Methuselah

The Righteous Methuselah, also called Mathusala, was a patriarch before the flood, the son of Enoch, the father of Lamech and the grandfather of Noah. According to the book of Genesis he lived nine hundred and sixty-⁠nine years, the longest life mentioned in the Bible. His name has remained in everyday speech for a very old man.

In Scripture

Methuselah is mentioned in Genesis 5:21 and following, in the line of generations that links Adam to Noah. According to the Hebrew text, Enoch was sixty-⁠five when Methuselah was born, and Methuselah was a hundred and eighty-⁠seven when Lamech was born and lived seven hundred and eighty-⁠two years after that. The figures of the Septuagint, which the Orthodox Church uses, are different, a hundred and sixty-⁠seven and eight hundred and two, but the total is the same: nine hundred and sixty-⁠nine years. Scripture says of him only that he had other sons and daughters and that he died.

His name is also found in the genealogies of the First Book of Chronicles and of the Gospel of Luke, in the line of the ancestors of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

His name and his years

The Hebrew name Methushelah has been explained in various ways, among them "man of the javelin" and "his death shall send". Some early readers saw a sign in it: the flood was to come after his death, and the length of his life showed the long-⁠suffering of God, who delayed the judgment. By the Hebrew figures, Methuselah dies in the very year of the flood.

By the Septuagint figures the count leads to a difficulty that ancient writers already noticed: Methuselah would have lived fourteen years after the flood. Blessed Augustine takes up this difficulty in the City of God and blames the copying of the figures in the manuscripts.

Other writings and veneration

The Book of Enoch, a non-⁠canonical writing, shows Methuselah as the one to whom Enoch entrusted his visions. Jewish tradition remembers him as a righteous man in the time of Noah, and his name appears in Islamic tradition among the ancestors of Noah.

In the Orthodox Church Methuselah is counted among the righteous of the Old Testament and among the ancestors of the Lord according to the flesh, who are remembered on the Sundays before the Nativity, above all on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers.