Why David and Solomon mattered so much

For centuries, readers of the Bible have encountered David and Solomon not just as religious figures, but as epic founders of a powerful kingdom.

• David is portrayed as the warrior who unites the tribes, captures Jerusalem, and defeats surrounding enemies.

• Solomon is depicted as ruling a wealthy, peaceful empire from Jerusalem, building the Temple, and hosting foreign dignitaries like the Queen of Sheba.

If archaeology could uncover clear, datable evidence for a united, powerful kingdom centered on Jerusalem in the 11th century BC—the traditional time of David and Solomon—it would strongly support those stories as rooted in real political power. If not, say skeptics, then perhaps the stories were later idealizations, written generations after the fact. That “yes or no” question gave these two kings an outsized importance in modern debates.

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The early hunt: looking for a golden age

In the early days of biblical archaeology (late 19th and early 20th centuries), many explorers went into the field expecting to “prove the Bible right.”

• They looked for monumental architecture in Jerusalem and across Israel that could be linked to David’s conquests and Solomon’s building projects.

• The hope was to find palaces, city walls, and inscriptions actually naming these kings—something like “Palace of King David, year X” or “Solomon, king of Israel, built this.”

Every big find—a city gate, a palace, a strong wall from roughly the right period—was eagerly measured against the biblical description. When major structures from the 10th–9th centuries BC were uncovered at places like Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, some archaeologists initially saw them as proof of Solomon’s centralized building program.

At that stage, many believed it was only a matter of time before an inscription mentioning David or Solomon in their lifetimes would appear.

The challenge: silence and reinterpretation

But as methods improved—radiocarbon dating, more precise pottery chronologies, careful stratigraphy—things became more complicated.

• Some buildings once assigned confidently to Solomon were later redated down to the 9th century BC, more likely linked to later kings like Omri or Ahab.

• Excavations in Jerusalem itself are difficult: the ancient city lies under a dense modern one, and key areas are politically and logistically sensitive. That limits what can be found and how clearly it can be interpreted.

For decades, there was no contemporaneous inscription from the 10th century BC explicitly mentioning “David king of Israel” or “Solomon son of David” from inside Israel or Judah. That silence led some scholars to propose that David and Solomon were much smaller figures than the Bible suggests—or even purely legendary.

This tension—rich literary portraits on one side, hesitant or ambiguous archaeology on the other—is a big part of why the search for David and Solomon was called a holy grail. It seemed to hold the key to how “historical” the biblical narratives really were.

A turning point: the “House of David”

One of the most important shifts came not from Jerusalem, but from the north. In the 1990s, excavations at Tel Dan in northern Israel uncovered fragments of a victory inscription set up by an Aramean king (most likely Hazael of Damascus). The text, written in Aramaic and dated to the 9th century BC, appears to mention a Judean ruler as belonging to the “House of David.”

Even though the inscription is about a century after David’s supposed lifetime, it matters because:

• It shows that foreign neighbors recognized a dynasty in Judah named after a founder called David.

• That implies that David was not just a late literary invention, but a remembered royal ancestor important enough to name a ruling house.

This didn’t suddenly prove all the biblical stories in detail, but it shifted the conversation. The figure of David now had extra‑biblical support as a real, early king, even if the scale of his kingdom remained debated.

An Interpretive Key: They Were Not Looking Deep Enough

Together with Darrell K. White, I have been developing the Chronological Framework of Ancient History - a chronology for the ancient world that is based on historical durations between events as recorded by ancient historians. We have come to the conclusion that the real reason that archaeologists have failed to find David and Solomon has been that they were looking for them in the Iron Age Strata, when David and Solomon lived in the Middle Bronze Age, and were contemporaries of Hammurabi of Babylon. In short, they did not dig deep enough.

We have just published Paper #16 in our Chronological Framework of Ancient History series, in which we reveal the holy grail of archaeology. David and Solomon are found in the letters of Mari, Qatna, and Babylon in the Old Babylonian Period. The reason scholars never associated them before was that they have the wrong date for the Old Babylonian Period. They have shoved Hammurabi back eight centuries before he actually lived. Once he is placed in his proper chronological context, Hammurabi is named in contemporary texts as an equal of King Solomon.

Not only did we find David and Solomon, we also found King Saul and his ill-fated son Ishbosheth. Ishbosheth made a marriage alliance with David’s enemy, Hadadezer, who then supported him with a few thousand troops to fight the civil war against David.

If you want to learn the details, please enjoy the paper.

https://www.academia.edu/166250608/CFAH_16_The_Kings_of_Israel_and_Judah_Paper_No_16_in_the_Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_Series

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Vigato cites Obrien to the effect that the platform at Baalbek uses Egyptian Royal Cubits as the unit of measure, while the Temple of Jupiter clearly uses Roman units:

“Now, the foundation platform on which the Trilithon rests is not only entirely different in style from other parts of the complex, but it has a different quantum of measurement”191.
– (Vigato 2026, 130)

Velikovsky’s posthumously published essay, The Secret of Baalbek, argues that Solomon built Baalbek and that Jeroboam later used it for the northern golden calf temple (Velikovsky 1999). In light of our identification of Qatna as the site of Kirjath Dan, and the close similarities between the foundation enclosure stones of Baalbek and the stones of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Velikovsky’s hypothesis looks increasingly plausible.

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Scripture states that Jeroboam was foreman over the work crews of Ephraim and Manasseh (1 Kings 5:13-18; 1 Kings 11:28), which had built Solomon’s Temple, as well as the many store cities and other projects in Solomon’s kingdom. When Jeroboam led the secession of Israel from the House of David, he placed two golden calves in temples so the people would not travel to Jerusalem for the high holy feasts of Yahweh. The temple in the south was at Bethel and the northern temple was in Dan (1 Kings 12:28-30). If we view Dan in that instance as meaning the larger territory of the Danites controlled by the city of Qatna, then Baalbek was in the territory of Dan.

Given that Jeroboam’s goal for the Temples was to make them closer to the people so they would not travel to Jerusalem, it makes sense that he would utilize a pre-existing pagan worship site in the middle of the Bekka Valley rather than in Qatna itself at the very northern border of Israel.

Vigato (2026, 8-14) notes the tradition that Baalbek was originally a cult of El with strong connections to Egypt, and that the older megalithic outer wall and platform, which contains the trilithons, dates to the Middle Bronze Age. He notes that the toponym, “Mbk Nhrm,” meaning “source of the two rivers,” may refer to the location of Baalbek on the divide between the Litani and Orontes Rivers, whose sources were believed to be in a cavern beneath the temple.

We might conclude that only Solomon had the experience, the technology, the manpower, and wealth to build the original megalithic temple at Baalbek with its mind-boggling trilithon stones, which the Romans later built on top of. Vigato notes that the stones of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem are identical in style and construction method to the stones in the lower podium at Baalbek (Vigato 2026, 112-113).

Velikovsky cites Benjamin of Tudela as attributing the construction of Baalbek to Solomon:

12th‑century Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela: “This is the city which is mentioned in Scripture as Baalath in the vicinity of the Lebanon, which Solomon built for the daughter of Pharaoh.”
– (Velikovsky 1999)

Supporting Tudela’s claim that Baalbek was an Egyptian-influenced temple, Vigato observes that the original platform and surrounding wall of Baalbek were very similar in style and layout to the Egyptian temple of Ptah at Edfu, which itself was based on much older Egyptian temples (Figure 11; Vigato 2026, 119).

Figure 11. Vigato’s comparison of Baabek to the Egyptian temple at Edfu.

Vigato notes that the original megalithic platform at Baalbek appears to have been interrupted during its construction and was either unfinished or completed with inferior material and craftsmanship. We suggest that Baalbek was one of the pagan high places built by Solomon for his foreign wives “when he was old” near the end of his reign (1 Kings 11:6-9). His death and the civil war that immediately followed probably interrupted the construction of the megalithic temple at Baalbek. When it was later finished under Jeroboam I, who was not nearly as wealthy as Solomon, lower quality materials were used.

Whether the sanctuary was originally built under Solomon at “Baalath” as some scholars suppose, or whether it was built by Jeroboam I after the death of Solomon, the Middle Bronze Age megalithic enclosure of the Temple of Baalbek fits the times and construction methods of the Temple of Solomon. As Jeroboam converted the Israelites from the worship of Yahweh to the worship of a solar deity, Baal, hybridized with Egyptian Apis worship as the golden calf called Simigi, Baalbek is a plausible match for the location of the temple that Jeroboam utilized in Dan for the northern golden calf. Velokovsky makes a thorough case for the golden calf at Baalbek in his essay (Velikovsky 1999).

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References

Velikovsky, Immanuel. 1999. “The Secret of Baalbek: The Temple at Dan.” Velikovsky Archive. https://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/baalbek.htm .

Vigato, Marco. February 10, 2026. The Baalbek Enigma. (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18573529 .

The SKL continues:

Then the Flood swept over. After the Flood had swept over, and the kingship had descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kiš.

The list continues city by city, however the first two cities after the Flood, Kish and Uruk, have kings with reigns far longer than a human lifespan, but not nearly as long as the predeluvial kings. For example, the longest reign in the First Kish Dynasty was that of Etana the Shepherd who reigned for 1,500 years.

After the First Kish Dynasty, the SKL says:

Then Kiš was defeated and the kingship was taken to Eanna.

It then lists the kings of Uruk, the first five of whom again, have reigns of several centuries. After Gilgamesh, the fifth king, the reigns of the rest of the rulers in the list appear to be reasonable for normal human lifespans, except for the Kish dynasties II-IV, which continue to be “too high”.

Ancient Priests Loved to Play Games with Numbers

In several of my papers with Darrell White, we have pointed out that according to both Censorinus and Eusebius the pagan priests of several of the Mediterranean cultures would sometimes report days, months, bimestrals (two months), quadrimestrals (4 months) as “years” when giving their histories. We found several examples of this.

For example, Pliny the Elder reported that Greek astrologer, Epigenes (~270-200 BC), claimed the Babylonians had 720 or 720,000 years of astronomical observations on clay tiles. 720,000 year seems ridiculously too long, but 720 years is much shorter than Babylon was known to practice astronomy. However, if the 720,000 years are interpreted as days, they amount to 1,971 Julian years.

If Epigenes obtained this figure from a Babylonian source in the reign of Antiochus II Theos, whose accession to the throne was in 262 BC, then 1,971 years earlier was 2233 BC, the year for which we have found several other sources claiming the Tower of Babel was founded.

Another example of this practice was reported by Diodorus Siculus who said that the Egyptians claimed that Menes reigned 23,000 years before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. Interpreted as months, the 23,000 units become 1,859.5 years. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC. Adding 1,859.5 years comes to 2192 BC, the year reported as the Dispersion from Babel and the start of the reign of Ninus (Nimrod) by several sources.

Decrypting the Sumerian King List

My analysis of the Sumerian King List has revealed what appears to be a cipher. The scribe who composed the SKL multiplied the real reigns of the “gods” meaning ancestors before the Flood, and the rulers of Kish and early Uruk, by a consistent set of numbers, in order to exaggerate the reigns of the god-kings.

According to Eusebius and Syncellus, the Babylonian priest named Berossus wrote the history of Babylon as the book, Babylonaica, in Greek for the Seleucid Court. In that book, Berossus explained three Babylonian units of time as the saros (plural saroi) which was 3,600; the neros which was 600, and sessos which was 60.

The Babylonians used the sexagesimal numerical system where instead of each power of a number being written as 0-9, it was written as 0-60. In that system “10” means 60x60, or 3,600.

The Predeluvial Saros

While Berossus said the saros of 3,600 meant years, it could also have meant days. If we interpret the 432,000 years of predeluvial reigns reported by Berossus as being 120 x 3,600 days, the result is 120 decades of 360-day years, which is to say, 1,200 years of kings before the Flood. That is actually reasonably close to the time period recorded in Genesis that there were 1,656 years for the ten generations before the Flood from Adam to Noah.

Thus we might conclude that the 120 saroi in that context referred to decades. This multiplied the true solar years of the predeluvial rulers by a factor of 360.

The Deccans of Kish

After the Flood, the SKL continues with the rulers of Kish. We hypothesize that Cush originally named the city later called Babel after himself - Cush, or Kish. The reigns of Kish are inflated, but not nearly to the degree of the predeluvial kings. The first King of Kish is listed as Gišur, whom we identify as the Sumerian name for Cush.

By trial and error we came to the conclusion that the rulers of all four Kish dynasties in the SKL were given in deccans. A deccan is a period of 10 days. It was used in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and also in China and Greece for astronomy. The constellations were divided into 36 deccans, using a 360-day year. This probably means the constellations were so divided into deccans by one of the patriarchs before the Flood, when the year was only 360 days. If my hypothesis is correct then the reigns of the Kings of Kish in the SKL are multiplied by 36.

The god-Kings of Uruk

The first five kings of Uruk in the SKL also have inflated reigns. They have the star-sign meaning “god” written next to their names. However, they do not all use the same cipher. The first King of Uruk, Meš-ki'ag-gašer, is also identifiable as Cush, as pointed out by David Rohl. This indicates that the Uruk Dynasty counted its origin from Babel also.

It appears to us that the SKL multiplies the reign of Meš-ki'ag-gašer by a factor of 6, so the time period counted is in bimestrals of two thirty-day months. His actual reign from the time the Earth was Divided, when Peleg was born, was 54 or 55 years until the Dispersion when the tongues were confused in 2192/2191 BC.

After Meš-ki'ag-gašer come three rulers: En-mer-kar (Nimrod), Dumuzi (Semiramis posing as a man), Gilgamesh (Ninyas Zames in Ctesias). (See the table below.) These three appears to be using the multiple of 3.33, or 20/6. This is not a natural cycle, but appears to be a numerical cipher chosen by the scribe to be less than six, but for some reason, greater than 3.

The Babylonians worshipped their first king, Cush, under the name Bel Marduk, the son of Utu (Ham). But they also considered Gilgamesh the last of the gods. So perhaps the scribe felt he should inflate the reigns of those three, but not as much as the first King, Bel Marduk, also known as Meš-ki’ag-gašer.

By the way, Meš-ki’ag-Gašer means “the youth has become mighty.” This applies well to Cush who usurped the kingship after Noah divided the earth as an inheritance among his sons and grandchildren, 101 years after the Flood in 2247 BC.

To Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.
— Genesis 10:25

So, we conclude that the first five kings of the Uruk Dynasty reigned about 282 years. After Gilgamesh the reign of the rest of the kings the SKL, excepting Kish and Hamazi, are given in regular years.

If my hypothesis is correct then the scribe who wrote the SKL used the following series of descending ciphers to inflate the reigns of the early kings. In all but one case the scribe steps down by one of the factors of 60: 10 or 6.

