Talk:Chronology of the Bible

Wikipedia has recently wiped out most of the YEC chronology from wp:Chronology of the Bible. I propose to copy the pre-erasure article, lest this valuable information be lost forever. But, before doing this, I am starting this with a stub and seeking opinions from the RationalWiki denizens. I hear nothing negative over the next few days, I will just proceed with this. Of course, I will fully credit Wikipedia for it. TomS TDotO (talk) 17:37, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
 * We already mention the main YEC chronology on the Ussher page, what more do we need to say about it we couldn't just mention there? also No, we don't copy-paste wikipedia articles-- Mie kal  17:39, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
 * There is a lot of useful information which has been deleted from the Wikipedia article. The sort of stuff which pertains specifically to YEC - and, I assume, was deleted from Wikipedia because it is of interest only to YEC, stuff which is no longer in the mainstream of Biblical scholarship. But if we want to discuss YEC in detail, we have to understand when the events of the Flood occurred, when the Tower of Babel was. I point out once again, that this information is disappearing from Wikipedia, and I don't know where it can be found except by looking in the history of the article. Down the memory hole. I am not suggesting a copy-paste of the current Wikipedia article. I realize that this is an unusual recommendation, or I would just do it and see whether anyone would notice what I had done - it is unlikely that anyone would notice that it is an no-longer-active Wikipedia article.    TomS TDotO (talk) 16:27, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * What exactly are you referring to when you talk about "YEC chronology"? How is it different from Ussher's?
 * As far as I can gather the main competitors to Ussher are the old Christian traditions based on the Septuagint, rather than the Masoretic text, with the different being a creation date around 5500 BC, rather than ca. 4000 BC for Masoretic calculations.
 * Then there are very few markedly older creation dates calculated more recently, such as Harold Camping's 11,013 BC, and of, respectively, 12,500 BC and 20,000 BC. ScepticWombat (talk) 18:21, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * It looks interesting and potentially useful to me. A SW asks - is this the same as Ussher's?--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 18:29, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Take a look at wp.Chronology of the Bible as it existed on November 18, 2014.       TomS TDotO (talk) 00:03, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Apart from going into a rather superfluous level of detail (why do we need to know when "Arpachshad died"?), the dates in this older version generally seem to be rather "Ussher'ish". The sole exception is a single table (adjusted by me, considering AM (Anno Mundi) is the Masoretic date and that this put the Flood in 1656 AM/2469 BC, whereas Ussher is marginally later at 2348 BC):


 * This creates even less of a difference between Ussher and the other chronologies vis-a-vis the Flood (about 600 years later for the Septuagint-inspired Alexandrinus/Vaticanus or 349 years earlier for the Hebrew Torah in the Samaritan version) than the differences on creation (where the Septuagint chronology moves creation back about 1500 years prior to Ussher's).
 * So, apart from demonstrating that even on what ought to be the simple task of figuring out its chronology, the inerrant bible manages to muck it up, what exactly are we going to get from this? Are there any YEC who follow a chronology closer to the Samaritan or Septuagint versions? (I doubt this since YECs tend to be very devoted to King James or other Masoretic inspired bible versions).
 * In the end, I'm not sure we need to be overly concerned with whether such impossible and fictional events as the Flood are claimed to have occurred about 4500, 3900 or 4800 years ago. Even using the Samaritan version, we'd still have the Flood occurring during the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt and the Old Kingdom popping up less than 200 years after the entire world was supposedly drowned. Similar problems abound vis-a-vis Sumer, Mohenjo-daro and the Harappans in the Indus Valley, and so on and so forth. Or the fact that we have trees that are older than that(!) ScepticWombat (talk) 06:53, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I think that it is worthwhile to show that it is not all that straightforward to derive dates from the Bible. How many KJV-only people realize that?
 * I think that this framework could be expanded to include dates from the "secular" world, showing the Flood occurring after the Pyramids. (BTW, there is the old legend that the Israelites built the pyramids!)
 * I don't know that an encyclopedia that it is all that superfluous to include the dates of forgettable characters. It does show the methodology of YEC in full glory. And it shows the YECs that we know what they're talking about. Better than them. But if need be, I am willing to sacrifice.      TomS TDotO (talk) 12:39, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've added a (rather long) footnote giving some of the bare bones of the varying chronologies we've discussed. If YECs really do discuss significantly different chronologies (i.e. difference in the hundreds of years) we can always recycle bits & pieces of this talkpage either as a new page on biblical chronology or as a section in YEC. If (as I suspect) most YECs tend to follow Ussher or simply have a vague notion of creation being "at one time within the last 10,0000 years or so", I think the current state of affairs will suffice. ScepticWombat (talk) 08:54, 28 January 2015 (UTC)