JETS

48/2 (June 2005) 225–48

TABLES OF REIGN LENGTHS FROM THE

HEBREW COURT RECORDERS

rodger c. young*

i. understanding the tables

The tables at the end of this article summarize the results of my previ-

ous three papers dealing with the chronology of the kingdoms of Judah and

Israel.

These tables are meant to display the chronological data in a format

that will make it easy for writers of Study Bibles or commentaries to incor-

porate the reign lengths and starting and ending years of the kings into their

texts. The present paper avoids the various calculations that derived these

dates (those calculations were done in the earlier papers) and seeks to focus

on how to use the tables, and also on their importance for our understanding

of the Scriptures and the doctrine of inspiration.

To use the tables, it may be helpful to review how the calendar of the

Hebrews differs from our own. The Hebrew calendar was (and is) lunar-

solar. Each month started with the new moon. Since twelve lunar months

fall short of a full solar year, in some years a thirteenth month was added.

In later years the formula was worked out with some exactitude as to when

this should be done. The month that began near the spring equinox was called

Nisan. The northern kingdom (Israel) considered the year to start in Nisan

throughout its history, whereas for civil purposes Judah considered the year

to start in the seventh month, Tishri, corresponding roughly to our October.

The Scriptures often give the number of the month instead of the month’s

name, and when this is done the numbering always starts from Nisan, in-

dependently of whether the ofﬁcial year started in Nisan or Tishri.

In the tables, the expression “931n” is used to represent the year be-

ginning on Nisan 1, 931

and ending the day before Nisan 1, 930

. This

is the kind of year that would be used in the court records of the northern

kingdom. “931t” represents the year beginning Tishri 1, 931

and ending

the day before Tishri 1, 930

; this is the kind of year that would be used

in Judah. The six-month overlap of these two dates is written as 931t/930n,

meaning the time period that began on Tishri 1 of 931

and ended the day

before Nisan 1 of 930

. The overlap of 932t and 931n is written 931n/931t.

This method of expressing dates may be called the “Nisan/Tishri” notation.

Rodger Young, “When Did Solomon Die?”

JETS

46 (2003) 589–603; “When Did Jerusalem

Fall?”

JETS

47 (2004) 21–38; and “When Was Samaria Captured? The Need for Precision in Bib-

lical Chronologies,”

JETS

47 (2004) 577–95.

* Rodger Young resides at 1115 Basswood Lane, St. Louis, MO 63132.

journal of the evangelical theological society

226

In column 6 (“Years reigned”) of the ﬁrst two tables and in column 4

(“in”) of tables 3 and 4 there is often a number followed by another number

in parentheses. When this is the case, it means that the ﬁrst number is the

length of years given in the scriptural text, but that number must be taken

in a non-accession or inclusive-numbering sense, so that the second number

(always one less than the ﬁrst) is to be used in formulas for the passage of

time. Non-accession numbering means that when a king died, that year was

counted as part of his reign, but it was also counted in the total number of

years of the king who succeeded him. In this way, a king who died one year

after he started would be given two years instead of one, which is the reason

that reign length formulas use a number that is one less than the non-ac-

cession number.

In the histories of Israel and Judah the decision whether to use accession

or non-accession years for the current king was always an arbitrary choice,

perhaps made by the king himself. We owe a great debt to Edwin Thiele

for

determining when the scriptural texts use accession reckoning and when they

use non-accession reckoning in giving the total years of a king’s reign or the

year of that reign in which a king of the rival kingdom began (a synchro-

nism). One general principle is that non-accession years are used when the

years are measured from the start of a king’s coregency with his father. In

Table 2, there are two non-accession numbers where Thiele assumed acces-

sion reckoning. The ﬁrst is for Uzziah, where Thiele went against the usual

rule for coregencies and considered that Uzziah’s ﬁfty-two years were by

accession reckoning, so his starting year for the Amaziah/Uzziah coregency is

one year earlier than the 791t shown in Table 2. Thiele’s reasoning for this

exception is weak and is not adopted in the chronology presented here. The

second is for Zedekiah, the last king of Judah. The reason for this is ex-

plained in my “Jerusalem” paper.

For the general reader the Nisan/Tishri dates of the tables will need to

be expressed in terms of

years. This might be done as follows.

(1) 931n would be written as 931/930, since the Nisan year falls in both

these

years. 931t would be written in the same way, even though

it represents a time period that is six months later than 931n.

(2) The six-month interval 931t/930n would also be written as 931/930

(3) 931n/931t may be written as simply 931

ii. where these dates come from

Dates for the kings of Israel.

Thiele’s third edition generally expressed

starting and ending years as

dates. By doing this, all the exactness of the

dates for Zechariah, Shallum, Pekah, and Menahem was lost. Therefore dates

for Israel will be compared to those in Thiele’s second edition. The chronology

Edwin Thiele,

The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan/Kregel,

1983); earlier editions were in 1951 (New York: Macmillan) and 1965 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

Page numbers cited in this article refer to the third edition.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders

227

of Table 1, for Israel, is identical to that of the second edition, except that

the ending date for Hoshea is reﬁned from Thiele’s 723n to the ﬁrst half of

that year, as demonstrated by my “Samaria” paper and the various authors

cited there. Except for this minor change, the dates for the northern kingdom

have needed no alteration since they were published in the ﬁrst edition of

Mysterious Numbers

in 1951, and they have proved to be useful in settling

some issues in Assyrian chronology.

Dates for Judah, Saul to Ahaziah (1051t to 842t).

My “Solomon” paper

demonstrated that Solomon died and Rehoboam began before Tishri of 931

not in the six-month interval beginning with Tishri of that year as assumed

by Thiele.

This slight adjustment for the date of Solomon’s death resolved

the problem that Thiele’s chronology produced in the reign of Jehoshaphat;

Thiele’s attempt to ﬁx this in his third edition only extended the problem into

the reigns of Ahaziah and Athaliah. Since the death of Solomon occurred be-

fore Tishri of 931

, by Judean reckoning this moved the beginning date

for Solomon and his immediate successors one year earlier than in Thiele’s

chronology.

The beginning year of Solomon is calculated by taking his forty years as

a non-accession number, because it is assumed that it is measured from the

beginning of his coregency with David. The length of the coregency is not given

in Scripture, so we cannot be very speciﬁc about when David died. (Actually

there were two anointings of Solomon as coregent—1 Kgs 1:39; 1 Chr 23:1;

29:22.) There was enough time after Solomon was installed for David to

accumulate some of the building materials for the Temple (1 Chronicles 22),

and if we assume that David was dead by the fourth year of Solomon when

the foundation of the Temple was laid (spring of 967

; 1 Kgs 6:1; 2 Chr 3:2),

then we might guess a two-year overlap of the reigns of David and Solomon.

Using this assumption, the conjectural dates for David and Saul in Table 1

are provided for convenience. Since we lack precise information about when

David’s forty years ended, his dates and Saul’s cannot be speciﬁed as ex-

actly as those of Solomon and all the subsequent kings of Judah and Israel.

Dates for Judah, Athaliah to Hezekiah (842t to 687t).

For Athaliah

and Joash the years agree with those in Thiele’s second edition; the third

edition contradicts itself for the beginning date of Athaliah. The dates for

Amaziah through Hezekiah were calculated in my “Samaria” paper, where

the differences with Thiele’s ﬁgures were noted. The major difference was

that Thiele did not recognize the Ahaz/Hezekiah coregency.

Although my “Solomon” paper showed that Solomon died and Rehoboam began before Tishri

of 931

, I was not justiﬁed in assuming that Jeroboam’s reign also began before Tishri of that

year. Some weeks or even months were necessary for the news of Solomon’s death to reach Egypt

and for Jeroboam to return from there and be installed as king of the breakaway tribes. Whether

this time extended past Tishri 1 of 931 is not known. The scriptural data only allows us to narrow

the beginning of Jeroboam’s reign to some time in 931n and the beginning of Rehoboam’s to some

time in 932t.

journal of the evangelical theological society

228

Dates for Judah, Manasseh to Zedekiah (697t to 588t).

