51/2 (June 2008) 225–43

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE FROM

RALPH HAWKINS FOR A LATE-DATE EXODUS-CONQUEST

rodger c. young and bryant g. wood*

able problems associated with a late-date exodus-conquest and offered five

arguments which he suggested “may open up the possibility of a renewed

consideration of the Late Date Exodus-Conquest as a viable choice for evan-

First wrong textual argument: the 480 years are inconsistent with the

chronology of Judges

are entirely consistent with the chronology of the book of Judges, as Paul Ray,

Andrew Steinmann,

century exodus cannot be reconciled with its time spans and sequences. The

various pericopes of Judges can be divided into two classes, the sequenced

and those that might be called unprovenanced, to use a term familiar to

“Of the going-out (exodus) of the people of Israel from the land of Egypt.” The preposition

(“of”)

here is often wrongly rendered “after,” but this sense is not consistent with its proper meaning

and its usage in this phrase. In the Pentateuch, the exodus from Egypt is considered as starting

an era. The exodus itself occurred in year one (not year zero) of the exodus-era, and Aaron’s death

occurred in year forty of this era (Num 33:38), that is, thirty-nine years after the exodus. See the

further discussion in Rodger C. Young, “When Did Solomon Die?”

46 (2003) 602. In the

present paper, the term exodus-era will frequently be used when referring to the 480-year figure of

1 Kgs 6:1. From this verse we learn that temple construction began in the 480th year

48 (2005) 491–500.

* Rodger C. Young, who wrote section I, is a retired systems analyst residing at 1115 Basswood

Lane, St. Louis, MO 63132; Bryant G. Wood, who wrote sections II and III, is Director of Research

at the Associates for Biblical Research, P.O. Box 144, Akron, PA 17501.

For a presentation of the problems, see Bryant G. Wood, “The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century

Exodus-Conquest Theory,”

48 (2006) 475–89; idem, “The Biblical Date for the Exodus is

1446 BC: A Response to James Hoffmeier,”

journal of the evangelical theological society

archaeologists. Sequenced stories are those that are connected to what

immediately precedes or follows by a time-sequence phrase (some are con-

of Samson (Judges 13–16), the story of Micah and the Danites (Judges 17–

18), and the final three chapters of Judges. The only chronological marker

in the history of Samson states that he judged Israel for twenty years in the

days of the Philistines (Judg 15:20; 16:31). This could have overlapped a part

of the judgeships of Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, or Abdon, who also were active

in the days of the wars against the Philistines.

Judges 13–16, then, provides

an example of a pericope which is not in strict chronological order with what

that are sequenced. Sequences of years can be constructed from the latter,

be negated, because the numbers exceed the time that proponents of a late-

date exodus can afford to give to the time of the judges. This is true even

with a judicious approach to the chronological data instead of Hawkins’s

and Hoffmeier’s artificial adding up of everything. The proper approach to

Judges, then, is to carefully study which sections are sequenced and which

are unprovenanced, taking note of the exact meaning of the various bridge

passages and considering whatever extra information is available, such as

the 300 years of Judg 11:26. Advocates of a thirteenth-century exodus cannot

afford to take this approach, and so they must discredit the data. Or, in the

case of Kitchen’s treatment of Judg 11:26, he defames poor Jephthah.

consistently and literally, they do not add up to the number 480 given in 1 Kgs 6:1. . . . The aggre-

gate total of all these numbers [from the exodus to the end of Judges] is 515.” In a similar fashion,

James Hoffmeier (“What is the Biblical Date of the Exodus? A Response to Bryant Wood,”

50

[2007] 227–28) adds all timespans mentioned from Solomon back to the exodus to get a total of

633 years and then goes on to say that anyone who recognizes an overlap between some of the

narratives “abandons a straightforward, literal reading of the Judges through Exodus narratives”

(p. 228). But it is Ray and Steinmann, not Hawkins and Hoffmeier, who look at the texts in a

a critical analysis of a late-date exodus-conquest

Second wrong textual argument: the 480 years represent twelve genera-

. Hawkins repeats the familiar argument that the 480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1

As supporting evidence for 40 years = one generation, van Daalen

cites Exod 16:35; Num 14:33, 32:13; Ezek 4:6; and 29:11.