Predeluvial: 360X
Kish Dynasty (Babel): 36X
Cush: Meš-ki’ag-Gašer: 6X
Nimrod-Gilgamesh: 3.3 X
After Gilgamesh: 1X

The entry for Lugal Banda in the list is an outlier as his 1,200 year reign appears to use the deccan of Kish (36X).

Ok, so now we have a hypothesis, and we have a theory for why the scribe did it this way. But is my hypothesis falsifiable? Yes, it can be tested, which I will do next.

The Test Case: From Babel to Sargon of Akkad

I have identified the first rulers of both Kish and Uruk as references to the same person, Cush, the son of Ham, remembered as Belus, or Bel Marduk, and later worshipped as the god of Babylon.

There is a synchronism between Ur Zababa, the second king of the fourth Kish Dynasty in the SKL, and Lugal Zagesi, the only king of the third Uruk Dynasty. They were both defeated by Sargon of Akkad, near the start of his reign. And Lugal Zagesi was the king of Uruk whom Sargon persuaded to help him defeat King Ur Zababa of Kish. If my hypothesis is correct, then the time from the founding of Babel to the defeats of those two kings should be about the same in both Kish (multiplied by 36X) and in Uruk (factoring for the inflated reigns of the first five god-kings). If the time between those two events does not come to roughly the same duration using the 36X multiple for the reigns of Kish, then my hypothesis will be proven false.

However, the first five reigns at Uruk are not precise, so we will count instead from the death of Gilgamesh, also known as Ninyas Zames, which several ancient chroniclers dated to 1968 BC.

Summing the reigns of SKL kings after Gilgamesh down to the death of Lugal Zagesi comes to 352 years. Subtracting from 1968 BC yields 1616 BC.

On the Kish side, if we sum the reigns of the Kings of Kish from Gisur to the death of Ur Zababa, and then divide by 36, the result is 614 years. Subtracting 614 from the year that Cush founded the Tower of Babel, 2233 BC, yields 1619 BC for the defeat of Ur Zababa by Sargon and Lugal Zagesi. That is only three years difference!

Even if we use my estimate of 282 years for the first five kings of Uruk, and use the year the Earth was Divided, when some chroniclers counted the start of the reign of Cush, then the result comes to 2247-634 = 1613 BC for the death of Lugal Zagesi. While that date is not as close to the start of Sargon of Akkad’s reign, it is still close enough to be plausible if someone does not like my date for Gilgamesh.

The results along the two paths give answers that are only three years apart. (see chart below) It is entirely reasonable that after helping defeat Ur Zababa and establishing himself as King of Akkad, it took three years for Sargon to consolidate his power and then attack and defeat his former ally, Lugal Zagesi.

Conclusion

This result confirms my hypothesis that the scribe who first composed the Sumerian King List was using a cipher to inflate the reigns of the early kings that Sumerian culture deified as gods. The Sumerian King List preserves real data, but inflates the reigns of the early kings using a consistent cipher that decreases by powers of 6 and 10, the two base factors of the Babylonian numeral system.

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So Saul clothed David with his armor, and he put a bronze helmet on his head; he also clothed him with a coat of mail. David fastened his sword to his armor and tried to walk, for he had not tested them. And David said to Saul, “I cannot walk with these, for I have not tested them.” So David took them off.
— 1 Samuel 17:38-39

In the same account we are told that Goliath was so enormous that his spear shaft was as thick as a weaver’s beam.

And a champion went out from the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, from Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze. And he had bronze armor on his legs and a bronze javelin between his shoulders. Now the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam, and his iron spearhead weighed six hundred shekels; and a shield-bearer went before him.

The Bible says that David used Goliath’s own sword to cut off his head. One must wonder, how did skinny David manage to do that?

The answer is that bronze is weaker than steel, and the maximum effective length for a bronze sword is a little over two feet. Goliath’s primary weapon was his enormous spear. He carried a short bronze sword on his belt like a dagger for self defense and for jobs like cutting off the heads of his enemies.

David probably could not have wielded Goliath’s spear. But Goliath’s sword was just the right size.

CFAH-14: Ancient Assyria — A Layman’s Summary

This paper, co-authored by me (Kenneth Griffith) and Darrell K. White, is the 14th installment in the Chronological Framework of Ancient History (CFAH) series. Its central argument is that two major errors in how scholars have interpreted Assyrian history have caused ancient Babylonian and Israelite history to be misplaced by nearly a millennium — and that correcting those errors allows seven biblical kings of Israel to be identified in the archaeological records of neighboring nations.​

What Is the Paper About?

The paper examines ancient Assyrian historical sources — including the Assyrian King List (AKL), the Eponym Chronicle, Ptolemy’s Canon, and royal inscriptions — to reconstruct a revised chronology of Assyria that aligns with the Ussher-Jones chronology of Scripture. The Ussher-Jones chronology is the traditional biblical timeline, which places Creation at 4004 BC and the Exodus at 1491 BC. The paper argues that Assyria was actually the oldest civilization on earth, even predating Babylon and Egypt, and that according to Cicero, the Egyptian god Thoth brought writing and laws from Assyria to Egypt.​

The Assyrian King List Goes Back to Adam

One of the paper’s striking claims is that the 17 earliest names in the Assyrian King List — the “kings who lived in tents” — correspond to the pre-Flood patriarchs of Genesis. For example:​

• Adamu = Adam

• Nuabu (”Noah is Father”) = Noah

• Abazu = Shem

• Azarah = Asshur, son of Shem and ancestor of the Assyrians

• Ushpija = the founder of the city of Assur, grandson of Shem​

The city of Assur itself is dated to approximately 2139 BC, shortly after the Biblical Dispersion from Babel in 2191 BC, when Nimrod (known to ancient chroniclers as Ninus) was driven out of Assyria into Egypt by Shem’s descendants.​

The Four Errors That Derailed History

The paper identifies four errors that have distorted conventional Assyrian chronology. The two big ones are:

Error 1: The Shamshi Adad Problem

This is the paper’s most important finding. A king named Shamshi Adad appears in Assyrian records as a famous conqueror who fled from a “Naram Sin” and then conquered the city of Assur and the kingdom of Mari. Scholars assumed this was Shamshi Adad I, who reigned around 1841 BC. However, the paper argues he was actually Shamshi Adad IV, who reigned around 1053 BC — nearly 800 years later.​

The confusion arose because two different kings named “Naram Sin” lived 800 years apart. The Naram Sin that Shamshi Adad actually fled from was the king of the city of Eshnunna (a Middle Bronze Age city), not the ancient Naram Sin of Assyria. A late scribe in the era of Ashurbanipal apparently conflated them — possibly deliberately as political propaganda — to make it appear Assyria had been allied with Babylon from the very dawn of civilization.​

The effect of this error was to push all of early Babylonian history back by nearly 1,000 years in the conventional timeline.

Error 2: The Ashuruballit Problem

Two letters (EA15 and EA16) found in the famous El Amarna archive of Egyptian diplomatic mail were written by an “Ashuruballit” who called himself “Great King of Assyria.” Scholars identified him as Ashur-Uballit I from the Assyrian King List (~1353 BC). The paper follows researcher Reilly in arguing this was actually a non-canonical Assyrian governor of Harran, a vassal of the Mitanni empire, who reigned around 920 BC. Conflating these two figures made Assyria appear to be a major military power a full century before it actually became one, and pushed the chronologies of Egypt and the Kassite Dynasty of Babylon back by roughly four centuries.​

Why Does This Matter for Biblical Chronology?

This is where the paper becomes especially exciting for students of the Bible. When you correct the Shamshi Adad error and move him from the 19th century BC to the 11th century BC (around 1053–1020 BC), he falls precisely into the era of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon in the Ussher-Jones biblical timeline.​

The paper identifies 18 specific synchronisms — matching names and events — between the archives of Mari/Qatna and the Bible. These include:​

Additionally, the Banu Yamina mentioned as enemies of Shamshi Adad in the Mari Letters is essentially identical to the Hebrew word for Benjaminites (Benyamina), consistent with Saul being the first king and defining Israel by his tribe. The paper also notes that letters from Ishbosheth (Saul’s son) and mentions of David, Solomon, Jeroboam, and Nadab appear in the Mari and Qatna archives once the revised dating is applied.​

The Anchor Points: How They Date Everything

The paper works backward from secure historical dates, establishing a chain of “anchor points”:​

• 539 BC — Cyrus conquers Babylon (universally accepted)

• 626 BC — Accession of Nabopolassar (from Ptolemy’s Canon + Berossus)

• 612 BC — Fall of Nineveh (confirmed by the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle)

• 705 BC — Death of Sargon II (Ptolemy’s Canon)

• 1232 BC — Tukulti-Ninurta I conquers Babylon (10+ independent durations)

• 1841 BC — Shamshi Adad I (from Shalmaneser I’s temple inscription: “580 years elapsed”)

• 2000 BC — Erishum I (from another duration in the same inscription)

• 2191 BC — The Dispersion from Babel / founding of Nineveh by Nimrod​

Each anchor point is triangulated by multiple independent ancient sources, including Berossus, Ctesias, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Ptolemy’s Canon.​

The Bigger Picture

The paper is part of a larger project to show that the conventional academic chronology of the ancient world — which places many events centuries earlier than the biblical timeline suggests — rests on a small number of specific errors that, once corrected, bring archaeology and Scripture into remarkable agreement. By placing the conquest of Mari by Shamshi Adad (Hadadezer) in the 1050s–1020s BC, the entire Middle Bronze Age of the ancient Near East aligns with the period of the United Monarchy of Israel under Saul, David, and Solomon. This is a dramatic claim that, if correct, would mean that a vast body of ancient Near Eastern archaeological material — palace archives, diplomatic letters, king lists — directly corroborates the historical narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles.​

Prepared using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Thinking

The reason that archaeologists have completely missed David and Solomon is that they believe King David lived in the Iron Age, when he actually lived in the culture they call the Middle Bronze Age. In other words they are not digging deep enough.

Another reason is that some of the kings of Israel used throne names, different from their given names used in Scripture. That was a common practice in the ancient near east. When a man was crowned king, he took on a new name, his throne name, which was used in all diplomatic correspondence.

Once you repair the broken chronology of the Ancient Near East by bringing it down by about 800 years, the Israelite Kings pop out of the woodwork. Their neighbors to the North referred to them as Benyamina (the Benjamites) and the Kings of Qatna, meaning the City of Dan. There are even several letters from Saul’s whiney son, Ish-bosheth to his daughter’s father in law, and uncle in law.

Royal Servant of the God El

According to Jewish tradition, King Solomon had at least seven names. We have identified him as the fourth king of the City of Qatana, which we belive to have been a contraction for “Kiriath Dan.” (Many cities in that region used the Kar-Ka-Qa prefix meaning “city of” like Carchemish, Kanesh, QarQar, etc.) King David did not capture Jerusalem until 1048 BC. For the first four hundred years that Israel was in the Promised Land, the two biggest cities were Dan and Hazor. Therefore, during the United Monarchy of Israel, their neighbors viewed King Saul, King Ishbosheth, King David, and King Solomon as the kings of Qatna, meaning, “King of Dan.”

The Netherlands today has two names. The country is called The Netherlands, but the people who live in that country are called the Dutch. Israel was labeled in a similar manner by its neighbors. When speaking of Israel’s kings, they were called Kings of Qatna. But, when speaking of the people of Israel, they were called Benyamina - the Benjamites. The reason is that Israel’s first king, Saul, went by the title “Saul of Benjamin.” About two dozen of the diplomatic letters from Mari, a city on the Euphrates River, discuss the problems with the tribes of Benyamina, and also mention the chiefs of various tribes of the Benyamina, including the Rabbu, which were probably the tribe of Reuben.

Rezon of Damascus, Ruler of Syria, Enemy of Solomon

The Book of Kings tells us that God raised up three enemies for Solomon because of his apostasy with foreign women. The third of these was a king named Rezon, son of Eliada, who fled from his master, Hadadezer.

And God raised up another adversary against him, Rezon the son of Eliadah, who had fled from his lord, Hadadezer king of Zobah. So he gathered men to him and became captain over a band of raiders, when David killed those of Zobah. And they went to Damascus and dwelt there, and reigned in Damascus. He was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon (besides the trouble that Hadad caused); and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria. (1 Kings 11:23-25)

This king Rezon son of Eliada, who fled from Hadadezer the King of Zobah can be identified as Zimri-Lim the King of Mari, whose father’s name was Yahdun-Lim. In the local dialect, they used Lim instead of the Hebrew El. El Yahdun = Eliada. He was one of the Kings of Zobah that King Saul fought early in his reign.

So Saul established his sovereignty over Israel, and fought against all his enemies on every side, against Moab, against the people of Ammon, against Edom, against the kings of Zobah, and against the Philistines. Wherever he turned, he harassed them. (1 Samuel 14:47)

In Yahdun-Lîm’s royal “Disc Inscription” (RIME 4, E4.6.8.1) he recorded that he defeated three Yaminite Kings near Tuttul on the Euphrates, establishing control of the city of Saggaratum. This probably occurred in the final two years of King Saul’s reign while Israel was distracted with the Philistine war that took the lives of Saul and Jonathan.

David fought a seven year war with Ishbosheth. Ishbosheth contracted a marriage alliance with Yasmah-Adad, King of Mari, in his first year as king after Saul’s death. Hadadezer, the father of Yasmah-Adad, supplied Ishbosheth with troops to fight David’s “rebellion”. However, Ishbosheth was ultimately murdered by his own men. Then David moved the capital and the Tabernacle to Jerusalem in 1048 BC.

Shortly after 1048 BC, King David made his first campaign against Hadadezer, who had conquered the city of Asshur in 1053 BC and taken the title Shamshi Adad IV.

David also defeated Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he went to recover his territory at the River Euphrates. David took from him one thousand chariots, seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand foot soldiers. Also David hamstrung all the chariot horses, except that he spared enough of them for one hundred chariots.

When the Syrians of Damascus came to help Hadadezer king of Zobah, David killed twenty-two thousand of the Syrians. Then David put garrisons in Syria of Damascus; and the Syrians became David’s servants, and brought tribute. So the Lord preserved David wherever he went. (1 Samuel 8:3-6)

The territory along the Euphrates that David “went to recover” was the territory along the Euphrates between Tuttul and Saggaratum that had been taken by Yahdun-Lim about ten years earlier. This gave Israel a “port” on the Euphrates River that allowed downstream trade with Babylon and upstream trade with Anatolia.

About ten years later, Yahdun-Lim was killed by Shamshi Adad (also known as Hadadezer), who conquered the City of Mari in 1038 BC and placed his own son, Yasmah-Adad on the throne there. When Shamshi Adad killed Yahdun-Lim, the son of the dead king, Zimri-Lim fled to the King of Yamahad (Hamath), whose name was Yarim-Lim. Yarim-Lim was the man named Joram whose father had sent him to King David with gifts in the year David conquered Jerusalem.