The years for

Manasseh and his son Amon present no special problem and their dates in

Table 2 are the same as Thiele’s. My “Jerusalem” paper showed that Josiah’s

thirty-one years (2 Kgs 22:1) are to be taken in an accession sense. That paper

also demonstrated that there was a change to non-accession reckoning in

2 Kings for the reign of Zedekiah. It can be shown that the change took

place after the reign of Jehoiakim. Zedekiah’s eleven years are given by

non-accession counting in both 2 Kings and Jeremiah (2 Chronicles follows

2 Kings in its dates). This means that 2 Kings and Jeremiah are in harmony

with Ezekiel’s dates for the fall of Jerusalem; all three sources date that

event in 587

iii. areas of controversy

Tables 1 through 4 are meant to be an aid to the writers of commentaries

and Study Bibles who want to provide dates for the Hebrew kings or who

want to show how the various reign lengths and synchronisms given in Scrip-

ture are calculated. Such writers will want to know how solid the reasoning

was that produced these dates and formulas. They will also want to know

which dates are controversial and likely to be challenged. I have touched

brieﬂy on the reasons behind the dates in the section immediately preced-

ing; for the complete reasoning my “Solomon,” “Jerusalem,” and “Samaria”

papers must be consulted. But no matter how much I may be convinced that

the calculations are sound in the three papers, it would be naïve to expect that

no disagreement will arise regarding these ﬁgures, particularly where they

disagree with Thiele’s dates. Allow me to anticipate where the areas of con-

troversy will be.

My revision for the years of the kings of Judah, Solomon to Ahaziah.

I do not expect much controversy over this, unless it comes from someone

who has not understood the method I used to arrive at the results in my

ﬁrst paper. No one, to my knowledge, has written anything justifying Thiele’s

restriction of the death of Solomon to the last half of 931n—consequently I

might hope that my statement that he died before Tishri of that year will be

accepted as entirely possible. Further than that, placing Solomon’s death

before Tishri, i.e. in 932t instead of 931t, solves problems that Thiele was

never able to resolve, as explained in the “Solomon” paper. The chronology

of this period affects the biblical date for the exodus that is calculated from

1 Kgs 6:1, since it places the laying of the Temple’s foundation in the spring

of 967

instead of in 966

as required by Thiele’s dates.

Accepting

967

for laying the foundation of the Temple determines that the exodus

was in the spring of 1446

, a date which many of those who accepted

Given that Solomon died in 932t, his fourth year calculates to 968t whether accession reckoning

is used for his forty years (start in 972t and subtract 4) or non-accession reckoning is used (start

in 971t and subtract 3). The second month of the year 968t, when the foundation of the Temple was

laid, was Ziv in the spring of 967

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders

229

Thiele’s 966

date arrived at anyway by incorrectly going back 480 years

instead of 479 to determine the time of the exodus.

Dates for the eighth century

: Ahaz and Hezekiah, Menahem, Pekah,

and Hoshea.

In my “Samaria” paper, the dates I derived for the Judean

kings of the eighth century

are consistent with those of other conserva-

tive scholars who accept the Ahaz/Hezekiah coregency that is so deﬁnitely

implied in Scripture. Some non-conservative scholars continue to reject the

coregency but none offer any compelling reason for the rejection. Hezekiah’s

father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had coregencies with their fathers,

and Hezekiah had a coregency with his son; why then rule out a coregency

of Hezekiah with his father Ahaz?

Regarding the Pekah/Menahem rivalry there may continue to be contro-

versy. I entered into the fray in my “Samaria” paper with observations about

the source documents of the period, and also by comparing the dual-dating

for the reign of Pekah with the dual-dating for the reign of Thutmose III,

whose career in many ways was similar to that of Pekah. (After submitting

the paper, I learned that Gleason Archer had also made this comparison

between the careers of Thutmose III and Pekah.)

Those who, like myself,

accept Thiele’s thesis that Menahem and Pekah became rivals on the death

of Shallum are able to show that thereby harmony is demonstrated in the

scriptural data for the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, Menahem, Pekahiah, Pekah,

and Hoshea—a rather impressive argument for the reasonableness of the

assumption. Authors who reject the Pekah/Menahem rivalry can demon-

strate no such agreement among the scriptural synchronisms and dates for

the period. Neither is there any consensus among these authors regarding

their dates for Pekah.

Those who object to the rivalry can make the point that it is not stated

explicitly in the Scriptures but must be inferred from the various synchro-

nisms that are given to the reign of Pekah in 2 Kings 15 and 16. It is true

that the rivalry is not explained explicitly, although Thiele and Cook

give

examples of some Scriptures outside of 2 Kings that assume the rivalry.

Also, Hos 5:5 clearly distinguishes Ephraim and Israel as separate kingdoms

at that point in history (the Hebrew says, “Both Israel and Ephraim . . . ,”

as does the

lxx

). There are many places in Scripture and in other historical

writings where we could wish for a fuller explanation, and where inference

must be used to ﬁll in the details of what happened. Inference is a standard

modus operandi

of historians.

Perhaps surprisingly, there continues to be some ferment over the date of

the fall of Samaria, and again there is general disagreement among scholars

who do not accept the scriptural data or who read into it unnecessary assump-

tions. A recent example is Christine Tetley’s conjecture that the king to whom

Hoshea paid tribute “year by year” (2 Kgs 17:4) was Shalmaneser, rather

See my “Solomon” paper for an independent veriﬁcation of the 1446 date from the Jubilee cycles.

Norman Geisler, ed.,

Inerrancy

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979) 71.

Thiele,

Mysterious Numbers

129–32; H. J. Cook, “Pekah,”

14 (1964) 128–34.

journal of the evangelical theological society

230

than his predecessor Tiglath-Pileser.

By this unwarranted assumption, plus

the

a priori

decision that no coregencies would be allowed for the kings of

Judah, a chronology is provided which contradicts several Scriptures besides

just those referring to the reign of Hoshea.

The date of the fall of Jerusalem (ending date for Zedekiah).

In an ar-

ticle published in 1982, Alberto Green listed twenty-eight scholarly articles

or books that were published after Wiseman’s publication of the Babylonian

Chronicle in 1956 and that took the Babylonian dates in the Chronicle into

consideration when trying to determine the chronology of the last days of

the Judean monarchy.

Other articles on this question have appeared in the

years following Green’s paper. It was not my intent when I approached the

subject to review or evaluate this literature; rather it was to apply the same

methods I had used in my “Solomon” paper to the question of when Jerusa-

lem fell. When I began to look into the issue, I had no ﬁrm conviction about

whether it was 587 or 586

, but I had the notion that 587 was accepted by

the more recent scholars, among whom were two that I especially esteemed,

Donald Wiseman and Kenneth Kitchen.

On the other hand, I also respected

the work of Thiele, and he settled on 586.

My procedure was to apply the completely neutral tools of Decision Analy-

sis to each of the three biblical sources that bear on this question: Ezekiel,

Jeremiah, and 2 Kings (2 Chronicles mirrors 2 Kings). It was possible that the

analysis would show that these Scriptures could not be brought into agree-

ment on the date of the fall of Jerusalem and the other dates and reign

lengths associated with it. This is the result that would have been predicted

by proponents of the various theories that say that the books of Scripture were

not authored by contemporaries of the events described, such as Jeremiah

and Ezekiel, but were the handiwork of anonymous and late-date editors or

post-exilic pretenders who wrote in the name of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. But

instead of ﬁnding a conﬂict among the various writings, the results showed

that the three scriptural sources were internally consistent, consistent with

each other, and consistent with a date for the fall of Jerusalem in 587

The date of the destruction of Jerusalem by the armies of Nebuchad-

nezzar is one of the most important dates in world history. For that reason,

along with the great number of scholarly papers and popular articles that

have already been written on the subject, it is easy to predict that those who

have advocated 586 for the fall of Jerusalem may not readily change their

minds, however convincing a case I or anyone else could make for the 587

date. The only primary sources we have at present describing the fall of Je-

rusalem are the scriptural texts, so anyone who declares a date for that

M. Christine Tetley, “The Date of Samaria’s Fall as a Reason for Rejecting the Hypothesis of

Two Conquests,”

CBQ

64 (2002) 63.

