Welcome to Part 2 in the series on biblical genealogy.
The focus today is on the chronology of the Hebrew Bible, known to Jews as Tanakh and to Christians as the Old Testament.
In part 1, the point of view is this part of the Bible (Old Testament) is a mix of mythology, legend, and real history. Therefore you might be wondering why bother calculating biblical dates if most of them are not considered to be historical.
One of the things that some people seemed to misunderstand from the first part is the idea that ancient stories can still be considered extremely valuable, even If they are only partially historical at all.
This is because there is more than one way to communicate truth.
In philosophy, the terms 'Logos' and 'Mythos' are sometimes used to explain this concept. If we only focus on what is literally true and approach things in a practical, logical, and scientific way, that's logos. And of course, logos is very useful. However, there are certain things that simply cannot be fully communicated through logos alone.
Sometimes, in order to communicate our deepest feelings and intuitions, we need to use a song or a poem, or, in the case of the Bible, a story. This way of communicating truth is called mythos and it's the reason why we still teach the Humanities alongside the sciences.
Which brings us back to chronology. If a family tree of the characters from Tolkien's Middle Earth were made, one needs to understand the chronology Tolkien used, even it is literature and not real history.
Considering the impact that the Bible has had on our modern culture and considering that it is at least partially based on real history, the topic of biblical chronology is extremely important, even if most of the dates aren't based on literal history.
The first thing you need to know about biblical chronology is that there are a lot of different opinions on it. It's kind of like a puzzle, and this is one of the reasons why it is so fascinating. Over the years, many different people have offered many different solutions to the puzzle.
For example, when it comes to calculating the exact year that the creation supposedly took place, numerous dates have been proposed. According to the calendar used by most Jews today, it's 3761BC. And, according to many evangelical Christians, it's around 4004BC, thanks to a guy named James Ussher.
Here's a list of some of the other data that have been proposed.
Please understand that in this article (video), only one potential solution to the puzzle (the one that makes the most sense). And the reason why it makes the most sense is that it simply takes the text at face value. many of the biblical chronologies out there bend over backward to try and make the numbers fit either with real history or with some theory involving prophecy.
Assume in this article (video) that most of the numbers weren't meant to be historical and therefore, we can just take them exactly as they were given.
One more important thing to point out is that the numbers that are used in this article (video) are the numbers from the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text is based on Hebrew manuscripts that go back about 1000 years and it is the primary text used in most English translation today, including both Jewish Bibles like the JPS Tanakh and Christian Bibles like the NIV or KJV.
If you're wondering about the Septuagint, we'll come back to that near the end.
The Bible begins with the Creation story. Obviously, it doesn't give us a date. It just says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". For now, we will simply call that year 'Year 1' or '1 AM' (AM standing for Anno Mundi meaning, 'in the year of the world').
In Genesis 5. we're given the genealogy of the first 10 generations of humans along with the exact age of each person when the next generation was born. We can easily put the numbers together to form a timeline.
In Genesis 6:1, it tells us that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood came, we now know that the Flood occurred exactly 1656 after Creation. Since we're starting a Year 1 instead of a Year Zero, that means that the Flood occurred in the year 1657 AM.
The next even we want to get to is the birth of Abraham. To do that, we can use the numbers given in Genesis 11, just like we did with Genesis 5. Here the lifespan starts to get smaller so the timespan between the Flood and the birth of Abraham ends up being just 290 years, bringing us to 1947 AM.
In Genesis 21:5, it says that Abraham was 100 when he had Isaac, in Genesis 25:26, it says that Isaac was 60 when he had Jacob and in Genesis 47:9, it says that Jacob was 130 years old when he and his family moved to Egypt. From the birth of Abraham to Jacob's family moving to Egypt is another 290 years.
It's not a coincidence that we get a repetition of this same number. We're going to see several numbers repeat themselves, which is further evidence that we're dealing with something more similar to poetry than to literal history.
From this point forward, the Bible no longer gives us exact numbers for each generation.
However, we can still date several more key events due to two very important verses, the first of which is Exodus 12:40. That verse reads, "The length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was 430 years." We now know when the Exodus from Egypt occurred. It occurred exactly 2666 years after Creation, or, according to our numbering system, in the year 2667AM.