When Toi king of Hamath heard that David had defeated all the army of Hadadezer, then Toi sent Joram his son to King David, to greet him and bless him, because he had fought against Hadadezer and defeated him (for Hadadezer had been at war with Toi); and Joram brought with him articles of silver, articles of gold, and articles of bronze. King David also dedicated these to the Lord, along with the silver and gold that he had dedicated from all the nations which he had subdued— from Syria, from Moab, from the people of Ammon, from the Philistines, from Amalek, and from the spoil of Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah.

Yarim-Lim of Hamath had given his daughter in marriage to Zimri-Lim. When Hadadezer (Shamshi-Adad) died in 1020 BC, Zimri Lim came back from Hamath. His return to Mari coincided with the final tumultuous years in Israel caused by David’s sin with Bathsheba. Zimri-Lim boasted in his first two years of reign, while David was still alive, of having defeated the Yaminites along the Euphrates.

Zimri-Lim aka Rezon, Solomon’s Enemy

After retaking Mari, and defeating the Israelite tribe of Rueben along the Euphrates River, Zimri Lim (Rezon) turned the city of Mari into a wonder of the ancient world. He built a palace with 251 rooms. Other kings of the region asked to come visit him just so they could see his amazing palace!

However, Rezon was a sharp dealer and a snake. He wrote the following letter to Solomon. (Solomon used the throne name Amut-pi-El, which means “Royal Servant of the Most High God.”) Here is the letter from Rezon (Zimri-Lim) to Solomon:

Tell Amut-pi-El, so says Zimri-Lim, your brother.
(About) your messenger that you have sent to Ešnunna and about whom have written me as follows, “Assign protectors for him to take him safely to Ešnunna.” This is what you wrote me. I have confined your messenger by me. As the adage has it [5 lines missing], “. . . you would be sending this man . . . into the fire.” He [the king of Ešnunna] has thoroughly intimidated those messengers of Yarim-Lim who came here, by saying, “Why did he not give me the urnu-wood that I asked of him?” He treated them as must not be done. For this reason, I have kept your messenger and have promptly sent you a full report. Now then, send me a full report whatever your decision as suits your consultation. Until an answer to my letter reaches me, I am keeping your messenger with me. Another matter: You are invited to the “cadavers of Dagan” (pagrāʾum) sacrifices and those for Ištar. Come.

Solomon knew that Zimri-Lim was his enemy. Solomon was obviously trying to establish good relations with the King of Eshnunna, a kingdom to the far east, just East of Babylon. That is why Solomon sent his messengers there. But Zimri-Lim detained his messengers with the excuse that the King of Eshnunna had been mean to the messengers of another kingdom recently.

It appears that Zimri-Lim was stirring up trouble and trying to prevent communication between Solomon and the King of Eshnunna. The trade route to Eshnunna from Israel required traveling down the Euphrates River. Zimri-Lim’s city of Mari was the only place with clean water and supplies along a long stretch of the river as it passed through the desert.

Here is Solomon’s reply to Zimri-Lim:

You wrote me the following about the messenger I sent to the king of Ešnunna, “I have kept him with me; your previous messenger was put to death. Should we cast into the fire this one as well?” This is what you wrote.

What have I done to the king of Ešnunna and how did I offend him? What have I taken from him? Following your suggestion, I conferred with my servants: his mission is fine. If he is to be kept alive, let him be kept alive. But if he is to be put to death, let him be put to death. He would be offering himself for his land and kinfolk. Let any other king who would send his messenger to Ešnunna learn from my example. As for you, send your messenger along with mine to lead him safely to Ešnunna. By these acts, I shall experience you as brother and friend.

Solomon’s answer is very smooth. While he obviously must suspect that Zimri-Lim was up to no good, Solomon charitably speaks to him as if his intentions are good. He says, if the King of Eshnunna treats messengers this way, other kings will learn not to trade or send messengers to him. But, Solomon still calls upon Zimri-Lim to send his own messenger along with Solomon’s to lead him safely to Eshnunna through Mariote territory.

Solomon’s conclusion, “by these acts, I shall experience you as brother and friend” is a classic example of encouraging people to be their best by assuming the best of them and asking them to take concrete action to show their good intentions.

Sadly, only one letter from Solomon has been preserved. We do not know what exactly caused the relationship between Solomon and Zimri-Lim to deteriorate, but we do know the eventual outcome.

Solomon and Hammurabi Carved Up the Kingdom of Zobah

Rezon (Zimri Lim) made plenty of enemies with his double dealing. While none of their correspondence has been preserved, it appears that Solomon made an alliance of sorts with Hammurabi of Babylon. In 998 BC, Hammurabi captured the city of Mari with its enormous palace. His men spent two years hauling away all the treasure and carefully cataloguing all of Zimri-Lim’s diplomatic correspondence (to learn which of the neighboring kings had been loyal and who had betrayed Hammurabi). In 996 BC, Hammurabi ordered his men to destroy the city of Mari. It was never rebuilt. The palace archives lay undisturbed in the dirt until they were rediscovered by French archaeologist André Parrot in 1933.

The year after Hammurabi’s men destroyed Mari, the Bible records what Solomon did.

It came to pass at the end of twenty years, when Solomon had built the house of the Lord and his own house, that the cities which Hiram had given to Solomon, Solomon built them; and he settled the children of Israel there. And Solomon went to Hamath Zobah and seized it. He also built Tadmor in the wilderness, and all the storage cities which he built in Hamath. He built Upper Beth Horon and Lower Beth Horon, fortified cities with walls, gates, and bars, also Baalath and all the storage cities that Solomon had, and all the chariot cities and the cities of the cavalry, and all that Solomon desired to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion.

Apparently, Hammurabi and Solomon had arranged to split Zimri-Lim’s kingdom into two parts. Hammurabi took the East, and Solomon took the West. The kingdom of Yamhad had been King David’s ally. But Yarim-Lim had died and his son, also named Hammurabi, had become allied with Rezon (Zimri-Lim). Solomon went up in his 20th year, 995 BC, and conquered both Yamhad (Hamath), and went as far as Shubat-Enlil, the city of Zobah, which had been Shamshi-Adad’s capital. After Solomon destroyed Shubat-Enlil it was never rebuilt. Today the mound is called Tell Leilan, near the city of Nisibit.

Source

Jack M. Sasson. 2015 From the Mari Archives - An Anthology of Old Babylonian Letters. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns.

From page: 171-173

Who Diodorus Was

Diodorus came from Agyrium in central Sicily, a region shaped by Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman power. He lived roughly between 80 and 20 BC, when the Roman Republic was turning into the Roman Empire. He travelled widely, including stays in Rome and perhaps Egypt, gathering material for his history over many years.

He was not a famous statesman or general, and he did not participate personally in the big events he describes. Instead, he was a patient collector of other people’s accounts, trying to weave them into a single continuous narrative. In that sense, he is closer to an encyclopedist than to a modern investigative journalist.

The “Library of History”

Diodorus’s work is usually called the Bibliotheca Historica or “Library of History,” and it originally filled forty books. Only fifteen survive complete today: Books 1–5 and 11–20, with fragments and quotations from the others preserved in later writers.

He divided his universal history into three broad parts.

• Books 1–6 covered the myths and early histories of both non‑Greeks and Greeks, up to the Trojan War.

• Books 7–17 carried the story down to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC.

• Books 18–40 took it from there to roughly the time of Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul.

The surviving books are uneven in content but remarkable in scope. Book 1, for example, is devoted almost entirely to Egypt and is one of the fullest ancient literary accounts of Egyptian history and customs after Herodotus. Books 2–5 range from Mesopotamia and India to North Africa, Greece, Europe, and various islands, mixing legends, geography, and cultural description. Books 11–20, which are complete, offer a year‑by‑year account of Greek and Mediterranean history from the Persian Wars in 480 BC down to 302 BC, the era of Alexander and his successors.

How He Worked

To write a “library” of world history, Diodorus relied heavily on earlier authors whose works are now lost. For Greek history he drew especially on Ephorus (for the period 480–340 BC) and Hieronymus of Cardia (for Alexander’s successors), while for Roman affairs he made use of Polybius and Posidonius.

He tells us that each book opens with a preface explaining why history matters and what the book will cover, and then he proceeds either region by region or, in the later part, year by year. In the early books, he sometimes arranges material geographically and admits that exact dating for “barbarian” peoples and very early times is hard or impossible. From roughly Book 11 onward, he adopts an “annalistic” structure: for each year, he reports events across the known world before moving to the next year.

Modern scholars note that Diodorus is not a brilliant analyst or stylist by ancient standards. His value lies instead in his choice of sources and his habit of reproducing them fairly faithfully. As one modern assessment puts it, he is “as good as his sources,” and he usually chose good ones.

Why His Work Matters

For a lay reader, it can be hard to see why a somewhat plodding compiler deserves much attention. The answer is simple: if Diodorus had not written, large parts of ancient history would be almost invisible to us.

• For the “classical” Greek period, the surviving Books 11–20 are the only continuous Greek narrative of events from 480–302 BC. Other great historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon—cover parts of that span, but Diodorus stitches it together into an unbroken story, especially valuable for stretches where other sources fall silent.

• For the age of Alexander’s successors (the Diadochi), his books based on Hieronymus of Cardia make him the chief literary authority. Without him, the political and military struggles that shaped the Hellenistic kingdoms would be far less clear.

• For Sicily and the western Greek world, his narratives are irreplaceable. Scholars have remarked that a connected history of Sicily would hardly be possible without Diodorus’s information.

• For Egypt, Book 1 preserves a long, coherent account of religion, customs, and royal traditions that complements and sometimes updates Herodotus. That makes him important not just to classicists but to historians of ancient Egypt and the broader eastern Mediterranean.

In addition, Diodorus sometimes preserves documents, speeches, and local traditions that do not survive elsewhere. His “fasti”—lists and notices of Roman magistrates and events—are recognized as among the oldest and most trustworthy such records. In many cases, when modern historians try to reconstruct a battle, a treaty, or a political crisis, Diodorus is one of the few narrative voices they can still consult.

The Broader Value for Us

Beyond the technical value for specialists, Diodorus matters for how we think about history itself. First, his project is an early example of “world history”: he wanted to show how the stories of Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and many others formed one interconnected human past. That ambition echoes modern efforts to write global histories rather than isolated national stories.

Second, he begins his work by defending the importance of studying history at all. In his prologues, he argues that history provides moral examples, practical lessons, and a kind of collective memory that helps later generations avoid old mistakes. Even if we might frame the benefits differently today, the basic idea—that knowing how people acted before us can guide how we act now—remains recognizable.

Third, Diodorus reminds us how fragile our access to the past is. A complete copy of his forty books still existed in Constantinople in the 15th century, but it was lost when the city fell in 1453. What we read today survives thanks to a chain of 59 medieval manuscripts, many of them preserving only selected groups of books. His “Library” thus becomes a symbol of historical memory itself: partial, vulnerable, and dependent on the efforts of copyists, editors, and readers across centuries.​

Finally, Diodorus offers a useful illustration of how history is made. He did not witness the Persian Wars or Alexander’s campaigns; he assembled earlier writings, weighed them as best he could, and arranged them into a narrative others could use. Modern historians, armed with more tools and stricter methods, still do something similar: they sift surviving evidence, most of it created by others, and try to construct a coherent picture.

For lay readers, then, the importance of Diodorus Siculus is twofold. His Library of History is one of the largest surviving bodies of ancient Greek historical writing, an essential source for key periods, regions, and cultures. At the same time, his work shows how much our understanding of antiquity depends on a few determined individuals who chose to gather, preserve, and organize the stories of their world for future generations.

You may read the full paper here:
https://www.academia.edu/92995116/Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_2_Founding_of_the_Nations

1. The Temple Was Founded 144 Years before Carthage

First, because Josephus said Solomon founded the Temple 144 years before Elissa founded Carthage, there has been much debate over when Solomon built the Temple and when the city of Carthage was founded. Several Roman sources seem to place the founding of Carthage in 814 BC, which suggests Solmon’s Temple was founded in 958 BC, which is 53 years later than the biblical chronology places the founding of the Temple. I have answered this problem in detail in the paper, The Foundings Dates of Tyre and Carthage. The simple answer is that Phoenician sources, the culture that actually built Carthage, unanimously place the founding of Carthage in 868 BC, agreeing precisely with the Ussher-Jones chronology of the Bible.

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2. David’s Hiram Was Reigning 25 Years Before Solomon’s Hiram Came to the Throne

A second problem is that Josephus states that Solomon founded the Temple in the 12th year of King Hiram of Tyre, which scripture states to have been the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (1 Kings 6:1). However, 2 Samuel 5:11 says that Hiram of Tyre sent messengers to King David in the first year that he reigned in Jerusalem, which was seven years after he became king in Hebron, therefore 1048 BC. If Solomon’s temple was founded in the 12th year of Hiram, then Hiram’s reign began in 1023 BC. This means that David’s Hiram sent messengers and gifts 25 years before Solomon’s Hiram began to reign!

Academic scholars merely bend the scripture durations of David and Solomon’s reigns to force a fit for the reign of Hiram of Tyre. However, there is a simple and obvious solution that harmonizes the biblical data with that of Menander and Josephus. Josephus does not say how long that Abibaal, the father of Hiram reigned. We only know that he died 12 years before Solomon founded the Temple in 1011 BC. Therefore Abibaal died in 1023 BC. If his reign was about 20 years, then his predecessor would have been on the throne when David founded his throne in Jerusalem in 1048 BC.

Therefore, we can conclude that there were two kings of Tyre name Hiram. Hiram I was reigning in 1048 BC, and probably died within five years of that date. He was followed by Abibaal, with a reign of about 20 years. Hiram II took the throne in 1023 BC, eight years before the death of David in 1015 BC.

3. The Sums of Menander’s Reigns in Josephus Fall 19 Years Short of the Given Total

Josephus passed on two durations from Menander relating Hiram II and the Temple to the founding date of Carthage. He said the sum of reigns of all the kings from Hiram to the 7th year of Pygmalion, when Elissa founded Carthage, was 155 years. Elsewhere he wrote that the time from the founding of Solomon’s Temple in the 12th year of Hiram to the founding of Carthage was 143 years and eight months.

Table 1 lists the figures of Menander for the reigns of the kings of Tyre. Two problems arise from this data. Both the sum from the start of Hiram’s reign and the sum from the 12th year of Hiram’s reign fall 19 years short of the totals of 155 and 144 years given by Josephus. This suggests that there has been a scribal error when copying the reigns of one of the kings.

Scribal errors do not normally change a number with a completely new one. The most common error when copying a king list is for the scribe’s eye to wander to the wrong row, and thus copy the reign of a king above or below the row with the value that he meant to copy.

In all probability the scribal error is one of the repeated numbers. In Menander’s kings list, we see two 12’s and three 9’s. Since the list comes 19 years short, this suggests that a 19+9 = 28 was replaced by a 9, or a 19+12 = 31 was replaced by a 12.

