This presentation was given at the 2019 meeting of the Near East Archaeological Society in

San Diego, CA, on Friday, November 22, 2019. Its purpose was to compare the consensus

or majority chronology for the reign of Herod the Great with the chronology developed by

W. E. Filmer, “Chronology of the Reign of Herod the Great,” Journal of Theological Studies

ns 17 (1966): 283-98.

The consensus chronology is built on an implicit acceptance of the correctness of two

Roman consular years given by Josephus for events in the life of Herod, the first for his

appointment as king by the Romans and the second for the year in which Herod and

Sossius besieged Antigonus in Jerusalem.

It will be shown that accepting these two consular dates has produced conflict with: 1)

The history of the time as found in Roman authors; 2) The method of counting years

elsewhere in Josephus; and 3) The post-exilic Sabbatical year calendar that is firmly

established by archaeological, inscriptional, and numismatic evidence. The

Filmer/Steinmann chronology that puts Herod’s investiture by the Romans and his capture

of Jerusalem in 39 BC and 36 BC, respectively, and Herod’s death in early 1 BC, will be

shown to be compatible with everything except Josephus’s erroneous consular dates.

Three major events in Herod’s life are his investiture as de jure king by the Romans, his

capture of Jerusalem 3 years later, and his death. Josephus says a lunar eclipse was

observed a few weeks before Herod’s death. The slide shows the two candidates for the

eclipse. The NASA diagram of the eclipse on the left is advocated by those who hold that

Herod died in 4 BC. In this partial eclipse, one edge of the moon went through the full

umbra of the earth. Advocates of the minority view say that the eclipse was the full lunar

eclipse of January 10, 1 BC.

The inscription from Aphrodisias shows that Roman Senate was in session, with Antony and

Octavius present, at time consistent with Filmer’s chronology for Herod becoming king,

which was in 39t (the Jewish year that began on Tishri 1, 39 BC). The Senate approved

Antony’s initiative to bestow the kingdom of Judea on Herod. This would have to be after

Sept. 20, 39 BC (= 1 Tishri) in order to be in 39t, and the Aphrodisias inscription shows that

the Senate was indeed in session after Tishri 1 of 39 BC. It is interesting also that in the

Aphrodisias inscription Antony is mentioned first, then Octavian, then the Senate, showing

that Antony, who was 44 years of age at this time, was a more dominant figure in late 39

BC than Octavian, who had just turned 24.

Filmer, who wrote in 1966, was not aware of the archaeological find from Aphrodisias,

published in 1992, that supported his date for Herod receiving his kingship at sometime not

long after Tishri 1 of 39 BC.

The consensus view has Herod appointed as king by the Senate a year earlier, in the fall of

40 BC. The next slides will show that this date contradicts major events in the history of the

time.

Roman authors agree: the war against the Parthians did not commence until after the

Treaty of Misenum. It also makes sense that Antony, Octavius, and the Senate would not

start a campaign against the Parthians until a peace was negotiated between Antony and

Octavius. This was accomplished at Brundisium. It also makes sense that another problem

needed to be taken care of before a war against the Parthians could begin. The problem

with Sextus Pompeius was resolved, temporarily, at Misenum.

Josephus agrees with the Roman authors: Herod did not arrive at Ptolemais until after the

Treaty of Misenum was signed, after which Ventidius departed for Syria, after which Herod

arrived there. Herod was in a hurry to start the campaign against the Parthians and their

surrogates in Judea because his mother, his fiancée Mariamne, and other relatives were

under siege in Masada by the forces of Antigonus. He therefore stayed only seven days in

Rome (Ant. 14.14.5) before departing for Ptolemais, where Antony and the Roman Senate

expected him to initiate the raising of a Judean army to assist Ventidius.

The Jewish way of dating events was by the year of the reigning king, not by Roman

consular years. In his first book, the War, Josephus gave the years of Herod’s reign but did

not associate them with Roman consular years. When he wrote Antiquities, he added the

consular years, but apparently made a mistake of one year for one of the events, and then,

since his regnal data indicated three years between Herod’s investiture and his siege of

Jerusalem, he calculated a second consular year. There should have been some suspicion

that he might have made a mistake in this, because all agree that his Olympiad year for

Herod’s investiture is at least one year too early.

