How old was Adam when he died?

What Genesis says

Adam’s age is not in the garden story. It comes in Genesis 5, the family record that runs from Adam to Noah, ten generations told to the same beat: he lived, he had a son, he lived on, he died. Adam opens the list.

Adam lived one hundred thirty years, and became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he became the father of other sons and daughters. All the days that Adam lived were nine hundred thirty years, then he died.

Notice the phrase about Seth, “in his own likeness, after his image.” Two verses earlier, God made humankind “in God’s likeness” (5:1). The image passes from parent to child. Cain and Abel are missing from the list; this line runs through Seth, the son born after Abel’s death (4:25). The old Greek translation, the Septuagint, has Adam father Seth at 230 and live 700 more years. The total is the same: 930.

Who was alive when Adam died?

Add up the ages in Genesis 5 and something surprising appears. Adam was still alive when eight generations of his descendants were born. In the year he died, by the Hebrew text, they were these ages:

• Seth, his son: 800
• Enosh: 695
• Kenan: 605
• Mahalalel: 535
• Jared: 470
• Enoch: 308
• Methuselah: 243
• Lamech, Noah’s father: 56

Noah himself was born 126 years later. So by the story’s own clock, the first man could have spoken with the grandfather and the father of the man who built the ark. Jewish chronology, which counts years from creation, places Adam’s death in the year 930.

“In the day that you eat of it”

The number raised an old puzzle. In the garden, God gave the man one rule.

but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

Adam ate, and lived nine centuries. Ancient readers answered with a psalm: “a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4). The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BC, says Adam died seventy years short of a thousand, and so died within that one day of God’s (Jubilees 4:29–30). Justin Martyr made the same argument around AD 155 (Dialogue with Trypho 81). Others read the verse differently: death entered his life that day, when the way to the tree of life was closed (Genesis 3:22–24). A later Jewish legend, found in the Zohar, says Adam gave seventy of his thousand years to King David, who lived exactly seventy.

Where was Adam buried?

Genesis does not say. Jewish tradition reads the old name of Hebron, Kiriath Arba, “city of four,” as four couples buried in the cave of Machpelah: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah (Talmud, Eruvin 53a). Christian tradition put his grave under Calvary, so that the cross stood over the first man’s skull; in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the chapel beneath the rock of Golgotha is still called the Chapel of Adam. The story behind that skull is told in what Golgotha means. The ages of Adam’s descendants, and the longest life of all, are in how old Methuselah was.