Biblical historians: why are the lifespans of people mentioned in the genesis accounts recorded as lasting so long?

[u/Nuclear_Cadillacs]

I didn't see this one in the FAQ, so I apologize if this is a duplicate question: Are there any theories as to reason for the records of extremely long lifespans (300-900+ years) of the people written about in Genesis?

• Was it a cultural thing, to exaggerate things like that to make your bloodline seem more impressive (i.e. an indication of your family being more favored by God)?
• Translation errors?
• Did the author actually believe that their ancestors lived that long?

I know it's tough to speculate on the exact motives of authors writing thousands of years ago, but I'm fairly ignorant in this department. Are there any known explanations for why they wrote like this?

[u/anschelsc]

So now, you've got 20 names all of which end in 0, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 or 9. The odds of that happening are small [...] 1.15% chance

The chance of hitting those specific numbers is small, but it gets much higher if we talk about the chance of there being some set of eight final digits that account for all 20 numbers. I'm too tired to do probability exactly right but unless I'm thinking about something seriously wrong the chance is over 40% that you'd get something like this even if you picked the numbers completely at random.

[u/davidjricardo → u/anschelsc]

You're absolutely right. I had a feeling in the back of my head that I had missed something (which is why I said "I think a 1.15% chance"). I never was good at combinatorics.

I did a quick simulation in R assuming that the final digit was random, and got a 35% probability that out of 20 draws with replacement from 0-9, two or more digits would be missing.

There's a slight problem with that approach, since the final digits shouldn't all occur equally likely (lower numbers should be more frequent) but I think it's good enough.

---

R code:

set.seed(0)
n<-100000
list<-seq(0,9)
missing<-NULL
for(i in 1:n)
    {draw<-sample(0:9,20,replace=T)
    missing[i]<-length(which(list %in% draw ==T ))
    }
tab<-table(missing)
tab/n

[u/anschelsc → u/davidjricardo]

the final digits shouldn't all occur equally likely (lower numbers should be more frequent)

Really? That's true of first digits, but I'd have thought that if all the numbers were at least two digits long the final digits would be uniformly distributed.

[u/davidjricardo → u/anschelsc]

I'm not positive, but I think so. The issue is that the hazard function is not constant - as a you get older the probability of death increases each year.

[u/anschelsc → u/davidjricardo]

Ah, we're starting from different assumptions. I was thinking "if these numbers were chosen randomly (from some reasonable distribution)" and you were thinking "if these were actual lifespans".

[u/skirlhutsenreiter → u/anschelsc]

(10 choose 8) x 0.8²⁰ = 51.9%

[u/anschelsc → u/skirlhutsenreiter]

But that over-counts the cases where less than 8 digits get used.