How old was Noah when he died?

The line that closes his story

Genesis 5 is a list with a drumbeat: each man lived, had a son, lived on, “then he died.” Noah’s entry starts there and breaks off at 5:32, with his three sons. Four chapters of flood, covenant and vineyard follow. Only then does the list pick up its beat again and finish his line.

Noah lived three hundred fifty years after the flood. All the days of Noah were nine hundred fifty years, and then he died.

That is all. Genesis tells one episode from those 350 years, the vineyard and Noah’s drunkenness (9:20–27), and says nothing of where he died or was buried.

Who was alive when he died

Follow the numbers of Genesis 11 and the world at Noah’s death is crowded with his descendants. Shem’s son Arpachshad was born two years after the flood (11:10), and eight generations after him comes Abram, the future Abraham. If Abram was born when his father Terah was seventy, the plain reading of Genesis 11:26, that was 292 years after the flood, and Noah was still alive for Abram’s first 58 years.

There is a catch. Abram left Haran at 75 (12:4), and Acts says he left after his father died (Acts 7:4). Terah died at 205 (Genesis 11:32), so on that reading Terah was about 130 when Abram was born, and Noah had died a couple of years before.

A long life, then a falling line

Noah is the hinge between the old lifespans and the new. Before him, most of the men in Genesis 5 pass 900. After him the numbers drop, generation by generation, as Genesis 11 gives them:

• Shem, 600 years (11:10–11)
• Arpachshad, 438 (11:12–13)
• Shelah, 433 (11:14–15)
• Eber, 464 (11:16–17)
• Peleg, 239 (11:18–19)
• Reu, 239 (11:20–21)
• Serug, 230 (11:22–23)
• Nahor, 148 (11:24–25)
• Terah, 205 (11:32)

By Abraham the figure is 175 (25:7). Why the first lives are so long, and how they compare with the Sumerian King List, is taken up under Methuselah.

Other ancient retellings

Later writers filled in what Genesis left out. The Book of Jubilees, from the second century BC, counts Noah’s 950 years as nineteen jubilees of 49 years, two weeks of years and five years, and says he was buried on Mount Lubar, one of the mountains of Ararat, the peak where it also sets the ark’s landing (Jubilees 5:28; 10:15–17). The Quran keeps the number but moves it: Noah lived among his people a thousand years less fifty, warning them, before the flood came (Quran 29:14).

Several places still show a tomb of Noah, among them Karak Nuh in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and the city of Nakhchivan in Azerbaijan. For where the ark itself came to rest, see where Noah’s ark landed.