Mods, if this turns into a debate please feel free to move this thread.
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.
5768 years.
Where does the bible say that?
Most people take as their starting point Ussher’s 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.
on page 5768. It’s a very literal reading.
He was incorrect though. By almost a quarter of an hour.
drats, too late.
The Jewish figure of 5768 years is based on 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.
Gee, and I was just going to say that I trust cmkeller’s figure, since he knows the folks who wrote the book…
Read it again. Where does THE BIBLE say how old the earth is.
Correct.
The fact is, the bible doesn’t say.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Please let me remind everyone of what the OP’s exact question was:
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.
The bible can’t say anything, it’s a book for crying out loud! Since when do books talk??? 