It’s not really a good question. It is asked incredulously by modern man, at most by men who have lived on the planet for only 4500 of its 6000 years. If during the pre-flood world a question were to be asked about men’s longevity, assuming those ancient men could get wind of what the planet’s peoples would come to, it would be, “How in the world is it that people in later years will live such incredibly short lives, when all of us stay around for nearly a millennium?”

We are the oddities. We are the ones causing gasps in the great human family.

Originally man was to live forever. Because of the Garden failures, death came into the world and cut man to a mere 900 or so years. Tracing the line provided for us in Genesis, only one descendant of Adam from his life until Noah, lived appreciably less than 900 years. Methuselah and his grandson were well on their way to their 1,000^th birthday.

Then something happened to cut back life expectancy even more. The Bible itself does not specify what it was that did this, so we are left with scientific speculation, some of which may be quite helpful, some of which may not.

When it is recorded in the Noahic flood that God “opened the windows of heaven,” we are led to believe that this is more than poetry. Could it be that a canopy of water that engulfed the planet was suddenly punctured when rains began to fall for the first time? Could it be that the ozone (gas) layer that had previously done so well to protect human life from radiation (they still talk of this today in “global warming” discussions), was now not functioning so well?

Could it also be that the lifting of the ban on eating animal flesh played into the deterioration of human life? Do the vegetarians among us know some things we ought to be following?

Some say simply that God’s curse was upon us, period. That He needs no means whereby to do that curing. He simply instituted a slow death upon us that will one day result in our total annihilation should Jesus not return in time.

Which He will, of course.

Put all of this and perhaps other factors into the mixture, and the description goes something like this:

Since Noah there has never been a man – of record – who has lived as many as 700 years. Quite the contrary, the numbers since the flood are progressively lower, generation after generation.

Noah’s son Shem was 600 at death. Shem’s son, 438. His son, 433. Then there was 464, 239, 230, and then the grand-father of Abraham, 148. His son terah, 205. Abraham himself dies at 175. But the record says that he died at a “good old age, an old man, full of years.” Noah, 930 years, but Abraham’s life is full and complete at 175.

Likewise his son Isaac, 180. And remember Jacob’s classic conversation with the reigning Pharaoh who is told by the patriarch that his days have been “few and evil.” He eventually dies at 147. Few indeed, by comparison!

Jacob’s favorite, Joseph, only makes it to 110.

The odds keep going down through the Pentateuch, with only superstars defying them. Moses dies at 120, and he is considered remarkable in that “his eyes were not dim, his natural vigor was not diminished.”

Psalm 90:10 seems to set the standard for the rest of recorded history. It is Moses contemplating life and commenting that the days of man are threescore and ten, unless by reason of strength he is allowed to see fourscore years.

The great King David only survived to the first of those levels.

Through Biblical and secular history there have been many variations on the theme, but 70-80 still stands as a guideline. The greatest life expectancy in today’s world is in Japan (84). The United States is around 30^th on the list, but still posts 79 years as a norm. Much of Africa is on the other side of things, 50’s and 60’s, with Sierra Leone one of the worst, 46 short years!

But the worldwide average is not far from what Moses said 3500 years ago: 67.5.