I'll wager that you read the first chapter of my novel and immediately decided, "Fantasy!" I understand completely. Who has ever heard of humans living hundreds of years or the mysterious Nephilim? They don't exist anywhere in our experience. It's easy to come to the "fantasy" conclusion when you read about them.
Except . . .
I found the often-overlooked details mentioned above in the first book of the Bible. The novel City of a Thousand Gods is not fantasy. The novel is biblical fiction based on solid fact.
Where did I get the preposterous idea people ever lived upwards of 1,000 years? Genesis chapter five outlines the life-spans of pre-Flood men from Adam to Noah. Adam lived 930 years; Seth 912. Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, hung around the longest -- until age 969. Enoch was the youngerster who did not have to die, because God took him alive from the earth at age 365. Genesis 5:24 says so.
Noah didn't even become a father until after 500. Then he had three sons in quick succession.
And that tidbit about Noah, combined with the fact that the majority of those men fathered first sons somewhere in the vicinity of 100 years of age, tells us that they were all still young by our standards and enjoying good health when their chornological ages rivaled that of our California redwoods. (Don't you wonder how old they were at the onset of puberty?)
Did the writer of Genesis (Scholars believe Moses wrote the book as God directed.) have a different way of reckenoning time?
No.
If you do the math in Genesis Chapter 11, you'll discover that Shem's pre-Flood body out-lasted many of his descendants and was still around when the Israelites followed Joseph to Egypt. I assume that's why Joseph's father, Jacob, told Pharoah that the 130 years he had "sojourned" had been "few and evil" and he had not "attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers" (see Gen.47:9). His great-something grandfather Shem was still alive.
Which begs the question: Why did men live so long back then? There are several theories.
One group of vegetarians today teaches that men began living shorter lives after the Flood because no one ate meat until then. And meat shortens one's life.
While I don't know if meat shortens lives or not, I think people ate meat before the Flood.
- When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he killed animals to provide clothing for them. And God never wastes anything. (Remember the baskets of leftovers Jesus gathered when he fed the 5,000 in the New Testament? No waste.) So I doubt God wasted animals just to make a couple of cute outfits for his rebellious kids. I think it likely that Adam and Eve ate the meat.
- Later, Abel's sacrifice to the Lord consisted of the "firstborn of his flock and their fat portions."
- We know Abel killed his sacrifice because one can't bring "fat portions" from a live animal. Abel's pleasing sacrifice foreshadowed the sacrifices God commanded throughout the Old Testament where he instructed his people to eat the sacrificed first-born in his presence. I believe Abel and his parents were eating meat long before Noah's Flood.
Another theory to explain pre-Flood longevity is based on the sixth verse in Genesis where God created an "expanse" (the sky) to separate "waters from the waters." We know the waters below the expanse eventually became oceans. Some theologians speculate that the waters above the expanse formed a protective canopy that prevented people from aging until it fell to earth when the "windows of heaven were opened" during the Flood (see Gen. 6:11).
I subscribe to that theory since it sounds the most logical to me. After the canopy disappeared, all bets were off and now it's wrinkle city for the rest of us during our "few and evil" years on this planet.
Fortunately, eternal life is just around the corner.
But before any of us depart, I hope you'll meet me here again in a day or two and we'll discuss the Nephilim. Very interesting stuff.
Read the first two chapters of the novel at
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