Methuselah

The antediluvian patriarch Methuselah, son of Enoch, is chiefly noted for living longer than any other man, a total of nine hundred and sixty‑nine years. This is all that is recorded of him in the Bible, although Jewish legend can add a little more.

Seventy or more years ago a suggestion was mooted, by one Arthur Gook in a booklet entitled "Can a young man trust his Bible?" to the effect that the long life of Methuselah was a witness to the world of that day of the inevitable coming of the judgment of the Flood. The meaning of his name, it was claimed, was "when he is dead, it shall be sent." This, so went the argument, the longer he lived the more cogent the warning, and the fact that he lived longer than any other demonstrated the forbearance of God until the last possible moment. According to the Masoretic chronology of Genesis, which is embodied in the Authorised Version, he is represented as dying in the very year of the Flood.

Arthur Gook evidently based his suggestion upon the Hebrew words muth, meaning to die, cause to die, be dead, and shalach, a verb "to send", as sending an arrow from a bow, thus making "Muth‑u‑shalach" which correctly reproduces the consonants of the name (the last letter of his name in the Hebrew Received Text is caph (ch) and not hay (h) as in the A.V.). This would then mean "be dead—send" which unless elaborated as it was in the booklet, is not very informative. Unfortunately for the theory, however, one important point was overlooked. Methuselah was not a Hebrew, and he lived nearly three thousand years before the Hebrew language came into existence. If his name was intended to have any meaning at all, it would have been derived from the language of the day in which he did live, before the Flood.

There is no doubt that the ancients gave significance to names. Thus the Hebrew Je‑ho‑shua (Joshua in the AV) means "Jehovah saves". Transliterated into Greek the name becomes Iesous and transliterated again into English it is Jesus. So Hebrew Miriam becomes Greek Mariam and thence English Mary. The spelling of the name changes as it passes from language to language but its meaning, if any, must be that which it bore in the language from which it originated.

Because that language in this case is unknown, there can be no certainty. It is possible though to embark upon a little exercise in possibilities and probabilities. The admitted earliest written language at present known is that of the Sumerians, descendants of Ham, son of Noah, in about the middle of the second millennium B.C. This was only seven centuries after the Flood and not far from the time when all the earth spoke "one language and of one speech" (Gen.11.1). It could be thought hardly likely that the antediluvian language spoken by Noah and his sons had changed much in that short time and it might well be that archaic Sumerian is not very far removed from that earlier tongue. In that case the Sumerian meaning of the name might form a better basis for assessing its significance, if any. In that language the genetic word for men or cattle in the plural is adamutu (from which comes the Hebrew word "adam" for man) and from adamutu is derived mutu for "husband" and matu as a prefix denoting men or women in the plural. The second part of the name could well be met by u‑sal‑la (peace) and suffix ka, a voice, to speak, to proclaim. Thus "Methuselach" transliterated back into Sumerian would appear as Matu‑usalla‑ka, literally "men of peace proclaiming" or as would be rendered in English, "preachers of peace", or possibly "preacher of peace". Noah his grandson is said in 2 Pet.2.5 to have been a "preacher of righteousness" and this expression in Sumerian would be matu‑dug‑ka, a very similar word.

If in fact Methuselah's name did bear this signification—there can be no certainty—it does evoke an interesting reflection. Enoch his father was devoted to God; he "walked with God" according to Gen.5.24. Methuselah's son Lamech was a godly man as shown by Gen.5.29. His grandson Noah was also and had divine approval (Gen.6.8‑9). It could be a reasonable assumption that Methuselah himself, in this God‑fearing line, shared and conveyed the same faith from father to son. If this be conceded, then from at least the early days of Enoch to the time of Noah, something like a thousand years of history, there was a consistent witness to God and righteousness in the world before the Flood.

There is some support for this conclusion in Jewish legends. Whilst mere tradition should not be taken too seriously, there is usually some basis of truth hidden at the kernel of such stories, handed down through the ages and being constantly modified and changed in the process. Nevertheless tradition does have some value. The British legend of St.George and the dragon can be traced back to the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda, in which the hero delivered the maiden from the sea‑monster of Joppa, and from that myth back to the story of Jonah and the great fish as narrated in the Bible. In this case the old traditions of Israel (preserved in this case mainly in the apocryphal Book of Enoch) depict Methuselah in this light. He is said to have been charged by his father Enoch to preserve the sacred books for future generations and to have received a vision of the coming Flood, whereupon he called together all his brothers to warn them. Later on his son Lamech at the birth of Noah came to him in great distress because of the striking appearance of his newly‑born son, whereupon Methuselah took a journey to the ends of the earth to his father Enoch to seek advice and was given the full story of the coming Flood and the part the child Noah was destined to play. All legendary but at least tending to show that in the traditions of Israel Methuselah was credited with faith.

It may have been, then, that there was a nucleus of faithful believers almost up to the end in a world that had become so hopelessly corrupt that at the last God looked down and "saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually". So God sent the Flood.

Methuselah, if righteous, must have been dead by then. According to the Septuagint (Greek Bible) chronology, which is nowadays established to be nearer the truth, he died six years before the Flood, and his son Lamech pre‑deceased him. Name or no name, if that was the case and he the last righteous man to die before the cataclysm, he was indeed a sign to that generation. There was at least a final six years for repentance. But no one repented. And they all perished.

AOH