition is all about.

The problem with the story/myth angle is that you have to find a rational way to differentiate between the "myths" of Adam and Eve, and the very real physical truth of Christ's resurrection.

I don't see that as problematic.
Myth is a true story. The story of Adam and Eve is absolutely true.
But just how we understand that truth doesn't have to be wedded to the concept that history as it is known now is a set of factual occurences that can be reported as a set of actual physical occurences that happened at a specific time. History, generally, was not accounted for in that way.

What is truth in account of Adam and Eve in Genesis:
God created man and woman in His image and likeness. He gave them dominion over creation. His plan for them was to partake in the divine nature. Through free will, sin entered the world and the result was a fallen state.

Whether or not there was a literal geographical location of a Garden, whether the first man's biological existence literally came from clay from the ground, whether there were six 24-hour segments of time are not necessary to establish the truth of the propositions I listed above.

The account tells us of a real death in Genesis. It really doesn't take anything away from the fact that we see the coming of Jesus, his death and resurrection as real literal factual events.

Whether or not primeval history was accorded that way does not affect the truth of the resurrection and its relation to the account of Adam.

In the Troparion for the Feast of the Transfiguration, we sing, "You were transfigured on the mountain, O Christ God, and You showed your disciples as much of your glory as they could hold".

God reveals to man as much as man can comprehend at any given time. There is much in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible that we do not accept as literal because the state of our knowledge has advanced since those books were composed. We are not geocentric, we do not believe the heavens are a crystal bowl suspended above the earth, and many other things. We may accept that such descriptions were representative of the state of human knowledge of the natural world at that time.

With regard to the Flood, many cultures in that region, and the surrounding regions, have myths and legends about a great inundation. Most also have myths about an idyllic period that preceded this inundation.

It turns out that all of these myths may have a basis in historical fact: some 7000 years ago, what is now the Black Sea was a freshwater lake separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a land bridge where the Bosphorus is now located. The region was incredibly fertile and may have been the place where mankind first developed agriculture and domesticated cattle. The climate was mild and the living was easy.

Some 5600 years ago, the climate changed, the sea rose, and the land bridge collapse. The freshwater lake and the entire Black Sea basin were quickly flooded by a rush of salt water rising at a rate of 3-4 feet per day. All the freshwater plants and animals in the lake were killed by the influx of salt water, which also created a "dead zone" of hydrogen sulfide-rich water near the bottom, which perfectly preserved a host of stone-age villages around the former waterfront. To those who were caught up in the flood, it must have seemed like the end of the world--and that's just how they described it in their songs and stories.

The population of the basis dispersed, some moving north into what is now the Crimea and Ukraine, others east into Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and they all carried flood stories with them, which is why they are ubiquitous.

What makes the biblical account of Noah so different from that, say, in Gilgamesh, is how the ancient Hebrews interpreted the events. In most of the myths, the flood is the result of a conflict between gods, and the human hero who survives does so because of his own cleverness, or by the favor of one god over another. Only the Hebrews explained the event as caused by human wickedness; only the Hebrews claimed that mankind survived because divine intervention; only the Hebrews claimed that God's love for man was so great that He promised never to resort to such methods again.

Life for the refugees was hard, and it is reasonable that they would think back on their ancestral homeland--dimly receding in the collective memory--as paradise (a Babylonian word, by the way, for a pleasure garden). The Hebrews were unique in attributing their expulsion from that pleasure garden to human sinfulness, and to trace all the wickedness in the world to the cosmic aftershocks of that first sin. It is the insight of the authors of Genesis that reveals the divine inspiration, which means that not every last word has to be considered literally true, or every event described historically accurate. The underlying truth endures, even as our knowledge expands beyond the bounds of those who originally wrote the words.

