Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
For almost 2,000 years, hundreds of Bible scholars have tried to date the beginning of the flood. Bishop Ussher (1581–1656) proposed the most well-known date: 2348 B.C. It and Ussher’s date for the creation (4004 B.C.), were printed in the margins of many Bibles, beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible. However, there are many different biblical dates for the flood, so some confusion has resulted and the issue is unresolved. Why do the dates differ?
Here is a typical (but not necessarily correct) biblical calculation for the year the flood began.
If all of the above were correct, then summing the years would give 2519 B.C. as the date of the flood. Unfortunately, several rows above contain major uncertainties:6
Row 1: The ages given in Gen 11:10–26 are based on the Masoretic (or Hebrew) text. Other major Bible manuscripts give totals that differ from the Masoretic’s 352 years. For example, the Septuagint (Alexandrinus) manuscript gives 1072 years; the Septuagint (Vaticanus) manuscript gives 1172 years; the Samaritan Pentateuch gives 942 years.
Controversy surrounds Terah’s age when his son Abraham was born. While some say it was 70 years, my reasons for using 130 years are given in Endnote 1 on page 464.
Row 3: The Masoretic manuscript says, in Ex 12:40, that the children of Israel were in Egypt for 430 years, but Septuagint and Samaritan manuscripts say that Israel’s time in Egypt “and in the land of Cannan” was 430 years. Those who hold to the Septuagint or Samaritan usually assume that 215 years were spent in Cannan and 215 years were spent in Egypt. Josephus (37–100 A.D), the Jewish-Roman historian, also took that position.
Row 4: Gerald E. Aardsma claims that I Ki 6:1 should have given the time period as 1480 years, instead of 480 years. [See Radiocarbon and the Genesis Flood (El Cajon, California: Institute for Creation Research, 1991), pp. 82.]
Row 5: Some authorities give slightly different dates for the fourth year of Solomon’s reign.
As explained on the preceding page, the five most clocklike comets were clustered near the Earth in 3344.5 B.C. That is a statistical match for the biblical date of the flood only if (a) the ages of the patriarchs given in the Septuagint7 are used, (b) Terah was 130 years old when Abraham was born, (c) Jacob’s descendents were in Egypt for 430 years, and (d) several key interpretations of Ussher are used. Ussher’s date for the flood would have been 3343 B.C. had he used the Septuagint’s patriarchal ages instead of the Masoretic’s and had he used 430 years instead of 215 years for the length of time the children of Israel were in Egypt.8 As mentioned on page 464, round-off errors are undoubtedly imbedded in the ages of the patriarchs, because too many of their ages end in 0 or 5. Despite this statistical uncertainty of perhaps a dozen years, assumptions (a)–(d) are still the only possible choices if the biblically derived date corresponds to the date based on the backward projection of the most clocklike comets. That set of assumptions places the creation in about the year 5602 B.C., the flood 2262 years later in 3344.5 ± 1 B.C., and the age of the Earth at about 7,615 years.9