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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



ANTEDILUVIAN LONGEVITY. 

 Messrs. Editors. 



A LETTER in your February number, 

 from Mr. C. S. Bryant, propounds a 

 new view respecting the age of antediluvian 

 patriarchs, and expresses a hope that the 

 revisers of the Old Testament will give heed 

 to what he regards as cases of apparent 

 errors in the reading of Hebrew numbers. 

 Being one of those revisers, I may, perhaps, 

 properly ask for a little space in which to 

 comment on his suggestions. While I have 

 no doubt of his sincere desire to solve a se- 

 rious difficulty, I must say that his theory is 

 utterly untenable. This can be easily shown. 

 Mr. Bryant says, "In reading concrete 

 numbers, the Hebrews gave the larger num- 

 ber first." This is true in some cases, in 

 others not. Thus in Genesis xiv, 14, the 

 Hebrew gives the number of Abram's ser- 

 vants as " eighteen and three hundred," the 

 larger number last. Even in Genesis v, 3. 

 adduced by Mr. Bryant, the Hebrew reads, 

 " thirty and a hundred years " the larger 

 number last. In like manner also in verse 

 5, Adam's age is said to have been " nine 

 hundred years and thirty years." I do not 

 see, therefore, the bearing of this inaccu- 

 rate observation. Mr. Bryant's point really 

 is (though he does not state it) that, though 

 the Hebrew inserts no conjunction " and " 

 between "nine" and "hundred," we may 

 read it " nine and a hundred and thirty." 

 When he speaks of an inverted rule in the 

 case of verse 5 (authorized version), and 

 says that verse 3 translated in the same way 

 would read " thirty hundred years," he 

 overlooks the fact that in verse 3 the He- 

 brew has a conjunction between the two 

 numerals, reading " thirty and a hundred," 

 so that the most literal translation would 

 still give us one hundred and thirty. In 

 short, the authorized version renders with 

 perfect exactness. 



The real question, then, is whether Mr. 

 Bryant's method of putting in a conjunction 

 where there is none in the Hebrew is justi- 

 fiable. In the case in question the word 

 " hundred " is in the plural, so that, exactly 

 rendered, it would be "nine hundreds year, 

 and thirty year" ("year" being singular, 

 as we often say, colloquially, " a hundred 

 foot"). Mr. Bryant overlooks this fact, 

 which is very inconvenient for his theory. 

 Even, therefore, though we might imagine 

 that "nine hundred and thirty" really 

 should be read "nine, one hundred, and 

 thirty," the plural form " hundreds " is un- 

 explained. 



_ Mr. Bryant says, " At the date of this 

 writing the Hebrews had no means of writ- 

 ing ' nine hundred,' or any number of hun- 

 dreds above one, without repetition or cir- 

 cumlocution." This is an assertion without 

 proof, and needs no answer. That it bor- 

 ders on the absurd is obvious to almost any 

 one. 



But more conclusive proof of the error 

 of Mr. Bryant's hypothesis is yet to come. 

 It prepares any one to expect it when, e. g., 

 Seth's age, according to him, is stated (verse 

 8) as " twelve years, and nine [and] a hun- 

 dred years," and so is equal to one hundred 

 and twenty-one ! Circumlocution indeed ! 

 Could not the poor Hebrews express even 21 

 better than by adding 12 to 9 ? So Enos's 

 age is got by adding 5, 9, and 100 ! 



But the absolutely knock-down argu- 

 ment is this : Mr. Bryant says (without tell- 

 ing us how he learned it) that " Seth was 

 born when Adam was one hundred and 

 thirty years old, and was his last child." 

 But he forgets to quote verse 4, which says 

 (according to his own method of translating), 

 " And the days of Adam after he had begot- 

 ten Seth were eight [and] a hundred years." 

 Thus, adding 130 to 108 we get necessarily 

 238 as Adam's age at his death. And yet, ab- 

 solutely overlooking this, Mr. Bryant makes 

 Adam's whole age to have been only 139 ! 

 Precisely the same absurdity results in the 

 following cases: Seth at the birth of his 

 son was one hundred and five years old. 

 But after the birth of Enos he lived (verse 

 7), according to Mr. Bryant's own way of 

 translating, " seven years, and eight [and] a 

 hundred years." So, then, at his death, Seth 

 must have been 105 + 115 = 220years old. 

 But Mr. Bryant, translating verse 8 in his 

 peculiar way, makes the age to be one 

 hundred and twenty-one ! We have, in the 

 mention of the age before and that after 

 the birth of the son, an absolute test of the 

 correctness of Mr. Bryant's theory as com- 

 pared with the ordinary one. According to 

 the ordinary one, the two numbers added 

 together make exactly the number given as 

 the whole age. According to Mr. Bryant's 

 theory, the narrator can not add together 

 any of the two numbers correctly. He 

 contradicts himself, so that the merest child 

 can see the blunders. 



If Mr. Bryant thinks that this method of 

 reducing the ages of the patriarchs is going 

 to relieve the biblical narrative of difficulty, 

 he is obviously mistaken. I repeat that, he 

 may be very sincere ; but, in view of what 

 has been presented, his sincerity can be 



