Time

One of the unfortunate things about history books is that the story is most often told by those who weren’t there.  It can suffer accuracy problems as a result.  When it is told by someone who was there, it can be challenging, too, if that someone was involved or the center of that historical series of events (their image and ego are involved and sometimes the facts get shaded.)  That doesn’t leave a lot of options for accurate history telling, does it?

So that brings us to the Bible.  Fortunately, we have many (but not all) gospels and old testament books that were written by witnesses or by those central figures in the history themselves.  What do we do with the ones that weren’t written by those two categories of authors?  That’s where things get complicated.  We compare what various contemporaries say about events, and we attempt to use logic and other technical and scientific research to verify events.  Sometimes we are pretty successful at that.  Other times, not so much.

One interesting issue for me has always been some of the Old Testament writings that identify people like Methusaluh as being over 900 years old.  Now I know they were more into their veggies, and were not packing away the Big Macs and fries…but seriously, is that going to lengthen their lives by over ten-fold.  Even lacking genetic degeneration and less pollution and radiation seems unlikely to help lengthen life that much, but many knowledgeable people will make that argument.  So what are we to assume?

My own theory is that the accounts of genesis are ancient oral traditions passed down through a culture that 5,000 years ago may well have counted each month cycle as a year.  Words also change meanings over time, and year in the Hebrew language (yom) has at least a half dozen meanings (i.e. day, era, epoch, etc).…who knows what it meant 5,000 years ago?  (Which also helps me accept the fact that the earth is older than 5,000 years.)  As time went on perhaps cultural changes tied the year down to an annual cycle like we know today, but maybe the oral story traditions didn’t pick up on the change.  Is this really a critical element in Biblical reading?  Probably not.  But if it is a stumbling block for you, then perhaps this is one easy explanation.