Customer Reviews

Annals of the World: James Ussher's Classic Survey of World History

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I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book, and was amazed beyond my best expectations. The first day I picked it up, I could hardly put it down, reading long past midnight. The descriptions of the people, the rulers, the battles, the times, are fascinating. Not only is there a treasure trove of biblical information, but also many first person accounts of encounters with Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, etc. The source materials used are from the people who were there! Any one with an interest in history and notable people of the past will be fascinated. Remember Herod, who ordered the slaughter of the infants when Jesus was born? According to this, he included his own children! Read about Ptolemy Philopator, who in 216 BC tried to murder all the Jews in Alexandria by locking them in the hippodrome with 500 drunken elephants. (It didn't work.) Really, you have to see this to believe it. This is definitely worth every penny.

Instead of going to school, I read this instead. I win! Summary: For more than three hundred years, Ussher's colossal Annals of the World remained inaccessible to all but the most esoteric of scholars. This is the first-ever English translation of this enormously important work. A hero of biblical chronology and one of the most astute church historians ever, Ussher is both loved and hated. He is loved by all those who share a commitment to the fidelity of Genesis as an accurate account of human origins, and who consistently hold to the literal, grammatical, historical approach to Bible interpretation. He is hated by evolutionists and compromising theologians who would seek to integrate evolutionary cosmology with the philosophy of science advocated in Holy Scripture. Many thanks to the people at Masters Books for years of research and hard work to bring this volume back to life, and in such a beautiful form. As of this writing, Amazon does not have a photo of this great-looking edition, but it is truly heirloom quality.
What Augustine was for orthodoxy and Calvin was for theology, James Ussher was for Biblical historiography. No man in church history left a more indelible imprint on the thinking of Christians concerning the chronology of the ancient world than Ussher. Though he was an Anglican Archbishop of Ireland who died during the rule of Cromwell, Ussher was decidedly a Puritan. He was so revered by all, including Cromwell (an independent), that Ussher was given the honor of being buried in Westminster Abbey.
For three hundred years, his rigorous and comprehensive scholarship on chronology and biblical history was considered the unassailable standard by theologians. Until the very recent takeover of our major seminaries by misguided theories of origins which integrate evolutionary cosmology with Scripture at the expense of sound theology and sound science, Ussher's work was not only a staple of Christian education, but his comments were found in the margin notes of many King James Bibles.
Ussher did what no other theologian of note had ever accomplished. He dedicated an entire lifetime of study to the issue of world history and chronology. His studies required him to travel extensively throughout Europe, examining the oldest and most rare manuscripts in the world, manuscripts which today are missing or have been destroyed, which is why Ussher's work can never be replicated.
Dr. Francis Nigel Lee (who has more than ten doctorates), a biographer and commentator on Ussher, explains that the Dublin-born prelate was "raised in a Bible-believing Calvinistic environment. He soaked himself in the Holy Scriptures without ceasing. He also read the Early Church Fathers - systematically, every day, for eighteen years. After becoming Professor of Divinity at Dublin's Trinity College in 1607, he wrote the Irish Articles during the next decade. Head of Ireland's foremost Theological Faculty, Ussher was internationally the greatest Anglican antiquarian and theologian of his age - if not of all time."
Ussher not only gave us a reliable date for the age of the Earth and drafted the documents which were the primary influence outside the Scriptures themselves on the Westminister Confession of Faith, but he proved through his exhaustive and well-documented research that the first five hundred years of Christianity in Ireland predated the influence of the Roman church. According to Lee:
"Ussher was very emphatic that Christianity had first reached the British Isles not via Rome but directly from Palestine. He put the arrival date, shortly after Calvary, at around A.D. 35f and not at all at around A.D. 596f (and from the Vatican). (See Ussher's 1631 Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British and his 1639 Antiquities of the British Churches. Especially the latter is highly impressive. The Schaff Herzog Encyclopaedia rightly describes it as a work of twenty years' labour, great research, and critical penetration.) Ussher was a pioneer in the historiography of the Early Church. He set out to prove that the Ancient Church in the British Isles was independent of the Roman Church and its later unscriptural traditions. Ussher's various views themselves derived from the remnants of Irish Culdeeism or Proto Protestantism readily found themselves into the later Westminster Standards based upon his own Irish Articles."

Hundreds of years after first publishing this work for the scholars of his day, Master Books has accomplished the massive and expensive task of translating the entire 960-page tome so that this rare treasure trove of ancient history can, for the first time, be accessible to the general public. Updated from a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript into modern English, "The Annals of the World" contains the fascinating history of the ancients, from the Genesis creation through the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70. At last, students have a comprehensive history of the ancient world which allows them to draw heavily from Scripture and primary source documents. Despite the open mockery of him by evolutionists committed to their own religiously driven view of earth history, Ussher's scholarship remains unassailable and has stood the test of time.

