The Current State of the Biblical Chronology Debate
Part II - What are the true chronologies of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Greece?
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.
Having already addressed the first question in Part I, in this post, I will survey the groups that give answers to the second question: what are the true and correct chronologies of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Greece?
There are presently three different schools on this question: The Conventional Chronology taught in universities and seminaries, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s revised chronology of Egypt, and David Rohl’s New Chronology. To these we add the Chronological Framework of Ancient History, a new school developed by Kenneth Griffith (this author) and Darrell K. White.
The Conventional Chronology of the Ancient Near East
The Conventional Chronology, as taught in universities and seminaries, could be described as an old leather wineskin into which modern historians and archaeologists have poured new wine whenever they dig up new tablets from the Ancient Near East (ANE).
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. (Luke 5:37)
The old wineskin of the Conventional Chronology was based on Manetho’s list of thirty Egyptian Dynasties, passed down to us by Eusebius, Africanus, and Syncellus. Long interpreted as a linear sequence of dynasties, rather than parallel dynasties in different cities, Manetho’s chronology nearly doubles the length of the true Egyptian history.
In the 19th century, archaeologists started digging up and reading tablets in Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. There, they found additional lists such as the Assyrian King List, Sumerian King List, and Babylonian King List. Instead of taking a comprehensive approach to analyze all the sources and develop a new framework of ancient history, the archaeologists and historians merely appended the new king lists to those of Manetho. The result is a chronology that places the founding of the first kingdoms after the Flood circa 3200 BC.
This Frankenstein chronology of various parts sewn together from different sources has many internal inconsistencies. Consequently, within academia, there are three forks of the Conventional Chronology referred to as the high, middle, and low chronologies.
Among Christians and Creationists, the Associates for Biblical Research is the primary group of scholars attempting to reconcile the Conventional Chronology with Scripture.
Immanuel Velikovsky’s Chronology
The first person to point out that the Academic Emperor of ancient history was wearing no clothes was Immanuel Velikovsky, beginning in 1952. As a Russian immigrant to the United States, whose training was in the field of psychology, Velikovsky wrote a series of books called Ages in Chaos, arguing that Egyptian chronology has been stretched out and misplaced. He identified the Exodus as occurring just before the Hyksos invasion of Egypt, and Thutmose III as the Shishak who robbed the Temple in Jerusalem in the reign of Rehoboam.
Velikovsky also identified the 19th Dynasty as contemporary with Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, and the 20th Dynasty as contemporary with the late Achaemenid Empire and the early Hellenistic Period.
Velikovsky did not limit his speculations to history. He also postulated what is now advocated as the “electric universe theory” and argued that some of the catastrophes in Earth’s history were the result of rogue planetary orbits in the solar system. This earned him many enemies in the academy who sought to prevent his books from being published via outright censorship.
Chronologically, Velikovsky used the now commonly accepted Divided Kingdom chronology of Edwin Thiele. This lowered his dates for Solomon’s Temple by 44 years. In my view, this 44-year reduction caused Velikovsky’s chronology of the El Amarna Era to collide with Shalmaneser III of Assyria. As will be discussed below, the CFAH chronology uses Ussher’s date for Solomon and therefore avoids the collision between the El Amarna Era and the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
In 1971, Donvan Courville published a two-volume book, The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications, which proposed that Manetho’s dynasties were organized by city and that more than one dynasty reigned in different parts of Egypt at the same time. Though focused on the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, Courville’s work naturally leads to Velikovsky’s conclusion that Dynasty 18 was contemporary with the United Monarchy and Divided Kingdom of Israel and Judah.
David Rohl’s New Chronology
Several enthusiastic followers of Velikovsky organized a conference in 1978 in Glasgow, which Velikovsky himself attended, as well as David Rohl and Peter James. However, several of the participants in the workshops at that conference rejected Velikovsky’s placement of Dynasties 22 and 25 of Egypt between Dynasties 18 and 19. Their basis for this rejection was the assumption that the Ashur-Uballit in the Amarna Letters was Ashur-Uballit I of the Assyrian King List. (Spoiler: he was not the same person, because he was an Assyrian king of the cadet dynasty of Bit-Adani near Harran.)
Rohl and James both created their own chronologies that fall in between those of the Conventional Chronology and Velikovsky by cutting only about three centuries from the conventional timeline of Egypt.
Rohl’s chronology has gained a substantial following, including several academics such as Dr. John Bimson.
The Chronological Framework of Ancient History
Arriving quite late to the chronology party, Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White developed a new method of building an ancient chronology called the Chronological Framework of Ancient History (CFAH).
The new method introduced by CFAH is to comb through ancient historical sources for durations between two events. We then apply higher criticism to the durations and look for anchor points where two or three sources give the same date. The resulting framework largely supports both Ussher’s chronology of the Bible and the chronologies of Velikovsky and Courville for Egypt.
In the course of fixing dates for the CFAH, we always attempt to find durations from an event both backwards and forwards to other known events. This gives us higher confidence that our results are in the right ballpark.
Three Schools on the Exodus Date
Within the biblical chronology debate, there are three proposed dates for the Exodus.
1. Ussher’s original date was 1491 BC, derived from the Biblical chronology.
2. Kitchen and Hoffmeier promote the late date of 1286 BC for the Exodus based on the assumption that the Exodus Pharaoh had to be Rameses II.
3. Using Thiele’s chronology of the Divided Kingdom, the Associates for Biblical Research promote the “Early Exodus” date of 1446 BC, identifying the Exodus Pharaoh as Amenhotep II of Dynasty 18.
While disagreeing with Ussher’s identifications of Egyptian synchronisms, the new Chronological Framework of Ancient History confirms Ussher’s date of the Exodus from durations in Egyptian history, and identifies Merenre II of Dynasty 6 as the Exodus Pharaoh.
Know therefore and understand from the command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. That was Cyrus. The wall would be rebuilt after that command. Not only Does Daniel 11:2 not recognize the later kings of Persia, Josephus has no history for them and not enough high priests to cover that time period.
I have not found any scholar attempting to relate the Achaemenid period. It seems clear to me that the 70 week (490 year) period is intended to begin with the decree of Cyrus (conventionally dated 538 BCE) and end with the appearance of the Messiah (usually dated between 26-30 CE. The evidence supporting the later kings of Persia seems scant and I suspect much confusion has come about entangling the Ataxerxes’ and Darius’ histories. I suspect Cyrus should be dated about 80-some years later to fit not just the 490 time period, but also the narrative of Daniel 11:2. What are your thoughts on this?