From Memories of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Biblical History — Ancient and Modern, by Philip R. Davies. . . . . .
1 and 2 Kings detail corresponding years of ascensions and deaths between kings of the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, and the lengths of reigns of each. The refrain goes like this:
In the twenty-seventh year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Azariah the son of Amaziah, king of Judah, became king. He was sixteen years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-two years in Jerusalem. (2 Kings 15:1-2)
It’s all very precise. So we can be confident that the authors were not speaking in rough generalizations when they said David ruled for 40 years as did his son Solomon. Their interest in detailed matching informs us that they were interested in precision. So we can accept that when they said 40 years they meant literally 40, not some vague “generation”.
But the scribes who authored and edited these books never expected a generation would come when every Tom, Dick and Harriette would have a cheap copy and spare pen and paper and the ability to take time to work out the details of how the reigns looked in a nice chart or table.
Probably most bible-buffs have tried it and found there are problems. When one plots on paper the years each king came to power in relation to his neighbouring dynasty, and the length of each reign, there are gaps. The figures don’t add up.
Take the king Amaziah and his successor Azariah (also called Uzziah for some reason left unexplained):
In the second year of Joash the son of Jehoahaz, king of Israel, Amaziah the son of Joash, king of Judah, became king. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. (2 Kings 14:1-2)
Joash of Israel happened to reign for 16 years (2 Kings 13:10) and was succeeded by Jeroboam II. Jeroboam’s 27th year is said to be the starting year of Azariah (see the 2 Kings 15 citation above). But if Azariah’s father reigned 29 years from the second year of Joash’s 16 year reign, then Azariah should have begun his reign around Jeroboam’s 15th year. But no, we are told in 2 Kings 15:1-2 that it began in Jeroboam’s 27th year.
There is a gap of twelve years here. No king seems to have ruled Judah in the twelve years between Amaziah’s death and Azariah’s ascension.
So an easy solution is commonly applied to explain such discrepancies. Co-regencies. If we can juggle the figures so that certain reigns overlap, and certain ascension years are really the years a prince began ruling with his father before assuming sole authority. That can be done to make the figures work out. But the trouble with this as a solution is that there is no evidence that Israel and Judah had any custom of co-regency. It is simply a made up ad hoc guess. (The precise numerical details applied by the authors would, moreover, suggest that they were conveying precise times and years, and were not likely to be so slapdash as to omit vital details like co-regency data if it did exist. Further, texts such as 2 Kings 8:16 and 15:5 are shown on close examination not to point to co-regency as is sometimes casually — wishfully? — assumed.)
There is another very strange detail in the chronology of the kings:
Saul was a year old when he began to reign, and he reigned two years over Israel. (1 Sam.13:1)
“This is what the canonical (Masoretic) Hebrew text says.” (p.22) Other manuscript evidence either omits it or attempts to re-write it into something more intelligible.
But when we add the total years of the kings of Judah as given in the sometimes seemingly gap-ridden narrative, we come a step towards understanding what the authors/redactors of these figures were thinking.
When totalled, the period from the building to the destruction of the first temple is 430 years.
By keeping Saul’s reign short as writ, the period from the Exodus to the first temple is 480 years.
Most readers of the Bible are familiar with these numbers. But what is their significance in the larger scheme of things?
Counting back from the Exodus to the birth of Abraham we total 720 years, hence 1200 years from the birth of Abraham to the First Temple.
But to cut to the chase (with an acknowledged debt to Thompson):
Creation to the Flood: 1656 years
Creation to the birth of Abraham: 1946 years
Creation to the Exodus: 2666 years (= two thirds of 4000)
Creation to the First Temple: 3146 years
Creation to the destruction of temple: 3576 years
Creation to the edict of Cyrus (538 b.c.e.) to build second temple: 3626 years
and finally finally, by adding a “remaining” 375 years . . .
Creation to the rededication of the temple (163 b.c.e.) by Judas Maccabee: 4000 years
(The Book of Jeremiah contains a different chronology from this one, since it assigns 70 years of exile instead of 50. There is evidence that different schools of redactors have attempted to introduce varying chronologies.)
The artificial design of the numbers of kings and their reigns in the biblical history is further underscored by the fact that
The books of Kings list twenty kings after Solomon in each of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Now, the kingdom of Judah lasted over a century longer than Israel, which makes this equivalence very curious, not to say suspicious. (p.26)
(Davies also observes that in each dynasty it was “coincidentally” the 7th reign that introduces an evil woman.)
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The numerical flaws in Kings and Chronicles are easily covered up by the fact that these 4 books are boring and hardly ever read, and if read, read in a monotone voice moving rapidly. The voice may slow down to describe the building of the temple or David’s reign, but then its back to lightspeed.
