The Millennial Week

A day is as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8): from creation to the millennial reign, laid out across seven thousand-year "days", with the genealogy, archaeology and prophecy that fill them.

One set of dates drives three views, Chart, Timeline and Family tree, and the period you choose carries from one to the next. How each works, and where the dates come from, is below the chart. The year 6000 is where the arithmetic lands, not a date for Christ's return: He kept the day and hour hidden (Mark 13:32).

How to read it

Chart

Chart lays history out on A4 sheets, to print, pin up and teach from. Each of the seven days of the creation week stands over its thousand years. The ages run across the top in the names Christians have long used for them: before the Flood, after the Flood, the patriarchs, Israel under the Law, the church age, the millennial kingdom and the new creation. Under them are the periods, with an arrow at each exile and each return.

Below run four lanes. Scripture and history puts a picture over the main events. People draws each life in the genealogy to scale: Methuselah dies in the year of the Flood, and Noah's son Shem is still alive when Abraham is 150. Texts and finds sets the manuscripts, inscriptions and ancient writers from Ancient Texts and Manuscripts against the history they bear witness to. Threads follow a promise to its fulfilment: the promised Seed, the temple, and Daniel's sixty-nine weeks.

Spread a period over up to twelve sheets. Fit the scale to the events or keep it even, and switch any lane off. In black and white the ages are told apart by pattern. Daniel's kingdoms is a sheet of its own: Nebuchadnezzar's image down the side, each part ruled across to the years its kingdom held. The Image and the Kingdoms works it through. Print landscape at 100% with no margins, or download a sheet as SVG for a print shop.

Timeline

Timeline is the one to explore with. Pick a period to zoom in (from Creation to the Flood down to the years Jesus was on earth) or type any range of years, and the list under the chart shows every event in view. AD 33 can be followed day by day and hour by hour: Passion Week, Thursday night's betrayal and trials, the crucifixion from the third hour to the ninth, the three days and nights, the resurrection morning, and the fifty days to Pentecost, each set against the Hebrew day and the appointed feast it fell on. The address bar keeps the period (for example /timeline/#christ), so a view can be shared. Two further periods, Daniel's seventieth week and the millennium, are drawn on their own undated axis: Scripture gives their lengths and their order, and keeps their start hidden.

People and the family tree

The genealogy runs through the chart as a row for each person, Adam to Jesus, with the events they took part in marked on their row. Hatched bars are lives the text leaves estimated or calculated. Choose anyone for their Hebrew name and its meaning, their dates in both calendars, their family, their events and everyone alive in their lifetime; hover the chart for the year, and click it to list who was alive then. Family tree shows the same people by descent.

The dates

The horizontal axis is Anno Mundi, years since creation, on this site's one chronology line: the Masoretic numbers of Genesis 5 and 11, pinned to the Gregorian calendar by an Exodus in 1446 BC, which puts creation at 3959 BC, the Flood at 2303 BC, the cross at AM 3991 and the year 6000 at AD 2042. Archaeology (Qarqar, Sennacherib, Cyrus and others) fixes the Gregorian years below Solomon independently of the genealogies. Chronology Anchors sets out what can be dated and how tightly, and why the site anchors where it does. Four Hundred and Eighty Years counts back from the temple to the Exodus, and Why Not 4004 BC? explains why this line sits forty-five years after Ussher's. Every study behind these dates is in Chronology.

The Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch and dsscalendar.org's epoch reckon differently, and can be switched on in the chart for comparison. Genealogy and Times and The Flood and the King Lists give the reasons the site follows the Masoretic numbers.