This means that the first of the three benchmarks in the life of Herod, namely his

investiture by the Romans, the evidence is solidly in favor of the minority view that it

occurred in late 39 BC.

So whose consular years do we accept: Josephus’s or those of the Roman historians Dio,

Appian, and Plutarch? Consider also that Josephus’s consular dates conflict with his

chronology elsewhere, as shown on the previous slide.

There is no conflict, however, of these ancient records with the minority view that holds

that Herod’s appointment as king by the Romans took place in the fall of 39 BC, i.e. in 39t

BC by our notation.

It was just shown that the first of the three benchmarks in the life of Herod, namely his

investiture by the Romans, the evidence is solidly in favor of the minority view that it

occurred in late 39 BC. Dio Cassius shows that the second benchmark, his siege of

Jerusalem, also contradicts the consensus view that places this in 37 BC. Following is more

evidence that this date is one year too early.

In 1857, Benedict Zuckermann produced his landmark study on Sabbatical and Jubilee

years. For the period of the Second Temple, he looked for a sure date for one Sabbatical

year. He thought he had found this in Josephus’s mention (Ant. 14.16.2, 15.1.2) that a

Sabbatical year was in progress when Herod and Sosius besieged Antigonus in Jerusalem

(Treatise, p. 46).Josephus’s consular year for this event placed it in the summer of 37 BC,

implying that a Sabbatical year would have started in Tishri of 38 BC (38t). When

Zuckermann desired to check how this worked out, he immediately—on the next page of

his text—ran into problems, as shown on the next slide.

After deriving his starting point based on Josephus’s consular year, Zuckermann decided to check it against

two Sabbatical years in the Hasmonean period, as derived from Josephus and 1 Maccabees. He immediately

ran into a conflict: both Hasmonean Sabbatical years appeared to be one year later than his newly-

constructed calendar would allow. Here are quotes from how he handled (or mishandled) the conflict with his

calendar.

In a footnote on p. 46, Zuckermann says that the sentence in Josephus stating that a Sabbatical year

commenced when Hyrcanus was besieging Ptolemy “has proved a difficulty to learned inquirers,

because it seems to express that the Sabbatical year only commenced after the siege had lasted

some length of time . . .” Zuckermann tries various ways to get around this. He settles on a

translation of the relevant sentence in Josephus as follows “The siege lingered on for some time, and

the year had already arrived in which the Jews had Sabbatical rest . . . “.

This cannot be supported by the original Greek of Josephus. The first verb in this sentence, ἑλκομένης, is a

participle and is therefore closely connected with the main verb ἐνίσταται, “there came around”. Preserving

the participial connection between the participle and the main verb, a somewhat wooden translation into

English would be “The siege dragging on, there came around” the Sabbatical year.

Josephus’s consular years for Herod have produced conflict with other ancient sources dealing with the

history of this time, conflicts that those who advocate the consensus chronology have not been able to

resolve. This includes Zuckermann and Schürer. Schürer thought he had another confirmation of his

chronology in Zuckermann’s Sabbatical-year calendar, but that was built on the same mistake: wrong

consular years for Herod in Josephus. Accepting these consular years has made the consensus view

incoherent.

Those who adhere to the consensus view need to consider why the Filmer/Steinmann approach has harmony

with the data that have been presented, and then explain how that harmony came about if the

Filmer/Steinmann chronology is wrong. That chronology dates Herod’s death to 1 BC, consistent with the 11

early Christian writers cited by Finegan (Handbook, p. 291) who date Christ’s birth to late 3 or early 2 BC. This,

in turn, supports the date of the Crucifixion on April 3 and the Resurrection on April 5 of AD 33.

Notice also that Zuckermann’s conclusion (“so much is sure, that Josephus designates as Sabbatical the year

when Simon was murdered . . .”) is completely illogical and in contradiction to Josephus’s sentence:

Zuckermann says that Josephus places Simon’s murder in a Sabbatical year, when what Josephus said quite

plainly, especially in the original Greek, was that Simon was murdered, and after this his son John Hyrcanus

besieged the murderer Ptolemy, and after that, while the siege was dragging on, a Sabbatical year began. Yet

Zuckermann’s illogic, and it resultant calendar for Sabbatical years that is one year too early, is accepted by all

those who follow the consensus chronology of Herod.

