Talk:Chronology of the Bible

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 May 2020 and 23 July 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Nmonserrat.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:40, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Who first mentions the 4000 for the MT?

PiCo, above you mentioned Wellhausen. But now I see that W doesn't actually relate the 4000 to the MT. He only mentions the 2666, as noted by Thompson. So who proposed the hypothesis, before Thompson, that the 4000 ends with the rededication of the Temple (and not Jesus' birth)? Thanks! ProfGray (talk) 12:08, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Ussher's method

A few minutes ago, the article claimed, "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; he 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."

That's not how Ussher did it. He didn't calculate a 4000-year span and then use the birth of Christ to date the creation. And the Hughes citation doesn't say that he did. He calculated the 4004 BCE figure in a way that doesn't depend on Christ's birthdate at all. Ussher worked through the biblical dates from Genesis to the accession of Amel-Marduk, and then used secular data to pinpoint when the accession of Amel-Marduk was (Ussher thought 563, modern scholarship says 562). The misconception that Ussher calculated a 4000-year period to Christ, calculated the birthdate of Christ, and then fixed the creation that way is common, but baseless. Hughes favorably cites Barr's summary of Ussher method. Here's Barr:

<<But we must now go back and consider how Ussher actually worked. First of all, he did not work, as many people suppose he worked, by taking the number of generations and multiplying them by what was supposed to be a probable average: a little thought quickly shows that this cannot fit the biblical material. Ussher worked entirely, or almost entirely, from express and exact dates, as far as concerns the biblical material. But this leads us to a fundamental point which explains why Ussher, like other biblical chronologists, could not work by simply adding the figures of the Bible together. First of all, though most biblical dates are probably unambiguous, a certain number could conceivably be taken in more than one way, and this, as we shall see, is an essential factor in a . number of Ussher's decisions. But, more important, the Bible in itself cannot furnish us with a chronology. Putting it crudely, this is because the Bible does not specify the chronological distance between the Old Testament and the New. No event in the New Testament is given a precise date stating distance from any Old Testament event. Putting it in another way, unlike our A.D.1B.C. system, which dates events back from the first century, the Bible dates events from the creation forward. It is impossible from the Old Testament, taken alone, to know how far back its events had lain in history. At the end of the Old Testament, e.g. the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, no firm dating is given. The construction of any biblical chronology required a synchronism with profane history, with extra-biblical data, at some point or other. Ussher himself tells us (viii.6-7) what the essential synchronism for him was. It was the death of Nebuchadnezzar, and his succession by his son Amel-marduk, known in English as Evil-Merodach. According to the "Chal- daean" historical tradition, which means through Berossus (Josephus, C. Ap., i.146-50), this took place in the year which from Greek and Roman history can be reckoned back to and fixed as 563.9 This year was, according to I1 Kings xxv.27ff., the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin. This synchronism thus provides an entry from without into the latter part of the chronological figures of the Books of Kings, and from these it was possible, it was thought, to reckon back to the time of Solomon, and from there, step by step, to creation itself. Now Ussher was highly successful at this point, for this date was historically almost correct: Nebuchadnezzar did die in the year 562.>> -- James Barr, Why the World was Created in 4004 B.C.

Israelite Kings section

Could we get a less biased summary of the chronology of the Divided Empire than the book cited which criticizes Thiele for being "complicated" and "unique" but goes to revise Assyrian and Egyptian chronology (places Sheshonq I's ascension in 995!)? Tetley's book is essentially revisionism, it shouldn't be cited on wikipedia at all as a mainstream opinion.

Quite a few "non-harmonist" scholars accept Thiele's work, and if the Israelite kings had a bearing on anything outside the Old Testament, many more would. It seems written by a one-sided pov. Thiele's work does not use unwarranted coregencies, implied by the Kings text where mere verses later talks about an overlap any author with basic math skills would've seen. The calendar system is not at all a "complex system of calendars" - there's only two! And these are well-attested. They're used in determining the Fall of Jerusalem was in 587 BC, and not the older date of 586 BC (at least it's independent confirmation if there's a different reason). Siegfried H. Horn uses Babylonian cuneiform evidence to show the Fall reckoning of Judah [1], and the spring reckoning was well-known (Nisan being the first month of the year) from Persian, Babylonian, etc sources. In Nehemiah, the author clearly uses a fall to fall reckoning.

Thiele's work nicely matched Jehu's reign with Assyrian (extrabiblical) chronology such as the Black Obelisk, which Tetley has to reassign to Joram (revisionism again). The only place where there is anything that breaks the simplicity is a switch in Judah's calendar to Spring reckoning during Athaliah's reign (makes sense since she was from the north), and the issue with Pekah's "third" Israelite kingdom, which in no way should cast a shadow on the rest of the work, as it's only one reign date compared to the dozen others (could be a copyist error, as there is one with Jotham's years around there).

Sincerely requesting someone make it a little more nuanced and balanced, because if I made any changes the bias would full swing the opposite way, making the section equally unappealing as the anti-biblicist who originally wrote it. Cornelius (talk) 09:15, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Inconsistencies?

I ran through the calculations, and everything seems to be two years off.

Creation of Adam = AM 2

Birth of Abraham = AM 1948 (=2+130+105+90+70+65+162+65+187+182+500+100+35+30+34+30+32+30+29+70)

Entrance into Egypt = AM 2238 (=1948+100+60+130)

Exodus = AM 2668 (=2238+430)

Solomon's Temple = AM 3148 (=2668+480)

Exile = AM 3578 (=3148+430)

Any idea where my extra 2 years are coming from? (I suspect maybe it's because I start counting from AM 2 rather than 0? But is there any reason why we're starting at 0? The AM dating system begins in AM 1, not 0. And according to the Anno Mundi article, Adam was created in AM 2, not in AM 1.)

73.133.224.40 (talk) 17:32, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

The rediscovered only unfalsified Biblical Chronology is missing:

You are cordially invited to a comprehensive critical fact check of newly discovered archeological evidence confirming the one and only unfalsified Biblical Chronology (OT) rediscovered by Dr. Roger Liebi, OT translator of the famous Schlachter Bible. All other Chronologies are changing or ignoring biblical time figures so that their numbers add up. The rediscovered unfalsified Chronology delivers over 100 archeologically evidenced matchings with the Bible unvealing the complete History of Israel in Egypt on www.IsraelinEgypt.com Investigate especially Chapter Chronology including a critical comparison with the two leading Chronologies of Biblical Archeology. 2A04:4540:6C20:1700:CDF1:AB7B:BD97:C360 (talk) 08:56, 20 June 2022 (UTC)