>>8681142

I believe they were two different Enochs. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense. But we're talking about the Bible, where people live up to +900 goddam years. Speaking of which, I don't understand why Abraham and his wife Sarah lived so little in comparison (175 and 127 years respectively)

It seemed to me that the ages of which characters died goes down as Genesis progresses, until it reaches somewhere around what is considered normal.

Actual Jew here to answer your questions
People back then counted years differently than now. 900+ years could easily mean 75 by today's standards
Incest was pretty common back then, that's why latter in Leviticus there's around a page of describing who you can and can't fuck.
A few chapters later Noah gets gets super drunk and like most of us after one or two drinks starts rolling round the tent with no pants on. Anyway Noah 's son Ham happens to walk in and see him in his full glory (and according to some interpretations rape him?) So after Noah decides to sober up he decides to appropriately punish him by cursing Ham's children. Which is the bible's reasoning why the people of Canaan where slaves to jews later on.

There'd been a downward trajectory in life expectancy from the get-go. But it really started becoming a thing after the big flood with Noah. Shem's (Shem being Noah's descendants all had short lives:

* Shem: 600 years old at death
* Arpachshad: 438 years old
* Shelah: 433 years old
* Eber: 464 years old
* Peleg: 239 years old
* Reu: 239 years old
* Serug: 230 years old
* Nahor: 148 years old
* Terah: 205 years old
* Abram (later, Abraham): 175 years old

(source: Gen 11:10-27 and Gen 25:7; each one listed is the first son of the person above them)

The sudden, big, and irreversible drop between Eber and Peleg is quite interesting. Eber was alive when Peleg died (Eber was 34 when Peleg was born; so Eber would've been 273 at Peleg's death). Same for Serug and Nahor.

If people counted years differently back then, and years were actually months (being 900 months the equivalent of 75 years) that would make goddamn sense. In fact, that's what I've been told in catachesis, and wanted to believe. But there are instances in the Bible in which they mention at what age people had their offspring. (Gen 11:14 "When Shelah had lived 30 years, he became the father of Eber")

That means that they do actually counted years as we do now, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to believe that he was two and a half years when Shelah had his first son.

I don't find it strange if they lived up to 900 years, by the way. I mean, c'mon, it's the Bible. I'm curious to know what could have had happened with life expentancy and why it significantly dropped to 120 years

Genesis is a composition of two parallel accounts. OT scholars call these two sources J and E, after the respective names they use for God, Yaweh (spelt with a J in German, the language of some of the greatest OT scholarship) and Elohim. It's why there are two accounts of the Creation story, two accounts of Noah, two accounts of Jacob.

> and according to some interpretations rape him?

This is based on such stupid logic:

According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, a judgment that he based on analogy with another biblical incident in which the phrase "and he saw" is used: With regard to Ham and Noah, Genesis 9 reads, "[22] And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. [23] And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness."[7] In Genesis 34:2 it reads, "And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her (Dinah), he took her and lay with her and defiled her." According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, "both indignities were perpetrated."

This theory was popular for a long time, but has been mostly abandoned in the last decade, at least among academics.

You mean abandoned by some academics?
The Jerusalem Bible still supports it for example. Or partially at least,

Then why wouldn't all of humanity look like the Hapsburgs, or a trailer park in Kentucky?

Numbers are always getting mixed up in historical sources, but since it's a religious text there would be less emendation.

Maybe we do look retarded compared to Adam

The way I was taught it, the idea is simply that as man becomes further removed from God, his life span becomes more ordinary.
Adam and Eve would’ve been living forever had they not been cast out of Eden.

underrated post

I think it's actually some twisted Jewish word play with numbers whose meaning got lost. Look up gematria.

Interesting. Thank you

>this thread

epic secular textual interpretation bro, im sure it checks out on wikipedia