CHRONOLOGY OF THE PATRIARCHS

This 12th Post accompanies gospel doctrine lesson 7, The Abrahamic Covenant.

In this post I'm giving you an article I wrote in 1998 about the strange arithmetic associated with The Chronology of the Patriarchs. I'm sorry, but I don't know where I got the top half of the first page. I'll include an article I wrote ten years before that which contains some raw data I collected. Enjoy.

Aside from dating the Fall of Adam as 4000 BC, the 2013 LDS King James Bible Chronology doesn't even hazard a guess about any other date down to the beginning of Saul's reign in 1095 BC. Look it up on page 749 (2353 in the PDF).

Not everyone is this cautious, and someone has said that "for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert". Some folks start with the 4000 BC date and work forward, using the information in Genesis, and others start with a well-established historical date like the beginning of Saul's reign and work backwards. Here are a few dates people have obtained in these ways, or simply pulled out of thin air, for the birth of Abraham. They span 350 years! I collected most of them in about 2000, as part of some research project I was doing at the time. Almost all the websites I got them from no longer exist. You'll just have to trust me.

2163 BC – Mindspring – if 430 years in Egypt
2134 BC – End Time Prophecy
2062 BC – Stephen O'Neil
2056 BC – A Chronology of the Patriarchs Timeline I created
2055 BC – Central Highlands Christian Publications
2018 BC – Bible Decoded article
2008 BC – Sequence of Prophecy
2000 BC – Internet Dynamics
1996 BC – Amazing Bible Timeline – possibly where I got my date
1992 BC – J. N. Darby
1991 BC – Dr. Len's Kenpo Pages
1948 BC – Mindspring – if 215 years in Egypt
1813 BC – NNDB

Wikipedia concludes that "the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the judges, is a late literary construct that does not relate to any period in actual history".

The real question is, does any of this have any bearing whatsoever on your salvation? Probably not.

Thanks for visiting.

Now, go read your Book of Mormon!