So Adam and Eve lived for 900+ years and Methuselah celebrated 930 years. Is it just me, or do these claims not strain credulity beyond its limits?

It strains credulity, and you are right to say so. Nine hundred and thirty years is not a normal lifespan, and any answer that begins by pretending the number is unremarkable has already lost you.

1. The Bible knows normal lifespans too. These chapters are not written by people who thought everyone lived for centuries. Psalm 90:10 puts a human life at “seventy years, or even by reason of strength eighty.” Genesis 6:3 caps human days at 120. Moses dying at 120 is treated as a marvel of preserved strength, not a typical death (Deuteronomy 34:7). Something unusual is being reported, and the text knows it.

2. The chapter is built on a formula. Genesis 5 repeats the same cadence: he lived, he fathered, he lived on, and he died. The refrain “and he died” tolls eight times like a bell. Whatever the numbers mean, the chapter is making an argument about death, not compiling a census — and Paul reads it exactly that way in Romans 5:12, where death spreads to all because all sinned.

3. The ages trace a curve, not a table. Adam's 930 gives way to Noah's 950, and then the numbers collapse after the flood — Abraham reaches 175, Jacob 147, and by the monarchy a long life is seventy or eighty. That downward slope is theological before it is chronological: distance from Eden on one side, the accumulating weight of sin on the other.

4. Against its neighbors, Genesis is restrained. The Sumerian King List, a well-known Mesopotamian text, gives its antediluvian kings reigns in the tens of thousands of years, adding up to more than two hundred thousand for eight kings. Genesis, sitting in the same literary neighborhood, reports hundreds. If the author wanted to impress the neighbors, he went about it strangely. More likely he is writing in a known genre while deliberately toning it down.

5. Ancient genealogies compress generations. In Hebrew, “son of” routinely means descendant, not immediate child. Matthew's genealogy skips three kings between Joram and Uzziah without a blush (Matthew 1:8), which tells you how the convention worked. Kenneth Kitchen has documented these ancient Near Eastern genealogical habits at length, and they are not what a modern reader assumes.

6. The numbers themselves look schematic. Many of the figures are round, and several cluster around the Mesopotamian sexagesimal system rather than around anything a modern actuary would produce. That has led some interpreters to read them as statements about completeness and fullness rather than durations. This is a contested proposal and should be labeled as one, but it is not an ad hoc escape hatch.

7. The manuscripts disagree, and that is informative. The Septuagint and the Masoretic text differ by a century on the age at which several of these men fathered their sons. If these were transmitted with the precision of a bank ledger, that divergence would be strange. It fits better with numbers that carried meaning and were copied with some freedom.

8. The objection assumes what it needs to prove. “Nobody lives that long” is true of the world we observe now, and it is also the exact claim under dispute. The Genesis narrative says death entered through sin (Genesis 2:17), which predicts exactly this: long lives early, shortening later. If there is a God who made a world and then grieved what it became, extended lifespans are not the implausible part. If there is not, the objection is not an argument so much as a restatement.

9. Christians genuinely differ here. Young-earth readers take the figures as straightforward durations and defend their internal coherence; old-earth readers often take them as honorific or schematic; others read Genesis 5 as a theological genealogy in a framework of its own. I am not going to pretend the church has one answer. But the disagreement is about genre and numbers, not about whether the text may be trusted at all.

The ages are strange, and Genesis does not apologize for them. But a strange number in an ancient genealogy is a question about literature and transmission, not a refutation — and the chapter's own point, that death came and kept coming, is one every reader already knows from the inside.

Sources: Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament; John Walton; Henry Morris; C. John Collins.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!