Where are you in time? Every chapter page now carries a small timeline strip that answers for that chapter; this page is the whole ledger. It runs on two clocks, kept honestly apart — and a third voice, the archaeologists', explained below.
Genesis keeps its own calendar: the begetting-ages of chapters 5 and 11 and the stated ages of the patriarchs add up, year by year, from Adam. The first column — "years from Adam" (the traditional Anno Mundi) — is nothing more than that arithmetic, done on the Masoretic numbers this translation is made from. The flood lands in year 1656; Abram leaves Haran in 2023; the covenant of circumcision falls in 2047. No outside assumption is added — it is the Bible timing itself.
The second column gives the dates Archbishop James Ussher published in his Annals (1650) — creation in 4004 BC, the flood in 2348, Abram's call in 1921 — the numbers the margins of old English Bibles carried for centuries. They are a reconstruction built on clock ① plus a chain of assumptions about the later periods, and they are offered here as the classic tradition, not as fact. (For everything before Terah, Ussher's date is simply 4004 minus the first column; from Abram on the two columns run sixty years apart — the Terah crux, below, explains why.)
Absolute, checkable dates enter the Bible's world from outside sources — Assyrian eponym lists pinned to a solar eclipse (763 BC), Babylonian chronicles, synchronisms with named kings. Those anchors reach the era of Israel's monarchy (the battle of Qarqar, 853 BC; the fall of Jerusalem, 586 BC) and will enter this page when the story does. The patriarchal age has no such anchor: if Abraham's journeys are history, they sit in the Middle Bronze Age (roughly 2000–1550 BC) — broadly where both clocks above put them — but no inscription names him, and this page won't pretend one does.
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4004 BC | The creation week | Gen 1:1 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–130 | — | Eden, the fall, Cain and Abel — undated, inside Adam's early years | Gen 3:1 |
| 130 | 3874 BC | Seth born, 'in place of Abel' | Gen 4:25 |
| 987 | 3017 BC | Enoch taken — 'and he was not there, for God took him' | Gen 5:24 |
| 1056 | 2948 BC | Noah born | Gen 5:29 |
| ≈1536 | — | The 120-year countdown announced | Gen 6:3 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1658 | 2346 BC | Arpachshad born, 'two years after the flood' | Gen 11:10 |
| 1757 | 2247 BC | Peleg born — 'in his days the earth was divided': Babel's window | Gen 10:25 |
| 1948 (or 2008) | 1996 BC | Abram born — the Terah crux in one row Terah fathered his first son at 70 (11:26); whether Abram was that son decides the number — Acts 7:4's ordering implies he wasn't (Terah-130). Ussher sided with 130. | Gen 11:26 |
| 2006 | 1998 BC | Noah dies — Abram is already alive on the plain count | Gen 9:29 |
| 2083 | 1921 BC | Terah dies in Haran at 205 On the plain count Terah lives on sixty years after Abram's departure; Acts 7:4 and the Samaritan text read it the other way. | Gen 11:32 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 1921 BC | The call: Abram leaves Haran at 75 | Gen 12:4 |
| 2023+ | c. 1920–1912 BC | Egypt; the parting from Lot; the war of the kings; the covenant of the pieces — undated, within the decade | Gen 12:10 |
| 2033 | 1911 BC | Hagar taken, 'after Abram had lived ten years in the land' | Gen 16:3 |
| 2034 | 1910 BC | Ishmael born; Abram 86 | Gen 16:16 |
| 2047 | 1897 BC | The covenant of circumcision; Abraham and Sarah named; Isaac promised for next year | Gen 17:24 |
| 2047 | 1897 BC | Three visitors at Mamre; Abraham argues the Judge of all the earth down to ten | Gen 18:1 |
| 2047 | 1897 BC | Sodom and Gomorrah overthrown; Lot escapes to Zoar; Moab and Ammon born | Gen 19:24 |
| 2047–2048 | c. 1897 BC | Abraham at Gerar — the sister-ruse replayed; Abimelech's dream; the first 'prophet' | Gen 20:3 |
| 2048 | 1896 BC | Isaac born, 'at the appointed time' — and the laughter lands; Hagar and Ishmael sent to the wilderness of Beersheba The child promised for three chapters is born to a hundred-year-old Abraham and a ninety-year-old Sarah, and the name banked since 17:17 is paid: Yitschaq, 'he laughs' (21:6). At the weaning feast the household divides — Hagar's second desert scene closes on the same seeing that named her first (21:19). | Gen 21:2 |
| — | c. 1870s BC? | The Aqedah — Abraham binds Isaac on Mount Moriah; the ram in the thicket; the promise sealed by God's own oath The altar of Genesis 22 stands on the hill 2 Chronicles 3:1 names as MOUNT MORIAH — the future Temple Mount, where David will buy Araunah's threshing floor and Solomon will build the first Temple (c. 966 BC). Moriah, north of the Jebusite town of Salem/Jebus, is drawn into Jerusalem only when the city expands to build there — so the hill of the binding becomes the city's heart before it wears the name. The year is uncertain: Isaac's age is debated (the midrash makes him 37). | Gen 22:2 |
| 2085 | 1859 BC | Sarah dies at Hebron; Abraham buys the cave of Machpelah — the patriarchs' first foothold in the land Sarah dies at 127 (the only woman whose lifespan the Torah records), and Abraham — a landless 'resident alien' in the land promised to his seed — buys a field and cave from Ephron the Hittite for 400 shekels, witnessed at the city gate (Genesis 23). It is the first parcel of Canaan the patriarchs indisputably own, and becomes their tomb (Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah); Herod's enclosure over the cave still stands at Hebron. | Gen 23:19 |
| 2088 | 1856 BC | Isaac marries Rebekah — the servant's journey to the old country, the sign at the well, 'I will go' Abraham, old, sends his senior servant back to the family in Aram-naharaim to find Isaac a wife — not from the Canaanites, and not by bringing Isaac back east (the promise runs forward, not home). At the well the servant asks for a sign of CHESED — the girl who waters ten thirsty camels unasked — and 'before he had finished speaking' Rebekah appears (Genesis 24, the longest chapter in the book). Asked 'Will you go?', she answers with the whole faith of Abraham in a single word — 'I will go' (elekh) — leaving her land and kindred for a land she has never seen, and her family blesses her in the very words of the Aqedah oath. Isaac is 40 (25:20); he brings her into his mother Sarah's tent, loves her, and is comforted after Sarah's death. | Gen 24:67 |
| 2108 | 1836 BC | Esau and Jacob born to Isaac and Rebekah; the elder to serve the younger, and the birthright sold for stew After twenty barren years Isaac entreats Jehovah and Rebekah conceives twins who struggle in the womb; she inquires of Jehovah directly and hears the oracle that governs the rest of Genesis — 'two nations… and the elder will serve the younger' (25:23). Esau is born ruddy and hairy (Edom, Seir), Jacob gripping his heel (Ya'aqov, the heel-holder who will supplant). Isaac is 60. Grown, Esau trades his birthright for a bowl of red lentil stew and 'despised' it (25:34) — the New Testament's type of the profane man who sells the eternal for one meal (Hebrews 12:16). | Gen 25:26 |
