Not sure that the 120 years thing is supposed to be taken absolutely literally as a cap, but maybe more as a general declaration of the range we won’t get far past. I don’t pretend to be a scholar on this. FYI, you also have to deal with the fact the the bible itself documents cases after this verse of people living longer then 120, such as Abraham (175) and Issac (180) to name a few.

Wow! Scotty V going non-literal on us. Rock on Scott! Welcome to the 21st century, bro!

Scott is right. I think we can miss the larger points when we try to read the story and ask “how could that literally work” or “how does one verse written in one century reconcile with another verse written in another”. We may miss the forest for the trees. These are ancient symbolic stories, and their “truth” is in the underlying meaning not the details of the dialog and scenes. It’s a story, the characters can live as long as the author wants, right? Instead, maybe we should ask, “what did the author mean?”

My take on Cain and Abel is that it represent the shifts in culture from a hunter-gather society (Abel) to agrarian society (Cain) and the struggle for a nomadic herding culture of the ancient people to survive in a changing region. With the advent of agriculture, people were able to say in one place, accumulate wealthy elite classes of people, and develop oppressive governments and armies. That meant bigger cities and more “corruption” and cross pollination of ideas/religions. The story may represent a frustration with the larger more dominant agricultural neighbors and the pressure that changing world must have placed on the earlier nomadic tribes to conform. Don’t forget that Israel’s ancestors wound up being pressured into Egypt because of drought. In the end, Cain (the agriculturally based domineering governments like Egypt) conquered Abel (the nomadic herders of Israel’s ancestry).

I don’t have an answer for your first question.

The public worship of God had not been established before Seth’s time; the worship of God was still family-based. Genesis 4:26 likely refers to the public worship of God.

Scott’s right about not taking the numbers literally. Numbers in the Bible are usually intended to be symbolic rather than specific. For example, when Jesus fed the 5,000, there actually would have been somewhere around double that number. The number 5,000 likely referred to the number of families (or, more accurately, the number of heads of households, i.e., men).

Noah and Moses are the only two individuals in the OT described as having “found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” That would explain why Noah and his family were spared in the flood.

@Mike: Didn’t you warn us yesturday that “If we read it with some agenda or superimpose a later meaning on top of the text” we could miss what is really being said…so is it not also dangerous to read the bible simply from a social activism and anti-empire point of view, would one not read into it symbolism that might not have ever been intended by the authors? Could not someone reading from this mindset make the same mistakes that you caution here about?

@Scott: We could certainly make that mistake if we ignore the authors and focused on us. I actually think we can approach something that gets close to the author’s own intentions by learning about the author’s context and reading through their lens, not ours. But only if we ask questions that are less superficial. This is why conservative and liberal fighting about the “facts” of the bible have both equally missed the point. Liberals are just as misguided. It isn’t about “did it or didn’t it happen?”. Both polarized sides are asking the wrong questions.

If we strip away the more western individualized consumerist views, then listen to the original voices, we might see it is first and foremost the story of Israel. A story that makes critical statements about social structures and their God given call for creating a just society free of kings (dictators), with forgiveness of debts (sacrifices), and with structures for preventing generational wealth (jubilee). It condemns society’s fallen status as a betrayal of that mission.

I think the power structures would like us to forget that. They want us to trivialize and individualize these stories or confuse them with crude attempts at science or history. Think for just a minute how it might look to the artist/author who wrote a symbolic story about the rise and fall of God’s desire for a kingdom of justice, when we come along and try to pick it apart and wonder if the details in the story could have literally happened. It would be like watching the movie “Crash” and focusing on why the characters drove an Escalade instead of an Explorer in scene 2. It would miss the bigger social statements of the film.

The questions so far are asking about details “in” the story, but maybe we are forgetting to ask why the story was written. So that is my question for you: from your “point of view”, why did these these ancient Jewish authors create, edit, and preserve the story of Cain and Abel? I think those are the kinds of “living” questions that make our sacred text so powerful and such a joy to unpack.

I think the big picture that most of us miss is that God wants to have a personal relationship with his creation. He goes out of his way and changes his mind to destroy us completely because he loves us so much. If only we loved Him a portion of that. I believe the Bible is a history book. It cannot record every detail but gives us a complete story of Gods love for us and what he went through to reconcile us to Himself. We are not worthy of that love, but we can accept it as a gift just as life itself is a gift. How will we live it today?