"This is the written account of Adam's family line. When God created mankind, He made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And He named them 'mankind' when they were created." (Genesis 5:1-2) The Lord blessed Adam and Eve and told them to multiply and be fruitful. Some scholars estimate that by the time of Noah there could have been hundreds of thousands or even millions of people inhabiting the earth. Considering the extra long lifespans of humans in the pre-flood era, and considering there were no methods of birth control other than abstinence, and considering that people appeared to remain fertile for extended periods of time, the estimate of the earth's population being in the millions is not unreasonable. I hate to think there were millions of wicked people on the earth who perished in the great flood because they had turned their backs on the Lord to live in violence and depravity, but that very well may be the case. If so it's no wonder the Lord "regretted that He had made human beings on the earth". (Genesis 6:6)
We don't know at what age Adam and Eve first began to have children, but it wasn't until Adam was 130 years old that the son was born from whose line the Messiah would someday come. "When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died." (Genesis 5:3-5) A lot of people have tried to claim that the "years" in Genesis don't mean actual years, but I see no reason to doubt that when the author of Genesis says "years" he means years. The Bible is not the only source for evidence of extended lifespans in the early years of man's sojourn on earth. The Sumerian King List, an ancient stone document that includes the reigns of eight kings who ruled prior to the flood, states that these kings had unusually long lifespans and reigns. The lifespans attributed to them are far longer than those listed in Genesis, and there is likely some error in translation since it doesn't seem possible for anyone to have lived for several thousand years, but still we find evidence here that there was something different about the earth and about man's life on the earth before the great flood.
How and why did people live so long prior to the flood? One theory is that it's because the Lord created the bodies of human beings with the capability of living forever. If Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, they never would have died. When they sinned against God, the pollution of sin entered the world. It affected the bodies of every living creature, including humans. It affected plant life, for the Lord told Adam that the ground was now "cursed" because of sin. It probably affected the entire environment of earth, but the changes would have been somewhat gradual. If we think of sin as a pollutant that affects everything on the earth, then it would have taken some time to permeate every aspect of life. This could explain why lifespans were so long at first and why they decreased over time until they reached the level we are familiar with today.
Another potential---and practical---reason for extra long lifespans in the beginning is that they were needed in order to populate the earth quickly. Imagine how much more slowly this would have happened if each person only lived to be eighty to a hundred years old and if the females became infertile around age fifty as is typical today.
Disease was not rampant in the early world. The closer a person lived to the dawn of time, the fewer germs and bacteria and viruses existed. If indeed a vapor canopy surrounded the earth as many scientists believe, then the first humans would have been protected from some of the damaging rays of the sun and from a lot of the radiation from space. This would have helped to prevent the buildup of free radicals in the body and it would have helped to prevent various types of cancer, skin cancer in particular. The food sources were also much healthier. There were no cheap and unhealthy processed foods. There were no pesticides and chemicals being used on the crops. People were eating the purest whole food diet possible, and that would have helped to prevent obesity and heart disease and so many other maladies that people suffer with today because of unhealthy diets.
Join us tomorrow as we look at the descendants of Adam's son Seth on down to Noah.
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