| 2123 | 1821 BC | Abraham dies at 175, 'old and full of years,' and is gathered to his people — buried by Isaac and Ishmael at Machpelah The first generation of the promise closes: Abraham dies at 175, 'gathered to his people' (the death-formula that reaches past the grave to the ancestors), and his two eldest sons — Isaac the heir and Ishmael the sent-away — stand together to bury him in the cave he had bought for Sarah (Genesis 25:7-10). He lived fifteen years past the twins' birth, long enough to see his grandsons grow. Keturah's six sons, meanwhile, fan out east as the peoples of Arabia — Midian among them, the line Moses will later marry into. | Gen 25:8 |
| — | c. 1810–1796 BC | Isaac's Gerar years — the covenant reaffirmed, the re-dug wells, and a pact with Abimelech at Beersheba The one chapter given wholly to Isaac (Genesis 26). A famine sends him to Gerar, but unlike his father he is told not to go down to Egypt; God re-grants him the whole Abrahamic oath — 'because Abraham obeyed my voice.' He replays the sister-ruse, grows rich enough that the Philistines envy him, and patiently re-digs his father's stopped wells, yielding the contested ones (Esek, Sitnah) until God gives him room (Rehoboth). At Beersheba he hears 'do not fear, for I am with you,' builds an altar, and cuts a treaty with Abimelech. The quiet middle patriarch inherits and preserves rather than breaking new ground; the chapter ends with Esau's Hittite wives — 'a bitterness of spirit' that will set the next chapter in motion. | Gen 26:24 |
| ≈2185 | c. 1760 BC | The stolen blessing — Jacob deceives the blind Isaac and takes Esau's blessing; Esau's grief drives him to flee toward Haran Isaac, old and blind and thinking himself near death, sends Esau to hunt game for the blessing; Rebekah dresses Jacob in his brother's clothes and goatskins and cooks the savory food, and Jacob lies his way to the blessing his mother heard promised at his birth (Genesis 27). The blessing spoken cannot be recalled — 'yes, and he will be blessed' — and Esau's great and bitter cry, 'bless me too, my father!', is one of the Bible's most anguished moments (Hebrews 12:17). Esau plots murder; Rebekah sends Jacob east to her brother Laban 'for a few days' — she will never see him again. It is the hinge of the whole Jacob cycle, and the beginning of the deceiver's own long schooling in being deceived. | Gen 27:35 |
| ≈2185 | c. 1760 BC | Jacob's ladder at Bethel — the covenant confirmed to the fugitive on the road to Haran; his first vow On the first night of his flight, alone with a stone for a pillow, Jacob dreams of a stairway between earth and heaven with angels ascending and descending, and hears the whole Abrahamic promise spoken over him — land, seed like the dust, all families of the earth blessed, 'and I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go' (Genesis 28). He wakes crying 'Surely Jehovah is in this place, and I did not know it,' sets his stone up as an anointed pillar, names the place Bethel ('house of God'), and vows his first vow — a tenth of all he is given. It is grace to a deceiver on the run, and the stairway Jesus will one day claim as himself (John 1:51). | Gen 28:12 |
| ≈2185 | c. 1760 BC | Jacob serves Laban — deceived into marrying Leah, then Rachel; the tribes begin to be born Jacob reaches Haran, meets Rachel at the well, and serves Laban seven years for her — 'and they seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had for her.' But on the wedding night Laban substitutes his elder daughter Leah, and in the morning 'behold, it was Leah!' (Genesis 29). 'Why have you deceived me?', Jacob demands — and Laban answers with the very principle Jacob had trampled: 'we do not give the younger before the firstborn.' The deceiver is deceived; he serves seven more years for Rachel too. God, seeing Leah unloved, gives her the first four sons — Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah — so that the priestly and the royal (and messianic) lines both spring from the wife nobody chose. | Gen 29:25 |
| ≈2192–2205 | c. 1753–1740 BC | The tribes born and Jacob grows rich — the war of the wives, and the speckled flocks that outwit Laban Through the bitter fertility-contest of Rachel and Leah and their two maidservants, eight more of Jacob's children are born (Genesis 30): Dan and Naphtali to Bilhah, Gad and Asher to Zilpah, Issachar and Zebulun and the daughter Dinah to Leah, and at last — 'God remembered Rachel' — Joseph, to the wife who had waited longest. With Joseph born Jacob asks to go home, but Laban, who admits 'Jehovah has blessed me for your sake,' bargains him into staying for wages of the speckled and spotted flock. Jacob answers Laban's cheating with the peeled rods and shrewd selective breeding, and 'the man increased exceedingly' — so that within six years the near-empty-handed fugitive is rich in flocks, servants, and camels, and ready to return to Canaan. | Gen 30:22 |
| ≈2205 | c. 1740 BC | Jacob flees Haran — Rachel steals the household gods; the treaty-heap at Galeed and Mizpah Warned by God to return, and with Laban's goodwill soured, Jacob gathers his wives, eleven sons, and vast flocks and slips away across the Euphrates toward Gilead — while Rachel, unknown to him, steals her father's teraphim (household gods). Laban pursues for seven days, is warned in a dream to 'speak neither good nor bad,' and overtakes Jacob in the hills of Gilead; he ransacks the tents for his gods (Rachel hides them under the camel-saddle and sits on them) and finds nothing. After Jacob's long, bitter account of twenty years' faithful service, the two make a boundary-covenant and heap up stones — Laban names it in Aramaic (Jegar-sahadutha), Jacob in Hebrew (Galeed), the first Aramaic in the Bible — and set the Mizpah watchpost between them: 'May Jehovah watch between me and you.' In the morning Laban kisses his grandchildren and goes home for good; Jacob turns toward Canaan and the brother he wronged. | Gen 31:49 |
| ≈2205 | c. 1739 BC | The wrestling at the Jabbok — Jacob crippled, blessed, and renamed Israel On the threshold of Canaan, and terrified that Esau is marching to meet him with four hundred men, Jacob meets the angels of God at Mahanaim ('two camps'), sends a lavish gift of livestock ahead in waves to appease his brother, and prays the first recorded prayer of his life — 'I am too small (qatonti) for all the kindness you have shown your servant.' Then, having sent everyone across the ford of the Jabbok, 'Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until dawn' (Genesis 32). Crippled at the hip but refusing to let go without a blessing, he is given a new name: 'no longer Jacob, but Israel — for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.' He names the place Peniel, 'the Face of God,' and limps away at sunrise to meet Esau. It is the turning point of the Jacob story and the moment the nation of Israel receives its name; the sinew of the thigh is not eaten to this day in memory of it. | Gen 32:29 |
| ≈2205 | c. 1739 BC | Jacob and Esau reconciled; Jacob settles at Shechem and builds an altar The reunion Jacob had dreaded turns out to be an embrace: Esau — who had once sworn to kill him — runs to meet him, falls on his neck, and weeps (Genesis 33). Jacob bows seven times, presses his lavish gift on his brother as a 'blessing' returned, and says, 'to see your face is like seeing the face of God.' They part in peace — Esau home to Seir, Jacob keeping a careful distance — and Jacob crosses into Canaan at last, camping at Succoth and then before the city of Shechem, where he buys a field for a hundred kesitah (the second parcel of the Promised Land any patriarch has owned, after Machpelah) and raises an altar, El-Elohe-Israel, 'El, the God of Israel' — claiming the God of his fathers under his own new name. The twenty-year exile is over. | Gen 33:4 |
