Құдай кітабындағы ең ұзақ өмір сүрген адам – Мәтусала

Longest lived figure mentioned in the Bible
the biblical figure

Methuselah (/US//m//ə/'/θ//uː//z/,/l//ɑː/; Məṯūšélaḥ, in pausa מְתוּשָׁלַח Məṯūšālaḥ, "His death shall send" or "Man of the Javelin" or "Death of Sword"; Mathousalas) According to the Book of Genesis, Methuselah was the son of Enoch, the father of Lamech, and the grandfather of Noah. Elsewhere in the Bible, Methuselah is mentioned in genealogies in 1 Chronicles and the Gospel of Luke. His life is described in further detail in other texts such as the Book of Enoch, Slavonic Enoch, and the Book of Moses. Bible commentators have offered various explanations as to why the Book of Genesis describes him as having died at such an advanced age; some believe that Methuselah's age is the result of a mistranslation, while others believe that his age is used to give the impression that part of Genesis takes place in a very distant past. Methuselah's name has become synonymous with longevity, and he has been portrayed and referenced in film, television and music.

Interpretations of the Bible following biblical literalism take Methuselah's 969 years to be 969 solar years. Some literalists attempt to give certain arguments for how this could be: early humans had a better diet, or a water vapor canopy protected the earth from radiation before the Flood. Others introduce theological causes: humans were originally to have everlasting life, but sin was introduced into the world by Adam and Eve, its influence became greater with each generation, and God progressively shortened human life, particularly after the Flood. The Catholic Encyclopedia says "Certain exegetes solve the difficulty to their own satisfaction by declaring that the year meant by the sacred writer is not the equivalent of our year." but the same calculation applied to Enoch would have him fathering Methuselah at the age of 5 using numbers from the Masoretic Text. Donald V. Etz suggested that the Genesis 5 numbers "might for convenience have all been multiples of 5 or 10". Ellen Bennet argued that the Septuagint Genesis 5 numbers are in tenths of years, which "will explain how it was that they read 930 years for the age of Adam instead of 93 years, and 969 years for Methuselah instead of 96 years, and 950 years for that of Noah instead of 95 years" "Surely it is much more rational to conclude that Noah lived 50 years instead of 500 years before he took a wife and begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth " and then lists the Septuagint total ages with decimal points: 93.0 for Adam, 91.0 for Cainan, 96.9 for Methuselah, 95.0 for Noah, etc. This, however, also implies that Enoch became a father at the age of 6.5 and that the other antediluvian patriarchs did so at implausibly young ages.

Yigal Levin states that these long lifespans are intended simply to speed the reader from Adam to Noah. Claus Westermann states they are intended to create the impression of a distant past. Some versions of the Sumerian King List mention a character named Ubara Tutu who seems almost identical to Methuselah. He was the son of En men dur ana, a Sumerian mythological figure often compared to Enoch, as he entered heaven without dying. Ubara Tutu was the king of Sumer until a flood swept over his land. Although the ages of Methuselah and Ubara Tutu are different, they both died in a Great Flood. Babylonian writer Berossus also claims that, prior to the events of Babylon's flood myth, kings could live for tens of thousands of years, which bears some similarity to Genesis 5. In Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity, Lucian Boia says that the Bible's portrayal of Methuselah and other long lived figures features "traces of the Mesopatamian legends" found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh rules Uruk for 126 years, and his ancestors are said to have ruled for several hundred years each. Boia also notes that tales of kings who lived for thousands of years can be found in both Hindu and Chinese mythology, and that the Bible is comparatively "restrained" in depicting early humans as being able to live for hundreds of years, rather than thousands. Boia notes that following the Flood, the Bible depicts its characters' lifespans as gradually diminishing; Noah's sons lived between 400 and 500 years, while Abraham died at 175, Moses died at 120, and David died at 70, an age that the Bible portrays as old for David's time period. Boia compares early biblical figures and their vast lifespans to the people of the Golden Age in Hesiod's poem Works and Days, whose bodies are perpetually youthful.

Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed. Boia believes that Methuselah serves the symbolic function of linking the Creation and the Flood, as Adam would have died during Methuselah's lifetime and Methuselah could have learned about the Garden of Eden from Adam. The kings of the Sumerian King List lived for over a thousand years, and Mesopotamians believed both that living over a thousand years made someone divine or somewhat divine, and that their contemporary kings were descended from the kings of the Sumerian King List. Robert Gnuse hypothesizes that the author of Genesis made all of its characters die before they turned one thousand as a polemic against these Mesopotamian beliefs, as well as any claim that a king is divine. Gnuse also believes that the author of Genesis said that Methuselah died before he lived a thousand years to show that he was not divine.

Methuselah's name "has become a synonym for longevity". Saying that someone is "as old as Methuselah" is a humorous way of saying that someone is very elderly. In this context, dogs which have lived long lives have been described as "Methuselah dogs". The word "Methuselarity", a blend of Methuselah and singularity, was coined in 2010 by the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey to mean a future point in time where people are expected not to die from age related causes anymore, however long they live. A year old Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing high in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California is called Methuselah. In the 1970s mathematician John Conway introduced the Game of Life, a cellular automaton. In cellular automata, methuselahs refer to a small initial state of cells that continue to grow for a large number of generations. The character Flint from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Requiem for Methuselah" is a nearly immortal man who was born in ancient Mesopotamia during the year 3,834 BC; and was a soldier (probably of Babylon) before his powers. His identities include Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Solomon, Lazarus of Bethany, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms. He knew Moses, Socrates, Jesus, Galileo Galilei, and many more. Flint becomes lonely after living for a time on a deserted planet, and creates an immortal gynoid to keep him company. He eventually begins to slowly die because he left Earth's atmosphere, and dedicates the remainder of his days to the betterment of Mankind. In the TV series Altered Carbon, based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name, a class of people who can afford to live forever by transferring their consciousness into cloned bodies are called "Meths" or "Methuselahs." The subgiant star HD 140283, believed to be the oldest extant star discovered, is often nicknamed "The Methuselah Star" after the ancient biblical figure. The name is also used to refer to the exoplanet PSR B1620−26 b, which is one of the oldest known exoplanets with an estimated age of 12.7 billion years old. A giant monster or "Titan" named Methuselah appears in the 2019 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters, residing in Monarch Outpost 67 in Munich, Germany. In the film, it is woken up by King Ghidorah alongside the other Titans. It also makes an appearance in the 2021 graphic novel Godzilla Dominion. The Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences has an Australian lungfish named Methuselah. It is the world's oldest aquarium fish with an estimated age of 93 years old (± 9 years). Methuselah appeared in Darren Aronofsky's 2014 film Noah, with Thor Kjartansson playing him as a youth and Anthony Hopkins playing the elderly character. In the film, Noah's adopted daughter Ila (played by Emma Watson) is infertile until Methuselah blesses her. The lyrics of Ira Gershwin's song "It Ain't Necessarily So" (1935) cast doubt on various aspects of the Bible, such as the idea that Methuselah lived so long, the idea that the devil is evil, the story of Jonah, and the story of David and Goliath.