Bible Timeline | Bible Quiz and Facts

Bible Time Line

The mystery of Earth's creation.

The timeline of Earth's creation according to the Bible and other sources.

The Protestant Bible indicates that Earth has existed for 6,000 to 10,000 years.
Many scientists, including zoologists and archaeologists, as well as followers of other religions, believe Earth is much older.

Consider the following information gathered from the internet and the wisdom of this site's author:
There are several ways to interpret the length of "time" in biblical time, which can be confusing.

There are some references in the Bible where many interpret a day as being a thousand years.

In the past, a day in the Bible was of variable length.

In some cases in the Bible, a day means a year.
In other cases, a day is a thousand years long.
Perhaps this is why the Bible has some believe the Earth's creation was 6,000 years ago, and the scientific community believes Earth was created much further back in time.
It is difficult to discredit the scientific community.
Looking at timelines makes it much easier to accept that the Bible may not be understandable.

A physical day in the Bible starts at sunset on the first day and ends at sunset on the second day.

Note: The third hour is three hours after sunrise.
The third hour is not three hours after sunset.
The third hour is not three hours after midnight.

Just like today, ancient people divided their days into two 12-hour periods.

However, the 12 hours were flexible and varied.
The first period was 12 hours from sunset to sunup, no matter how many minutes or hours that took.
The second period was 12 hours from sunup to sundown, no matter how many minutes or hours it took.
An hour was not exactly 60 minutes; the modern-day hour is exactly 60 minutes.
The hours' length was variable due to the year's seasons, when nights were shorter or longer than days.
Summer day hours were longer (more minutes) than the night hours.
The winter day hours were shorter (fewer minutes) than the nighttime hours.

The Roman day (the one we use) starts at midnight and ends the following midnight.

During ancient Rome, they had variable hour lengths as well.
There are several intriguing things about the calendar and days of the week.
Parts of the world, present and past, use the moon to record time.
Some use the sun as we do in North America.
There are the Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar, Roman-Byzantine, Egyptian, Iranian, Islamic, Jewish, Turko-Mongol, and Western calendars.
The Pope's decree to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in October 1582 cost the calendar ten days.
Removing the ten days allowed the calendar to keep the vernal equinox from March 11 to March 21.
Most countries in the modern world use the Gregorian solar calendar, which has 12 months.
The time it takes for Earth to orbit the sun (solar year) is approximately 365.25 days.
Every four years, we must add a day to the calendar to align the four seasons with the sun's orbit.
Most of the Islamic world uses the lunar calendar, which also has 12 months.
The time it takes the moon to orbit the earth (lunar month) is approximately 29.53 days, totaling about 354 days a year.
A month is from new moon to new moon.
Every 12 years, we must add a month to align the seasons with the moon's orbit.

"Seeing is believing." "Reading is faith."

Reading someone's rendition of an event that happened a thousand years ago is difficult to believe if scientific evidence does not support it.

Which is correct, someone's recollection or the scientific evidence?
In certain instances, it's possible that neither interpretation is accurate.
So there we have it.
There are two ways of looking at the past.
Biblical faith refers to someone's recollection and interpretation, or scientific interpretation.
Which is correct?
What is the correct interpretation?
It's one or the other, or perhaps neither, or maybe sometimes both.
Everyone knows that eyewitnesses are not 100% dependable.
Eyewitness accounts, like faith, sometimes lack proof and can be unreliable.
We are all aware that science has occasionally proven to be incorrect.
Once upon a time, scientists thought the Earth was the center of the galaxy.
Before Columbus, everyone accepted the earth's flatness.
So, I have to ask, "How reliable are these people?"
Perhaps both scientists and eyewitnesses are reliable to some degree.
The reality is that, most likely, it's just that we don't understand either method.

The Bible was written over the course of 1500 years.

Experts can't decide on the exact years when the ancient manuscripts and biblical scriptures were written.
Furthermore, it is not known who the specific authors are for many of the books.
The early biblical scriptures and Old Testament writings date from around 1650 BC to 1000 BC.
Moses lived between 1500 and 1300 BC.
Moses or his aides are acknowledged as the authors of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible).
Moses somehow was aware of all the events before his time.
He most likely learned through traditional oral stories passed down from generation to generation.
Or perhaps it was given to him on Mount Sinai by God and the angels during the Exodus.
Then again, there is evidence that written language was used as far back as Abraham.