Neat: this has attestation from three different disciplines! The year was AD 748t; 748 + 37 –

1 (no year zero) = 784 years, 112 cycles, after Sabbatical year 37t BC. This is in agreement

with Wacholder’s calendar of Sabbatical years and the minority (Filmer/Steinmann) view

that places the Herod and Sossius’s siege of Jerusalem in the summer of 36 BC. The

consensus year of the siege and capture of Jerusalem is 37 BC, a year in which Dio Cassius

said that the Romans “accomplished nothing worthy of note in Syria,” and “Sosius, because

anything he did would be advancing Antony’s interests rather than his own . . . spent the

time in devising means, not for achieving some success and incurring his [Antony’s] envy,

but for pleasing him without engaging in any activity” (History, 49:23). For Roman writers,

“Syria” included Judea—see also Luke 2:2.

Here are some other Sabbatical years that show that Zuckermann’s Sabbatical-year

calendar was one year too early, based as it was on Josephus’s wrong consular year for

Herod’s siege of Jerusalem. I have chosen those that are most firm in their dating.

Wacholder, whose name is associated with the revised calendar, sometimes used evidence

that was ambiguous, or that he did not treat in a satisfactory manner. So, although

Wacholder’s calendar is correct, I don’t accept everything he wrote. In particular, his

treatment of the Seder ‘Olam passages is unsatisfactory. He did not realize that three

separate chapters of the Seder ‘Olam show that Jerusalem fell to the Romans in the latter

part of a Sabbatical year (summer of AD 70), strongly supporting his calendar versus that of

Zuckermann.

A contract found at Wadi Murabba‘at is dated according to the years of the Bar-Koseba

rebellion. It looked forward to a Sabbatical year beginning in the fall of AD 139, which is AD

139t – 69t = 70 years, or 10 Sabbatical cycles, after the Sabbatical year in which Jerusalem

was taken by Titus, AD 69t. Those who support the consensus view say that this means we

have to start the Bar-Koseba rebellion in 131n, instead of the 132n that is well attested by

independent sources including numismatics.

All these dates of post-exilic Sabbatical years are consistent with Herod’s siege in 36 BC

(Filmer and Steinmann).

The episode of Caligula’s statue is the subject of an even longer treatment than that of

Josephus in the the Legatio ad Gaium (Embassy to Gaius (= Caligula)) of Philo of Alexandria.

The Legatio exceeds 33,000 words in the text that has survived. Philo led the delegation

that went to Rome to protest to Caligula about the treatment the Jews were suffering in

Alexandria, and when he arrived at Rome in the fall of AD 40 he learned of Caligula’s plan

to put the statue in the Holy of Holies.

The chronology of these events conflicts with the Sabbatical-year calendar of

Zuckermann. Of interest here are the repeated references to agricultural activities—

activities that pious Jews—who were willing to die rather than see their Temple

desecrated—would not have engaged in in a Sabbatical year. Yet in the consensus

chronology, AD 40t has to be a Sabbatical year if 37t BC, their year for Herod’s siege of

Jerusalem, was a Sabbatical year.

Advocates of the consensus chronology for Herod have not dealt well with the Caligula

statue episode. In Schürer’s first edition, he recognized the problem and said, “The year

A.D. 40-41 could not have been a Sabbath year.“ In the second edition, he devoted a

paragraph to the issue but concluded that the evidence from Josephus’s consular years, in

conjunction with Zuckermann’s Sabbatical-year calendar (which he apparently did not

realize was based on those consular years), outweighed the testimony of Josephus and

Philo. This despite the fact that Philo was a direct witness of, and participant in, the events

involved.

How about later writers? In the third edition of Schürer, that of Vermes and Millar, ten

pages are devoted to issues related to Caligula’s statue, but there is no mention of the

problem that its chronology presents to the consensus chronology for Herod. It was glossed

over.