Given that the only number repeated consecutively was 12, we will guess that the error was to replace the 31 year reign of either the unnamed usurper or Astartus with a 12.

Since Ahab married Jezebel, the daughter of Ithobaal, we can test this correction to see if the reign of Ithobaal still overlaps with the reign of Ahab.

We tested this correction in Table 2.

In the Ussher-Jones chronology of Scripture, Ahab reigned from 918 to 897 BC. As seen in Table 2 above, our test correction places the reign of Ithobaal from 920 to 888, thus overlapping with Ahab. Furthermore, we can deduce that Ithobaal came to the throne at the age of 36 by subtracting his years of reign from his length of life. If Ithobaal sired Jezebel when he was 20 years old, then she would have been 18 years old when she was given in marriage to Ahab in the first year of his reign. Therefore the test case passes.

Just to be thorough we tested adding the missing 19 years to the other 12 and the three 9’s in the list. As it turns out, the reigns of Ahab and Ithobaal still overlap no matter where we insert the 19 years in the list. However, if we insert the 19 years into the reign of Matgenus, it results in Ahab coming to the throne in the 21st year of Ithobaal as king, and the 55th year of his life. Both of those are still quite reasonable.

We conclude that while several solutions to the Ithobaal problem are possible, the most probable solution is to make the reign of Astartus 31 years. Table 2 can therefore be safely relied upon for the dates of the Kings of Tyre.

Conclusions

We may conclude that the city of Tyre was founded in 1251 BC, 240 years before Solomon’s Temple, and Carthage was founded in 868 BC, 143 years and eight months after the Temple.

The Hiram who sent messengers and gifts to King David in 1048 BC was Hiram I, the grandfather of Hiram II who supplied Solomon with the materials to build the Temple.

Ithobaal of Tyre most likely reigned from 920 to 888 BC, overlapping all of Ahab’s reign and outliving him by 9 years. This may also help explain how Jezebel was able to retain power after Ahab’s death. Her father was a powerful king of Tyre.

And finally, Pygmalion, the brother of Elissa, reigned from 873 to 826 BC and was contemporary with Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb of Eygpt. He was the author of nine of the El Amarna Letters, #146–#155, as Abimilki, meaning Abimelech, King of Tyre. Either Menander or Josephus transliterated Abimelech into Greek as “Pygmalion.”

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https://www.academia.edu/146031286/Chronological_Framework_of_Ancient_History_No_13_The_Hittites_Cimmerians_and_Medes

AI Summary of the Paper

The paper argues that the so‑called New Kingdom “Hittite Empire” centered on Hattusa is in fact the western capital and bureaucratic expression of a late Iron Age Cimmerian–Median–Scythian coalition, and that several key “Hittite” kings are identical with named figures in Neo‑Assyrian annals and Greek historiography.​

Core thesis and chronological claims

• The authors contend that the archaeological “Median Empire” in Iran is largely missing, whereas the Hittite kingdom at Hattusa is archaeologically robust but inexplicably absent from Greek narrative sources.​

• They propose that New Kingdom Hittite rulers Mursilis II, Muwatallis II, and Hattusilis III are respectively Tugdamme the Cimmerian, Madyes the Scythian, and Cyaxares the Mede, so the Median “Empire” of classical authors is really a Cimmerian‑led coalition ruling from Hattusa ca. 705–547 BCE.​

• This reconstruction is embedded in the broader “Chronological Framework of Ancient History” (CFAH), which lowers Egyptian and Near Eastern dates, placing Ramesses II from 644–578 BCE, the Battle of Kadesh in 639 BCE, and the Treaty of Kadesh in 623 BCE, synchronizing them with late Neo‑Assyrian history and the rise of the Medes.​

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Hittites, biblical Hittites, and Tabal

• The paper distinguishes the biblical Hittites (descendants of Heth in Canaan) from the later Anatolian kingdom of Hattusa, arguing that the latter’s name “Hatti/Kheta” overlaps geographically and linguistically with Syrian “Hatti land” but arises in a different period.​

• It traces biblical references to Hittites from Abraham through Joshua, David, and Solomon, arguing that Israelite expansion pushed Canaanite Hittites north into Syria, where they formed the Hatti/Hattina of the Amuq and later Tabal/Neo‑Hittite states.​

• Assyrian references to Tabal, Mushki, and related polities (Tubal and Meshech of Ezekiel) are reinterpreted as the Old/Middle/New Hittite phases, leading into the Cimmerian takeover and the emergence of a “Hittite” (i.e., Tabalian) royal center under Cimmerian control at Hattusa.​

Key synchronisms: Mursilis II = Tugdamme

• The central argument is a synchronism “cluster” equating Mursilis II with Tugdamme (Dugdammi) the Cimmerian based on four shared features:

  • Both campaign against Sardis/Ephesus and defeat a Lydian ruler whose name means “grandfather” (Uhhazitis vs. Gyges), argued to be dialectal variants of the same name.​

  • Both reigns record a “thunderbolt/fire from heaven” event at or near Ephesus that injures or destroys the enemy, interpreted as a bolide airburst that later underlies the Ephesian cult of the “stone fallen from heaven.”​

  • Both kings suffer a stroke‑like illness involving facial paralysis and speech impairment (Mursilis’ “mouth went sideways” vs. Tugdamme’s half‑body palsy and tongue injury in Ashurbanipal’s annals).​

  • Both have a decisive solar eclipse omen interpreted in nearly identical divinatory terms (king or royal woman must die), which the authors fix to the precisely dated 15 April 657 BCE eclipse over Cimmerian territory.​

• By associating Mursilis’ eclipse campaign against Azzi (year 7 or 10) with the 657 BCE eclipse, they date Tugdamme–Mursilis’ accession to 667/664 BCE and the death of Gyges/Uhhazitis to 661 BCE, aligning this with Ashurbanipal’s third campaign chronology.​

• The authors argue that the probability of all four rare events coinciding twice, seven centuries apart, is effectively zero, so conventional Hittite–Assyrian chronology is displaced by roughly seven centuries.​

New dating: Hittites, Babylonia, and Egypt

• Using Berossus, the Sumerian King List, Larsa year‑names, and Babylonian King List B, the paper recalculates the fall of Akkad (to 1477 BCE), the life of Hammurabi, and the end of Babylon I, placing Mursilis I’s famous raid on Babylon in 851 BCE rather than the late second millennium, and linking it to a Kassite civil war described in Shalmaneser III’s annals.​

• Mursilis I (“Mushallim‑Marduk” in Assyrian eyes) thus becomes a player in ninth‑century politics, and the old‑Babylonian chronology is lowered to the early first millennium; this is set up for fuller treatment in CFAH‑14 and CFAH‑15.​

• The Dakhamunzu letter to Suppiluliuma I is likewise redated: the authors reject the standard identification with Tutankhamun’s widow, arguing instead for a queen of Necho‑Ramesses I (an Egyptian high‑king under Assyrian hegemony, killed in 664 BCE), amid conflicts involving Taharqa and Tantamani, Psammetichus’ flight, and Assyria’s reconquest of Egypt.​

• Within this framework, Suppiluliuma I becomes Partatua the Scythian (Prototythes/Phraortes in Herodotus), married to an Assyrian royal (Tawananna as Esarhaddon’s daughter), turning “Hittite” family politics into Scythian–Median–Assyrian dynastic politics.​

Cimmerian–Median empire built from west to east

• The authors challenge the standard model in which a Median state in Iran grows westward to absorb Urartu and Anatolia, insisting instead that power progresses from west to east: a western Cimmerian horde establishes itself in Tabal/Hattusa under Tudkhaliya III and Suppiluliuma I; Hattusa becomes a western capital; and only later does control extend over Central Iranian Media.​

• The Cimmerians are treated as closely entangled with Scythians and Medes, with Ishpaka (Ishkallu/Eshpai) and his son Partatua as early leaders, and Tudkhaliya III–Suppiluliuma I as their Hittite throne names.​

• The death of Sargon II in 705 BCE “on campaign to Tabal” is read as the Median revolt remembered by Herodotus and Ctesias, with Ctesias’ Arbaces and Sardanapallus narrative treated as a conflation of Sargon’s death and the later fall of Nineveh.​

• Evidence such as the Saqqez dish with a Luwian‑hieroglyphic inscription naming Partitavas (identified as Partatua) is used to argue that Scythian elites in Media adopted the Hittite writing system, confirming a Cimmerian/Scythian presence in the Hittite scribal milieu around 690 BCE.​

Madyes/Muwatallis II, Cyaxares/Hattusilis III, and later history

• Madyes the Scythian, who dominates Asia and the Medes for 28 years in Herodotus, is identified with Muwatallis II, the Hittite king who battles Ramesses II at Kadesh; his “28 years” are read as overlapping the reigns of Muwatallis II and his successor Mursilis III.​

• Hattusilis III is identified as Cyaxares the Mede, whose Hittite title “Kheta‑sar” (“king of Kheta/Hatti”) is argued to underlie the Greek form “Kyaxares”; Hattusilis (“man of Hattusa”) and Khetasar would be complementary throne titles for the same ruler.​

• Within the revised timeline, the Battle of Kadesh (Muwatallis II vs. Ramesses II) occurs in 639 BCE, corresponding to Madyes’ invasion of the Levant, and the Treaty of Kadesh (Ramesses II and Hattusilis III) falls in 623 BCE, just as Cyaxares and Nabopolassar launch their war on Assyria.​

• This treaty secures Egypt’s flank with the Cimmerian–Median coalition; the authors suggest it may explain later Judahite resistance to Necho II (Josiah’s death in 609 BCE) as an attempt to uphold an older Egyptian–Median arrangement.​

Extended synchronism network and king‑list harmonization

• A long sequence of synchronisms is assembled linking Hittite kings of Old/Middle/New phases with Assyrian rulers (Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III, Tiglath‑pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal), Lydian kings (Midas, Gyges, Alyattes, Croesus), and Median kings in Herodotus and Ctesias.​

• Labarna I and Hattusilis I are tied to Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III; Middle‑Kingdom Tudkhaliya II and Arnuwanda I are linked to Tiglath‑pileser III and Sargon II as puppet kings in Tabal; Mita of Mushki (Midas of Phrygia) surfaces in both Assyrian and Hittite texts, anchoring the middle chronology.​

• A composite king list is constructed in which Herodotus’ Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares, and Astyages, Ctesias’ parallel sequence, Hittite Tudkhaliya III–Suppiluliuma I–Mursilis II–Muwatallis II–Hattusilis III–Tudkhaliya IV–Suppiluliuma II, and Scythian/Cimmerian names (Ishpaka, Partatua, Tugdamme, Madyes) are all cross‑identified or aligned.​

• Late Hittite Tudkhaliya IV is equated with Astyages; conflict with an unnamed “king of Assyria” in Hittite letters is re‑attributed to Nabonidus rather than Shalmaneser/Tukulti‑Ninurta, on the grounds that Levantine and later Greek sources often call the Babylonian king “king of Assyria.”​

• Suppiluliuma II, last Great King of Hattusa, is identified as Cyaxares II/Darius the Mede (from Xenophon and Daniel), whose campaigns in Lycia and Tarhuntassa are equated with warfare against Croesus and Nabonidus leading up to Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon.​

• Hartapu, a Hittite prince ruling in the Konya plain, is proposed as Harpagus, the Median general who aids Cyrus and later becomes satrap of “Asia,” using Hittite/Arzawan evidence to backfill Greek accounts.​

Interpretive conclusions

• The authors argue that once Mursilis II is accepted as Tugdamme and Hattusilis III as Cyaxares, the Hittite archives furnish the missing internal history of the Median/Cimmerian Empire: a line of kings using Hittite throne names but remembered by Greeks under Median and Scythian ethnonyms.​

• “Median Empire” is thus recast as a convenient classical label for a Cimmerian‑dominated federation of Cimmerians, Scythians, Medes, Manneans, Urartians, and Tabalians, with Hattusa as a major western capital linked to Media by the Persian Royal Road.​

• Herodotus’ neat genealogy from Deioces to Astyages is taken to compress co‑regencies, hostage princes, and succession by sons‑in‑law or nephews, much as the Hittite succession often passes through marriage rather than direct patrilineal inheritance.​

• The paper closes by asserting that this re‑identification of New Kingdom Hittites with Cimmerian–Median rulers both explains the archaeological absence of “Median imperial” material in Iran and the textual absence of “Hittites” in classical narratives, while vindicating the lowered, duration‑based CFAH chronology developed in earlier installments.​

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Whether a tribe of one-eyed men such as the cyclops ever existed, we might seriously doubt. But we do know from Scripture that there were giants on the earth in those days and also afterwards. The accounts of such giants from many different cultures are consistent. Whatever their degree of civilization might have been, they often lived in caves, and ate humans.

In search of evolutionary ancestors of mankind, evolutionary archaeologists discovered a cave system near Atapuerca, Spain that dates back 1.2 million years according to them. I would instead argue that it dates to the first six centuries after the Flood, probably around 2000 to 1800 BC. The world was in the grip of the Ice Age, and the glacial maximum was near at hand. The massive mixed herds of tropical and temperate climate animals around the shores of the North Atlantic had begun to diminish as the climate drastically cooled because the ocean warmth that caused the heavy precipitation of the Ice Age had been exhausted.

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In this cave system they found remains of Neanderthals along with an even earlier clade of men called Homo Heidelbergensis. However, more than 30% of the human remains found in the caves had been subjected to bone cutting, breaking, and cooking, similar to the animal remains found there. Whoever ate them was cooking and cracking the bones to eat the marrow.

Most of the cannibalized human remains belonged to children under ten years of age. The archaeologists concluded that the people who lived in the cave preyed upon the children and teenagers of another tribe of humans who lived in the region.

From the biblical worldview, we know that people before the Flood lived nearly 1,000 years. With such incredibly long lives, their skeletons may have aged differently, or more completely than modern humans do.

After the Flood men continued living over 500 years for the first three generations, however, their lifespans gradually diminished to the current value of 80 to 120 years by the time of Moses.

The orthodontist, Frank Cuozzo, wrote a book called Buried Alive, in which he argued that the brow ridges of the early humans such as Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Neanderthalus, and Homo Erectus were simply the result of humans living over 150 years in age. Every time we chew food, the stresses on our skull cause the brow ridge to add a little more bone. A human who lived to be centuries old would be expected to develop a brow ridge such as those found in these early human skulls.

Returning to the human remains found in Atapuerca, it seems likely that the creatures who were eating the children of the other tribe were among the Nephilim, not unlike the Cyclops encountered by Odysseus in the same region a few centuries later.

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How Nimrod Brought Writing to Egypt

In his twenty-eighth year (2163 BC) Nimrod traveled to Egypt, where he found his Uncle Mizraim ruling in the newly founded city of Thinis on the upper Nile. There he introduced pictorial writing on clay tablets, for which he was later remembered as Thoth, the god of wisdom.

