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"years" and years The age of the most biblical characters seems ridiculous - several hundred years. So, an obvious thought, we wrongly assumed that the time unit mentioned in the scriptures is a year, it is something shorter. There were attempts to assign a month to the unit but that would mean some of those characters fathered children in their childhood. Besides, that was my thought many years ago, moon phases didn’t mean much in the early agricultural societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is Sun, the major holiness in so many religions, to whom a farmer owns so much. And we know that equinox, vernal and autumnal, and solstice, summer and winter, were among the first human astronomical knowledge. If we assume the time unit mentioned in the scriptures to be a season, that is one quarter of a year, than biblical ages of a hundred to two hundred years are acceptable. Even today an age of hundred years is not rare; in the biblical times environment was healthier, man was more dependent on nature than on his own culture, and the accumulation of genetic errors in Homo Sapiens was lower. I did mention my hypothesis to some of my friends with no much approval. Recently, while reading on the subject of agriculture origins, I’ve ran into the same dilemma. Historians place the beginning of agriculture in Mesopotamia roughly ten thousand years ago, which coincides with the end of last glacial period, 12,500 years ago. Of course, this is the beginning of agriculture as main food source - farming as supple- mental food source dates probably thousands years earlier. But in my high school textbook, in early nineteen-fifties, I remember, I was astonished reading that Egyptian ruling dynasties could be traced, by their stone inscriptions, 36 thousand years ago. Here we go again: taking those "years" as seasons, nine thousand years fit nicely into the picture because large scale agriculture was the very base of city and state as social institutions. |
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