And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
All the days that Adam lived. What vicissitudes must the personal history of Adam have comprised! What a momentous change from a state of unalloyed happiness to a condition of labour and varied suffering! and how frequently must the painful reflection have embittered his life, that all the errors and crimes, the misery and death, which he witnessed among his posterity, were the consequences of his own unhappy transgression of the Creator's easy law. But he is ranked in the list of antediluvian saints; and therefore the conclusion may be reasonably drawn, that he had happily repented, and believed the Gospel which was preached to him (Hebrews 6:2).
And he died. This event, with the announcement of which the notice of each of these antediluvian patriarchs is closed, is the more remarkable as their protracted lives may seem to have amounted almost to an earthly immorality; and yet the experience of all of them attested that the sentence denounced against the commission of sin was carried into immediate and universal execution. Since Abel's life had been abridged by violence, Adam, the first sinner, was probably the first to suffer the penalty of death in a natural way; and although the aggregate sum of his years is nominally less than that of some of his descendants, yet, considering that he was created in full maturity, and the number of years which, in that patriarchal age, separated infancy from manhood, his life, had he been born a child, would have been the longest on record.