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Chronology issues

Here's a very quick heads-up, because my schedule is getting pretty tight, and my one scholarly source, i.e. my pastor, has a very tight schedule of his own. But he is very, very interested in your work product thus far. Your analysis (or perhaps that was Leslie McFall's analysis) of 2_Kings 17:1 was not something that he had ever seen before. He is not prepared to accept that as correct this instant, but he did give me his pledge to chase that down. The only trouble is that he has a lot of other things on his plate and might not get to it for weeks!

FYI, The Rev. Alan B. Brown, MDiv, ThM, is well-studied in ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek and has in fact taught Greek at seminary level. (My church is like a layman's community seminary, with all the high-powered learning that the pastors, deacons, and other teachers have to offer.) He freely stated that ancient Hebrew sometimes created confusion between sequential and disjunctive uses of the letter vav, if I am not totally mistaken in his meaning.

I'll try to have that table published to the essay-talk page sometime this weekend. In the meantime, I would like to see an article on Leslie McFall. I also authorize you to discuss in detail the implications of the Thiele/McFall system for the reigns of Pekah, Menahem, and Pekahiah. Once again, I'm not prepared to accept those arguments as "winning." But the arguments need a full airing, anyway.

The pastor has promised to review not only my essay but also its talk page. That will be a lot of material, so neither one of us can expect him to turn on a dime. In fact he freely confessed to me that the Ussher/Thiele dispute on the reigns of the kings of the divided kingdoms was something he had never really considered. All he knew was that he preferred a date of 1446 BC for the Exodus of Israel, and preferred this "early date" to the "late date" given by those who tried to connect the Exodus with Rameses II of the 19th Dynasty of Manetho. That the "early date" might itself be forty-five years too late is something that never occurred to him until now. So he's interested. But he's also busy.

Bottom line: We'll both have to be patient.

And because this site is intended as a scholarly resource, all arguments have their place. So remember the guidelines that I laid down, and I look forward to reviewing your submissions. You should be able to edit and create pages right away.--Temlakos^Talk 17:58, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

McFall article has been created

From Latent 01:20, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I created the Leslie McFall article today. Main idea was to get the tables out that show how his chronology works. I know very little of a biographical nature. Also, I didn't get the references to show up at the bottom.

Latent 01:20, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Pekah

I have just finished editing your submission to the Pekah article. You will notice that I removed a few parts of your submission. Here is why:

1. For future reference, you need not sign a submission to an article. You need to sign a submission to a Talk page, because we want to know who is saying what on those pages. But material in an article does not have to be signed, and in general we ask that you not sign it.
2. Your discussion of "evidence against the interregnum" was confusing, and probably resulted from some confusion on your part. I never said that the Second Interregnum followed the killing of Menahem. Neither did Ussher, or Pierce, or any other Ussherite that I know of. Rather, the Ussherite contention is that the Second Interregnum ran from 739 to 730 BC, or nine years following the assassination of Pekah. Therefore your discussion of the Menahem-Pul tributary interaction is not relevant to a discussion of the Second Interregnum. It is relevant to a discussion of any hypothetical rivalry between the House of Menahem (Menahem and Pekahiah) and the House, such as it was, of Pekah. Therefore I left in your discussion, and the reference to Thiele's Mysterious Numbers, which I placed in the form of a tagged reference. But I had to remove your discussion about the interregnum, mainly because I couldn't make sense of it, and some of it you had already mentioned anyway in another context.

What you can certainly do is put in a paragraph or two describing the perfect/pluperfect interpretation of the Hebrew verb malak. I'm still having that investigated, and my pastor is very much interested, but he's frightfully busy with other things, not least of which is preparing to take a bunch of us (including me) camping in a place where we might have a chance to catch sight of wild elk and eagles. Perhaps he and I can discuss this grammatical point in between elk/eagle sightings.

Response to an attempted defense of Thiele and impugning of Ussher

I have little time to spare for this, as I am on the road. But:

I find your rehabilitation of Edwin R. Thiele lacking in objectivity. You appear to be a champion of Thiele and defend his assumptions of viceroyalties, co-regencies, and the telescoping-out of 45 years of Hebrew history, without regard to the difficulties this poses to chronology and synchrony.

