Biblical Dating

No, this article is not about whether or not the Bible says it’s okay to kiss on the first date. (But there will be some discussion of begetting.) Mainly, we’re going to talk about how can we assign a date to events reported in the Bible and if the relative chronology provided by the Scriptures is reliable.

When Was Christ Born?

In my last article I discussed how, in the 17th century, Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland used time indicators in the Bible to develop a biblical chronology covering 4000 years from the creation of the world to the birth of Jesus. Following the thinking of the time, he placed the birth of Jesus in the year 4 BC. How could Jesus be born 4 years “Before Christ”?

Back in antiquity, years were counted from the beginning of the reign of a monarch (e.g., the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar) or some other notable event (e.g., the founding of Rome). In the 6th century CE, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Latin for “Dionysius the Humble”) decided that we should count the years from Christ’s birth, not from the reign of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Diocletian who had been a notorious persecutor of Christians. Therefore, he reckoned years should be dated either “before Christ” or “years of our Lord” (in Latin, anno domini). (There is no Year 0 and his calendar goes from 1 BC to AD 1.)

The problem is that Dionysius didn’t get the year of Christ’s birth right. Matt 2:1 and Luke 1:5 both agree that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great. Dionysius thought that Herod died 754 years after the founding of Rome (AUC, for ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city), but Herod died in 750 AUC. This mistake was known in Ussher’s day and their best guess was that Jesus was therefore born in 4 BCE. Historians today would estimate that Jesus was born a few years before  the death of Herod (e.g., 7-6 BCE).

It's a well-known fact that back in the 50s, guys could only afford one milkshake.

It’s Written in the Stars

All of which raises the question: How we can date any event in the past to any degree of accuracy? Occasionally, we get lucky. The Babylonians, for example, not only recorded the reigns of kings and dates of battles, but they also recorded astronomical observations. On one astronomical diary for the 37th regnal year of Nebuchadnezzar, there are about thirty precise observations of the moon and planets that allow astronomers to determine the 37th regnal year ran from March/April 568 to March/April 567 BCE. Such dates are called “absolute dates” because we know with mathematical precision when they occurred on our BCE/CE calendar.

From such absolute dates, the relative dates in a chronology can be assigned. For example, with the 37th year of Nebuchadnezzar fixed as an absolute date, it can be easily calculated that his 18th year, during which he destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple was 587/586 BCE. With absolute dates, the entire Babylonian chronology can be recreated. And the same can be done using data from the records of other cultures.

Then, by cross-checking events mentioned in the biblical Books of Kings with known dates in the chronologies of Assyria, Babylonia, and other surrounding kingdoms, scholars can establish with some degree of confidence that the Divided Monarchy (Israel in the north, Judah in the south) began with the death of Solomon in 931/930 BCE.

But that’s the end of the road because if we try to push back before the time of Solomon, it becomes increasingly difficult to find synchronisms between the Bible and historical records from the surrounding nations. We’re left with only the witness of the Bible and its authors were not trying to document events with historical accuracy.

The Lost Generations 

As we saw in my previous article, the Bible records the Exodus occurred after the Israelites had lived 430 years (to the day!) in Egypt. Solomon began construction on the Temple in the 480th year since the Exodus. That’s 910 years to account for. Yet when we look at genealogical lists such as Ruth 4:18-22, there are simply not enough generations.

Gen 46:12 says that Judah, his son Perez, and his grandson Hezron were 3 of the 70 members of Jacob’s family who went down to Egypt. An adult Nahshon was a chieftan of the tribe of Judah (Num 2:3; 7:12) during the desert wanderings. Over 400 years separate Hezron from Nahshon, but only 3 generations.

It’s even crazier for Moses. According to Gen 46:11, Levi and his son Kohath migrated to Egypt with Jacob. But according to Ex 6:18-20, Kohath was Moses’ grandfather and lived to be 133. Amram, Moses’s father, died at age 137. Adding these two ages gives you 270 years. Even if they both fathered children on their deathbed, that’s not enough time to have an 80-year old Moses at the time of the Exodus.

