The chronology of the Bible is an elaborate system of lifespans, "generations," and other means by which the passage of events is measured, beginning with Creation and extending through other significant events. A widespread scholarly understanding is that the Bible marks out a world cycle (Great Year) of 4,000 years, beginning with Creation and ending, presumably, around 164 BCE, with the year AM 2666 for the Exodus representing 26 2/3 of 100 years or two-thirds of the total. It was theological in intent, not historical in the modern sense, and functions as an implied prophecy whose key lies in the identification of the final event.
The count begins with creation and Year 1. The passage of time from the Creation to the Exodus is measured by adding the ages of the Patriarchs at the birth of their firstborn sons, later through express statements, and later still by the synchronised reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah. The Exodus takes place in the year anno mundi 2666, or AM 2666, exactly two thirds of the way through the four thousand years, the Temple in Jerusalem is commenced 480 years, or 12 generations of 40 years each, after that, and 430 years pass between the building of the Temple and its destruction. The 50 years between the destruction of the Temple and the "Decree of Cyrus" and end of the Babylonian Exile, added to the 430 years for which the Temple stood, produces another symmetrical period of 480 years, and the 374 years between the re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees and the Edict of Cyrus completes the 4,000 years.
As recently as the 18th century, scholars of the stature of Isaac Newton believed that the date of Creation was knowable from the Bible. Today, the Genesis account of Creation has long since vanished from serious cosmology, the Patriarchs and Exodus are no longer included in most serious histories of ancient Israel, and it is almost universally accepted that Joshua and Judges have little historical value. Even the monarchy is questioned, and although scholars continue to advance proposals for reconciling the chronology of the Books of Kings, there is "little consensus on acceptable methods of dealing with conflicting data."
Video Chronology of the Bible
Pre-Masoretic chronologies
During the centuries that Biblical texts and canons developed, theological chronologies emerged at different composition stages, though scholars have advanced various theories to identify these stages and their schematizations of time. These chronologies include:
- A "Progenitor" chronology that placed Abraham's birth at AM 1600 and the foundation of the Temple at AM 2800. Alfred Jepsen proposed this chronology on the basis of melding time periods in the Samaritan and Masoretic recensions.
- Distinct chronologies can be inferred from the Priestly source (of the Pentateuch), along with priestly authors of later Biblical books, and the Deuteronomistic history, which purports to chronicle the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel (with some significant historical corroboration, see below and History of ancient Israel and Judah).
- The Nehemiah chronology, devised to show 3,500 years from creation to Nehemiah's mission. Northcote says that this chronology was "probably composed by Levites in Jerusalem not long after Nehemiah's mission, perhaps sometime late in the fifth century BCE (i.e. nearing 400 BCE)." Bousset (1900) apparently sees this schematization, too, but calls it Proto-MT.
- A proto-Masoretic chronology, shaped by jubilees, with an overall literary showing of 3,480 years from creation to the completion of the Second Temple, per B.W. Bousset (1900), and which had the first Temple at 3,000 years.
- The Saros chronology that reflected 3,600 years leading up to the first Temple and 4,080 years from creation to the completion of the Second Temple. This scheme served as "the basis for the later LXX chronology and pre-SP Samaritan Pentateuch chronologies".
Maps Chronology of the Bible
Masoretic Text
It should be noted that some data in this table are questionable. For example, Genesis 11:10 states that Shem was 100 years old when he gave birth to his son two years after the flood. The statement (Gn 5:32) that Noah was 500 years old when his sons were born, means that they were born starting then. Some commentators state that Shem was the youngest of the three, which could mean that he was born two years later in order to make his age 100 two years after the flood. If one starts from two years after the flood (no matter what the age of Shem was) and adds the ages of his descendants, Abraham was born in 1948 AM. Isaac was born when Abraham was 100 years old in 2048. According to some commentators the Exodus is dated as 400 years after the birth of Isaac (from Genesis 15:13), making it 2448. According to others the 430 year time mentioned in Exodus 12:40 is dated from the descent of Jacob to Aegypt, making it 2668.
The temple was built 480 years after the Exodus, in the fourth year of King Solomon's rein, according to I Kings 6:1. This places the start of King Solomon's reign as 2924 and the building of the temple as 2928.
The Masoretic Text is the basis of modern Jewish and Christian bibles. While difficulties with Biblical texts make it impossible to reach sure conclusions, perhaps the most widely held hypothesis is that it embodies an overall scheme of 4,000 years (a "great year") taking the re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees in 164 BCE as its end-point. Two motives may have led to this: first, there was a common idea at the time of the Maccabees that human history followed the plan of a divine "week" of seven "days" each lasting a thousand years; and second, a 4,000 year history--even longer in the Septuagint version--would establish the antiquity of the Jews against their pagan neighbours.
