Editing Methuselah (section)

===Symbolic===
Methuselah's father Enoch, who does not die but is taken by God, is the seventh patriarch, and Methuselah, the eighth, dies in the year of the Flood, which ends the ten-generational sequence from Adam to Noah, in whose time the world is destroyed.<ref>Abraham Malamat, "King Lists of the Old Babylonian Period and Biblical Genealogies," ''[[Journal of the American Oriental Society]]'' 88 (1968): 165. See also the discussion of "ten" in the Gen. genealogies in M. Abot section 5, Jacob Neusner, ''The Mishnah: A New Translation'' (New Haven, CT: [[Yale University Press]], 1988), 685. Duane A. Garrett also thinks this is deliberate, thus indicating redaction, ''Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Bible'', Ross-shire, Great Britain: [[Christian Focus Publications]], 2000, p. 99.</ref> Boia believes that Methuselah serves the symbolic function of linking the Creation and the Flood, as Adam would have died during Methuselah's lifetime and Methuselah could have learned about the [[Garden of Eden]] from Adam.{{sfn|Boia|1998|page=11}} The kings of the ''Sumerian King List'' lived for over a thousand years, and Mesopotamians believed both that living over a thousand years made someone divine or somewhat divine, and that their contemporary kings were descended from the kings of the ''Sumerian King List''.{{Citation needed|date=October 2021}} Robert Gnuse hypothesizes that the author of Genesis made all of its characters die before they turned one thousand as a polemic against these Mesopotamian beliefs, as well as any claim that a king is divine. Gnuse also believes that the author of Genesis said that Methuselah died before he lived a thousand years to show that he was not divine.{{sfn|Gnuse|2014|page=173}}