LONGEVITY
499
LONGEVITY
months, of thirty days each, to the year. "Nor is there," obsfirves St. Augustine {T)e Civ. Dei, xv, 12), " any care to be giv'en unto those who think that one of our ordinary years would make ten of the years of these times, being so sliort ; and therefore, say they, 900 years of theirs are 90 of oiu-s — their 10 is our 1, and their 100 our 10. Thus think they that Adam was but 20 years old when he begat Seth, and he but 20i when he begat Enos, whom the Scriptures caU (the Sept. ver.) 205 years. For, as these men hold, the Scripture di- vided one year into ten parts, calling each part a year ; and each part had a sixfold quailrate, because in six days God made the world. Now 6 times 6 is 3G, which, midtiplied by 10, makes 360 — i. e. twelve lunar months." Abarbanel, in his Comment, on Gen. v, states that some, professing Christianity, had fallen into the same mistake, viz. that Moses meant lunar, and not so- lar years. Ecclesiastical history does not inform us of this fact, except it be to it that Lactantius refers (ii, 12) when he speaks of one Varro : " The life of man, though temporary, was yet extended to 1000 years ; of this Yar- ro is so ignorant that, though known to aU from the sacred writings, he would argue that the 1000 years of Moses were, according to the Egyptian mode of calcu- lation, only 1000 months !"
That the ancients computed time differently we learn from Pliny {Hist. Xut. vii), and also from Scaliger (Z>e Emend. Temporum, i) ; stiU this does not alter the case as above stated (see Heidegger, De Anno Pairiarcha- rum, in his Hist. Patr. Amst. 1C88, Zur. 1729).
But it is asked, if Closes meant solar years, how came it to pass that the patriarchs did not begin to beget children at an earlier period than they are reported to have done? Seth was 105 years old, on the lowest cal- culation, when he begat Enos, and Methuselah 187 when Lamech was born ! St. Augustine (i, 15) explains this ditHculty in a twofold manner by supposing, 1. Either that the age of puberty was later in proportion as the lives of the antediluvians were longer than ours, or, 2. That Closes does not record the first-born sons but as the order of the genealogy required, his object being to trace the succession from Adam, through Seth, to Abraham.
While the Jews have never questioned the longevitj^ assigned by Moses to the patriarchs, they have yet dis- puted, in man}' instances, as to whether it was common to all men who lived up to the period wlicn human life was contracted. Jlaimonides {More Nehochim, ii, 47) takes this view. With this opinion Abarbanel, on Gen. V, agrees; Nachmanides, however, rejects it, and shows that the life of the desceiulants of Cain must have been quite as long as that of the Sethites, though not noticed by Moses ; for only seven individuals of the former filled tip the space v/hich intervened between the death of Abel and the flood, whereas ten of the latter are enu- merated. We have reason, then, to conclude that lon- gevity was not confined to any peculiar tribe of the ante or post diluvian fathers, but was vouchsafed, in gen- era], to aU. Irenaeus (Adrersus Iheret. v) informs us that some supposed that the fact of its being recorded that no one of the antediluvians named attained the age of 1000 years, was the fulfilment of the declaration (Gen. iii), '• In the day thou catest thereof thou shalt surely die ;" grounding the opinion, or rather conceit, upon Psa. xc, 4, namely, that God's day is 1000 years.
As to the probable reasons why God so prolonged the life of man in the earlier ages of the world, and as to the subordinate means by which tliis might have been accomplished, Josephus says {A nt. 1. c.) : " For those an- cients were beloved of God, and lately made by God himself; and because their food was then fitter fbr the proliingation of life, they might well live so great, a number of years; and because God afforded them a lon- ger time of life on account of their virtue and the good use they made of it in astronomical and geometrical dis- coveries, which would not have afforded the time for foretelling the periods of the stars unless they had lived COO years ; for the great year is completed in that in-