It is not known for sure how the Bible stories got to Moses.

If we believe the story of Noah and the Flood wiping out the planet, everything flows from Noah.

All people on Earth (and all animals) drowned except the eight in Noah's family and the mammals that God told Noah to take aboard the Ark.

All humans are thought to be descended from Noah and his eight family members.
All the animals, as well as the human race, are descendants of the Ark.
Noah, before the flood, had to have known everything in the Bible up to that time.
There was no one else that could have known all that information.
Did he memorize it or write it down?
Perhaps he was ignorant, and God later passed on the history of past times to Moses.
Like Noah, Moses had to have been knowledgeable of the entire biblical past from the beginning of God's creation up to the time of the massive exodus from Egypt.
There is no evidence that this knowledge was in written documents before Moses.
Did Noah have manuscripts on the Ark? We don't know.
Was the biblical history passed down from generation to generation verbally until it reached Noah? We don't know.
Was biblical history passed down generation to generation, from Noah to Moses? We don't know.
It is most probable that all stories and traditions were passed down from Adam and Eve through each generation orally until it got to Moses.
The other theory is that Moses learned humanity's history during the forty days and nights that he spent on Mount Sinai with God.
After that encounter, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. He had 40 years to write it.

No matter the method, Moses had to have gotten this information somehow to write about it.

If stories were passed down orally, how accurate were the 1600 years of oral tradition from Creation until the Flood?
I remember in grade school, the teacher whispered something into the ear of the student near the right side of her desk.
The whisper went around the room until it ended up at the last student in the room near the left side of her desk.
Of course, you know the outcome of this little demonstration.
Instead of the dog getting a treat from the youngest boy in the family for doing beneficial tricks, the young boy got a dog from his family because he didn't play tricks on them and was a good boy.
There were 22 students in the class.
That means there were twenty-two renditions of the story.
How many renditions are there in 1600 years of biblical pass down?
After 1600 years of transmission, one would anticipate a completely different story.
But the wonderful thing is that the story has not changed.
Writing documents accurately is one thing.
Telling a story orally for 1600 years without variations is something else.
Just thought-provoking.
When we compare the creation described in the Bible with the scientific explanation of creation, we find something amiss.
It always comes down to putting faith in the Bible or the scientific community. Which is accurate? Maybe neither.
However, we must recognize that for the past 100 years, the scientific community has been slowly but continuously proving the Bible to be accurate.

Is science 100% accurate?
Surprise! It's not.

It turns out that all the scientific dating methods have flaws. They are not exact sciences.
Many scientific methods disagree and can be thousands or even millions of years apart.
The scientific explanation of Earth's creation started as a "theory" in the 1800s by one man, a mathematician, that others bought into.
The theory didn't evolve based on scientific evidence but only on "reasoning" to explain Earth's creation using the logic of the day.
One geologist bought into it and developed the radiometric dating system.
Two geologists in the 1950s bought into it and developed a radiocarbon dating system.
Since then, many other dating methods have been created, using uranium, samarium, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, fission track, uranium-thorium, chlorine-36, luminescence, beryllium, and more.
It turns out that these dating methods have significant inaccuracies and inconsistencies, with discrepancies spanning millions of years.

The scientific community tends to apply the findings improperly.

The scientific community uses these dating systems to support their "theory" of a 5-billion-year-old Earth.

Scientists cannot agree on a single theory about the Earth's creation.
They are still arguing over it.

Space.com is one source. There are several theories. You can read about them on the internet.

The two prominent theories are the core accretion and the disk instability models.
The U.S. Geological Survey is the nation's largest biological science and civilian mapping agency.

It collects, monitors, analyzes, and provides a scientific understanding of natural resource conditions, issues, and problems.
They are the ones that have "scientifically" determined the age of the earth.

Here is the direct quote from their web page.
"So far, scientists have not found a way to determine the exact age of the earth."
Their website reveals that rocks from other planets determine the earth's age.
Note that there is a limited sampling of those rocks from a limited number of sources.
According to the theory, the Earth must be as old as other materials discovered in space.
Really?

