Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
Genesis 5:2 names the first man and woman together as Adam, the pair from whom the generations before the Flood descended. The surrounding genealogy is a literal record from Adam to Noah that briefly gives each patriarch's lifespan and states that he died. With one or two exceptions, those patriarchs lived between nine hundred and a thousand years, or nearly a thousand years. With but an exception or two, the record never mentions how old women were at the time of their death. The brief notices say that he died without describing prolonged suffering or particular diseases, showing that the people from Adam to Noah, living on plant foods, generally enjoyed health.
While Adam and Eve ate of the tree of life they could not die, because the tree possessed power to perpetuate life. That life-giving power was transmitted from Adam and Eve to their descendants, and for that reason the lives of the antediluvians were protracted to great length. The race was created with ten times more vital force than it now possesses, without which its violations of the laws of health and life would long ago have extinguished it altogether. The average age across nine generations before the Flood was 912 years, contrasted with an average of 332 years across the nine generations after the Flood, showing a decline in human longevity. Afterward life gradually tapered down to between one and two hundred years at the time of the Egyptian vassalage, to only three-score years and ten at the time of David about halfway from Adam to the present day, and now to but thirty years in Europe and the United States and but twenty years in great cities, because violation of God's laws of health and life has cut down the years of man to contemptible brevity and filled them with pain, surrounding the cradle with diseases that seize the infant at birth.
Genesis 5:2 names the first man and woman together as Adam, the pair from whom the generations before the Flood descended. The surrounding genealogy is a literal record from Adam to Noah that briefly gives each patriarch's lifespan and states that he died. With one or two exceptions, those patriarchs lived between nine hundred and a thousand years, or nearly a thousand years. With but an exception or two, the record never mentions how old women were at the time of their death. The brief notices say that he died without describing prolonged suffering or particular diseases, showing that the people from Adam to Noah, living on plant foods, generally enjoyed health.
While Adam and Eve ate of the tree of life they could not die, because the tree possessed power to perpetuate life. That life-giving power was transmitted from Adam and Eve to their descendants, and for that reason the lives of the antediluvians were protracted to great length. The race was created with ten times more vital force than it now possesses, without which its violations of the laws of health and life would long ago have extinguished it altogether. The average age across nine generations before the Flood was 912 years, contrasted with an average of 332 years across the nine generations after the Flood, showing a decline in human longevity. Afterward life gradually tapered down to between one and two hundred years at the time of the Egyptian vassalage, to only three-score years and ten at the time of David about halfway from Adam to the present day, and now to but thirty years in Europe and the United States and but twenty years in great cities, because violation of God's laws of health and life has cut down the years of man to contemptible brevity and filled them with pain, surrounding the cradle with diseases that seize the infant at birth.