This Old Testament timeline follows the traditional chronology of Archbishop James Ussher (1650), the same framework used on many classic Bible charts, including ours. Modern scholars propose different dates for many early events, so treat the earliest dates as traditional rather than fixed.
Key dates (Ussher chronology)
- 4004 B.C.: Creation and Adam (Genesis 1–2)
- 2348 B.C.: The Flood (Genesis 6–9)
- c. 2247 B.C.: Tower of Babel and the dispersion of nations (Genesis 10–11)
- 1996 B.C.: Birth of Abram (Genesis 11)
- 1491 B.C.: The Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 12–14)
- 1451 B.C.: Israel enters Canaan under Joshua
- 1095 B.C.: Saul becomes Israel's first king (1 Samuel 10)
- 1055 B.C.: David becomes king (2 Samuel 2–5)
- 1012 B.C.: Solomon begins the Temple (1 Kings 6)
- 975 B.C.: The kingdom divides into Israel and Judah (1 Kings 12)
- 721 B.C.: The northern kingdom falls to Assyria (2 Kings 17)
- 588 B.C.: Jerusalem destroyed by Babylon (2 Kings 25)
- 536 B.C.: Return from exile under Cyrus (Ezra 1)
Seeing it in context
Dates on a list are hard to picture. On a wall chart you can see that Abraham lived while Egypt's early dynasties ruled, that David's reign falls in the same era as early Greek city-states, and that the exile overlaps with the rise of Persia. That is the idea behind our laminated Bible History Chart: the Old Testament, the New Testament and world history on one 45 × 37 in laminated sheet.