If today's life expectancy is about double what it was in ancient times, why does the Bible assert that man's allotted span is "three score years and ten"?
- "Life expectancy" is the length of life which the average baby could expect at birth. As such, it is purely a mathematical construct and has little to do with real lengths of life over historical periods. In times - and environments - where perinatal mortality is high and childhood illnesses are often fatal, the average lifetime will be consequently low. Also, fatal accidents are similarly related to ages and places where life is hazardous, eg through unsafe working conditions and war.
However, the large numbers dying young do not mean that those surviving to adulthood do not live to a ripe old age. Visit any ancient cemetery and you will find plenty of septuagenarians, odd octagenarians, and even nonagenarians who lived and died 200-300 years ago.
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- "Life span", the maximum age to which any human being can live under ideal circ*mstances, is now thought to be 110-120 years. J D Montague (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1994) compared the length of life of men who survived into adulthood in ancient Greece and Rome with similar samples from three other periods. He concluded that individuals born before 100 BC lived as long (median 72 years) as those who died in the periods 1850-1899 and 1900-1949 (median 71 and 71.5 years). Only those who died between 1950-1990 had significantly longer lives (median 78 years). So the Biblical statistician seems to have been both accurate about his/her own time and prescient about the future.
Michael Hutton, Camberwell, London.
- Michael Hutton is in error in attributing to some Biblical statistician the estimate of human lifespan of three score years and ten. It comes from a psalmist together with a proviso that this may be extended to four score years (Psalm 90). Far more explicit is Genesis 6 v.3 that "his days shall be an hundred and twenty years". This forecast has rarely been exceeded despite the passage of years.
John Wynne, Otley, Yorks.
- With the patriarchs living such long lives (Adam 930 years, Seth 912, Enos 905, Cainan 910, Mahalaleel 895, Jared 962, Enoch 365 not out, Methuselah 969, Lamech 777, Noah 950 - Genesis c5 & c9), the ancients could stand a lot of infant mortality and still have an average span of 70.
John Gill, Heswall, Wirral.