Here is a theoretical story to ponder:

Henry Bessemer created a thin sheet of steel in 1881.

The sheet was stored for future use.
In 1981, Ford Motor Company purchased that sheet of steel.
Ford created a new prototype vehicle that never went into production.
They used this piece of steel, created in 1881, to manufacture a prototype in 1981.
Don't get ahead of me in this story.

In the future year of 3981, a construction crew excavated a plot of land in Detroit to build a high-rise building.
The workers dig up a weird-looking vehicle.
They have no idea what it is.
They are curious about its age and call in the science crew.
The dating system used during the year 3981 is very accurate and precise to the exact year.
How old does their dating system say that the vehicle is?
Stop trying to get ahead of me.
Their dating system indicated that Ford built the vehicle in 1881, not 1981.
If you haven't already figured it out, does it make sense now?
The dating system determined the age of the steel.
It did not determine the age of the vehicle.
Do you see the correlation of this story to Earth's creation?
The rocks are older than the planet they created.
Another fascinating piece of trivia is that scientists now admit that some moon rocks are older than the Earth.

How accurate is the scientific community?

As always, with the scientific community, anyone who goes against their "golden standard" gets unheard, ridiculed, shunned, and laughed at.

Pythagoras theorized that the earth was round.
The scientists of the day shunned him for making that statement.
The scientist said, "This can't be real."
Aristarchus figured out in 300 BC that the earth revolved around the sun.
This revelation was against the "scientific norm" of the sun rotating around the Earth.
And they said, "Not true."
The scientific community shunned Aristarchus, laughed him out of the meetings, and discredited him.
Copernicus went further.

He proposed that we are part of the solar system and that all the planets revolve around the sun.

It took decades before the scientific community finally accepted it.
Semmelweis, an obstetrician, published evidence that when doctors washed their hands before examining or treating patients, there was less illness and mortality.
It went against the medical approach at the time. No one believed him.

However, his hospital proved him correct.
Our human nature was at its peak.
And the list of "scientific misinformation" goes on and on until a rogue scientist is brave enough to challenge the "Club."

The scientific community (the Club) still has the self-egotistical "We know better than you" and "Don't challenge what we think we know" attitude.

The evidence is there to challenge the scientists if we look.
According to the Christian interpretation of the Bible, Earth was formed 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Since then, God created life, the flood occurred, and Jesus came and went.
The Genesis creation story is a viable explanation of the scientific world.
Modern "rogue scientists," like those listed above, are going against the egos of the mainstream scientific community but are being proven to be correct in showing that the Bible's creation is viable.
The mainstream scientific community does not want to look at the evidence and admit they are mistaken.
As a side note, watch the documentary "Is Genesis History?" There are also several books out.

Scientific Timeline

Earth's timeline.

Below is all speculation. Different historians and learned people have different timetables.
The assumption is that scientific radioactivity and carbon dating are accurate.
A belief is that the ancient Biblical year equals the modern year in length.

Timeline of American geochemists Patterson and Tilton, using their dating system:

Earth was created.
Microbial life is evident.

Fungal life found.

Plant life formed.

Land animals.

Fish came about.

Dinosaurs appeared.

Primates on Earth.

Apes appeared.
Caveman.
Stone tools found.

Fire and cooking.

Modern Humans.

Oldest pictograph.

Oldest hieroglyphic.

Oldest Hebrew Text.

Oldest Cuneiform.

Chinese inscription.

Hebrew manuscripts.

More "scrolls" were written.

Oldest text in ink.

4.4 bil. yrs

3.5 bil. yrs

1.5 bil. yrs
800 mil. yrs

600 mil. yrs
500 mil. yrs
100 mil. yrs

65 mil. yrs

8 mil. yrs

4 mil. yrs
3 mil. yrs

1.5 mil. yrs

800 th. yrs

5.5 th. yrs

5.1 th. yrs

4.3 th. yrs

4.0 th. yrs

3.3 th. yrs

3.2 th. yrs

2 th. yrs

900 yrs

Irish physicist and mathematician Lord Kelvin, are scientists who believe the Earth was created
20-40 million years ago.

