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Methuselah was the oldest person whose age is mentioned in the Bible. Genesis 5 states that he died at the age of 969 in the year of the great flood. This makes him the only person who walked the earth with Adam and was still alive at Noah's time.
This is not the place to speculate about Methuselah's age and different translations and interpretations contradicting each other. If you are interested, Wikipedia has a whole chapter on the topic.
But even if Methuselah's age is correct, his namesake, the World's Oldest Tree has lived almost five times that long. It lives in California's White Mountains at 13,000 feet elevation in the world's oldest forrest, Methuselah Grove and by 2007, it has reached the biblical age of 4,768 years.
This tree started growing at around the time when the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed (2600 BC). It were 600 years old when Stonehenge was completed (2000 BC) and 800 years at the beginning of the Bronze Age (1800 BC). When it was 1,100 years old (1500 BC) the Maya Civilization rose in Central America and when it was 1,300 years old (1300 BC), Moses lead the Hebrews from Eygpt to the land of Israel. It was 1,400 years old when the ancient Pueblo civilization rose in North America while at the same time, at the other end of the world, the Greeks fought in the Trojan War (1194 BC). It was 1,800 years old at the beginning of the Iron Age (800 BC) and passed 2000 years when the city of Rome was founded (753 BC). It was close to 2,100 years old when Gautama Buddha achieved enlightenment and founded Buddhism in India and older than 2,100 years when China's first emperor built the Great Wall of China (528 BC). When it was 2,500 years old, Julius Caesar was born. It was 2,600 years old when Jesus Christ was born and 3,200 years old when Muhammad founded Islam (610). King William conquered England when it was 3,760 years old (1066) and Christoph Columbus landed in America when it was 4,370 years old (1492). It wa salmost 4,400 years old when the United States declared independence and had reached the age of 4,450 when California joined the Union. And it keeps getting older still!
Another interesting trivia about Methuselah: as far as I know it is the only name from the Old Testament that made it to Mars, where a landscape is named after him. |