Jonathan Goldstein, another advocate of the consensus chronology for Herod, wrote in his

commentary I Maccabees, p. 316:

“Wacholder (p. 168) asserts that the year from Tishri, 40 C.E., to Tishri, 41 C.E., could not

have been a sabbatical year because Josephus in his account of the momentous events of

the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula attests that pious Jews of Judaea sowed their files

in that year (BJ ii 10.5.200; AJ xviii 7.3–4.271—74). But Philo (Legatio ad Gaium 33–34.249–

57) puts the same events, not at the time of the autumn sowing, but at the time of the

spring harvest. Hard as it may be to explain how Josephus could have been mistaken, it is

harder still to explain how Philo could have been in error . . . The problem is still unsolved

(the suggestions of Vermes and Millar in Schürer, History of the [p. 317] Jewish People in the

Age of Jesus Christ . . . are unsatisfactory too; Philo and Josephus cannot both be correct).

But one certainly cannot take Josephus’ chronology of the events of Caligula’s reign as a sure

basis for a theory of the dates of the sabbatical year.”

Comment: we don’t need to “take Josephus’ chronology” for the events of Caligula’s

reign; his chronology is fully established by Roman authors, as well as by Josephus and by

Philo of Alexandria. Goldstein cannot explain the contradiction between the Caligula statue

incident and the chronology of Sabbatical years accepted by those who follow the consensus

dating of Herod’s reign. All sources agree that the events related to Caligula’s statue are

dated from the fall of AD 40 to the spring of AD 41. This is another example of the strange

measures that are resorted to by those who put implicit faith in Josephus’s consular years—

compare it with Zuckermann’s twisting what Josephus wrote about the Sabbatical year in 1

Maccabees 16.

The solution is that their dating of Herod’s siege of Jerusalem is one year too early: the

siege was in the summer of 36 BC, with the Sabbatical year beginning in the preceding fall

(Tishri of 37 BC), in accordance with Wacholder’s Sabbatical-year calendar. Goldstein’s

statement, “The problem is still unsolved” should be expanded to say “The problem is still

unsolved by those who adhere to Schürer’s chronology for Herod, but it has been solved by

those who follow the lead given by Filmer and Wacholder, who put the siege in 36 BC.

The failure of consensus scholarship to deal with the Caligula statue episode is discussed

at more length in an article by Andrew Steinmann and myself that is scheduled to appear in

the December 2019 issue of JETS.

One of the assumptions made by Schürer in order to get his chronology to work is that

Josephus, and Herod himself, measured Herod’s years of reign according to a calendar that

began the regnal year on Nisan 1. The minority view assumes a Tishri-based year, as used in

Judah throughout the kingdom period. It is often overlooked in this discussion that

Josephus makes it quite clear, in his original Greek, that he would be using Tishri-based

years in discussing governmental matters such as the reigns of Herod and his successors.

Thackeray unfortunately followed, or perhaps just copied, Whiston’s translation,

although no such meaning is given in the lexicons.

Consensus presuppositions for dating Herod: Nisan years, inclusive (non-accession)

counting of years, acceptance of Josephus’s consular dates, and Zuckermann’s calendar of

Sabbatical years. If any one of these presuppositions is wrong it would break the consensus

chronology. They are all wrong.

The present slide shows a difficulty when it is assumed that Herod’s reign is reckoned by

Josephus in terms of Nisan years. There is not enough time for these events—16 days at

the very minimum—even if Herod obligingly died at the earliest possible time in this 13-day

interval.

There is no reason to doubt the essential factuality of Josephus’s account of Herod’s

death and funeral, as described both in War and Antiquities. His source was probably

Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod’s friend and biographer. The account is also consistent with

the magnificence that would be expected for this event.

In the extensive charts that Schürer uses to display the chronology of Herod, dates are

given in terms of AUC and BC years, thus obscuring the difficulty of the narrow timeframe

for Herod’s death. In a long footnote beginning on p. 1.464 of Schürer’s History of the

Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ and continuing on to page 465 he devotes one

sentence to the problem. After citing the Mishnah and the Talmud that say that New Year

for kings was on 1 Nisan, he writes “If this be so, the thirty-fourth year of Herod would

begin on the 1st Nisan of the year B.C. 4, and Herod must in that case have died between

1st and 14th Nisan, since his death occurred before the Passover.” He does not try to

explain how all these events could fit into 13 days, even assuming that Herod conveniently

died on 1 Nisan. Perhaps he avoided an explanation because he knew that any explanation

he gave would not have given the reader a favorable impression of his credibility. This is

unmistakenly “glossing over.”

