According to th bible, how old is the Earth?

[Shakes]

Mods, if this turns into a debate please feel free to move this thread.

[askeptic]

The bible doesn't say how old the earth is but a guy did add up all the generations listed in Genesis and came up with a figure around 6000 years.

[cmkeller]

5768 years.

[askeptic]

5768 years.

Where does the bible say that?

[Dr. Drake]

Most people take as their starting point Ussher's chronology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology). It adds up the individual numbers. There are some potential flaws --- how long between creation and the expulsion from Eden? A week, seventeen years, 4.3 billion? The Bible doesn't say.

[NurseCarmen]

Where does the bible say that?on page 5768. It's a very literal reading.
:)

[mr. jp]

Most people take as their starting point Ussher's chronology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology).

He was incorrect though. By almost a quarter of an hour.

[KneadToKnow]

on page 5768. It's a very literal reading.
:)
:p :D :p :D

[Uncommon Sense]

Where does the bible say that?
drats, too late.

[Keeve]

Where does the bible say that?The Jewish figure of 5768 years is based on Seder Olam Rabbah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seder_Olam_Rabbah), which was written around 1800 years ago, only a few centuries after the close of the Jewish Bible. Read the Wikipedia article in that link for more details, but basically, the Seder Olam Rabbah is a history book, which did the calculations of all the genealogies, kingdoms, and other dates mentioned in the Jewish Bible. These calculations provide an exact number of years from Creation to the most recent events mentioned in the Bible. Many of those events (destruction of the Temple, for example) are well-known to contemporary historians, and can be pinned down to specific dates in our calendar system. Add the two together, and you have the final calculation for the entire stretch, putting the Creation at 5768 years ago.

I do concede that some of the calculations are arguable, and there are some disputes about the dating of some events, but if one wants to know where the "5768" comes from, the above is the answer.

[DrFidelius]

Gee, and I was just going to say that I trust cmkeller's figure, since he knows the folks who wrote the book...

[askeptic]

The Jewish figure of 5768 years is based on Seder Olam Rabbah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seder_Olam_Rabbah), which was written around 1800 years ago, only a few centuries after the close of the Jewish Bible. Read the Wikipedia article in that link for more details, but basically, the Seder Olam Rabbah is a history book, which did the calculations of all the genealogies, kingdoms, and other dates mentioned in the Jewish Bible. These calculations provide an exact number of years from Creation to the most recent events mentioned in the Bible. Many of those events (destruction of the Temple, for example) are well-known to contemporary historians, and can be pinned down to specific dates in our calendar system. Add the two together, and you have the final calculation for the entire stretch, putting the Creation at 5768 years ago.

I do concede that some of the calculations are arguable, and there are some disputes about the dating of some events, but if one wants to know where the "5768" comes from, the above is the answer.


Read it again. Where does THE BIBLE say how old the earth is.

[raindog]

Read it again. Where does THE BIBLE say how old the earth is.
Correct.

The fact is, the bible doesn't say.

[jackdavinci]

Read it again. Where does THE BIBLE say how old the earth is.

Is that a woosh? It was already established in this thread that the Bible *doesn't* say how old the Earth is, at least not explicitly. But various outside sources have used the premise that the Bible texts *infer* the age indirectly in such a way that it can be figured out.

[askeptic]

Is that a woosh? It was already established in this thread that the Bible *doesn't* say how old the Earth is, at least not explicitly. But various outside sources have used the premise that the Bible texts *infer* the age indirectly in such a way that it can be figured out.

You mean in the first post after the OP where I said the bible does not say how old the earth is? Then people keep chiming in with figures based on wonky math and faulty assumptions that are not in the bible. The question was not how old can we infer the earth is. It was a straight forward question.

[Keeve]

Read it again. Where does THE BIBLE say how old the earth is.Sorry I misunderstood your question. Please explain for me exactly what it meant by "something saying how old something else is".

For example, if a newspaper published in July 1996 mentioned that George W. Bush was born in 1946, does it say how old he is?

One might argue that it does NOT say how old he is. I admit that technically, it does not say how old he is, but the information in that newpaper is sufficient for us, today in 2007, to calculate how old he is now (allowing for some accuracy errors due to not knowing his exact birthday).

So too, if the Bible said something like "The Earth was X years old when Cleopatra was born", or even "The Earth was created X years before Cleopatra was born", these statements are sufficient to tell us how old the Earth is, to the extent and accuracy of our knowlege of Cleopatra.

[Keeve]

The question was not how old can we infer the earth is. It was a straight forward question.Does ANY book older than one year accurately say how old something is? No, of course not. They either (1) give the birthdate, so you can infer the current age. Or they (2) give that age as of publication, and if you know when it was published, then you can infer the current age.

Hmm... actually #1 was wrong. The "birthdate" is essentially the same as saying "He was born X years after someone calculated Jesus was born." And by knowing the number of years that today is, based on that same supposition of when Jesus was born, anyone can figure the guy's current age.

Are any of the above significantly different than what I wrote in my post?

[Bambi Hassenpfeffer]

You mean in the first post after the OP where I said the bible does not say how old the earth is? Then people keep chiming in with figures based on wonky math and faulty assumptions that are not in the bible. The question was not how old can we infer the earth is. It was a straight forward question.
Well, if it's such a straightforward question with a simple answer, then why didn't you just stop after you said that the Bible doesn't say how old the Earth is? Why'd you have to include a number calculated by some guy based on wonky math and faulty assumptions?

Shouldn't you just have said THE BIBLE DOESN'T SAY and left it at that? Or are you going to permit the discussion to continue on in our standard GQ way?

[Keeve]

Please let me remind everyone of what the OP's exact question was:According to th bible, how old is the Earth?In other words: "Based on what it says in the Bible, how old is the earth?" I think that calculations based on numbers derived directly from the Bible DO qualify.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Where does the bible say that?The bible can't say anything, it's a book for crying out loud! Since when do books talk??? ;)

[Arnold Winkelried]

P.S. Are there are any "logical" chronologies besides Ussher and the Seder Olam Rabbah?

[Keeve]

P.S. Are there are any "logical" chronologies besides Ussher and the Seder Olam Rabbah?I'm not sure who is "logical" and who isn't, but a good place to start might be Wikipedia's article on Chronology of the Bible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_Bible)

[Bryan Ekers]

The bible can't say anything, it's a book for crying out loud! Since when do books talk??? ;)

My bible-on-tape sez 5768.

[Colibri]

[Moderating]

Guys, let's not get into a nit-picking contest (although I know how much fun that can be).

As I see it, the question on hand is, according to information presented in the Bible, how old is the Earth calculated to be. Of course the Bible doesn't say explicitly how old the Earth is.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[DrDeth]

Before we laugh at the rube who was Ussher (1648AD), let's look at some other estimates:

Zoroasterism= 12,000 yo
Maya= 13 August 3114 BC.

The scientist George-Luis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) in 1778 came up with= 75,000 yo.

Darwin (1859)= 306,662,400 yo.
Lord Kelvin (1897)= c.20 million yo
Geologist John Joly (1900)= c. 100 million yo.

The current age calculation is c. 4600 million yo.

Lord Kelvin, a well known physicist, writing 250 years or so after Ussher- was off almost as much as the poor reviled Archbishop. Other faiths are as far off.

[DaveRaver]

Well Genesis says the universe was created in 6 days. Adam appeared on the 6th day, and from there we have a specific chronology of who begat whom and how old each person lived to up to Abraham's generation. So that's a basis to start from.

[Chefguy]

The Jewish figure of 5768 years is based on Seder Olam Rabbah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seder_Olam_Rabbah), which was written around 1800 years ago, only a few centuries after the close of the Jewish Bible. Read the Wikipedia article in that link for more details, but basically, the Seder Olam Rabbah is a history book, which did the calculations of all the genealogies, kingdoms, and other dates mentioned in the Jewish Bible. These calculations provide an exact number of years from Creation to the most recent events mentioned in the Bible. Many of those events (destruction of the Temple, for example) are well-known to contemporary historians, and can be pinned down to specific dates in our calendar system. Add the two together, and you have the final calculation for the entire stretch, putting the Creation at 5768 years ago.

