Condensed History
It’s true, the Roman republic only lasted about 482 of those years, but even then, the U.S. is only slightly over half that old. In 2018, the U.S. turned 242. When Rome turned 242, there were still 221 years to go before Julius Caesar became dictator.
221 years ago, the U.S. was still on its first president.
We have a skewed sense of time. We know so much about the recent past it seems long, and so little about the ancient past it seems short. We go about each day minute-by-minute but we see history in time-lapse. Everything old is compressed, everything new is stretched out.
This happens some in the Bible, too.
If you add up timelines listed by different authors in the Bible and match the more recent ones with known historical events, the planet was created about 6000 years ago.1
The Bible itself isn't quite so old.
Genesis is the first, and possibly oldest, book in the Bible. It was likely written around 3500 years ago2 by Moses, a shepherd living near modern-day Saudi Arabia.
3500 years seems like a good bit, but when Moses started writing, over 40% of world history had already happened.
With all that ancient history, Moses compressed things just like we do today. He covered 2000 years,3 over 80% of his history, in the first 22% of the book. That makes the first part an overview. It’s the main points of pre-history: where people came from, where sin came from, and things that happened to the whole human race. The rest of the book is the story of Moses’ family.
After Moses, it took another 1600 years4 for the rest of the Bible to be written, with most of the New Testament discussing events covering only 100 years.
Before we get impatient about waiting 2000 years for Christ's return, it’s worthwhile to look back at history for a moment. There was a longer gap between creation and Moses writing the first book of the Old Testament than between the last book of the New Testament and today.
The further back you go in time, the more the stories get compressed. I wonder what details were left out.
1. Ussher, J. Revised and updated by Pierce, L., Pierce, M. (2012) The Annals of the World (p. 17). Master Books.
2. Historically, people considered Moses the author of Genesis. There's a lot of debate about this, but if you accept the traditional opinion, then Moses wrote it around 1500 BC, since that's when he was alive.
3. Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (p. 278). Master Books.
4. Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (p. 279-280). Master Books.
Dates in various diagrams come from a variety of sources: George Washington, Magna Carta, Jesus’ crucifixion. For the writing of Genesis at the start of the Old Testament and Revelation at the end of the New Testament: Barker, K. L. (2002) NIV Study Bible (p. 2, p. 1963). Zondervan. Perhaps Genesis is not the oldest book, and Revelation is not the newest, but they're probably close.