Was Adam a Slave?

[timtofly]

Please provide reference the bolded. Moses claimed to be sent by God for a specific purpose. I do not know of anyplace he claimed special knowledge of the origins.



That would include about 500 years after the deluge. Abram would be 300-350 years after. Shem would have outlived Abraham.

J

Exodus 24. The whole chapter deals with the subject, but verse 12 says that God wrote the Torah and the Law on tablets for Moses to give to the children of Israel.

Noah was around when Abraham was a boy. Shem died around the time Esau and Jacob were born.

What in the Bible allowed these people to live so long, did God give them extra powers after the flood so that they could best spread his message or whatever?

And when did this stop and why?

I don't remember learning about people living to be 900 years old in Sunday school, and I had a heavy religious upbringing (from society, not my parents)

A timeline

There are several places in the Bible that God gives a life span: Genesis 6:3 gives 120 years. Psalm 90:10 gives 70 years. In Isaiah 65:20 says that in the future a person who dies less than 100 will be considered a child.

It is part of the thought process that when God cursed the earth because of Adam, that time came into an important place in the makeup of human existence. Living in a less than perfect environment for eternity would not work. One of the reasons we can not reconcile that God would allow such a thing to happen in the first place. Perhaps one reason we accept humans just made up stories instead of God telling Moses what actually happened.

Since Adam the earth has gone through some cataclysmic processes that have shortened and even caused humans to age differently. The biggest thing was the Flood of Noah. Modern man, even YEC'ers reject that there was a water canopy on the grounds that it would have heated up the surface of the earth too much. Yet the Bible says there was something and perhaps whatever it entailed, it allowed humans to live hundreds of years. We no longer have that protection. Genesis 6 just says that God decided not to put up with humans and only let them live 120 years. By the time of the Kingdom periods that had been shortened down even further to only 70 years. Even today we have the technology to save life, and even expand it, yet the current biological makeup does not hold together long enough, and even if we keep replacing the different parts, eventually the essence of the person has changed or no longer has a will to go on. I am sure there are some here who would like to argue that point though.

 

[El_Machinae]

Genesis 6:3 is a foretelling of when the flood would occur, it's not a statement regarding lifespans.

edit: according to my reading, I mean. I like that Isaiah 65:20, though!

 

[timtofly]

Noah was 500 years old in the last verse of chapter 5. It only took 100 years to build the ark. Moses was the model human who lived 120 years and had no sign of aging. Moses lived in a period that was around 1000 years after the flood.

The Flood would occur in 100 years give or take, but more importantly humans would be considered mature at 120. There would be no guarantee of life after that. Depending on what chemicals humans take into their system, they tend to start looking and even feeling old at a certain age. Most humans even today may live past 70, but age starts to take a toll after that point. For some it is sooner, because of modern day chemicals we allow into our bodies.

 

[El_Machinae]

That's one reading, but I don't think it resonates. A ridiculous number of later characters live longer than 120 years. And, notice that the Flood occurs "100 years later, give or take", so the '120' part of that verse really fits in with the rest of the chronology. There's no way people had 120 year lifespans when Genesis was compiled, and that '120' would have stuck out as being wildly untrue to any Rabbis - unless it was seen as a foretelling of the Flood. The exceptional lifespans they compiled about would all have been in "the far past" from their perspective, and thus believable.

If you re-look at the timelines, you'll see that the 120 fits very nicely into the story of the Flood and thus "is the end of the time of Man"

 

[timtofly]

That's one reading, but I don't think it resonates. A ridiculous number of later characters live longer than 120 years. And, notice that the Flood occurs "100 years later, give or take", so the '120' part of that verse really fits in with the rest of the chronology. There's no way people had 120 year lifespans when Genesis was compiled, and that '120' would have stuck out as being wildly untrue to any Rabbis - unless it was seen as a foretelling of the Flood. The exceptional lifespans they compiled about would all have been in "the far past" from their perspective, and thus believable.

If you re-look at the timelines, you'll see that the 120 fits very nicely into the story of the Flood and thus "is the end of the time of Man"

The humans before the Flood were considered gods, because very few of them died from the natural aging process. For all we know perhaps only a dozen of them even died of "old age". Why would it not resonate, that God in mercy shorten the human life span to 120? Now if one holds that species evolve into the capability of longevity, as opposed to the view that decay happens faster after the flood, it may make sense. Most modern men view the past as never having humans living long life spans, yet we see that even the non-biblical records give humans long life spans and even immortality like a mundane existence. We just tend to chalk it up as run away human imagination.

