Birthdays

1. Controversy surrounds the antediluvian genealogies in Genesis. Are the ages realistic? As I've often observed, if professing Christians find it hard to believe that people could live that long, do they believe Christians will live forever after the resurrection of the just? What's a 1000 years compared to eternal life? 

2. But now I'd like to make some different points. The objection has it backwards. The antediluvian genealogies are not about longevity but mortality. What was lost when Adam and Eve were banished from the garden. Loss of immortality. Loss of access to the tree of life for Adam's posterity.

3. In addition, the controversy can blind us to other interesting things about the genealogies. We take birthdays for granted. That's a fixture of our culture. I don't know how widespread it is. 

But because we take birthdays for granted, that may cause us to overlook how far back that extends. It goes all the way back to the history of the antediluvians. 

4. Of course, babies weren't born in hospitals until modern times, and the antediluvians may not have had calendars, so they couldn't date and celebrate birthdays with the same accuracy we can. Maybe they marked one's age in terms of solar years or seasons. If the area had recognizable seasons, and you were born in spring, summer, fall, or winter, you might mark your age by when the same season came around. Likewise, certain constellations have a seasonal position or magnitude. In that regard, the fourth day (esp. Gen 1:14) may, among other things, foreshadow birthdays and genealogies. 

5. Birthdays are more significant in a fallen world characterized by mortality and the lifecycle. The sense that life has a beginning, middle, and end. 

And the significance of birthdays would be intensified in the past by high rates of mortality due to the prevalence of fatal illness, famine, untreatable injuries, crime, and war. Unlike modernity, there was no presumption that you'd still be alive from one year to the next. So I expect that lent birthdays a certain suspense, foreboding, and poignancy that is lacking today. 

By the same token, will we still have birthday celebrations in the world to come. We might if we continue to have children in the world to come. At least through childhood. But what about adults? When your sainted mother turns 1 trillion-years-old, do you compliment her: "You don't look a day over 999-billion-years old!"