Look at the commentators on the Noah portion, in chapter 8 after the Flood. Malbim and others…

Here you’ll find some interesting answers on the subject.

As for the question itself, there are several medieval authorities who suggest that these ages are not those of individual people but of dynasties or tribes that existed for hundreds of years before the Flood. I’ll add a little-known idea, briefly: Methuselah’s years had to be 969 because afterward came the Flood. Meaning, he died in the Flood. Rabbi Judah the Pious, in his commentary Rokeach on the Torah, adds that even the fathers of the world did not live even one day of the Holy One, blessed be He, and did not reach one thousand years (“For a thousand years in Your eyes are but as yesterday…”); not even in lunar years. He therefore writes that Methuselah lived 969 years and no more, because when converted to lunar years it comes out to exactly 999 years. (A solar year has 365 days, and a lunar year has 354 days, as is well known.) Solar years and lunar years play a starring role in the days of the Flood (the Flood began on 17/2 and ended on 27/2, in order to encompass a full solar year of 365 days, which exceeds the lunar year by 11 days, but all the intermediate dates in the Flood are dated by lunar months, and I can’t go into it all here). The number 365 itself is hinted at twice: in the years of Enoch (the father of that same Methuselah, who is dated specifically in lunar years — note the father with the shortest lifespan opposite the father with the longest lifespan), who died at age 365. And also in the number of years that passed from the birth of the new dynasty: Shem begot two years after the Flood, and if you count from that mysterious date until the revelation to Abraham when he was 75, you find that exactly 365 years passed. Indeed: “Who has stirred up one from the east, whom righteousness meets at every step?” The sunrise of Abraham took place after a number of years equal to the solar year from the birth of the new dynasty after the Flood. (Another point is that if you count from the new dynasty not until the revelation to Abraham but until his birth, 75 years earlier, the number is 290 years — what does that express? — and that is exactly the total number of years that will pass from the time of Abraham’s birth until Jacob’s descent into exile in Egypt: 100 + 60 + 130. However, if we count again from the revelation to Abraham / his entry into Canaan until Jacob’s descent to Egypt, 215 years pass (290-75), which is exactly half of the years of the Egyptian bondage: 430 years — which according to the Sages is counted as doubled years, meaning in practice 210 years, or perhaps 215 years; see the Da’at Mikra commentary at the conclusion of the Exodus section.) Bible scholars have noted that the Babylonians knew the orbital periods of the five visible planets, and when one checks the ages of the antediluvian fathers, they come out exactly according to combinations of such planets. The astronomer Ariel Cohen showed in several of his articles that both the date of the Flood in 1656 and the ages of the antediluvian fathers overlap with various astronomical phenomena connected to the Hebrew calendar, but his calculations are complex and understandable only to those initiated into such matters. (By the way, the number of days in 1656 years is identical to the number of seconds in the seven days of Creation, 84,600, but it’s a bit too long to explain here. The idea is that a new creation begins, indeed, only after the Flood.) Clearly, these ages conceal various codes, and I have several comprehensive articles in English on this area; if anyone is interested, I’ll send them. And lastly, note the numerological phenomenon in the lives of the three patriarchs:

Schildenberger’6′ has been credited with the observation that the three ages(d) form the regular pattern:
Abraham: 175 = 7 x (5 x 5)
Isaac: 180 = 5 x (6 x 6)
Jacob: 147 = 3 x (7 x 7)
Labuschagne and Vawter both point out that this may be derived from the number 17:’62
159 ibid. 287; author’s italics.
160 Cassuto 1 961: 280
161 According to Gevirtz (1977: 570), quoting J. Meysing ‘The Biblical Chronologies of the Patriarchs’ Christian News from Israel 14 (1963) p26f.
7 + 5 + 5 = 17
5 + 6 + 6 = 17
3 + 7 + 7 = 17
Gevirtz commented that the age of Joseph could be seen as following a similar pattern: i.e. 110 = 1 x (52 + 62 + 72);’63 and Williams, after reviewing a number of links between Joseph and the patriarchs and matriarchs, suggested that the pattern showed that ‘Joseph is the
Whoever has read this far, and would be interested in making time and studying this complex topic together, while reading the relevant articles — please contact me, and perhaps we’ll manage to put something in writing on the matter.

I’ll add that there is a commentator who dealt in the most comprehensive way with the meaning of these ages — and he is not well known and is not used even in the scholarly world, for various historical and unintended reasons — and that is Benno Jacob. The problem is that his books on the matter are written only in German. If someone reads German and would like to go through the material, blessings upon him and upon us.