Alberto Green, “The Chronology of the Last Days of Judah: Two Apparent Discrepancies,”

JBL

101 (1982) 57–58 footnote.

NBD

217.

Thiele,

Mysterious Numbers

187, 189–91.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders

231

event must justify it from the Scriptures, relating the pertinent texts to the

latest dates before the fall that are preserved in the Babylonian Chronicle.

I would hope that all those who hold a high view of the inspiration of Scrip-

ture and who previously advocated 586 will come around to the 587 ﬁgure,

since it is the only date that can be reconciled with all the texts involved.

Even among these scholars, however, there might be some who hold onto

the 586 date for some reason such as their presupposition that Zedekiah

absolutely must have used accession reckoning for his reign. Why Zedekiah

switched to non-accession reckoning I do not know. But anyone who insists

that he could not have made a decree to switch to non-accession reckoning

should be obliged to tell us why it was impossible for him to do so.

Before someone asserts that I arrived at 587 by forcing my preconcep-

tions on the scriptural data and then manipulating the numbers to come up

with this conclusion, let me spell out what my preconceptions might be in

the matter.

First, as someone with mathematical training, I would not allow any reign

lengths to be measured in a non-accession sense. It is scandalous that one

year could be counted for each of two kings, thus throwing into confusion

what should be a simple addition of reign lengths to show elapsed time. Non-

accession counting will not be allowed.

A second preconceived idea results from my being enough of a moralist to

say that we ought to obey the commandments of God. Since God told Moses

that the year was to start in Nisan (Exod 12:2), all years must be reckoned

that way. But, says someone, the Jewish people to this day celebrate the New

Year in Tishri! Such disobedience will not be tolerated; the year starts in

Nisan.

My third presupposition arises because I see nothing foolish in consistency,

so I must be one of those little minds that Emerson complained about.

a kingdom starts measuring its reign lengths in one way, it ought to keep

measuring them that way as long as it exists, even if it got started on the

wrong foot (i.e. non-accession reckoning).

Now imagine how I felt when the analysis for the reign of Zedekiah showed

that (1) he used non-accession reckoning; (2) he started his years in Tishri;

and (3) he changed the reckoning system from that used by his immediate

predecessors. Should I force my eminently reasonable preconceptions on the

data, declaring that every text that does not agree with my scheme is the

late-date invention of an incompetent redactor? Or should I take the place

of a learner and think that maybe I need to change some of my ideas?

iv. the unexpected (incredible) result

The major lessons to be learned from the four tables accompanying this

paper are not the dates and the calculations shown in the tables, but the

generalities and truths that may be inferred from them. These generalities

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

journal of the evangelical theological society

232

bear the same relation to the ﬁgures of the tables that the theories of science

bear to a notebook showing the results from an experiment that was testing

one of those theories. The results of the experiment are a means to an end, and

that end is either verifying or disproving the theory. The results are espe-

cially important if the experiment is designed in such a way that the data,

properly collected and interpreted, can be used to show which of two com-

peting theories offers the better explanation of physical reality. To use an

example from my “Samaria” paper, emission lines from the hydrogen atom

were found on the spectrographic plate exactly where they were predicted to

be by the theories of quantum mechanics, and the location of these lines could

not be predicted by the laws of classical electromagnetism. The immediate

result of the experiment was a set of tables representing wave lengths taken

from a spectroscopic plate; the ultimate result was the replacement of one

theory with another for the explanation of phenomena on the atomic level.

Before any “ultimate results” are deduced from the tables in the present

article, some observations need to be made about the characteristics of these

tables.

The tables are internally consistent and consistent with each other

The starting and ending years match with the length of the king’s reign,

and the end of each reign matches the starting year of the next king’s sole

reign. The starting dates used in the tables of synchronisms are the same as

the starting dates in the reign length tables.

The tables are consistent with several ﬁxed dates in Middle Eastern

history

. This point is less trivial than the preceding one, which would have

been satisﬁed by most, but not all, chronologies that appeared before Thiele’s

work.

Thiele’s chronology (which differs from that of the present paper in

only a few places) won the respect of historians because its dates agree with

the following dates in Assyrian and Babylonian history: the Battle of Qarqar

in 853

; the tribute of Jehu to Shalmaneser III in 841

; the capture of

Samaria by Shalmaneser V in 723

; the invasion of Sennacherib in 701

;

the Battle of Carchemish in 605

; and the ﬁrst capture of Jerusalem by

Nebuchadnezzar in 597

The four tables are consistent with all texts in Kings and Chronicles

that give reign lengths or that match the starting year of a king to the regnal

year of a king in the rival kingdom.

These are the familiar texts that either

give the reign length by itself or that have the form “In year x of y, king of

Israel, z became king of Judah and he reigned w years.” My “Samaria” paper,

and articles which preceded it by other authors, argued that this stereotyped

formula represents extracts taken from the ofﬁcial court records of Judah

and Israel. Every scriptural text that has one of these extracts or simple reign

lengths, from the time of David to Zedekiah, is represented in the four tables.

The four tables are consistent with the texts in Jeremiah and Ezekiel

that give synchronisms or dates for the last years of the Judean monarchy.

The older interpreters introduced interregna in their chronologies, so that reign lengths do

not always match beginning dates of the kings.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders

233

My “Jerusalem” paper listed all synchronisms (seven) in Jeremiah and three

in Ezekiel,

and these are consistent with the dates of Table 2 of the present

article. A similar statement cannot be made for any chronology that places

the fall of Jerusalem in 586 bc.

All of the numbers in the tables (reign lengths, dates, and synchronisms)

were determined by ﬁrst ascertaining the methods of measurement used in

the Scriptures. None of them represents an emendation of the text. To ex-

plain these observations and the characteristics listed above, the following

conclusion, generalizing theory, or thesis will be stated: Tables 1 through 4

represent the reign length formulas of the ofﬁcial court recorders of Judah

and Israel, preserved for us without alteration by the Masoretic and prior

scribal traditions.

According to a great number of scholars who have written in this ﬁeld,

for anyone to be able to produce a chronology of the Hebrew kings that is con-

sistent with all the scriptural texts and also consistent with ﬁxed external

dates is a most surprising and unexpected result. Many have expressed the

opinion that it could never be done. In an article in the AUSS, Thiele listed

fourteen authors who stated quite dogmatically that the dates and synchro-

nisms in the Books of Kings were in error and no consistent chronology could

be constructed from these texts.

These were eminent scholars, and their

opinions as cited by Thiele included the following:

∑ S. R. and G. R. Driver: “Since, however, it is clear on various grounds that

these synchronisms are not original, any attempt to base a chronological

scheme on them may be disregarded.”

∑ R. Kittel: “Wellhausen has shown, by convincing reasons, that the synchro-

nisms within the Book of Kings cannot possibly rest on ancient tradition,

but are on the contrary simply the products of artiﬁcial reckoning . . .”

∑ Theodore H. Robinson: “Wellhausen is surely right in believing that the syn-

chronisms in Kings are worthless, being merely a late compilation from the

actual ﬁgures given.”

∑ R. H. Pfeiffer: “In spite of these discrepancies, inaccuracies, and errors, the

chronology of Kings is not fantastic.”