Let's pause for a second, 2667 is a pretty interesting number. It happened to be exactly 2/3 of the way between 1 and 4000. Keep the number 4000 in mind because we're going to come back to it.
The next important verse is 1 King 6:1. There we read that exactly 480 years after the Israelites left Egypt, Solomon began to build his temple. That brings us to 3147 AM. Note that this is exactly 1200 years after the birth of Abraham.
Again it is doubtful if this is a coincidence. Whoever was putting together this chronology worked these nice round numbers in for the sake of symmetry and symbolism.
From this point forward, we can use the reigns of the various kings of Israel and Judah to continue the chronology. If we look at each set of kings separately, and take the numbers at face value, rather than try to synchronize them with each other, we end up with 280 years to the fall of Israel to the north and 430 years to the fall of Judah in the south. That gives us the years 3347 and 3577 AM.
It's at this point that the real fun starts. You see, the fall of Judah (in which the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians along with their first temple) is a known historical event. We can confirm it from Babylonian and other records, and in fact, we can come up with an exact historical date for it - 587BC.
Which brings us back to the number 4000. If 3577AM = 587BC, we can then calculate that 4000AM would equal 164BC. And since it would appear that this entire chronology is building up to something special happening in the year 4000, we need to ask ourselves: did anything special, in fact, happen in the year 164BC?
Yes. Indeed it did. As mentioned in Part 1, Judah was conquered by Babylon, Babylon was then conquered by Persia, Persia was then conquered by Alexander the Great, and then after Alexander died, Judea ended up in the hands of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire.
But in the year 167BC, the Jews revolted under the leadership of the Maccabees and on their independence - an event that is celebrated by Jews today during the festival of Hanukkah.
Three years after they won their independence, in the year 164BC, the temple in Jerusalem was rededicated. This is a historical event that we know actually happened.
In the opinion of many biblical scholars, we can conclude the following: In order to help the people appreciate the significance of the great event they were witnessing, the scribes reworked the numbers in their sacred texts so that the year of the rededication fell exactly in the 4000th year since the creation of the world.
At the time, Jews considered 40 years to be the symbolic length of a generation, so this would also mean that the people living at the time would be the 100th generation.
Now don't misunderstand, we're not saying that the scribes did something sneaky by inputting these very specific numbers into the Bible. Writers back then simply did not write in the same way that modern historians write. They often used symbolism and poetry, and they often mixed mythology with current events. Precise dates and numbers simply weren't important to them like they are to us today. What mattered to them was the overall story and how it related to themselves, in their present point in time.
It does however seem to appear that they understood at least a bit of real history. Because their year for the destruction of Jerusalem matched perfectly with what we know from history.
And they used that date as an anchor to come up with some approximate dates for their older legends and myths.
Let's take a look at those.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Solomon started building his temple around 1017BC.
Now we don't actually have evidence that Solomon ever existed or that he built the first temple. As mentioned in Part 1, Kings David and Solomon are mostly likely legendary figures, and not truly historical. By that, it means that they probably existed but were likely just minor rulers, not the mighty kings that the Bible describes.
But with that in mind, this date is not a bad guesstimate for when the Israelite kingdoms would have first started to develop as it's right in the middle of what's known as the Great Dark Ages. The archaeology from this time shows that this period is when the previous Canaanite culture collapsed as was slowly replaced by the newer Israelite culture. So far, the chronology matches up well.
Going backward using this chronology, we can now calculate that the scribes living in the Maccabean period dated the Exodus to the year 1497BC. Again, this is not a bad guesstimate on their part. This would set the story during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt when Egypt was at one of its greatest peaks of power. It's also shortly after the Hyksos left and returned to the Levant.
On Part 1, there are many interesting comments related to the Exodus, the Moses story was labeled as mythology, but please understand that there is a blurry line between mythology and legend. There may be aspects of real history that inspired the Exodus story. For example, the name Moses clearly has an Egyptian origin.
And there is some scant evidence of people speaking a Semitic language living in Egypt, possibly as slaves from Canaan. Or maybe some of the Israelite people were slaves in Canaan during the period when Egypt controlled the area.
