A Reply to Beckman's Defense of Thiele's Chronology
Part 1 -Jewish Sources for the Chronology of the Divided Kingdom
For most of the past 1,900 years, Christian and Jewish historians agreed quite closely on the chronology of the Divided Kingdom. While the Jews chopped out two centuries from the Achaemenid Persian Empire period, to make Daniels’ 70 weeks point to Simon Bar Kochba, Jewish and Christian sources were nearly unanimous that about 390 years had passed from the death of Solomon to the destruction of the First Temple in the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar, circa 587/586 BC.
With the rediscovery of the Egyptian, Akkadian, and Persian languages in the 19th century, Assyriologists unearthed a series of inscriptions and tablets with chronological data in them. These were interpreted to mean that the chronology of the Divided Kingdom must be wrong. Edwin R. Thiele wrote his master’s thesis in 1945 to prove that the Divided Kingdom must be reduced by about 44 years in order to accommodate the Assyrian synchronisms. This reduces the date of Solomon’s Temple from 1011 to 967 BC, and it also reduces the date of the Exodus from 1491 to 1446 BC. Since then, Thiele’s work has become the de facto standard at most universities and seminaries.
In writing our Chronological Framework of Ancient History series, Darrell White and I found that the ancient Egyptian chronology appears to agree with Ussher’s dates for the Exodus and for the death of Solomon, to the year. In attempting to publish these findings, we have received very passionate blowback that we cannot possibly support Ussher’s date for the Exodus (1491 BC) because it has been conclusively disproven by Thiele, Couke, McFall, Steinmann, and Young in their various books and papers over the past century.
This prompted us to write a rebuttal of Thiele’s chronology in three parts. It may eventually be turned into a book.
Part 1 - The Ancient Jewish Chronology
Part 2 - The Assyrian Synchronisms
Part 3 - The Founding Dates of Tyre and Carthage
In these papers, the authors engage with the arguments of Coucke, Thiele, McFall, Steinmann, and Young. Together, our three papers might be considered a frontal assault on the Divided Kingdom Chronology accepted in the majority of colleges and seminaries.
The first paper is now published as a preprint at the Open Science Foundation. You can read it here:
