Biblical chronology dispute

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

The Disputed Era
The dispute at hand concerns the full length of the Old Testament era from Creation to the death of Nebuchadnezzar II. Secular history pegs this date at 562 BC.  Most discussions of the dispute in the secular literature (including the Wikipedia) seem to center on the dates of:


 * 1) The groundbreaking of the Temple of Solomon
 * 2) The Exodus of Israel

Concerning the Exodus, secular archaeologists and Biblical scholars have often argued whether this event occurred in 1290 BC (the Late Date) or in either 1446 BC or earlier (the Early Date). But concerning the other dates, the disputes on them are merely the symptom of the actual sources of dispute, as the discussion will further show.

Five Schools of Thought
The five traditions, each of which gives its own dates for the events detailed above and, by extension, the date of Creation, are the Hillel Tradition, the Late Date Tradition, the Ussher Tradition, the Thiele Tradition, and the Long Chronology Tradition.

The Hillel Tradition
This camp includes the great Rabbi Hillel II, inventor of the nineteen-year-cyclic luni-solar Hebrew calendar used by 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 Tradition is at the greatest odds with the others discussed here 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.

The primary source for the Hillel Tradition is the Seder Olam, a second century Targum of Rabbinic Judaism.

The Late Date Tradition
This newest of the five positions holds that the Exodus occurred later in the history of Egypt than do the other three--anywhere from 155 to 200 years later.

The Ussher Tradition
This camp takes its name from James Ussher and includes Biblical scholars who support Ussher's original chronology, including Floyd Nolen Jones and Larry Pierce. Followers of Ussher's tradition insist that the chronological data found in the Scriptures are impeccable and unimpeachable, and that conflicting data from non-Biblical sources must give way to it. Several of the major creation ministries, such as Answers in Genesis, and The Creation Research Institute, follow the Ussher Tradition.

However, Ussher’s chronology of the kingdom period suffers from several internal inconsistencies of a small nature and two major contradictions of the Bible. The first of the major contradictions is regarding 2 Kings 15:8, where the Bible says that “In the 38th year of Azariah king of Judah did Zachariah the son of Jeroboam reign over Israel in Samaria six months.” Ussher says he did not really become king then, but instead an interregnum started in which there was no king in Samaria. The Hebrew verb in this verse, malak, “reigned” or “began to reign,” cannot honestly be interpreted in any other way than specifying that “Zechariah. . . did reign” in the 38th year of Azariah. A second contradiction of the Bible is found in Ussher’s treatment of 2 Kings 15:30, which says that Hoshea, Israel’s last king, slew Pekah “and reigned in his stead, in the twentieth year of Jotham the son of Uzziah.” Ussher says that instead of Hoshea reigning at that time, “the kingdom was in civil disorder and anarchy for nine years,” again contradicting any honest translation of this verse. These two interregna, which cannot be supported by, but are contradicted by, the Biblical texts cited are part of the reason that Ussher’s chronology is, by the time of Solomon, 45 years earlier than the chronology determined by modern Bible-based scholarship.

The major chronological works of the Ussher tradition are:
 * James Ussher, The Annals of the World, 1654
 * Floyd Nolen Jones, The Chronology of the Old Testament, Master Books, 2005

The Thiele Tradition
This camp takes its name from Edwin Thiele, historian and Biblical scholar who attempted to determine the methods of the Hebrew court recorders who gave us the chronological data for the Hebrew kingdom period, as found in the historical and prophetic books of the Bible. After he had established such a pattern, he attempted to match it to an accepted date in secular history in order to give BC dates to his pattern. (All chronologists must do this at some point; Ussher chose the death of Nebuchadnezzar II in order to give BC dates at the end of the kingdom period.) When Thiele matched his Biblical pattern to accepted Assyrian dates for the Battle of Qarqar in the sixth year of Shalmaneser III and the tribute of Jehu in Shalmaneser’s 18th, year, he found inconsistencies with his Biblically-derived dates. Further investigation revealed it was the dates assigned by Assyriologists to these events that needed modifications, not Thiele’s Bible-based chronology. Thiele’s resultant revision of the Assyrian Eponym Canon—the very backbone of Assyrian chronology—on the basis of the Bible’s data has won the universal respect of Assyriologists. It must be emphasized that Thiele’s chronology therefore started with the Biblical data and corrected Assyrian dates based on the Bible because many false statements have been made saying just the opposite; that Thiele started with the Assyrian data and forced texts of the Bible to conform to the Assyrian data. Any such statement is in plain contradiction of the facts, and can only be taken as an extreme, and unwarranted, measure by writers who cannot support their argument by legitimate scholarship.

