KidzPort June 28th – Some Really Old Dudes.

June 30, 2009

This week started with a little trivia excercise by Sister Maureen.  She was asking various questions, and challenging the kids to find the answer in Scripure.  One of the things that struck a chord was a question about Noah’s Ark.  The kids were astounded to find out that the most common answer given for how long it took Noah to build the ark was 120 years!

This was a hard thing to comprehend, so we started talking about how long people lived in the bible.  It turns out, that prior to Noah, the average lifespan of people in the bible was over 900 years!! Imagine being born in 1109!  You would have been born before Gengis Khan and Richard the Lionheart.  You would have lived through the Crusades!  You would be older than fireworks in China!

Some of the oldest people in the Bible:

• Seth – 912 years
• Adam – 930 years
• Noah – 950 years
• Jared – 962 years
• Methuseleh – 969 years old!!

But in Genesis 6:3, God says to Noah ” My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”  So after the flood, God decided that man’s lifespan was too long, and he limited it.  (Apparently living for 900 years gave man waaaay too much free time!)  In fact, after Noah’s time, only one person in the bible is recorded as living over 120 years.  (Can you find out who?) 

Ironically, modern scientists have pegged the maximum human life expectancy at about 120 years. The oldest person recorded in modern times is a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122.