Buddhists believe that the Earth
has no beginning or end.

Muslim Koran indicates that Earth was created
50 thousand years ago.

Hindu Text suggests that Earth was created
150 trillion years ago.

Christian Bible implies that Earth was created
6-10 thousand years ago.

Timeline according to the Christian Bible (Best Estimate).

Get the complete timeline here.

God created Earth.
Genesis:1 Year 1 4004 BC

Cain killed Abel.
Genesis:4 1000 3004 BC

Lamech sired Noah at age 182.
Genesis:5 1056 2948 BC

Noah built an ark at 600 years old.
Genesis:7 1656 2348 BC

All humans on Earth die in a flood, except Noah's family of 8 adults.

Noah died at age 950.
Genesis:9 2006 1998 BC

Amram sired Noah at age 65.
Exodus:2 2477 1527 BC

The Book of Job was written.
Job:1 2504 1500 BC

Moses led the Exodus at age 80.
Exodus:1 2557 1447 BC

Ten Commandments revealed.
Exodus:20 2604 1400 BC

Moses died at age 120.
Deut:34 2597 1407 BC

The Hebrew Bible was created.
3400 400 BC
It consists of 24 parchment scrolls.

"The Silent Era."
Nothing was written for 400 years between the Old and New Testaments.

Septuagint Bible
Greek Text. 3974 30 BC

Jesus is born.
Luke:2 3945 1 AD

Jesus is crucified.
Matthew:27 3977 33 AD

The last apostle, John
Died at 93. 4070 66 AD

According to the Hebrew Scrolls:

The "Dead Era or Betrothal Era" began at the crucifixion.
Since then, the world has been waiting for the return of Jesus.

Vulgate Bible
Latin Translation. Handwritten.
4386 382 AD

The Hebrew Bible—Tanakh.
It is finalized and authorized.
4454 450 AD

Catholic authorized the Latin Vulgate.
4504 600 AD

Latin Vulgate (first printed Bible).
The first Gutenberg printing.
5359 1455 AD

Tyndale Bible
The first English translation.
5434 1530 AD

King James Bible

The most popular Bible.

5515 1611 AD

Revised Standard

King James Revision.
5805 1901 AD

Since 1901, hundreds of translations have been made.

There are 6,000 years of Earth's biblical history, divided into the first, middle, and last years.

During the first 2,500 years, there has been no discovery of any biblical documents written.
The assumption is that all scripture must have been passed down by oral tradition from Adam and Eve, through the family of Noah, and finally to Moses.

Only during the middle 1,500-year period were biblical scriptures or manuscripts physically written.
Moses is believed to have written down all this orally passed-down scripture.
He wrote this history down in manuscripts and codices.

That scripture makes up the first five books of the modern Old Testament and is called the Pentateuch.
This is the foundation and source of the Jewish religion.

During those 1,500 middle years, there were 400 silent years between the writing of the Old and New Testaments.
No written documents exist during the silent period.
These "silent years" were between Malachi at about 430 BC and Luke at about 50 AD.
It is assumed that eight men wrote the entire New Testament between 50 AD and 95 AD.

During the last 1,500 "dead years," there have not been any newly written documents.
The mainstream Christian community has made copies and translations, but no new revelations, manuscripts, or documents.
Other religions recognize new material, and the mainstream Christian fellowship is skeptical of its authenticity.
The Mormons have the Book of Mormon, and the Islamic world has the Koran, to name two.
Are they the real truth from the heavenly maker of the earth and humanity? The believers think so.

During those past 1,500 years, since the apostles' deaths, no "new" documented written biblical history has come forth.

This is because of the "wedding story" Jesus explained to his disciples before his crucifixion.

Jesus is the "groom" and has left to go and prepare a "new home" for his "bride" (the believers).

All will be quiet during this "betrothal period" until the day Jesus comes back to get his believers.

That day is unknown and determined by God.
The Bible even states that Jesus does not know the day.

During this betrothal intermission, we are to straighten ourselves out with God.

If someday people standing or sitting next to you instantly disappear, you need to worry.