After their father ascends into heaven, Methuselah and his brothers build an altar and make "a great festivity, praising God who had given such a sign by means of Enoch, who had found favor with Him.

"[10] The Book of Jubilees presents itself as "the history of the division of the days of the Law, of the events of the years, the year-weeks, and the jubilees of the world" and claims to be a revelation of God to Moses, given through the Angel of the Presence in addition to the written Law received by Moses on Mount Sinai; and, while the written Law was to be imparted to all, this was to be a secret tradition entrusted only to the saints of each generation, to Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, and Shem, then to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Levi, and finally to the priests and scribes of the latter times.

At God's command, they both announced that 120 years would be given to men for repentance; if, in that time, they had not mended their evil ways, the earth would be destroyed.

[12] But their plea was in vain; even while Noah was engaged in building the ark, the wicked—who were of immense stature as they were descended from the sons of God—made sport of him and his work, saying: "If the Flood should come, it could not harm us.

[13][14] The 17th-century midrashic Sefer haYashar ("Book of Jasher")[15] describes Methuselah with his grandson Noah attempting to persuade the people of the earth to return to godliness.

[21] Some biblical literalists attempt to justify "969 years": perhaps early humans had a better diet, or a hypothetical "water vapor canopy" protected the earth from radiation before the Flood.

[citation needed] He was the son of En-men-dur-ana, a Sumerian mythological figure often compared to Enoch, as he entered heaven without dying.

[30] Babylonian writer Berossus also claims that, prior to the events of Babylon's flood myth, kings could live for tens of thousands of years, which bears some similarity to Genesis 5.

[31] In Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity, Lucian Boia says that the Bible's portrayal of Methuselah and other long-lived figures features "traces of the Mesopatamian legends" found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh rules Uruk for 126 years, and his ancestors are said to have ruled for several hundred years each.

Boia compares early biblical figures and their vast lifespans to the people of the Golden Age in Hesiod's poem Works and Days, whose bodies are perpetually youthful.

[citation needed] 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.

[38] The word "Methuselarity", a blend of Methuselah and singularity, was coined in 2010 by the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey to mean a future point in time where people are expected not to die from age-related causes anymore, however long they live.

[39] A 4,856-year-old[40] Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing high in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California is called Methuselah.

In cellular automata, methuselahs refer to a small initial state of cells that continue to grow for a large number of generations.

The character Flint from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Requiem for Methuselah" is a nearly immortal man who was born in ancient Mesopotamia during the year 3,834 BC; and was a soldier (probably of Babylon) before his powers.

His identities include Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Solomon, Lazarus of Bethany, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms.

He eventually begins to slowly die because he left Earth's atmosphere, and dedicates the remainder of his days to the betterment of mankind.

[43] In the TV series Altered Carbon, based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name, a class of people who can afford to live forever by transferring their consciousness into cloned bodies are called "Meths" or "Methuselahs.

[6] The lyrics of Ira Gershwin's song "It Ain't Necessarily So" (1935) cast doubt on the idea that Methuselah lived so long.