The Contraversy of Biblical Ages
Early in the 17th Century, Archbishop James Ussher attempted to calculate the age of the Earth down to the exact date of its Creation according to the Bible. He did this by adding the ages of Biblical characters whom begat other Biblical characters to establish at genealogical time-line back to Adam. Then to all the above ages, he would add the previous days of the Creation myth to the ultimate date of origin in 4,004 BC. His labors in this calculation were left unchallenged for centuries and the so-called "young Earth" Creationists have accepted that the Earth could now be no older than 6,000 years regardless of all evidence to the contrary.
Ussher himself admits vary variables, but one he did not consider was an assumed link between those Biblical characters who might actually have existed historically and those who's true origins are completely shrouded in the Genesis myths. Not only is there no actual lineage between the two, but the ages of both groups are still at issue.
Historic data remains inconclusive on many points. There are numerous discrepencies in the supposed ages of the first characters in Genesis especially in the comparison of rabbonic to Christian interpretations. There are even discrepancies as to the actual life of Moses himself. He was first believed to have lived around 1250 BC, the popular impression being that the pharaoh of the Exodus was Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty. Archbishop Ussher dated the landing of Noah's Ark at the 5th of May, 1491 BC. This would mean that the flood occured just a couple of centuries before Moses's birth. Not quite long enough to populate the world from the inbred stock of Noah's three sons.
However further evidence suggests that the more probable pharaoh at the time of Moses was
Amemhotep a.k.a. (Amenemhet III). This means that Moses may have lived as early as the 12th Dynasty in 1700 BC and chronicled the flood of Noah 200 years before it happened. By this rekoning, Moses would have died at least a century before Ussher's flood.
The flood event of Zuisudra took place approximately 1,400 years before Ussher's date. The Creationist's arguments assume the accuracy of Ussher's conclusion, yet here is a descrepancy of over 14 centuries! Odd thing that such an enormous inconsistancy could exist unmentioned, while young-Earth Creationists taut the validity of this document's every word and base their argument on Ussher's miscalculations.
The Zuisudra epic was first recorded in the syllabic cuneiform texts as much as 1200 years after the depicted event and still centuries before Moses' earliest possible incarnation. The gap in time increases once it is realized that at least the final drafts of the Old Testament were not written by Moses at all, but were finally ammended in 500 BC, about 1,000 years after Moses' death is detailed (presumably) by another author. An auto-obituary in Deuteronomy is unlikely, even for Moses.
Genesis implies that Noah and each of the other characters in Genesis lived to be several hundred years old. Even if that were possible, it would be unlikely that in such a hazardous and primitive world that there was not one character to have an accidental death before seeing the turn of his first century. Cain (banished) and Abel (murdered) are of course exceptions as their ages were never indicated.
Human life span has never really changed, if anything our survivability has increased. Where once we died of the first heart attack, we now commonly survive half-a-dozen or more and also survive far more than what would have done us in just a century ago. Tetanus and syphilis and the like have been disabled and trauma surgery was never possible in earlier decades. In past centuries, if a man survived to our current expectancy, he was said to have lived three times over the norm. We now outlive nearly every other animal on Earth and the few that still survive us cannot exist a fraction of the span suggested for biblical characters. Except perhaps for the shark which may once have been evidenced to exist for up to 700 years. Even with the recent life preserving growth hormone treatments, they've realized that a lifetime of multiple centuries is still impossible for mammals due to the continuing degradation of the brain. Other than that, no life form short of a tree contends with the duration implied in the Bible.
Each of the pagan religions are acutely attentive to lunar phases, marking each full moon with ceremonial significance. Many other primitive cultures and especially those in equatorial regions logged the passage of age not in years, but in months then described as lunar cycles. Some recently discovered ancient Greek tablets also describe Biblical character's ages in months as well.
If the ages of the characters from biblical Genesis are each divided by twelve, it can be seen that measuring their ages in months reveals a life expectancy quite normal for pre-industrial mankind. This is true of most of the Genesis characters. This is not to suggest that any of these characters actually existed, but most myths are loosely based on the adventures of actual persons. One of the youngest in Genesis is the concubine, Sarah at the concenting age of 127. In such primitive societies, girls are usually pubescent at only 10 ½ old. Even in the last century, it was not inconceivable to take a pubescent girl as a concubine in many societies and such was not uncommon until relatively recent history. It is certainly more believable for that time than a 127 year-old concubine. Methuselah, the eldest, would have begat Lamech before turning 16 years of age which was the norm even after the renaissance and still common today. He would then have lived an incredible 65 more years to a then nigh impossible age of 80 years old! By this reckoning, Noah begat Shem when he was 41, not 500 and would have been 50 at the time of "the flood."
When the first versions of what would become the Bible were composed, the ages of the characters inspired by the Sumerian works might well have been exaggerated, but they may only have been misinterpreted. Such crypto-linguistic mistranslation have been common to anthropologists of all eras even including the translation of the Egyptian glyphs in the 1920s. It was discovered then, that all Egyptian numeric equations and historic records would remain anomalous with the rest of the world unless reduced by a factor of ten.
Similarly, the Sumerians used a special archaic number sign for counting years although it was seldom used for more than ten years. About 2600 BC when a Shuruppak scribe calculated the Genesis 5 numbers from archaic real estate tax records, he used a number system designed for counting volumes of grain. Hundreds of years later, these numbers were mistranslated by a Babylonian scribe who confused the sign for one with the sign for one-tenth.
For more indepth research sources into Biblical Ages, click here.