Biblical literalist chronology
Biblical literalist chronology is the attempt to correlate the historical dates used in the Bible with the chronology of actual events. The Bible measures time from the date of Creation (years are measured as anno mundi, meaning Year of the World, or B.C.) Some of the better-known calculations include Archbishop James Ussher, who placed it in 4004 BC, Isaac Newton in 4000 BC (both off the Masoretic Hebrew Bible), Martin Luther in 3961 BC, the traditional Hebrew calendar date of 3760 BC, and lastly the dates based on the Septuagint, of roughly 4650 BC. The dates  between the Septuagint & Masoretic are conflicting by 650 years between the genealogy of Arphaxad to Nahor in Genesis 11:12-24. The Masoretic text which lacks the 650 years of the Septuagint is the text used by most modern Bibles. There is no consensus of which is right, however, without the additional 650 years in the Septuagint, according to Egyptologist the great Pyramids of Giza would pre-date the Flood (yet show no signs of water erosion) and provide no time for Tower of Babel event. Background. The Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament) dates events either by simple arithmetic taking  the creation of the world as the starting point, or, in the later books, by correlations between the reigns of kings in Israel and Judah. The data it provides falls into three periods: Some believe that for the biblical authors the chronology was theological in intent, functioning as prophecy and not as history. Biblical literalism, however, does not treat it this way, because literalists have a profound respect for the Bible as the word of God. This way of thinking had its origins in Christian fundamentalism, an early-20th-century movement which opposed then-current non-supernatural interpretations of the life  of Jesus by stressing, among other things, the verbal inspiration of scripture. The underlying concept, or fear, was that if anything in the Bible were not true, everything would collapse. Literalist chronologies. The creation of a literalist chronology of the Bible faces several hurdles, of which the following are the most significant: Tables. The Bible measures events from the year of God's creation of the world, a type of calendar called Anno Mundi ("Year of the World"), shortened as AM. The task of a literal biblical chronology is to convert this to dates in the modern chronology expressed as  years before or after Christ, BC and AD. There have been many attempts to do this, none of them universally accepted. The following tables (derived from Thomas L. Thompson, "The Mythic Past"; notes within the table as cited) divide the Bible's AM dates by the three periods into which they most naturally fall. Example of literalist chronology. The following tabulation of years and dates is according to the literal letter of the text of the Bible alone. Links to multiple translations and versions are provided for verification. For comparison, known historically dated events are associated with the resultant literal  dates. Dates according to the famous Ussher chronology appear in small type italics "'" (Latin: ""Year of the World""), "'" (Latin: ""Before Christ""). In ancient Israel a part year was designated as the previous king's last year and the new king's 1st year. The arithmetic can be checked by starting at the bottom of the table with the date of the destruction of the Temple in 587 and adding the number of years in the Scriptures (books of the "Prophets" and "Chronicles" through "Genesis") back up to the beginning. Dates with "events in italics" appearing in "" for historical comparison are  according to Bernard Grun's "The Timetables of History". For the period after 587 BCE known historical dates are used as referents. Biblical source texts for stated numbers of years are referenced and linked. Reference sources are the RSVCE, The New American Bible "The Timetables of History" by Bernard Grun, and the "Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary" (2003).