I believe you base your assumption that Thiele was correct and Ussher wrong, purely on the Assyrian Eponym Canon as it has survived.

You misunderstand. Thiele did not base his chronology on the Assyrian Eponym Canon (AEC). How can I make this any clearer? He started with the Bible’s chronological data for the kingdom period and endeavored to understand the methods used by the writers of the Bible. After that was done, he had to choose some anchor point on which to attach his chronology, in order to give absolute (BC) dates. Ussher had to do the same. When Thiele did this, he found disagreements with the chronology of the AEC as it was then understood by the majority of Assyriologists. Further study showed it was the Assyriologists who were wrong. Thiele then published his revision of the chronology of the AEC in all three editions of Mysterious Numbers. Thiele’s revision of the chronology of the AEC is universally recognized by Assyriologists. That revision came about because of the Biblical data, so the charge, made repeatedly by Ussher’s supporters, that Thiele based his chronology on the AEC rather than the Bible not only needs to be abandoned, but a confession of error—a deliberate misinterpretation of Thiele—needs to be made. User:Latent February 2, 2018.

Martin Anstey (ca. 1900) showed that Tiglath-Pileser III "memory-washed" at least 45 years of his empire's history. This includes the reign of King Pul, who likely was the same as the one whom Jonah managed to convert in his mission to Nineveh. (See Jonah chapter 3.)

I read Anstey many years ago and I do not remember his argument. I would guess that his argument is based on trying to rescue Ussher’s excess of 45 years for the beginning of the kingdom period. If we don’t start with the a priori belief that Ussher is correct, then what inscriptions from ancient times does Anstey cite in order to support his thesis that T-P III erased 45 years of Assyrian history? Did T-P somehow censor all copies of the AEC, of which we have multiple examples, found in different places and written at different times? Please document. User:Latent February 2, 2018.

I have further evidence that supports Ussher and his chronology far more than does Thiele:

1. I personally—not relying on Ussher or Floyd Nolen Jones, but by my own effort—constructed a spreadsheet to synchronize the Kings of Judah and Israel. I applied diligently the formula "In Year X of the reign of King A of {Israel|Judah} began King B to reign in {Judah|Israel}. {Y number of years old was he when he began to reign, and} he reigned for Z number of years." I understand—up to a point—your use of the term "King C reigned in his stead" to mean "King C began to reign at once upon the death of King B." I suggest to you that you cannot rely upon that absolutely, not when the numbers would force us to assume, for instance, that King Ahaziah (Uzziah) began his viceroyalty eight years before he was born. But more to the point:
2. Walter T. Brown, of Hydroplate Theory fame, worked out an astronomical fix for the date of the Global Flood. He based it on a regression analysis of the orbits of Comets Halley and Swift-Tuttle, the two comets that the gas giant planets have largely "left alone." That event took place 5300 years ago, give or take a hundred. Five candidate dates for the Global Flood fall within this window, and only one of them is consistent with Edwin R. Thiele's Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings. The others are consistent with the Ussher/Lloyd/Jones chronology. (The five dates are also all consistent with a Long Sojourn in Egypt. Most are consistent with a Late Birth of Abraham and with the use of the Septuagint chronology for Genesis 11:10-21, the "Annals of Terach."

Note that the “Long Sojourn” contradicts Ussher’s chronology, as you have stated elsewhere. The use of the Septuagint for the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 also contradicts Ussher. If one of these dates for the Flood is in agreement with Thiele, that should not be grounds for rejecting Thiele’s chronology. But it is more important to stick closer to what Thiele actually wrote about, which was the chronology of the kingdom period. I’d rather not get involved in a discussion of the several assumptions and alternate interpretations regarding when the Flood happened. User:Latent February 2, 2018.

(FYI: the Hydroplate Theory assumes that the "fountains of the great deep" were a subcrustal ocean. The theory explains the comets as having formed from Flood waters that actually escaped into outer space from the force of the "breaking open" of those fountains.)