But, as is so often the case with regard to legendary events (e.g., the Trojan War), the legend preserve the kernal of the historical reality: just as there was a Troy and a great Mycenaean culture which probably fought a long and bloody war (or series of wars) at the end of the Bronze Age, so there was, at one time, a lush and fertile land where man experienced a degree of material fulfillment he was not to know for a long time thereafter. This land--the true Eden--was in the Black Sea basin. Man was forced to leave it under cataclysmic circumstances and thereafter had to extract food by the sweat of his brow. There was a great flood, but it did not cover the whole world, only that part of the world in which lived the ancestors of the people whom God would choose to act out his plan of salvation. They interpreted their ancestral experience in accordance with insights provided by God, and in so doing, created what C.S. Lewis would call "a myth that is also true".

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Stuart,

Do you at least believe that there was a real Adam and a real Eve? I do have a lot of respect for you and I have slowly come to understand that the Catholic (and I'm assuming, but not sure, the Orthodox) Church does not take everything in Genesis as literal as most protestants do. And that it is ok to believe that the world was created in 6 days or over an undefined amount of time. Despite the archaeological finds, what you are describing sounds akin to those critical "scholars" who, as far as their works can be perceived, lack faith in the Holy Scriptures. I'm pretty sure you are not like that :-P, but this description you gave sounds like something they would say. I'm just concerned with the understanding of the flood story described here in.

Out of curiosity, though, are you not aware that there are many other cultures not near that area and all around the world that have some type of flood story?

Kyrie eleison,

Manuel

I'm torn a bit in this discussion because I want to explore the difference between East/West understandings of Genesis, but also discuss, and there is much to discuss.

I had "six literal 24-periods of creation" drilled into my brain growing up, and it took an astronomy class in college to prompt me to really question and scrutinize that. After a lot of study, reading, and contemplation, I came to understand how taking something literally in English ("evening and morning, the first day") makes no sense at all, and how looking at the original words and context makes much more sense. Today I have fun asking literal creationists "How was there a morning and an evening before there was a sun to rise and set?" That clearly is not literal, so we have to go deeper. When you look at the words used, it becomes clearer that a translation closer to the original would be something like, "an age came and went" etc. And when you look at the sequences of "creation days", they match our understanding of how the universe unfolded from the Big Bang. God "separating the light from the dark" doesn't make much sense at all, until you understand that in it's earliest moments, the universe was expanding from the Big Bang but was so dense, light could not escape it. As it spread out in the initial moments, it's gravitational pull on itself weakened, to the point where light particles (photons) could escape it's pull. And suddenly they would have burst out at the speed of light. Light separated from the dark. Etc. So, when Genesis was written, nobody is going to be talking about photons and big bangs. But it makes sense. As Stuart quotes Clive Staples, myth that is also true.

I find it harder to reconcile the ages of early Bible figures. Is there a similar context that is missing without research? Did "years" mean something different back then?

As per the flood account, it's hard to ignore all of what Stuart describes. It took many centuries before humanity recognized the Earth as a spherical chunk of rock hurtling through the cosmos, so a flood covering the [known] earth is also an adequate explanation. But then, I suppose, we'd have to wonder why two of every animal had to be stored on his ship. That's a pretty important part of the story... Yet, on the flip side of that coin, if the 6-day creation is true, there are dinosaur bones in that region, so why didn't dinosaurs go on the ark? Etc.

At what point, and on what basis, is the line drawn between "mythical truth" and "factual truth"?

On the huge original sin discussion in another thread, Adam and Eve's account is cited very frequently, with major theological ramifications depending on slight nuances. Can we then say they never actually existed, and the story never actually happened?

And of chief import... did Christ *actually* die and live again? Or is that just as explainable as Methuselah living to 950?

Yes, but not in the same way as a biblical literalist or fundamentalist Protestant. "Anatomically" modern humans emerged perhaps 100,000 years ago, but exhibited little difference from their archaic human ancestors (e.g., Homo Neanderthalis). But perhaps 50,000 years ago, all of a sudden, there was a great change in the way human beings acted, leading to what anthropologists call "behaviorally modern" humans. Among other things, these behaviorally modern humans begin to leave behind evidence of moral awareness and the capacity for worship. Alexander Schmemann wrote that the capacity for--the irresistable urge to--worship was what really distinguished man from other creatures.