Thiele's defining work on chronology was:
 * Edwin R. Theile - The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1965. The following quote from that work shows the falseness of statements from Thiele’s detractors to the effect that he started with Assyrian dates and then “force-fit” the Biblical data to those dates:

"[N]o dates were used in the early pattern that I produced. In this way I eliminated the inclination, as certain fairly well established dates in Hebrew history were being approached, to endeavor to modify the pattern one way or another to cause it to conform to preconceived ideas of what it ought to be at those points. . . . The aim was to produce a system, if possible, in which the reigns of the kings were arranged in harmony with the data on both the synchronisms and the lengths of reign. Then, on the completion of such a pattern, I meant to test the results by a comparison with the established dates of contemporary history."

Today, most evangelical scholars have joined the Thiele camp;. Showing the respect that Thiele’s Bible-based chronology has earned from the Assyrian academy, the noted Assyriologist D. J. Wiseman wrote “The chronology most widely accepted today is one based on the meticulous study by Thiele.” Biblical chronologist Leslie McFall, who corrected Thiele’s error for the reign of Hezekiah, asserted, “Thiele’s chronology is fast becoming the consensus view among Old Testament scholars, if it has not already reached that point.” Among the many scholars who have accepted Thiele’s date of 931 BC for the beginning of the divided monarchies are T. C. Mitchell in the Cambridge Ancient History series, Walvoord and Zuck in The Bible Knowledge Commentary, Leslie McFall, Gershon Galil, Jack Finegan in his influential handbook on ancient chronological systems and the Bible, and Andrew E. Steinmann.

Long Chronology or Variant Manuscript Tradition
Several creationist scholars such as Lambert Dolphin base their chronologies on the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch. These variant manuscripts add about 1500 years to a chronology constructed from them using the same method as Ussher and others. In this system the date of creation (according to the Byzantine Creation Era) is given as September 1 5508 BC, giving the second dominant Biblical date for creation (i.e., circa 4000 BC and circa 5500 BC).

Points of Agreement
The various camps agree on a number of key facts:
 * 1) 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 four of these camps accept virtually without question. The Long Chronology camp insists that the manuscripts other than the Septuagint skipped or omitted a number of generations.
 * 2) The genealogy from Abraham to Jacob's sons forms another unquestioned interval of time--though Terah's age at the birth of Abraham is in dispute (see below).
 * 3) The groundbreaking of the Temple of Jerusalem took place in the 480th year following the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. The Late Date Camp, however, dates the Exodus in 1290 BC, 201 years later than Ussher and 156 years later than Thiele, compressing the period of the Judges greatly.

Key Points of Dispute
As has been noted elsewhere, attempts to establish a universally acceptable equivalency between Anno Mundi dates and Before Christ dates have faltered because of inability to resolve disputes on certain key dates, or epochs, in Biblical chronology and Biblical genealogy. None of the camps dispute the order of the events in the world time line. What they dispute is the intervals between and among them.

The Birth of Abraham
The first of these disputes concerns the birth of Abraham. The Bible says the following concerning the life of Terah, Abraham's father: Further along, concerning the end of Terah's life, the Bible says: Immediately thereafter, the Bible details this event in Abraham's life: The Hillel camp assumes that Abraham was born when Terah was seventy years old. But the Ussher camp asserts that the Bible shows Abraham leaving the Haran country after Terah was dead at the age of 205--which would make Terah 130 years old when Abraham was born. They explain the 60-year discrepancy by holding that Nahor or Haran was born when Terah was 70 years old, and Abraham was born much later.

Ussher's chief 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. But in addition, Stephen, testifying before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem at his blasphemy trial, said this of Abraham:

The key to supporting the late-birth assumption is further assuming that dead means only physically dead. 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. is a perfect example of this. One can see further examples in the King Lists in I and II Kings. But the key point that critics of the late-birth assumption make is that the phrase "when his father was dead" 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. By that reckoning, Terah might as well have been dead as far as Abraham's spiritual destiny was concerned, and even as far as God Himself was concerned. God told Abraham to go, and he went--because Abraham was faithful and Terah wasn't.

The Sojourn in Egypt
The Bible says this concerning the length of time that the Israelites stayed in Egypt: And this: But Paul in his Letter to the Galatians observed: 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. Furthermore, Stephen, the New Testament source cited earlier, reiterates that God told Abraham that his people would suffer for four hundred years.

Please consider the discussion article, entitled Israel in Egypt for more information.

The Septuagint, for reasons lost in antiquity and probably known only to the original Seventy Interpreters, quotes 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.
 * On the day of the Exodus, the nation of Israel had six hundred thousand men of military age, in addition to children. A nation having this many men of military age surely numbered at least two million altogether, and very likely five million.

If one assumes that each of those original "seventy souls" who entered Egypt had a fifty-member household (including family retainers), then the number of people who entered Egypt might have been 3500. To reach five million people requires the population to double at least ten times, and possibly eleven times.

