Biblical scholarship today

Posted by Dan Bruce on May 18, 2012
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A reader asked how the work of The Prophecy Society differs from the scholarship being done at better-known and more academically-prestigious seminaries and schools of biblical studies. The answer involves methodology. For the most part, we use the same Bible texts and strive to adhere to the same high academic standards, but employ a different methodology.

The past one-hundred years or so have witnessed an incredible amount of biblical scholarship, especially at the university level. Unfortunately, the attitude of most modern Bible scholars has been to doubt everything, then zero in on the things that can be “proven” by human reasoning alone. That approach works well for scientific inquiry, but not so well for understanding the Bible. The supernatural is left out of the process. The resulting God (and the resulting Jesus in Christian scholarly circles) becomes more and more a manmade creation.

Here at The Prophecy Society, the opposite approach is taken. The Bible—all of it—is accepted as the inspired Word of God, accurate in its details as revealed and transmitted to this generation. We base our biblical research on the assumption that belief comes first, then understanding. In other words, we believe that through faith comes the enlightnment of the Holy Spirit, who, using the evidence provided in the Holy Scriptures, testifies to us accurately about God the Father and God the Son.

We feel that it is on that basis of belief first—and on that basis alone—that meaningful biblical research can advance our understanding of God’s plan and purpose for the world.

Moses in Egyptian history?

Posted by Dan Bruce on May 15, 2012
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Moses was born in the second year of Thutmose I, the first Egyptian king to have the nomen (birth name) Thutmose (meaning “born of Thoth”). Some have associated the name Moses with the last two hieroglyphs in the pharaoh’s name, ms, which mean “bear” as in “bear a child,” and it is similar to the last syllables in the name Ramose (meaning “born of Ra”), which was the name of the father of Hatshepsut’s great steward Senenmut. Shown below is an expansion of Timeline B of Appendix Two of Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings (page 138), which reveals some interesting chronological Senenmut-Moses correlations.

Expanded Timeline for Senenmut and Moses
High Chronology (all dates BCE)*
ca. 1536 b. Thutmose II (born at about the same time as Hatshepsut, see below).
ca. 1535 b. Hatshepsut, daughter of the future Thutmose I (her birth can be estimated from her estimated age of about 52 years old at her death in 1482 BCE).
1524 Thutmose I became pharaoh, decreed death for all Hebrew male infants.
1523 b. Moses, Exodus 2; found by pharaoh’s daughter Hatshepsut (12 years old).
1518 d. Thutmose I.
1518 Thutmose II became pharaoh, with his sister Hatshepsut as wife-consort.
1516 Hatshepsut recognized as pharaoh in the second year of Thutmose II’s reign, according to an inscription in the Chapelle Rouge, block 287, that describes a festival of Amen during which Hatshepsut is made a pharaoh unified with the Ka in the presence of an unnamed king (her husband Thutmose II).
ca. 1506 b. Thutmose III, son of Thutmose II and a secondary wife, Iset.
1504 d. Thutmose II.
1504 Thutmose III became king as an infant (less than 2 years old).
1504 Hatshepsut continued as pharaoh, coreigning with her step-son, Thutmose II, who, at less than 2 years old, was too young to rule as king.
1498 Hatshepsut assumes male pharaonic identity, ruling as primary king.
1486 Hatshepsut celebrated her “sed year” (her 30th year as a pharaoh).
1483 Hatshepsut’s great steward Senenmut disappeared from history (inscriptions place his disappearance in Hatshepsut’s sixteenth year as king).
1483 Moses (40 years old) fled to Midian, Exodus 2.
1482 Thutmose III became sole ruler when Hatshepsut died.
* from Chronicle of the Pharaohs by Peter A. Clayton (New York: Thames & Hudson; 2006)

