The earth has it's 6000th birthday coming up in a few days. In the
17th century, James Ussher, the Archbishop of Dublin, arrived at the year of
4004 B.C. as to when God created the earth. To figure biblical chronology
for his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, he simply assigned a year value
to the span of a human generation and then counted up Old Testament
generations up to his own times.
However it was John Lightfoot, a Hebrew scholar at Cambridge
University, deeply read in rabbinical literature, who wasn't happy with such
an inexact estimate and exerted some energy on more precise calculations to
arrive at 4004 B.C. on October 26 at nine o'clock in the morning.
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