When Did Noah Live? 2948 to 1998 BC by Ussher’s Count

Genesis gives Noah’s ages, not his dates, so every year assigned to him is a calculation. The best known, Archbishop James Ussher’s, has him live from 2948 to 1998 BC, with the flood in 2349 BC. Counts that follow the Greek Septuagint, or allow gaps in the genealogies, place him earlier, and some Christians leave the date open.

Genesis 5 runs from Adam to Noah and gives each father’s age when the next son in the line was born. Add those ages and you have the years from creation to any birth in the list, a count known as Anno Mundi, “year of the world”, or AM. In the Hebrew text, which the King James Version follows, the sum reaches Noah in AM 1056: “And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son” (Genesis 5:28), and the next verse names him Noah. The flood came 600 years later, in AM 1656, for “Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth” (Genesis 7:6).

Turning AM into BC takes a second step: a fixed point where the Bible’s years meet a known date, and a chain of reckoning back from it through the kings, the judges, the Exodus and the patriarchs. Ussher, as John D. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research explains, “chose the known date of Nebuchadnezzar’s death as his starting point, and worked forward and backward from there.” Each link in the chain has its own disputes, which is one reason Christian dates for Noah differ.

Ussher’s Annals of the World, published in Latin in 1650 and in English in 1658, enters Noah’s birth under AM 1056, 2948 BC. The Greek Septuagint, the translation used in many of the New Testament’s quotations of the Old, adds a hundred years to six of the fathers before Noah, gives Methuselah 167 years before his son instead of 187 and Lamech 188 instead of 182, so on its numbers Noah was born in AM 1642. Genesis does not say where he was born.

His age when he began the ark is not given, so how old Noah was when he built the ark has to be worked out from other verses. The length of his life is plain: “And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died” (Genesis 9:29). On Ussher’s count he died in 1998 BC.

Genesis dates the flood to the day, though by Noah’s age rather than by any calendar: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). Turned into a year, that day falls anywhere from about 2350 BC to tens of thousands of years ago, depending on which ancient text of Genesis is followed, whether its lists of fathers and sons are complete, and how the centuries after Abraham are dated.

Who	How they count	The flood
James Ussher, Annals of the World	Hebrew text, no gaps, creation in 4004 BC	2349 BC
Answers in Genesis	Ussher’s 4004 BC less the 1,656 years from creation to the flood	2348 BC
Institute for Creation Research (Brian Thomas, 2018)	Hebrew text, counted back from Abram’s birth in 2166 BC	about 2472 BC
Traditional Christmas Proclamation, Roman Martyrology	an ancient reckoning with the Septuagint’s 2,242 years from creation to the flood	2,957 years before the birth of Christ
Associates for Biblical Research (2019)	Septuagint and Samaritan ages for Genesis 11	around 3300 BC at the earliest
Reasons to Believe	gaps in the genealogies; a flood over the region where people then lived	possibly 50,000 to 40,000 years ago
BioLogos	a real flood remembered and retold with Israel’s theology	no date; it “is not important to the meaning”

Answers in Genesis reaches 2348 BC by subtracting 1,656 years, the 1,056 of Genesis 5 and Noah’s 600 at the flood (Genesis 7:6), from Ussher’s 4004 BC. Morris notes that 2348 is also the flood year once printed in the margins of nearly all King James Bibles. Ussher’s own figure is a year earlier because his years begin in late October: AM 1656 ran from the autumn of 2349 BC into 2348 BC, and by his Annals the flood began in its second month, on 7 December 2349 BC. Noah left the ark on 18 December 2348 BC, early in AM 1657.

ICR’s Brian Thomas starts instead from Abram’s birth, dated 2166 BC in the scholar Andrew Steinmann’s chronology, and arrives at “about 2472 B.C. for the Flood year.” ICR does not show its working: on the Hebrew figures in the next table, 2166 BC plus 292 years gives 2458 BC, or 2518 BC with Terah at 130.