I believe that there must have been, at some point, a first "behaviorally modern" man and a first "behaviorally modern" woman; these were, for all intents and purposes, Adam and Eve, the father and mother of us all.

Genetically, it appears that the Genesis story is also "essentially" true: at some point perhaps 50-60,000 years ago, some great calamity caused the entire population of homo sapiens (then located entirely in Africa) to neck down to perhaps fewer than 500 individuals; all men and women alive today are descended from just one pair of those humans.

.

As I was not born a Christian, and was not a practicing Jew, "faith in scripture" was not something inculcated in me, and just reading the Bible did not result in some divine smack upside the head that made me a believer. Rather, from my training as an historian, I came to realize that the historical books of the Bible are quite authentic history--as good or better than anything produced by the pagan historians. And, because an historian has to be able to deal with pre-history, it also struck me that the "mythic" books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Samuel, Judges--were also true.

The historical truth of the Bible (evidence for which increases every day) is what inclined me to faith. Knowing that the events described therein did happen (perhaps not in precisely the way they really did, but, hey, I write history and am honest about what I do) opened me to accept that this was precisely what it claimed to be--the story of the relationship of God with his chosen people. The more I study it, the more I am inclined to believe it and thus to place my faith and trust in God.


There are, but they are different in many respects from those found in the lands around the Black Sea basin. Lots of places have floods. I'm sure that if we lived in pre-literate times, some bard would have made up an epic poem about Hurricane Katrina which, after a few dozen generations, would have taken on mythic proportions (actually, since most of what people know about Katrina came from watching TV news, the event has already taken on mythic proportions in just five years or so). But there is no evidence that the entire face of the earth was covered with water at any time after it was inhabited by man (indeed, probably never).

Two only of every unclean animal, and six of every clean one--Noah's gotta eat, don'tcha know. There must have been many fewer types of animal back then, though, because we're pretty thorough taxonomically these days, know how many different types there are, and how much space they and their fodder would need for a forty day voyage.

To paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws: "Noah, you gotta get a bigger boat!"

I’m not sure there is a neat demarcation. I asked this same question when I took my course in Hebrew Scriptures, but there is really no definitive answer.
It’s not like the scriptures were written from page one onward, so the chronology presented is rather loose if one is going to look for such a break from mythic truth to factual truth.

I’m not really sure we have that kind of wiggle room. It seems that polygenism has been rejected by the Church, and as Humani Generis states, it is not readily explainable to reconcile “some” of the ideas of evolution with the idea that the entire human race descended from one pair.
There is still a tension here, that has not yet been worked out. But I don’t think that should really cause angst for anyone.
That humanity descended from a single human pair is still the belief of the Church.

Some liberal Roman Catholic theologians have begun recently (in the 20th century) to contemplate and reflect on whether or not the resurrection event needs to be seen as a factual literal event. I don’t see how anyone can conclude anything other than the fact that it WAS an actual event.
Sin is a fact. Christ’s resurrection was a fact. That’s what I believe. Whether or not Adam was factually literally in existence is secondary to the question of sin and Christ as redeemer of all.

Male and female:

RSV Genesis 6:19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

Actually, seven:

RSV Genesis 7:2 Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate;

But (in the Ark) he did not eat the animals; other provisions were specified by God:

RSV Genesis 6:21 Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them."

The clean animals were for sacrifice:

RSV Genesis 8:20  Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

Also, it is implicit in Genesis that Man/Noah was a vegetarian before the Flood. With the Flood, however, God concedes the final alienation in His creation resulting from the Fall, and indicates the final estrangement:

RSV Genesis 9:2 The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 9:3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

So, if the flood was localized and not global, why two of every living thing of all flesh, male and female, into the ark?

And going back to the original topic, is there a difference between how East and West view the notion of humans living close to a thousand years in Genesis?

Especially when we broach Adam and Eve. Both of their accounts are scrutinized heavily in terms of our understanding of original sin. If their story is not literally true, how can we place so much emphasis on the events as described in forming our theology?