∑ K. Marti: “Almost along the whole line, the discrepancy between synchro-

nisms and years of reign is incurable.”

∑ C. H. Gordon: “The numerical errors in the Books of Kings have deﬁed every

attempt to ungarble them. Those errors are largely the creation of the edi-

tors . . . the editors did not execute the synchronisms skillfully.”

To this list of “assured results” may be added the observation of W. F.

Albright: “It is incredible that all these numbers can have been handed down

through so many editors and copyists without often becoming corrupt. . . .”

There is some uncertainty about a fourth possible synchronism in Ezekiel, which is the “thir-

tieth year” mentioned in Ezek 1:1. It is possible that this refers to the thirtieth year of a Jubilee

cycle if Ezekiel was using an archaic method of counting Jubilee years, or it is also possible that

it refers to the thirtieth year of the prophet’s life. This synchronism has been left out of the

present summation.

Edwin Thiele, “Synchronisms of the Hebrew Kings,” AUSS 1 (1963) 124–25.

W. F. Albright, “The Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel,” BASOR 100 (1945) 17.

journal of the evangelical theological society234

The context here shows that by “incredible” Albright meant that no one should

believe that an authentic chronology could have been passed down to us.

But our thesis is that, all these scholars notwithstanding, this is precisely

what has happened: the internal and external consistencies of Tables 1

through 4 are the characteristics that we would expect if we did indeed have

the original and authentic ﬁgures from the period of the Hebrew monarchs.

This consistency does not amount to proof of authenticity, but it would be

very difﬁcult to understand how it could have come about unless the syn-

chronisms and reign lengths are authentic, i.e. represent historical fact. As

was mentioned above, the tables contain all the numbers representing exact

reign length ﬁgures and synchronisms for the thirty-seven kings and one

queen who reigned in two kingdoms from Solomon to Zedekiah. The time from

the ﬁrst year of Solomon to the last synchronism given in 2 Kgs 25:27 is 409

years; to describe events in this time span, sixty-ﬁve reign length ﬁgures

and forty-two synchronisms to the rival kingdom are given in Kings and

Chronicles. Furthermore, there are six exact synchronisms to events that

can be dated in Assyrian and Babylonian history, plus one synchronism to

an event (the exodus) that can be independently dated by references in the

Talmud. To this should be added the seven synchronisms in Jeremiah and

three in Ezekiel that are also consistent with these tables. Altogether this

makes 124 exact statistics that are summarized in the chronology of the

tables at the end of this article. As Albright said, it is “incredible” that this

complexity of numbers and their interdependencies could have been trans-

mitted to us without error, or that all these ﬁgures could represent the

actual dates of the kings of Judah and Israel. Yet it is our thesis that this

is exactly what we have. How could this “incredible” result have come about?

There seem to be three alternatives: (1) a naturalistic explanation; (2) a

miracle; or (3) it is all due to the clever manipulation of ﬁgures by Thiele

and those who followed him; the chronology is not authentic, but is a syn-

thetic formulation of writers who were “trying to prove that the Bible is

true.” Let us examine these alternatives.

v. possible explanations of the incredible result

1. The naturalistic explanation.

a. Jeremiah and Ezekiel. As a naturalistic explanation, it can be main-

tained that the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel were written by the two

seventh/sixth-century prophets of that name—or if not by them, by someone

who lived at the same time, although this is more difﬁcult to imagine than

is the simple proposition that Jeremiah really wrote Jeremiah and Ezekiel

really wrote Ezekiel, since it would be clear that a fraud was taking place

if the two prophets were still alive when the fraud was perpetrated. The

authors then would have had direct knowledge of the events that are men-

tioned in the two books. All dates and synchronisms would be authentic be-

cause they were recorded by men who lived through the times.

b. Kings and Chronicles. For the Books of Kings and Chronicles, the

naturalistic explanation would be that there was a school of scholars simi-

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 235

lar to, if not identical to, the schools of the prophets that Thiele maintained

were the sources of the Book of Kings.

The school somehow felt responsible

for keeping annals of the history of the two kingdoms, and it passed on this

responsibility through the centuries. Parallels to this can be found in the

schools of Jewish rabbis who preserved learning during the Middle Ages or

in the academy of Plato, which endured for nine centuries after its founding.

c. Transmission to the present. Finally, there would have to be a tradi-

tion of scribes who instituted very careful procedures and checks to make

sure that the copying process was as accurate as it was possible to make it,

so that the original writings could be preserved through the centuries. This

might be hard to envision if we did not have the example of a scholastic tra-

dition that did exactly these things: the Masoretes. All that is necessary is

to imagine a similar reverence and care for the sacred writings among their

custodians for the centuries intervening between the original compositions

and the beginning of the Masoretic tradition.

These assumptions would explain why the chronology represented by

Tables 1 through 4 is internally consistent, consistent with every Scripture

in the six books of the OT that gives exact chronological details over a span

of four centuries, and consistent with ﬁxed external dates in Assyria and

Babylonia. The consistency would be because the dates and numbers are all

in accord with reality, and they have been transmitted to us correctly by the

scribal schools, many of whose methods of assuring accuracy we know from

the traditions of the Masoretes. These are all plausible assumptions, and there

is nothing inherently supernatural about them. They offer an explanation

that is almost identical to the historic position of Judaism and Christianity,

but differing in this one essential: the supernatural supervision of the Holy

Spirit, who determined the content of the texts, and who also guaranteed that

the autographs were without error and that the copying process preserved

for us a text that is close enough to the autographs so that we can have con-

ﬁdence in the doctrines presented. The traditional approach, then, incorpo-

rates something from the naturalistic explanation and the supernatural

explanation presented next.

2. A miracle. If Jeremiah and Ezekiel were not actually written by con-

temporaries of the events described, and if Kings and Chronicles were not

derived from written records preserved by some such school as was envis-

aged under the naturalistic explanation, then the alternative is that these

various books were written by people of a later time who had no direct knowl-

edge of the events recorded. At this point the imagination can run wild in

hypothesizing what the sources utilized by these authors might have been.

Anyone who is familiar with the history of biblical criticism in the last two

centuries knows that such wild hypothesizing is exactly what has happened.

The resultant theories are marked by the scholar imposing his imagina-

tive ideas on the scriptural data, and as would be expected, there arose a

great confusion of theories about which sections of Scripture came from which

Thiele, Mysterious Numbers chap. 10.

journal of the evangelical theological society236

imagined source. The lack of consensus on what the source documents were

should have served as a warning that there was something radically wrong

with these theories. They did, however, have one thing in common: they all

agreed that the persons responsible for the ﬁnal form of the OT documents

lived later, often much later, than the events described in those documents.

If that were the case, then how could these various late-date authors and

editors produce synchronisms and dates that without exception are internally

consistent, consistent with those of the other late-date editors and pseude-

pigraphic authors, and consistent with long-forgotten events from the sur-

rounding nations? The only answer seems to be a miracle: the supernatural

intervention of the Holy Spirit somehow made all things come out right,

overruling the ignorance and mistaken ideas of the writers of Scripture.

The greater the distance of the writer from the events described, the greater

the miracle must have been. The more radical the form critic (as measured

by how late he dated the writings), the greater he must imagine the miracle

to be so that his late-date writer or editor could have come up with a harmo-

nious chronology for events long past, when even the method of measuring

years or assigning reign lengths had been forgotten.

Radical form critics, however, seem from their writings to have a tendency

not to believe in the supernatural, so it is doubtful that any who have this out-

look will resort to miracles to explain the consistencies found in Tables 1

through 4. They will surely prefer the next alternative, since the ﬁrst (nat-

uralistic) alternative is contrary to their one unifying principle, which is that

Scripture is almost always written later than the date that would be assumed

by taking the scriptural texts at face value.

