My students, in their American literature textbooks, have a small section on Poor Richard’s Almanack. Pictured is a page from it (presumably the title page), which says, in part, "An Almanack for the Year of Christ 1733, Being the First after LEAP YEAR: And makes since the Creation…By the Account of the Eastern Greeks…7241 [years] By the Latin Church…6932 [years] by the Computation of W. W. …5742 [years].
I know that’s awkward-looking, but it’s set up in sort of a chart on the page.
Anyway, the question I was asked was, “What does the ‘W. W.’ stand for?” I did not know, and promised to find an answer.
I’m sure I was overlooking something obvious, but what is it?
Oops. That final “by” (before “the Computation of W. W.”) should be capitalized, as it’s a new entry in the chart. Again, I know this looks awful, but I didn’t know if I could set up a chart or table on this board, or how to do so.
That looks like it would come out to be 4009 BC. A little off from Bishop Ussher’s calculation. The only web site I found for 4009 was this one, but nothing about any W. W. that I could see.
I have to give this a bump, in hopes that someone that knows will come along. If not, I guess I’ll give the kid extra credit to research it and find out.
“W. W.” was evidently some Bible-thumper who added up what was “known” of the life spans of various people in the Bible and thereby concluded that the Creation happened in 4009 B.C.
Google “Allon Maxwell” “Bible Digest” “4009 B.C.” and you will find a lengthy demonstration of how this is done. Maxwell–the author of this particular piece, lists various other dates which have been calculated for the Creation by such people as Johannes Kepler and James Ussher, but treats the 4009 B.C. as his own discovery. Evidently W.W. was some Biblical scholar who followed the same path.
I can’t quite prove it, but it’s almost certainly William Whiston.
This is going to be a bit roundabout, so fasten your seatbelts.
Whiston had an odd career that’s difficult to do justice to in summary. He started off as a protegy of Newton and was nominated by him as his successor as Lucasian professor in Cambridge. It turned out that his most important contribution to emerging Newtonism was to publish A New Theory of the Earth in 1696. This proposed that the events of the Old Testament, most notably the Deluge, could be explained by giant comets passing close to the Earth. Because of this, he’s come to be seen as a forerunner of Velikovsky, but it’s better to see him in his own time as a central figure in popularising Newtonian ideas and raising questions about how to explain earth history in terms of physics. Now one of the reasons Whiston was close to Newton was that they secretly shared anti-Trinitarian opinions. The latter kept quiet about this, but Whiston eventually convinced himself that he had proof that the Trinity was a bastardisation of Christianity. So he did the obvious thing you’d do is those circumstances: he went to the Archbishop of Canturbury and tried to convince him that Anglicanism was all wrong. The result was that Whiston had to resign from Cambridge and suffered social disgrace. For the remainder of his life he had to survive as a writer publishing theology. He thus became one of the more colourful and famous figures of early 18th century England, a noisy, controversial voice just outside the Established church. Predicting the end of the world, endorsing Mrs. Toft and her miraculous rabbits - you name it, Whiston crops up. He’s a common figure in satirical prints. He’s the background to The Vicar of Wakefield …
Whiston’s greatest bestseller was a translation of Josephus, which was a huge success and which is still in print today. Despite his heresy, to any educated English speaker of the 18th and 19th centuries, he was thus a noted authority on Biblical history.
My initial guess was thus that “W.W.” was a straight reference to his edition of Josephus. It’s not. The link above only includes the texts and footnotes, omitting Whiston’s longer commentary articles at the end. And it’s his 5th Dissertation “Upon the Chronology of Josephus” (I’m using the 1987 Hendrickson reprint of the 1736 edition) that gets into the dating of the Old Testament in mind-numbing detail. Most of the discussion is just concerned with Josephus’ datings, but section 38 summarises Whiston’s best guess at the main dates. Which dates the creation of Adam to 4484 B.C. Hmm.
But section 57 includes a table comparing a couple of dozen different authorities datings for the death of Moses. In this Whiston notes that he used to believe in a different estimate for this date. One that agreed with Ussher. Furthermore, turning to Stephen J. Gould’s essay on A New Theory (it’s in Bully for Brontosaurus), he notes that there Whiston was dating the Deluge to 2349 B.C. This is also just Ussher’s date. So it looks as if at some point Whiston agreed with Ussher’s chronology to quite far back. However, this doesn’t seem to help - as Faldage points out above, Ussher dated Creation to 4004 B.C., not the 4009 B.C. attributed to “W.W.”
There’s a twist. James Force’s fine study William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985) doesn’t go into his chronological work in much detail at all and doesn’t seem to mention any of his datings. But Force does go into the scenarios of A New Theory thoroughly, including Whiston’s description of Creation. And Whiston identified each day of Creation as a year (p45). On the other hand, Ussher didn’t. (There’s a thread from a few months back where I was quibbling about Ussher’s exact dating if you want evidence of that.) Part of the reason Whiston differed from Ussher on this point is that a year for each step gave greater scope for fitting in the specific physical events he was hypothesising.
I’d want to see it in black and white from Whiston to be sure, but if he were adopting Ussher’s dating back to Adam and then substituting years for day before that then he could easily land on: 4009 B.C.
If Whiston’s change of mind dates from 1736, then of course an almanac for 1733 would be using his earlier estimate.
The fact that I didn’t quite close the circle on this (very) old thread always slightly niggled. Over the years I’ve always checked any images or physical copies of the frontispiece of Poor Richard’s Almanack to see whether Franklin ever adjusted it to reflect Whiston’s change of mind. He doesn’t seem to have (presumably out of the sheer ignorance of not keeping up with Whiston’s latest thinking), so that was a blank.
But being aware of just how much stuff is now available online compared to 2003, I was recently idly prompted to have a poke around to see whether this would resolve matters. The decisive find was the full text of the original 1696 edition of A New Theory of the Earth. Which has a table on p125 laying out his initial chronology. Do the sums and it confirms that he was indeed dating the Creation to 4009 BC at that point. Bingo.
The neat additional touch was finding an image of a particular copy of the 1747 edition of the almanac via this page. On which someone, in what looks like a contemporary hand, has expanded the “W.W.” into “W.Whiston”.