Eclipse of Chronology

Newton and the Origin of Civilization by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold is a search for the historical Newton, an effort to show the single man who could create modern physics while spending his spare time with apocalyptic and biblical chronology. Along the way, the authors provide a treasure chest of forgotten erudition, especially concerning biblical and ancient chronology.

Chronology was a contentious business: “in seventeenth-century parlance ‘when two men be irreconcileable, they are . . . compared to Chronologers’” (112). This led some, like John Donne, to adopt a stance of skeptical indifference. Others, like Hugh Broughton and Matthieu Beroalde, were so insistent on the accuracy of the Bible’s chronological information that they rejected anything that was not recorded in Scriptue. Beroalde denied that Cyrus was followed by Cambyses and rejected the existence of Darius Histaspis because “they are never found in Scripture.” By accepting only those Persian kings who were mentioned in Scripture, he reduced the Persian empire’s history to a mere 130 years (114).

Newton’s chronology is the focus of the book. Though he believed Scripture’s chronology to be accurate, he also figured in information from extra-biblical sources, whether documentary or astronomical. But Newton did sometimes reject other chronologies when they failed to align with Scripture. He had no use for the Assyrian king list from Cnidus because the names “are not Assyrian, nor have any affinity with the Assyrian names in Scripture” (115).

Newton would have quite agreed with John Lightfoot: “to take the plain and clear account and reckoning of the Scripture, which hath taken a peculiar care to give and exact and most certain Chronicle to [the incarnation of Christ], and not to rely upon the computation of the Olympiades, Consuls or any other humane calculation; which, it cannot be doubted, must, of necessity, leave the student of them in doubting and uncertainty” (121).

By the end of the seventeenth century, interest in chronology had declined. The reason, Buchwald and Feingold suggest, is twofold: On the one hand, after the work of John Scaliger, chronology became a highly technical discipline; on the other hand, new conceptions of gentlemanly education were taking root. Locke included geography and chronology in his sketch of the gentleman’s education, but only “the general part” of chronology needed to be learned (124). The rest was left to experts.