Hypothesis: Thutmose I became pharaoh in the year 1,524 BCE. The new king decreed that all male Hebrew infants be killed. The following year, in 1,523 BCE, his twelve-year-old daughter Hatshepsut rescued the infant Moses from the Nile River with the intention of raising him as a member of her household. When Thutmose I died in 1,518 BCE, his son Thutmose II became pharaoh and his half-sister Hatshepsut became his wife and queen. In the second year of his reign, according to inscriptions on block 287 from the Chapelle Rouge, Thutmose II presided over a festival of Amen during which Hatshepsut was recognized as a pharaoh, circa 1516 BCE. During their coreign, Hatshepsut produced no male heir with Thutmose II, but he did sire a son, Thutmose III, with a secondary wife. When Thutmose II died in 1,504 BCE, Hatshepsut continued as pharaoh, at first sharing her reign with her step-son Thutmose III, who, being less than two years old, was too young to rule. Seven years later, in 1,498 BCE, Hatshepsut assumed a masculine public identity and reigned as king of Egypt for the next seventeen years, with Thutmose III serving in a subordinate role. Sometime after her recognition as pharaoh, Hatshepsut elevated Senenmut to be her chief steward (top official), but Senenmut disappeared from history in 1,483 BCE, about a year before Hatshepsut’s death and at precisely the same time that the biblical Moses fled to Midian after murdering an Egyptian. Was Senenmut the “Moses” who fled to Midian, or did Moses kill Senenmut and then have to flee from Hatshepsut’s wrath, before returning to Egypt forty years later as the prophet Moses? The chronological correlations and historical details do allow such questions.

Kings list for kingdom of Tyre

Posted by Dan Bruce on May 13, 2012
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Several days ago, I read a paper that discussed the details of the chronology during the reign of King David. It stimulated me to focus anew on the reign of Hiram I of Tyre, who reigned concurrently with both David and Solomon, and, consequently, I had to examine the entire chronology involved with the kings list from the Annals of Tyre that was mentioned by Menander (342–291 BCE) in his history, which was then preserved for posterity by Josephus in Against Apion written circa 97 CE.

Josephus recorded that the time span from the start of the reign of Hiram I of Tyre until the founding of the city of Carthage in the year 825 BCE was 155 years and 8 months. Josephus then records the names of eleven kings of Tyre, together with the number of years in their reigns, as follows: *

Eiromos/Hiram I – 34 years
Balbazeros/Ba’l-mazzer I – 17 years
Abdastartos/Abd-Astart – 9 years
(eldest usurper) – years n/a
Astartos/Astart (usurper)- 12 years
Astharumos/Astart-ram (usurper) – 9 years
Phelles/Pilles (usurper) – 8 mos.
Ithobalos/Itto-ba’l – 32 years
Balezeros/Ba’l-mazzer II – 6 years
Mattenos/Matten – 29 years
Pugmalion/Pummay-elyon – 7 years (+ 40 years after Dido fled in 825 BCE)

The above regnal chronology fits the traditional Edwin R. Thiele chronology of the Hebrew kings, which postulates that the kingdom of United Israel divided into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the year 931 BCE, which requires that Solomon’s reign had to have begun forty years earlier, in 971 BCE, and that would make his fourth year, the year he started the Temple in Jerusalem, be the year 967 BCE. Since Josephus wrote that the Temple was begun in the twelfth regnal year of Hiram, that would indicate that Hiram’s first regnal year occurred in 980/979 BCE, and that is the date accepted by most scholars. However, the chronology for the Hebrew kings proposed in my book, Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings, says that the fourth year of Solomon occurred in the year 1,003/1,002 BCE, and that the Temple was begun in 1,002 BCE, thirty-four years earlier than the traditional date.

How can the 34-year difference be explained? Quite simply, by realizing that the 155 years and 8 months figure used by Josephus should be calculated from the end of Hiram’s reign, not from the beginning. Josephus (or perhaps the author of his source text, Menander, when the latter was copying from the original Annals of Tyre) started the individual reigns in the kings list in the wrong place. The 34-year reign attributed to Hiram should have been attributed to his successor, Baal-Eser I, and all other successive reigns moved back accordingly, as follows.

Hiram I (1033-980 BCE) – unspecified
Baal-Eser I (980-947 BCE) – 34 years
Abdastartus (947-930 BCE) – 17 years
Astartus (930-921 BCE) – 9 years
Deleastartus (921-909 BCE) – 12 years
Astarymus (909-900 BCE) – 9 years
Phelles (900/899 BCE) – 8 mos.
Ithobaal I (899-867 BCE) – 32 years (concurrent with Ahab of Israel)
Baal-Eser II (867-861 BCE) – 6 years
Mattan I (861-832 BCE) – 29 years
Pygmalion (832-787 BCE) – 7 years (+ 40 years after Dido fled in 825 BCE)

With the reigns now realigned to correct for an assumed text transmission error by Josephus-Menander as described above, the length of Hiram’s reign is left unspecified. However, Josephus does mention that Hiram lived to be fifty-three years old and that could be another error, that figure being the length of Hiram’s reign instead of his age. Ignoring Josephus’ note that Solomon began his Temple in Hiram’s twelfth regnal year, the above realignment list assumes that Hiram became king in 1,033 BCE. If Hiram did begin his reign in that year, then it would have overlapped the reign of David for twenty-seven years, and would have overlapped Solomon’s reign for at least twenty-six years after David’s death.

