Tell Me Another Story, Grandpa
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I stumbled across an interesting statistic on the internet this morning, Ethel Caterham is 116 years old and is probably the oldest person alive today. Since I am only a few years shy of that and slowing down a tad I started to wonder what happened to human longevity.
With all the wonder drugs Big Pharma is coming up with and the additives food chemists have added to our diets, why are we croaking so early? I would have thought we should be up to 150 by now and even beyond, but obviously not, and why not? Something got screwed up along the way. Come to think of it, why would you want to?
Folks lived a long time in Biblical days, or so it was said. Reaching seven or eight hundred years, and then some, wasn’t unusual. If their old age pensions kicked in at 65, government payroll deductions must have been a bit steep. Methuselah could bankrupt a nation all by himself. He was 969 years old when the Grim Reaper harvested him. The heat from his birthday cake may have been the first documented cause of global warming. Blowing out the candles would have required gale force winds and the icing would be found as far away as Baghdad.
I hope there wasn’t a surprise party for the old duffer. Once a person reaches 950, a crowd jumping out from behind the couch yelling, Happy Birthday is usually fatal.
I wonder how old Methuselah really was. One couldn’t send away to Jerusalem for a birth certificate in those days. So there may have been a fair amount of guesswork about just how old some of the ancients really were. If we could somehow go back and interview a few members of his family, we might find that Methuselah was actually a month or two over 36.
All the old crocks were still procreating when they were well over a hundred too. Methuselah sired Lamech when he was 187 years old. Of course there was no television back then and the internet was centuries in the future so they had to find something to do after the sun went down. Their sexual prowess does seem remarkable though considering most men in their late 80s and 90s today aren’t advertising themselves as available for stud service. But let’s give the Old Testament boys the benefit of the doubt and say men were a bit friskier back then and leave it at that.
I don’t mean to offend anyone with my questioning of religious beliefs, but after all most of the early books of the Bible were written several hundreds of years after the event, birth, or miracle, was supposed to have happened. The story was told and retold until eventually what was remembered was compiled by someone, written down on a scroll, then copied by scribes. Plus we have the language problem. Languages change over the years, even our own. How about this little snippet from Shakespeare’s King Lear.
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggardly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue one-trunk-inhereting slave, one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service… and on and on.
But what do half of the insults mean and the Lear play is only 400 years old and was written down. Can you imagine trying to remember conversations like that sitting around a campfire?
None of the Middle East nations spoke the same language and that’s another problem. I wonder how much of the actual Biblical story remained after centuries of retelling.
I’m not saying they are wrong necessarily but some, maybe most, are questionable.
I was quite impressed with the story of Daniel in the lions’ den as a child. But now that I’m old and cynical I suspect the big cats had either just finished dinner or Dan lucked upon the only vegetarian lions in the Middle East.
Joseph’s coat of many colours was also an intriguing story. But if I had one I would never know when to wear it. Would a jacket that gaudy go with everything or nothing at all? I can just hear my wife, “And where do you think you are going in that?”
I suspect my Technicolor dream coat would end up hanging in the back of the closet with my 70’s polyester leisure suit and the tux I bought for $5 at a Legion rummage sale.
And a real kicker, Israeli archaeologists have not been able to find any trace of the Exodus out of Egypt. Did it really happen? Think about that for a while.
Believe what you want, but belief doesn’t make it true.
(Image Supplied)