Other Second Temple chronologies: Septuagint, Samaritan, Jubilees
The canonical text of the Hebrew Bible is called the Masoretic Text, a text preserved by Jewish rabbis from early the 7th and 10th centuries CE. There are, however, two other major texts, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Septuagint is a Koine Greek translation of the original biblical Hebrew holy books. It is estimated that the first five books of the Septuagint, known as the Torah or Pentateuch, were translated in the mid-3rd century BCE and the remaining texts were translated in the 2nd century BCE. It mostly agrees with the Masoretic Text, but not in its chronology. The Samaritan text is the text preserved by the Samaritan community. This community dates from some time in the last few centuries BCE--just when is disputed--and, like the Septuagint, differs markedly from the Masoretic Text in its chronology. Modern scholars do not regard the Masoretic Text as superior to the other two--the Masoretic is sometimes clearly wrong, as when it says that Saul began to reign at two years of age and reigned for one year. More relevantly, all three texts have a clear purpose, which is not to record history so much as to bring the narrative to a point which represents the culmination of history.
In the Samaritan Pentateuch, 'the genealogies and narratives were shaped to ensure a chronology of 3000 years from creation to the Israelite settlement of Canaan. Northcote reports this as the "Proto-SP chronology," as designated by John Skinner (1910), and he speculates that this chronology may have been extended to put the rebuilding of the Second Temple at an even AM 3900, after three 1,300-year phases. In the Septuagint version of the Pentateuch the Israelite chronology extends 4,777 years from creation to the finishing of the Second Temple, as witnessed in the Codex Alexandrinus manuscript. This calculation only emerges by supplementing Septuagint with the MT's chronology of kings. There were at least 3 variations of Septuagint chronology; Eusebius used one variation, now favored by Hughes and others. Northcote asserts that the Septuagint calendrical pattern was meant to demonstrate that there were 5,000 years from creation to a contemporaneous Ptolemaic Egypt, circa 300 BCE.
The 2nd century BCE Book of Jubilees begins with the Creation and measures time in years, "weeks" of years (groups of seven years), and jubilees (sevens of sevens), so that the interval from Creation to the settlement of Canaan, for example, is exactly fifty jubilees (2450 years).
Seder Olam
More significant, and still in common use among Jews, was the Seder Olam Rabbah ("Great Order of the World"), a work tracing the history of the world and the Jews from Creation to the 2nd century CE. It allows 410 years for the duration of the First Temple, 70 years from its destruction to the Second Temple, and 420 years for the duration of the Second Temple, making a total of 900 years for the two temples. This schematic approach to numbers accounts for its most remarkable feature, the fact that it shortens the entire Persian Empire from over two centuries to just 52 years, mirroring the 52 years it gives to the Babylonian exile.
Christian use and development of biblical chronology
The early Church Father Eusebius (c. 260-340), attempting to place Christ in the chronology, put his birth in AM 5199, and this became the accepted date for the Western Church. As the year AM 6000 (800 CE) approached there was increasing fear that the end of the world was nigh, until the Venerable Bede made his own calculations and found that Christ's birth took place in AM 3592, allowing several more centuries to the end of time.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) switched the point of focus from Christ's birth to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, which he placed in the year AM 4000, believing this marked the moment when the Mosaic Law was abolished and the new age of grace began. This was widely accepted among European Protestants, but in the English-speaking world, Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) Ussher calculated a date of 4004 BCE for creation; he was not the first to reach this result, but his chronology was so detailed that his dates were incorporated into the margins of English Bibles for the next two hundred years. This popular 4,000 year theological timespan, which ends with the birth of Jesus, differs from the 4,000 timespan later proposed for the Masoretic text alone, which ends with the Temple rededication in 164 BCE.
The Israelite kings
The chronology of the monarchy, unlike that of earlier periods, can be checked against non-Biblical sources and seems to be correct in general terms. This raises the prospect that the Books of Kings, linking the Hebrew kings by accession and length of reign ("king X of Judah came to the throne in the nth year of king Y of Israel and ruled n years"), can be used to reconstruct a chronology for the monarchy, but the task has in fact proven intractably difficult. The problem is that the books contain numerous contradictions: to take just one example, since Rehoboam of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel began to rule at the same time (1 Kings 12), and since Ahaziah of Judah and Joram of Israel were killed at the same time (1 Kings 9:24, 27), the same amount of time should have elapsed in both kingdoms, but the count shows 95 years passing in Judah and 98 in Israel. In short, "[t]he data concerning the synchronisms appeared in hopeless contradiction with the data as to the lengths of reigns."
Possibly the most widely followed attempt to reconcile the contradictions has been that proposed by Edwin R. Thiele in his The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (three editions between 1951 and 1983), but his work has been widely criticised for, among other things, introducing "innumerable" co-regencies, constructing a "complex system of calendars", and using "unique" patterns of calculation; as a result his following is largely among scholars "committed ... to a doctrine of scripture's absolute harmony" (the criticism is to be found in Brevard Childs' Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture). The weaknesses in Thiele's work have led subsequent scholars to continue to propose chronologies, but, in the words of a recent commentary on Kings, there is "little consensus on acceptable methods of dealing with conflicting data."
See also
- Biblical cosmology
- Chronology of the ancient Near East
- Chronology of Babylonia and Assyria
- Dating creation
- Development of the Hebrew Bible canon
- Development of the Old Testament canon
- Development of the New Testament canon
- History of ancient Israel and Judah
- Intertestamental period
- Kings of Judah
- Missing years (Jewish calendar)
- Universal history
- Ussher chronology
References
Sources
Source of article : Wikipedia
0 Comments