Typically, a fast-growing population might double every twenty-five years. This means that at least two hundred fifty or two hundred seventy-five years must have passed between entry and Exodus. Thus a mere 215-year stay in Egypt falls short. A 430-year stay offers ample time and allows the population to double less frequently than once every twenty-five years.

In addition to which, many named characters in the Bible have as many as ten named generations--far too many to have occurred in 215 years.

To the objection that only four generations of Levites are named from Levi to Moses, 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.

Further support for a long Sojourn can be found here. Briefly, the longer the Sojourn, the further back in history was the Babel Incident. If the Sojourn was short, and Abraham was born early in Terah's life, then Peleg would have been born in 2187, or one year after the likely founding of the Egyptian nation-state. A long Sojourn obviates the problem.

The Date of the Exodus
The Late Date camp asserts that the Exodus occurred late in the history of Egypt mostly on archaeological grounds. Some Late Date theorists argue that the references to the cities of Pithom and Pi-Ramesses in force a late date, because those cities, by those names, did not exist in the 15th century BC. Dyer says that this argument can hardly be conclusive, because even the late date would have the city of Ramesses built before Ramesses II took the throne, even under the assumptions of conventional Egyptian chronology.

The other four camps stand on. Late-date theorists cannot and do not attempt to square this simple statement--that the Temple was built exactly 480 years after the Exodus--with archaeological findings that, to some, suggest that the Exodus and the Temple groundbreaking occurred closer together in time. Instead, they simply assert that the literal reading cannot be trusted, on grounds that their opponents find highly tenuous at best.

The Chronology of the United and Divided Kingdoms
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 of Israel 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:

The first two sets of dates are exactly 45 years apart. The obvious question arises: What is the reason for the 45-year difference? Surprisingly, the two camps agree within two years on the date of the last event, the Fall of Jerusalem.

The differences result from the two differing assumptions that the two camps have made. Ussher assumed:


 * 1) That he knew for certain the date of the death of Nebuchadnezzar II—which was 562 BC.
 * 2) That this was also the date that Nebuchadnezzar's son Evil-Merodach began to reign.

There is, however, a problem with Ussher’s calculation at this starting point. It is known from Ptolemy’s Canon and from contract texts that Evil-Merodach’s accession year was the year that started in Nisan (a spring month) of 562 BC. This was also the 37th year of Jehoiachin’s captivity (2 Kings 25:27), so that he would have been taken captive in (562 BC + 36) = 598 BC. Ussher assumed Nisan years for all these dates and accession reckoning for Zedekiah, successor to Jehoiachin, which would end Zedekiah’s 11-year reign in 587, in agreement with some modern detailed studies, instead of Ussher’s 588.

From his date of 588 BC, Ussher worked backward, using the meticulous dates that appear throughout I and II Kings and II Chronicles, 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. Ussher’s calculations then placed the division of the kingdoms at 975 BC, and the beginning of Solomon's reign at 1015 BC. In order to arrive at these dates, Ussher had to make several assumptions about how to interpret the Biblical data, such as whether a given reign length or synchronism was measured from a coregency or from a sole reign. He postulated three coregencies for Judah. For Israel, he assumed three coregencies, one rival reign, and two interregna. For comparison, Thiele postulated six coregencies for Judah, and one coregency and two rival reigns for Israel. This is the area where the largest divergences are between the Thiele and Ussher camps, and the source of the 45 year difference in their dates of Solomon.

In studying Ussher’s reasoning, it becomes clear that one of the major features contributing to the difference is the interregna, since both scholars used basically the same method in determining when the Biblical data called for a coregency. Ussher began an eleven-year interregnum at the death of Jeroboam II of Israel. Thiele's chronology, based on the same principles that Ussher used elsewhere in determining when there were coregencies, had no need of this interregnum. Ussher has another eight-year interregnum between Pekah and Hoshea, the last two kings of Israel. In 2 Kings 15:30, the Hebrew original says that Hoshea was actually reigning in the same year that he killed Pekah, so that Ussher's interregnum here contradicts 2 Kings 15:30. The Hebrew verb used cannot honestly be interpreted in any other way, and so this issue of the interregna has become problematic for Ussher’s chronology. As mentioned before, Thiele had no need of interregna; his interpretation of the Biblical texts is in harmony with the texts of 2 Kings 15:8 and 2 Kings 15:30.

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 of Israel. This places the Exodus at 1491 BC when using Ussher’s dates for Solomon.