| ≈2206 | c. 1739 BC | The massacre at Shechem — Dinah violated; Simeon and Levi deceive the town and destroy it; the family is driven toward Bethel The homecoming turns dark. Dinah, Jacob's daughter by Leah, is seized and violated by Shechem, the Hivite prince of the town where the family has settled (Genesis 34). His father Hamor proposes a merger of the two peoples, and Shechem offers any bride-price; but the sons of Jacob answer 'with deceit' (b'mirmah — the family's own besetting word), demanding that every male of the town be circumcised. On the third day, while the men lie in pain, Simeon and Levi — Dinah's full brothers — take their swords, kill every male, and carry off the city's wealth, women, and children. Jacob rebukes the two only for the danger they have made ('you have made me a stench to the land'); they answer with a question the narrator leaves unanswered — 'Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?' The atrocity ends the family's peace at Shechem and sets up the flight to Bethel, and it is never forgiven: on his deathbed Jacob curses the brothers' anger and foretells that Simeon and Levi will be 'scattered in Israel' (49:5-7). | Gen 34:25 |
| ≈2207 | c. 1739 BC | Jacob returns to Bethel — the foreign gods buried, his name sealed Israel a second time; Rachel dies bearing Benjamin on the road to Bethlehem Called back by God to the place of his fleeing vow, Jacob purges his camp of its foreign gods and earrings, buries them under the oak at Shechem, and goes up to Bethel to build the altar he had promised twenty years before (Genesis 35). There God appears again, blesses him, and confirms the name Israel and the covenant of El Shaddai — a nation, a company of nations, and kings to come. On the road south Rachel dies in hard labor bearing her second son; with her last breath she names him Ben-oni, 'son of my sorrow,' but Jacob renames him Benjamin, and buries her by the way to Ephrath — that is, Bethlehem — under a pillar that stands 'to this day.' The twelve sons are now all named — just before the family begins to tear itself apart over Joseph. | Gen 35:19 |
| ≈2288 | c. 1716 BC | Isaac dies at Hebron, 180 years old — buried by Esau and Jacob together (recorded in Genesis 35, though he outlives Joseph's sale) Isaac, 'old and full of days,' dies at 180 and is buried in the cave of Machpelah by his two sons — the twins who fought in the womb and over the birthright standing together at the grave, as Isaac and Ishmael had once buried Abraham (25:9). Genesis places his obituary in ch. 35 to close his generation before turning wholly to Joseph, but by the chronology he actually dies about a dozen years AFTER Joseph is sold into Egypt (ch. 37) — the same out-of-order mercy the book showed with Abraham, clearing the old man from the stage in peace before the years of grief begin. | Gen 35:29 |
| — | — | Esau's line becomes Edom in Seir — the clans, chiefs, and kings of the brother-nation (a genealogical interlude) Genesis pauses to catalogue Esau (ch. 36): his Canaanite wives and sons, his move to the red highlands of Seir 'away from his brother Jacob' (a peaceful separation, echoing Abraham and Lot's, 13:6), the clan-chiefs of Edom, the older Horite people they displaced (Deuteronomy 2:12), and eight kings who 'reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel' — a notably non-dynastic line, each king from a different city. Amalek, Israel's future arch-enemy, is quietly born in the roll (36:12). Undated by design: a genealogical bridge that settles Esau's account with honor before the book turns wholly to Joseph. | Gen 36:1 |
| ≈2276 | c. 1728 BC | Joseph sold into Egypt at seventeen — the coat stripped, the pit at Dothan, twenty pieces of silver Joseph's age is given exactly ('seventeen years old,' 37:2), and Genesis later dates him precisely enough to anchor the rest: he stands before Pharaoh at thirty (41:46), and Jacob comes down to Egypt in the second year of the famine, when Joseph is thirty-nine (45:6, 47:9) — so the sale sits about twenty-two years before the family's descent. The brothers grazed the flock at Shechem, the town Simeon and Levi had destroyed (ch. 34), and sold him to a caravan on the Gilead-to-Egypt spice road; the price, twenty shekels, is exactly the valuation Leviticus 27:5 later fixes for a male his age. Note that by this chronology Isaac is still alive — his obituary was placed early, in ch. 35, to clear his generation before the story turned to Joseph. | Gen 37:28 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | c. 15th c. BC | Israel enslaved in Egypt — store-cities Pithom and Raamses built; Pharaoh's decree against the newborn sons A new king 'who did not know Joseph' turns Jacob's multiplying household into a slave force (Exodus 1). On the EARLY date this translation follows (Exodus 1446 BC, from 1 Kings 6:1; Joel Kramer / Expedition Bible — see research), the oppressor is Thutmose III, Egypt's great empire-builder, and the pharaoh of the Exodus a generation later is Amenhotep II, whose Canaan campaigns cease after 1446 and whose successor's Dream Stele hints his firstborn had died. The store-city name 'Raamses' — the pillar of the rival late date (Ramesses II, ~1250 BC) — is taken as an updated place-name, like 'Dan' in Genesis 14:14. | Exod 1:11 |
| — | c. 1526–1486 BC | Moses born and drawn from the Nile; grown, he flees to Midian — and God hears Israel's groaning and remembers his covenant Born to a Levite couple under Pharaoh's death-decree, hidden three months, then floated on the Nile in an ark of papyrus (the word tevah, Noah's ark) and drawn out by Pharaoh's daughter to be raised in the Egyptian court (Exodus 2). His very name is Egyptian — mose, 'born of, son,' the element in Thut-mose and Ra-messes — under a Hebrew pun on mashah, 'to draw out.' At about forty he kills an Egyptian overseer and flees to Midian, marries Zipporah, and shepherds there until the oppressing pharaoh (Thutmose III on the early date) dies (2:23) — the forty silent years before the burning bush. The chapter ends on four verbs that turn the whole book: God heard, remembered his covenant, saw, and knew. | Exod 2:10 |
| — | c. 1446 BC | The burning bush at Horeb — Moses called; the Name revealed: 'I will be what I will be,' Jehovah At the mountain of God, an angel of Jehovah in a bush that burns unconsumed; 'take off your sandals, for the place is holy ground'; and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob names himself — ehyeh asher ehyeh, 'I will be what I will be,' and YHWH, 'this is my name forever, my memorial to all generations' (Exodus 3:14-15). The four verbs that closed chapter 2 (God heard, remembered, saw, knew) come back in the first person out of the fire. On the early date Moses is about eighty (7:7); the call opens the year of the Exodus, 1446 BC. This chapter is the ground of the whole translation's rendering of the Name as Jehovah. | Exod 3:14 |