Note that the king of Tyre recorded on inscriptions as paying tribute to Shalmaneser III under the name B’al-manzer in 871 BCE (the year of tribute payment according to the kings chronology in my book, Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings) would have been Ithobaal I. The archaeologist W.F. Albright suggested that “manzer” could be translated as something like “religious votary”, from nzr, “to vow.” ** It has been suggested that the phrase Ba’li manzer Suraya, which Albright translates as “Ba’li-Manzer the Tyrian”, may also be translated as “Baal manzer of the Tyrians,” or perhaps “[Itho]Baal, priest of Tyre”. Ithobaal, called Ethbaal in the Bible, was a priest of Astarte before he killed Phelles and took the throne.

(*) The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman (edited by Carol Meyers and Michael Patrick O’Connor; Eisenbrauns; 1983; p. 383).
(**) W. F. Albright, “The New Assyro-Tyrian Synchronism and the Chronology of Tyre” (l’Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves, tome XIII, 1953; p. 4).

The seventy years of the Babylonian exile

Posted by Dan Bruce on May 12, 2012
Book Notes (for all books), Book Notes: Lifting the Veil, Book Notes: Sacred Chronology, Book Notes: The Hand of God / No Comments

A reader asked me to explain the chronology associated with the seventy-year Babylonian captivity. Here’s what I found during my studies for the book, Lifting the Veil on the Book of Daniel …

The Babylonian Exile was one of the most important events in Jewish history. The Children of Israel had been warned by God before they entered the land that their possession of the land promised to the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would depend on their faithfulness to his commandments given through the prophet Moses in Deuteronomy, chapter 30. However, for more than eight-hundred years after crossing the Jordan to take possession of the land, the Israelites (and then the people of the kindoms of Israel and Judah) provoked God with their off-again on-again disobedience. Finally, in the year 586 BCE, the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II came against Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple of Solomon and the city, and carried away the remaining Jewish remnant to exile in Babylon, essentially ending the possession of the land by the Jews.

However, the exile to Babylon was not to be permanent. It was to last only for seventy years, according to the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who said:

“And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations” (Jeremiah 25:11-12 KJV); and “For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place” (Jeremiah 29:10 KJV).

Since the Babylonian Empire came to a close with the capture of Babylon by the army of Cyrus II “the Great” of Persia on the sixteenthth day of Tashritu (equivalent to the Hebrew month Tishri), which is the proleptic date October 5, 539 BCE, on the Gregorian calendar, a simple calculation reveals that the exile, from God’s viewpoint, lasted from circa 609 BCE until 539 BCE. In the ninth chapter of the Book of Daniel, the prophet Daniel (obviously referring back to the words recorded in the twenty-fifth and twenty-ninth chapters of the Book of Jeremiah shown above) reveals that he understood how to calculate Jeremiah’s prophecy about the seventy years of exile, saying:

“In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans; In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem” (Daniel 9:1-2 KJV).

What exactly did Daniel understand? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Undoubtedly, Daniel knew that the Hebrew years were counted as Passovers. In other words, the seventy years meant that the exile would end sometime after seventy Passovers had been observed and before the seventy-first Passover could be observed. Babylon fell in October of 539 BCE, so the last Passover of the exile and last one to be counted in the count of seventy Passovers occurred earlier that spring in the same year, 539 BCE. Counting back seventy Passovers allowed Daniel to calculate that the first Passover in the exile was the one that occurred in 608 BCE. The chart displayed below will show how the count of the seventy Passovers was done by Daniel (with the year of a Passover followed by its number in the count).

