For the first time, Mafia Methuselah is mentioned in the biblical Old Testament. According to Genesis, Methuselah reached the longest age of all those mentioned in the Bible. It is believed that he lived for almost a thousand years, which served as the birth of the famous phraseological unit of the "Methuselah century."
Methuselah's mention in history
Jewish legends tell of Methuselah as a patriarch and defender of humanity from evil spirits, who drives away death by the power of their life-giving prayers. Prayer here is akin to fighting death, a kind of spiritual sword. The story mentions that the name Methuselah comes from the words “shalah” and “mawet,” which means “to send death.” Methuselah was the grandfather of Noah - the one who built the ark of the same name.
It was believed that when the prayers of Methuselah and Noah were joined together, they were able to delay the onset of the Flood. And, no matter how surprising it may sound, but the flood began seven days after the death of the patriarch, as soon as the funeral week ended. The Bible says that the elder lived to be 969 years old and no one else was able to overtake him in terms of life expectancy. The numbers seem completely implausible, and linguists have long made various assumptions about the Hebrew system of timekeeping. It is believed that the ancient Jews considered the year one full lunar month. Based on this assumption, it follows that the real age of Methuselah was a little over eighty years. If we draw a parallel with modern centenarians, then the antediluvian old man is inferior to many by twenty to thirty years.
The meaning of phraseology "methuselah century"
The expression about Methuselah gained its significance due to the number of years lived by the great elder, a direct descendant of Adam and Eve, one of the few antediluvian patriarchs. The word "antediluvian" is used here in the literal sense, they mean those who lived before the time of the Great Flood, and only Noah and his family survived from the Adam and Eve clan after the flood. In modern colloquial speech, the phrase “methuselah century” is used to denote extraordinary longevity, life to a very old age, and certainly by more than a hundred years, because only an age exceeding a hundred years will be considered a lived century.
The emergence of phraseology in Russian
The phrase “Methuselah Century”, the meaning of which is considered in this material, was first used in Russian literature by the educator and bishop of Peter I - Feofan Prokopovich in 1721 in the manuscript “Spiritual Regulations”. In it, he writes: “Through direct teaching, an enlightened person never has satiety in his knowledge, but never ceases to be taken into account, although he has survived the Methuselah century.” Later, this winged expression is mentioned in the work of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. We are talking about the "Diary of a Provincial in St. Petersburg": "Well, how will I live a Methuselah century?" In the Russian language there is a similar phrase “areov’s eyelids”, which has a similar meaning. Jared was the grandfather of Methuselah and lived for 962 years, which is 7 years less than his grandson. Apparently, for this reason, the phrase took root less successfully, although, according to linguists, the difference between them is only a little more than six months.