But the point is that there is absolutely no evidence that an entire nation of people was enslaved in Egypt en masse and that those same people wandered through the desert, entered Canaan, and became the United Kingdom of Israel. Sure, the Egyptians could have censored their records, but it would have been impossible to cover up the whole thing.
On top of this, there's plenty of positive evidence that the Israelites were simply another Canaanite tribe that had been there all along. Because the link to some form of Egyptian slavery is so fuzzy, it is still labeled best as mythology.
And remember, just because something is recorded in the style of mythology, it doesn't mean that that story is useless. Mythos can still teach us the truth - just a different kind of truth.
Going back to the other dates. According to this chronology, the Flood would have occurred around 2500BC. Again, there's all sorts of interesting theories about what might have inspired the Flood story, which is found in Babylonian records as well. The most likely candidate is a localized flood is Sumer that occurred around the year 2900BC.
According to this very straightforward chronology, crated by scribes living around 164BC, the world was created exactly 4000 years earlier, in the year 4163BC. That means that today, we will be living in the year 6183AM.
The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament and in fact, we have manuscripts of the Septuagint that are about 600 years older than the oldest copy of the Hebrew Masoretic text.
And the interesting thing about the Septuagint is that the numbers in Genesis 5 and 11 are quite a bit different.
If we were to build a chronology using the Septuagint numbers, it would look quite a bit different. Some people argue that the Septuagint numbers are the original ones and others argue that the Masoretic numbers are the original. Unfortunately, the Dead Sea Scrolls don't include much from Genesis 5 and 11, so that can't really help us solve the problem.
It doesn't really matter anyway, because neither version was attempting to record literal history anyway. Both were simply communicating mythos and each one had different reasons for why they presented the mythos in the way that they did.
The Masoretic chronology was used in this article/video because that's the one found in most people's bibles.
_______________________________________________________
This is a partial transcription of UsefulCharts YøùTùbé video titled 'Biblical Chronology | Understood as Literature, Not Literal History'.
Watch this video here. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
Download the full chronology as a PDF (free). You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
The focus today is on the chronology of the Hebrew Bible, known to Jews as Tanakh and to Christians as the Old Testament.
In part 1, the point of view is this part of the Bible (Old Testament) is a mix of mythology, legend, and real history. Therefore you might be wondering why bother calculating biblical dates if most of them are not considered to be historical.
One of the things that some people seemed to misunderstand from the first part is the idea that ancient stories can still be considered extremely valuable, even If they are only partially historical at all.
This is because there is more than one way to communicate truth.
In philosophy, the terms 'Logos' and 'Mythos' are sometimes used to explain this concept. If we only focus on what is literally true and approach things in a practical, logical, and scientific way, that's logos. And of course, logos is very useful. However, there are certain things that simply cannot be fully communicated through logos alone.
Sometimes, in order to communicate our deepest feelings and intuitions, we need to use a song or a poem, or, in the case of the Bible, a story. This way of communicating truth is called mythos and it's the reason why we still teach the Humanities alongside the sciences.
Which brings us back to chronology. If a family tree of the characters from Tolkien's Middle Earth were made, one needs to understand the chronology Tolkien used, even it is literature and not real history.
Considering the impact that the Bible has had on our modern culture and considering that it is at least partially based on real history, the topic of biblical chronology is extremely important, even if most of the dates aren't based on literal history.
The first thing you need to know about biblical chronology is that there are a lot of different opinions on it. It's kind of like a puzzle, and this is one of the reasons why it is so fascinating. Over the years, many different people have offered many different solutions to the puzzle.
For example, when it comes to calculating the exact year that the creation supposedly took place, numerous dates have been proposed. According to the calendar used by most Jews today, it's 3761BC. And, according to many evangelical Christians, it's around 4004BC, thanks to a guy named James Ussher.
Here's a list of some of the other data that have been proposed.
Please understand that in this article (video), only one potential solution to the puzzle (the one that makes the most sense). And the reason why it makes the most sense is that it simply takes the text at face value. many of the biblical chronologies out there bend over backward to try and make the numbers fit either with real history or with some theory involving prophecy.
