Genesis 5:29, commentary and pictures

Lamech called his son Noah in the expectation that this same son would bring comfort concerning work and toil of hands because of the ground which the Lord had cursed. The naming belongs to the literal pre-Flood record in which nine generations averaged 912 years of life, showing the original great longevity given to humanity. The patriarchs from Adam to Noah lived nearly a thousand years, with one or two exceptions living between nine hundred and a thousand years.

Those long lifetimes were protracted because the tree of life had power to perpetuate life so that as long as Adam and Eve ate of it they could not die, and that life-giving power was transmitted from Adam and Eve to the antediluvians. At this time human life was still measured by centuries because only a few generations had passed since Adam had access to the tree that prolongs life, so the race still retained much of its early vigor with rare powers to plan and execute. That long life and ability was given to be devoted to the service of God, to make the Creator's name a praise in the earth and to answer the purpose for which life was given, but the people failed to do this.

Though there were many giants of great stature and strength, renowned for wisdom and skillful in devising cunning and wonderful works, they gave loose rein to iniquity, so their guilt was in proportion to their skill and mental ability. The race was created with ten times more vital force than it now possesses, for otherwise its violations of the laws of health and life would long ago have extinguished it. This cutting down of human years to contemptible brevity, harrowed with pain and with diseases that seize the infant at birth, is caused by awful violations of God's laws of health and life.

After that early period average human lifespan steadily decreased through woeful physical deterioration, to an average of 332 years over nine generations after the Flood. Human life afterward tapered down to between one and two hundred years by the time of Egyptian bondage. By the time of Moses and David, about halfway from Adam to the present day, the average was only seventy years, and at present it is about thirty-five years, with the average in Europe and the United States only thirty years and in great cities only twenty years. These early generations stand in contrast to the sickness and mortality prevailing in the present generation.

The genealogy shows how knowledge was kept before the Flood, since Adam was formed in God's image and pronounced good, instructed by the Creator in all wisdom pertaining to the material world and in the history of creation, and himself witnessed the events of nine centuries, and he imparted his knowledge to his descendants. With such long lives seven generations lived upon the earth at the same time with opportunity to consult together, each profiting by the knowledge and experience of all. Without books or written records, men of great physical and mental vigor had strong memories able to grasp and retain what was communicated and to transmit it unimpaired to posterity, giving that age unrivaled advantages for acquiring religious and scientific knowledge, greater than modern people have even with the benefit of the work left by master minds who planned and studied and wrote.

Noah and his son Shem stand in the line that carried what God taught Adam directly to later generations. Adam was still alive when Methuselah was 243 years old, Methuselah was still alive when Shem was 98 years old, Shem lived 150 years after the birth of Abraham and 50 years after the birth of Isaac, and Abraham lived till Jacob and Esau were 15 years old and Isaac till they were 120, so Adam imparted it to Methuselah, Methuselah to Shem, Shem to Abraham and Isaac, and these patriarchs to Jacob, the father of the tribes of Israel. Noah was one of the righteous men before the Flood who with Seth, Enoch, Methuselah and others presented truth and kept the knowledge of God continually before the world. He was a faithful preacher who warned the old world that a flood was coming, and Methuselah, his sons and grandsons, and others learned from him and helped build the ark. He lived among a long-lived race that despised the truth as people despise truth today, whose imaginations of the heart were evil and only evil continually, who formed secret societies to work in darkness to do violence, and whom the Lord destroyed by a flood.