On the chronology of the Bible

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The Wikipedia page Chronology of the Bible isn’t too bad. It basically outlines one way of looking at the chronology of the Bible. I’m not sure if you could quite call the 4000-year framework it explains a majority view, but it’s prominent.

The Wikipedia page Ussher chronology isn’t too bad either, as a very quick-and-dirty introduction to Ussher. A better introduction, if you’ve got some time on your hands, is James Barr’s Why the World Was Created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology. You can find a PDF here.

Barr is smart, and you should trust him implicitly. If you read Latin, you can also find Ussher’s whole chronology online. As far as I know, the 1658 English translation by Ussher hasn’t made it online. But one day, I hope, it will.

There are two central problems of biblical chronology: one internal, and one external. There are some comparatively small disagreements between various manuscripts and interpretations that bear on the question of biblical chronology, but at the end of the day, the Bible teaches that the first day of creation was on the order of 5700-7600 years ago.

So the external problem is that mankind, and animals, didn’t appear within that timeframe. The city of Çatalhöyük not only was begun before the biblical date of creation, but it continued to exist for two thousand years and was abandoned before the biblical date of creation. And that’s just civilization. The other issues make things worse: people leaving Africa 50,000 years ago, dinosaurs roaming around 200 million years ago, etc. etc. etc.

The internal problem is that the Bible doesn’t agree with itself on all the chronological questions. Was the period of the judges about 600 years as implied by the book of Judges, or closer to 300 years as implied by other passages? Was Arphaxad born 600 years into Noah’s life, or 602? Etc. etc. etc.

There are two big mistakes that can be made when thinking about all this: a conservative mistake and a liberal mistake. The conservative mistake is to think the Bible intended an (approximately) 4000 BC creation, and that it actually happened. The conservative takes a true statement and draws an invalid inference from it. It’s wishful thinking.

The liberal mistake is to think that the earth is obviously older than that, and that therefore the Bible must not actually have intended to say the things it clearly does say about chronology. The liberal takes an obvious fact, and then draws an invalid inference. It’s another form of wishful thinking.

A great transition occurred (in academic circles) around the 1830’s, around the time of Lyell’s Principles of Geology being published. Science was establishing that the world was much older than the traditional biblical chronologies, like Ussher’s from two hundred years earlier, had imagined.

Liberal theologians responded fairly quickly by attempting to explain away the Bible’s statements about chronology. A prominent example of this genre of obfuscation came with William Henry Green (of Princeton!)’s remarks on biblical chronology (here). Jeremy Sexton takes apart Green’s work pretty straightforwardly here.

The Bible simply does make chronological claims about the past. As far as I’ve been able to tell, everyone who ever commented upon the relevant passages treated them just as if they were chronological claims about the past right up intil modern science made this inconvenient.^[1]

It is often claimed that the biblical writers weren’t “doing history in the modern sense.” That’s true. But they still constructed elaborate chronological schemes and stuck them in biblical stories, without alerting their readers to the fact that these numbers weren’t reliable.

That’s the biggest problem with the whole thing. There are, of course, liberal ways of reading Genesis — as symbolic, without historical content, etc. But the Bible seems unaware of that. It presents an overarching story, with chronological information from one end to another (though not perfectly in agreement with itself). This is the Primary History: Genesis-Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers-Deuteronomy-Joshua-Judges-Samuel-Kings.

Read it from one end to the other. It keeps giving chronological detail, and pursues one long story (“meta-narrative” if you like) from creation, through the antediluvians, from Noah to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve sons of Israel, the twelve tribes of Israel, the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, the Judges, the Kings of Judah, the exile.

It’s all continuous. It’s all salted with dates. There are no labels that mark off where mythology ends and history begins. Piecemeal approaches — denying the globalness of the flood, the existence of the gapless chronologies of Genesis — miss the forest for the trees.

Conservatives misread the Bible all the time. So do liberals. But the conservatives are right about one thing. The Bible really does produce a chronology from Adam to Amel-Marduk.

Don’t believe me? Believe James Barr. James McGrath says he’s right.