I'll be glad to share with you other insights I had when I wrote the two articles you have been revising. I hope I can convince you, frankly, that Ussher was right and Thiele wrong. The justice of the charges by Larry Pierce et al. remains to be worked out. We might agree that Thiele acted in the general ignorance, by him and all his contemporaries, of the physical evidence, on Earth and in outer space, not only telling us that the Global Flood occurred but even telling us when. Why Thiele missed Martin Anstey's analysis of the Assyrian Eponym Canon was probably a secret Thiele took with him to his grave.--Temlakos^Talk 10:08, 2 February 2018 (EST)

Again, please present the information from Anstey, with documentation of which Assyrian, Babylonian, or any other ancient inscriptions show that T-P III excised 45 years out of Assyrian history, and how he was able to modify all of the eponym-lists that go into our modern compilation of the AEC so that these 45 years disappeared. Have you read pages 67–78 of Mysterious Numbers?

Ptolemy’s Canon verifies the accuracy of the AEC for the period from which the Canon starts, 747 BC, which is before the time of Tiglath-Pileser III (745 to 727 BC). The Khorsabad King List also verifies the accuracy of the AEC for the period from 845 BC, first year of Shalmaneser III who received tribute from Jehu in his 18th year, to the reign of Ashur-Nirari V, who reigned 755-745 BC. Another source verifying the accuracy of the AEC is the Seventh-Day Adventist King List (SDAS), of which Thiele writes (Mysterious Numbers, p. 70) “The SDAS King List is practically identical to the Khorsabad List, with the exception that it gives the names of two kings at the end of the list not found on the Khorsabad List, namely, Tiglath-Pileser II, with eighteen years (745-727 B.C.), and Shalmaneser V, with five years (727–722). The two lists provide a number of checks on each other.” Does Anstey process any of this information? User:Latent February 2, 2018.

Tiglath-Pileser’s tribute from Menahem cannot be reconciled with Ussher’s chronology

Regarding Tiglath-Pileser III, Floyd Nolen Jones has written “Thus, there is no Assyrian historical text which says or even infers that Tiglath-pileser collected tribute from Menahem of Israel, although almost all scholarly sources proclaim that he so did.” (Jones, Chronology of the OT, p. 172a.). When Jones made this statement in the first edition of his book, he had to discount the record found in T-P’s palace in Calah that mentioned tribute from Menahem, saying that the inscription was from Adad-Nirari IV, with his only evidence for that attribution, contrary to all Assyriologists, was that Ussher’s date for Menahem, 772 to 761 BC, match those of Adad-Nirari and not those of T-P III. However, in the Iran Stela, the text of which was published in 1994, T-P III clearly and unmistakably mentions receiving tribute from “Menahem of Samaria.” Jones had adequate time, when he issued revisions of his book in 2005 and 2009, to retract his erroneous statement about T-P III. He did not do so. The Iran Stela was actually a verification of Thiele’s chronology, although it was published eight years after Thiele’s death.

The multiple times when Thiele’s chronology was verified by later archaeological findings is documented in the Edwin Thiele page (section on “Successes . . .” and, to a lesser extent, in the Biblical chronology dispute page. I can supply more documentation if necessary; Thiele’s successes are not matters of opinion, but of recorded events that happened in the 20th century.

Supporters of Ussher’s chronology tend to discount virtually all Assyrian records in order to justify their position, and then they make the demonstrably false accusation that they are the ones defending the Bible whereas Thiele and those who follow in his footsteps start with the Assyrian data. These falsehoods about Thiele need to be renounced in the interest of honest scholarship. But, for the sake of those who do not accept archaeological data, the argument holds that Ussher’s interpretation of 2 Kings 15:8 and 2 Kings 15:30 is contrary to the express statement of the Bible that, in the first instance, Zechariah son of Jeroboam II was actually reigning in the 38th year of Azariah, and in the second instance, that Hoshea killed Pekah and was actually reigning in the 20th year of Jotham. The Hebrew verb used in these verses cannot be interpreted in any other way. Ussher’s interregna therefore cannot be supported unless the Bible is declared to be in error in these verses by saying that Zechariah and Hoshea were not “really” kings at those times. This is what Ussher’s supporters say, whereas the Bible says, definitely, that they were reigning in the years specified. User:Latent February 2, 2018, 12:54 PM CST.