“Varro in Augustin, says the Egyptians were taught letters by Isis 2,000 years before his time.’‘
—(Williams 1789, 147-148)

Varro was born in 116 BC.

116 BC, birth of Varro; plus,
2,000 years of writing in Egypt; gives:
2116 BC +/- 50 years for the introduction of writing into Egypt (2166 - 2066 BC)

“Plato in Phaedro expressly attributes the invention of the practice of letters to the Egyptian Thoth the Hermes or Mercurius Teismegistus thrice great of the Greeks but Thoth is understood to have been assistant and secretary to his father Mizraim and Mizraim was son of Ham Vide Diod Sicul lib i cap 8 35 Euseb Prep Ev p 36”
—(Calumet 1814, 202)

The Phoenician chronicler, Sanchoniatho concurs:

“Sanchoniatho attributes the invention of letters to Thoth the grandson of Ham From Misor Mizraim says he came Taautus who found out the writing of the first letters whom the Egyptians call Thoorthe and the Grecians Hermes. But Thoth died before Abraham entered into Canaan and consequently Letters were before the time of Abraham, Thoth however was not the inventor of Letters for I think it demonstrable that he received the elements of this knowledge from Noah. Even Sanchoniatho himself expressly asserts that Thoth imitated the art of picture writing practiced by Ouranus or Noah ... and delineated the sacred characters that formed the elements of this kind of writing.”
—(Oliver 1830, 117)

We find in Pliny another duration in myriads, similar to the two previous ones we found for 720,000 days to Babel, and 480,000 to Egyptian Belus creating the astronomical college. In the very same passage he writes, “Anticlides writeth, that one in Egypt named Menon was the Inventor of Letters, fifteen [myriad] Years before the Time of Phoroneus, the most ancient King of Greece: and he endeavoureth to prove the same by Monuments.” (Pliny 1847, VII.58, 250)

Phoroneus was one of the early kings of Greece. Clinton estimated the rule of Phoroneus to 1753 BC, with an error of +/- 16 years. (AP-19)

15 myriads is 150,000 days, or 410.67 Julian Years, with rounding error of 1.4 years. (Adding the error of our Anchro Point #19 gives a total error of 18.4 years for this duration.)

1753 BC rule of Phoroneus; plus,
411 years; gives:
2164 BC +/- 18.4 years that Thoth introduced writing to Egypt

Nimrod’s Soft Conquest of Egypt

When Nimrod brought writing to Egypt in 2163 BC, he found his uncle Mizraim ruling the settlement of Thinis which was founded about 25 years earlier. Apparently Mizraim’s sons had each formed their own tribe and settlements, as reflected on the Libyan Palette, which shows seven founding cities of Egypt. Each city is shown with its own animal totem. We can see a scorpion, a baboon, an ibis, and twin falcons, among others.

Nimrod appears to have transliterated his Sumerian name, En Mer, meaning “Lord Storm,” into Egyptian as Nar-Mer, written as catfish-chisel. Due to the effects of the confusion of tongues his name Mer meant “catfish” in Egyptian. Later, the catfish became a sacred fish in Egypt because its connection to the name of Nimrod as Narmer.

Nimrod, under his Egyptian name, Narmer, recruited his uncle Mizraim to fight a war to forcibly unite the seven tribes of Egypt under him. This war of unification occurred in 2163 BC and is depicted on the Narmer Palette.

In early Egypt, each year special objects would be gifted to the temple depicting the events of the previous year. The Narmer Palette dates to the year 2062 BC and depicts Nimrod’s conquest of the tribe of Egypt that refused his demand for unification under him.

Based on the Narmer Palette, it appears that only one tribe refused to unify and was made an example of. The Narmer Palette depicts Narmer (Nimrod) defeating the rebels. It shows the body of ten of the rebels decapitated on the ground. (It may also depict a pair of sauropod dinosaurs on the back.)

Horus versus Set

The Egyptian god, Set, appears to be based on Seth, while the god known as Horus the Elder was based on Cain. Cain was the first to use force to avenge himself upon Abel for whatever Abel did to offend him. By deifying Cain, Nimrod was self-consciously choosing the ethic that “might makes right.”

Nimrod’s religion was the Way of Horus, or the Way of Cain. He deified the Egyptian state as Horus, and its king as the incarnation of Horus. While the rituals may vary, in substance, Nimrod’s religion was the same as all humanist religions since then - man is his own god, and the state is the deification of man. As the embodiment of the state, the king was the avatar of the god Horus. The Egyptians called the king “Horus on Earth”, and one of his five titles was his Horus Name.

In Egypt the followers of Set appear to have been followers of the patriarchal religion taught to them by Noah, who was still alive when Nimrod unified Egypt. They worshipped God under the name Re, the God of Light. The religion of Set was ridiculed and parodied in early Egyptian writings, but eventually Set was syncretized with the set of gods associated with Horus and a peace was made that effectively allowed the Egyptians to worship either Horus or Set as long as they submitted to the primacy of the King.

Nimrod as Osiris

The contemporary inscriptions indicate that Nimrod was known under the name of Narmer when he was alive in Egypt. Later he was deified under the name Thoth, or Atothis, the god of knowledge, and as Osiris the warrior king who founded Egypt. In the next episode we will look at the deeds of Nimrod recorded under the name of Osiris.

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On September 11, 1872, Ladislau Netto, the Director of the Brazilian National Museum, Instituto Historico, received a letter with a copy of the above inscription, alleged to have been found on a stele in Paraíba, the easternmost state of Brazil. Little did Netto know, that inscription would ruin his career. Why? Because it claimed to be by the crew of a Phoenician ship that had been blown off course by a storm and beached in this unknown land (South America).

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Cyrus Gordon tells how Netto was ruined by the inscription:

The inscription was assigned for publication to Ladislau Netto, Director of the Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro. With no background in Semitics, he plunged into the study of Hebrew and Phoenician to translate it. The Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, albeit an amateur, enjoyed the reputation of being the nation’s only Semitist. Since Brazil had no one really competent in oriental studies, the Emperor and Netto turned to Renan for guidance. Renan, who had seen only a few phrases excerpted from the text (and grossly misinterpreted some of them!), condemned it as a fake in a letter to Dom Pedro written at Sèvres, Sept, 6, 1873 (Henriette Psichari, Œuvres complètes de Ernest Renan [Calmann-Iyévy; Paris], vol. 10, no. 452, p. 641 f.). From that moment Netto was doomed to ridicule which ruined his life. Half-crazed from public humiliation, he tried to extricate himself by publishing his Lettre à Monsieur Ernest Renan (Ivombaerta & Comp.; Rio de Janeiro 1885), in which he claims that ten years earlier (1875) he wrote letters to the five [all still unidentified!] people in Brazil capable of composing such a text in 1872.

Sadly, Netto’s career was ruined because he published a letter that gave evidence of something that was politically incorrect, then and now. It showed that the ancient Phoenicians had reached Brazil. Not only that, it showed that they sailed from the port of Ezion Geber which had been built by Solomon on the Red Sea for his Ophir expeditions.

That such a voyage was possible should not surprise us, for Herodotus records that Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BC), after failing to make a canal from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean, dispatched a fleet of ships from the Red Sea to circumnavigate Africa and that it took them three years to return by the Pillars of Heracles (Gibraltar) to Egypt.

A century after Netto’s humiliation, the esteemed linguistic scholar, Dr. Cyrus Gordon, re-examined the Paraiba Inscription, and concluded that it was authentic because it was written using Ugaritic Canaanite, which was unkown in 1872, and therefore could not have been written by a forger. Here is Gordon’s translation:

We are Sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of the king.
Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of mountains.
We set (= sacrificed) a youth for the exalted gods and goddesses
in the nineteenth year of Hiram, our mighty king. We embarked from Ezion-Geber into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at sea together for two years around the land belonging to Ham (= Africa) but were separated by a storm (lit., ‘from the hand of Baal’) and we were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three women, on a ... shore which I, The Admiral, control. But auspiciously may the exalted gods and goddesses favor us!

Figure 2 shows the route that the sailors took from Ezion Geber, the Israelite port on the Gulf of Aquaba, on the Red Sea.

Sponsored by King Hiram of Tyre, King Solomon’s ships sailed from the same port of Ezion Geber to the Land of Ophir, a journey that took three years round trip (1 Kings 9:26).

However, Gordon argues that the Hiram mentioned in the inscription was Hiram III (551-532 BC), who reigned as a judge over Tyre at the time that Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon. Gordon comes to this conclusion because the inscription is written in Aramaic, and 2 Kings 16:6 says that Rezin of Damascus captured Elath (Ezion Geber) and the Syrians (Arameans) or Edomites lived there to the time that the Book of Kings was compiled, during the Exile in Babylon. Therefore the use of Aramaic dates the sailors who left the inscription to the reign of Ahaz (d. 627 BC) or later.

According to Josephus, Hiram III was the last king of Tyre. He was deposed in the fourteenth year of Cyrus the Great, which was (533 BC). Having lost their homeland to the Persians, the Phoenicians had every reason to migrate to their overseas colonies. The fact that the Paraiba inscription mentions the presence of women means that these sailors had brought their wives. They were colonists going in search of a new homeland. By the hand of fate, and the storm that separated them from the other nine ships, they found that homeland in Pairaiba Brazil circa 530 BC.

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Two years later, the Pharaoh started having bad dreams, and the butler finally remembered Joseph who had been able to interpret his dream accurately. In his third year, Senusret summoned Joseph from the prison to hear his dream. And the rest is history. Because of Joseph’s accurate interpretation of the dream, he was elevated to the right hand of the high king, and indeed he became a king himself. He is found in the 13th Dynasty as Yufni, which is probably a mispelling of Yusef.

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Senusret, also called Sesostris, was quite serious about honoring the God who had revealed the coming famine to him. Breasted writes:

In his third year Sesostris I called together his court, and announced his purpose of erecting a temple to the [Re] at Heliopolis.

Re was the Egyptian equivalent of El, the God of light who created the world.

Senusret left the following account in a leather scroll that survived to the present day.

Thir month of the first seasons, day ___, under

the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Kheperkere,

Son of Re, Sesosris (I), triumphant.

Living forever and ever.

When the king appeared in the double crown,

Occurred in the sitting in the audience-hall,

One took counsel with his suite,

The companions of the court,

The princes of the Place of ___.

One commanded, while they heard,

One took counsel, while making them reveal:

“Behold, my majesty is exacting a work,

And taking thought on an excellent matter.

For the future I will make a monument,

And set up an abiding stela for Harakhte [a title of Re].

He begat me to do that which he did,

To execute that which He commanded to do.

He appointed me shepherd of this land.

He recognized him who should defend it,

He hath given to me that which he protects,

And that which the eye, that is in him, illuminates.

…

He appointed me lord of the two halves,

As a child, before the swaddling clothes were loosed for me,

He appointed me lord of mankind,

…

My beauty shall be remembered in his house,

My name is the pyramidion, and my name is the lake,

Eternity is that excellent thing which I have made;

The king dies not, who is mentioned by reason of his achievements.

…

It is excellent to look to the morrow,

And with excellent things to the coming time.

After waxing long about his own greatness, Senusret mentioned his new companion, who was Joseph.

The king himself said

to the wearer of the royal seal, the sole companion,

The overseer of the double White House,

The privy counselor of ——

It is thy counsel which shall cause the work to be done.

Of which my majesty desires, that it should be;

Thou are the commander belonging to it,

Who shall do, according to that which is in my heart,

….. vigilance,

That it may come to pass without laxity,

That all the work …..

..

I have commanded those who work,

To do according as thou shalt exact.

The primary work of Joseph during the seven years of plenty was to direct the Egyptian workforce to dig a canal from the Nile River to the Fayum depression, which enabled the creation of Lake Moeris. The Fayum depression was a dry sandy dustbowl which had gone dry during the Ice Age. When Joseph connected the Nile to the Fayum Basin, Lake Moeris was created. The lake acted as a reservoir for the scarce water of the Nile during the dry season, and also extended the season of irrigation using the waters of the Nile.

In the ninth year of Senusret, which was the sixth year of plenty, the lake was completed. His servant, Meri, writes:

I wa a zealous servant, great in character, amiable in love. My lord sent me wiht a commission, because I was so very zealous, to execute for him an eternal dwelling, great in name thatn Rosa, and more excellent in appaointments than any place, the excellent district of the gods. Its columns pierced heaven; the lake which was dug, it reached the river; the gates towering heavenward, were of limestone of Troja. Osiris, First of the Westerners, rejoiced over all the monuments of my lord; I myself rejoiced, and my heart was glad at that which I had executed.

Senusret wished to honor the God who sent him the dream and the interpreter that saved Egypt and make him fabulously wealthy. To do so he erected an obelisk in Heliopolis, the city of the priests of On. He had given Joseph as his wife the woman, Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, the High Priest of Re at On. That obelisk is the oldest Egyptian obelisk still standing in its original position today. The God who sent the dream preserved the obelisk down to AD 2025. Despite wars, invasions, and gunpowder, the obelisk honoring the true God still stands today in its original position, 3,740 years after it was first erected.

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By Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White

Introduction

For the past two centuries, Bible scholars have debated the length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt. The reason for the debate is the wording of the passage in Exodus 12:40. Did the Israelites spend 430 years from Jacob’s entry into Egypt, or were the 430 years from Abraham’s entry into Egypt, as stated in Galatians 3:16-18? In this short paper, we will endeavor to show that the Short Sojourn is the only view that is compatible with Scripture and that it is also supported by two external witnesses.

Over the past few decades, Associates for Biblical Research and several other Christian scholars have promoted the interpretation that the 430 years count from God’s covenant with Jacob to the Exodus, rather than from Abraham’s entry into Egypt until the Exodus (Petrovich 2024). The primary reason for preferring this interpretation has been to fit the conventional chronology of the 12th Dynasty of Egypt, which several scholars recognize as being the dynasty under whom Jacob entered Egypt (Stewart 2008, 80-107; Petrovich 2019, 37). However, those who make this argument have typically resorted to claiming that the genealogies recorded in Exodus and Numbers are missing several generations. Ray makes this argument:

A comparison of various genealogical data reveals that while on the surface, at least, the Levitical genealogy of Moses shows only four generations, other genealogies, such as those of Judah, and the two sons of Joseph, reveal six, seven, and eight generations for the same time period, evidencing that there are some missing generations in the genealogy of Moses. Thus, this genealogy in Exodus 6:16–27 should not be taken as support for the 215-year view. The genealogical data favor, instead, a longer time period.
– (Ray 2007, emphasis added)

Additionally, those like Ray and Petrovich who choose the Long Sojourn in order to match Jacob with the 12th Dynasty of Egypt assume that they know the chronology of Egypt better than we know the chronology of Scripture. If we presuppose that Scripture is chronologically accurate and are open to the possibility that it is the accepted chronology of Egypt that is mistaken, then the problems are easily resolved.