How to Count the Seventy Passovers of Exile
608 BCE – P1 607 BCE – P2 606 BCE – P3 605 BCE – P4 604 BCE – P5 603 BCE – P6 602 BCE – P7
601 BCE – P8 600 BCE – P9 599 BCE – P10 598 BCE – P11 597 BCE – P12 596 BCE – P13 595 BCE – P14
594 BCE – P15 593 BCE – P16 592 BCE – P17 591 BCE – P18 590 BCE – P19 589 BCE – P20 588 BCE – P21
587 BCE – P22 586 BCE – P23 585 BCE – P24 584 BCE – P25 583 BCE – P26 582 BCE – P27 581 BCE – P28
580 BCE – P29 579 BCE – P30 578 BCE – P31 577 BCE – P32 576 BCE – P33 575 BCE – P34 574 BCE – P35
573 BCE – P36 572 BCE – P37 571 BCE – P38 570 BCE – P39 569 BCE – P40 568 BCE – P41 567 BCE – P42
566 BCE – P43 565 BCE – P44 564 BCE – P45 563 BCE – P46 562 BCE – P47 561 BCE – P48 560 BCE – P49
559 BCE – P50 558 BCE – P51 557 BCE – P52 556 BCE – P53 555 BCE – P54 554 BCE – P55 553 BCE – P56
552 BCE – P57 551 BCE – P58 550 BCE – P59 549 BCE – P60 548 BCE – P61 547 BCE – P62 546 BCE – P63
545 BCE – P64 544 BCE – P65 543 BCE – P66 542 BCE – P67 541 BCE – P68 540 BCE – P69 539 BCE – P70

With the Passover of 608 BCE being the first Passover in the count that defines the seventy years of exile (that first Passover shown as “P1″ above), what is the event that began the exile? To answer that question, we must drop back in Jewish history to the reign of Manasseh of Judah. If you recall, Manasseh was a very wicked king, doing deeds so wicked that God declared judgement on Judah (the northern kingdom of Israel had already suffered God’s judgement at the hands of the Assyrians with the fall of Samaria in 721 BCE), as follows:

“But they hearkened not: and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel. And the Lord spake by his servants the prophets, saying, Because Manasseh king of Judah hath done these abominations, and hath done wickedly above all that the Amorites did, which were before him, and hath made Judah also to sin with his idols: Therefore thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab: and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down. And I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance, and deliver them into the hand of their enemies; and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies; Because they have done that which was evil in my sight, and have provoked me to anger, since the day their fathers came forth out of Egypt, even unto this day” (2 Kings 21:9-15 KJV).

When Manasseh died, he was succeeded by his young son, Josiah, who became king when he was only eight years old. Josiah had been raised by his mother, Jedidah, who apparently had instilled in the boy a desire to please God. In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, in 623 BCE, the Book of the Law was discivered in the Temple, which was undergoing restoration. The High Priest Hilkiah had the scribe Shapham read it to the king. When Josiah realized how far from God that Judah had strayed, he was stricken with grief and sent to the prophetess Huldah to seek God’s instruction, and God answered thus:

“And she [Huldah] said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Tell the man that sent you to me, Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof, even all the words of the book which the king of Judah hath read: Because they have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other gods, that they might provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands; therefore my wrath shall be kindled against this place, and shall not be quenched. But to the king of Judah which sent you to enquire of the Lord, thus shall ye say to him, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, As touching the words which thou hast heard; Because thine heart was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself before the Lord, when thou heardest what I spake against this place, and against the inhabitants thereof, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and hast rent thy clothes, and wept before me; I also have heard thee, saith the Lord. Behold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. And they brought the king word again” (2 Kings 22:15-20 KJV).

Josiah spent the next year restoring Judah to proper worship as commanded by the God of Israel, and in 622 BCE led the people in a celebration of the Great Passover, the largest Passover celebrated since the Children of Israel had entered the promised land. For more than a decade thereafter, the nation and people lived in peace and prospered. Then, in the spring of 609 BCE, the pharaoh Necho left Egypt and moved his army up the coast of Judah and Israel, intending to aid his Assyrian allies who were being beseiged in the city of Harran by the Babylonians. Josiah, who was allied with Babylon in some manner, met and opposed the Egyptian army at Megiddo, and was wounded in battle there. Josiah was taken back to Jerusalem, where he died sometime after Passover in 609 BCE.

