Genesis 5:27

And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years, and he died,.... This was the oldest man that ever lived, no man ever lived to a thousand years: the Jews give this as a reason for it, because a thousand years is God's day, according to

Psalms 90:4 and no man is suffered to arrive to that. His name carried in it a prediction of the time of the flood, which was to be quickly after his death, as has been observed, Genesis 5:21. Some say he died in the year of the flood; others, fourteen years after, and was in the garden of Eden with his father, in the days of the flood, and then returned to the world a; but the eastern writers are unanimous that he died before the flood: the Arabic writers b are very particular as to the time in which he died; they say he died in the six hundredth year of Noah, on a Friday, about noon, on the twenty first day of Elul, which is Thout; and Noah and Shem buried him, embalmed in spices, in the double cave, and mourned for him forty days: and some of the Jewish writers say he died but seven days before the flood came, which they gather from Genesis 7:10 "after seven days"; that is, as they interpret it, after seven days of mourning for Methuselah c: he died A. M. 1656, the same year the flood came, according to Bishop Usher.

a Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 74. 2. b Apud Hottinger, p. 244. c Bereshit Rabba, sect. 32. fol. 27. 3. Juchasin, fol. 6. 1. Baal Habturim in Gen. vii. 10.