I’m 50 years old, actually I’m 54 and aging by the day. By all measures of age, I’m past the middle; halftime is over and I’m a few minutes into the third quarter with more time behind than ahead. That is if we’re measuring by the average age of an America.
But if you compare me to those from the Bible, I’m still a youngster, especially when you consider that Abraham lived to be 175 years old and his father Terah was 205. This was before germ theory and wars and covid and Al Sharpton. And it predates vaccines and hospitals and almond milk and gluten free donuts. And the clock hadn’t been invented yet so did time even exist?
And this is if we take the ages of those in the Bible at face value. The Bible was written almost 2,000 years ago and I have to assume that some of the writers were the originators of tall tales with all of the animals of the world on an ark. I have to wonder what the carnivores ate but perhaps that’s why we have no unicorns.
Jonah was a literal big fish story and Jonah “was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17) and grad school felt like a lifetime so there’s that. For now, I just take solace in the fact that I have at least 100 more years to ponder mysteries such as these.
