Archbishop Ussher dated the creation of the world
On this day · 23 October 4004 BC
By counting biblical generations, an Irish archbishop pinned the universe's birth to a single autumn date.
In 1650, James Ussher, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, published his Annals of the Old Testament. In it he fixed the moment of creation with startling precision: the night preceding October 23, 4004 BC.
Ussher built his timeline by summing the generations and reigns recorded in scripture, then anchoring them to known ancient dates — including the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar — to translate biblical chronology into calendar years. He placed the first day near the autumnal equinox, a choice that also lined up with Jewish New Year tradition.
His date once sat in the margins of countless printed Bibles.
Far from a lone eccentric, Ussher landed close to other learned estimates of his era — Kepler’s 3992 BC, Newton’s roughly 4000 BC. Modern geology puts Earth’s age at about 4.5 billion years, but Ussher’s calculation remains a landmark of meticulous, if mistaken, scholarship.
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