In light of the fall, it was a great kindness from God to Adam to allow him to see so many of his descendants—even to the seventh generation. This is heightened by the fact that Adam’s first son murdered his second son. How kind was our God to show Adam something of His covenant faithfulness by allowing him to participate in and witness the populating of the earth. What a reminder to mankind that God had promised to send a redeemer into the world—the “offspring of the woman.”

In 2019, the United Nations reported that “All societies in the world are in the midst of [a] longevity revolution—some are at its early stages and some are more advanced…”[1] Although it is highly improbable that nations will ever succeed in prolonging the average lifespan to any significant extent, there was a time when mankind lived extraordinarily long lives during the time leading up to the flood. Scripture teaches that there was then a progressive shortening of man’s lifespan from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham to Moses. There are several important reasons why God purposed to allow the first generations of humanity to live as long as they did; and, there is a significant theological rationale for why He shortened the lifespan of humanity. 

At the beginning of Genesis, we read of a number of extraordinarily long lives at the beginning of human history. In Genesis 5, we read, “Adam lived 930 years…Seth lived 912 years…Enosh lived 905 years…Kenan lived 910 years…Mahalalel lived 895 years…Jared lived 962 years…Methuselah lived 969 years…Lamech lived 777 years…Noah lived 950 years.” 

These ages come in the record of the genealogy of Seth—Adam and Eve’s son, given by God to replace Abel. The ages of Seth’s descendants pose a number of challenges for the modern reader. Some modern interpreters have suggested that this genealogy belongs to a mythopoetic narrative written to compete with other ancient near eastern mythopoetic origin stories, while the better part of the Christian church throughout history has taken this genealogy to be historically factual record of the primitive history of mankind. Before we seek a rationale for the length and the shortening of the lifespan of humanity, we need to be settled on the historicity of the narrative. 

According the both the Old Testament and the New Testament, Moses wrote Genesis under inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Genesis is historical narrative given from a divine perspective. The repeated use of the phrase, “these are the generations of….”—from the creation of the world to the life of Jacob—supports the historicity of the revelation (Gen. 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1, 9; 37:2). Reflecting on the first genealogy—namely, the generation of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1–2, Geerhardus Vos observed, 

“God does not make a chain of solid gold, in which the first link is a floral wreath. If the creation history is an allegory, then the narrative concerning the fall and everything further that follows can also be allegory. The writer of the Pentateuch presents his work entirely as history.”[2]

The historicity of Adam relies on the historicity of the creation account. The historicity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob relies on the historicity of Adam. The historicity of the Jewish nation relies on the historicity of Abraham. It is, as Vos noted, “a chain of solid gold.” 

We are now left with the question concerning the rationale for the length and the shortening of the lifespan of humanity. Working back on the text from a bird’s eye view of redemptive history, several categories help us arrive at reasonable explanations. Consider the following: 

Population

In the first place, extended lifespans allowed mankind to populate the earth in partial fulfillment of the promise of redemption (Gen. 3:15). God had promised to redeem a people through the seed of the woman. God chose to use the very people who brought sin and misery into the world to populate the world in light of His promise of redemption. In Genesis 5:4 we read, “The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters.” We don’t know how many children Adam and Eve had, in addition to the three sons we read of in the early chapters of Genesis; however, we do know that they had many other children among whom marriages and procreation transpired. The mandate to be “fruitful and multiply” did not pass away after the fall.

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