The "days of man" and 120 Jubilees

How one interpretation of Genesis 6:3 may indicate the end is here

Recently, I wrote an article about whether or not we are “in those days and at that time,” according to an end-times prophecy from Joel. In that article, I made it clear a few things I believe strongly about Bible prophecy:

• First, that we are living in the generation Jesus speaks of in Matthew 24—the generation that will see events like the Tribulation and Second Coming.

• Second, that you should not believe any current prophet or scholar who declares that “God told me a generation is XX years long.”

• Third, that we should only trust what the Bible says about the length of a generation.

I then pointed to Psalm 90:10, which indicates that most humans live between 70 and 80 years. The current average life expectancy of 78.9 years seems to confirm this.

Why does this matter? It matters because it has been 72 years and six months since the birth of Israel on May 14, 1948, an event that started the prophetic clock ticking. We’re past the 70-year point and I believe we are nearing the end of the timeline.

If you haven’t read that article, please do. You can find it here.

What about the 120 years of Genesis 6:3?

But I received an interesting question from a reader in response to that article. That subscriber asked about Genesis 6:3, which seems to provide an alternate biblical definition of a generation:

And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”

Why would I set aside the 120-year answer and focus instead on the 70- or 80-year answer?

That’s a very good question, and while I answered that reader in the comments to the original post, I’d like to explore it more in detail here.

To begin, I take the Bible very seriously and believe the teachings and stories in the book of Genesis to still be incredibly relevant today. So when God says the human lifespan is 120 years long, then I would not dream of discounting that statement.

This verse very well could mean that a generation is 120 years long and, therefore, we have another 40 years to wait until Jesus returns. I hope that isn’t true, but I accept that it could be true.

But I also think God gave us the capability of thinking rationally and using our intellect to understand His Word. All it takes is for me to look at the world around me. How many people do I know who have lived to the age of 120? Zero.

But I know dozens and probably hundreds of people living into their 80s, 90s and even the age of 100. This makes sense, given that the human lifespan is almost 79 years. That’s an average, which means plenty of people will live past that span.

So if 120 was set as a limit to human life—or an average lifespan—we should expect to see a lot of people reach that mark and keep living. We would know people who lived to 125 or 130.

But obviously we don’t. The oldest person alive right now is a 117-year-old living in Japan. The oldest American is Hester Ford, who is either 115 or 116. (There is some confusion about her birth certificate.) The longest documented lifespan in modern history is Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years old.

Old Testament figures lived much, much longer

That’s in modern times. Any student of the Bible, however, knows that many, many people recorded in the histories of the Bible lived much longer. Methuselah lived to the age of 969. Adam lived 930 years. Noah lived to 950. Abraham lived to 175 and Jacob lived to 147.

However, generations later, Moses only lived to 120—which does fall in line with Genesis 6:3. I especially like the description of Moses at the time of his death: “Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated” (Deuteronomy 34:7). May this be true of all of us as we age!

So why did some patriarchs live for centuries and centuries but eventually the lifespan of humans began to decrease? Theologically, there are a couple of different ways to think about this conundrum.

The first may have something to do with the Great Flood. If you pay close attention to biblical genealogies, you realize that those who lived enormously long lives were of the generation that preceded the Flood. The generations that followed began to live shorter lives: 600 years…then around 400 years…then to 200 years and less. By the time of Moses—the author of Genesis—people were living around 120 years.

I’ve encountered several theories to explain this:

• People began eating meat after the Flood instead of a purely vegetarian diet, so maybe the declining lifespan was related to that.

• The atmosphere could have had more oxygen before the Flood, which made human bodies healthier and better able to thrive. (This might be due to the “dome” or “firmament” that separated the waters at Creation, which was released during the Flood.)

• The overall post-Flood environment may have been less healthy once the water receded.

• Or maybe the “genetic bottleneck” caused by saving only Noah’s family resulted in a limited gene pool, and those genes tapped out at 120 years. (This one does make a lot of sense, given what we know today about genetics.)

Anyway, there are a lot of interesting ideas out there, and I personally have studied this for a long time. But one explanation that makes a lot of sense to me starts with Adam.

When a “day” is not a day and a “year” is not a year

Romans 6:23 says death is the result of sin. When God created Adam and Eve, death was not part of the Garden. Death only came into the world when they sinned, and with every generation, death began to take greater hold. That may be why Adam lived so long and most generations lived shorter lives after him. Each generation saw a progressively shorter lifespan because of original sin.

By David’s time, 120 years had been reduced to 70 or 80 years, which is where we are today—and thanks to modern medicine, the lifespan trajectory is now moving up instead of down.

But there’s another way to see this that, personally, I find very compelling. It treats Genesis 6:3 not as a limit to human endurance but as a prophecy, which explains why people lived far beyond 120 years even after the Flood. This is known as the 120 Jubilees prophecy.

In Genesis 2:17, God tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Of course, Adam and Eve didn’t immediately die when they sinned. Adam lived nine more centuries! So how do we explain this?

One way is by taking the Bible at its word when 2 Peter 3:8 says “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

That means when Adam died at the age of 930, he fell just short of living one thousand years. In other words, he died before the end of that millennial day.

120 Jubilees and 6,000 Years

Based on this explanation, some students of Scripture have suggested that the “120 years” of Genesis 6:3 represent 120 periods of time—not literal years. What could those periods of time be?

In the Bible, God counts time in sevens. In Genesis 1, He takes seven days to create the world. Then in Leviticus 25, God tells the Hebrew people to mark every seventh year as a Sabbath year, during which they are to let the land rest and plant nothing. At the end of seven Sabbath years, they are to commemorate with the Year of Jubilee. So a Jubilee period is a 50-year period of time based on seven sabbath years: 7 x 7 years is 49, followed by a year of Jubilee.

If the generation of mankind is 120 “years” and each year represents a 50-year Jubilee period, then 120 x 50 = 6,000.

What’s significant about that number? Throughout the centuries, many Jewish scholars taught that the seven days of Creation in Genesis 1 correspond to the entirety of human history. So when God takes six days plus a day of rest to create everything that exists—and if a day is a thousand years to God—then God is saying, “There will be 7,000 years for humanity.”

During the first 6,000 years, humans will have an opportunity to manage the earth. Then comes the Millennial reign, in which Jesus Christ reigns for a thousand years.

So when Genesis 6:3 says “his days shall be one hundred and twenty years,” this theory suggests it is a reference to the 6,000 years allotted to human existence. We don’t know exactly how old the earth is, but many Young Earth Creationists and a famous 17th-century theologian added up the genealogies in Genesis and determined that our planet may have been created as recently as 4,004 BC. That’s slightly more than 6,000 years ago.

In other words, humanity’s 6,000 years are over.

God started His clock at the very beginning of Creation, and we just happen to be the generation that is alive as all things are being fulfilled.

Again, the 120 Jubilees Prophecy is just one interpretation that makes sense of a potentially confusing passage of Scripture. But it does help explain why Genesis references a 120-year generation and Psalms defines a 70-year generation. More than anything, it definitely suggests that—as I write in my book Tipping Point—the end isn’t just near, the end is here.