120 Years (Gen 6:3)

Adam’s Aftermath

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³ Their days will be 120 years. וְהָי֣וּ יָמָ֔יו מֵאָ֥ה וְעֶשְׂרִ֖ים שָׁנָֽה׃

This is the end of Gen 6:3, the verse that NJPS puts between em-dashes to suggest that it is interrupting the context. We’ll talk in a moment about the translation that heads today’s post, but first let’s put the whole package together for those of you who are not avidly collecting my every word:

YHWH said, “My wind will not remain in the humans forever, given that they are meat too. Their days will be 120 years.”

We’ve already concluded that YHWH’s wind must be what he breathed into the first human in 2:7 and that our being made of meat makes him somewhat uncomfortable too. He has already taken steps to ensure that human beings will die, but the mixing of humans and gods makes him uneasy.

Those NJPS em-dashes suggest that this verse originally came from somewhere else and was not written in sequence. In the context of our story, however, the implication is that the mixing of Sky-ness and Earth-ness will stretch out human lives longer and longer. Given that Methuselah is already pushing 1,000 even without divine parentage, it seems reasonable to say, “The sky’s the limit!”

Now it will no longer be. The limit has been set much, much lower — at 120 years. If Methuselah had died at 120, even his first child would not yet have been born (and he is not the only one). This means that 120 is not merely a cut-off point. The entire life span has been contracted. This is the original “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

Did he really, though? When we keep reading, we find these examples (given in the NJPS translation except that I’ve turned all the ages into numerals for ease of comparison):

• ^{Gen 9:29} And all the days of Noah came to 950 years; then he died.

• ^{Gen 11:32} The days of Terah came to 205 years; and Terah died in Haran.

• ^{Gen 23:1} Sarah’s lifetime—the span of Sarah’s life—came to 127 years.

• ^{Gen 25:7} This was the total span of Abraham’s life: 175 years.

• ^{Gen 25:17} These were the years of the life of Ishmael: 137 years; then he breathed his last and died, and was gathered to his kin.

• ^{Gen 35:28} Isaac was 180 years old ²⁹ when he breathed his last and died.

• ^{Gen 47:28} Jacob lived seventeen years in the land of Egypt, so that the span of Jacob’s life came to 147 years.

• ^{Num 33:39} Aaron was 123 years old when he died on Mount Hor.

• ^{Deut 34:7} Moses was 120 years old when he died; his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.

You might want to suggest, as Richard Elliott Friedman does, that it took a while for this limit to be reached:

God sets a maximum of 120 years for a human life. The reduction takes place gradually from a peak in the 900s (Methuselah and Noah) to ages in the 100s for the patriarchs. At the end of the Torah, Moses is said to have lived the full 120 years.

And indeed Joshua does not make it that long:

• ^{Josh 24:29/Jud 2:8} After these events, Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years.

Keep reading, however, and almost at the very end of the (Jewish) Bible, you find this:

• ^{2 Chron 24:15} Jehoiada reached a ripe old age and died; he was 130 years old at his death.

There may well be other examples; I did a quick word search, not a demographic analysis. This is a Bible column, not the census.

Another possibility is that this is a misunderstanding of the phrase. Nahum Sarna explains:

Early exegesis of this verse prefers to see here a reference to the interval of time remaining before the Flood. The figure would then represent three conventional generations of forty years each.

Here’s how David Kimhi put it:

“I will give them another 120 years. If they repent, fine. If not, I will wipe them off the earth.” Why precisely 120 years we do not know, other than that this was the will of the Creator.

That is, as Abraham ibn Ezra explained, “God was giving mankind a deadline.”

This latter explanation has some of the arithmetical problems that are so common in biblical chronology. Like all such things, they can be resolved if you want them to be; see Rashi’s comment, and Ibn Ezra’s much longer full comment, in my Commentators’ Bible translation or elsewhere.

Where the “deadline” explanation — 120 years until I flush you off the planet — really founders is that no one has done anything wrong. We don’t know what instructions, if any, the sons of the gods were supposed to be following; the daughters of the humans certainly haven’t been told anything. The problem, at least where we now find this verse, is the icky mixing of Sky and Earth, rûaḥ and adama. So the limit on the human lifespan is the most logical interpretation of this verse.

In the Sumerian “Tale of Enlil and Namzitara,” Namzitara is told the same thing by the god Enlil: 120 years is the outer limit of human existence. So this idea may have been circulating in the ancient Near East. That still leaves us with the question, Why 120 years? Here, I think the answer must be Mesopotamian mathematics. 120 is twice 60 and ⅓ of 360, and it’s also 1x2x3x4x5. A perfectly ripe old age.

⇥ Those who would prefer to forget that the Bible is written in Hebrew can skip down to a public service announcement from the book of Isaiah. Now — you delightful friends who have stuck with me — let’s take a quick look at the grammar here. Those who want even greater detail will find it in Lesson 25 of my Hebrew course, where you will learn the linguistic secret behind the song “Hava Nagila.”

⇥ Many translations say here “let their days be” instead of “their days will be.” Technically that would call for a jussive form (the “wishful future,” as one of my students once brilliantly named it), instead of what we actually have, an indicative (“just the facts, ma’am”) converted perfect. God is not wishin’ and a-hopin’ their days will be 120 years; he is announcing it. ⇤

Some thousands of years later (according to biblical chronology), a prophetic voice announced that there was a time limit on the time limit. One day, “the former troubles shall be forgotten,” and we will all be living in a new Xanadu Park in Jerusalem:

^{Isa 65:20} No more shall there be an infant or graybeard

         Who does not live out his days.

         He who dies at a hundred years

         Shall be reckoned a youth,

         And he who fails to reach a hundred

         Shall be reckoned accursed.

It will be a new mythological age, and I (for one) am ready for it. While we are waiting, we’ll return next time to the original mythological era, and resume our reading of Genesis 6 with verse 4.