Methuselah: The Oldest Man in the World, and Enoch's Heir
He is famous for a single number, 969. The Book of Enoch gives him a more interesting role: the man who received the books, kept them and passed them on.
In shortAccording to Genesis 5, Methuselah lived 969 years, longer than any other person mentioned in the Bible. He was the son of Enoch, the father of Lamech and the grandfather of Noah.
969. That is the number, and it is almost all that most of us know about Methuselah. He lived longer than anyone else in the Bible, and his name has become a byword for extreme old age. Beyond that the Book of Genesis tells us nothing about him: he was born, fathered sons and daughters, and died. He has no deed and no line of dialogue.
The Book of Enoch fills the gap, and the picture that emerges is surprising. The Methuselah of the Book of Enoch is a busy man: a messenger, a witness, and above all the keeper of a library.
The arithmetic of Genesis
Genesis 5 delivers the numbers with the dryness of a ledger. Enoch fathered Methuselah at the age of 65. Methuselah fathered Lamech at 187. Lamech fathered Noah at 182, and the flood came when Noah was 600. Add up the last three numbers and you get 969.
By this reckoning, Methuselah died in the very year of the flood. The Torah does not say so outright, but the numbers do. The rabbis of the Talmud noticed. In tractate Sanhedrin they expound the verse “And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth”: those seven days were the days of mourning for Methuselah, and the flood waited until they were over.
In the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Torah, the numbers are different, and according to many of its manuscripts Methuselah went on living for fourteen years after the flood, although he was not in the ark. The difficulty troubled early Christian scholars, among them Jerome and Augustine, who devoted a discussion to it in The City of God. The Samaritan version of the Torah has a third number: there Methuselah lives only 720 years, and by that reckoning too he dies in the year of the flood. Three versions, three numbers, and none of them says what the man did in all those years.
Apparently even a man who did nothing can keep commentators busy for generations, provided he lived long enough.
The son who receives the books
In 1 Enoch, Methuselah is first of all an addressee. Large parts of the book are phrased as things Enoch says to his son, opening with the words “And now, Methuselah my son.” To him Enoch tells his dreams, to him he explains the courses of the lights of heaven, and him he asks to gather his brothers to hear his last words.
Above all, it is to him that Enoch hands the books:
And now, Methuselah my son, I am telling you all these things and writing them down for you. I have revealed everything to you and given you the books in which all this is written. Methuselah my son, keep the books written by your father's hand, so that you may pass them on to the generations to come. I have given wisdom to you, to your children and to the children who will be born to you, so that they may pass this wisdom on to their children, for all generations.
1 Enoch 82:1–2
This is one of the important moments in the book, although it has no angel in it and no vision. Enoch has seen the heavens, but Enoch is about to be taken. What will remain after him is what was written, and what was written will remain only if someone keeps it. Methuselah is that someone. In today's terms we would say he is the first librarian. And the librarian gets working instructions too: to keep the books written by his father's hand, and to hand them on to the generations to come.
A messenger to the ends of the earth
Methuselah also has a more practical role in the book. When Noah is born, and his father Lamech is frightened by the sight of the baby, it is Methuselah who sets out. He travels to the ends of the earth, calls out to Enoch, hears from him that the child is Lamech's son and that a flood is coming, and returns with the answer.
It is easy to miss how special his position is. Enoch no longer lives among human beings, and Lamech cannot reach him. Methuselah is the only one with a foot in each world: the son of the man who walked with God, and the grandfather of the man who will build the ark. Everything that passes from Enoch to Noah, and from the world before the flood to the world after it, passes through him. No other son of Enoch is mentioned by name so often in the book.
The Methuselah of 2 Enoch
2 Enoch opens with his birth:
And this is what he told: At that time, when I was a hundred and sixty-five years old, my son Methuselah was born to me.
2 Enoch 1:2
Anyone who remembers Genesis will stop here. There Enoch is 65 when Methuselah is born, and here he is 165. The number is not a copyist's slip. It is what the Septuagint says, and it is one of the hints that the author of 2 Enoch knew the Torah in its Greek version.
Later in the book, when Enoch returns from heaven for thirty days to say goodbye, he asks Methuselah to gather the family. The book even gives the names of his brothers: Regim, Riman, Uchan, Chermion and Gaidad. And after Enoch is taken for the last time, Methuselah and his brothers build an altar at the place from which he went up, and offer a sacrifice there before all the people. For a moment the librarian becomes a priest as well.
A name and a number
The meaning of the name Methuselah is uncertain. Some have explained it as “man of the dart,” that is, a man of weapons, and there are other proposals. Here too, as with everything about him, the Bible is silent.
The name itself, on the other hand, has had an impressive career. “As old as Methuselah” is a common expression in many languages. A bristlecone pine in the mountains of California, more than 4,800 years old and one of the oldest trees in the world, is named after him, and so is an oversized wine bottle that holds six liters. Anyone who wants to say “a very long time” in one word turns to him.
We remember Methuselah for the length of his life, and that is an odd kind of fame. Longevity requires no talent, no courage and no original idea. Mostly it requires patience. Perhaps that is why the authors of the Book of Enoch were not content with the number, and gave him a job.
The job they gave him says something about what they themselves thought of time. A person can live 969 years and vanish without leaving a mark. A book can survive for thousands of years, on condition that in every generation someone is willing to receive it from the generation before and hand it to the generation after. The Methuselah of the Book of Enoch is the first link in that chain. Whoever is reading the book today is, for the time being, the last.