I was mainly playing with a bit of rhetoric but no doubt the details were studied carefully by the scribal/theological schools for whom they held a strong interest, even an ideological meaning. We are bored by the details of the measurements of the tabernacle and temples (Solomon’s and Ezekiel’s), and long genealogical lists, but a comparison with nonbiblical literature from the same milieu makes it pretty evident that details that have no meaning for us were of central interest (for reasons perhaps now lost) to their authors.
Thanks for posting this!
I personally have solved the mystery of where the numbers for the patriarchs in Genesis came from as of a few weeks ago as well as the supporting chronological numbers for the flood. I intend to publish this in a proper academic venue before long, so hopefully you won’t have to wait long for the big reveal.
Now that I’ve got Genesis done, I’m working on deciphering the chronology of the kings of Judah and Israel, and I’m fairly certain that the reign lengths are close to entirely fictional, and it seems quite likely that at least some of the kings are just flat out made up. While we can’t fully rule out the possibility that the author of Kings might have had some legitimate source about the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, it is my extremely strong suspicion that the only legitimate source that the author of Kings had for the kings of Israel and Judah may have been records of Assyrian and Babylonian interactions with Israel and Judah that were preserved in Berossus, probably from Berossus copying something like the Babylonian Chronicles.
One of the most strikingly unusual things about the chronology of Kings that I’m not sure that I’ve heard remarked upon is that the age of ascension is given for many of the kings as well as the name of the king’s mother and often the mother’s father. Also it is extremely striking that the author would claim to know exactly which year it was in Judah’s chronology when something happened in Israel and exactly which year it was in Israel’s chronology when something happened in Judah.
The aforementioned details should be interpreted as super obvious markers of fiction. Outside of the Bible, we have almost no records of the age of ascension for almost any known king of the ancient near east of the first millennium BCE or earlier. We also lack records of the names of the mothers of the kings for the vast majority of ancient kings as well. Even in cases where we know the name of one king’s favored queen, it is often questioned whether that queen was the actual mother of the next king which isn’t that surprising given harem practices and siblings contending for the throne. I believe Manetho gave a grand total of 1 age of ascension and 0 mother’s names out of hundreds of kings (unless maybe Isis the mother of Horus counts?). Berossus is similarly thoroughly lacking in this type of data (apart from mothers Tiamat, Lahamu, and Damkina :P), as are the cuneiform tablets and inscriptions from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Names of queens are more commonly known than age of ascension as names of queens are sometimes listed in inscriptions, but the names of the queen mothers are still mostly entirely unknown for the vast majority of ancient kings.
Are we to believe that Israel and Judah were unique among all the kingdoms of the ancient near east in accurately recording and preserving the age of ascension and names of the kings’ mothers and their maternal grandfathers in their royal chronicles as well as the exact year of their neighboring king’s reign for 400+ years despite that no other known kingdom of the ancient near east did anything even remotely similar?
Genesis author, you really crack me up. I know it was you who also wrote Kings, and you have a funny sense of humor 😛
I do however wonder about the claim in this article that the chronology of the Primary History is intended to be a 4,000 year period ending at Judas Maccabee. I have uncovered what seem to me to be a lot of examples of the Genesis author kissing Ptolemy II’s ass, and the Genesis author also very frequently portrays both Israel and Judah in quite negative terms, thus I have a very high degree of confidence that the primary author of the vast majority of the Primary History was from Alexandria and NOT from Judah and DEFINITELY NOT from Samaria. Also, I thought that there is at least one known Jewish writer of the late 200s BCE who knew Genesis and wrote about it, although I haven’t super carefully looked into this. Additionally I’ve read some articles saying that the oldest known Jewish synagogues are from Alexandria in the 200s BCE and are confirmed by archeology, which is suggestive if not proof of the existence of Judaism, which did not exist in any meaningful sense before the Pentateuch was created.
If the chronology was intended to be a 4,000 year period ending at Judas Macabee, that would either imply that it was all made up at the time of Judas Macabee or later, or alternatively, the end part of the 4,000 year chronology was written down about 100 years later after Genesis-Kings, or maybe the chronology, particularly in Kings was later modified. I think it not very likely that Chronicles was written by the same author as Kings, and thus Chronicles and its sequels are later. I also think the author of Genesis may have also written Esther and Job, and I have some evidence based on the chronology to suggest that the Genesis author himself was involved in translating the Hebrew to Greek and that the numerical modifications of Genesis in the Septuagint strongly indicate the involvement of the original Hebrew author. So anyway, the chronology of Kings super obviously ends at the destruction of the first temple. If it really is the case that that year was chosen to create a final gap leading to a 4,000 year period from creation to Judas Macabee then I need to figure out what I’m missing. If this stuff was all written at the time of the Macabbees then we should be able to find plenty of evidence of Macabee context. Or maybe the 4,000 year period is created by whoever wrote Chronicles, not the original primary author of Genesis-Kings.