How old was Methuselah when he died?

What Genesis says

Methuselah appears in the genealogy of Genesis 5, the list that runs from Adam to Noah with the beat of a drum: he lived, he had a son, he lived on, and he died. His entry takes three verses.

Methuselah lived one hundred eighty-seven years, then became the father of Lamech. Methuselah lived after he became the father of Lamech seven hundred eighty-two years, and became the father of other sons and daughters. All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty-nine years, then he died.

There is an irony in the list. His father is Enoch, the one man in it who never dies: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him” (5:24). The son of the man who left early is the man who stayed longest.

He died in the year of the flood

Genesis never says how Methuselah died, but its numbers say when. He was 187 when Lamech was born. Lamech was 182 when Noah was born (5:28). Noah was 600 when the flood came (7:6). Add them up: 187 + 182 + 600 = 969. Methuselah dies in the flood year. His son Lamech, who lived 777 years (5:31), had died five years earlier.

Jewish tradition noticed. The Talmud reads the seven days of waiting before the rain (Genesis 7:4, 10) as the week of mourning for Methuselah, the righteous man, for whose sake God held back the water (Sanhedrin 108b). The Septuagint, the old Greek translation, gives different ages: Methuselah fathers Lamech at 167 and Lamech fathers Noah at 188. By those numbers Methuselah outlives the flood by fourteen years, though he was not on the ship. Augustine wrestled with this famous puzzle in The City of God (15.11).

The longest lives in the Bible

1. Methuselah, 969 years (Genesis 5:27)
2. Jared, his grandfather, 962 (5:20)
3. Noah, 950 (9:29)
4. Adam, 930 (5:5)
5. Seth, 912 (5:8)
6. Kenan, 910 (5:14)
7. Enosh, 905 (5:11)
8. Mahalalel, 895 (5:17)

After the flood the numbers fall step by step. Shem lives 600 years (11:10–11), Abraham 175 (25:7) and Moses 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7), the very figure God had named in Genesis 6:3. A psalm sets the ordinary span at seventy years, “or even by reason of strength eighty” (Psalm 90:10).

Why so long?

Many traditional readers take the ages at face value, as a picture of a younger world. Many scholars compare them with the Sumerian King List, clay tablets from ancient Iraq that give eight kings before the flood 241,200 years between them. In both, the distant past is a time of enormous spans, and the flood is the line after which life shortens. Attempts to turn the years into months fail on the arithmetic: Enoch would have become a father at about five.

A byword for old age

In English, “as old as Methuselah” means older than anyone can remember, and the name is borrowed for very old things. A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains, more than 4,800 years old, is called Methuselah. So is a date palm that sprouted in 2005 from a 2,000-year-old seed found at Masada. A six-liter bottle of Champagne is a methuselah too. And Luke keeps the old man in the family tree of Jesus: “the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch” (Luke 3:37).