I do concede that some of the calculations are arguable, and there are some disputes about the dating of some events, but if one wants to know where the "5768" comes from, the above is the answer.

Does that mean Jews don't believe in carbon dating?

[Keeve]

Does that mean Jews don't believe in carbon dating?Well, 1800 years ago, no one had yet heard of carbon dating, so I suspect that you're not asking why the Seder Olam Rabbah didn't see any conflicts. Rather, you're asking about the conflicts that might be seen by people of today. So, to answer your question: Yes, we are aware of these conflicts, and there are various ways of resolving them, all of which are way off-topic for this thread.

[bonzer]

P.S. Are there are any "logical" chronologies besides Ussher and the Seder Olam Rabbah?

I'm not sure who is "logical" and who isn't, but a good place to start might be Wikipedia's article on Chronology of the Bible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_Bible)

While reasonably involved as is, that Wikipedia entry barely begins to cover the full range of dates people proposed. Biblical chronology was an immensely popular scholarly pursuit in the 17th and 18th centuries and Ussher's scheme was only one of many proposed. Another prominant player of the game, William Whiston, surveyed the state of the field in the early 18th century in one of the appendices to his influential translation of Josephus. (Whiston's appendices are almost invariably dropped by people publishing his translation these days, but they're included in the 1987 edition published by Hendricksons.) His tabulation of the dates proposed for the death of Moses lists over 3 dozen different authorities who've had a go and the resulting range of dates are scattered over 5 centuries, with the traditional Jewish one being the most recent. Their dates for Creation correspondingly vary as well. All these different people were using variations on the same methodology, supplemented by greater or lesser amounts of astronomical calculation.

Ussher's scholarship was highly respected in the period and his chronology was accordingly particularly influential. But it's really only the fact that this leads to the long-running tradition of incorporating his dates into the margins of Anglican bibles that led to his being the version that is remembered at the expense of all the others. That his is now the only name popularly associated with such exercises obscures the reality that there was a range of competing schemes in his day and for some time afterwards.

[Colibri]

Does that mean Jews don't believe in carbon dating?


[Moderating]

Once again, I'd like to see if we can keep this in GQ. The question isn't about how old the Earth actually is, or conflicts between that and the Bible, it is about what calculations can be made concerning the age of the Earth based on information in the Bible.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[DanBlather]

Does that mean Jews don't believe in carbon dating?Well you can date anyone you want, but it's best if you marry a nice Jewish doctor.

[Chronos]

How can the different calculations vary by so much, though? They're all based on adding up the numbers in "so-and-so was such-and-such an age when he begat his son, the other guy", right? Each step will have a spread of at most a year (depending on how far into his such-and-such year so-and-so was when he did the begetting), and if you assume the average for each, the error should only accumulate as the square root of the number of begettings. And I know there weren't 250,000 generations recorded in the Bible, so how do dates vary by five centuries?

[Blake]

There are some potential flaws --- how long between creation and the expulsion from Eden? A week, seventeen years, 4.3 billion? The Bible doesn't say.

Yeah, it does. It says that all the days of Adam from his creation to his death were ~900 years. So we know it was somewhere between 24 hours and 900 years. It can't possbly have been 4.3 billion years.

[Blake]

How can the different calculations vary by so much, though? They're all based on adding up the numbers in "so-and-so was such-and-such an age when he begat his son, the other guy", right? Each step will have a spread of at most a year (depending on how far into his such-and-such year so-and-so was when he did the begetting), and if you assume the average for each, the error should only accumulate as the square root of the number of begettings. And I know there weren't 250,000 generations recorded in the Bible, so how do dates vary by five centuries?

Part of it is because the geneaolgies themselves are inconsistent and self-contradictory when taken at face value. For example:

1 Kings 16:8
"So Baasha slept with his fathers, and was buried in Tirzah: and Elah his son reigned in his stead.
...
"In the twenty and sixth year of Asa king of Judah began Elah the son of Baasha to reign over Israel in Tirzah, two years." So Baasha died in the 26th year of Asa's reign.