Interesting, and thank you. By the way, “Who has stirred up one from the east” can be explained completely plainly, just as the commentators there explain it, even without any connection to the solar year (and I also didn’t understand what exactly it has to do with sunrise). One should also distinguish between internal numerical correspondence (seconds in Creation paralleling days until the Flood) and external correspondence (290 or 215 years perhaps corresponding to something in the stars). With numerical correspondence one can say that perhaps the first is arbitrary and the second was adjusted to it because there is some “deep,” Maharal-style relation between the two. But external correspondence to solar years and stars — what is the point of that?

[But tell me:
A. Don’t these numbers raise the suspicion that this is like gematria? Out of chaos people find a few points of order that appeared randomly and then attribute meaning to them. (In any chaos there will be some appearances that look like order. After all, no one defined in advance what counts as order.) I think this needs serious statistical groundwork before we approach the findings themselves.
B. If these things are both actual history and also correspond to some Pythagorean numerical conception hovering over our humble world, then the meaning of the matter would be that the Holy One, blessed be He, arranged for these numbers to appear? Why did He do that? This isn’t a case of writers inventing things and wanting to create symmetrical structures out of the illusion that this testifies to some deep reality stirring secretly beneath the ground of all creation.]

Isn’t Benno Jacob “the commentator of Nehama Leibowitz”? Without reading a direct word of what he wrote, I feel like I learned quite a bit from him — through her. And from my limited and meager familiarity with Nehama Leibowitz, I don’t remember her dealing with numbers.

By the way, in Rachel Elior’s books on Qumran she presents them, based on the scrolls, as addicts for numerical symmetries (I read this a long time ago and remember very little).

Be Wholehearted, thank you for your comments. Benno Jacob is indeed quoted by Nehama, who knew German and translated some passages. As for gematria and the like, I think that is exactly the intention of Scripture there — there is some kind of code there; otherwise why specify the ages in such detail? This appears right at the opening of the Torah, and it is all highly dramatic stories full of myth and depth, and suddenly boring lists with no understandable point? If it is just to express the age of the world, it would be enough to state at what age they begot children, but not all the extra detail of how long they lived afterward and at what age they died. If it is to indicate the longevity of the ancients, then too I wouldn’t need all the detail beyond a general statement that they lived close to a thousand years and then God shortened it to 120 years. And there are many more difficulties. In my opinion there is some code there that was known to the readers/priests in the First Temple period and afterward — as all the articles written on this prove, revealing the hidden intentions of the Samaritan version and the Septuagint and others, which changed the ages in order to lead to all kinds of calculations that would produce, for example, a reckoning according to which the 6,000 years would end shortly after the death of Jesus the Christian, and many other lengthy details. But throughout all the changes and versions, the same patterns are surprisingly preserved, and there are many mathematical correspondences that overlap — which teaches, in the view of scholars, that they understood some definite mathematical scheme that always had to be preserved in these lists. In that sense it is our obligation to understand these codes; otherwise we have not understood the main message. As for the ages themselves, in my understanding there is no way to read them literally, and clearly human beings five thousand years ago lived in a way similar to ours, simply because they had no unique biology — if one understands that the Garden of Eden itself was only a parable (for the transition from the hunter-gatherer era to agriculture and domestication and the creation of culture and cities — look immediately after the expulsion: Cain and Abel, “by the sweat of your brow,” the building of a city, and the invention of crafts in the line of Cain). And all the more so because human beings existed tens of thousands and millions of years before them — so what happened that suddenly people lived for hundreds of years?! Is this some ongoing miracle with no reason? Even the miracles of the Exodus were momentary and for a purpose, but a biological miracle with no meaning and no purpose is unacceptable except to creationists who think the world is 6,000 years old and all humanity was created from Adam, and therefore they can accept that there was something special and exclusive about the “first” generations. (This is how, for example, Professor Nathan Aviezer explained it, and many Christian creationists as well. An interesting interpretation they give is that indeed there were human beings, but in the Garden of Eden — which cannot be found because it was washed away in the Flood — there was the Tree of Life, and apparently man’s eating from the tree before his expulsion left a genetic imprint on his descendants.) All this is not plausible — which again obligates us to find the meaning of the numerological significance of these numbers — and thus redemption comes to Zion.
P.S. As for the very existence of gematria in the Hebrew Bible, I think there is evidence that this tool too was used. The Babylonians already used it. See, for example, that Abram + Hagar = Ishmael in gematria. “The children of Israel” = 603 in gematria — corresponding to the number of the children of Israel in the Exodus. “A silver bowl” = 930 in gematria, corresponding to the age of Adam, and therefore its weight there is 130, corresponding to the age at which he begot Seth. (Rashi brings this in the name of Moshe HaDarshan, with additions from the midrash in Torah Shelemah.) And there are more such examples. Still, there is no need to go as far as gematria, and it is more likely that the ages of the antediluvian fathers are connected in some way to astronomical phenomena, because the whole context there speaks about a complex reality of time, with all the strange and unnecessary dates in the Flood story (which give the impression of a “ship’s log”), and so on. And as mentioned, the Babylonians — who are the source of the myth about antediluvian fathers who lived hundreds of thousands of years — were deeply involved in astronomy (they even developed Rabban Gamliel’s secret of calendar intercalation), and among them too the seventh king is connected to the worship of the sun, like our seventh, Enoch, who lived 365 years — like the days of the solar year.

