How Old Is the Earth According to the Bible?

Happy birthday, world! Well, according to James Ussher, that is! He calculated the day of creation to be October 23, 4004 BC, which would make October 23, 2026, earth’s 6030th birthday (or to be more accurate earth’s 6029th birthday because there was no year 0). Actually, Ussher was using a proleptic Julian calendar—the date of creation would translate to September 21, 4004 BC in the modern Gregorian calendar.

The specificity of his calculation raises questions though. How do we estimate a specific date when the Bible doesn’t outright give us one?

Is the Bible Rounding Regarding the Age of the Earth?

Any time you measure something, you have the option of rounding to a measurement that makes sense for the scale you’re measuring at. For instance, if I say my car is 2,000 pounds, but the most specific I can weigh the car is 2,050 pounds, I’m just rounding to the nearest thousand, which makes sense. If I say my hometown is 500 miles away from where I live now, but it’s actually 476 miles, that’s also just rounding to the nearest hundred.

This is a valid way to talk about all types of measurement, so is the Bible rounding? Almost certainly, at least a little bit. This is because a lot of the numbers that help us get to the age of the earth are from the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. Adam fathered Seth when he was 130 years old (or 230 according to the Septuagint—don’t worry, we’ll discuss that later!), but if he was actually 130 years old, 8 months, and 3 days, that much time wouldn’t explicitly be reflected in the text because it’s giving ages to the year, not the month or the day. The Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies have less than 20 years of “wiggle room” because there are 20 entries in the genealogies.

The Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies have less than 20 years of “wiggle room.”

We do know that, for some dates, there’s no wiggle room because the Bible tells us! Genesis 7:11 says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on this day all the fountains of the great deep split open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.” And Exodus 12:41 says, “And it happened at the end of 430 years, to the very day, that all the hosts of Yahweh went out from the land of Egypt.” So the Bible can give very specific time measurements when it wants to.

The Masoretic or Septuagint Text?

When we’re talking about the age of the earth according to the Bible, we also have to point out that there are three different textual traditions, which each give different ages in the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies. We prefer the Masoretic Text (MT) for good reasons,1 but some young-earth creationists prefer the Septuagint (LXX),2 which gives a slightly older age of the earth, but still within what we would call a young-earth time frame. The Samaritan Pentateuch gives a slightly shorter time frame than the Masoretic Text, and most agree it isn’t correct, but it’s an important witness to the textual copying traditions.

From Adam to the Flood

The first significant text for calculating the age of the earth is Genesis 5, which gives the genealogy from Adam to Noah (and Genesis 7:6 says Noah was 600 when the Flood began). The Masoretic Text gives 1,656 years from creation to the Flood, plus less than 10 years of uncertainty. The Septuagint gives 2,242 years.

From the Flood to Abraham

The second significant text is the genealogy in Genesis 11, which traces the line from Noah’s son Shem to Abraham. The MT gives 352 years from the Flood to the birth of Abraham,3 while the LXX gives 1,132 years. Therefore, in the MT, Abraham was born 2,008 years after creation, and in the LXX, 3,374 years. And at this point, there is a total of 20 years’ uncertainty due to about a year’s possible rounding of each age.

Short or Long Sojourn?

The next major decision for the biblical age of the earth has to do with how long Israel’s sojourn is.

Abraham departed Haran at 75 (Genesis 12:4), and he was 86 years old when Ishmael was born (Genesis 16:16). In between those two events, God promised him that his descendants would be persecuted and enslaved for 400 years but afterward would come out and possess the land.

Exodus 12:40–41 makes it a bit more specific. The LSB says, “Now the time that the sons of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years. And it happened at the end of 430 years, to the very day, that all the hosts of Yahweh went out from the land of Egypt.”

Where those 430 years start and what they entail has two major interpretations that have been held since before the time of Christ. The short sojourn position starts the 430 years at the promise to Abraham, meaning that there were 215 years from Jacob’s going to Egypt until the exodus.4 The long sojourn position states that there were 430 years from Jacob’s going to Egypt until the exodus.5

As you can see, the two positions have a 215-year difference.

A short sojourn position that favors the MT of Genesis 5 and 11 results in an exodus that occurs 2,513 years after creation, while a long sojourn position that favors the MT would date the exodus at 2,728 years after creation. A short sojourn that favors the LXX would result in the exodus being 3,879 years after creation and a long sojourn that favors the LXX would result in the exodus being 4,094 years after creation. All of those views add less than 3 years of uncertainty to the age, meaning a total of less than 23 years of uncertainty.

From the Exodus to Solomon’s Temple

First Kings 6:1 says, “Now it happened in the four hundred and eightieth year after the sons of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv which is the second month, that he began to build the house of Yahweh.” We know that Passover marked the beginning of the year for the Israelites (Exodus 12:2), so this adds 480 years and between 1 and 2 months to the age of the earth, since we aren’t told what day of the second month the work started.

• MT short sojourn date of the temple building: 2,993 years after creation + less than 23 years
• MT long sojourn date of the temple building: 3,208 years after creation + less than 23 years
• LXX short sojourn date of the temple building: 4,359 years after creation + less than 23 years
• LXX long sojourn date of the temple building: 4,574 years after creation + less than 23 years

From Solomon’s Temple to the Exile

The era of the kings is full of coregencies that make the calculation of the time from the temple to the exile complicated. By comparing with the kings of Israel, we can tell that it is around 380 years from the temple to the exile. The exile took place around 586 BC. This means that by calculating back, we can put the four major dating options in terms of BC dates.

• MT short sojourn creation date: 3959 BC
• MT long sojourn creation date: 4174 BC
• LXX short sojourn creation date: 5325 BC
• LXX long sojourn creation date: 5540 BC

Can We Narrow It Down More?

Any of the four major options would fall within a young-earth creationist range for creation because you can derive those dates from Scripture alone. However, there are good reasons to prefer the MT dates over the LXX dates, which is why everyone from Bede to Newton landed on that side of the chronological debate. That doesn’t mean we should divide from our LXX brothers or completely negate that time frame. Since the ministry of AiG focuses on biblical authority, this is not a salvation issue, but a disagreement on which timeline in Scripture (MT or LXX) is better textually.

The Bible gives us the time frame for human history, and we can trust its authoritative record!

So while we can’t emphatically say that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 BC, we can say that the Bible gives us a timeframe of around 6,000 years for human history, and we can trust its authoritative record!