With Josiah’s death, the fate of Judah was sealed. God resumed the judgement that had been paused in recognition of Josiah’s tender heart, and, for all practical purposes, Josiah’s death marked the beginning of the exile of Judah, although the exile itself would be realized in stages for the next seventy Passovers, ending only when Cyrus granted the Jews permission to return to Jerusalem sometime between the Passover of 539 BCE and the Passover of 538 BCE. Of course, the Bible never actually says that the exile (i.e., time the Jewish people were captive in Babylon) would be seventy years. It said that “seventy years would be accomplished,” which is a much more inclusive statement that encompasses the rise and fall of Babylon as a disciplinary factor in the spiritual affairs of the Jews, and that is exactly what happened.

New books on prophecy

Posted by Dan Bruce on April 18, 2012
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Our new books are now back from the printer and available for distribution. You can check out our current titles and plans for future titles at: http://www.prophecysociety.org/publications.html

Errata, p. 21, 88, 111

Posted by Dan Bruce on March 26, 2012
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In Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings, there is a typo on page 21. The years for Rehoboam in parenthesis should be 966-961 BCE, not 996-961 BCE. Also, on the charts on pages 99 and 111, the name of king Nadab is shown as Nadad. It should be Nadab, of course.

Date of Creation

Posted by Dan Bruce on March 19, 2012
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A reader who previewed my new Bible chronology book emailed me about my views on the Young Earth vs. Old Earth controversy. In other words, he wanted to know if I believe the Bible’s version of creation or science’s version of creation. The answer is “Yes” and “Yes”. I believe both are compatible with one another, as I state in my book, Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings (p. 144):

The chronology in this book has been limited back in time to 2,162 BCE, back only to the birth of Abram. For your author, attempting to establish dates much further back in time seems futile, since Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verse 11b, very clearly states, “He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end” (NASB). As for creation, your author accepts the biblical account as inspired and accurate, and he also accepts as credible the empirical evidence that supports the scientific theory of creation, which posits a universe originating with a Big Bang that occurred 13.75 ± 0.12 billion years ago. He offers no apology for not attempting to reconcile the two creation accounts. Over the years, he has heard more than a few cosmologists repeating distortions of sacred texts in an attempt to discredit the biblical account of creation, and he has heard just as many young-Earth creationists repeating what can best be described as pseudo-science to explain away the findings of their assumed scientific adversaries, and he wishes to do neither. From personal experience, your author can certify that the Bible has always proven dependable and true for him, and that, using his technical training and God-given intellect, he has examined and found the chronological conclusions of modern science to be deserving of respect as well. When both the words of the Bible and the observations of science are correctly interpreted and fully understood, your author has no doubt that any truth revealed by one will agree with the truth revealed by the other since, ultimately, truth is an inherent attribute of God, who is, by definition, One.

New books to be released on April 10th

Posted by Dan Bruce on March 16, 2012
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We have been busy for the past twelve months revising our current titles and preparing new titles for print. As of today, plans are to have the following three books published by The Prophecy Society ready for release and distribution as indicated:
 
Lifting the Veil on the Book of Daniel (release date: April, 2012)
An exposition explaining what the seven chrono-specific predictive prophecies in Daniel say about the history of the Jews, Jerusalem, and the Anointed One of Israel
ISBN 978-0-9816912-2-0
 
Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings (release date: April, 2012)
A harmony of the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah, and how those reigns synchronize with the chronologies and histories of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia
ISBN 978-0-9816912-3-7
 
Life and Times of Jesus the Jew (release date: June, 2013)
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, from his baptism to his ascension, with his words and deeds presented chronologically in a first-century Jewish milieu
ISBN 978-0-9816912-4-4

The Hand of God in the History of Israel (release date: April, 2015)
The remarkable story of one man’s faith, one people’s struggles, and how God’s promises to them will one day be fully fulfilled by the Anointed One of Israel;
ISBN 978-0-9816912-5-1
 
All books published by The Prophecy Society will be available at www.prophecysociety.org, at Amazon.com, and at better bookstores.