| — | c. 1445 BC | At Sinai, the law of the offerings given — Leviticus is spoken from the tent of meeting In the second year after the Exodus, with the tabernacle finished and filled with the glory-cloud (Exodus 40:17, 34), Jehovah calls Moses from within it and gives the sacrificial law — beginning with the olah, the whole burnt-offering (Leviticus 1). Israel is still encamped at Mount Sinai; the whole book is delivered here in about a month, before the march north resumes (Numbers 10:11). The offering's refrain, 'a soothing aroma to Jehovah,' reaches back to Noah's first altar after the flood (Genesis 8:21), and the demand for a victim 'without blemish' (tamim) reaches back to the walk God asked of Abraham (Genesis 17:1). | Lev 1:3 |
| — | c. 1445 BC | The census at Sinai — Israel mustered as an army; 603,550 fighting men, the Levites set apart On the first day of the second month of the second year — one month after Leviticus, thirteen months out of Egypt — Moses and Aaron take a census of the twelve tribes: every male from twenty years old and upward, all who could go to war, tribe by tribe, to a total of 603,550 fighting men (Numbers 1). Israel is arrayed as an army for the march to Canaan, one chieftain (nasi) per tribe, Judah's Nahshon at the head. The tribe of Levi alone is left off the war-roll, appointed instead to carry, pitch, and guard the tabernacle and to camp around it as a buffer 'that there be no wrath upon the congregation.' The star-promise to Abram (Genesis 15:5) has become a countable host; but this same generation, at Kadesh, will refuse the land and be sentenced to die in the wilderness — the muster is of an army that never fights the war it was numbered for. | Num 1:46 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | c. 762–760 BC | Amos of Tekoa goes north — and dates his own book two years before an earthquake A Judean sheep-breeder preaching at Bethel in the reign of Jeroboam II, when the northern kingdom was as rich and as large as it ever became. On most reckonings the EARLIEST of the writing prophets. ⚠ Uniquely, he fixes his date by a natural disaster as well as by two kings: 'two years before THE earthquake' — still a landmark for Zechariah two and a half centuries later (14:5), and commonly identified with the mid-eighth-century destruction layers at Hazor, Lachish, Gezer, Deir Alla and in the City of David. He opens by sentencing five foreign nations, and his audience agrees with every word until the eighth oracle turns on them. | Amos 1:1 |
| — | c. 780 BC | Jonah son of Amittai prophesies under Jeroboam II — later the runaway of his own book 2 Kings 14:25 has the historical Jonah, of Gath-hepher near Nazareth, foretell Jeroboam II's restoration of Israel's borders — a nationalist good-news prophet. ⚠ The BOOK of Jonah, which sends that same prophet to save Nineveh and has him flee to Tarshish and be swallowed by a great fish, is widely dated centuries later (post-exilic), a pointed tale built on his name. Filed here for the man; the book is a later telling. | Jonah 1:1 |
| — | c. 730–700 BC | Micah of Moresheth prophesies in Judah — the country prophet who out-lasted his own words A Shephelah farmer's-prophet, contemporary of Isaiah under Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. His horizon spans Samaria's fall (722) and Sennacherib's invasion of the Judean lowlands (701), which he mourns town by town in an untranslatable chain of place-name puns (Micah 1:10-16). ⚠ Jeremiah 26:18 quotes him BY NAME a century later — the only writing prophet so cited — and credits his 'Zion will be plowed as a field' with moving Hezekiah to repent. His book gives the NT Bethlehem (5:2) and 'do justice, love mercy, walk humbly' (6:8). | Micah 1:1 |
| — | c. 663–612 BC | Nahum foresees the fall of Nineveh — Jonah's city, a century and a half later, with no mercy this time A single sustained oracle against Assyria's capital, dated by the two cities it names: Thebes (fallen 663, spoken of as past, 3:8) and Nineveh (which the Babylonians and Medes destroyed in 612). ⚠ The dark twin of Jonah — the same city, the opposite verdict — its name 'Comfort' meaning that Nineveh's fall is the good news for everyone Assyria had crushed. Opens with a wrath-hymn built as a half-finished alphabetic acrostic, and turns the Exodus-34 formula toward JUSTICE where Jonah had quoted its mercy. | Nahum 1:1 |
| — | c. 605 BC | Habakkuk argues with God as Babylon rises — 'the righteous will live by his faith' A contemporary of Jeremiah at the end of Judah's independence. His book is a dialogue, not a sermon: he complains of the violence rotting Judah, and God answers that he is raising up the Chaldeans (Babylon) — an answer that only deepens the prophet's protest, since Babylon is more wicked than Judah. ⚠ The reply, in 2:4, is the New Testament's most quoted verse ('the righteous will live by his faith,' Romans 1:17 etc.), and the book ends (ch 3) on the highest note of trust-in-the-dark in Scripture: 'though the fig tree does not blossom… yet I will exult in Jehovah.' A commentary on it (1QpHab) was among the first Dead Sea Scrolls found. | Habakkuk 1:1 |
| — | c. 630 BC | Zephaniah, of royal blood, preaches the 'day of Jehovah' — a de-creation undoing Genesis 1 A great-great-grandson of King Hezekiah, prophesying under Josiah, probably just before the reform of 622. His book opens with the most total judgment in the Twelve — 'I will sweep away human and beast, the birds and the fish,' Genesis 1 in reverse — and the Day-of-Wrath poem of 1:15 gave the church, via the Vulgate, its funeral hymn the DIES IRAE. But his name means 'Jehovah has hidden,' and the book turns (2:3) to 'perhaps you will be hidden' and ends (3:17) with God 'exulting over you with singing.' An older contemporary of the young Jeremiah. | Zephaniah 1:1 |
| — | c. 750–722 BC | Hosea preaches in the northern kingdom — three children named as sentences, and the covenant formula unsaid Beginning under Jeroboam II at the height of northern prosperity and running to the edge of Samaria's fall. Jezreel, Lo-Ruchamah (Not-Pitied) and Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People) are the message; within three Hebrew verses all three names are reversed. Assyria took Samaria in 722 and the northern kingdom never returned. | Hosea 1:4 |
| — | c. 740–700 BC | Isaiah prophesies in Jerusalem under four kings — Assyria destroys the north (722) and besieges Jerusalem (701) 'The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz… in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah' (1:1). Sennacherib's prism records the siege from the other side: Hezekiah shut up in Jerusalem 'like a bird in a cage.' The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsa-a, c. 125 BC) preserves the whole book a thousand years before the oldest complete Masoretic manuscripts. | Isaiah 1:1 |
| — | c. 970–931 BC | The Song of Songs — love poetry attributed to Solomon, and the only book of the Bible in which a woman's voice dominates 'The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's' — a Hebrew superlative (the best song there is) over a preposition that may mean by him, for him, about him, or in his manner. The book has no plot, no narrator, and no mention of God; it was disputed at Jamnia and kept, Rabbi Akiva calling it the holy of holies of the Scriptures. | Song of Solomon 1:1 |
| — | c. 970–931 BC | The Solomonic persona of Ecclesiastes — the setting the book claims, though its Hebrew is centuries later Qohelet introduces himself as 'son of David, king in Jerusalem' and then says 'I WAS king' (1:12) — a past tense that does not fit Solomon, who never stopped being one. The book is filed here because that is where it puts itself; its language (Aramaic ra'yon, Persian pardes and pitgam) puts the writing four to six centuries later, in the Persian or early Hellenistic period. | Ecclesiastes 1:12 |