these citations refer to the forty years that Israel wandered in the desert,

while the Ezekiel passages refer to other forty-year periods that are irrelevant

to the discussion. For the present purposes, Num 32:13 can be taken as rep-

resentative of the texts that are sometimes used to support the equation of

forty years with a generation (others that can be cited are Deut 2:14; Ps 95:10;

and Heb 3:9–10). These texts relate that the Lord was angry with that gen-

forty or thirty-eight years are given as the time necessary for that

die, excepting those under twenty years of age (Num 14:29). The word

in these passages does not refer to a lapse of time, such as the time from the

birth of a father to the birth of his son, although that is one of its meanings

elsewhere. This could not be the meaning in the case of Israel in the wilder-

ness, because every parent who had children twenty years old or older died

together with those children; this would have been two generations dying in

the wilderness if the meaning were a time lapse between the birth of the

parent and the birth of the child.

wilderness in Heb 3:10 and the

that sought a sign in Matt 12:39 indi-

cate the same meaning: a group of contemporaries, not a measure of elapsed

time. By failing to recognize the specific meaning of “generation” in these

passages and taking it to mean a period of elapsed time, rather than a group

of people, van Daalen and others have reached an erroneous conclusion.

Moreover, Hawkins fails to deal with the arguments previously presented

showing the incorrectness of this conclusion.

David H. van Daalen, “Number Symbolism,” in

The Oxford Companion to the Bible

M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogen; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 561–63.

Ibid. 562–63.

Wood, “Rise and Fall” 484, 486. Neither Hoffmeier (“Response to Wood”) nor Hawkins has

produced any evidence to show that the author of 1 Kgs 6:1 intended his readers to understand that

the 480 years were twelve generations, nor did they address the statement on page 486 of Wood’s

article that 1 Chr 6:33–37 gives nineteen generations from Korah, who opposed Moses, until the

journal of the evangelical theological society

because of this wrong practice of equating the “generation” with a period of

480th year of the exodus era, the only conclusion that the reader was intended

to draw was that 479 years had passed, and unfortunately many commen-

tators and translators miss even this meaning of the verse.

Third wrong textual argument: the 480 years are an artificial construct

designed to put the temple at the center of Israelite history

The attempt of Burney to show that the 480 years are artificial

repeated the notion of earlier writers that the author of 1 Kgs 6:1 artificially

Judges first published London: Rivingtons, 1918, Kings first published Oxford: Clarendon, 1903)

the 480 years (Julius Wellhausen,

Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel

[New York: World,

1961; first published Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885; German original Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878;

trans. J. Southerland Black and Allan Menzies]). See the remarks of Rodger C. Young, “When Did

Jerusalem Fall?,”

47 (2004) 28–29, n. 13, regarding the artificiality of Wellhausen’s con-

struction. Other authors who have followed Wellhausen in his faulty reasoning include Bernhard

Stade,

Geschichte des Volkes Israel

1 (Berlin: G. Grote, 1887) 89; Emile F. Kautzsch,

a critical analysis of a late-date exodus-conquest

dicts Hawkins’s first argument that they symbolize twelve generations of

assessment that the regnal data have been falsified, because he writes, “When

biblical history.”

genuine history and cannot be used to create a proper chronology of the

kingdom period.

“Propositions” 36.

60. The rationale for choosing this particular timespan to insert in 1 Kgs 6:1 is not

explained by Burney. Hawkins, however, provides a reason, as given earlier by Nahum Sarna.

Sarna suggests, “[T]he biblical writer [of 1 Kgs 6:1] wanted to place the Temple at the center of

biblical history” (Nahum M. Sarna “Israel in Egypt: The Egyptian Sojourn and the Exodus,” in

journal of the evangelical theological society

thirty-seven years assigned from Solomon’s fourth year to his fortieth year

should be thirty-six. Second, six years are assigned to Athaliah, from 2 Kgs

Third, fifty years are assigned from the exile to the decree of Cyrus,

instead of the proper forty-nine years (587 to 538

is fallacious, a fact Hawkins acknowledges.

to co-regencies and non-accession reckoning.

Solomon’s fourth year (967

) was

380 years, not 430, and the total to the decree of Cyrus in 538

was 429 years, not the artificial 480 years calculated by Wellhausen and

53 years after Cyrus’s accession to the throne.” But there is no record, biblical or otherwise, of any

(Hawkins takes 966 for the start of temple construction and ends the 480 imaginary years in 486.)

ship of the Scriptures destroys all confidence in anything presented in the written text, whether

it be matters of history or of doctrine. But imaginative theorizing of this sort has no explanation for

why sound scholarship has shown that the reign length data have all the characteristics of authen-

ticity, so that a coherent and rational chronology has been constructed from them.

