Did God limit human life to 120 years, when people later lived longer and the psalm speaks of seventy?

Genesis 6:3 most likely sets the time left before the flood, not the length of a human life. The verse stands in the account of the corruption that led to the flood, and it says that God’s patience would not last for ever: there would be 120 more years. The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan already read it as a space given for repentance, and Gill and Keil and Delitzsch take it the same way. Peter speaks of the same patience when “the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing” (1 Peter 3:20). Keil and Delitzsch reckon that the warning was given in Noah’s 480th year, since the flood came in his 600th (7:6); Genesis 6:1–3 is not set in strict time order after the note on Noah’s sons in 5:32. On this reading the long lives in Genesis 11 raise no difficulty.

Psalm 90 is a different kind of statement. Its title calls it “A Prayer of Moses the man of God”, and it is a lament on the shortness of life, describing what a lifetime usually amounts to: seventy years, eighty for the strong. It sets no limit, and Moses himself lived to 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7).

A limit reached over time

Others read the 120 years as a new upper limit on human life, set in principle then and reached over the following generations as ages fell after the flood (Genesis 11). On this view too, Psalm 90 describes the usual span, not the limit.

Christian interpreters remain divided between these two readings, and the rare Hebrew verb earlier in the verse (yadon, ‘strive’ or ‘abide’) is itself uncertain.