| — | c. 970–931 BC | Solomon reigns in Jerusalem — the wisdom of the royal court; the proverbs gathered under his name David's son, at his asking, is given 'a wise and understanding heart' (1 Kings 3); his court becomes the Bible's byword for wisdom, and Proverbs is filed under his name (Proverbs 1:1) — the wisdom books' home era. His forty-year reign is the high-water mark of the united kingdom, before it splits in two at his death. | Prov 1:1 |
| — | c. 966 BC | Solomon builds the First Temple on Mount Moriah — the hill of the Aqedah becomes the house of Jehovah 2 Chronicles 3:1: Solomon built 'on Mount Moriah, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite' — the very hill where Abraham had bound Isaac (Genesis 22) and where David had raised an altar. The bare height north of the old Jebusite town is now the city's heart, and 'on the mount of Jehovah it is seen to' (Genesis 22:14) has its building. Destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. | Gen 22:14 |
| — | c. 970 BC | David dies; Solomon anointed at Gihon and the kingdom established in his hand 1 Kings 1-2. The succession is settled in a single afternoon: Adonijah's feast at En Rogel against Solomon's anointing at the city's own spring. Solomon's fourth year, when the temple is begun, is dated in 1 Kings 6:1 to the 480th year after the exodus — the verse the whole chronology of the monarchy hangs from. | 1 Kings 1:39 |
| — | c. 852 BC | Ahaziah of Israel dies after a fall; Elijah's last confrontation with a king, and Moab's revolt 2 Kings 1. The Moabite side of that same revolt survives independently on the MESHA STELE (the Moabite Stone, found at Dhiban in 1868), where King Mesha gives his own account of throwing off Israel and credits his god Chemosh — one of the few places where the other party to a biblical war left a statement of its own. | 2 Kings 1:1 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | 605 BC | Nebuchadnezzar's first deportation: Daniel taken to Babylon; the temple vessels to Shinar Daniel 1:1's 'third year of Jehoiakim' vs Jeremiah 25:1's 'fourth' — Babylonian accession-year counting vs Judean inclusive counting; both land on 605, the year of Carchemish, fixed by the Babylonian Chronicle tablets: the chronology's first externally documented date. | Dan 1:1 |
| — | c. 605–598 BC | Jeremiah in the stocks — Pashhur renamed Terror-All-Around; Babylon named as the exile's destination The first recorded violence against Jeremiah: a night in the 'twister' at the upper Benjamin Gate, for the sermon preached over the valley of Ben-Hinnom. The oracle that followed is the first in the book to say 'Babylon' out loud — five times in three verses — and the confession after it ('You enticed me… a burning fire shut up in my bones… cursed be the day I was born') is the rawest prayer in the prophets. | Jer 20:7 |
| — | 597 BC | The first great deportation — Jehoiachin (Coniah), eighteen and three months on the throne, carried to Babylon; the signet torn off Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem the first time (2 Kings 24:10-16) and deports the boy-king Jehoiachin with the treasures, the craftsmen, and ten thousand captives — Ezekiel and the exile community among them; Jeremiah's tariff of kings (ch. 22) ends on his sentence, 'though Coniah were a signet on my right hand, yet would I tear you off… write this man childless.' The Babylonian Chronicle dates the city's fall to 2 Adar (16 March 597), and the excavated palace RATION TABLETS list grain and oil for 'Ya'u-kinu, king of Judah' — the deposed king, alive in Babylon, named in the archive of his captor. | Jer 22:24 |
| — | 588–586 BC | The final siege of Jerusalem — Zedekiah's delegation told: the city goes to the fire; life is outside the walls Nebuchadrezzar's armies close on the city; the king's last-ditch embassy asks for an Exodus-style wonder and hears the Exodus formula aimed inward — 'I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and a strong arm' (Jeremiah 21:5). The city and temple burned in the summer of 586 (2 Kings 25:8-9); the Lachish ostraca — Judean military letters scratched during this very campaign, dug from the gate-room ash — carry the panic contemporaneously. | Jer 21:5 |
| — | 539 BC | Babylon falls to Cyrus — 'and Daniel continued until the first year of King Cyrus' The exile's terminus, posted at its start (Daniel 1:21); pinned outside the Bible by the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder. | Dan 1:21 |
| — | c. 536 BC | Daniel's last vision, by the great river — the scroll of wars, the sleepers who wake, the sealed book One scene spanning chapters 10–12, dated by 10:1 to 'the third year of Cyrus' — an old man shown the far end of history and dismissed with a personal promise: 'you shall rest, and you shall stand up to your lot at the end of the days' (12:13). The Hebrew Bible's clearest resurrection text (12:2) belongs to this vision. | Dan 12:2 |
| — | 597 BC | Jerusalem surrenders; King Jehoiachin, the court and the craftsmen deported to Babylonia — the exile Ezekiel dates everything from The Babylonian Chronicle records Nebuchadnezzar taking the city and appointing a king of his own choosing, dating the capture to 2 Adar (16 March) 597 BC — one of the firmest dates in Old Testament history. Ration tablets excavated in Babylon name 'Ya'u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu' among those fed at the king's expense. | Ezekiel 1:2 |
| — | 593 BC | Ezekiel's call by the Chebar canal — the chariot vision, and the first prophet commissioned outside the land Dated by the book to the day (1:1-2). The point of a throne on wheels, seen in Babylonia, is that it goes where the exiles are. | Ezekiel 1:1 |
| — | 586 BC | Jerusalem burned — the First Temple destroyed, the walls broken down, the city emptied Nebuzaradan, Nebuchadnezzar's officer, burns the house of Jehovah, the king's house and every large house, and the Babylonian army pulls down the walls (2 Kings 25:8-10). Lamentations is the poetry written over it — five poems, four of them alphabetical, read every year on the ninth of Av. Babylon is not mentioned once in them. | Lamentations 1:1 |
| — | c. 586 BC | Obadiah — the shortest book in the Bible — condemns EDOM for standing by, and looting, at Jerusalem's fall ⚠ Dated by the crime it describes: verses 11-14 have Edom watching foreigners enter Jerusalem's gates and cast lots over the city, then joining the plunder and cutting off the fugitives. The same bitter memory is in Psalm 137:7 ('remember, Jehovah, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem') and Lamentations 4:21-22. Its first nine verses run almost word for word with Jeremiah 49:7-22. A minority dates it to a 9th-century raid instead; the internal evidence points hard at just after 586. | Obadiah 1:11 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | 538 BC | Cyrus of Persia allows the exiles to return; the first company goes home to a ruined Jerusalem The Cyrus Cylinder records the Persian policy of restoring deported peoples and their sanctuaries — the imperial background to Ezra 1. Daniel 1:21 closes on the same year, 'the first year of King Cyrus.' | Dan 1:21 |