2 Chronicles 16
"In the six and thirtieth year of the reign of Asa Baasha king of Israel came up against Judah, and built Ramah, to the intent that he might let none go out or come in to Asa king of Judah." So Baasha built a fortified town in the 36th year of Asa's reign, when he had been dead 10 years. The man was a workhaolic

2 Kings 24:8
"Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign"

2 Chronicles 36:9
"Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign"

And so forth. there are literally dozens of these sorts of contradictions, some of them resulting in errors of many hundreds of years. There are various ways to "reconcile" them, and depending on what methods the genealogist uses will influence the times of the generations.

[Lumpy]

Before we laugh at the rube who was Ussher (1648AD), let's look at some other estimates:

Zoroasterism= 12,000 yo
Maya= 13 August 3114 BC.

The scientist George-Luis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) in 1778 came up with= 75,000 yo.

Darwin (1859)= 306,662,400 yo.
Lord Kelvin (1897)= c.20 million yo
Geologist John Joly (1900)= c. 100 million yo.

The current age calculation is c. 4600 million yo.

Lord Kelvin, a well known physicist, writing 250 years or so after Ussher- was off almost as much as the poor reviled Archbishop. Other faiths are as far off.In defense of Kelvin, he was estimating how old the Sun, and by extension the Earth and solar system, could possibly be. Before the discovery of nuclear energy, the best guess where the sun could be getting it's energy from was it's own gravitational contraction. Kelvin calculated how long a sun that was originally the diameter of the Earth's orbit would take to cool and shrink to it's present size, and got the ~20 million figure. This was substantially less than the geologists' best guesses, which were hundreds of millions of years; and yes, people were aware of the discrepency at the time.

[pmwgreen]

How can the different calculations vary by so much, though? They're all based on adding up the numbers in "so-and-so was such-and-such an age when he begat his son, the other guy", right? Each step will have a spread of at most a year (depending on how far into his such-and-such year so-and-so was when he did the begetting), and if you assume the average for each, the error should only accumulate as the square root of the number of begettings. And I know there weren't 250,000 generations recorded in the Bible, so how do dates vary by five centuries?

I've always had a certain fondness for Ussher. He just takes the Bible as a starting point, then adds a few philosophical ideas to the mix, whacks the dates around and settles on the autumnal equinox, 4004 BC (which means we know the exact time too).

[Voyager]

Yeah, it does. It says that all the days of Adam from his creation to his death were ~900 years. So we know it was somewhere between 24 hours and 900 years. It can't possbly have been 4.3 billion years.
More usefully, Seth was born when Adam was 130 (Gen 5:2). The ages of the fathers' when the next generation was born are all given, so dating from the beginning is not difficult. The tricky part is aligning some end date to a historical event whose date we can agree on.

Anyhow, I'm not sure when Cain and Abel were born, but the maximum garden time was less than 130 years, not 900.

[cmkeller]

Sorry I was away from this thread for a while, but here goes:

Askeptic:

Where does the bible say that?

Calculations, although once we get past the Biblical era and into the historical era, the numbers are certainly open to question. In addition, one link in the chain is not explicit in the Biblical text, but is instead the result of derivation. Here are the relevant numbers, with verses:

Heaven and Earth created (Genesis 1:1): Year 1.
Adam created 5 days later - on the Jewish New Year (Genesis 1:26): Year 2.
Adam begets Seth at age 130 (Genesis 5:3): Year 132.
Seth begets Enos at age 105 (Genesis 5:6): Year 237.
Enos begets Kenan at age 90 (Genesis 5:9): Year 327.
Kenan begets Mehallallel at age 70 (Genesis 5:12): Year 397.
Mehallallel begets Yered at age 65 (Genesis 5:15): Year 462.
Yered begets Enoch at age 162 (Genesis 5:18): Year 624.
Enoch begets Methuselah at age 65 (Genesis 5:21): Year 689.
Methuselah begets Lemech at age 187 (Genesis 5:25): Year 876.
Lemech begets Noah at age 182 (Genesis 5:28): Year 1058.
Noah in 600th year of his life (i.e., 599 years old) when flood begins (Genesis 7:11): Year 1657.
Noah's son Shem begets Arpachshad two years after the flood began 1 (Genesis 11:10): Year 1659.
Arpachshad begets Shelah at age 35 (Genesis 11:12): Year 1694.
Shelah begets Ever at age 30 (Genesis 11:14): Year 1724.
Ever begets Peleg at age 34 (Genesis 11:16): Year 1758.
Peleg begets Reu at age 30 (Genesis 11:18): Year 1788.
Reu begets Serug at age 32 (Genesis 11:20): Year 1820.
Serug begets Nahor at age 30 (Genesis 11:22): Year 1850.
Nahor begets Terah at age 29 (Genesis 11:24): Year 1879.
Terah begets Abram at age 70 (Genesis 11:26): Year 1949.
Abraham (originally Abram) begets Isaac at age 100 (Genesis 21:5): Year 2049.
Isaac begets Jacob at age 60 (Genesis 25:26): Year 2109.
Jacob and his family go to Egypt when Jacob was aged 130 (Genesis 47:9): Year 2239.
Israelite Exodus from Egypt after 210 years of slavery 2(Midrashic commentary to Exodus 12:40): Year 2449.
Solomon begins construction of first Jerusalem Temple, 480 years after the Exodus, which is four years into his reign (I Kings 6:1): Year 2929.
First Temple destroyed after 410 years3: Year 3339.
Second Temple construction begins after 70 years of Jewish exile 4: Year 3409.
Second Temple destroyed after 420 years (Talmud, Tractate Avodah Zarah, page 9a - this is not Biblical, obviously, but is based on how they dated their documents, so it's somewhat contemporary): Year 3830, which is historically known to be year 70 of the current calendar system.
2007 is 1937 years after that, which gives us year 5767 from creation. The Jewish New Year has already occurred since the last anniversary of the Temple's destruction, which gives us 5768.

1The phrase "2 years after the flood" must mean after the flood began rather than after it ended, because Noah was 500 when Shem and his brothers were born (Genesis 5:32) which would make Shem somewhere in the 98-99 range when the flood began (depending on what day he was born), in the 99-100 range when it ended. The year following the flood's end, Shem would be 100-101. Genesis 11:10 says that Arpachshad was born when Shem was 100 years old, 2 years after the flood, so that must mean after the onset of the flood. 2 years after the end of the flood, he would have been at least 101, possibly 102.

2Exodus 12:40 says that "The settlement of the Israelites that they lived in Egypt was 430 years." However, it can be proven from previous verses that Israelites were not actually in Egypt 430 years: Levi's son Kehath came to Egypt with Jacob (Genesis 46:11) and died at age 133 (Exodus 6:18). Kehath's son Amram lived till age 137 (Exodus 6:20). Amram's son Moses was 80 when the Israelites left Egypt (7:7). So even if Kehath arrived in Egypt the day he was born, Amram had been born the year Kehath died, and Moses born the year Amram died, they could have been in Egypt no more than 350 years. This forces a different understanding of the verse. Therefore, the Midrash concludes that the word "settlement" is more properly translated as "lifestyle", i.e., they lived in a manner of foreigners for 430 years, which the Midrash says is when G-d made a covenant with Abram indicating that his descendants would be foreigners in others' lands for 400 years (Genesis 17). The first descendant of Abraham for whom the 400 years are reckoned is Isaac, and from Isaac's birth until Jacob went to Egypt is 190 years (Jacob born when Isaac was 60, and 130 years old when went to Egypt), leaving 210 years as the actual time in Egypt.

3I was intending to write a completely annotated time-line of the Kings of Judah to demonstrate this number in detail, but I just didn't have the time to finish it yet, and I didn't want to return to this thread a ful week or so after the above question was posted. So here's the summary number, and details, if you wish, can follow.