Ussher and Steinmann both add the Hebrew numbers without gaps, yet Ussher’s Abram is born in 1996 BC, 170 years after Steinmann’s. The difference lies in the centuries after Abraham. Ussher’s chronology dates the Exodus to 1491 BC, Steinmann’s to 1446 BC. Larger still is how each reads “the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years” (Exodus 12:40). Steinmann counts the 430 years from Jacob’s arrival in Egypt. Ussher, as Rodger Young of the Associates for Biblical Research explains, read the verse “in light of Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:17,” where the law came “four hundred and thirty years after” the covenant with Abraham, which leaves 215 years in Egypt. Steinmann’s stay in Egypt, 215 years longer, outweighs Ussher’s Exodus, 45 years earlier.

The Associates for Biblical Research, who hold to a global flood and a young earth, said in 2019 that “based on preliminary investigations,” taking the Septuagint and Samaritan ages for Genesis 11 as original “would date the Flood around 3300 BC,” which they call “probably the outer possible date.” The statement adds that not all of its staff took part in the study and that they hold “a variety of views” on the years before Abraham.

Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe answers differently: “It is not possible to assign an accurate date for Noah’s flood. However, a reasonable estimate can be assigned to the event.” Reasons to Believe places its suggested date in the last ice age. BioLogos holds that “the exact nature or date of this historical flood is not important to the meaning of the Genesis account.”

Genesis 5 and 11 come down to us in three ancient forms whose numbers differ: the Hebrew Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Greek Septuagint.

Text	Creation to the flood	Flood to Abram’s birth
Hebrew (Masoretic)	1,656 years	292 years (352 if Terah was 130)
Samaritan Pentateuch	1,307 years	942 years
Greek Septuagint	2,242 years (2,262 in Codex Alexandrinus)	1,072 years in Augustine’s copies

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 set the three side by side, judged that “the diversity is due to systematic change”, and told its readers that “the freedom of the Catholic in investigating the chronology of this period is quite unrestricted.” The New American Bible’s notes say the same more briefly: “There are some differences in the numbers in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.”

Augustine met the problem in the fifth century: on the Greek numbers his Bible followed, Methuselah outlives the flood by fourteen years, though only eight people were in the ark. (Codex Alexandrinus, which gives Methuselah 187 years, removes the difficulty.) In The City of God he blamed an early copyist, not the Jews or the translators, and ruled that where the two versions cannot both be true, “we must take our ideas of the real facts from that text out of which our own version has been translated”, that is, the Hebrew. Yet he counted from the flood to Abraham by the Greek: “There are thus from the flood to Abraham 1072 years, according to the Vulgate or Septuagint versions.”

The churches still read different texts. The Orthodox Church, as the Orthodox Church in America puts it, “uses primarily translations from the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint.” In the Catholic Church the Christmas Proclamation, traditionally chanted just before Midnight Mass, once dated the birth of Christ “the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood” and 5,199 years from creation, which leaves the Septuagint’s 2,242 years between the two. The approved English text now says only “century upon century had passed” since the flood.

Every calendar date for the flood, from Ussher’s to that of the Associates for Biblical Research, adds up Genesis 5 and 11 as unbroken lists of fathers and sons. Christians disagree about whether that is how the lists work. Reasons to Believe holds that “strong evidence shows that genealogy gaps exist,” so the ages cannot simply be summed. The Associates for Biblical Research concluded in 2019 that “the fluidity interpretation (chronological gaps in the genealogies) is exegetically and hermeneutically untenable.” Answers in Genesis and ICR add the ages as they stand. The New American Bible’s notes stress another purpose: such lists “had a communicative function, grounding the authority or claim of the last-named individual in the first-named.”

No inscription names Noah, and no excavation has dated his flood. Archaeology has found flood deposits in the cities of ancient Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, and Sumerian writings that remember a great flood. In 1929 Leonard Woolley, digging beneath the royal cemetery at Ur, struck clean, water-laid mud that a larger pit the next season showed to be eleven feet thick. Woolley told the public he had found the flood of Genesis, but, as the Ur Online project of the Penn Museum and the British Museum records, “in his academic discussions he never did.”

The Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer surveyed the finds in the Penn Museum’s Expedition magazine in 1967. Woolley’s deposits, he wrote, “go back to at least 3500 B.C.”, too early to fit the Sumerian flood story, while flood layers at Kish and at Shuruppak lay just above remains dated about 3200 to 3000 BC. Shuruppak was, in Sumerian tradition, the city of Ziusudra, the hero of that story. Kramer, following the archaeologist Max Mallowan, concluded that the Mesopotamian story, and the Genesis account he took to be based on it, remembered “an actual catastrophic but by no means universal disaster” about 3000 BC.

Christians weigh these finds differently. BioLogos holds that Genesis 6–9 is not “borrowed from the stories of other cultures” but rests on “a common cultural memory of a watery cataclysm.” Those who hold to a flood over the whole earth look for its traces in rocks worldwide rather than under one city: Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis cites “billions of fossils, rapidly deposited rock layers,” and ICR’s Brian Thomas writes, “We already have a world full of rock layers and fossils from the Flood.” A flood about 3000 BC would come six centuries before Ussher’s date, though close to the Septuagint count of the Christmas Proclamation.

The Bible does not say where Noah lived or where the ark was built. Genesis places Eden in the east, “a garden eastward in Eden” (Genesis 2:8), and the New American Bible’s notes sum up its picture: “In the Genesis perspective, the human race originated in the East.” After the flood, Noah’s descendants moved from the east into Shinar, the land of Babel, Erech and Accad in Mesopotamia (Genesis 10:10): “as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there” (Genesis 11:2). That journey came after the flood, so it says little about where Noah lived before it; at most the verses point east, and only by inference.

The ark grounded “in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4). That names a mountain country, not a single peak. The New American Bible’s note puts it plainly: “There is no Mount Ararat in the Bible.” Where the ark came to rest, and the long search for it, is the subject of whether Noah’s ark has been found.

Of Noah’s life afterwards Genesis records one occupation: “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20). It does not say where the vineyard was or where he died, only that “Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years” (Genesis 9:28).

Genesis 11:10–26 runs from Shem to Abram, again by fathers’ ages, starting “two years after the flood” (Genesis 11:10). The last link is the uncertain one: “And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran” (Genesis 11:26). If Abram was born that year, the line reaches him 292 years after the flood.

Ussher took the verse to give the year Terah’s first son was born, and that son was Haran. Terah died at 205 (Genesis 11:32); Stephen says Abraham left Haran “when his father was dead” (Acts 7:4); and “Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran” (Genesis 12:4). Then Terah was 205 less 75, or 130, at Abram’s birth, and Abram, as Ussher put it in 1658, “came not into the world till 60 years after.” On that reading the count from the flood to Abram is 352 years.

The Catholic New American Bible keeps Terah at 70. Its note on Genesis 11:32 reckons that Terah “lived in Haran for sixty years after Abraham’s departure,” and reads Stephen’s words through another text of Genesis: in the Samaritan Pentateuch Terah dies at 145, which is 70 plus 75, “in the same year in which Abraham left Haran. This is the tradition followed in Stephen’s speech.” ICR also keeps 70, noting that some conservative scholars add the 60 years but that others have set out “a coherent chronology without these 60 years.”

Did Noah live to see Abraham? On the Hebrew numbers with Terah at 70, yes: Noah died 350 years after the flood, when Abram was 58. With Terah at 130, Abram was born two years after Noah died; Ussher dates Noah’s death to 1998 BC and Abram’s birth to 1996 BC. On the Septuagint’s numbers Abram was born more than 700 years after Noah died. Noah’s years after the flood are set out in how long Noah lived.

Hebrews 11 names the two men one after the other among the people of faith: Noah, who “prepared an ark to the saving of his house,” and Abraham, who “went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:7–8).

• When and where was Noah born?
• How long was Noah on the ark?
• Who helped Noah build the ark?
• The generations from Noah to Jesus
• How many years from Adam to Jesus?