Rodger Young's Papers on Chronology

In the Babylonian Talmud, the author of the folio 'Arakhin 12a refers to Ezekiel 40:1 and asks two rhetorical questions of his reader: "Is it not written 'In the twenty-fifth year of our captivity, on Rosh HaShanah, on the tenth of the month, in year fourteen after the smiting of the city'? But which year is it when Rosh HaShanah is on the tenth of the month? It must be said that this is a Jubilee." The plain implication: the 'Arakhin author assumed that his audience was familiar enough with the Torah (Pentateuch) that any one of them would have known, based on their familiarity with the book of Leviticus, that the only time Rosh HaShanah (New Year's Day) was on the tenth of the month was at the beginning of a Jubilee year (Lev 25:9-12). It is regrettable that in our day we cannot assume that readers or even teachers of the Bible have this fundamental knowledge. The present paper, first in a two-part series, examines all the time-phrases in Ezek 40:1, and shows that each of these five phrases is consistent with the vision of the last nine chapters of Ezekiel occuring at the beginning of a Jubilee year. This is what the author of 'Arakhin assumed his readers would know just from their reading of the text and their familiarity with the book of Leviticus. The present discourse further shows, based on modern scholarship, that the date of the vision was Tishri 10 of 574 BC.

There is something else that the author of the Babylonian passage introduces that further complicates the issue for those who maintain that the Sabbatical and Jubilee year legislation of Lev 25 is from the so-called 'P' source. These scholars usually date the hypothesized P document(s) to the Post-Exilic, or sometimes as early as the Exilic, period. The 'Arakhin author presents an amazing difficulty to these late-date theorists when he goes on to say, in folio page 12b, and citing the earlier writing on this subject in Seder 'Olam ch. 11, that Ezekiel's Jubilee was the seventeenth Jubilee. Doing a little arithmetic--no fudging of numbers or special pleading please--means that starting of counting for the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles occurred in 1406 BC.

The latter part of the present paper then shows, with a careful examination of the Hebrew text of 1 Kgs 6:1, how this date of 1406 BC is the same date calculated from this literal and grammatically exact reading of 1 Kings 6:1 and the subsequent 40 years in the wilderness. It further demonstrates that 1 Kgs 6:1 is the last of nine Exodus Era texts given in the Hebrew Bible, all nine of which were meant to be taken in a literal and exact sense. Skeptical scholarship, and those who advocate a 13th century Exodus, have yet to explain this strange coincidence of these two ways of calculating the time of the Exodus and of Israel's entry into the land 40 years later. But everything is explained if Israel's priests, one of whom was Ezekiel, were keeping track of the timing of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years as was always part of their priestly duty, and further, that 1 Kgs 6:1 was always meant to be interpreted literally and as an authentic historical datum.

In 1966, W. E. Filmer published an article that showed that the conventional chronology for the reign of Herod the Great cannot be correct, because that chronology required that all year-figures associated with Herod must be reckoned in an inclusive or non-accession sense. Filmer cited the list of six Hasmonean rulers whose total length of reign was 79 years, but using the consensus non-accession reckoning for each of the six gives a figure that falls six years short of the actual figure--just what would be expected for anyone who assumed that Josephus used non-accession reckoning when considering reign lengths. Filmer gave several other reasons that the principal dates of Herod, as derived by Emil Schürer in what is called the consensus chronology for Herod (appointed king of Judea by Romans in 40 BC, captured Jerusalem in 37 BC, and died in 4 BC) cannot be correct.