Assume in this article (video) that most of the numbers weren't meant to be historical and therefore, we can just take them exactly as they were given.
One more important thing to point out is that the numbers that are used in this article (video) are the numbers from the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text is based on Hebrew manuscripts that go back about 1000 years and it is the primary text used in most English translation today, including both Jewish Bibles like the JPS Tanakh and Christian Bibles like the NIV or KJV.
If you're wondering about the Septuagint, we'll come back to that near the end.
The Bible begins with the Creation story. Obviously, it doesn't give us a date. It just says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". For now, we will simply call that year 'Year 1' or '1 AM' (AM standing for Anno Mundi meaning, 'in the year of the world').
In Genesis 5. we're given the genealogy of the first 10 generations of humans along with the exact age of each person when the next generation was born. We can easily put the numbers together to form a timeline.
In Genesis 6:1, it tells us that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood came, we now know that the Flood occurred exactly 1656 after Creation. Since we're starting a Year 1 instead of a Year Zero, that means that the Flood occurred in the year 1657 AM.
The next even we want to get to is the birth of Abraham. To do that, we can use the numbers given in Genesis 11, just like we did with Genesis 5. Here the lifespan starts to get smaller so the timespan between the Flood and the birth of Abraham ends up being just 290 years, bringing us to 1947 AM.
In Genesis 21:5, it says that Abraham was 100 when he had Isaac, in Genesis 25:26, it says that Isaac was 60 when he had Jacob and in Genesis 47:9, it says that Jacob was 130 years old when he and his family moved to Egypt. From the birth of Abraham to Jacob's family moving to Egypt is another 290 years.
It's not a coincidence that we get a repetition of this same number. We're going to see several numbers repeat themselves, which is further evidence that we're dealing with something more similar to poetry than to literal history.
From this point forward, the Bible no longer gives us exact numbers for each generation.
However, we can still date several more key events due to two very important verses, the first of which is Exodus 12:40. That verse reads, "The length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was 430 years." We now know when the Exodus from Egypt occurred. It occurred exactly 2666 years after Creation, or, according to our numbering system, in the year 2667AM.
Let's pause for a second, 2667 is a pretty interesting number. It happened to be exactly 2/3 of the way between 1 and 4000. Keep the number 4000 in mind because we're going to come back to it.
The next important verse is 1 King 6:1. There we read that exactly 480 years after the Israelites left Egypt, Solomon began to build his temple. That brings us to 3147 AM. Note that this is exactly 1200 years after the birth of Abraham.
Again it is doubtful if this is a coincidence. Whoever was putting together this chronology worked these nice round numbers in for the sake of symmetry and symbolism.
From this point forward, we can use the reigns of the various kings of Israel and Judah to continue the chronology. If we look at each set of kings separately, and take the numbers at face value, rather than try to synchronize them with each other, we end up with 280 years to the fall of Israel to the north and 430 years to the fall of Judah in the south. That gives us the years 3347 and 3577 AM.
It's at this point that the real fun starts. You see, the fall of Judah (in which the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians along with their first temple) is a known historical event. We can confirm it from Babylonian and other records, and in fact, we can come up with an exact historical date for it - 587BC.
Which brings us back to the number 4000. If 3577AM = 587BC, we can then calculate that 4000AM would equal 164BC. And since it would appear that this entire chronology is building up to something special happening in the year 4000, we need to ask ourselves: did anything special, in fact, happen in the year 164BC?
Yes. Indeed it did. As mentioned in Part 1, Judah was conquered by Babylon, Babylon was then conquered by Persia, Persia was then conquered by Alexander the Great, and then after Alexander died, Judea ended up in the hands of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire.
But in the year 167BC, the Jews revolted under the leadership of the Maccabees and on their independence - an event that is celebrated by Jews today during the festival of Hanukkah.
Three years after they won their independence, in the year 164BC, the temple in Jerusalem was rededicated. This is a historical event that we know actually happened.
In the opinion of many biblical scholars, we can conclude the following: In order to help the people appreciate the significance of the great event they were witnessing, the scribes reworked the numbers in their sacred texts so that the year of the rededication fell exactly in the 4000th year since the creation of the world.
