Adam Signed a Contract Giving David Seventy of His Years

On the first day of his life, Adam was shown a book. The rabbis who wrote about the scene, staring at the phrase in (Genesis 5:1) that reads "this is the book of the descendants of Adam," refused to read the word book as a metaphor. They said there was an actual scroll. God opened it in front of the newborn man and unrolled the whole future of the human race in front of him the way a tailor unrolls a bolt of cloth in front of a customer. Every generation. Every scholar. Every king. Every death.

Somewhere in the scroll, Adam saw a shepherd with reddish hair and the beginning of a voice that would write half the Psalms. Next to the name was a number. Three hours. Or, in the other version of the legend, one minute. Either way, the soul Adam was looking at had been given almost nothing to work with.

The Yalkut Shimoni, the great thirteenth-century anthology of earlier rabbinic literature compiled by Rabbi Shimon ha-Darshan of Frankfurt, preserves what Adam did next. He did not keep reading. He stopped at the minute and asked God a question. Master of the world, he said, this should not be. The soul he had just seen was not some unknown. It was David. The voice in the scroll was going to be the voice of Israel at prayer for three thousand years. One minute was not enough to start the voice. It was barely enough for a breath.

God did not argue. Adam asked how many years he himself had been given. The answer was a thousand. A full day of the Lord, the round number the older traditions associated with the first man because a thousand years, the Psalm says, are as a day in the sight of God. Adam asked whether he could give some of those years away as a gift. God said yes.

Seventy, Adam said. Seventy to the shepherd.

The Yalkut Shimoni does not leave it as a verbal agreement. It says Adam drew up a shtar, the technical Hebrew word for a legal contract, specifying what he was transferring and to whom. Good looks. Kingship. The songs of praise. Seventy years of life, so that the shepherd could use them to become the man who would sing before God. The contract was not signed by Adam alone. It was witnessed. God countersigned. Metatron, the angel the later mystical tradition would call the Prince of the Face, signed as the second witness. The Yalkut Shimoni, drawing on earlier midrashic material going back at least to fourth- or fifth-century Palestine, treats the document as a piece of heavenly bureaucracy as solid as any deed of sale in a Babylonian court.

Louis Ginzberg, synthesizing this tradition in the second volume of his Legends of the Jews published in 1910, adds the detail that the contract was reflected in Adam's own lifespan. The Torah records that Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, not a thousand, and Ginzberg explains the missing seventy as the years that had been transferred. The math was visible in the text of Genesis all along. Anyone who did the subtraction and asked where the missing seventy had gone was being asked, quietly, to look at the length of David's reign in the Book of Kings. Seventy years. Exactly. The same seventy.

The connection between the two men did not end with the contract. Midrash Tehillim, the rabbinic commentary on Psalms whose oldest layers go back to fifth-century Palestine, keeps returning to the claim that David's songs were not only David's. Rabbi Samuel taught that four specific Psalms were actually written for moments Adam had lived through and failed to sing about. Psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, was the song the first man should have sung on the morning he woke up and realized the whole world had been made for him and he had said nothing. Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God, was the song Adam should have sung the first time the sun rose and he did not know what to call it. Psalm 92, a song for the Sabbath day, was the song Adam should have sung on the first Shabbat when the attribute of judgment was suspended and the punishment for his transgression was held back until the sun set. Psalm 16, preserve me God, was the song for the moment he realized he had inherited a world he could lose.

Adam had lived all four of those moments and sung none of the songs. David, centuries later, using the voice that had been made possible by Adam's seventy-year gift, sang them for him. The midrash reads the whole Psalter as a kind of posthumous repayment from the shepherd to the first man, one voice picking up where the other had gone quiet.

Bereshit Rabbah, the foundational midrash on Genesis compiled in fifth-century Palestine, adds the scale that makes the whole arrangement feel less like bookkeeping and more like the inside of a body. Rabbi Elazar taught that when God created Adam he created him so immense that he filled the entire world. From east to west, from north to south, from the ground to the top of the heavens. The first man was not a figure in the world. He was the world. And inside that immense unformed body, Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon adds, God had already placed every generation that would ever descend from him. Every scholar. Every prophet. Every king. David was in there too, at the size of a word, already waiting for the minute of life that would be measured out to him and the seventy years that would be added to it by the man he was living inside.

Ginzberg preserves one more turn in this tradition that deserves to be told last. Later in the Legends, David, grown now and sitting on the throne the contract had made possible, looked back at Adam's case in front of the heavenly court and argued for Adam the way a defense lawyer argues for a client. Master of the universe, David said, you told Adam on the day he ate from the tree he would surely die, and yet he lived nine hundred and thirty years. The Yalkut Shimoni puts the line in David's mouth because only David, of all the descendants of Adam, had the standing to argue the case. He owed Adam seventy of his own years. He had a personal stake in the verdict.

God listened. The Yalkut says God's mercy toward Adam, the banishment instead of the death sentence, was vindicated by David's plea. The gift went in both directions. Adam had given David the years. David, using those years, had spoken the words that made Adam's long life look, in the end, like an act of divine patience rather than a broken threat.

The Torah does not tell you any of this. It just gives you the number. Nine hundred and thirty years. A round thousand would have been simpler. Seventy years are missing from the first man's life, and the older traditions of Jewish memory will not let you read past the gap without remembering where those years went, or who sang for them when they got there.