Exponential Decay of Biblical Longevities

Abstract

The Hebrew Bible is often read that men once lived nearly a thousand years. Then, after a cataclysm in the form of a flood, their life spans followed an exponential decline to contemporary values, but no explanation for this decline was offered. Recently, it has been suggested that the decline can be attributed to marriage of the descendants of Noah to a population of short-lived survivors of the flood. This journal has previously published a paper that argued that the numbers expressing these longevities have the properties of real numbers and none of the properties of artificial or made-up numbers, and that the reasons for doubting the biblical numbers do not survive close examination. Moreover, recent work argues that humans may ultimately have biblical longevities. The present article shows that the intermarriage explanation for the decay of longevities is plausible.