Filmer's arguments were convincing enough that Jack Finegan, in his second edition of the Handbook of Biblical Chronology, adopted Filmer's dates for Herod: Appointed king 39 BC, captured Jerusalem 36 BC, and died 1 BC. In spite of Filmer's sound reasoning and authoritative citation of ancient texts, the Schürer dates for Herod are still considered by many to be the "consensus" dates, as if a consensus of modern scholars is in agreement with Schürer. Addressing this strange deficiency in interpreting the original sources (Josephus and the Greco-Roman writers Appian, Plutarch, Dio Cassius), Andrew Steinmann, in a 2009 issue of Novum Testamentum, gave further reasons why the Filmer chronology was correct. Then, beginning in 2019, Dr. Steinmann and I wrote four additional articles that showed the deficiencies of the consensus chronology for Herod and his successors. The latest of these articles, "Dating the Death of Herod and the Reigns of His Sons," BSac 2021, examined all the dated coins of Herod and his successors, showing that all such coins are incompatible with the consensus date of 4 BC for the death of Herod. The thousands or ten thousands of dated Herodian coins all agree with what to us was a somewhat surprising result: Although Herod died in 1 BC, his successors, as proved by the solid physical evidence of the coins, antedated their reigns to the time when Herod delegated kingly prerogatives to his son Antipater in the Judean year that began in Tishri of 6 BC. This is well before either the consensus date for the death of Herod (between Nisan 1 and Nisan 14 of 4 BC) or his actual date of death between the lunar eclipse of 9/10 January, 1 BC, and the start of Passover in 1 BC. All of the thousands or tens of thousands of dated Herodian coins agree with this chronology, for which we await a response from those who still favor Schürer's chronology, a chronology that has been shown to be wrong in so many respects--the subjects of our other papers and Filmer's seminal study that has never been refuted by subsequent scholarship.

The PowerPoint presentation displays pictures of the site on Mt. Ebal, the stones that make up the two altars, and the defixio in its original form, followed by the reading of the curse tablet as published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Note: In the Chrome browser, you can switch the pdf file to PowerPoint by choosing the "Present" option from the dropdown in the upper right corner.

An interesting question is posed in this article—a question that apparently no one has asked previously. Although none of the coins of Archelaus have a date signifying his years of reign, there are thousands of coins that do have a such a date (year of reign) for the other two sons of Herod, Antipas and Philip. Why, among these thousands of coins, have none been found for years one through three?

Part 2 (click here to listen) discusses the importance of having the correct chronology for the reign of Herod the Great. Dr. K asks, What is the basis for the consensus date of Herod's death? Dr. Steinmann replies that it is based on the wrong consular year that Josephus gives for Herod's investiture as king by the Romans. This wrong consular year then leads to a host of other errors in interpreting the chronological data of Josephus. “When we build our chronology of the life of Herod on those consular years we will get multiple conflicts with other statements in Josephus regarding the history of the times.” In the podcast, Dr. Köstenberger says that he is now convinced that, although he once accepted the consensus view that Herod died in 4 BC, he now accepts 1 BC: "You simply have to go with the evidence, and if once you are confronted with the evidence, you continue to hold on to some sort of a conventional explanation, at that point . . . you are no longer, I think, living up to the highest calling of a scholar."

Dr. K then asks about the census in the time of Quirinius and how it relates to the time of our Lord's birth, which gives an occasion for both respondents to present the ideas of John Rhoads as given in his JETS paper "Josephus Misdated the Census of Quirinius." The session closes with a discussion of the importance of a correct chronology in determining that the earliest recorded statements of the divinity of our Lord were made immediately after the Resurrection, as now admitted by even Bart Ehrmann.

On the day following the archaeology class, Drs. Stripling (left) and Petrovich (center) arranged an interview. A caveat about Doug’s over-enthusiastic introduction: my research has been largely confined to the time of the Hebrew kingdom period and going back to the Exodus. (I also deal extensively with the timing of the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles.) A scholar who has a broader grasp of all of the Biblical chronology, starting with Abraham and continuing through the NT era, is Dr. Andrew Steinmann. I have had the pleasure of working with Dr. Steinmann for some years now, especially in our current efforts to correct the incoherent consensus (Schürer) chronology for the reign of Herod the Great and the year of birth of our Lord and Savior.

In the recorded interview, I was asked to respond to six questions: (1) How did God guide you into the study of chronology? (2) What is the basis for firmly building an OT chronology? (3) Why does it matter when things happened as long as we believe that they happened? (4) What are the primary weaknesses in the 13th Century BC Exodus theory? (5) What would you say to a scholar who methodologically uses only the Book of Exodus to arrive at his Exodus date? (6) Who are Manetho, Cheremon, and Lysimachus and why do they matter? The podcast of the interview is available by clicking on the image to the right or on the title bar at the top of this section.