Biblical chronology dispute: Difference between revisions

The [[Biblical chronology|chronology]] of the events in the [[Bible]], and hence of the length of the history in the world, remains in sharp dispute today. At least three different camps have made various assumptions concerning the interpretation of relevant [[Bible|Scripture]] and even the "best fit" of Scripture to the [[Archaeology|archaeological record]]. What follows below is a description of the three camps, and the assumption that each camp has made, followed by a synoptic comparative chronology illustrating the implications of the various positions.

The dispute at hand almost exclusively concerns the full length of the [[Old Testament]] era from [[Creation]] to one of two post-exilic events that almost everyone accepts as well-attested to within one or two years. Those dates are:

 

# The [[Fall of Jerusalem]], which secular history places at 586 BC, and

# The death of [[Nebuchadnezzar II]], which secular history places at 562 BC.

 

Even those two dates give rise to a one-to-two-year dispute in their placement, so that "exactitude" in secular historical dating might not be a safe assumption. Nevertheless, ''some'' point of departure is required. Of the two points of departure mentioned above, the death of Nebuchadnezzar is actually undisputed. The Fall of Jerusalem is a disputed date--again, with a two-year margin.

 

Most discussions of the dispute in the secular literature (including the [[Wikipedia]]) seem to center on the dates of:

But the disputes on these dates are merely the symptom of the ''actual'' sources of dispute, as the discussion will further show.

== Three Opposing Camps ==

The three opposing camps, each of whom gives its own dates for the events detailed above and, by extension, the date of Creation, are the '''Hillel Camp''', the '''Ussher Camp''', and the '''Thiele Camp'''.

This camp includes the great [[Rabbi]] [[Hillel II]], inventor of the nineteen-year-cyclic luni-solar [[Hebrew calendar]] used by [[Judaism|Jews]] worldwide, and especially in present-day [[Israel]]. This calendar calculates Creation, which presumably would fall on 1 Tishri Year 1, as October 7, 3761 BC according to the [[Julian calendar]].

The Hillel Camp is at its greatest odds with the other two camps primarily because it assumes that the [[Messiah]] was ''not'' [[Jesus Christ]] at all, but a rebel leader named [[Simon bar Hochva]], who revolted against [[Rome]] in 135 AD, prompting [[Emperor]] [[Hadrian]] to scatter the Jews to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire (the [[Diaspora]]) and rename the region from ''Judea'' to ''Palaestina'', which is the nearest equivalent to "Philistia" in [[Latin]].

This camp takes its name from [[James Ussher]] and includes every Biblical scholar, including [[Floyd Nolan Jones]] and [[Larry Pierce]], who supports Ussher's original chronology. Ussherites insist that James Ussher's calculations, made strictly from Scripture, are impeccable and unimpeachable, and that any other date from archaeology ''must'' give place to it. However, as will soon be apparent, Ussher's assumptions are not entirely without controversy.

This camp takes its name from [[Edwin R. Thiele]], an archaeologist and Biblical scholar who was one of a few key investigators (another was [[William A. Fulbright]]) to attempt to reconcile the king lists given in I and II Kings to the accepted secular translations of [[Assyria|Assyrian]] stone tablets and other records--the [[Assyrian chronology]]. Today, most evangelical scholars have joined the Thiele camp; Fulbright and other competitors of Thiele are regarded as less important. The Thiele camp makes some of the most controversial recommendations known to Biblical scholarship, and the dispute between the Thiele and Ussher camps is perhaps the most bitter.

The three camps do agree on a number of key facts:

# The genealogy in the [[Bible]] from [[Adam]] to [[Noah]], the date of the [[Global Flood]] in relation to [[Creation]], and the further genealogy from [[Shem]] son of Noah to [[Terah]] father of [[Abraham]], make a continuous timeline that all three camps accept virtually without question.

# The groundbreaking of the [[Temple of Jerusalem]] took place in the 480th year following the [[Exodus]] from [[Egypt]]. This simple statement ({{Bible ref|book=I_Kings|chap=6|verses=1}}) ''does'' represent a point of dispute between these three camps on one hand, and secular archaeologists and historians on another. Specifically, the Thiele and Ussher camps are only forty-five years apart on the date of the Exodus, while some (though not all) secular investigators have tried to date the Exodus in 1290 BC, 201 years later than Ussher and 156 years later than Thiele. This would, if it could be shown, compress the period of the [[Judges]] greatly. But all three camps described above accept the statement in [[I Kings]], and thus this controversy is irrelevant to the dispute between and among them.

As has been said [[Anno Mundi#Date of creation in The Annals of the World|elsewhere]], Ussher's sole warrant for assuming this later date for Abraham's birth was the placement of the description of Abraham's departure after the account of Terah's death. He assumed that the Bible listed events in the order in which they took place. Modern Ussherites, among them [[Larry Pierce]], assume the same.

Critics of this assumption by Ussher point out that ample precedent exists for the listing of certain events out of their strict order of occurrence, and in a more logical grouping by the life of the person involved. {{Bible ref|book=Genesis|chap=5}} is a perfect example of this. One can see further examples in the King Lists in I and II Kings. More to the point, the sentence "Terah died in Haran" could refer to a ''spiritual'' death that [[God]] reckoned when Terah forgot his initial purpose in taking his family out of their home city of [[Ur of the Chaldees]].

