Different Ways to Count Age

When we read about someone's age in the Bible, we automatically think of the way we count age. But actually there are four different ways to count age. We count age using exclusive counting based on birthdays. In other words, after a year has passed from birthday to birthday, we add one to a person's age. Another way to count age is to use inclusive counting. That is, if a person is in their first year of life, they are considered to be age one. Using inclusive counting (that is, counting that first year of life) yields an age that is one more than the normal way that we expect age to be counted. But there are two other ways of counting age. Instead of counting from birthday to birthday, one may count regarding the year in which one is born. When the new year arrives, a year is added to the person's age. China uses this method with inclusive counting. That means that a child who is born on the day before Chinese new year is considered age one; the next day, on new year's day, the child is age two, for this is the second year in which the child has lived. It is also possible to use birth year with exclusive counting. In this method, a child is not age one until the new year after its birth. The kings of the Old Testament used these last two methods to determine how many years they reigned. In fact, when the kingdom of Solomon divided after his death, the northern kingdom used inclusive counting of years and the southern kingdom used exclusive counting of years, considering the year that a man became king as his accession year. This was further complicated by the fact that the northern kingdom used the religious calendar with spring to spring years which the months are numbered after, and the southern kingdom used the old agricultural calendar with fall to fall years. Thus the Jewish new year from the old calendar falls on the first day of the seventh month. Babies were circumcised on the eighth day using inclusive counting; we would say one week. With all these different methods, it is impossible to know exactly how people's ages were counted in the Bible. We cannot just assume that they counted the number of years the same as we do. But even though the methods might be different, they would not yield an age that was more than a year or two different.