We just celebrated the autumnal equinox. The equinox in the fall denotes the beginning of fall and the end of summer. It also signifies that the harvest is soon to come, and of course we celebrated Harvest Festival the weekend before the equinox.

In 1650, Irish Bishop James Usher tried to determine the age of the earth using the ages of various Biblical men and other historical events. He came up with the creation of the earth on Sunday, Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. (at 10 a.m. no less). His first calculation determined that in 1650, the earth was 7,154 years. He arrived at that date using the various ages of the men given in the “Septuagint”, which was the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

He rejected that age and instead went to the Hebrew Bible in which the various ages of the men were different. From that he figured that the time between the creation of the earth and the birth of Jesus was 4,000 years making the earth 5,650 years old. Actually, it would have been 5,654 years old because we now know the calendar that Dionysius Exiguus invented was off by four years so that today we say the birth of Jesus was in 04 B.C.

The reason he rejected the 7,154 years in favor of the 5,654 years was he believed that the earth could only exist for 6,000 years. Well, he was wrong because if we use his numbers, Monday the 22nd would have been the 6,029th birthday of the earth. Why Monday?

The Village

Naturalist

Usher believed the earth was created on the autumnal equinox because the fruit in the Garden of Eden was ripe. He gave that day an October date because he was using the Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar that we use today. He chose a Sunday because Sunday is the first day of the week and the earth was created on the first day. He chose 10 a.m. because it would have been mid-morning.

We now know that the equinox is when the sun is directly over the equator on its apparent trip south.

Because of that, the day is equal to the night. If you are on the equator, on the equinox the sun rises directly east and sets directly west. Because of the curvature of the earth north and south of the equator the equality of the day and night are a little off.

Here in Gothenburg, for example, at 40.9* North Latitude, the equal day and night was not until Friday the 26th…something that can only be explained by a spherical earth not a flat one.

People have known about these days for thousands of years. In Latin the term for “equinox” was “aequus” (equal) and “nox” (night). From there it became “equinoxe” in Old French and then in the 14th Century Chaucer translated that into Old English as “Equinox” in his poetry and writings.

I wanted to be able to note the day using two sticks with holes drilled in them placed 50 yards apart. You can see those sticks at the Salem Presbyterian Cemetery north of town and if you would have been there at sunup last week you could have looked through the west stick toward the east and the hole in the east stick lined up perfectly with the rising sun! Once something like that was serious science, now it is a novelty, and something that’s just fun to do!