a critical analysis of a late-date exodus-conquest 231

attempt to demonstrate an artificial span of 480 years is given by William

the non-accession reckoning of rabbinic scholarship. Thus David is given 39

years, Solomon 39 years, Rehoboam 16, down to 10 years for Jehoiakim. He

then adds thirty-six years to get to the thirty-seventh year of the captivity

of Jehoiachin. The sum is indeed 480 years, even though, as Barnes notes,

this does not represent actual elapsed time. In his view, however, it shows

that the numbers have been manipulated to give an artificial total. This

approach is similar to that of Wellhausen cited earlier, as followed by

Burney and Hawkins, even though the methods of Wellhausen and Barnes

contradict each other: one uses accession years, the other non-accession

years; one starts with the construction of the Temple, the other with David’s

authentic, not artificial. A problem with these schemes is that they are just

too clever. The late-date deuteronomists that these scholars posit as the

authors of Kings would lack any motive to put together a scheme like this,

since it took until the nineteenth century ad (for Wellhausen’s scheme) or

the twentieth century (for Barnes’s scheme) for someone to figure it out.

And it is not because no one was trying to find numerical schemes in the

Scriptures. An example of such searching for patterns is found in the Seder

‘Olam (second century ad), where Rabbi Yose calculated 850 years from the

entry into Canaan to the exile. He did this by starting with the 439 years

journal of the evangelical theological society232

from the entry to Solomon’s fourth year, and then adding, in a non-accession

sense, all Judean reign lengths from that time to the last year of Zedekiah.

extra year by taking six years for Athaliah instead of seven, as Burney did.

period. If schemes like this were inherent in the text, why did the Seder

‘Olam, the most extensive and detailed document from antiquity devoted to

OT chronology, fail to recognize them?

the regnal data of Kings and Chronicles are artificial and late is the fact

that these data have all been successfully integrated into a chronology that

has every indication of reflecting the actual history of the times. This is

more than can be said for the chronologies of Wellhausen and Barnes. Their

chronological schemes (which are different between the two scholars) have

not found any wide acceptance among historians, whereas the Thiele/McFall

seventeen years more than seventeen Jubilee cycles of forty-nine years each. Rabbi Yose then

asks how it is possible that there is an excess of seventeen years over the 833 years that he

apparently expected for the seventeen Jubilee cycles. He gives no answer. The reason is evident:

his 850 years is an artificial number that does not represent real elapsed time, similar to the

artificial constructs of Wellhausen and Barnes, and there is no reason to try to correlate it with

the seventeen Jubilee cycles that Rabbi Yose states as terminating fourteen years after Jerusalem

fell to the Babylonians. Neither is there any reason to relate Judean reign lengths to the 479 years

between the exodus and the building of the Temple. When artificial arrangements such as these

are imposed on the data, it creates confusion in any chronological scheme and leads to wrong

MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; first published Northvale, NJ, 1998) 117–18.

a critical analysis of a late-date exodus-conquest 233

Merrill.25 This date was derived by accepting the chronological data of

Kings and Chronicles as genuine history, not the manipulations of a late-

historically accurate, could it be that some ancient editor was astute enough

to add up the numbers and derive a 480-year figure in a fashion somewhat

like that of Wellhausen or Barnes, and then project this 480-year figure back

into the time between the exodus and the start of temple construction? In

other words, those who are seeking ways to show that the Bible is not to be

trusted in historical matters could say that the 480 years were deduced some-

how from the regnal data, which can be accepted as historically correct. They

would claim that the editor decided to stop counting either after the thirty-

editor knew nothing about the proper methods of interpreting the dates, but

merely added numbers from various starting and stopping places until a

nice sum was found. But let us, for now, consider this option as a possibility:

namely, that the 480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1 were extracted somehow from the

regnal data.

just been established. Since the regnal data of Kings and Chronicles, covering

a period of over four centuries, have been demonstrated by careful scholar-

ship to have every mark of authenticity,27 then how could it be that when

we come to 1 Kgs 6:1, the chronological data there are suddenly no longer

246, 249; Kitchen, On the Reliability 83; T. C. Mitchell, “Israel and Judah until the Revolt of

Jehu (931–841 B.C.),” in CAH 3.1.445–46; Gershon Galil, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel

and Judah (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 14; McFall, “Translation Guide” 12; Eugene H. Merrill, “Fixed Dates

in Patriarchal Chronology,” BSac 137 (1980) 241.

Kingdom,” AUSS 45 (2007) 163–89. For the Tyrian data, see Barnes, “Studies” 29–55. For more

on the verification from the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles, see below, section I.3.d.