3. The consistencies and apparent authenticity of these tables are due to

manipulation by Thiele and those who followed him. In this section it will

be demonstrated that the harmony in the chronology of Tables 1 through 4

is not the result of a clever manipulation of ﬁgures by Thiele and those who

corrected the few errors in his work, but is the result of applying a method

which is more logical and better suited for determining a chronology from

historical data than is the method used by most of Thiele’s critics.

To substantiate this statement, some misconceptions about Thiele’s

method need to be dealt with. Fortunately, that was done very well in a

paper by Kenneth Strand, which is highly recommended as an overview that

helps us to understand Thiele’s approach.

Refuting the idea that Thiele,

by trial and error, juggled dates until he could match ﬁxed dates in Assyrian

and Babylonian history, Strand wrote, “His only ‘trial and error’ procedure

was in seeing how the variable factors used by the Hebrew scribes were in-

volved in producing the numbers given in the MT for the lengths of reign

and synchronisms of the monarchs of the two Hebrew kingdoms. No dates

whatever—either biblical or extrabiblical—were placed in his charts until

he had established a pattern of internal consistency based solely on the bib-

Kenneth A. Strand, “Thiele’s Biblical Chronology as a Corrective for ExtraBiblical Dates,”

AUSS 34 (1996) 295–317.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 237

lical data.”

This is corroborated by Thiele himself, who wrote, “Let it be

repeated that the pattern of reign lengths set forth in the present book is

not the product of certain arbitrary adjustments to secure a series of pre-

determined results. Rather, it resulted from a quest to ascertain whether or

not the numbers now found in Kings could be brought together into some

harmonious arrangement of reigns, and whether or not such an arrangement

once produced was in harmony with the established dates of Near Eastern

history.”

The most important point to understand about Thiele’s approach, then, is

that he started with the scriptural texts and as the ﬁrst step sought to ﬁnd

the methods used by the authors of Scripture in recording their chronologi-

cal data. This is the key that explains the successes that eventually came from

his efforts. These successes could not have come if the texts were corrupt, as

the scholars cited above imagined them to be. Although it was arduous work

to ascertain the measuring methods used by the scriptural authors, Thiele

wrote of his progress once the methods were discovered as follows: “It was

four years after I had begun a serious study of the chronological involvements

of the Hebrew kings before I was able to work my way through the data for

the ﬁrst two or three kings of Israel and Judah. But then, having once dis-

covered the various principles involved, in only a few weeks I made my way

through to the end.”

In contrast with this approach is the method of all those who come to the

Scriptures with preconceived ideas and who then force those ideas onto the

data. This approach invariably leads to conﬂict with the scriptural data, which

the older conservative scholars attempted to resolve by introducing inter-

regna, and which more liberal scholars explained by saying that the data

was in error, which of course reinforced their philosophical presupposition

about the unreliability of the Scriptures. In my previous papers I have ar-

gued that this method of approaching biblical chronology is the single largest

source of confusion in the ﬁeld; my “Samaria” paper labeled it the “Factor

One” source of errors. An early example of this was the chronology of Thomas

Lydiat, who used an old Jewish notion that it would be 4000 years from the

creation to the coming of the Messiah. Lydiat thus set the creation of the world

in 4004 bc, a date which became familiar to the world through the writings

of Archbishop Ussher.

The goal of Lydiat and Ussher was doubtless to re-

inforce the faith of God’s people, but later scholars have produced artiﬁcial

schemes as a means to try to show that the scriptural texts dealing with chro-

nology were contrived and mythical, as I discussed brieﬂy in a footnote to my

“Jerusalem” paper regarding Wellhausen and one of his modern followers.

The relevance to our present discussion is this: It is not Thiele who should

be accused of juggling the texts to come up with an artiﬁcial and synthetic

Ibid. 297.

Thiele, Mysterious Numbers 18.

Ibid. 21.

Jeremy Hughes, Secrets of the Times (Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1990) 262.

Young, Jerusalem 28–29 n. 13.

journal of the evangelical theological society238

scheme; instead it is those like Wellhausen who had some preconceived idea

that they imposed on the Scripture, declaring that everything that did not

ﬁt their scheme represented a factual error introduced by the mistaken no-

tions of a late-date editor. “Artiﬁcial” and “synthetic” are adjectives that

should not be applied to Thiele’s method; they are more aptly applied to

those who produced these artiﬁcial chronologies and consequent “Factor One”

errors that are the chief source of confusion in the ﬁeld.

The reason that Thiele found harmony in his chronology was therefore not

because he cleverly manipulated the dates; it was because he started with

the proper methodology, and that methodology uncovered the harmony that

was inherent in the scriptural texts. The harmony, however, remained hidden

until Thiele (and to some extent Coucke before him) discovered the basic

dating methods that were used by the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (Tishri

years for Judah, Nisan years for Israel, etc.).

Thiele’s chronology needed emending in a few places, not because his

basic approach was wrong, but rather because it was incomplete: the thesis

of my three former papers was that there were combinations of factors that

Thiele overlooked, and these combinations resolved some problems that he

tended to gloss over.

In the ﬁrst two papers I introduced a method that can

help eliminate this kind of oversight. It is to be hoped that future technical

papers in the area of biblical chronology will adopt this method—Decision

Tables—in the treatment of knotty problems with synchronisms and reign

lengths.

Most of the scholars who write in this ﬁeld are proﬁcient in at least two

(usually more) languages besides their native tongue. The effort needed to

become proﬁcient in the use of Decision Tables is far less than that required

to learn a foreign language. Therefore it should not be too much to ask that

this skill be learned by any who, in the future, want to deal with the kind

of problems represented by the chronology of the divided kingdoms. Hopefully

I have made it clear that Thiele’s lack of acquaintance with this methodol-

ogy sometimes made him overlook more satisfactory solutions than the ones

he settled for. But the failure to explore all the possibilities characterizes

far more research in this area than that of Thiele. On the negative side, the

consequence has been declarations that the Scripture was in error when this

had not been demonstrated, and when in fact it was the scholar’s method

that was deﬁcient, not the Scripture. On the positive side, applying a meth-

odology that reveals all the possibilities can open up rewarding insights. My

paper on “Solomon” resulted when I applied Decision Tables to the begin-

ning of the divided monarchy and discovered what Thiele had overlooked

there. Even more rewarding was the application to the scriptural texts deal-

ing with the fall of Jerusalem, out of which was revealed an agreement in

My “Solomon” paper dealt with Thiele’s failure to examine the possibility that Solomon died

in the ﬁrst half of 931n rather than the last half. My “Jerusalem” paper examined possibilities for

the ways Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2 Kings treated chronological data that Thiele apparently had not

explored. My “Samaria” paper dealt with the Ahaz/Hezekiah coregency that many scholars sug-

gested but which Thiele did not consider. All these oversights were called “Factor Two” errors in

my “Samaria” paper.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 239

all the texts involved that I had never seen before. The method is logically

sound; it is not a means of imposing the scholar’s views on the data—it is

the opposite of that. In a real sense it completes the methodology that Thiele

pursued when his ﬁrst goal was to ﬁnd the means by which the scriptural

authors treated the history of their times, since it can provide all the possi-

bilities that are consistent with foundational principles.

If, however, writers ignore this tool when they examine some problem in

the chronology of the kingdom period, they are not justiﬁed in declaring that

the Scripture is in error because it does not ﬁt their scheme. The number of

papers that have done this in the past is legion, but now discerning readers

should have the knowledge that enables them to determine when an author

has declared that the Scripture is in error, but he or she has not done the

necessary analysis to validate that conclusion. Unless a competent use of

Decision Tables, or their logical equivalent, has been carried out to show that

no reasonable combination of factors can account for these chronological

texts, no writer is justiﬁed in declaring that the scriptural texts are in error.

The techniques of Decision Tables can be learned from several books that

are commercially available. As of the present writing, there is a web site,

www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~jharney/table.html, that offers a good introduction.

The basic idea can also be learned from my ﬁrst two papers, particularly the

“Jerusalem” paper.

