TGod looked down upon the earth (figuratively speaking) and saw that violence was the focus of man’s intentions. This grieved His heart, and He proclaimed a day of judgment coming. He resolved to preserve mankind by providing a way of escaping the coming judgment. Noah believed God. Because he believed in God, he spent over a hundred years preparing for the coming flood waters as God instructed him. Noah was not a young man when the floods came. Genesis 7:6 tells us, “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth.” Before the flood, people lived a long time. Many argue that in Genesis 6:3 we learn that God was about to reduce man’s lifespan to 120 years. There is still a lot of discussion about this. It could be referring to how long it will be before God sends the flood upon the earth. It says, “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’” This did not happen all at once. Those born before the flood still lived long lives. The person who lived to be the oldest is Methuselah. He lived to be 969 years. Jared is said to have lived till he was 962 years old. Noah lived for about 950 years. Other similar lifespans are also recorded. But what we see following the flood is a gradual decline in human lifespans.
In later genealogies in the Bible, we notice a big change in the ages of people from Eber to Peleg. At that time, the lifespan of man was cut in half swiftly. Some attribute this phenomenon to the “dividing” of the earth in Peleg’s lifetime. The argument might be that the flood caused cataclysmic events that removed the earth’s protective canopy of water, which caused a situation on Earth where our life spans declined. Genesis 10:25 tells us that it was in Peleg’s day that the “earth was divided.” Some argue that the receding waters created the continental shift, which made the continents as they are now. There was once one huge land mass, and during Peleg’s day, the cataclysmic event of a drastic continental shift did something to cause man’s lifespan to decrease.”
I was visiting a nursing home recently and saw a gentleman wearing a t-shirt that said 104 on it. I asked if that was his age. I was told that yes, it was, but the shirt is two years old! He was 106. He moved on his own. He was in the independent living section and seemed to be intelligent. The record for long life is in the 120s. I recently read that the oldest woman lived in Nebraska until last year (2022). She passed away at 122. You could say that the prophecy of Genesis 10 seems to work out to be true. However, in Psalm 90, we read that Moses limits man’s life even more. Psalm 90:10 says, “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” But this has been recognized as the average, not the limit. When I looked this up on Google, I found that the average lifespan for people on the whole earth is 69.9 years. That includes some third-world countries that have a low life expectancy. The lifespan of those living in the United States is closer to 77 years. However, we’ve been seeing a decrease in our lifespans. One report says, “Life expectancy at birth in the United States declined nearly a year from 2020 to 2021, according to new provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). That decline – 77.0 to 76.1 years – took U.S. life expectancy at birth to its lowest level since 1996. The 0.9-year drop in life expectancy in 2021, along with a 1.8-year drop in 2020, was the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”[1]
[1] Life Expectancy in the U.S. Dropped for the Second Year in a Row in 2021 (cdc.gov)