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Though this paper primarily critiques the arguments of Petrovich and Ray, Petrovich at least holds to the primacy of Scripture over Egyptian chronology:

The cart should not be trusted to pull the horse. The issue must be solved within the disciplines of biblical studies first, because there cannot be two or more lengths of the sojourn, two or more exodus dates, or two or more exodus pharaohs. As Benware rightly cautioned, the declarations of Scripture must provide the primary evidence to determine these events, and only then can ancient historical evidence be consulted to add flesh to the skeletal structure.
– (Petrovich 2019, 23)

Having established that Scripture must dictate chronology, let’s consider the passages and Petrovich’s interpretations of them.

Correctly Parsing Exodus 12:40

Now the sojourn of the children of Israel who lived in Egypt was 430 years. (Exodus 12:40 )

The word translated as “Egypt” in most English Bibles for this verse is “Mizraim”, but the LXX says, “Egypt and Canaan.” Petrovich argues that since the word in the Masoretic Text is “Mizraim,” the 430 years had to be entirely spent in the territory that we know today as Egypt, and therefore the LXX translation “Egypt and Canaan” was a corruption in the Greek text (Petrovich 2019).

However, Petrovich treats the question as being only whether or not the words “and Canaan” were in the original Hebrew text, rather than considering the geographical possibility that Mizraim could mean “Egypt and Canaan” Petrovich concludes:

While these texts could preserve correctly the inclusion of Canaan as one geographical locale for the sojourn, the MTʼs reading possesses substantial authority, and only with great caution should it be overruled. Due to the strength of the double tradition of the MT and the Dead Sea Scrolls, external evidence favors the reading without Canaan.
– (Petrovich 2019, 29)

While the question of whether “and Canaan” was included in the original Hebrew is certainly the first question that should be asked, that question alone cannot ultimately determine the passage’s meaning. We must go on to ask what the original Hebrew passage meant when it was written, and why the LXX translators might have substituted “Egypt and Canaan” for the word “Mizraim.” Petrovich prematurely concludes the matter after answering only the first question, and by doing so, he misses the forest for the trees.

The second question we should be asking is:

What was meant by the word “Mizraim” in the original text?

The place to begin is to let Scripture define Mizraim for us:

Mizraim begot Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, Pathrusim, and Casluhim (from whom came the Philistines and Caphtorim).
– (Genesis 10:13-14 emphasis added)

Scripture defines the word Mizraim in Genesis 10 as the tribes descended from Mizraim. When Abraham entered Canaan, the southern half was ruled by the Egyptian Philistine tribe, who were of the house of Mizraim.

Genesis 21 records two major events that appear to have occurred in the same year: the weaning of Isaac and Abraham being forced to make a covenant with Abimelech, the Philistine. Both events involved persecution from the house of Mizraim.

When Isaac was weaned around age five, he was mocked by Ishmael, the son of the Egyptian woman, which was highly symbolic. However, the actions of Abimelech the Philistine were more materially significant. The Philistines filled Abraham’s wells with rubble and forced him to enter a covenant with them as the subordinate party. Thus Abraham found himself as a vassal under the authority of Abimelech, king of the Philistines, who was of the house of Mizraim, and probably a vassal to the King of Egypt.

The third question we need to ask is:

Why did the LXX translators substitute “Egypt and Canaan” for “Mizraim” in the original Hebrew text?

A reasonable answer to this question is that by the time the LXX was translated, circa 260 BC, Egypt and Canaan were understood by the Greeks (for whom the LXX was translated) to be separate polities. Therefore, the phrase “Egypt and Canaan” is the Septuagint translation of the meaning of “Mizraim” from Abraham’s day into words the Greek audience understood in the third century before Christ.

When Abraham dwelt in Canaan, the region was effectively ruled by the 4th dynasty of Egypt, and when Jacob went down to Egypt, Canaan was ruled by the 12th and 13th Dynasties, as evidenced by a monument found in Byblos of a governor appointed by Neferhotep I of Dynasty 13. Senusret III of Dynasty 12 is also said by Diodorus to have placed a college of astronomer priests on the Euphrates after he conquered the Levant (Diodorus 1935, Book I.28.1), which indicates the Egyptian 12th Dynasty viewed the Euphrates as their northern border. Egyptian Kings would continue to claim the land of Canaan and Syria to Carchemish until Necho II of the 26th Dynasty, about 1,300 years after Abraham’s time (Jeremiah 46:42), and even further by the Ptolemaic Egyptians down to the reign of Cleopatra, who died in the reign of Caesar Augustus.

The view that Mizraim in Exodus 12:40 refers to both Philistine Canaan and Egypt proper is supported by Galatians 3:16-18:

Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ. And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect. For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.

This passage places the giving of the Law at Sinai 430 years after some event in Abraham’s life, most likely the first covenant when he was told to go to Canaan. Galatians explicitly states the covenant at the start of the 430 years was with “Abraham and your Seed,” but goes on to specify that the Seed “is Christ”.

Petrovich contradicts Paul’s identification of the Seed, by arguing the Seed, and therefore the start of the sojourn, refers to Jacob (Petrovich 2024, 8). However, Abraham is mentioned by name in the verses before and after the 430-year duration in the Galatians passage, and Paul himself explicitly states in that passage that the Seed refers to Christ, and therefore obviously not Jacob.

Since the law was given on Sinai the same year as the Exodus, this places the promise to Abraham 430 years earlier, not over 645 years earlier as required by the Long Sojourn.

The problem with arguing 400 or 430 years of sojourn from Jacob’s entry based on a strictly literal interpretation of Exodus 12:40 is that it contradicts Galatians 3, and it also creates chronological impossibilities in the lineage of Moses, which is already near the threshold of impossibility even with the shorter 215-year sojourn from Jacob’s entry.

Four Generations from Levi to Moses

The Bible chronology is explicit:

25 years from Abraham’s first visit to Egypt until the birth of Isaac (Gen 12:4; 21:5); plus,

60 years to the birth of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:26); plus,

130 years of Jacob’s life before meeting Pharaoh (Genesis 47:9); gives:

215 years from Abraham crossing the Euphrates to Jacob meeting Pharaoh

For the balance of the sojourn, we have three or four generations from Levi to Moses on his father’s and mother’s sides. We don’t know the ages at which the fathers sired the sons, but if we add them all, we get the maximum possible duration of the sojourn from Jacob’s entry date.

And the years of the life of Levi were one hundred and thirty-seven. The sons of Gershon were Libni and Shimi according to their families. And the sons of Kohath were Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel. And the years of the life of Kohath were one hundred and thirty-three. The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi. These are the families of Levi according to their generations. Now Amram took for himself Jochebed, his father’s sister, as wife; and she bore him Aaron and Moses. And the years of the life of Amram were one hundred and thirty-seven. (Exodus 6:16-20)

Kohath was already born prior to entering Egypt (Genesis 46:11) and was probably 5 or 6 years old unless he and his younger brother were twins. To grant that they were twins born the year of the migration gives the most time to the Long Sojourn.

133 years of Kohath’s life; plus,

137 years of Amram’s life; plus,

80 years of Moses’s life before the Exodus; totals:

350 years Maximum in Moses’ male line, assuming conception in the year of the death of the father for each generation.

We conclude from this passage alone that claiming 400+ years from Jacob to the Exodus explicitly contradicts Scripture unless we grant Ray’s assertion that Moses left out several generations of his own family history when he wrote the book of Exodus. Followers of the Documentary Hypothesis assert that Moses was not the author of Exodus (Dozeman 2010, 1-11), though that claim directly contradicts Scripture (Exodus 24:4). If Moses did omit some generations, then the included ages of only some of his ancestors are rendered useless information to us.

On the mother’s side, this duration is also limited. The fact that the mother of Moses, Jochabed, was Levi’s physical daughter also makes the 430-year sojourn from Jacob’s entry impossible.

The name of Amram’s wife was Jochebed the daughter of Levi, who was born to Levi in Egypt; and to Amram she bore Aaron and Moses and their sister Miriam. (Numbers 26:59)

Levi was older than Joseph, and we know Joseph’s age when his father came down to Egypt. Joseph’s age when Jacob arrived was 30 + (9 or 10), therefore, at a minimum, 39 or 40 years of Levi’s life preceded the family moving to Egypt. Joseph was born shortly before Jacob left Haran, and given that Rachel gave birth (and died) when he arrived in Shechem, that suggests Joseph was about 5 years old at that point. Jacob’s marriage was 20 years before he left for Haran (Genesis 31:38), and Levi was third-born and thus was born no less than 7 years after Jacob got married. 20 minus 7 minus 5, gives an 8-year estimated age difference between Joseph and Levi. Therefore, about 48 years of Levi’s life preceded Jacob going down to Egypt.

If Levi was 48 when Jacob entered Egypt, then he spent the final 89 years of his life in Egypt, living to 137. Moses was born 80 years before the end of the sojourn. Therefore, assuming that Levi sired Jochebed in the final year of his life, her age at the conception of Moses under the Long Sojourn theory must have been:

430-year sojourn; minus,

89 years of Levi’s life in Egypt; minus,

80 years of Moses’ life before the Exodus; gives:

261 years, the age of Jochebed when Moses was born under the Long Sojourn

We are unaware of any Bible scholars who argue that a woman born later than the fourth generation after the Flood had more than two centuries of fertility. Therefore, the Long Sojourn is also explicitly contradicted by the fact that Levi was the grandfather of Moses on his mother’s side through Jochebed.

Ray tries to get around this by claiming Jochebed was merely a descendant of Levi. Ray’s argument might pass for Jochebed, “the daughter of Levi,” meaning a descendant. However, the phrase “born to” (יָלְדָ֥ה) in the vast majority of cases used in Scripture means the act of birthing the child, never referring to a descendant. Jochebed was Levi’s direct, first-generation daughter. The reason that Levi’s paternity is repeated twice in the text is probably that it seems so unlikely.

Even for the Short Sojourn, the only way Moses could have been Levi’s grandson was if Levi sired Jochebed in Egypt about the age of 123, only 14 years before his death, and Jochebed bore Moses around the age of 60. Jochebed bearing her last child at sixty is reasonable because lifespans were still about 50% longer than the modern average during the sojourn.

Genesis 15:16 says: “But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” From Levi to Moses, there were four generations in the male line counted inclusively. Four generations in that era could not have stretched four centuries, based on the recorded ages of the patriarchs.

Ray introduces another argument, saying that the data in Numbers requires that in some family lines, there were 7 or 8 generations during the sojourn.

Further evidence pertinent to the Levi genealogies may be found in the fact that the genealogies of Judah (1 Chr 2:1–20) and Ephraim (Nm 26:35–36; 1 Chr 7:20–27) indicate seven and eight generations, respectively,[xviii] for the same or a slightly lesser time period than that encompassed in the four-generation genealogies of Levi in Exodus 6:16–27 and Numbers 26:57–62. At the very end of each of these other genealogies, we find reference to several contemporaneous individuals from the three tribes. Thus, these more-extended genealogies of Judah and Ephraim would seem to indicate incompleteness in the Levi genealogies.

The problem with Ray’s argument is that Israelite men in that era frequently took additional younger wives in their old age and continued to have children, like Abraham did with Keturah. Hezron is the most extreme example, who had at least three wives and whose last child was born after he died.

Also the sons of Hezron who were born to him were Jerahmeel, Ram, and Chelubai. … Now afterward Hezron went in to the daughter of Machir the father of Gilead, whom he married when he was sixty years old; and she bore him Segub. Segub begot Jair, who had twenty-three cities in the land of Gilead. … After Hezron died in Caleb Ephrathah, Hezron’s wife Abijah bore him Ashhur the father of Tekoa.
– (1 Chronicles 2:9-24, emphasis added)

Given that they were living 130 to 140 years and came to sexual maturity around age 30, that means an Israelite man in that era could sire children born up to 110 years apart in the same generation.

In the same space of 215 years argued by the short sojourn, there could have been some families that, starting with the generation (grandchildren of Jacob) that entered Egypt, begot seven more generations of the firstborn line in Egypt, for a total of nine generations after Jacob, as seen in the examples given by Ray above.

Ray’s error is to assume that the record of eight generations in one tribe at the Exodus, therefore, requires a longer sojourn than the three and four generations to Moses. However, any population will have a generational average of the dates of the births of all of the children, not just the firstborn. The long generations of Moses, assuming the 215 years of the Short Sojourn, averaged 67.5 years from the birth of the father. If most men sired children from age 30 to 110, as the biblical evidence suggests, the generational average could be as high as 70 years.

The eight-generation families and the three-generation families, like that of Moses, were merely the opposite tails of the bell curve, with the majority being the average somewhere in the middle. Dividing 215 years by an average generation of 70 years comes to just over three generations, plus the already-born generation when Jacob entered Egypt, makes four. If we use a more realistic average generation of 40 years, there were 5.3 generations born in Egypt before the Exodus. Thus, the average number of generations from Jacob across all the Israelite families at the time of the Exodus was probably around four or five. Moses was the youngest of the youngest line from Levi.

Ray also argues that the number of Kohathites recorded as over 8,000 men, shortly after the Exodus, was far too many to have been produced in only three generations from Kohath to Moses.

These families of the Amramites, Izharites, Hebronites, and Uzzielites consisted of 8,600 men and boys (not including women and girls), of which about a fourth (or 2,150) were Amramites. This would have given Moses and Aaron that incredibly large a number of brothers and brothers’ sons (brothers’ daughters, sisters, and their daughters not being reckoned), if the same Amram, the son of Kohath, were both the head of the family of the Amramites and their own father (Keil and Delitzsch 1952b: 470). Obviously, such could not have been the case.

Ray failed to count the extra generations in the line of Amram’s descendants in the eighty years between the birth of Moses and the Exodus.

The census in Numbers 3:28 tells us that there were 8,600 male Kohathites from infant to old age. And the census in Numbers 4:34-37 tells us that the heads of households from age 30 to 50 numbered 2,750. These two numbers also tell us about the fertility of the Kohathites. 8,600, minus 2,750, and divided by 2,750 is 2.12 sons per head of household. The portion of the Amramites being one-quarter of these, the total population of Amram at the Exodus was about 2,150 males from infant to old age. That is the number that the population calculations need to hit.

Read what Scripture says about the fertility of the Israelites:

But the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them.
– (Exodus 1:7)

This sentence says in four different ways that Israelite fertility in Egypt was extremely high. Benjamin is recorded as having ten sons when he entered Egypt (Genesis 46:21), though he would only have been thirty-five years old. To have so many sons in only five or six years, Benjamin’s father must have given him more than one wife as soon as he reached puberty, which would be consistent with Jacob’s favoritism toward Benjamin. Given their longer lifespan, their practice of polygamy, and lack of birth control, an average of ten children per Israelite man during the time in Egypt seems entirely reasonable, especially if they had low infant mortality.

