Isaac Newton and the left eye of history

Abstract

Worried about being associated with the esoteric art of constructing ancient calendars and royal genealogies, Isaac Newton downplayed his interest in chronology, yet it was a topic that came to obsess him after his move from Cambridge to London in 1696. During the previous hundred years, chronology’s advocates had been pairing it with geography as the right and the left eyes of history, the essential soul that would restore its shapeless carcass to life. Only a few decades into the eighteenth century, chronological research was itself a discipline of the past, its demise accelerated by John Locke’s insistence that the role of education should be to broaden competence, not foster narrow erudition. Relatively ignorant of humanist learning after devoting himself to the sciences, Newton embarked on an intensive course of self-tuition, but remained convinced that ancient pagan chronologies should be made to conform to the timeline provided by the Masoretic Bible, the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Old Testament and the only one that he trusted to have a verifiable provenance. Despite his late start, in pursuing this quest Newton spurned the shoulders of giants, confidently sidestepping other scholars’ opinions in his conviction that only he could discriminate between reliable sources and those that needed to be discarded. Drawing heavily on scriptural authority, he repeatedly executed reasoned yet convenient data adjustments to create a version of humanity’s history that was internally consistent but differed from those of his contemporaries. As his one-time acolyte William Whiston remarked contemptuously, Newton ‘‘seems to have digged long in the deepest Mines of Scripture and Antiquity for his precious Ore himself; and very rarely to have condescended to make use of the Thoughts or Discoveries of others on these Occasions’’ (129). After 1936, when Newton’s manuscripts on alchemy were snapped up by the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes at a London auction, historians started