Righteous Forefather Methuselah

Place in the Antediluvian Line

According to Genesis 5:21-27, Enoch became the father of Methuselah when Enoch had lived sixty-five years; when Methuselah had lived one hundred and eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech. Lamech was in turn the father of Noah, so that Methuselah belongs to the generation immediately preceding the Flood, as grandfather of the patriarch through whom mankind was preserved.

His father Enoch is distinguished in the same genealogy as the one who 'walked with God' and was taken by the Lord rather than passing through death in the ordinary way (Genesis 5:22-24), so Methuselah's name stands beside that of one of the most notable of the early forefathers.

Methuselah also appears in the New Testament, named in the Gospel of Luke's genealogy that traces the ancestry of Jesus Christ back through the patriarchs to Adam (Luke 3). It is by virtue of this place in the line of Christ's forebears that he is honored among the Holy Forefathers.

The Longest Lifespan in Scripture

Genesis records that 'all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years; and he died,' the greatest age attributed to any person in the Bible. This singular longevity has fixed his name in wider usage as a byword for extreme age.

By a traditional chronological computation drawn from the ages given in Genesis 5, some reckon that Methuselah's death fell in the same year as the Flood; this is presented as an inference from the recorded ages rather than as an explicit statement of the text.

Commemoration

In the Orthodox Church Methuselah is numbered among the Holy Forefathers, the righteous ancestors of Christ remembered during the Nativity Fast. The Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, kept on one of the Sundays before the Nativity, gathers the patriarchs and prophets who lived before and under the Law into a single commemoration of those from whom the Savior came according to the flesh.