It is well known that Ussher’s dates for the kingdom period have not found verification from archaeological discoveries and the reading of inscriptions from the Ancient Near East. This information was not available in Ussher’s time. As explained on the Edwin Thiele page, Thiele also initially had trouble matching his Biblically-derived dates with the Assyrian data, but further investigation showed it was the dates commonly accepted by the Assyrian academy that were in error, not the Biblical dates as derived by Thiele. Assyriolgists have generally accepted the corrections that Thiele found would be necessary in order to reconcile Assyrian dates with God’s Word. This is one of the strongest affirmations of the correctness of Thiele’s way of interpreting the rich and complex chronological data of the kingdom period.

The following list shows how Thiele’s Bible-based chronology disagreed at some points with the commonly accepted Assyrian dates, but Thiele “stuck by his guns” and showed that it was the interpretation of the Assyrian texts that was in error, not the texts from the Bible. The events are:


 * 1) That a king identified as Jehu paid tribute to King Shalmaneser III of Assyria in 841 BC, as the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III attests. Previous to Thiele’s studies, the majority of Assyriologists dated the tribute one year earlier. Thiele’s study of the Biblical data led him to investigate the reasoning of the Assyrian academy in deriving this date. His one-year correction for Jehu’s tribute, and the regnal years of Shalmaneser, is now accepted by Assyriologists.
 * 2) That a king identified as Ahab contributed a sizeable portion to a coalition force that fought against Shalmaneser III in a major battle at Qarqar in 853 BC. Again, Thiele’s chronology as derived from the Biblical historical books required that the tribute was in 853 instead of in 854, the date held by the majority of the Assyrian academy. In all three editions of his Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, Thiele published his revision of the Assyrian Eponym Canon that allowed the Assyriologists’ dates to match those derived from the Bible. This has been a great testimony to the reliability of the Bible’s chronological data when interpreted correctly.
 * 3) That Sennacherib invaded the Southern Kingdom, in the days of King Hezekiah, in 701 BC. The date is well established from Assyrian records, and it is consistent with Thiele’s chronology.
 * 4) That Menahem of Israel gave tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III at some time between the Assyrian’s first year of reign, 745 BC, and the death of Menahem, which Thiele placed in 742/41 BC. Tiglath-Pileser’s original name was Pul (2 Kings 15:9), as has been established from Babylonian and Phoenician records. The tribute was challenged by Floyd Nolen Jones, who wrote, “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.” This statement is false. The text of the Iran Stela, published in 1994, says explicitly that Tiglath-Pileser received tribute from Menahem of Samaria. Ussher’s dates for Menahem, 772 to 761 BC, would make it impossible for him to give tribute to Tiglath-Pileser, who reigned from 745 to 727 BC. This problem with Ussher’s dates has never been resolved by the “Ussher camp.” It arose in part because of Ussher’s interregnum that not only produced conflict with Assyrian dates, but, more importantly, with the Hebrew text of 2 Kings 15:30. This and Ussher’s other unwarranted interregnum have contributed to the 45-year divergence between Ussher’s dates and those of modern scholarship.

All these dates presented serious problems for Ussher’s interpretation of the chronological data of I and II Kings and II Chronicles—as shown by Ussher calculating King Jehu as having acceded to the throne of Israel (and also killed King Ahaziah of Judah) in 884 BC.

Other areas contributing to the 45-year difference are as follows.


 * 1) Thiele calculated that the 41-year reign of Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:23) was measured from his appointment as coregent, while Ussher preceded these 41 years with an 11-year coregency, thus making a total of 52 years for Jeroboam in Ussher’s system.
 * 2) Thiele’s chronology has no need of the two interregna immediately following the deaths of Jeroboam II and Pekah. These interregna cannot be supported by a literal and faithful reading of the two Scriptures involved, as mentioned above.
 * 3) Thiele determined, following some previous scholarship, that Pekah and Menahem began their reigns together and that Pekah simply wiped out the short-lived "House" of Menahem after building a rebel power base for twelve of the twenty years he is supposed to have reigned.

Some Ussherites contend that while Ussher assumed the primacy of Scripture, Thiele assumed the primacy of secular historical records (what Ussher called "profane history"). But anyone who has read, and understood, Thiele’s works will know that this is quite the opposite of the facts.

A Synoptic Table
The following synopsis (literally, a "view together") makes the following assumptions:


 * 1) The Global Flood occurred 1656 years following Creation, a point on which four of the five camps agree.
 * 2) The Temple groundbreaking occurred exactly 479 years following the Exodus of Israel, another point of general agreement.

Each epochal event has listed with it the relevant Biblical authority and sixteen dates, alternating between AM and BC.


 * Ussher and Thiele columns use Ussher's or Thiele's chronology, respectively, of the Divided Kingdoms.
 * Columns labeled I and II assume a "short sojourn"; columns III and IV assume a "long sojourn."
 * Columns labeled I and III assume a "late birth" for Abraham; columns II and IV assume an "early birth."