ANTEDILUVIAN PATRIARCHS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 135, 4 December 1909, Page 13

ANTEDILUVIAN PATRIARCHS.

AN OLD THEORY REVIVED. The problem of reducing to something like their allotted span the great ages to which the Antediluvian patriarchs ar© recorded as having lived ha-s for some time occupied the attention of students. Some of the theories which have been advanced are now dealt with in the Jewish World. It is surmised that in the earliest times the moon was used for reckoning times. Counting by months, however, must have grown cumbersome, and a longer division became absolutely necessary. There is a theory that the first years Avere composed of five months ' of thirty days each, the limit of five being derived from the fingera of one hand. It is also contended that before the five-months year there was a one-month year ; in other words, that a month, the period of a moon cycle, was termed a year. An endeavour has been, made to prove this by working out the great ages of the first men in the Bible. Thus Adam's 930 years of life, calculated at 29£ days (the period of a "lunation") a year, works out at 75£ years, which must strike many people as a normal period of existence. By this reckoning, be it noted, Methuselah loses his famous record, for his 969 reputed years are reduced to 78|. Excuse for this re-arrangement is found in the Palmist's limit of life to three score and ten years, and it is maintained that between the times of Noah and Moses no such .extraordinary change could have taken place as to reduce the life 'of man by ele\en-twelfths. The next stage in the marking of time is supposed to have been the discovery of the equinoxes in spring and autumn, when day and night were exactly the same length. This would give five months of thirty days each. On this basis of a year of 150 days, Abraham's 175 years work out at seventy-two and Isaac's 180 at seventy-four. (The theory has often been advanced ; but one simple considerlion shows it to be untenable. In every case the age of the patriarch at the time of the birth of his firstborn son (not necessarily his first child) is given. On the supposition that the "years" were moons (thirteen to the year), the first son of Adam was born when his father was just ten years old ; Seth, at the time of the birth of Enos was nearly seven ; Enos had a son at six, and, increasing in precocity for two more generations, the son of Enos saw his first-born boy at five years and five years and five months, and the grandson of Enos at just five years.)

Mr. W. C. Irwin, a British subject, recently filed a deed >in the Hawaiian Courts to pi'ove his title to tho ownership of the island of Lanai, one of the Sandwich Islands, which has an area of 161 Bi|\iH.fe miles and a population at 600.