At the time, Jews considered 40 years to be the symbolic length of a generation, so this would also mean that the people living at the time would be the 100th generation.
Now don't misunderstand, we're not saying that the scribes did something sneaky by inputting these very specific numbers into the Bible. Writers back then simply did not write in the same way that modern historians write. They often used symbolism and poetry, and they often mixed mythology with current events. Precise dates and numbers simply weren't important to them like they are to us today. What mattered to them was the overall story and how it related to themselves, in their present point in time.
It does however seem to appear that they understood at least a bit of real history. Because their year for the destruction of Jerusalem matched perfectly with what we know from history.
And they used that date as an anchor to come up with some approximate dates for their older legends and myths.
Let's take a look at those.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Solomon started building his temple around 1017BC.
Now we don't actually have evidence that Solomon ever existed or that he built the first temple. As mentioned in Part 1, Kings David and Solomon are mostly likely legendary figures, and not truly historical. By that, it means that they probably existed but were likely just minor rulers, not the mighty kings that the Bible describes.
But with that in mind, this date is not a bad guesstimate for when the Israelite kingdoms would have first started to develop as it's right in the middle of what's known as the Great Dark Ages. The archaeology from this time shows that this period is when the previous Canaanite culture collapsed as was slowly replaced by the newer Israelite culture. So far, the chronology matches up well.
Going backward using this chronology, we can now calculate that the scribes living in the Maccabean period dated the Exodus to the year 1497BC. Again, this is not a bad guesstimate on their part. This would set the story during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt when Egypt was at one of its greatest peaks of power. It's also shortly after the Hyksos left and returned to the Levant.
On Part 1, there are many interesting comments related to the Exodus, the Moses story was labeled as mythology, but please understand that there is a blurry line between mythology and legend. There may be aspects of real history that inspired the Exodus story. For example, the name Moses clearly has an Egyptian origin.
And there is some scant evidence of people speaking a Semitic language living in Egypt, possibly as slaves from Canaan. Or maybe some of the Israelite people were slaves in Canaan during the period when Egypt controlled the area.
But the point is that there is absolutely no evidence that an entire nation of people was enslaved in Egypt en masse and that those same people wandered through the desert, entered Canaan, and became the United Kingdom of Israel. Sure, the Egyptians could have censored their records, but it would have been impossible to cover up the whole thing.
On top of this, there's plenty of positive evidence that the Israelites were simply another Canaanite tribe that had been there all along. Because the link to some form of Egyptian slavery is so fuzzy, it is still labeled best as mythology.
And remember, just because something is recorded in the style of mythology, it doesn't mean that that story is useless. Mythos can still teach us the truth - just a different kind of truth.
Going back to the other dates. According to this chronology, the Flood would have occurred around 2500BC. Again, there's all sorts of interesting theories about what might have inspired the Flood story, which is found in Babylonian records as well. The most likely candidate is a localized flood is Sumer that occurred around the year 2900BC.
According to this very straightforward chronology, crated by scribes living around 164BC, the world was created exactly 4000 years earlier, in the year 4163BC. That means that today, we will be living in the year 6183AM.
The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament and in fact, we have manuscripts of the Septuagint that are about 600 years older than the oldest copy of the Hebrew Masoretic text.
And the interesting thing about the Septuagint is that the numbers in Genesis 5 and 11 are quite a bit different.
If we were to build a chronology using the Septuagint numbers, it would look quite a bit different. Some people argue that the Septuagint numbers are the original ones and others argue that the Masoretic numbers are the original. Unfortunately, the Dead Sea Scrolls don't include much from Genesis 5 and 11, so that can't really help us solve the problem.
It doesn't really matter anyway, because neither version was attempting to record literal history anyway. Both were simply communicating mythos and each one had different reasons for why they presented the mythos in the way that they did.
The Masoretic chronology was used in this article/video because that's the one found in most people's bibles.
_______________________________________________________
This is a partial transcription of UsefulCharts YøùTùbé video titled 'Biblical Chronology | Understood as Literature, Not Literal History'.
Watch this video here. You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
Download the full chronology as a PDF (free). You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
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