How can we reconcile the extremely long life spans of the Biblical patriarchs with today's life expectancies?
It was decreed (Gen. Ch.6) that the human life span would drop sharply after the Flood, and it continued to drop in later years (compare Abraham's 175, Moses' 120, and David's 70). In the years before the Flood, a generation was many decades long, but as we can see from the genealogies in Genesis, by the time of Abraham a generation was usually only 20 or 30 years long, as it is today.
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