The Current State of the Biblical Chronology Debate

Part I - What is the Correct Biblical Chronology?

The Creation History substack addresses three major questions that Christians must ask about the past.

What is the correct chronology of the Bible from Creation to Christ?

What are the true and correct chronologies of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Greece?

Where do the histories of the Bible and the ancient empires intersect to form synchronisms?

Varying answers to these questions lead to very different histories of the ancient world.

In this post I will survey the groups that give answers to the first question.

What is the correct Biblical Chronology?

The Bible preserves several dozen durations between events that enable the construction of a Biblical chronology from Creation until the decree of Cyrus releasing the Jews from captivity. However, due to manuscript variations and possible differences of interpretation for many of those durations, it is possible to construct several dozen, if not a hundred, chronologies of the Bible. The possible chronologies vary by up to 1,500 years. However, only one of them can be entirely correct.

The major points of disagreement:

MT vs LXX or SP chronogeneologies

The Masoretic Text (MT) and Latin Vulgate chronogeneologies in Genesis 5 and 11 are systematically shorter by 100 years per patriarch at the birth of his firstborn son. The Septuagint (LXX) adds 800 years after the Flood and another four centuries before the Flood to the Biblical chronology. The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) adds less time after the Flood than the Septuagint does.

The numbers found in the Latin Vulgate and MT were printed in the margin notes of King James Bibles in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The most popular Biblical chronology based on these texts was that of Bishop James Ussher of Armagh, North Ireland. While his chronology fell out of style in academic circles of the twentieth century, Floyd Nolan Jones has continued to defend and improve Ussher’s biblical chronology in his book, The Chronology of the Old Testament. Answers in Genesis used the Ussher-Jones Chronology in all of their reference materials and in their museums for the past nineteen years.

Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) is an organization of creationist Christian archaeologists. In order to fit their chronology of Egypt, they have begun promoting the Septuagint as the manuscript that contains the original numbers for the chronogeneologies in Genesis. This gives them an extra eight centuries between the Flood and Abraham into which they try to fit the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt. ABR scholars Henry Smith and Douglas Petrovich starred in Thomas Purifoy’s Is Genesis History and Tim Mahoney’s Patterns of Evidence videos, both of which have popularized the ABR chronology in the past decade.

Long Versus Short Sojourn

Abraham received a prophecy that his seed would suffer affliction for 400 years until being brought out of Egypt. The Short Sojourn says those four centuries began the year Isaac was weaned. The Long Sojourn says it did not begin until Jacob entered Egypt during the famine, thus adding 215 years to the duration from Abraham’s calling down to the Exodus.

ABR promotes the long sojourn to match Joseph to the Sothic Date of Senusret III of the 12th Dynasty of Egypt.

Ironically, both the Septuagint and Ussher’s chronology teach the short sojourn position, that from Abraham’s calling at age 75 until the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai was 430 years. While promoting the Septuagint for the chronogeneologies, ABR staff contradicted the Septuagint saying that Genesis 12:40 contains a “spurious error.”

Long versus Short Judges

Some chronologies, including that of Josephus, add more than a century to the time from the Exodus to Solomon’s founding of the Temple than the 480 years recorded in 1 Kings 6:1. Advocates of the Long Judges usually place the years of oppression recorded in Judges in series with the reigns of the judges. The Short Judges position recognizes that the reigns of the individual judges overlapped with the years of oppression in most of the recorded cases. (See Floyd Nolan Jones Chart 4.)

More recently the “Professional” archaeologists such as Kenneth Kitchen, James Hoffmeier, and David Falk have insisted that the Judges must be reduced by over two centuries to allow for a 1286 BC Exodus in the reign of Rameses II of Egypt. Thus they promote a super-short Judges of only 235 years. These positions give rise to three positions for the Exodus:

• Ussher’s Exodus - 1491 BC

• “Early” Exodus - 1447/1446 BC

• Late Exodus - 1286 BC

The fact that the middle 1447/1446 Exodus date is called the “Early” Exodus in Christian academic circles shows that academia has so completely discarded Ussher’s chronology of the Bible that they don’t even consider it when naming the positions.

Long Versus Short Divided Kingdom

Josephus, Ussher, and Floyd Nolan Jones all taught Divided Kingdom chronologies that place 390 years between the death of Solomon and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar circa 586 BC. This puts Solomon’s death in 976/975 BC.

Since the advent of Assyriology in the 19th century, most seminaries have adopted Edwin Thiele’s chronology which reduces the duration of the Divided Kingdom by 44 years to accommodate supposed Assyrian synchronisms, lowering Solomon’s death to 931 BC.

Long versus short Achaemenid Period

Several groups including Martin Anstey, the Orthodox Jews, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses interpret Daniel’s prophecy of 70 “sevens” from a decree to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls until the Messiah as dating from the Decree of Cyrus to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem from Babylon. Anstey and the Jehovah's Witnesses both say the period ends with the baptism of Christ, while the Orthodox Jews extend the prophecy to point to Simon Bar Kochba whose revolt against the Romans began in AD 132. In all three cases, these groups insisted on deleting between 82 and 200 years from the history of the ancient world between Cyrus and Julius Caesar. These groups delete most of the “extra years” from the Achaemenid Persian Empire period.

Ussher, Jones and the authors take the position that the classical history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire is for the most part correct. The seventy sevens prophecy most likely began with the decree in the 20th Year of Artaxerxes I to rebuild Jerusalem’s wall, as found in Nehemiah 2:7. The CFAH authors follow Gerard Gertoux’s position that the reign of Artaxerxes I began in 475 BC, not 465. The period began in the 20th year of Artaxerxes I in 455 BC, the sixty-nine sevens ended with the Baptism of Christ in the 15th year of Tiberius in September of the year AD 28.

Which one is best?

This author believes that Ussher’s chronology of the Bible as improved by Floyd Nolan Jones in his book “Chronology of the Old Testament” is the most consistent interpretation of all of the chronological passages found in scripture. Much of our work at Creation History is to extend the Ussher Jones Chronology to the ancient kingdoms of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and to defend the Bible’s chronology from historians who place higher confidence in the records of Egypt and Assyria than they do in Scripture.