I was curious how fundamentalists handle this and one such solution is the same as that used by Archbishop Ussher: follow the LXX which says the 430 years covers the time the Israelites spent in both Canaan as well as Egypt. This drops the time the Israelites spent solely in Egypt to 215 years and reduces the gap between Moses and his grandfather to a mere 135 years.

This still leaves 480 years from the time of Nahshon to the time of Solomon and only 6 generations separating them. Did each man father his son at the age of 80? Interestingly, 1 Chr 6:3-8 records 10 generations from Aaron (Moses’ brother and brother-in-law of Nahshon) to Zadok (priest of Jerusalem at the time of Solomon). Ten generations covering the same timespan in one genealogy as six generations in a different genealogy suggests that some intermediate ancestors were lost or one (or both) are both fictional.

An Unreliable Witness

Despite the earnest desires of biblical literalists, the time indicators in Scripture are not salvageable as historical data any earlier than the 10th century BCE. And it’s not just the dates but the events themselves. While there are a couple of mentions in extra-biblical inscriptions to a “house of David,” there are no references to a King David or a King Solomon outside of those in the Bible. There are no mentions in Egyptian chronicles of plagues or a mass exodus of Hebrew slaves. Archaeological evidence does not support the conquest story described in the Book of Joshua. All of this leads scholars to question whether any of the events described prior to the Divided Monarchy happened at all.

We will explore these topics further in my next article.

Ussher, U Got It Bad

Many readers of the Bible have looked at chronological markers, such as “When X had lived Y years he became the father of Z” in Genesis 5, and wondered if they could construct a timeline of biblical history. The best-known attempt of this was in the 17th century by Irish Archbishop James Ussher. He famously set the first day of Creation as 23 October 4004 BC. How difficult was this task?

Let’s do the timeline again

The first decision we need to make is which numbers to use. As I pointed out in my previous article on Genesis 5, many of the ages given in Genesis differ depending on whether you use the Hebrew MT or the Greek LXX. For example, the Flood occurred 1656 years after creation according to the MT, but the LXX says it was 2242 years. From here on, I will use the abbreviation A.M. (for anno mundi) to count the years since the creation. Since modern bibles are translated from the Masoretic Text (MT), we’ll use those numbers so you can check my math, if desired.

The next decision we need to make is to decide on the birth year for Shem’s son, Arpachshad. As stated in my previous article on the post-Flood genealogies, Gen 5:32 states Noah was 500 years old when he begat Shem and Gen 7:6 tells us Noah was 600 when the flood began. But Gen 11:10 says Shem was 100 when he fathered Arpachshad and that this was “two years after the flood.” But if the flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old and the flood lasted a year, Shem must have been older than 100 “two years after the flood.” Let’s say Arpaschad was born the same year as the flood, AM 1656.

Using the data for the post-Flood ancestors in Gen 11 we get to the year AM 1946 where Gen 11:26 says Terah was 70 when he “became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” In similar fashion, we can use other markers in Genesis (17:1; 25:26; 47:9) to get to the year AM 2236 when Jacob and his family migrated to Egypt. According to Ex 12:40-41 it was 430 years later (“on that very day”) when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt (AM 2666) and Solomon began construction on the first Temple (AM 3146) 480 years after the Exodus (1 Kgs 6:1).

After this the chronological markers aren’t so clear. The Bible lists the various kings and their reigns, but some of them overlap. But if we ignore those technicalities, we can use the information in 1 and 2 Kgs to add another 430 years from the beginning of construction of the Temple in Solomon’s fourth year until the destruction of that Temple by the Babylonians (AM 3576). Another 50 years brings us to the end of the Babylonian captivity when the Edict of Cyrus (AM 3626) allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem to construct the second Temple (Ezra 1:1-4). Thus we would have 480 years from the Exodus to the founding of the First Temple and 480 more years to the founding of the Second Temple.

Portrait of James Ussher by Cornelius Janssens van Ceulen (1593-1661). His head and hands look out of proportion to his body.