Annals of the World is packaged in a beautiful display box, and the volume itself is smythe-sewn with gold-gilded edges and foil embossing. It includes eight appendices, and contains over ten thousand footnotes from the original text which have been updated to references from works in the Loeb Classical Library by Harvard Press.

This is perhaps the most significant Christian publishing event of 2003. This is a multi-generational book, meant to be passed to your children. Christian fathers owe it to their posterity to acquire this volume and display it in a place of prominence in the family library.

This classic work is nearly 1,000 pages long--it begins at 1:00 a.m. on an unspecified day in 4004 B.C. and ends in A.D. 73, two years after the destruction of Jerusalem. It comes with a CD that contains maps, timelines, selected articles, and "much more!" This is a "must" read/have for anyone interested in matters pertaining to the Bible, Jewish history, and/or early Christian history.

I remember hearing Ussher ridiculed in my school days (I had majored in biology) for his setting a day and time for creation. That's all I knew about Bishop Ussher until Master Books came out with this beautiful, collector's volume of Ussher's work. It is a beautifully bound book. I don't think anybody could calculate the day and time of creation, but I made an effort of my own to see what year creation might have occurred if I followed the Biblical accounts and the historical dates for Abraham and the Israelite patriarchs. I came up with 4004 B.C. I calculated the flood to have occurred 1656 years later (2348 B.C). I was surprised years later when I discovered "The Wall Chart of History" ISBN: 0880292393, printed by The Tien Wah Press, Singapore. It had the same years for creation and the flood. Now I see that Bishop Ussher also came up with the same years.

I saw "The Annals of the World" advertised in "Biblical Archaeology Review." I didn't realize Ussher had written such a long book. Now that I have it, I see that Ussher tried to summarize human history from the creation to A.D. 73, when Ussher felt that "This was the end of Jewish affairs . . . (last paragraph of his main text on page 882). Ussher did something very similar to what Joseph did in his "The Antiquities of The Jews," which is Josephus' history starting with creation and ending about the same year when Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Both books are masterpieces and belong in every serious library.

In spite of my education in biology, I do not believe in evolution. I think Ussher will have the last word over those who ridiculed him. His naming times and days, I think, was ill advised, but the advocates of evolution have more serious things making them look silly. There is a wide spread belief that I did not become a human being until after my body was separated by birth from my mother's body. At that moment I, the person writing this, suddenly came into existence. There was no change to my body. It was biologically identical the instant I became a human as was the fetus that was not me but some tissue in my mother's body. The evolutionists can say the tissue in my body evolved from my mother's body, but I'm not tissue. I'm a human being. As a human being, I did not even evolve from my own mother. How could I have evolved from hominoid apes? I think a couple generations from now Ussher will carry much more respect than those who ridiculed him.

I have only one thing to add to Ussher's book. Seventy-three A.D. was not the end of Jewish affairs . . . Descendants of the defeated Judeans survived, and Judea, as a nation, continued. Later, in A.D. 131, all of their descendants united under Bar Kochba, built a 400,000-man army, defeated three Roman armies, and liberated all of Palestine. The government they set up was called "The First Jewish Commonwealth." The present Israeli government, incidentally, is "The Second Jewish Commonwealth."

Rome sent Septimus Severus to defeat Judea. He destroyed every city, town, and village in the land, killed many of the people, deported most of the survivors, and brought in foreign people to occupy the land. So effective was this destruction of the Judean nation that seventeen centuries later, in 1856, only 10,500 Jews resided in all Palestine. Josephus would not have known that. He died before A.D. 131. Bishop Ussher, if he had the benefit of archaeological evidence discovered after his death in 1656, especially the work of Yigael Yadin, he might have extended his Annals to cover the war under Bar Kochba.

"The Annals of the World" is a very beautiful book, leather bound, gilt edges, with a ribbon as a page marker. The book and its contents are a treasure for anyone's personal collection.

Maurice A. Williams
Author of "Prophet and Historian: John and Josephus"
ISBN: 1411627091

This is "the first major English revision" of Rev. Archbishop Ussher's Annals of the World since it was published in 1658.

"In most history books, it is very difficult to tell where the material came from. ... This is not true of Ussher's work. It contains more than twelve thousand footnotes from secular sources and over two thousand quotes from the Bible or the Apocrypha. There is very little editorialising and most editorial comments come from the original writers themselves." So for the most part this is a book of history.But I bought this book for its chronology, not its history.

