Pre-scientific Chronology: The Bible and the Origin of the World1

Abstract

Ifear that the reading of this paper may lead to my expulsion from this Society: for the Society since its foundation has been expressly devoted to and it is doubtful whether either Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson would have considered biblical chronology to be useful knowledge, or indeed to be knowledge at all. The only person I can appeal to for assistance is, perhaps, Sir Isaac Newton, whom they would both have respected. Newton devoted much time and effort to biblical chronology, and indeed at one stage, actually in his early thirties, made it his dominant concern and allowed it to crowd out his work on mechanics, optics, and such things.2 Moreover, I am encouraged by a happy recent event: namely, that the wellknown scientist Stephen Jay Gould in a recent book has also gone back to the subject of biblical chronology and indeed has done me the honor of quoting my earlier writings on this matter.3 So perhaps I shall not be expelled after all. Anyway, what I want to say is that, though biblical chronology may in modern times seem to be an area for cranks and crackpots, in older times it occupied some of the greatest minds. Alongside Newton we may mention Martin Luther, who wrote a Supputatio annorum mundi or Reckoning of the Years of the World,4 and the great classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609).5 In the English-speaking

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