It’s just a jump to the left, And then a step to the right

The chronological references end with Ezra and Nehemiah and we’re left with a relative timeline. What we need is an event in the Bible that can be assigned a fixed date in our own calendar. To achieve this, Bishop Ussher turned to Babylonian, Greek, and Roman sources to find such a date. He calculated the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar to be 562 BCE. This was also the accession year of his successor Amel-Marduk (known as Evil-merodach in the Bible). According to 2 Kgs 25:27, in his year of accession Evil-merodach released Jehoiachin from captivity after 37 years. Ussher determined this was AM 3442 in his chronology.

But our calculations above yield AM 3602, not AM 3442, as the year Nebuchadnezzar died (see table). Given the same information to work with, how did Ussher end up 160 years off?

Let’s go back to Abram. Above we pointed out that “Gen 11:26 says Terah was 70 when he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” Were they triplets? If not, one of them was eldest. Gen 12:4 says that Abram was 75 years old when God called him to depart from Haran for Canaan. Ussher reasoned that Abram was called to leave Haran the same year Terah died (AM 2083). This would make Abram the youngest of Terah’s three sons, born when Terah was 130 years old.

Ussher made another modification to the chronology we derived above when he used the LXX version of Ex 12:40 which says the children of Israel “sojourned in the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan” for 430 years (the MT says it was 430 years in Egypt only). So Ussher adds 430 years to the year Abram left Haran (AM 2083) to get the date of AM 2513 for the Exodus. This puts the founding of Solomon’s Temple at AM 2993 and he finds overlaps in the reigns of kings to reduce the time from the founding of the Temple to its destruction down to 423 years. Thus he determines AM 3442 as the year of Jehoiachin’s release. With this date as his anchor, he was able to determine the creation occurred in 4004 BCE. Q.E.D.

Event	Date AM	Date BCE	Ussher's AM	Date BCE
Creation	0	4164	0	4004
Flood	1656	2508	1656	2348
Abram born	1946	2218	2008	1996
Abram arrives in Canaan	2021	2143	2083	1921
Jacob into Egypt	2236	1928	2298	1706
Exodus	2666	1498	2513	1491
Founding of 1st Temple	3146	1018	2993	1011
Dedication of 1st Temple	3153	1011	3000	1004
Destruction of 1st Temple	3576	588	3416	588
Death of Nebuchadnezzar	3602	562	3442	562
Edict of Cyrus	3626	538	3485	519
Re-dedication of 2nd Temple	4000	164	3840	164
Birth of Jesus			4000	4

With a bit of a mind flip, You’re into the time slip

Ussher’s chronology appears too neat. He calculates 3000 years from the creation to the dedication of Solomon’s Temple and another 1000 years to the birth of Jesus. Ussher seemed to like large, round numbers. One suspects he began with the desired end result in mind and jiggered things around to make his chronology fit.

But the patterns in the Bible’s timeline are too on the nose: 430 years for the Hebrews living in Egypt and 430 years from the founding of the Temple to its destruction. 480 years from the Exodus to the founding of the Temple and 480 years from the founding of the First Temple to the founding of the Second Temple.

Just as Ussher labored to fix a period of 4000 years from creation to Christ, perhaps the biblical editors were also working under their own schema. Several modern interpreters have suggested that AM 4000 corresponds to 164 BCE and the re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees (the event celebrated at Hanukkah). Looking at the table, our timeline and Ussher’s sync up at the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the death of Nebuchadnezzar before diverging again. Yet our timeline ends with AM 4000 in 164 BCE. If Ussher had a specific event in mind as the terminus for his 4000-year timeline, maybe the 2nd century editors of the Bible did as well. If not, it’s an incredible coincidence.

Bottom line, the dates presented in the Bible are theological and symbolic. Despite Bishop Ussher’s assumptions, they cannot be relied upon as historical data. But we adjust biblical events to extra-biblical dates as Ussher did, can we calculate a more accurate biblical chronology? That will be the topic of my next article.