Chronology in the Seder Olam

Posted by Dan Bruce on March 16, 2012
Book Notes (for all books), Book Notes: Life and Times, Book Notes: Lifting the Veil, Book Notes: Sacred Chronology, Book Notes: The Hand of God / No Comments

Seder Olam, the name generally used to denote a work also known as the Seder Olam Rabbah (סדר עולם רבה, “The Long Order of the World”), is a book of Jewish chronology explaining biblical events from the Creation down to the end of the Achaemenid Persian Period and the advent of Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E., with a brief mention of the later bar Kochba revolt in 132-135 C.E. It was compiled from traditional Hebrew records edited into a single volume by the famous early Talmudist, Rabbi Yose ben Halafta, around 160 C.E. It has 30 chapters, formed into three thematic “gates,” each encompassing ten chapters. The purpose of the work appears to be calendrical, with specific dates given for various biblical events, and with comments that seek to explain the many chronological difficulties found throughout the Hebrew biblical text.

In my books, Lifting the Veil and Sacred Chronology, I have used selected chronologies from the Seder Olam, mainly as a way of cross-checking the biblical chronology. For example, the Seder Olam says that there were 155 years from the year that Solomon finished building the Temple until the year that Joash renovated the Temple in his 23rd regnal year, and that there were 218 years from the renovation by Joash until the renovation by Josiah in his 18th regnal year, which is known to have begun in 623 B.C.E. Using this information, one can compute that the 23rd regnal year of Joash was the year 841 B.C.E. (623 B.C.E. + 218 years), and that Solomon completed the Temple in 996 B.C.E. (841 B.C.E. + 155 years). This cross-references perfectly with what I calculated from the chronology for the kings of Israel and Judah (and the construction of the Temple) given in biblical text, using the chronology provided in Daniel, chapter 4, to calculate the monarchal period. Thus, the Seder Olam can be used as a cross-check on occasion, although it can never be used as the primary source in biblical interpretation. That role is reserved for the biblical text itself.

In working out the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah for my book Sacred Chronology, I have found that the Seder Olam is fairly accurate with regards to its chronological relationships, such as the example about the Temple given in the paragrah above, but not necessarily in its exact dates. For the dates after the Exile, the chronology in the Seder Olam seems to have been subject to error, either accidental due to the turmoil of the times, or perhaps even intentional later on to counter Christian exegesis relating to Jesus. For instance, the Persian Period is shortened to only 34 years in duration (52 years in French manuscripts), probably to accommodate an erroneous rabbinical interpretation derived from Daniel, chapter 9, that interprets that passage to say that the time between the destruction of the First Temple and the Second Temple had to be 490 years. Historians almost universally agree that the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., but the Seder Olam gives the destruction as occurring in the year 423 B.C.E., a 165-year difference, in this way allowing it conform to the incorrect 490-year rabbinic interpretation about the two Temple destructions. Thus, the duration of the Persian Period has to be shortened in the Seder Olam to accommodate the difference.

Wikipedia says this: “The traditional dates of events in Jewish history are often expressed in relation to the Gregorian calendar. For example, the traditional Jewish date for the destruction of the First Temple (3338 AM = 423 BCE) differs from the modern scientific date, which is usually expressed using the Gregorian calendar as 586 BCE. Implicit in this practice is the view that if all the differences in structure between the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars are taken into consideration, the two dates can be derived from each other. This is not the case. If the traditional dates of events before the Second Temple era are assumed to be using the standard Hebrew calendar, they refer to different objective years than those of the secular dates. The discrepancy is some 165 years.”

My use of the Seder Olam is confined mainly to cross-checking the biblical chronology, especially during the period of the divided monarchies, and, I emphasize again, it is never used as the primary source to supplant the biblical text. However, the Seder Olam can be a useful work for cross-checking chronological details of events and time periods that occurred before the Exile once the overall chronology has been derived from the biblical text.

Welcome to our website!

Posted by Dan Bruce on March 16, 2012
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Welcome to The Prophecy Society blog. The primary purpose of this blog is to allow discussion of our new books, Lifting the Veil on the Book of Daniel, which we believe is the most accurate and biblically strict interpretation of the seven chrono-specific prophecies recorded in the Book of Danie, and Sacred Chronology of the Hebrew Kings, which we believe is the most accurate and biblically faithful harmonized chronology of the Hebrew kings. We assume that you have read the books before you begin your participation here. As we publish more books and articles on other Bible prophecies, we will expand our discussion to cover those prophecies as well. In the meantime, we invite you to ask questions and share insights about Bible prophecies by entering your question in the “Questions and Answers” section of this blog. We look forward to your participation.