What all this means for the third “explanation”—that the harmony in

Tables 1 through 4 is a result of clever manipulation of the data—is that

this explanation is simply not tenable. Scholars who follow Thiele’s approach

of letting the Scriptures dictate which options are possible have far less

freedom to produce arbitrary schemes than do authors who invent their own

schemes that contradict the Scriptures, such as Wellhausen and his follow-

ers. The only reasonable alternative we are left with is that the harmony of

the chronology displayed in Tables 1 through 4 exists because we have in

these tables the authentic reign lengths and synchronisms as given by the

ofﬁcial court recorders of Israel and Judah, who began their task three thou-

sand years ago and ﬁnished it some four centuries later.

vi. limited inspiration

Theories of limited inspiration generally hold that there are major theo-

logical doctrines to be found in the Bible and these are inspired and should

be believed, but it is too much to expect that the Scriptures are accurate in

all matters of history and science. This necessarily produces a contradiction,

since one of the major theological doctrines of the Bible is that the Scripture

is without error in all its parts.

Despite the logical contradiction, theories of limited inspiration maintain

that in matters of minute historical detail we must expect some errors. The

authors cited by Thiele whose statements were included in Section IV all

believed in limited inspiration. Their advocacy of that doctrine led them to

expect that the detailed chronological notes of Kings and Chronicles, spread

over more than four centuries and hence necessarily coming from different

journal of the evangelical theological society240

authors, could not have all been recorded and transmitted correctly. If errors

are to be found, what better place to go ﬁshing for them than in this well-

stocked pool, teeming with an abundance of dates, reign lengths, and syn-

chronisms? Any theory of limited inspiration would recognize this as the

prime place in the whole Bible to ﬁnd the errors assumed by those who hold

to an errant Scripture. But a diligent search ﬁnds no such errors! What is

found instead is that all of the scriptural texts dealing with exact chrono-

logical details in these four books, plus the texts in Jeremiah and Ezekiel,

have the characteristics of authenticity. Such a ﬁnding strikes at the heart

of theories of limited inspiration. It is hard to imagine how a more damaging

blow could have been delivered to this doctrine. In an area where, if it were

true, we had every reason to expect results, it produced nothing.

Those who, because of their theological or moral standpoints, feel com-

pelled to continue in a doctrine of a defective Scripture can try to ignore this

argument (for the authenticity of all exact chronological details in six major

books of the Bible), or they can seek refuge in some other area of Scripture

where errors are assumed to exist. If they attempt to take the argument for

errancy to other areas, this question must be answered: Why do we ﬁnd

apparent authenticity and complete trustworthiness in the one area where

previously the holders of this doctrine were conﬁdent that we would ﬁnd not

just one, but multiple errors?

Take the example of two witnesses in a murder trial. Witness One has just

given a testimony that has 124 details that can be checked by independent

means. His testimony also includes statements in areas that the court cannot

check. Witness Two comes to the stand and makes several sweeping state-

ments about the unreliability of the details given by Witness One; he alleges

that certain individuals were not in the place that Witness One said they

were at the time stated, and that many of the time periods in Witness One’s

testimony are false.

Now suppose that an outside expert is brought in, and the expert’s tes-

timony shows that all 124 statements of exact particulars that Witness One

gave are consistent with his ﬁndings. Furthermore, these 124 items are not

matters of common knowledge, but are obscure details that could have been

known only by ﬁrst-hand experience. After this expert testimony, the only

reasonable conclusion is that Witness One was telling the truth about these

items; the testimony of Witness One must be accepted in this area that was

checked by the expert’s testimony. But there is another consequence: the

statements of Witness One would have great weight in the areas that cannot

be checked. The entire testimony of Witness One must be given the most se-

rious consideration in any further deliberations of the court.

Having established the integrity and credibility of Witness One, the court

would necessarily decide that the testimony of Witness Two could not be true

in the area where Witness One was vindicated, since Witness Two contra-

dicted Witness One in that area. Furthermore, since Witness Two was wrong

in the area that could be checked, all statements that Witness Two made in

other areas that could not be checked would necessarily be called into ques-

One Line Short

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 241

tion; his testimony no longer has weight in any area. Witness Two’s credi-

bility has been destroyed.

The analogy can be made more sweeping. Witness Two could have been

represented not as a single witness, but as a whole series of witnesses who

cannot agree among themselves on what actually happened, and who con-

tradict each other in their sequences of events (chronologies). The one uni-

fying principle in their testimony is that the statements of Witness One must

be false somewhere. When asked why they are so hostile to the testimony of

Witness One, they reply that it is nothing personal, but they ﬁnd it incred-

ible that Witness One could have been right in all of 124 precise statements.

Their philosophical commitments do not allow them to believe that anyone,

in heaven or on earth, could be completely truthful in all that he says.

vii. some cautions

It is possible to make some unwarranted assumptions based on the argu-

ments presented thus far. This section cautions against a few of these.

First, it should not be assumed that all scriptural texts dealing with chron-

ological issues anywhere in Scripture are free from possible textual prob-

lems. It is remarkable and even unexpected that the 124 exact synchronisms

and reign lengths dealt with in this paper, covering the period from Solomon

to Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, ﬁt together harmoniously and not one of them

requires emendation. However, when we leave these texts and go back to the

time of Saul, we encounter difﬁculty with the MT of 1 Sam 13:1. Another

problem text is Exod 12:40, where the Samaritan version of the verse is more

consistent with other chronological texts than is the MT version. It is interest-

ing, however, that in places like this we can ﬁnd other Scriptures that allow

us to state with some conﬁdence what the original reading was.

A second caution is about the use of Decision Tables: it must be realized

that the range of issues they can address is limited. There are many problems

in chronology for which they can offer no assistance. An example might be

the chronology of the book of Judges. The kinds of problems they should be

used with are those for which several parameters affect a result, and different

values for the parameters combine to produce different values for the result.

Another caution is that the major thrust of my work has been to show

that the scriptural texts regarding the chronology of the time are in agree-

ment with each other, while only minimal attention was devoted to external

consistency with events in the surrounding nations. It should not be pre-

sumed that because internal harmony has been demonstrated, therefore all

chronological problems of the period have been solved. There will continue

to be debate by Assyriologists, for example, over the dating of contacts of

Tiglath-Pileser III with Uzziah and Menahem. Discussions like this over

how the Hebrew chronology interfaces with extra-biblical events will still be

necessary, but the demonstration of a chronology of the period for Israel and

Judah that is internally consistent should lend credibility to the biblical evi-

dence in resolving issues in the chronologies of neighboring kingdoms.

journal of the evangelical theological society242

viii. conclusions

(1) The proper approach to use in constructing a chronology for the kings

of Judah and Israel is one which ﬁrst determines the methods of

dating used in the scriptural texts. Use of this approach is a primary

reason for the successes of Thiele’s chronology. Failure to use it is the

primary reason for the confusion of systems produced by authors who

followed a different approach.

(2) This approach could not have produced a chronology that is inter-

nally consistent and consistent with ﬁxed extra-biblical dates unless

the scriptural texts were characterized by internal harmony and har-

mony among the six books of Scripture that give exact chronological

data for the kingdom period.

(3) The most logical explanation of the internal harmony and harmony

with external dates is that all these texts give us the true chronology

of the time.

(4) No reign lengths or synchronisms of an exact nature from six books

that give chronological details (1 and 2 Chronicles, 1 and 2 Kings, Jere-

miah, and Ezekiel) were omitted from the studies that produced the

chronology of Tables 1 through 4.

(5) The explanation that this harmony, internal consistency, and agree-

ment with ﬁxed external dates from Assyria and Babylonia were

brought about by clever manipulation of data by Thiele and those who

followed him is not tenable.

(6) Although Thiele’s basic approach was correct, his methodology was in-

complete. Occasionally he overlooked possibilities that offered a better

explanation of the relevant texts than the explanation he settled on.

