Dakwah 950 Years

After the night prayer or dawn prayer, as usual, I read one juz of the Qur’an. I match the juz number I read with the date of that day. For me, it is a simple way to make the journey of reading the Qur’an feel like a safari through the pages of life’s calendar.

Yesterday I reached the end of Juz 20. My eyes suddenly paused, once again, on a number that I may have actually read many times before. This time, that number seemed to knock on the door of my attention. Allah says:

“And We certainly sent Noah to his people, and he remained among them a thousand years minus fifty years, and the flood seized them while they were wrongdoers.” (QS al-’Ankabut [29]: 14)

Nine hundred and fifty years! Not ninety-five. Not one hundred and fifty. Nine hundred and fifty. An extraordinarily long age. The question that immediately arises, almost like a modern human reflex, is: how old was Prophet Noah actually?

The answer turns out not to be as simple as the number 950. The Qur’an does not say that Prophet Noah lived to be 950 years old. What is precisely stated is that he “remained among his people” for 1,000 years minus 50 years. The word used is falabitsa fīhim — he stayed in their midst.

This point is important. Because those 950 years, according to the wording of the verse, are the period Prophet Noah was among his people, not explicitly his entire lifespan from birth to death.

The classical exegetes ultimately differed in opinion. Ibn Abbas, as quoted by Ibn Kathir, stated that Noah was sent as a messenger at the age of forty. He stayed with his people for 950 years, then lived 60 years after the flood. With this calculation, his age becomes around 1,050 years.

But that is not the only opinion. Qatadah has another narration. Noah is said to have lived 300 years before the period of preaching, preached for 300 years, then lived 350 years after the flood. The total is also 950 years. But Ibn Kathir considered this narration gharib and preferred the narration of Ibn Abbas.

There is also an opinion that Noah was sent at the age of 350, preached for 950 years, then lived another 350 years. If added together, his age becomes 1,650 years.

Al-Qurtubi, whose tafsir is full of quoted opinions, even collected more narrations. Some mention Noah’s age as 1,000 years, 1,020 years, 1,400 years, even 1,650 years. He also recorded a narration that Noah, who is among the Ulul ’Azmi, was sent at the age of 250 and lived 250 years after the flood.

So, if we ask, “How old was Prophet Noah according to the scholars?”, the answer is not a single agreed-upon number. The safest position is to say that the Qur’an only confirms the period of Prophet Noah’s stay with his people as 950 years. Regarding his total age, there are various narrations and exegetical opinions.

This actually makes our question even more interesting. Did ancient humans indeed live very long lives? If what is meant is humans in general, historical and anthropological science has no support for that assumption. We must distinguish between two things that are often mixed up: average life expectancy and an individual’s maximum age.

People often say, “In ancient times humans only lived 25 years.” That can be misleading. The figure of 20–30 years that often appears in ancient demography is life expectancy at birth. This figure is heavily depressed by infant mortality, infections, accidents, famine, and childbirth.

In the Roman world, demographic research places life expectancy at birth in the range of 22–25 years. This means that not all Romans were recorded as dying at an average age of 25. Someone who managed to survive childhood had a much greater chance of living longer.

Roman census data from Egypt shows that there were people who reached their 70s and 80s, although the numbers were small. This Roman Egyptian data is important because it is one of the places in the ancient world with the best demographic records from the first to third centuries CE.

However, we must not jump to the conclusion that ancient people commonly lived to 100, 200, let alone 900 years. Modern paleodemographic studies show that reaching a very advanced age in premodern societies was an extremely rare event.

A review in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology states that, based on tracked premodern societies, reaching even one hundred years of age was already very difficult. Let alone reaching hundreds of years. So the 950 years of Prophet Noah cannot simply be answered with the sentence: “That is how long humans lived in the past.”

Science has no scientific basis for that claim. So, does the story of Prophet Noah contradict science? This question must also be handled carefully.

Science works based on observable and testable patterns of nature. Science can conclude that there is no demographic evidence that ordinary humans in the past were generally capable of living for hundreds of years. But science cannot automatically conclude: therefore Prophet Noah could not possibly have lived that long.

Because the second claim speaks about an individual in a religious event, not about a biological pattern of a population tested through censuses or bone fossils. Science explains what is common for humans, while miracles speak of something that does not have to submit to that commonality.

And the Qur’an itself does not invite us to seek a biological formula for Noah’s age. Notice the context of the verse. Surah al-’Ankabut is speaking to Prophet Muhammad about the rejection of his people. The story of Noah is presented not to give a lecture on gerontology.

Through that verse, Allah is showing a historical irony. A person, even a prophet, can preach for a very long time, but the length of time does not automatically make people willing to accept the truth.

At-Thabari even…