Texts in Conversation
The Christian theologian Justin Martyr explains Adam’s death at 930 by saying a day for God equals a thousand years, using Psalm 90. Jubilees uses the same idea to address why Adam did not die in that day, showing how both try to solve this problem.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Jubilees 4:29
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
29 And at the close of the nineteenth jubilee, in the seventh week in its sixth year [930], Adam died, and all his sons buried him in the land of his creation, and he was the first to be buried in the earth. 30 And he lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore it was written concerning the tree of knowledge: 'On the day that you eat of it you shall die.' For this reason he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it.
Date: 170–125 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 81.3
Early Christian
3 Now we have understood that the phrase among these words, ‘According to the days of the tree [of life] shall be the days of my people; the works of their toil shall abound,’ points in a hidden way to a thousand years. For as Adam was told that on the day he ate from the tree he would die, we know that he did not live a full thousand years. We have also understood that the saying, ‘The day of the Lord is as a thousand years,’ bears on this.
Date: 155–160 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... This verse addresses an exegetical problem in Genesis 2:17. According to that verse, God commanded the man not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and threatened him “for on the day you eat from it you shall surely die.” Soon after, the snake promised the man and the woman that they would not die if they ate from the fruits of the Garden, and accused God of deception ... Jubilees 4:30 solves this problem by a reinterpretation of the word “day” in Genesis 2:17, “for on the day you eat from it you shall surely die,” not as 24 hours, but rather as a 1000-year period. The first man, who died at the age of 930 (Genesis 5:5), therefore did indeed die on the same “day” on which he ate, during the same 1000-year period. The identification of “one day” with “1000 years” is based upon Ps 90:4, which equates the two “in the eyes of God” ..."
Michael Segal, The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 310–311.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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