I know something about chronology since I did write the Chronology Papers. So I had always wanted to get a copy of Ussher's, The Annals of the World, just to see what was in it and how well it was documented. Well, I was surprised. It is basically a world history book with Ussher's idea of linking it with Biblical history. Ussher attempts to chronologize history from 4004 BC to 70 AD. If nothing else the documentation is worth the price of the book.

Ussher's book is a masterpiece. Simply brilliant in detail and idiosyncratic information pieces that may have seemed redundant or irrelevant then, but mean so much today. This exhaustive work is much different from other histories since he draws on materials that no longer exist, bringing to life other texts long since lost or forgotten.

I hope many people take the time to read this historical masterpiece, it will enlighten and please the most serious scholar and common lay person.

First published in 1650-1654 in Latin, and in English in 1658. Recently revised and updated by Larry Pierce and republished by Master Books.

The Annals is a complete history of the world covering every major event from the time of creation to 70 A.D. In writing this history, Ussher read everything about ancient history that existed in the seventeenth century, and his work is extensively footnoted with thousands of references to ancient writers. Actually, this work is a summary of what the ancients wrote. Ussher constructed a system of chronology which is held to this day by many Biblicists. He dates the creation of the world in the year 4004 B.C.

This book will prove to be the most valuable source of all time for the study of ancient history and of chronology.

This work is essential to anyone who studies the Bible, regardless of your views. While Lightfoot may have created a similar work in the 17th century, Ussher's work is the one that has affected our culture the most, even appearing in many Bibles for generations (Scofield Reference Bible). It has shaped prophecy timelines and, most recently, resulted in what most would refer to as pseudoscience: Young Earth creationism.

His work has been studied over the centuries for accuracy (since 1650). This translation makes some minor mathematical corrections. However, most would agree that it is Biblically accurate for the traditional Bible. Scholars who use the Septuagint (Greek translation of the first five books of the Bible) come to a slight difference in dates for creation (5586 BCE vs. 4004 BCE), but nothing major when you compare science's view that the universe is 14 billion years old and homo sapiens have roamed the earth for more than 200 thousand years.

Note that when I say it's biblically accurate, I mean that it accurately counts the dates for biblical genealogies - not that I consider its date for the creation of the universe to be correct.

One of the things that Ussher does is to create a chronology of world history. In other words, if he can pin point a date in the Bible using genealogies and reigns of kings, then he can report in the Annals what was happening in other parts of the world at the same time. This is the meat of most of this great work.

With that in mind, I was very much looking forward to seeing what he would say was happening in other parts of the world in 2349 BCE. Ussher places 2349 BCE as the year of the global Flood of Noah where God wipes out every living child, plant and animal on the planet (expect those on the boat). Therefore, I was really looking forward to seeing if he would show that Egypt's ruling class was in the sixth dynasty at that time, and whether or not he would mention that the seventh dynasty continued with no interruption. Alas, he does not mention this or any other world history at the time of the flood. He also does not mention Cuneiform and hieroglyphics or Chinese (etc) languages that existed prior to the Tower of Babel, where according to the Bible, there was only one world language and, according to Ussher, the year was 2242 BCE when God created all other languages.

If you are a skeptic with a penchant for history, you can see what fun you can have with Ussher's work.

In his defense, I'm not sure if this knowledge was available to Ussher in the 17th century. However, as an Agnostic, it's fun to see the dates of events that the Bible claims and compare them with the dates of current historical knowledge. On the other hand, once the Bible timeline moves further into a time of recorded history, Ussher does a good job of creating a chronology of world history.

The book, itself, is beautiful with gold gilding. It may not fit in your book shelf, though. It's just over 11 inches high. This book is well worth the price.

"Annals of the World" is a great historical reference for the most discerning of scholars. Covering the time from the beginning of creation to 70AD, James Usshur used over 2500 historical sources to ensure that he compiled a complete collection of historical facts.

Elaborating each of the positive qualities and reasons to purchase and read this book are highlighted in most of the 5 star raters, I would only be seconding what they have already stated.

James Ussher's classic work is an absolute joy to read. I was up 'til the wee hours reading the night I got it. The writing is truly fresh and exciting, a bit unexpected for a volume first published in the mid 1600's by an Anglican archbishop!

I happen to hold a young-earth creationist's view of origins, and find Bishop Ussher's calculations relating to creation utterly believable, but no matter your worldview you will find the histories complete and engaging, interspersed as they are with first hand accounts of some of civilization's most defining moments.

The bindings of this volume seem sturdy enough at first glance, though time only will tell how it holds up to the study this book will certainly receive! The print is crisp and clear, and the illustrations are very fine as well.

This volume belongs in the library of every serious student of history.

The supplemental CD gives a wealth of solidly scriptural information to complement the biblical timeline charts, and some excellent commentary on the position of God's infallible Word in ancient and contemporary times.

Buy this book! You will not be disappointed!