4Difficult to properly source, as the names of Persian kings used in the book of Ezra are difficult to correlate precisely with what is considered to be known of Persian kings by secular history. Some names thought by secular historians to refer to different individuals are considered by Jewish historians recorded in the Talmud to be alternate titles for the same individual. Nonetheless, even most secular time lines still accept that there were 70 years between the two Temples. Secular history tends to place the destruction of the first Temple and the second Temple about 160 years earlier than Jewish history does.

[CC]

Mods - if this should be a separate thread, I apologize and will start one if necessary -

How special was Noah, for example, to be given at least 600 years? Why did he live such a long life? Was he blessed for some reason? Wasn't he just another guy?

[Chefguy]

[Moderating]

Once again, I'd like to see if we can keep this in GQ. The question isn't about how old the Earth actually is, or conflicts between that and the Bible, it is about what calculations can be made concerning the age of the Earth based on information in the Bible.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

I wasn't trying to start a debate. I thought perhaps that was part of the belief system of this particular religion and was asking for clarification.

[Antinor01]

Mods - if this should be a separate thread, I apologize and will start one if necessary -

How special was Noah, for example, to be given at least 600 years? Why did he live such a long life? Was he blessed for some reason? Wasn't he just another guy?

He wasn't. According to the bible, that was not an usual age to live to in that time. Methusalah (Hmm, I'm spelling that wrong I think) lived to be just under 1000.

[Colibri]

I wasn't trying to start a debate. I thought perhaps that was part of the belief system of this particular religion and was asking for clarification.

Like Christians, some Jews are Biblical literalists while others are not.

I wasn't accusing you of starting a debate, I was just trying to head off the thread veering into discussion of conflicts between belief systems and science. That way lies Great Debates. ;)

[bonzer]

How can the different calculations vary by so much, though?

Most people who have done the exercise have basically agreed on the stretch between the Creation and Solomon, as nicely summarised above by cmkeller. As his post recognises, it's the later stages - and particularly the stuff relating to his footnotes 3 and 4 - where people have diverged from each other.

The disagreements get worse if we include Orthodox Christians. This is because the Septuagint gives different numbers in the early stages than the Hebrew text numbers quoted by cmkeller. The two generally agree on the quoted lifespans of the Patriarchs, but many of the ages for the begetting are systematically each a century older in the Septuagint. Those numbers have almost invariably been ignored in the Jewish and non-Orthodox traditions, but do mean that Orthodox Christians traditionally push their biblically-derived date of Creation back as far as 5586 BCE.

[Chief Pedant]

Mods, if this turns into a debate please feel free to move this thread.

According to the Bible, it's about 6,000 years old.
Ussher's calculations are as good as any, and was a decent scholarly analysis of Biblical text.

The general range (say, up to 10,000 years) given by the Bible was unquestioned until modern science revealed it to be ridiculously far off. At the point assorted re-interpretations were applied so as to not render the Biblical age nonsense. No one relying on the Bible itself would (or did) interpret the age of the earth to be anything older than several thousand years.

"The Bible doesn't say" is a silly wiggle-room argument advanced to protect the inerrancy of Scripture. While it may be technically correct, it implies that the Bible allows for the earth to be 4.6 billion years old. It does not, and the assorted contortions to make it seem so are foolish.

[Colibri]

According to the Bible, it's about 6,000 years old.
Ussher's calculations are as good as any, and was a decent scholarly analysis of Biblical text.

The general range (say, up to 10,000 years) given by the Bible was unquestioned until modern science revealed it to be ridiculously far off. At the point assorted re-interpretations were applied so as to not render the Biblical age nonsense. No one relying on the Bible itself would (or did) interpret the age of the earth to be anything older than several thousand years.

"The Bible doesn't say" is a silly wiggle-room argument advanced to protect the inerrancy of Scripture. While it may be technically correct, it implies that the Bible allows for the earth to be 4.6 billion years old. It does not, and the assorted contortions to make it seem so are foolish.

[Moderating]

Pedant, haven't you seen my comments in this thread? It has already been stated that the information in the Bible is in conflict with the scientific understanding of the age of the Earth. It is unnecessary to belabor this point further here. If you want to debate this question, or make comments on the foolishness other interpretations, please feel free to open a thread in Great Debates.

Thank you for your attention.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator