BiblicalInsights.net

Phillip Mauro gives a concise and readable chronology of the Bible in his book, The Wonders of Bible Chronology. Mauro references two other works on Bible chronology that are worth consulting when studying this important subject–one that is neglected in many churches.  The first is Dr. Martin Anstey’s, The Romance of Bible Chronology, c. 1913 by Marshall Bros, London. Two volumes.  Anstey’s work can be found online and is downloadable for free.  Anstey’s work rests upon the statements in the Bible alone.  The Bible gives a complete and consistent source of chronology that does not need outside sources to confirm it.  The Bible is the only infallible book in the world. The chronology is given in close association with the genealogies in Scripture.  The genealogies have one primary purpose, i.e. to record the lineage of the Messiah who would be the savior of the world.  The second work is that of James Ussher, The Annal’s of the World.  Ussher’s work was widely accepted until the mid 1800’s when the three-pronged attack of evolution (Darwin, c. 1859), higher criticism and textual criticism attacked the credibility of the Bible and attempted to change drastically the chronology given in the Bible.  I would like to add a third resource that of Dr. Floyd Nolan Jones, The Chronology of the Old Testament (Master Books Publisher) that has been reprinted several times.
Chronology is the science of dividing time into regular intervals and assigning dates to historic events in their proper order (Jones, p. 2).  The Bible does this rather remarkably.  Gen. 1:1, states thatthe history of the heaven and the earth had an initial beginning at the behest and power of God.  From this beginning of the history of the world, only six days pass until God creates Adam and Eve (Matt. 19:4; Gen. 1:26-27).  With the creation of Adam, the history of man begins.  The genealogy given in Gen. 5, gives a chronology of the history of man from the time of Adam until the time of Noah.  The time that passes during this period is 1656 years. There are two individuals that connect Adam to Noah, namely, Methuselah and Shem.  Mauro states, “…Adam was for 243 years the contemporary of Methuselah, that Methuselah’s life overlapped that of Shem for 98 years, and that Shem was, for 150 years, the contemporary of Abraham” (p. 28).  This means that specific knowledge of the creation and of the flood would have been passed down to the people of Abraham’s day through a direct line of descent from Adam. 
From Adam to Abraham, 2008 years pass.  By the time a reader of Genesis gets to Genesis chapter twelve, he has reached one-half of the history of the Old Testament.  The next approximately 2000 years will bring us to the time of Jesus Christ’s birth.  We live in the year A.D. 2016.  This means that the history of man encompasses around 6,000 years!