| — | 520 BC | Haggai and Zechariah rouse the stalled rebuilding of the temple; ground is broken twenty-three days after Haggai's first word Haggai 1. The first day of the sixth month in the second year of Darius I, dated to the day. Ezra 5:1-2 records the same moment from the outside; the enemies' protest sends Darius to the archives, where Cyrus's decree is found (Ezra 6), and the house is finished four years later in 516. | Haggai 1:1 |
| — | 520 BC | Zechariah, Haggai's contemporary, begins the eight night visions — the first sustained apocalypse, and the seedbed of Daniel and Revelation Zechariah 1. His opening call ('return to me, and I will return to you') is dated the eighth month of Darius's second year, between Haggai's second and third oracles; the myrtle-trees vision follows in the eleventh month. Ezra 5:1 names the two prophets together as the preaching that rebuilt the temple. | Zechariah 1:1 |
| — | 515 BC | The second temple finished — smaller than Solomon's, and wept over by those who remembered the first Ezra 6:15. It is this temple, in working order and taken for granted, whose altar Malachi finds treated with contempt. | Malachi 1:7 |
| — | c. 460-430 BC | Malachi — the last of the prophets: a burden against a bored priesthood, and 'my name is great among the nations' Undated by the book itself. Judah is a Persian province under a governor (1:8), the temple is running, and the abuses Malachi names — blemished offerings, neglected tithes, foreign marriages, casual divorce — are the same ones Ezra and Nehemiah confront. In the Christian arrangement of the Old Testament his is the last prophetic voice before the Gospels. | Malachi 1:1 |
| — | 445 BC | Nehemiah hears of Jerusalem's broken wall in Susa; the following year he rebuilds it in fifty-two days Nehemiah 1-6. The twentieth year of Artaxerxes I. An Aramaic papyrus from the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, dated 407 BC, names both Sanballat's sons as authorities in Samaria and Johanan as high priest in Jerusalem — an independent fix on the same officials this book names. | Nehemiah 1:3 |
| — | 483 BC | Xerxes' great assembly at Susa — and, four years later, a Judean queen of Persia Esther 1-2. Herodotus places Xerxes' war council for the Greek campaign in this same period; the invasion sails in 480 and is broken at Salamis. Esther becomes queen in 479, the year after the king's return. The book never mentions Greece. | Esther 1:3 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | 167 BC | The abomination that desolates — Antiochus IV halts the daily offering; an altar to Zeus on the altar of burnt offering 1 Maccabees 1:54 dates it to 15 Kislev, 167 BC, quoting Daniel 11:31's own phrase. Whether Daniel foresees or records the day is the book's great dating question — both readings, at full strength, on the chapter page. The temple was rededicated three years later (Hanukkah, 164 BC). | Dan 11:31 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | c. 6–4 BC | The genealogy and the birth of Jesus — 'God with us' Matthew opens the New Testament with a genealogy from Abraham through David to the Christ, forty-two generations in three panels of fourteen, four irregular women written into the line; then the virginal conception, Joseph stopped in a dream, and the naming of Jesus, 'YHWH saves'. ⚠ The birth falls a few years 'before Christ' because the sixth-century monk Dionysius Exiguus, who fixed the AD count, miscalculated: Herod the Great, in whose last years both Matthew and Luke set the birth, died in 4 BC. Matthew tells it from Joseph's side, Luke from Mary's. | Matt 1:23 |
| — | c. 5–4 BC | The magi and the star; the flight into Egypt; the killing at Bethlehem Herod died in 4 BC on the usual reckoning — Josephus places his death after a lunar eclipse and before a Passover, though a minority argues for 1 BC — so the visit of the magi and the flight into Egypt fall in the last year or two of his reign, and the birth itself a little earlier, since his decree covers boys 'from two years old and under'. ⚠ Which means the era named after Jesus begins a few years after he was born: the Anno Domini count is the arithmetic of Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century, and it is short. The stay in Egypt is given no length in the text. Josephus does not record the killing at Bethlehem; the reign he does record includes the execution of Herod's wife, her brother, her mother and three of his own sons. | Matt 2:11 |
| — | c. AD 26–29 | The Baptist at the Jordan; the Word made flesh; the first disciples Luke dates the Baptist's appearance precisely — 'the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius' (Luke 3:1), which is about AD 28–29 — and it is the firmest chronological peg in the Gospels. John preaches in the wilderness of Judea dressed in the clothes 2 Kings 1:8 puts on Elijah, and Malachi had promised Elijah before the day of the Lord. ⚠ The baptism of Jesus belongs here (Matthew 3:13-17): the heavens open, the spirit descends like a dove, and a voice speaks a sentence made of Psalm 2:7, Genesis 22:2 and Isaiah 42:1 at once. Matthew alone records John trying to stop him, and Jesus' first recorded words in that Gospel are the answer. | John 1:29 |
| — | c. AD 27–28 | The first sign at Cana; the temple cleared at the first Passover 'Forty-six years this temple has been under building' (John 2:20): Josephus dates Herod's rebuild from 20/19 BC — one of the Gospels' few countable dates, and a peg for the whole ministry. | John 2:20 |
| — | c. AD 28–29 | The testing in the wilderness; Capernaum; the first four disciples Forty days and forty nights in the Judean wilderness, and three temptations answered out of Deuteronomy — the book of the wilderness generation. ⚠ Matthew and Luke give the three in a different ORDER (Matthew: bread, temple, mountain; Luke: bread, mountain, temple), and neither claims to be sequencing them. Then John the Baptist is arrested and Jesus withdraws north, leaving Nazareth for CAPERNAUM on the lake — the base for nearly everything that follows — and begins preaching the identical sentence John had been preaching. Four fishermen are called off two boats: Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John. | Matt 4:17 |
| — | c. AD 28–30 | Healings around Capernaum — a leper, a centurion's boy, a storm stilled Matthew gathers the healing half of his summary at 4:23 into chapters 8-9, and closes the frame by repeating that summary word for word at 9:35. ⚠ The order is Matthew's own arrangement rather than a diary: he groups by theme, which is why the same events appear in a different sequence in Mark. The chapter holds the first 'Son of Man' in the Gospel (8:20), the first 'weeping and gnashing of teeth' (8:12), and a Roman officer whose faith Jesus says he has not found in Israel. | Matt 8:17 |
| — | c. AD 28–30 | The Sermon on the Mount — the Happy-sayings; 'you have heard… but I say'; 'love your enemies' Matthew 5–7, the first of the Gospel's five great discourses, on a hillside above the Sea of Galilee's northwest shore (tradition: the Mount of Beatitudes, above Tabgha). Undatable to a year within the ministry — placed here mid-course, where Matthew places it: after the calling of the first disciples, before the sending of the Twelve. | Matt 5:1 |
| — | c. AD 28–30 | John's question from prison; woes on Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum; 'Come to me, all who are weary' Matthew 11. John, now imprisoned, sends to ask the one question his own ministry never quite let him ask aloud: 'Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?' Jesus answers with a list of deeds echoing Isaiah's own picture of restoration, then identifies John himself as the promised Elijah (Malachi 3:23-24, Hebrew numbering) — before turning to reproach the towns that saw the most and repented the least, and closing on the Gospel's gentlest invitation to rest. | Matt 11:28 |
