CORRESP ONDENCE. 



553 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



THE DURATION OF HUMAN LIFE. 

 Messrs. Editors. 



I HAVE read with great interest an arti- 

 cle having the above title, by 11. Dc 

 Solaville, in the November issue of " the 

 Popular Science Monthly." As the article 

 is so conclusive as to the average age of 

 man, with one singular exception in relation 

 to the patriarchs, living before the flood, it 

 has taxed the ingenuity of many able as 

 well as serious mirids to account for the 

 wonderful discrepancy in this case. Buffon 

 has given, as the writer quotes him, the 

 reason of this difference to be, that " be- 

 fore the flood, the earth was less solid, less 

 compact than it is now. The law of gravi- 

 tation had acted for only a little time, the 

 productions of the globe had less consisten- 

 cy, and the body of man, being more sup- 

 ple, was more susceptible of extension. 

 Being able to grow for a longer time, it 

 should, in consequence, live for a longer 

 time than now." Hensler, he tells us, has 

 given a different reason, referring the ap- 

 parent conflict to the different modes of 

 dividing time. Voltaire rejected, on the 

 authority of the writer, " the longevity as- 

 signed to the patriarchs of the Bible," but 

 accepts without question the longevity as- 

 cribed to certain men in India, who reached 

 the age of one hundred and twenty years. 



On a full examination of the question 

 of patriarchal longevity, the disparity of 

 their ages to those of later times disap- 

 pears. A very slight error in the transla- 

 tion of the Hebrew numbers has ded to all 

 the apparent disparity. The age of the 

 antediluvians was not to exceed one hun- 

 dred and twenty years. Genesis vi, 3 : " And 

 the Lord said, my spirit shall not always 

 strive with man, for that he also is flesh, yet 

 his days shall be an hundred and twenty 

 years." This was the regular good old age 

 of men with special variations, both before 

 and for some time after the days of Abra- 

 ham. 



In reading concrete numbers the Hebrews 

 gave the larger number first, thus : Ninety 

 and seven for ninety-seven, forty and seven 

 for forty-seven. The reversal of this rule 

 in the translation of Genesis v, 3-5, as 

 an illustration, will show the error in all 

 similar ease?. " Adam lived a hundred and 

 thirty years and begat a son," etc. This is 

 correct, according to the rule ; Seth was 

 born when Adam was one hundred and 

 thirty years old, and was his last child. 

 But if the rule were here reversed, as it is 



in the authorized version in the fifth verse, 

 it would read thus : Adam lived thirty hun- 

 dred years, and begat a son ! This shocked 

 the consciousness of the Christian transla- 

 tor, and he was driven to the true rule of the 

 Hebrew uses in case of concrete numerals. 



In the fifth verse we have the force of 

 the violated rule, thus : " And all the days 

 that Adam lived were nine hundred and 

 thirty years, and he died " / A. V. The true 

 reading by the rule would be, " And all the 

 days of Adam, which he lived, were a hun- 

 dred years, and thirty and nine years, and 

 he died," making the entire age of Adam 

 one hundred and thirty-nine years, instead 

 of nine hundred and thirty years. 



It will be seen, on examination, that 

 concrete numeral adjectives, in Hebrew as 

 in other languages, agree in number with 

 their nouns. In the case cited in the A. V. 

 the nine is made to agree with hundred in 

 the singular and not with years in the plu- 

 ral. The error is seen at a glance, for the 

 difference between " nine years " and " nine 

 hundred years " is too great to be over- 

 looked in any careful translation of a sacred 

 book. The translator assumed that nine 

 here agreed with hundred, when it had no 

 such agreement ; hundred in the text is 

 itself a concrete numeral, and separately 

 agrees with years, meaning a hundred of 

 years. At the date of this writing the He- 

 brews had no means of writing "nine hun- 

 dred," or any number of hundreds above 

 one, without repetition or circumlocution. 

 There were then none of the masoretic 

 points in use. In the case of the age of 

 Terah, the father of Abraham, the trans- 

 lators have made the attempt to make two 

 hundred out of one hundred in the word 

 mathim [DlfiNQ], used in the plural as it 

 might be to agree with years, thus making 

 Terah two hundred and five instead of one 

 hundred and five years old, at his death ; 

 holding the theory that the word mae (or 

 one hundred) would, in the plural, mathim, 

 make two hundred. This is contrary to all 

 rule. The Hebrews could, by pluralizing a 

 numeral, less than ten, add tenfold to the 

 unit, thus : hemosh, Jive ; hemoshim, fifty. 

 This rule, applied in the case of Terah, 

 would make him ten times one hundred and 

 five years old, or one thousand and fifty 

 years old. In the case of Terah the his- 

 toric record conclusively contradicts the 

 translation, and hence demonstrates the 

 rule that pluralizing one hundred does not, 

 in the Hebrew tongue, make two hundred, 



