 | ||
The chronology of the Bible is the elaborate system of life-spans, "generations," and other means by which the passage of events is measured over the 4,000 years between the Creation of the world and the re-dedication of the Temple in 164 BCE. It was theological in intent, not historical in the modern sense, and functions as an implied prophecy whose key lies in the identification of the final event.
Contents
- Chronologies prior to canonization
- Masoretic table
- Samaritan Pentateuch
- Septuagint LXX
- Second Temple and Rabbinic traditions
- Christian chronologies from Eusebius to Ussher
- Correlation of historical evidence and the Israelite kings
- References
The passage of time from the Creation to the Exodus is measured by adding the ages of the Patriarchs at the birth of their firstborn sons, later through express statements, and later still by the synchronised reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah. The Exodus takes place in the year anno mundi 2666, or AM 2666, exactly two thirds of the way through the four thousand years, the Temple is commenced 480 years, or 12 generations of 40 years each, after that, and 430 years pass between the building of the Temple and its destruction. The 50 years between the destruction of the Temple and the "Decree of Cyrus" and end of the Exile, added to the 430 years for which the Temple stood, produces another symmetrical period of 480 years, and the 374 years between the re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees and the Edict of Cyrus completes the 4,000 years.
As recently as the 18th century, scholars of the stature of Isaac Newton believed that the date of Creation was knowable from the Bible. Today, the Genesis account of Creation has long since vanished from serious cosmology, the Patriarchs and Exodus are no longer included in most serious histories of ancient Israel, and it is almost universally accepted that Joshua and Judges have little historical value. Even the monarchy is questioned, and although scholars continue to advance proposals for reconciling the chronology of the Books of Kings, there is "little consensus on acceptable methods of dealing with conflicting data."
Chronologies prior to canonization
During the centuries that Biblical texts and canons developed, theological chronologies emerged at different composition stages, though scholars have advanced various theories to identify these stages and their schematizations of time. These chronologies include:
Masoretic table
(The following table is derived from Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past; notes within the table as cited)
While difficulties with Biblical texts make it impossible to reach sure conclusions about their chronology, perhaps the most widely held hypothesis is that the Masoretic text embodies an overall scheme of 4,000 years (a "great year") taking the re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees in 164 BCE as its end-point. Two motives may have led to this: first, there was a common idea at the time of the Maccabees that human history followed the plan of a divine "week" of seven "days" each lasting a thousand years; and second, a 4,000 year history – even longer in the Septuagint version – would establish the antiquity of the Jews against their pagan neighbours.
Samaritan Pentateuch
In the Samaritan Pentateuch, 'the genealogies and narratives were shaped to ensure a chronology of 3000 years from creation to the Israelite settlement of Canaan. Northcote reports this as the "Proto-SP chronology," as designated by John Skinner (1910), and he speculates that this chronology may have been extended to put the rebuilding of the Second Temple at an even AM 3900, after three 1,300-year phases.
Septuagint (LXX)
The Israelite chronology extends 4,777 years from creation to the finishing of the Second Temple, as witnessed in the Codex Alexandrinus manuscript. This calculation only emerges by supplementing LXX with the MT's chronology of kings. There were at least 3 variations of LXX chronology; Eusebius used one variation, now favored by Hughes and others. Northcote asserts that the LXX calendrical pattern was meant to demonstrate that there were 5,000 years from creation to a contemporaneous Ptolemaic Egypt, circa 300 BCE.
Second Temple and Rabbinic traditions
The first notable attempt to turn Biblical texts into a theological chronology was the 2nd century BCE Book of Jubilees; beginning with the Creation, it measures time in years, "weeks" of years (groups of seven years), and jubilees (sevens of sevens), so that the interval from Creation to the settlement of Canaan, for example, is exactly fifty jubilees (2450 years).
More significant, and still in common use among Jews, was the Seder Olam Rabbah ("Great Order of the World"), a work tracing the history of the world and the Jews from Creation to the 2nd century CE. It allows 410 years for the duration of the First Temple, 70 years from its destruction to the Second Temple, and 420 years for the duration of the Second Temple, making a total of 900 years for the two temples. This schematic approach to numbers accounts for its most remarkable feature, the fact that it shortens the entire Persian Empire from over two centuries to just 52 years, mirroring the 52 years it gives to the Babylonian exile.
Christian chronologies from Eusebius to Ussher
The early Church Father Eusebius (c.260-340), attempting to place Christ in the chronology, put his birth in AM 5199, and this became the accepted date for the Western Church. As the year AM 6000 (800 CE) approached there was increasing fear that the end of the world was nigh, until the Venerable Bede then made his own calculations and found that Christ's birth took place in AM 3592. Martin Luther (1483-1586) placed the Apostolic Council of Acts 15 in the year AM 4000, believing this marked the moment when the Mosaic Law was abolished and the new age of grace began. This was widely accepted among European Protestants, but in the English-speaking world, Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) switched the focus back to the birth of Christ, which he found had occurred in AM 4000, equivalent, he believed, to 4 BCE, and thus arrived at 4004 BCE as the date of Creation. Ussher was not the first to reach this result, but his chronology was so detailed that his dates were incorporated into the margins of English Bibles for the next two hundred years.
Correlation of historical evidence and the Israelite kings
(For detailed reconstructions of the chronology of the Hebrew kings, see Kings of Judah)
The chronology of the monarchy, unlike that of earlier periods, can be checked against non-Biblical sources and seems to be correct in general terms. This raises the prospect that the Books of Kings, linking the Hebrew kings by accession and length of reign ("king X of Judah came to the throne in the nth year of king Y of Israel and ruled n years"), can be used to reconstruct a chronology for the monarchy, but the task has in fact proven intractably difficult. The problem is that the books contain numerous contradictions: to take just one example, since Rehoboam of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel began to rule at the same time (1 Kings 12), and since Ahaziah of Judah and Joram of Israel were killed at the same time (1 Kings 9:24, 27), the same amount of time should have elapsed in both kingdoms, but the count shows 95 years passing in Judah and 98 in Israel. In short, "[t]he data concerning the synchronisms appeared in hopeless contradiction with the data as to the lengths of reigns."
Possibly the most widely followed attempt to reconcile the contradictions has been that proposed by Edwin R. Thiele in his The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (three editions between 1951 and 1983), but his work has been widely criticised for, among other things, introducing "innumerable" co-regencies, constructing a "complex system of calendars", and using "unique" patterns of calculation; as a result his following is largely among scholars "committed ... to a doctrine of scripture's absolute harmony" (the criticism is to be found in Brevard Childs' Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture). The weaknesses in Thiele's work have led subsequent scholars to continue to propose chronologies, but, in the words of a recent commentary on Kings, there is "little consensus on acceptable methods of dealing with conflicting data."