Numbers 3:19,27 lists Amram twice as the firstborn son of Kohath, whom we earlier calculated was about five years old when he came to Egypt. This suggests Amram was born about 25 years after Jacob’s entry, leaving 190 years for his progeny to multiply until the Exodus. Moses, being born 80 years before the Exodus, was sired when Amram was about 110 years old, by his [presumed] second wife, Jochebed. This assumes that Amram married at about age 30 and had an earlier set of children by his unnamed first wife. None of the geneologies list the children of the fourth generation from Jacob, except for the lines of notable leaders like Moses, Aaron, and Joshua. Therefore, Amram must have had sons beginning around age 30, and his marriage to Jochebed was a second, or third, marriage in his old age.

Assuming Amram began siring children with his first wife at age 30, if she had ten children, half boys, and we use the 40-year average generation, then there were 4.75 generations at the Exodus. Five sons per generation raised to the 4.75 power gives 2,089 male descendants, which is quite close to the target of 2,150 males. However, that calculation only tells us the size of generation 4.75 and does not include the fathers and grandfathers still alive from generations 3 and 4.

125 – Generation 3: 5³
625 – Generation 4: 5⁴
2,089 – Generation 4.75: 4^4.75
2,839 – Approximate Total Male Amramites living at the Exodus

With 5 sons per generation, the required number of descendants was exceeded by 32%. However, we must remember that the boys were killed for at least five years from the Decree to the birth of Moses, which would lower the count.

If the Israelite men were practicing polygamy before the final enslavement, as we know at least some of them did, the same results could have been achieved with only 5 births per woman instead of 10. Ray’s objection is thus reasonably overcome.

The Children of Israel

The Bible is internally consistent. So the question is, why does Exodus 12 say “the sojourn of the children of Israel” was 430 years if it doesn’t solely mean the children of Jacob, the first of whom weren’t even born until nearly halfway through the sojourn?

The passage uses the term seed in the same way that the author of Hebrews argues that Levi was in the loins of Abraham when he paid a tithe to Melchizedek.

Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. (Hebrews 7:10)

Of all of the “seeds” of Abraham, only the children of Jacob (Israel) sojourned under the Egyptians for the full 430 years from Abraham’s first visit to Egypt, or 400 years from the start of the persecution when Isaac was weaned. Ishmael and the sons of Keturah left Canaan and, therefore, Egyptian authority. Esau also left Canaan and went to the Southeast side of the Arabah to found Edom, outside of Canaan, and outside of Egyptian authority. Of all the children of Abraham, only the children of Israel sojourned the full 400 years under Egyptian authority. This seems to be why it was worded in that way.

400 Years of Bondage

Genesis 15:13 records God’s prediction to Abraham that his descendants would face 400 years of affliction, and Stephen in Acts 7 records that the bondage and oppression lasted four hundred years. Petrovich rightly observes that the 400 could be intended as a round number:

The exact length of the sojourn should not be sought in Genesis 15:13 because the “400” in this verse was intended to be a rough number, just as was the use of the term “fourth dor ” in Genesis 15:16 (Wenham 1987, 332). Kitchen (2003,355–56) perceptively referred to the predicted 400 years of the Egyptian sojourn as a number that was cast as a round figure and looked into the future, and he argued that the Hebrew word dor, which usually is rendered four “generations” in English translations, actually means “spans,” given that the West Semitic cognate daru was used to denote the seven spans of time that elapsed between the fall of the Akkadian Empire and the accession of Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria (ca. 1800 BC), whose scribes would have measured these spans as totaling between 530 and 730 years.
– (Petrovich 2019, 31)

Petrovich argues a bit too confidently because the 400 years could also be a precise duration, as proponents for the Short Sojourn have long argued (Jones 2026, 55-56). At this point, we will only say that it could be either rounded or precise, and we won’t hold him to the precise duration.

Adherents of the Long Sojourn argue that the 400 years of bondage mentioned by Stephen in Acts 7 must have been entirely in Egypt proper.

And from there, when his father was dead, He moved him to this land in which you now dwell. And God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on. But even when Abraham had no child, He promised to give it to him for a possession, and to his descendants after him. But God spoke in this way: that his descendants would dwell in a foreign land, and that they would bring them into bondage and oppress them four hundred years. ‘And the nation to whom they will be in bondage I will judge,’ said God, ‘and after that they shall come out and serve Me in this place.’
– (Acts 7:4b-7)

Note that Stephen did not use the word “Egypt” in that sentence or paragraph. When it is understood that Mizraim included the Philistines, the sojourn in the “foreign land” began with Abraham himself, who was a stranger in a strange land with “not even enough to set his foot on” shortly after Isaac was born, as is implied by the next verse:

Then He gave him the covenant of circumcision; and so Abraham begot Isaac and circumcised him on the eighth day; and Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot the twelve patriarchs.
– (Acts 7:8)

Thus, the four centuries of persecution mentioned in Genesis 15:13 and Acts 7:4-7 are chronologically consistent with the Short Sojourn from the weaning of Isaac at age 5 to the Exodus, exactly 400 years later. And the 430 years counted from Abraham’s first entry into Egyptian territory when he was 75 years old. Both durations are precise, and both are internally consistent with the other durations recorded in Scripture.

Egyptian Durations

In addition to the Scriptural durations, there is evidence from the Egyptian records that supports the Short Sojourn.

The Turin Canon informs us that the Egyptian 12th dynasty lasted 213 years (Lundström 2025). Stewart argues that an assassination attempt occurred in the twentieth year of its first king, Amenemhat I, which led to the trials of the baker and the butler (Stewart 2008, 80-107). Courville argued that the death of Concharis recorded in the book of Sothis was 34 years after the death of the last queen of Dynasty 12, and that Concharis died at the time of the Exodus (Courville 1971, Vol I, 121-122). If he was correct, the duration from the start of the 12th dynasty to the Exodus would have been 247 years.

Joseph was promoted two or three years after the assassination attempt in the twentieth year of the first king of Dynasty 12, and Jacob entered Egypt 9 or 10 years later in the second year of the famine. Therefore:

213 years of Dynasty 12; plus,

34 years to the death of Concharis in the Exodus; minus,

20 years to the assassination attempt; minus,

2 or 3 years to Joseph’s promotion; minus,

9 or 10 years to Jacob’s entry; gives:

214 - 216 years from Jacob’s entry to the Exodus

Three other ancient sources also give us a precise date for the Pharaoh Senusret III of Dynasty 12 returning from his Asian campaign and sending a college of astronomer priests to the Babylonians on the upper Euphrates (near Haran).

• Pliny, citing Berossus and Critodemus, says Babylonian astronomy was improved 480,000 [days] in the past. Berossus dedicated his book to Antiochus Theos, whose reign began in 262 BC. 480,000 days before 262 BC was 1576 BC. (Pliny 1855, Book VII.57.53)

• Diodorus wrote that “To Babylon…colonists were led by Belus…and after establishing himself on the Euphrates river, he appointed priests, called Chaldaeans by the Babylonians…; and they also make observations of the stars, following the example of the Egyptian priests, physicists, and astrologers.” 473,000 [days] prior to Alexander (Diodorus 1935, Book I.28.1; Book II.31.9). Assuming his source was Manetho, who dedicated his book to Ptolemy Philadelphus, whose first year was 282 BC, this points to 1577 BC.

• Dicearchus placed Sesostris III 293,6[00] [days] before the first Olympiad in 776 BC, yielding 1579 BC. (Spineto 1845, 403, 404)

Figure 3 shows these three durations in the context of the 12th Dynasty. The fact that three durations from different sources and events point to the same year for the founding of the astronomical college by Egyptian Belus, aka Senusret III, around 1577 BC is quite significant.

The year 1577 BC was 86 years before Ussher’s 1491 BC date for the Exodus. This becomes highly relevant when we look at the traditions of the Jews.

Jewish Traditions (Josephus, Seder Olam, and Talmud)

A second external set of testimonies is found in Josephus, the Seder Olam, and the Jewish Talmud.

Josephus states explicitly that the 430-year sojourn began with Abraham.

They left Egypt in the month of Xanthicus, on the fifteenth day of the lunar month: four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham came into Canaan. But two hundred and fifteen years only after Jacob removed unto Egypt; it was the eightieth year of the age of Moses, and of that of Aaron three more. (Antiquities Book II.XV.2)

However, in the previous chapter, Josephus relates that the Israelites labored 400 years under the Egyptians. However, Josephus does not peg the start and end of the four centuries of affliction in that passage; he merely mentions it amid a chapter about the afflictions. Recognizing Philistines as members of the House of Mizraim, this passage is also consistent with the Short Sojourn.

Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, an English translation of the Mishnah, specifies that the four hundred years of affliction began with Isaac’s birth (Ginzberg 2004, Vol 2, IV.125), but that the duration of the time in Egypt was only 210 years (Ginzberg 2001, Vol 2, IV.145).

The same text states that the decree to slaughter the infants was given 130 years after Jacob entered Egypt (Ginzberg 2001, Vol 2, IV.21). Elsewhere it states that the dominion of the Egyptians over the Israelites lasted only 86 years (Ginzberg 2001, Vol 3, I.27) but that the Israelites had been strangers in the land for four hundred years since the birth of Isaac (Ginzberg 2001, Vol 3, I.28). Thus, in the Jewish tradition, only the final 86 years of the four centuries of affliction as strangers were the Israelites reduced to chattel slaves.

Adding those two durations together, the total sojourn in Egypt comes to 216 years.

130 years from Jacob’s Entry to the Decree to kill babies; plus,

86 years from the Decree to the Exodus; gives:

216 years from Jacob’s entry to the Exodus

Also, the 210-year duration cited above may have been counting from the end of the seven-year famine, which lasted five more years after Jacob entered Egypt.

The 86-year duration is seen to be significant because Sesostris III returned from his Asian campaign and sent the astronomical college to the Euphrates about 86 years before Ussher’s 1491 BC Exodus date.

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us, and so go up out of the land.”
– Exodus 1:8-10

The context fits Sesostris III of Dynasty 12 as the king who knew not Joseph. In his Asian campaign, he fought the Edomite and Keturite descendants of Abraham and recognized the Israelites as their kinsmen, and feared they might turn against him. Thus, his decree to enslave the Israelites and kill their sons was most likely given in 1577 BC when he returned from his Asian campaign. This agrees within one year with the Jewish tradition that they served 86 years as chattel slaves. (Figure 1)

Conclusions

We find that two solutions are being proposed, one that breaks the durations and bends the biblical passages, and the other that harmonizes them.

The Solution that Breaks Everything

Advocates of the Long Sojourn, such as Petrovich and Ray, must resort to bending and breaking the other chronological passages of Scripture to force them into their predetermined conclusion of the 430-year sojourn. They claim that Moses omitted generations from his own genealogy and that Paul was speaking of Jacob, not Abraham, even though he explicitly named Abraham twice when speaking of the 430 years.

In doing so, they avoid dealing with the question of what it meant to sojourn as strangers for four hundred years in Mizraim. Petrovich abandons his inquiry after concluding the words “and Canaan” were not in the original Hebrew text. The stated motivation for preferring the Long Sojourn by both scholars is to make the chronology of the Bible fit the accepted chronology of Egypt’s 12th Dynasty.

In our view, this is backward because the true chronology of the 12th Dynasty of Egypt is by no means confidently known. Academics have high, middle, and low chronologies for that dynasty, differing by up to four centuries, which indicates they cannot even agree among themselves. Figure 2 shows that the Long Sojourn produces five gaps with the recorded scriptural and extra-biblical durations.

A Solution that Is True to the Biblical Data

When we interpret the relevant passages of Scripture in such a way that they all agree, the answer becomes clear.

• 430 years of the sojourn in Exodus 12:40 count from Abraham’s first visit to Egypt, the year that he crossed the Euphrates.

• 400 years as strangers in Genesis 15:13 and Acts 7:6 count from the birth of Isaac (rounded) or the weaning of Isaac (exact) to the Exodus.

• 430 years from the promise to the Law in Galatians 3:17 count from Abraham’s first meeting with God at age 75 until the Law was given at Mt. Sinai, three months after the Exodus.

• Internal chronological passages indicate that Jacob entered Egypt 215 years after Abraham crossed the Euphrates. Subtracting 215 years from the 430-year duration of the sojourn gives 215 years from Jacob’s entry into Egypt until the Exodus. This agrees with the external durations found in Egyptian records and Jewish historical traditions.

Christian theologians have been aware of this solution since before the time of Bishop Ussher in the 16th century.

In addition to Scripture itself, two sets of external witnesses concur with the Short Sojourn, namely the Egyptian data and the traditions of the Jews. As cited above, we have three precise durations to Sesostris III from the ancient chroniclers that agree with both Ussher and the Jewish traditions, but place Sesostris nearly two centuries later than the lowest accepted chronology for Dynasty 12. A fourth duration from the Midrash, that the decree was given 86 years before the Exodus, ties the other three to the Biblical chronology. Figure 3 shows how the Biblical data and the extrabiblical durations mesh together for the 12th Dynasty of Egypt.

As presuppositionalists, we do not allow extra-biblical sources to dictate our interpretation of Scripture. But when extra-biblical sources agree with an internally consistent interpretation of Scripture, that can be seen as a strong confirmation that the interpretation is correct.

The only internally harmonious interpretation of the relevant biblical passages is that the 430 years of the sojourn of the children of Israel were counted from Abraham crossing the Euphrates at the age of 75. Therefore, Jacob entered Egypt only 215 years before the Exodus.

References

Courville, Donovan. 1971. The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications. Vol I & II. Loma Linda, California: Challenge Books.

Diodorus Siculus. 1935. C. H. Oldfather, trans. Diodorus Siculus. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dozeman, Thomas B. (editor). 2010. Methods for Exodus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gardiner, Alan Henderson. 1959. The Royal Canon of Turin. Oxford: The Griffith Institute. https://pharaoh.se/turin-kinglist-column-7

Ginzberg, Louis. 2001. The Legends of the Jews, Vol I-IV, Gutenberg Project Foundation, Oxford, MS: Gutenberg Project Foundation.

Jones, Floyd Nolan. 1993-2026. The Chronology of the Old Testmament. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.

Lundström, Peter. 2025. Turin King List Column 7. https://pharaoh.se/ancient-egypt/kinglist/turin/column-7/

Petrovich, Douglas R. 2019. “Determining the Precise Length of the Israelite Sojourn in Egypt.” Near Eastern Archaeological Society Bulletin. NEASB 64 (2019).

Petrovich, Douglas R. 2024. Resolution of the Exodus 12:40 Textual Variant. Accessed on 1/31/2024. https://www.academia.edu/34278461/Resolution_of_Exodus_12_40_Textual_Variant

Pliny. 1855. John Bostock & H. D. Riley, trans. The Natural History of Pliny. London: Henry G. Bohn.

Ray, Paul J. Jr. 2007. “The Duration of the Israelite Sojourn in Egypt” Bible and Spade 20:3. 2007. https://biblearchaeology.org/research/chronological-categories/patriarchal-era/3228-the-duration-of-the-israelite-sojourn-in-egypt

Spineto, Marquis. 1845. The Elements of Hieroglyphics and Egyptian Antiquities, London: Printed for C.J.G. & F. Rivington by R. Gibert.