Be Wholehearted, send me an email and I’ll treat you to a few comprehensive articles in English, most of them aren’t online — I detached them from there: giladstn@gmail.com

As for “Who has stirred up one from the east,” I mean not according to the plain sense that applies it to Cyrus, but according to the midrash of the Sages — that it refers to Abraham. I was just offering a homiletic suggestion in trying to understand why 365 years passed until the revelation to him, and I suggested that it marks the dawn of a new revelation in the world of the Hebrew people. Dawn reminds us of the sun, and the solar year — the rule of the sun in the world — is the number 365. In general, when you encounter that number it triggers an association with the sun, and as I said above, the parallel to Enoch, the seventh generation, in the Babylonian myth indeed worshiped the sun god.

I thought you were explaining that these numbers are connected to historical truth in the sense that these were tribes and so on, not individual people, and that the years of slavery in Egypt are in fact correct, etc. Now it sounds like you are saying that all the details are false and this is basically just a numerological invention meant to encode for us some message that was forgotten in the past and is now being rediscovered (rediscovered in the sense that its existence has been discovered; what the content of the message is and why it matters has still not been discovered).

Of course people used gematria for amusement or concealment or to decide the length of their wall and the like, and it’s a nice thing, but to think that reality as a whole is run according to complex numerical structures (a Newtonian revolution in metaphysics!) — that requires a serious explanation: who imposes this law, and why does he do it? Unless, as I said, you say that it is all the invention of the writer, or that he drew it from the Babylonians, who themselves invented as their wine-inspired spirit pleased. Can you clarify this point?

[In parentheses, speaking for myself: without very precise and well-defined statistical treatment, I just don’t connect to flashes of brilliance that rely on numbers and subterranean structures. For all the feeling of concrete surprise, it still absolutely-absolutely-absolutely could be mere coincidence and meaningless. If “a silver bowl” didn’t fit Adam, then the empty space in the jar of manna would fit Zerubbabel, governor of Judah. There are endless possibilities to match things in all kinds of ways, and you need serious mathematicians who can say when a text contains an excessively unusual amount of a certain kind of order, and only then is there reason to think it has meaning. Admittedly, this does not apply to comparison of myths.]

Thanks Gil, I sent it. [But apparently you judged me favorably. I’m not a great expert (nor all that interested) in matters of Bible criticism. I’ve read a few books and heard lectures, and I know more or less what the state of the field is, but no more than that. Certainly not in avant-garde or niche topics. I only encounter what has already been digested and absorbed into the mainstream and passed their criticism. But on this topic, since you wrote about it, you piqued my curiosity.]

I’ll elaborate when I have time — I think this is historical truth indicating tribes and places and also historical people, in the form of a father begetting his son, though not always literally so. What is not historical truth is that a certain individual lived for hundreds of years. That is impossible. But even if we are talking about a tribe, it still makes no sense that a tribe from which another tribe branched off (that is, Enoch “begot” Methuselah) would always “live” another 800 years after that and then “die out.” So what seems to me is that the names point to historical reality — whether tribes/clans/geographical regions/kingdoms, or at times an actual historical figure such as some king and the like. Everything is true — except for the number attached to that figure as representing the years of his life. That is not true, and it probably encodes some calculation that we have to decipher. (There is of course a third approach, which I didn’t mention above: that the numbers are accurate, but they are reckoned differently from ours and need to be converted. There are many methods for this, and the best known is that a “year” indicates a monthly cycle of change — so according to that Methuselah lived only 80 years. After the Flood they began to count the four seasons of the year, and so their ages “shrank” to an average of 400, that is, our 100. After that came the double year, and finally from “This month shall be for you…” they counted a regular year, and indeed from then on people live only 70-80 years, or at most 120.) This method has quite a few difficulties, but it is not baseless.

P.S.

שחרור אל הזמן / איילת סקסטין