[Ruudjah]

Genesis 6:3

3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

AFAIK, all people in recent history (<3000 years) claiming to be aged over 120 years are either questionable or not verified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment If this is true, [i]Men[/i] still did not exceed 120 years by 128,99 days. Interpreting the bible is hard, determining as literal and figure of speech is the hard part.

[jacques_chester]

In any book composed of random fantasy elements, written by hundreds of authors, it is pretty much inevitable that some bits will, merely by chance, be correct.

Genesis is the same book that puzzlingly fails to mention the big bang, for example.

[glimcat]

In the beginning, there was light.

On second thought, do we have to count "the beginning" as the moment of the singularity or as the time when the universe became transparent to photons? Gonna end up with a holy war over that one.

Wait, it's all good. You start out with a dark and formless void, then you get your "fiat lux" afterwards. The Bible was right again!

[jacques_chester]

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Oops, there's water before there's light. Better retcon that sucker.

[michaeldhopkins]

The waters are figurative; they basically represent chaotic universal essence which God separates and shapes. If Plato wrote Genesis he would have said aether. We would probably refer to a singularity or strings or something else we think everything is made of.

[jacques_chester]

Or the waters are literal; and it represents that the Bible was written by a pre-modern people with nothing more than their imagination to guide them. I think Plato would have been embarrassed to be caught anywhere near Genesis.

[michaeldhopkins]

I assume you are saying that we should just believe whatever we like about old documents. I don't think that is a good idea. It's better to determine what the writers meant by conducting a careful linguistic study based on other texts, archeology and historical accounts written by people who seem to have had access to evidence that is now lost.

"Plato meets Moses" speculation is just fun, though. Since Plato was a monotheist I think he would have found enough common ground to debate with Moses. I expect the two would have disagreed on whether the forms were in God or residing elsewhere. The creation account in Genesis and in Timaeus are both geocentric accounts of an initially perfect creation, etc. They also would have agreed that the homogenous mixture of the elements was the same as the homogenous "formless and void," "surface of the waters" etc., but they definitely would have disagreed about the demiurge vs God/Satan, and also disagreed about quite a lot of what happened after creation. That's my speculation, anyway.

[Apocryphon]

Apropos of nothing, here's water where there isn't light!

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2085298,00.ht...

[lelele]

> 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Big Bang.

[jacques_chester]

Evidence suggests that energy preceded matter -- ie that light preceded earth, heaven and water.

Look, the Bible is an anthology of twisted fairytales that's been an absolute bonanza of story fuel for the western tradition. But it's not exactly replete with reliable scientific information.

[glimcat]

I'm actually rather fond of certain portions of Leviticus which describe diagnostic rituals.

[glimcat]

The Universe is about 13.75 Gyrs old while Earth is about 4.54 Gyrs old.

[stan_rogers]

Well (he said somewhat flippantly), in a manner of speaking it does, if one can consider the condensation first of energy (fiat lux) then matter (the separation of the waters) out of chaos to be a pretty decent neolithic understanding of the process. (Not a believer in any sense -- I've actually used this point against 6-day creationists, realising that I was wielding a sort of double-edged sword.)

[shawndumas]

Not that it matters but... If you take it in context the 120 years are referring to when the flood was scheduled to occur, not the upper bounds on human life. (See Calvin)

[chc]

Jeanne Calment, mentioned in the OP, lived to be 122. But yes, I think most people in the field agree that 120 is roughly our shelf life.

[ern]

Could there be some deeply ingrained idea, possibly derived from Genesis, that leads to dimished care for people as they approach 120, and hence increases mortality? I doubt it, but I wonder if this possibility has been explored.

[chc]

It seems quite unlikely to me. Without any affirmative evidence, I would assume not. It certainly wouldn't come from Genesis, as that book not particularly relevant to the vast majority of the world's population. (Even among Christians, few have the kind of familiarity needed to even know about that passage, and most people don't actually know that 120 is the age that both Genesis and modern medicine agree on.)

[JohnLBevan]

Fundamentalists working in care homes perhaps? Jeanne was spared for 2 years due to factions forming over whether Man referred to species or gender.

[zavulon]

Don't understand why you're getting downvoted.. if this was Reddit, then yeah, but I expected more from HN crowd.

I was about to post the same thing - this is no surprise to us Jews. As the saying goes - may you live to 120 years!

[ciupicri]

Speaking of the Bible, Adam lived 930 years ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam ) and if I remember correctly Eve also lived nine hundred years.

[demallien]

Pfft. Martin Silenus does better than that in Hyperion. Of course, the age of fictional characters doesn't really have much impact on the debate about the maximum possible age of a human being, does it now...

[mdonahoe]

If more characters lived extended lifespans, perhaps the general public would be more accepting of the pursuit of immortality

[jaredmck]

Now translate this directly from the original source.