From that last, Ussher assumed that the 430-year sojourn must have begun ''when Abraham entered [[Canaan]] for the first time.'' His modern critics and opponents observe that Ussher had no definite warrant for assuming that the "making of the promises" necessarily took place at the dramatic covenant ceremony referenced in {{Bible ref|book=Genesis|chap=15}}.

However, the [[Septuagint]], for reasons lost in antiquity and probably known only to the original Seventy Interpreters, quotes {{Bible ref|book=Exodus|chap=12|verses=40}} as saying, "who dwelt in Egypt ''and Canaan''" (emphasis added). Yet most Ussherites are loath to cite this as a ground for their dating of the sojourn, because Ussher himself distrusted the Septuagint and used the [[Masoretic Text]] instead. If an Ussherite were, therefore, to try to stand on the Septuagint's rendition of this verse, they would have committed a [[logical fallacy]] closely akin to [[special pleading]].

The Masoretic Text does indeed say that the sojourn--that is, a temporary stay--of the Israelites "who dwelt in Egypt" was 430 years. In addition to this consideration, one must consider the following:

*Seventy "souls" in direct line-of-descent from Jacob entered Egypt during the Famine. {{Bible ref|book=Exodus|chap=1|verses=1-8}}

*On the day of the Exodus, the nation of Israel had six hundred thousand men ''of military age'', ''in addition to'' children. {{Bible ref|book=Exodus|chap=12|verses=39}} A nation having this many men of military age surely numbered at least two million altogether, and very likely five million.

To the objection that only four generations of Levites are named from Levi to Moses (see {{Bible ref|book=Exodus|chap=2}}), most scholars would say that the expression "son of" or "daughter of" need not signify one actually born in the other's household, but merely a direct lineal descendant of any degree, including grandsons and great-grandsons and so forth.

This is the basis of the dispute between the Ussher camp and the Thiele camp, because it explains the two camps' divergent (by some forty-five years) dates for the [[Exodus]] and the [[Temple]] groundbreaking. The two camps arrive at the following BC dates for these two events, and for one other event in which they differ by two years:

# That he knew for certain the date of the death of [[Nebuchadnezzar II]]--which was 562 BC.

From this date, he worked backward, using the meticulous dates that appear throughout I and II Kings, each of which gives a date of a king's accession with references to a year of reign of another king--except that kings of the [[Southern Kingdom]] after the conquest of the [[Northern Kingdom]] are listed only with their ages and lengths of reign, and King [[Jehoiachin]] is referenced by how many years he had been a captive when Evil-Merodach acceded to his throne. That sequence definitely places the division of the kingdoms at 975 BC, and the beginning of Solomon's reign at 1015 BC. {{Bible ref|book=I_Kings|chap=6|verses=1}} states that Solomon broke ground on the Temple in the fourth year of his reign--and that this event took place in the ''four hundred eightieth year since the [[Exodus]].'' This places the Exodus at 1491 BC. (The sequence also places the Fall of Jerusalem at 588 BC, because it happened 11 years after Jehoiachin was taken captive.)

Thiele, on the other hand, made a number of assumptions from observations of Assyrian stone tablets that, he believed, warranted a ''revision'' of the king list in I and II Kings. They were:

All these dates presented serious problems for a strict reading of I and II Kings--primarily because Ussher calculated King Jehu as having acceded to the throne of Israel (and also killed King [[Ahaziah]] of Judah) in 884 BC (Ussher, ''Annals'', pgh. 535). Thiele solved this problem by ''moving forward the date of Jehu's campaign'' from 884 BC to 841 BC. That movement alone accounts for 43 of the 45 years by which the Ussher and Thiele dates of the Exodus and the Temple are discrepant.

Thiele also greatly compressed and telescoped the reigns of [[Amaziah]], [[Uzziah]], and [[Jotham]] of the [[Southern Kingdom]] to force them to synchronized with this reworked chronology of the Northern Kingdom.

Ussherites contend that while Ussher assumed the primacy of Scripture, Thiele assumed the primacy of secular historical records (what Ussher called "profane history"). Pierce in particular contends that Thiele had no right, according to the accepted canons of Biblical scholarship, to impart different meanings to verses that follow the same pattern without sufficient reason--an argument that [[Occam's razor|William of Occam]] might have made. Even if Thiele did have that right, Pierce maintains that Thiele's clues, such as they are, are not even grounded in anything approaching certainty. Ussherites also question Thiele's math--for example, Thiele seems to have assumed that Uzziah, whom II Kings states was 16 years old when he began to reign, was granted a viceroyship fully eight years before he was born! A later disciple of Thiele then claimed that what Thiele actually meant was that Uzziah became ''viceroy'' at sixteen, not ''sole ruler'' at sixteen. But McFall, according to Pierce, then proceeded to alter the text of Scripture itself (specifically {{Bible ref|book=II_Kings|chap=14|verses=21}} and {{Bible ref|book=II_Chronicles|chap=26|verses=1}}, a proposition Pierce denounced as outrageous.

# The [[Global Flood]] occurred 1656 years following [[Creation]], a point on which all three camps agree.

# [http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/ Calendar Converter] by Fourmilab (requires JavaScript to operate)