| Years from Adamthe text's own count | Traditional BCUssher, 1650 | Event | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | c. AD 30–33 | The ascension from the Mount of Olives — 'you will be my witnesses … to the end of the earth' Ten days before Pentecost, and the opening scene of Acts. The eleven walk back a sabbath day's journey to an upper room in Jerusalem and, among about a hundred and twenty, choose Matthias by lot to complete the Twelve — the last casting of lots recorded in the Bible. The year depends on the date of the crucifixion, for which AD 30 and AD 33 are the two serious candidates; both are reported, neither chosen. | Acts 1:9 |
| — | c. AD 45–49 / disputed | James writes to the twelve tribes — 'be doers of the word, and not hearers only' A letter of practical wisdom from James the Just, the brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem church, to Jewish believers scattered abroad — wisdom literature in a Christian key, thick with echoes of the Sermon on the Mount. ⚠ Its date is one of the most disputed in the New Testament: on the early view (placed here) it predates the Jerusalem council and is among the earliest Christian writings, a third contender beside Galatians and 1 Thessalonians; on the late view it is pseudonymous, after James's death about AD 62. The range is reported. | James 1:22 |
| — | c. AD 48–55 | Paul writes Galatians — 'a different gospel, which is not another' The most heated of Paul's letters, and his earliest sustained statement that a person is justified by faith and not by works of the law — written to congregations being pressed to add circumcision to Christ. ⚠ Its date swings a full seven years on which 'Galatia' is meant: the South-Galatian view makes it Paul's first letter of all (c. 48, before the Jerusalem council); the North-Galatian view puts it in the mid-50s beside Romans. Placed here at the early end of the range; the ordering is genuinely uncertain. | Galatians 1:4 |
| — | c. AD 50–51 | Paul writes 1 Thessalonians from Corinth — 'to wait for his Son from the heavens' Probably the OLDEST surviving Christian writing of any kind — earlier than any Gospel, and perhaps twenty years after the crucifixion. Written months after Paul was smuggled out of Thessalonica by night (Acts 17:1-9), and prompted by Timothy's report that the young congregation was holding. ⚠ The one rival for 'earliest' is Galatians, on the South-Galatian dating of its address; the question is unsettled and both are reported. Embedded at 1:9-10 is a summary of conversion-preaching widely thought to be older still than the letter carrying it — turn, serve, wait. | 1 Thessalonians 1:10 |
| — | c. AD 50–51 | Paul writes 2 Thessalonians — 'in flaming fire, dealing out vengeance' A second letter to the same congregation, close on the heels of the first, to steady it under sharpening persecution and to correct a rumour that the Day of the Lord had already come (2:2). Chapter 1 holds the strongest statement of retributive judgment in Paul, and offers it as comfort: the account will be settled by God, not by the sufferers. ⚠ It is the most disputed of the letters outside the Pastorals — many hold it to be by a later hand, chiefly because its 'signs first, then the End' (ch. 2) reads awkwardly beside the first letter's 'thief in the night', and because it leans so heavily on that letter's wording. The majority read it as Paul's, written soon after; both are reported. | 2 Thessalonians 1:8 |
| — | c. AD 54–55 | Paul writes to Corinth from Ephesus — 'we proclaim Christ crucified' A reply to a divided congregation, prompted by a report from Chloe's household and by a list of questions the Corinthians had sent. It is the New Testament's most practical letter — factions, lawsuits, sex, food, worship, resurrection — and the source of the love chapter and of the earliest written account of the Last Supper. Dated by the Gallio inscription at Delphi, which fixes Paul's eighteen months at Corinth to AD 50-52. | 1 Corinthians 1:23 |
| — | c. AD 55–56 | Paul writes 2 Corinthians from Macedonia — 'the God of all comfort' The most personal and least orderly of Paul's letters — a defense of his own ministry against rivals who had turned the Corinthians against him, written in relief after a reconciliation that had nearly failed (the 'painful visit' and the 'letter of tears'). It refuses to name the near-fatal 'affliction in Asia' that stands behind it, and rises at 12:9 to 'my power is made perfect in weakness'. | 2 Corinthians 1:3 |
| — | c. AD 56–57 | Paul dictates Romans from Corinth — 'the righteous will live by faith' Written at the end of the third missionary journey, to congregations in the capital he had never visited, as a letter of introduction before a hoped-for journey to Spain. Tertius, the scribe, signs his own name at 16:22; Phoebe of Cenchreae carries it. Paul would reach Rome a few years later, under guard. | Rom 1:1 |
| — | c. AD 60–62 | The prison letters — Ephesians: 'to gather up all things under one head in Christ' Written, on the traditional reading, from Paul's imprisonment in Rome and carried with Colossians and Philemon by Tychicus. The calmest and most cosmic of the letters, with no crisis behind it and no personal greetings in it. ⚠ The earliest manuscripts lack 'in Ephesus' at 1:1, and Marcion knew the letter as addressed to Laodicea — so it may have been a circular with the address left blank. Its authorship is also disputed. Both questions are reported, neither settled. | Ephesians 1:10 |
| — | c. AD 60–62 | The prison letters — Philippians: 'to live is Christ and to die is gain' A thank-you letter for money, written in chains to the congregation at Philippi — the first Paul founded in Europe and the only one that never gave him trouble. It sounds the word JOY some sixteen times from a prison cell, shrugs at rivals preaching Christ to spite him, admits he cannot decide between living and dying, and carries the hymn of chapter 2 ('he emptied himself'), which may be older than the letter. | Philippians 1:21 |
| — | c. AD 60–62 | The prison letters — Colossians: 'in him all things hold together' Written to a small town in the Lycus valley that Paul had never visited, whose congregation Epaphras had founded and which was being sold access to God through angel-ranks, food rules and special knowledge. Its answer is the hymn of 1:15-20 — probably older than the letter — and its centre is four words: 'Christ in you, the hope of glory'. Carried with Philemon and Ephesians by Tychicus and Onesimus, which is why Ephesians and Colossians run so closely parallel. | Colossians 1:17 |
| — | c. AD 60–62 | Philemon — 'no longer as a slave but a beloved brother' Paul's shortest and only private letter, written with Colossians from the Roman imprisonment and carried home by the runaway slave Onesimus himself. A masterpiece of tact asking his master Philemon to receive him back as a brother; Paul offers to pay any debt in his own hand and hints he expects 'even more than I say'. ⚠ Its authorship is undisputed. What Philemon did the letter never says — but its survival is often read as the answer. | Philemon 1:16 |