(7) The use of Decision Tables can provide all the possibilities that are

consistent with an author’s working hypotheses, and this methodol-

ogy is therefore recommended as the logical completion of Thiele’s

approach. It should be utilized in any study which has to deal with

the various options (Tishri or Nisan years, accession or non-accession

counting, etc.) that characterize the period of the Hebrew monarchies.

It might be contended that Thiele and those who followed him were unduly

inﬂuenced by a philosophical or theological disposition—namely the doctrine

of scriptural inerrancy. The answer to this is simple: there is no place where

such a presupposition has produced a result (a date, reign length, or syn-

chronism) that is contrary to reason and to the best historical method that

would be used for any other text from ancient times. Rather than being un-

reasonable, the basic postulates in Thiele’s system are simpler and more con-

sistent with the demonstrated practices of the ancient Near East than are

the presuppositions of the radical form critics.

Inerrancy, then, is not an

Thus coregencies have been substantiated in the dynasties of Egypt (E. Bell, “The Co-Regency

of David and Solomon (I Kings 1),” VT 27 [1977] 268–79). Tishri years for Judah are suggested by

Josephus’s remark (Ant. 1.3.3) that before the exodus the years were considered to start in Tishri,

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 243

irrational principle that produces unreasonable conclusions in an unreason-

able chronology. Instead it was a working hypothesis that led Thiele, as long

as he pursued it, to very fruitful results. His abandonment of the principle

for the reign of Hezekiah produced the one area of his chronology where he

has found very few followers, and where the solution proposed by Kitchen,

Mitchell, Horn, and others has all the advantages of simplicity, agreement

with the scriptural texts involved, and consistency with the basic principles

that Thiele used elsewhere.

There is no doubt that the success of this approach (the approach of assum-

ing that the biblical records were correct until they were proved wrong) has

made a strong statement in favor of the doctrine of inerrancy. But even if it

could be proved that all the scriptural dates and synchronisms for the king-

dom period are authentic, this demonstration would still not be the primary

reason why we should believe in inerrancy. Studies which show that the Bible

is accurate and true, even in the most unexpected places such as in the

minute details of chronology, can never “prove” the doctrine of the inerrancy

of Scripture—any proof would have to establish all facts external to the

Bible, and then prove that every item in the Bible is consistent with those

facts, which is impossible. The doctrine of inerrancy has an altogether dif-

ferent basis: inerrancy must always ﬁnd its origin in the belief that it is a

major doctrine taught in the Bible itself (Deut 8:3; Ps 12:6; 93:5; 111:7–8;

119:89, 140, 160; 2 Tim 3:16; Titus 1:2; 1 Pet 1:25), that it is unmistakably

the position of our Savior, who knows all things (Matt 5:18; Luke 16:17; 24:25;

John 5:46, 47; 10:35; 17:17), and that God promises blessing to those who

believe his Word (Gen 15:6; 2 Chr 20:20; Rom 4:3; Jas 2:23). To this can be

added the philosophical reason that if there is a God and we are his crea-

tures, then there is a certain moral obligation for the Divine Being to make

his thoughts known to us in a revelation that is completely trustworthy. No

amount of proof of a scientiﬁc or historical sort will ever go beyond these

reasons for believing in the doctrine of inerrancy of the Scriptures.

Although the demonstration of harmony between any set of scriptural

texts and historical fact cannot prove the doctrine of inerrancy, what can be

said is that the internal harmony of all the ﬁgures in Tables 1 through 4,

plus their consistency with ﬁxed extra-biblical dates, are exactly what we

would expect if the doctrine of inerrancy of God’s Word is true. Furthermore,

the consistency and harmony of these tables are not what would be pre-

dicted by any theory of the limited inspiration of the Scriptures. Such theo-

ries fail to explain the apparent authenticity of the chronology in the tables,

and approaches based on these theories (approaches which assumed that the

as well as by Jewish practice to this day. By observing the New Year in Nisan, the northern king-

dom was adopting the system used in Babylonia and Assyria. As for rival reigns (Omri and Tibni,

Pekah and Menahem), the case of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III in Egypt offers a parallel; indeed,

Egyptologists say that whole dynasties from Manetho’s list were contemporaneous rivals. Compare

these well-substantiated practices with some of the postulates of, for example, Wellhausen: that

writing was not known among the Hebrews in the time of Moses; that there were no coregencies in

Judah and Israel; that the use of dual divine names implies dual sources (disproved at Ugarit); etc.

journal of the evangelical theological society244

scriptural data was wrong and needed correcting by the author’s scheme)

have not been able to achieve the success that Thiele’s approach has had in

predicting the correct dates of events in Assyrian history. It can therefore be

said that in the area of chronology, approaches which assume an errant scrip-

ture have failed, and progress will only be made when we follow the path on

which Thiele (and Coucke, and others) initially set out, of ﬁrst humbling

ourselves enough that we can approach the Scriptures as if they really are

the Word of God, a Word from which we need to learn before we brashly pro-

duce theories that show our cleverness.

To summarize: the apparent authenticity of all the chronological details

shown in Tables 1 through 4 would never have been predicted by a theory of

limited inspiration. Any such theory would produce, instead, the conﬁdent

assertions of the authors cited in Section IV, that the chronological details

of the OT are the locus where we can be sure that errors are found. Such

“Witness Two” type statements are no longer credible; the apparent authen-

ticity of the chronological details of Scripture is precisely what would be ex-

pected if the doctrine of limited inspiration is false and that of inerrancy is

true. But, as said before, our reasons for believing in the doctrine of inerrancy

are not based on demonstrations like this; the most that we can say is that

these ﬁndings in the ﬁeld of chronology are consistent with such a belief.

The doctrine will not be ﬁnally proven until our Redeemer returns and asks

why we did not believe everything that was written in his eternal, inerrant

Word.

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 245

ix. tables of reign-lengths and synchronisms

For instructions on how to read the ﬁgures in these tables, see Section I,

“Understanding the Tables.”

Column 5 has the king’s start and end dates (in Nisan/Tishri notation) that were

used by the court recorders in determining the length of the king’s reign. Column 6

has the elapsed years based on those start and end dates. When there are two ﬁgures

in column 6, this indicates that the reign length given in Scripture (the ﬁrst ﬁgure) is

by non-accession counting. The comparison of column 5 with the beginning and ending

dates and with column 6 shows that the court recorders of Israel always kept in mind

the ofﬁcial starting year of a king and were exact in all their representations of his

reign length.

Table 1. Chronology of the Kings of Israel

King

Overlapping

reigns

Began

sole reign Ended

Ofﬁcial

start and end

Years

reigned

Jeroboam I 931n 910t/909n 931n–910n 22 (21)

Nadab 910t/909n 909t/908n 910n–909n 2 (1)

Baasha 909t/908n 886t/885n 909n–886n 24 (23)

Elah 886t/885n 885t/884n 886n–885n 2 (1)

Zimri 885t/884n 885t/884n 885n 7 days

Tibni 885t/884n 880n/880t 885n–880n (not stated)

Omri 885t/884n 880n/880t 874t/873n 885n–874n 12 (11)

Ahab 874t/873n 853n/853t 874n–853n 22 (21)

Ahaziah 853n/853t 852n/852t 853n–852n 2 (1)

Joram 852n/852t 841n/841t 852n–841n 12 (11)

Jehu 841n/841t 814t/813n 841n–814n 28 (27)

Jehoahaz 814t/813n 798n/798t 814n–798n 17 (16)

Jehoash 798n/798t 782t/781n 798n–782n 16

Jeroboam II 793n 782t/781n 753, Elul

(Sep)

793n–753n 41 (40)

Zechariah 753, Elul 752, Adar

(Mar)

753n–753n 6 mo.

