Why Did People Live So Long in the Bible?

Why did people live so long in the Bible? Let's look at the evidence.

Joshua lived to 110 because Moses lived to 120, and the status of Joshua was less than that of Moses. Yes, the Tâ’eb is to live to the age of 120 and then die. This makes him equal in status to Joshua but not Moses. (The Jewish view is that the משיח is to live to 120, like Moses. In Acts III it is implicit that Jesus is equal to Moses, or greater than Moses, because both were resurrected). It also makes him equal to Joseph, but not to Jacob, who lived to 147 (genesis XLVII: 28).The concept must come from a group that maintained that the Tâ’eb was NOT equal to Moses. The argument in the Tîbat Marqe is that if the Prophet to come is to be like Moses (Deuteronomy XVIII: 15 & 18), then Moses is the standard, so “like” does not mean “equal to”. If you think about it, the orthodox interpretation of the title Tâ’eb is artificial. The word naturally means “one that comes back”, being the qal (= pe’al; and don’t confuse Aramaic pe’al = Hebrew qal with Aramaic pa’el = Hebrew pi’el participle n Aramaic). To mean “one that brings something back”, i.e. the Tabernacle and the era of Râ’ûta, it would have to be in the pa’el or af’el (= Hebrew hif’il). This means the term is older than the meaning, and the meaning has been changed artificially, so that it could be denied that the one to come would be equal to Moses and would bring a new Torah. On the other hand, the term Tâ’eb does not occur in the liturgy before the 11th or 12th c., and where it occurs in the Tîbat Marqe it is always in a late addition, never in an original part of the book. This all means that the TERM was taken over from the Dositheans when the two main parties amalgamated in the 11th or 12th c., but the MEANING was artificially changed in a way that was grammatically impossible.

This means that the Marqe known to us as the codifier of Samaritan orthodoxy is not Marcus Agrippa. The choice of name must have had a motive, and as far as I can see that must have been to connect him with Marcus Agrippa, or alternatively to give his NEW theology the status of that of Marcus Agrippa. I favour the second explanation. The insistence on the numerical value of his name being equal to that of Moses shows a concept that is opposed to what he says in the Tîbat Marqe about how no-one can be equal to Moses. I can’t explain this at the moment. Have you got any suggestions? The best I can come up with just now is that he wanted to give himself the same authority as that of Marcus Agrippa, while denying his claim to be the new Moses. The start of the Epistle to the Hebrews has a third position, that Jesus is greater than Moses.