Methuselah: How Old Was He, and What Did Enoch Leave Him?
The longest-lived man in the Bible, 969 years, and in the Enoch books the son who carried his father's secret writings.
Genesis 5:27 gives Methuselah, Enoch's son and Noah's grandfather, the longest life in the Bible: 969 years. In the Enoch books he keeps his father's writings and can still reach Enoch "at the ends of the earth."
Methuselah is the son of Enoch and grandfather of Noah. Genesis 5:27 gives him the longest life in the Bible: "all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died." If you add up the ages in the standard Hebrew text, he dies in the very year of the Flood, which led later Jewish tradition to say the Flood was delayed until the mourning for him had ended.
In the Enoch books he has a bigger job. At the end of the Astronomical Book, Enoch tells him to preserve "the books from thy father's hand" and hand them down to future generations. In 1 Enoch 106, when Lamech is frightened by the unearthly newborn Noah, it is Methuselah who travels "to the ends of the earth" to find the departed Enoch and ask what the child means. In 2 Enoch he becomes a priest after his father is taken.
His name is usually explained as "man of the dart" or "man of the javelin," though some read it as "man of Shelah," a possible deity. The long ages of the pre-Flood patriarchs resemble the enormous reigns in the Sumerian King List, which gives some kings tens of thousands of years. Methuselah has become a byword for old age. Inside the Enoch tradition he is something more interesting: the go-between who still has a way to contact his vanished father.
In 1 Enoch, Methuselah can still reach his father at "the ends of the earth" after Enoch has been taken, as if Enoch had moved rather than died.
Scholars treat the long lifespans in Genesis 5 as symbolic or schematic, comparable to the inflated reigns of Mesopotamian king lists, not as records of real ages.