Shallum 752, Adar 752, Nisan

(Apr)

753n–752n 1 mo.

Menahem 752, Nisan 742t/741n 752n–742n 10

Pekahiah 742t/741n 740t/739n 742n–740n 2

Pekah 752, Nisan 740t/739n 732t/731n 752n–732n 20

Hoshea 732t/731n 723n/723t 732n–723n 9

journal of the evangelical theological society246

Some reign lengths are measured from the start of a coregency. Jotham’s sixteen (ﬁfteen)

years ended when his son Ahaz was installed by the pro-Assyrian faction in Judah, in

735n/735t, although some considered him the rightful ruler until his death in 732t, thus

giving him the twenty years mentioned in 2 Kgs 15:30. The comparison of column 5 with

the beginning and ending dates and with column 6 shows that the court recorders of Judah

always kept in mind the ofﬁcial starting year of a king and were exact in all their rep-

resentations of his reign length.

Table 2. Chronology of the Kings of Judah

(dates are conjectural for Saul and David)

King

Began

co-regency

Began

sole reign Ended

Ofﬁcial

start and end

Years

reigned

Saul 1051t? 1009t? 1051t–1009t? 42?

David 1009t? 969t? 1009t–969t? 40

Solomon 971t 969t? 932t 971t–932t 40 (39)

Rehoboam 932t 914n/914t 932t–915t 17

Abijah 914n/914t 912t/911n 915t–912t 3

Asa 912t/911n 871t/870n 912t–871t 41

Jehoshaphat 873t 871t/870n 848n/848t 873t–849t 25 (24)

Jehoram 854t 848n/848t 841n/841t 849t–842t 8 (7)

Ahaziah 841n/841t 841n/841t 842t–842t 1 (0)

Athaliah 841n/841t 835n/835t 842t–836t 7 (6)

Joash 835n/835t 796n/796t 836t–797t 40 (39)

Amaziah 796n/796t 767n/767t 797t–768t 29

Uzziah 791t 767n/767t 740t 791t–740t 52 (51)

Jotham 750n/750t 740t (735n/735t) 732t 751t–736t 16 (15)

Ahaz 735n/735t 732t 716t/715n 732t–716t 16

Hezekiah 729t/728n 716t/715n 687t 716t–687t 29

Manasseh 697t 687t 643t 697t–643t 55 (54)

Amon 643t 641t 643t–641t 2

Josiah 641t 609 Tammuz (Jul) 641t–610t 31

Jehoahaz 609

Tammuz

609 Tishri (Oct) 610t–609t 3 mo.

Jehoiakim 609

Tishri

598 21 Heshvan

(about 7 Dec 598)

609t–598t 11

Jehoiachin 598 21

Heshvan

597 2 Adar

(Mar 16)

598t 3 mo.

10 d.

Zedekiah 597 2

Adar

587 9 Tammuz

(Jul)

598t–588t 11 (10)

tables of reign lengths from the hebrew court recorders 247

Column 5 has the years that elapsed for the Judean king, giving the synchronism to Judah

provided by the court recorders of Israel. Although the court recorders would not have written

things in this fashion, the dates they used correspond to those displayed here in Nisan/Tishri

notation and their calculations correspond to those shown in column 5. By comparison with

column 4 and Table 2, it will be seen that the court recorders of Israel always used an ofﬁcial

starting year (a Tishri year) from Judah, and they were always exact in their calculation of the

synchronism.

Table 3. Synchronisms, Israel to Judah

Reference King began in Formula

More exact

date

1 K 15:25 Nadab sole reign 2 Asa 912t–910t = 2 910t/909n

1 K 15:28, 33 Baasha sole reign 3 Asa 912t–909t = 3 909t/908n

1 K 16:8 Elah sole reign 26 Asa 912t–886t = 26 886t/885n

1 K 16:10, 15 Zimri sole reign 27 Asa 912t–885t = 27 885t/884n

1 K 16:21–23 Omri sole reign 31 Asa 912t–881t = 31 880n/880t

1 K 16:29 Ahab sole reign 38 Asa 912t–874t = 38 874t/873n

1 K 22:51 Ahaziah sole reign 17 Jehoshaphat 871t–854t = 17 853n/853t

2 K 3:1 Joram sole reign 18 Jehoshaphat 871t–853t = 18 852n/852t

2 K 1:17 Joram sole reign 2 (1) Jehoram 854t–853t = 1 852n/852t

2 K 9; 2 Ch 22 Jehu same time as Athaliah 841n/841t 841n/841t

2 K 13:1 Jehoahaz sole reign 23 (22) Joash 836t–814t = 22 814t/813n

2 K 13:10 Jehoash sole reign 37 Joash 836t–799t = 37 798n/798t

2 K 14:23 Jeroboam II sole reign 15 Amaziah 797t–782t = 15 782t/781n

2 K 15:8 Zechariah sole reign 38 (37) Uzziah 791t–754t = 37 Elul, 753

2 K 15:13 Shallum sole reign 39 (38) Uzziah 791t–753t = 38 Adar, 752

2 K 15:17 Menahem rivalry 39 (38) Uzziah 791t–753t = 38 Nisan 752

2 K 15:23 Pekahiah rivalry 50 (49) Uzziah 791t–742t = 49 742t/741n

2 K 15:27 Pekah sole reign 52 (51) Uzziah 791t–740t = 51 740t/739n

2 K 15:30 Hoshea sole reign 20 (19) Jotham 751t–732t = 19 732t/731n

2 K 17:1 Hoshea ended 12 Ahaz 736t–724t = 12 723n/723t

journal of the evangelical theological society248

Column 5 has the years that elapsed for the Israelite king, giving the synchronism

to Israel provided by the court recorders of Judah. Although the court recorders would

not have written things in this fashion, the dates they used correspond to those dis-

played here in Nisan/Tishri notation and their calculations correspond to those shown

in column 5. By comparison with column 4 and Table 1, it will be seen that the court

recorders of Judah always used an ofﬁcial starting year (a Nisan year) from Israel,

and they were always exact in their calculation of the synchronism.

Table 4. Synchronisms, Judah to Israel

Reference King began in Formula

More exact

date

1 K 15:1;

2 Ch 13:1

Abijah sole reign 18 (17)

Jeroboam

931n–914n = 17 914n/914t

1 K 15:9 Asa sole reign 20 (19)

Jeroboam

931n–912n = 19 912t/911n

1 K 22:41 Jehosh. sole reign 4 (3) Ahab 874n–871n = 3 871t/870n

2 K 8:16 Jehoram sole reign 5 (4) Joram 852n–848n = 4 848n/848t

2 K 8:25 Ahaziah sole reign 12 (11)

Joram

852n–841n = 11 841n/841t

2 K 9:29 Ahaziah sole reign 11 Joram 852n–841n = 11 841n/841t

2 K 9;

2 Ch 22

Athaliah same time as Jehu 841n/841t 841n/841t

2 K 12:1 Joash sole reign 7 (6) Jehu 841n–835n = 6 835n/835t

2 K 14:1 Amaziah sole reign 2 Jehoash 798n–796n = 2 796n/796t

2 K 15:1 Uzziah sole reign 27 (26)

Jeroboam

793n–767n = 26 767n/767t

2 K 15:32 Jotham coregency 2 Pekah 752n–750n = 2 750n/750t

2 K 16:1 Ahaz coregency 17 Pekah 752n–735n = 17 735n/735t

2 K 18:1 Hezekiah coregency 3 Hoshea 732n–729n = 3 729t/728n

2 K 18:9 Hezekiah 4 (3) = Hoshea 7 729t–726t = 3

732n–725n = 7

725n/725t

2 K 18:10 Hezekiah 6 (5) = Hoshea 9 729t–724t = 5

732n–723n = 9

723n/723t

2 K 14:17;

2 Ch 25:25

Amaziah outlived Jehoash 15

years

782n–767n = 15 767n/767t