| — | c. AD 62–64 | Peter writes 1 Peter from 'Babylon' — 'born again to a living hope' The New Testament's great letter of hope in suffering, sent from Rome ('Babylon', 5:13) to scattered Christians across Asia Minor facing hostility. It calls them exiles, steadies them with the new birth and an imperishable inheritance, and reads Christ as the true Passover lamb who ransomed them by his blood. ⚠ On the traditional reading it is by the apostle Peter, shortly before his martyrdom under Nero; a body of scholarship judges it pseudonymous and later. Both are reported. Silvanus is named as his amanuensis (5:12). | 1 Peter 1:3 |
| — | c. AD 64–65 / disputed | 2 Peter — the apostle's last testament — 'partakers of the divine nature' Cast as Peter's farewell, written knowing his death is near ('the putting off of my tent is soon'), it arms the readers against false teachers and scoffers who deny Christ's coming, and stakes its authority on having SEEN the Transfiguration. ⚠ It is the most disputed book in the New Testament canon: the early church itself hesitated (Eusebius listed it among the 'disputed' books, and it was the last to be widely accepted), and its Greek, its overlap with Jude, its treatment of Paul's letters as 'Scripture' (3:16), and its remark that 'the fathers have fallen asleep' (3:4) lead most modern scholars to date it pseudonymous and late, c. AD 100–130. Placed here at the traditional date, from Rome just before Peter's martyrdom; both positions are reported. It holds the New Testament's clearest word on how prophecy is inspired — men 'carried along by the Holy Spirit'. | 2 Peter 1:4 |
| — | c. AD 62–66 / disputed | 1 Timothy — 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners' The first of the three PASTORAL letters, to Paul's lieutenant left at Ephesus to stop teachers of 'a different doctrine'. ⚠ Its date is bound to its authorship, which is the most contested in the Pauline collection: on the traditional view Paul wrote it after a release from the Roman imprisonment of Acts 28, on a journey Acts does not record (hence c. 62-66); on the majority-critical view it is pseudonymous, written in Paul's name around AD 90-110, when the church order it presupposes had formed. Placed here at the traditional date; both positions are reported. It holds the first of the Pastorals' 'faithful sayings' and the doxology to 'the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God'. | 1 Timothy 1:15 |
| — | c. AD 63–66 / disputed | Titus — 'appoint elders in every town' A short commission to Paul's Gentile delegate Titus, left on CRETE to finish organising its congregations. ⚠ Like 1 Timothy it is a Pastoral, its date bound to the contested authorship: traditionally from a post-Acts mission after release from Rome (c. 63-66), on the majority-critical view pseudonymous, c. AD 90-110. Both reported. Its chapter 1 uses 'elder' and 'overseer' of one office — a clear window on the earliest church order — and quotes, and endorses, the Cretan poet Epimenides: 'Cretans are always liars'. | Titus 1:5 |
| — | c. AD 66–67 / disputed | 2 Timothy — Paul's last letter — 'I have fought the good fight' On the traditional reading the LAST thing Paul wrote, from a second Roman imprisonment with execution in view ('the time of my departure has come', 4:6) — a charge to Timothy to guard the deposit and hand it on, and the most personal of the three Pastorals. ⚠ Its authorship is disputed with its companions, though even many who reject the Pastorals allow that 2 Timothy keeps genuine Pauline notes; on the pseudonymous view it is later, c. AD 90-110. Both reported. Tradition, early and consistent, has Paul executed at Rome under Nero soon after — beheaded, the citizen's death. | 2 Timothy 1:12 |
| — | c. AD 60–69 | Hebrews — 'in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son' An anonymous 'word of exhortation' in the most polished Greek in the New Testament, arguing that Christ is better than the prophets, the angels, Moses and Aaron, and that his once-for-all self-offering makes the temple system obsolete. ⚠ Its author is unknown — Paul by old tradition, but doubted since antiquity (Origen: 'who wrote it, God knows'); Barnabas, Apollos and Priscilla are among the guesses. Dated before AD 70 because it speaks of the temple sacrifices as still going on and never mentions their end. | Hebrews 1:3 |
| — | c. AD 85–95 | The letters of John — 'God is light… God is love' Three letters from the Johannine circle at Ephesus, to churches torn by secessionists who denied that Christ had come in the flesh and had 'gone out from us' (1 John 2:19). 1 John, the longest, opens like the Gospel's prologue and answers the crisis with two great declarations — 'God is light' (1:5) and 'God is love' (4:8) — and the test of love in action; 2 and 3 John are single-sheet notes, from 'the elder', on whom to welcome and whom to refuse. ⚠ Authorship is debated with the whole corpus: the apostle John by tradition, a 'Johannine school' or an elder on many critical readings. Reported, not settled. | 1 John 1:5 |
| — | c. AD 95 | John, exiled on Patmos, sees the vision — 'I am the Alpha and the Omega' Irenaeus (c. AD 180) places the vision 'toward the end of Domitian's reign' (d. 96); a minority tradition dates it under Nero, before 70. Reported, not settled. | Rev 1:9 |
The Terah crux (a sixty-year fork). "Terah lived 70 years, and fathered Abram, Nahor and Haran" (11:26) — but was Abram the firstborn, or just first-listed? On the plain reading Abram is born when Terah is 70 (AM 1948) — which has Terah living on in Haran sixty years after Abram's departure. Stephen's speech in Acts 7:4 says Abram left after his father died, which works only if Abram was born when Terah was 130 (AM 2008) — and the Samaritan Pentateuch shortens Terah's life to 145 so the plain reading works instead. Ussher sided with Acts; the first column here keeps the plain arithmetic and flags the fork.
Three Bibles, three totals. The begetting-ages themselves differ between the ancient witnesses: the Masoretic numbers (used here) put the flood at AM 1656; the Septuagint, whose pre-flood fathers mostly beget a century later, puts it at AM 2242; the Samaritan Pentateuch at AM 1307. Someone in antiquity adjusted the arithmetic — which way, and why, is argued to this day. The differences are noted, not resolved, exactly as this translation treats every variant.
Round numbers. The spans themselves love pattern — 400 years foretold (15:13), 120 years counted down (6:3), Abram called at 75, a covenant at 99. Ancient chronology often works in schematic, symbolic figures, and adding them like an accountant may be more precision than the text ever intended. The ledger above is offered in that spirit: the text's own arithmetic, not an affidavit.
From Expedition Bible (Joel Kramer), the project's trusted archaeology shelf: how Old Testament dates are actually established — the outside anchors, and how far back they reach.
The timeline grows one chapter at a time, like everything on this site. Ahead: Isaac, Jacob and Joseph complete the patriarchal ledger; the Exodus opens the era where the 400 years of Genesis 15:13 come due; and with the kings of Israel and Judah the third clock finally engages — synchronisms with Assyria and Babylon that let whole reigns be pinned to checkable dates. When the Gospels arrive in force, the same treatment applies to Herod, Pilate, and "the fifteenth year of Tiberius."