Reference in row 2 is to Alla Kushnir-Stein, “Another Look at Josephus’ Evidence for the

Date of Herod’s Death,” Scripta Classica Israelica 14 (1995), p. 76. Alla Kushnir-Stein says that

the working assumptions of consensus view “leaves less than two weeks for all the events

described by Josephus between the king’s death and Passover, which is plainly impossible.”

There is no problem like this in the minority view that has Herod’s final year beginning on

Tishri 1 (Oct. 1) of 2 BC, with his death sometime between the lunar eclipse of January 9/10

and the Passover that started three months later, on April 8 of 1 BC.

It might seem that all that is needed, then, is to move the consensus calendar down one

year. This would put the date of Herod’s death in 3 BC rather than the 4 BC of the

consensus. Or it could be as late as 2 BC if we assume Tishri years with Herod’s last year

starting in Tishri of 3 BC. However, one more step is necessary. Schürer assumed that the

year to which Herod’s sons antedated their reigns, 4 or 5 BC, was the year of Herod’s death.

In order to match this with 37 years from Herod’s investiture and 34 years from the death

of Antigonus, he had to assume that Josephus really meant 36 years and 33 years, i.e. that

Josephus used inclusive numbering for the years of Herod. Andrew Steinmann and I have

written a paper that examines all the times when Josephus dated things as related to the

reign of Herod. The paper will appear next year in Bibliotheca Sacra. This slide and the next

three summarize what we found. We have tried to be complete, looking at all relevant

passages, with no special pleading.

#6 “on the very same day, the Day of the Fast.” The Greek word is νηστεἰας, the same

word used in Acts 27: 9 to refer to the Day of Atonement.

This and the following three slides are abstracted from Tables 1 and 2 of the paper by

Andrew E. Steinmann and Rodger C. Young, “Elapsed Times for Herod the Great in

Josephus,” to be published in Bibliotheca Sacra, June-Sept. 2020 issue.

Item (10) contradicts (7). We would not expect (10) to be exact; the 126 years of (7) must

be the correct time.

One curiosity here is that the consensus view for (9) gives the correct year for the Battle

of Actium, although to do so it must take Herod’s starting year as the year in which he

conquered Jerusalem, rather than the year in which he was appointed as king by the

Romans that is the more common starting place in Josephus. The compound errors of the

consensus view (wrong starting year, wrong use of a Nisan calendar, and wrong use of

inclusive numbering) cancel each other out to give the correct time for the battle. The fact

that the consensus formula seems to work cannot be used to disprove the minority view,

however, because the minority view also gives the correct date for the Battle of Actium,

and it starts from a more probable starting date. Josephus did not switch from his

consistent method of counting for Herod (accession years in a Tishri-based calendar) to use

the faulty consensus method in order to get this date; his consistent method elsewhere is

also consistent here, and it is only by a coincidence of three errors canceling each other out

that the consensus system appears to work for this date.

This and the preceding slide show that the consensus chronology for Herod has multiple

internal contradictions to its basic assumptions that were thought necessary in order to

accommodate its date of 4 BC for the death of Herod. The consensus chronology for Herod

is absolutely incoherent. It also contradicts well-established evidence from Roman and

Judean history.

These charts were derived from my proceeding through Antiquities and War looking for all

places where Josephus gave an elapsed time that related to the reign of Herod. This was

motivated by the treatment of some of these elapsed times in Steinmann, “When Did

Herod the Great Reign,” Novum Testamentum 51 (2009) 1-29. It was very gratifying to see

the harmony in date-computations based on Filmer’s hypotheses, as contrasted with the

incoherence of the same calculations when starting with the hypotheses of the consensus

(Schürer) chronology.