Stewart, Ted T. 2003. Solving the Exodus Mystery. Lubbock, Texas: Biblemart.com, 70-107.

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Rameses VII as Alexander the Great

One apparent weakness of Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of Dynasty 20 is that if Rameses VI was Nectanebo II, then who were Rameses VII, son of Rameses VI, and Rameses VIII, alleged to be the son of Rameses III? These two kings appear to have ruled immediately after Rameses VI.

In Velikovsky’s chronology, the Persians reconquered Egypt, and Nectanebo II/Rameses VI fled away to the south. We would expect that Rameses VII must have ruled during the final 11 years of the Persian 31st Dynasty, or Rameses VII would have to be Alexander the Great. As it turns out, on closer examination, several points of evidence support the idea that Rameses VII was the Theban identity of Alexander the Great.

First, the throne name of Alexander the Great is known to have been Setep en Ra mery Amun. The throne name of Rameses VII is nearly identical, with the addition of the phrase “User Maat Ra”: User Maat Ra, setep en Ra, mery Amun.

Second, as reported by Diodorus, Plutarch, and Strabo, Alexander was told by the Oracle of Amun in Thebes that he was the divine son of the god Amun, which the Greeks considered the Egyptian equivalent of Zeus. Thus in taking a set of Egyptian titles, it would not be surprising if one of these alluded to that claim. The personal name of Rameses VII was Ramessu, ity Amun, heqa netjer Iunu, translated as “Ramesses, his father is Amun, god and ruler of Heliopolis.” There is no other Egyptian ruler known to have a personal name in this form.

Third, the highest attested year of Rameses VII was 8. Alexander conquered Egypt without a fight in the Autumn of 332 BC, but was not inaugurated as Pharaoh until the Spring of the following year, 331 BC. Unlike Babylon and Judah, which used accession years, Egyptian reigns were dated from the day of inauguration. Alexander died in June of 323 BC, which was 8 years from his inauguration as Pharaoh.

Fourth, there is little known about Rameses VII, except that grain prices soared in his reign. After being crowned as Pharaoh in the Spring of 331 BC, Alexander left Egypt in the hands of Cleomenes of Naucratis, who is recorded as having manipulated the price of grain, buying it at 10 drachmas but then selling it for 32 drachmas, and deliberately exacerbating shortages by cornering the grain market (Bevin 1927).

The unfinished tomb of Rameses VII names Rameses VI as his father. This would seem to contradict the notion that Alexander the Great could have been Rameses VII, as his father was Philip of Macedon. However, a fable called The Alexander Romance maintained that after fleeing Egypt from the Persian reconquest, Nectanebo II was a wizard who traveled to the court of Philip in Macedon and, as the incarnation of Amun, impregnated Olympias with Alexander. While this is dismissed as a late fable, given everything else we know about Alexander’s claim to be the son of Amun, the Alexander Romance could very well have been propaganda created by Alexander’s Egyptian handlers to legitimize his reign in the eyes of the Egyptians. The claim that Rameses VI (Nectanebo II) was the father of Rameses VII (Alexander the Great) is entirely consistent with this possibility.

Lastly, the tomb of Rameses VII was left incomplete. We know that Alexander’s body was intercepted by Ptolemy I, who interred it in Alexandria, where he could keep an eye on the tomb. The reason for this was that in the Macedonian culture, the possession of and piety towards his predecessor’s body was one of the proofs of the legitimacy of the successor’s claim to the throne. The choice to bury Alexander in Alexandria brought an end to seven centuries of burials in the Valley of Kings.

In summary, the possibility that Rameses VII was Alexander the Great is supported by the nearly identical throne name, the personal name as the son of Amun, the Alexander Romance which names Nectanebo II as the father of Alexander, the spike in grain prices in the reigns of both Rameses VII and Alexander, the length of reign, and the cancellation of the tomb in Kings Valley.

This leaves a question of when Rameses VIII reigned. This king left no tomb, but a stele claimed he was the son of Rameses III (Nectanebo I). Rameses VIII may have briefly pretended to the Egyptian throne during the final 11 years of the Persian reconquest of Egypt prior to Alexander’s arrival in 332 BC. Like as not, the Persians decided they had had enough of Egyptian kings and killed him.

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Halloween shares deep historical roots with All Souls’ Day, which is itself connected to Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and, according to certain interpretations, all of these traditions may ultimately trace back to ancient commemorations of Noah’s Flood—a cataclysmic event purported to have claimed over a billion lives. While the connections span centuries, religious reformations, and cultural blending, the common thread among them is the ritual and remembrance of the dead, reflecting humanity’s enduring fascination with mortality and the afterlife.​

Halloween and All Souls’ Day: Shared Origins

Halloween’s most direct ancestor is the Christian observance of All Hallows’ Eve—the night before All Saints’ Day, established in the eighth century when Pope Gregory III assigned November 1 as the date to honor Christian saints. This move was a Christianization of existing harvest and ancestral festivals, most notably Samhain, a Celtic celebration marking the end of the harvest season and the onset of winter. Samhain was believed to be a time when spirits of the dead could cross into the world of the living, so communities lit bonfires and wore costumes to protect themselves from wandering souls.​

As Christianity spread across Europe, its holy days blended with local traditions. All Saints’ Day commemorated the saints, while the following day, All Souls’ Day (November 2), became a time for prayers and masses offered for all departed faithful, not just canonized figures. Catholics observed these days by attending church, praying for the souls in purgatory, and visiting graveyards to decorate family graves—a practice that persists in many cultures.​

The Day of the Dead: Christian and Indigenous Synthesis

The Mexican holiday Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, owes much to this Christian calendar but integrates Indigenous beliefs dating back millennia. Pre-Hispanic civilizations such as the Aztecs and Maya held cyclical views of life and death, honoring ancestors through offerings and rituals designed to nourish and guide their spirits. When Spanish colonists imposed Catholicism, these rituals merged with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days to create a unique holiday honoring the dead and stressing the continuity of existence.​

Day of the Dead is thus the result of Catholic holy days entwined with Indigenous reverence for ancestors. Today, families gather at cemeteries, decorate graves with marigolds and candles, share food, and celebrate the lives of their loved ones—emphasizing joyous remembrance over mourning.​

Noah’s Flood: Commemoration and Global Death Festivals

The idea that All Souls’ Day, Day of the Dead, and Halloween ultimately stem from ancient commemorations of Noah’s Flood is advanced by historians such as Colonel John Garnier. Garnier posits that global festivals of the dead—especially those held near November—can be traced to traditions originating with the biblical Deluge. Given the explosion of flood legends across diverse civilizations, Garnier theorizes that many ancient societies marked both the destruction wrought by the Flood and the subsequent rescue from it, using this pivotal event as a template for rituals commemorating the dead.​

These commemorations, Garnier suggests, developed into widespread festivals of death and remembrance, subtly evolving as societies changed. The sacrifices Noah offered after the Flood and the honoring of souls lost in the Deluge became embedded in traditions, rituals, and mythologies across continents. The flood’s timing—said to have begun on the “seventeenth day of the second month,” corresponding roughly to November—aligns with the present-day death festivals in many cultures.​

Global Traditions and Cultural Persistence

Practically every ancient civilization—from Assyria and Egypt to China, India, and Native America—contains flood legends and days set aside for memorializing the dead. The universal commemoration of lost souls connects with deep human anxieties surrounding death, renewal, and spiritual continuity.​

Even the transition of All Souls’ Day and Day of the Dead into joyous celebrations, rather than solemn mourning, reflects ancient views that death is a passage to another realm, integral to the cycles of existence. Lighting candles, offering food, and gathering families reinforce the social bonds among the living and the dead—a symbolic gesture echoed from the time of Noah’s sacrifices to the present.​

Lasting Connections

The web of associations linking Halloween, All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, and Noah’s Flood reveals more than a simple genealogy of holidays: it uncovers an intricate tapestry of myth, history, and human longing for remembrance. The distinct markers of each tradition—costumes, bonfires, prayers, offerings—are outward signs of a persistent recognition that life and death are inseparable, and both deserve ritual acknowledgment.​

As families make altars for loved ones, parade in costumes, or offer prayers for ancestors, they participate in a tradition that, stretched over millennia, affirms humanity’s resolve to remember, mourn, and celebrate its collective past. Whether charted through religious doctrine or ancient legend, the commemoration of the dead endures as a central, unifying ritual—linking autumn’s descent not only to saints and souls, but also, perhaps, to the memory of a world transformed by flood.

One of my readers, named Dan Janzen, has stridently objected that the name “Prepottery Neolithic” is misleading because it assumes that people gradually learned how to make pottery rather than recognizing that some cultures used perishable containers such as leather wineskins, while others used pottery.

Genesis 10 and 11 clearly show that the generations immediately after the Flood had advanced knowledge of ceramics and architecture. “Let us make bricks and back them thoroughly.” So the idea of a gradual evolution from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers over tens of thousands of years is obviously false.

I agree with Dan that “Prepottery Neolithic” is a misleading name for two reasons. First, the name “Neolithic” means “new stone” and refers to the Darwinist assumption that the Paleolithic and Mesolithic stone ages preceded the Neolithic stone age, when people suddenly learned how to farm. It is my belief that the so-called Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites and artefacts were merely the disposable tools made and used by hunters during the first seven centuries after the Flood.

The so-called “Neolithic” tools were the stone tools used by sedentary farmers and village builders during the exact same time period. Scripture informs us that after the Flood, “Noah began to be a farmer.” Therefore, we can date the “Neolithic” as beginning within a decade after the Flood itself in 2348 BC. So there was nothing “new” about the “Neolithic” because it was contemporaneous with the Paleolithic. The two types of tools were used for different modes of life, hunting versus farming.

It may be that during those seven centuries after the Flood, in some locations, a village was later built on a Paleolithic campsite. This could give the appearance that the Neolithic followed the Paleolithic.

Second, the word “Prepottery” grossly oversimplifies the reality with a false assumption. There are several reasons why the earliest culture after the Flood did not make ceramic pottery. Noah’s Ark must have had many containers to store water, food, wine, oil, and other precious substances. (I have argued elsewhere that the amazing predynastic stone jars are pre-Flood artefacts that were part of the Ark’s cargo.) Given they had a new world to explore and learn how to live in, it stands to reason that the patriarchs would have recycled the containers from the Ark until they were all gone.

Additionally, the choice of whether to use a leather waterskin or a ceramic amphora would largely depend on whether you had to transport it. Leather water skins are highly portable, though they have a lower volume. But skins are so perishable that they leave almost no trace in the archaeological record. Later cultures developed the capacity to transport large amphorae full of wine and oil in ships and with carts. But they required special precautions to keep them from breaking during transport. Ceramic shards are nearly indestructible and therefore leave a permanent archaeological record.

I must conclude that the terms “prepottery” versus “pottery” and “lithic” versus “bronze” ages are both false dilemmas. They were lifestyle technologies practiced by different cultures at roughly the same time in history.

My dilemma as a historian and author is that the Prepottery Neolithic is central to my arguments about the early history of mankind after the Flood. This culture is the strongest evidence that civilization began after the Flood in the mountains of Urartu, just as the Bible says it did.

I do need to put this on my charts in a way that people can look it up to see what I’m talking about. However, I don’t want to mislead my audience by reinforcing false evolutionary assumptions either. I need a new name for the Prepottery Neolithic. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions from my readers on this.

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In the previous episode of the Sojourn in Egypt, I recounted how the Pharaoh, Amenemhat I, had suffered a nearly successful assassination attempt. Though he survived another ten years, he was permanently disabled. He raised his son, Senusret I, to the throne with him as the high king over all of Egypt. Senusret investigated the assassination attempt, which led to the butler and the baker coming under suspicion and being detained in the prison with Joseph.

Joseph had met the chief butler and baker and interpreted their dreams correctly. However, Joseph continued to languish in prison after the butler was exonerated. About two years later, the younger Pharaoh, Senusret I, had begun to have a recurring dream that greatly disturbed him. According to the Midrash, Joseph had the same recurring dream as the Pharaoh.

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Scripture records the nature of the dream:

Then it came to pass, at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh had a dream; and behold, he stood by the river. Suddenly there came up out of the river seven cows, fine looking and fat; and they fed in the meadow.

Then behold, seven other cows came up after them out of the river, ugly and gaunt, and stood by the other cows on the bank of the river. And the ugly and gaunt cows ate up the seven fine looking and fat cows.

So Pharaoh awoke. He slept and dreamed a second time; and suddenly seven heads of grain came up on one stalk, plump and good.

Then behold, seven thin heads, blighted by the east wind, sprang up after them. And the seven thin heads devoured the seven plump and full heads.

(It was a dream, so I interpreted it in a nightmarish way in the clip below.)

Joseph Gets Promoted

So Pharaoh awoke, and indeed, it was a dream. Now it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled, and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men. And Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was no one who could interpret them for Pharaoh.

Then the chief butler spoke to Pharaoh, saying: “I remember my faults this day. When Pharaoh was angry with his servants, and put me in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, both me and the chief baker, we each had a dream in one night, he and I. Each of us dreamed according to the interpretation of his own dream. Now there was a young Hebrew man with us there, a servant of the captain of the guard. And we told him, and he interpreted our dreams for us; to each man he interpreted according to his own dream. And it came to pass, just as he interpreted for us, so it happened. He restored me to my office, and he hanged him.”

Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him quickly out of the dungeon; and he shaved, changed his clothing, and came to Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I have had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. But I have heard it said of you that you can understand a dream, to interpret it.”

So Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh an answer of peace.”

We know how the story goes. Joseph interpreted the dream to mean that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of famine. We can gather that both the years of plenty and the years of famine would be caused by the Nile River, because both the fat and the skinny cows came from the river in the Pharaoh’s dream.

The Pharaoh promoted Joseph to his right-hand man and gave him a copy of his signet ring. A copy of the scarab seal of Senusret I has been found, identical to the one that Joseph wore on his finger.

For more than two thousand years, Christian theologians have debated whether catastrophes and natural disasters are always signs of God’s wrath on humanity for collective wickedness, or only sometimes. In Genesis, we see the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as clear examples of God’s judgment upon exceptionally wicked men. But Christ also pointed out that the people who were killed by a tower that collapsed were not more sinful than others. A Christian might also argue that all men deserve to die because of sin, and that those who do not suffer calamities are preserved solely due to God’s mercy and grace.

In the case of the Atlantis myth, there are two versions of the narrative from cultures on opposite sides of the Atlantic, where both agree that the downfall and destruction of Atlantis resulted because the Atlanteans incurred the wrath of the gods.

Plato preserved parts of the Atlantis myth in two of his dialogues, Critias and Timaeus. The shorter account is in Timaeus and merely summarizes the downfall of Atlantis.

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