How Long People Lived in the Bible / Where Did Cain Find His Wife?

[andersent]

One other question, but I'll start a new thread on this.  As a fundamentalist I was always taught that when the bible says that people prior to the flood lived 900 years or 700 or whatever that this must be taken literally.  What is the Catholic position on this?  Do we think that this is just a hebrew way of saying that mankind became gradually more and more corrupt and that it moved away from Eden and the original purity of Adam and Eve more and more as time went on? Or are we to believe that people really lived that long back then?  Wouldn't there be evidence of this long life span from other cultures writings or from scientific evidence?? If they did not live this long then what of the attempt of genesis to write about the history of people--he lived so many years and had so many sons, etc....

[andersent]

I see this sort of thing going on a lot in early Genesis--trying to "out do" the competing ideas of who God is and why events (i.e. flood) may have occurred.  It's sort of a beginning of the contemplation of the true God in ancient culture--this makes sense to me, and is helpful to modern scientific minds.  One thought though...and this is more of an academic question than scriptural i suppose.. How is it that all of these surrounding peoples around the Hebrews had basically no knowledge of the true God?  Do we think this was once had and was lost over time due to sin/idolatry, etc, or do we think that God just never really revealed Himself to them and only to the Hebrews?  In other words, I'm contemplating whether all of these competing ideas of religion back then was a falling away from the knowledge once had by these other nations or whether it was a knowledge that was just never revealed to them in the first place...I realize this is speculative and there is no clear answer from scripture (that I am aware of).

[David W. Emery]

I thought the following viewpoint on Genesis 5:5 from the older Haydock Commentary would be of interest:

God prolonged the lives of the patriarchs to a more advanced age, that the world might be sooner filled. Their constitution was then more excellent, the fruits of the earth more nourishing, &c. But the sole satisfactory reason for their living almost a thousand years, while we can hardly arrive at 70, is, because so it pleased God, in whose hands are all our lots. There is a great difference in the number of years assigned by the Hebrew and Vulgate, from that which the Samaritan copy mentions; and the Septuagint differs from both. Whether the difference be real, or only apparent, we shall not pretend to determine. The Church has not decided which system of chronology is the most accurate.

Note that this opinion was current among Catholics of the 18th century. It assumes that the ages listed in the ancient texts are historically accurate. I am of the opinion that one ought always to assume the accuracy of the bible as received unless there is a grave reason to believe that it has become corrupt. In the case of the advanced ages listed for the pre-patriarchs, the evidence is universal, even if not in perfect agreement from all sources. The question then becomes whether this was a literary device (for which we would have to supply a reason) or historical fact. There being no hard evidence either way, we must leave the question open.

David

[DWB]

This discussion thread brings to mind the old question that kids often ask:  Where did Cain get his wife?  The established fundamentalist/evangelical answer is that these other people were also children of Adam.  But I always thought it strange that the Bible did not specifically mention these others being born to Adam as it does for Cain, Abel and Seth.

I also vote for taking the Bible literally on the patriarchs' longevity.  Although I am not a young-earth creationist, I think it important to take the Scriptures at what they say as much as possible.

take care,
Dan

[Juanita]

This discussion thread brings to mind the old question that kids often ask: Where did Cain get his wife? The established fundamentalist/evangelical answer is that these other people were also children of Adam. But I always thought it strange that the Bible did not specifically mention these others being born to Adam as it does for Cain, Abel and Seth.

I also vote for taking the Bible literally on the patriarchs' longevity. Although I am not a young-earth creationist, I think it important to take the Scriptures at what they say as much as possible.

take care,
Dan

Although the Bible doesn't give the names of their other children, it does say that others were born to Adam and Eve:

Genesis 5:4 The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters.

Regarding the ages of the descendents of Adam (through Seth), if you plot out their life spans on a time line, a couple of interesting things show up: 
1)  All of the listed descendents except Noah could have talked to Adam. 
2)  All except Noah and Methuselah had died before the year of the flood.  Methuselah died the year the flood began. 

Nita

[Dave Armstrong]

Catholic Answers ("Quick Questions") gave this explanation of Cain's wife:

* * * * *

Adam and Eve had both sons and daughters (Gen. 5:4). Because there were no human beings except those born of Adam and Eve, sibling marriages were a necessity. St. Augustine says,

As, therefore, the human race, subsequently to the first marriage of the man who was made of dust, and his wife who was made out of his side, required the union of males and females in order that it might multiply, and as there were no human beings except those who had been born of these two, men took their sisters for wives,—an act which was as certainly dictated by necessity in these ancient days as afterwards it was condemned by the prohibitions of religion . . . and though it was quite allowable in the earliest ages of the human race to marry one’s sister, it is now abhorred as a thing which no circumstances could justify.

(The City of God, XV.16)

[Steven Barrett]

It's "threads" like this about Cain and Mrs. Cain (boy, they  must've had some helluva streak of hellacious arguments) that remind me of the old play, "Inherit the Wind" and why I'm thankful to be back on the Catholic side of the tracks. Of course time was kept differently back when a man didn't have to buy his suits in a haberdashery: He simply went out and got them like future wolves working between the bears n' bulls on Wall St. He literally ripped 'em off his victims' backs. And this was before Calvinism and the Protestant Work Ethic, not to mention one's fear of not taking every historical mention in Scripture as equally factual as God's lesso ns when it came to the real imporant things in life: faith and morals. The real number of real years these people lived  matters less than what we take from the lessons their life's examples are meant to impart. I have a more updated Bible question: How is it the that the same kinds of folks who sneer at our Catholic forebearers for "chaining the Bible" to the church pillars haven't gotten around to unchaining their members from an insistence on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING IN THE BIBLE TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY. Jesus said he wasn't going to change anything because he bigger things to  take care of. It's the latter half of sentences like the one immediately before this that seldom ever met the eyes of an overly rigid and zealous Christian hell bent on stressing his points for Biblical literalism in the worst ways imaginable. Quite often they succeed; literally so.