“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Shades of the great ages given for those patriarchs in the Bible! That was my first thought when Seth told us that in ancient times certain people had “lived for several centuries.” My second thought was to cut his statement out of this record entirely, so that Jane and I wouldn’t have to contend with it at all. Jane wasn’t upset by Seth’s remark, and I could appreciate the humorous aspects of my own initial reactions—yet in all of the years he’s been giving us material, Seth has never before made a reference to what seems like impossible longevities.

I checked several Bibles, a Biblical almanac, and a Biblical dictionary. But one has only to read Chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood. Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912? (Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?) Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible. Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).

During the little time we’d spent thinking about such matters, Jane and I had considered the Biblical accounts of such great ages to be simply wrong, badly distorted, or perhaps epochal—that is, Abraham’s ancestors may be listed in the correct genealogical sequence, but with many gaps among the individuals named. Also, a given father-son relationship may have actually been one between a father and a great-great-grandson, for example. There are other epochal lists in the Bible.

Both of us thought that the long-lived individuals postulated by Seth had existed outside of the Biblical framework, however, and in truth far earlier historically. “Seth saying that makes perfect sense to me. It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said when I asked her what she thought of Seth’s material. “You weren’t encouraged to read the Bible even in Catholic grade school,” she added. “We just didn’t deal with it that much to worry about it. I never even read it through….”

Second: “The Bible is a conglomeration of parables and stories, intermixed with some unclear memories of much earlier times. The Bible that you recognize—or that is recognized—is not the first, however, but was compiled from several earlier ones as man tried to look back, so to speak, recount his past and predict his future. Such Bibles existed, not written down but carried orally, as mentioned some time ago, by the Speakers. It was only much later that this information was written down, and by then of course much had been forgotten. This is apart from the fact of tampering, or downright misinformation, as various factions used the material for their own ends.”