Annotatio LXXV
”Their days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” — Genesis 6:3
Josephus, in the first book of the Antiquities, explaining this passage, says that God, angry with the human race, circumscribed the life of men within a shorter span, and — the longevity of living which they had before the Flood being abrogated — restricted it within a hundred and twenty years.1 This same opinion, expounding this very [text], Lactantius Firmianus followed, in book 2 of the Divine Institutions, chapter 14; and Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus — which opinion Chrysostom, in homily 20, disapproves, and Jerome, in the book of Hebrew Questions, refutes by the example of the many who lived far more years after the Flood, such as Abraham, whose life reached up to the hundred and seventy-fifth year.2