So, Why Did Human Lifespans Decrease?

On Friday, April 15, 2022, the Seventh-day Adventist Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide asked these two questions:

"Compare the life span of antediluvians (Genesis 5) to that of the patriarchs. How would we explain this decreasing of the span of human life? How does this degeneration counter the premises of modern Darwinism?”

I think the lesson was seeking the following response: Human lifetimes began to degrade as a result of sin, and this fact speaks against the arguments of ongoing, upward advancement, which many say evolution puts forward.

However, if so, I’m not sure this is the correct answer.

Putting aside evolution, I’d say we’d explain the decrease in human lifetimes as being based in a specific pronouncement by God, in Genesis 6:3: "Then the Lord said, 'My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

Many Christians, perhaps, and certainly many SDAs, hold this statement to be a pronouncement by God that He would judge the world with a flood in 120 years; i.e., God is giving a deadline, saying, “Mankind has 120 years left before they are destroyed.”

Ellen G. White says this. In From Eternity Past, ch. 7, “When the World Was Destroyed by Water,” p. 52, paragraph 3, she states:

“A hundred and twenty years before the Flood, the Lord declared to Noah His purpose and directed him to build an ark. He was to preach that God would bring a flood of water upon the earth. Those who would believe the message and would prepare by repentance and reformation, should find pardon and be saved.”

(Even our children’s stories advance this idea: I plainly recall one of our most capable youth, at my home church, recently sharing the Noahic narrative with our youngest members, and telling them he preached for 120 years before he entered the ark.)

Noah did enter the ark with his family (Gen. 7:7). However, the Bible never says he preached to the antediluvians. Even note Christ’s statement in Matt: 24:39, re: Noah’s peers: “They knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away."

Further, from biblical, chronological data, it’s clear Noah could not have taken 120 years to build the ark. Noah did not start having children until after he was 500 years old (Gen. 5:32), and by the time God commanded him to build the ark, his three sons were adult men with wives (Gen. 6:18).

The flood starts when Noah is 600 years old; in fact, the Bible says he is precisely 600 years, 2 months, and 17 days old (Gen. 7:11).

Now, the Bible does not date God’s Gen. 6:3 edict. However, most Bible readers take it to coincide with God's call to Noah; to be contemporaneous with it; for example, Ellen White does, above.

However, if we hold on to this 120-year deadline model, this means we no longer can say Gen. 6:3 coincides with the Noahic call. We can’t say, when Noah was 500, God called him, because the flood came when Noah was 600; i.e., 100 years after Noah was 500, not 120. Instead, we must conclude God deemed humans reprobate when Noah was 480 years old, then waited 20 years, minimum, to call Noah.

I say “minimum” because, again, Noah did not have children until after he was 500, and they were married adults when God called him. (Keep in mind: All of this computation would save the 120-year-deadline. But it would not save the 120-year ark-building timeline which, again, most SDAs hold to start when God’s deadline does.)

I propose a simple way out of all this: There is no deadline. Instead, again, I argue, Gen. 6:3 is an edict that human lifetimes would be reduced to 120 years.

For example, notes to the NIV Study Bible alternately translate Gen. 6:3

“Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’”

as

“Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit will not remain in man forever, for they are corrupt; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’”

Indeed, this conclusion fits not only biblical data, but scientific reality: After God’s proclamation in Gen. 6, human lifespans drop from just under a thousand years (Gen. 5), to a few hundred (Gen. 11), all the way down to Moses — one of the last patriarchs for whom a lifespan is given — who dies at 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7).

(Joshua, his successor, dies at 110 [Joshua 24:29]. Centuries later, the priest, Jehoiada, dies at 130 [2 Chronicles 24:15], amidst a chronology of short-lived, Israelite kings.)

However, 120 years is also, currently, deemed by scientists to, apparently, be the human limit; the oldest recorded human being died about 25 years ago at the age of 122.

So, to the lesson’s question, I’d answer this way: We explain this decreasing of the span of human life via an edict given by God in Genesis 6:3, reducing it to 120 years, much the way we explain man’s mortality via his being denied access to the Tree of Life in Genesis 3:22.