 

[El_Machinae]

It just doesn't flow, like I said, later Biblical characters (pre-Israeli history, though) go on to live well past 120 years. Everyone would have noticed the discrepancy if your interpretation was the mainstream one.

 

[classical_hero]

So there were 5 people who lived to be 900 years old each. They interbred and had children, and those children interbred, and then uncles interbred with sisters and brothers with aunts and mothers and even cousins with grandmothers, and whatever else, and 5,000 years later or so people only live to be say 80 years old because of all of that initial interbreeding.

That is a pretty epic story. Why didn't they teach this to me when I was learning about the creation of the world and how things came to be? I mean, they didn't even have to get into the sexual aspect of it. They could have said it was God's plan for humanity that's too complicated for children to understand. I would have bought that. I would have been amazed at how everything came to be and how people used to live to be A THOUSAND YEARS OLD.

I guess maybe they didn't want to confuse us. Somebody's brother became his father? And a grandmother that can turn into a sister? That just confuses children about the type of family the church wants us to live in, I guess. I can totally now see everyone at the meeting agreeing to not teach the part about interbreeding. But the part about people getting to live to be hundreds of years old? If you want to keep kids interested in church, tell them that part. and more stuff like that. Aren't there giants in the Bible? And dragon-like beasts or something? I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure there's giants.. and maybe angels? Focus on that stuff and you will get kids hooked.

It's called a genetic bottle neck. After the flood we go from millions to just 8 people and as a result of that you lose a lot of genetic information and as such we lost the ability for the genome to repair itself like it could when it had more information in it to make life longer. Every time we have observed a genetic bottleneck in animals it has always resulted in a less fit animal and thus short lifespans and in some animals that have been isolated, some diseases are widespread amongst them, such as a face cancer that affects the Tasmanian Tiger.

Another problem to consider is the change in environment that occurred after the flood and thus it meant conditions were much harsher than they were pre-flood. Which meant that surviving cost a lot more energy than they previously needed thus wearing out the body much sooner and making for shorter lifespans.

So as a result of the many mutations that have occurred it means that the possibility of dangerous mutation being passed on increases with each generation and the closer you are to the person the more likely to both have the same mutation and pass it on to the next generation. But this is a problem not matter what your views of our beginnings are, since both start out with a single pair, but it is a great problem for Evolution since the supposed time we have been here means we should have died out 100 times over. Contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations: why have we not died 100 times over?

Genesis 6:3 is a foretelling of when the flood would occur, it's not a statement regarding lifespans.

edit: according to my reading, I mean. I like that Isaiah 65:20, though!

Yeah that is what it means, not what will be our lifespan. It is the time Noah had until the flood and time for him to preach. We find that Noah was 600 when the flood came he was 480 when he got the instruction a full 20 years before his first son.

 

[JollyRoger]

Genetic bottlenecks? Doesn't sound like intelligent design.

 

[onejayhawk]

Exodus 24. The whole chapter deals with the subject, but verse 12 says that God wrote the Torah and the Law on tablets for Moses to give to the children of Israel.

Noah was around when Abraham was a boy. Shem died around the time Esau and Jacob were born.

That is not specific about the creation. Of course, given more than a month to talk, it may have come up.

Genetic bottlenecks? Doesn't sound like intelligent design.

I heard an analogy on high energy physics.

When a particle collider is constructed, it takes years of digging, moving thousands of tons of dirt and substrate. Then the construction involves hundreds of people thousands of miles of wire and millions of components. The finished product has massive banks of capacitors, a dedicated power plant, dozens of techs and scientists, the best computational power we are able to apply. All of this for an experiment that lasts a fraction of a second and occupies a volume measured in centimeters, with results that last femtoseconds on a subatomic scale.

It gives you a way to make some sense of the scale of things.

J

 

[Hygro]

It's called a genetic bottle neck. After the flood we go from millions to just 8 people and as a result of that you lose a lot of genetic information and as such we lost the ability for the genome to repair itself like it could when it had more information in it to make life longer.

Wow, this is great!

Let's worship that God. "Naw I'm not really feeling 'em, let's make them inbred and die at 50. Trolololo"