In looking for elapsed times that Josephus gave when referring to Herod the Great, I was

careful to choose the relevant texts. These charts are not the result of a selective or special

pleading process. There are some elapsed times, such as that a famine occurred in Herod’s

thirteenth year, that are somewhat difficult to check by external circumstances, and I have

not discussed the lengthy analyses that some have given to these events in order to

determine their year of occurrence. Those who are involved in these more problematic

studies should, however, take into consideration the findings illustrated here, namely that

Josephus consistently used Tishri-based calendar and accession years for Herod, as they

attempt to resolve these other, more problematic, dates.

In the presentation as given in November of 2019, I had Item 9 as a “No” for the Filmer

chronology. That was because of a mistake in my reasoning. I had assumed that, since

Josephus placed the Battle of Actium in Herod’s seventh year, and the “seventh” was an

ordinal number, then six actual years had passed, yielding 39t BC – 6 (act) = 33t BC, which

is too early for the Battle of Actium. However, I forgot that when accession reckoning is in

effect, the “first year” or “year one” of a regent is the complete year after the partial year

in which he took office, so that non-inclusive numbering is necessary. Although the

Antiquities and War passages use the ordinal, “seventh year” of Herod for the Battle of

Actium, in accession reckoning this does not imply inclusive numbering. In the accession-

year system, a king’s “first year” was the year after his “zero” or accession year, and his

seventh year would be a full seven years after the accession year. This is amply demonstrated

for the regnal years of the divided monarchy (see, for example, 1 Kgs 15:25, 28, 33, etc.), and

also in Babylonian and Assyrian official records. 39 Tishri 1 in 31 B.C. was on September 21,

so that the Battle of Actium took place toward the end of Herod’s seventh Tishri-based year,

32t BC.

The four pillars of the consensus scholarship for the chronology of Herod:

1. Zuckermann’s Sabbatical year calendar

2. Inclusive numbering in Josephus for the life of Herod

3. Nisan years in Josephus for the life of Herod

4. Josephus’s consular years for Herod’s investiture by the Romans and his siege of

Jerusalem

If any one of these can be shown to be false, Herod’s death can no longer be calculated as

occurring in 4 BC. Today’s demonstration has shown that all four of them are false. It has

also endeavored to show that Filmer’s chronology for Herod is in agreement with the

proper understanding of these four points, giving the correct date for Herod’s investiture in

late 39 BC, his siege of Jerusalem in the summer of 36 BC, and his death in early 1 BC. The

consensus scholarship, with its death of Herod in 4 BC, requires that our Lord had to be

born in 5 or 6 BC instead of the late 3 or early 2 BC that is reported by virtually all early

Christian historians who wrote on the subject. Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical

Chronology (2nd edition), p. 291, lists these Christian authors as Irenaus, Clement of

Alexandria, Tertullian, Julius Africanus, Hippolytus of Rome, Hippolytus of Thebes, Origen,

Eusebius, Epiphanius, Cassiodorus Senator, and Orosius.

If there were no other considerations, I would reject the consensus chronology because of

its conflict with Sabbatical/Jubilee years. Zuckermann missed a great opportunity by not

taking advantage of the SO statements that place a Jubilee in Josiah’s 18th year, and

another, which the SO calls the 17th, 14 years after the city fell (Ezek 40:1). He could have

constructed a pre-exilic Sabbatical-year and Jubilee-year calendar based on just one of

these. They both imply that counting for the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles began in 1406

BC. See Young, “The Talmud’s Two Jubilees and Their Relevance to the Date of the Exodus,”

Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006), 71-83,

http://www.rcyoung.org/articles/jubilee.pdf, or “Evidence for Inerrancy from a Second

Unexpected Source: The Jubilee and Sabbatical Cycles,” Bible and Spade 21:4 (Fall 2008),

109-122, http://www.rcyoung.org/articles/unexpected2.pdf.

I was surprised by the harmony that exists in Josephus’s chronology once we realize his

mistake for the two consular years. Actually he made one mistake, then the other followed

when he consulted his table of consuls and separated the second one three years from it

because his regnal-year data showed three years between Herod’s investiture and the siege

of Jerusalem. In War, he went by reign lengths, the Judean method, and provided no

consular years. That mistake came later. Even Schürer recognized that Josephus’s Olympiad

for Herod’s investiture by the Romans was one year too early.