By Nathaniel Burson
This is an ambitious project. Understanding the chronological history of the world is no small feat, especially to start from scratch. So we’ll be doing this in several passes; first, we’ll give you the broadest outline, so you understand what is being talked about and why it matters.
At this point we’ll discuss the biggest mistakes traditional historians (and other revisionist historians) make in chronology, and make arguments for each of the major differences we have with them.
Then we’ll go through and deal with each era in detail in a given region – say, Sumer – showing why we’ve positioned the kings and events the way we have in each section, lasting about 5 centuries each. Then we’ll look at that same section focused on another region, say Egypt.
In this way we’ll work our way up to the time of Christ. There are infinite stories to be told, and infinite details to discuss. And the longer history goes on, the more stories there are to tell; so we will focus on the ones that had the most impact on the dating of the events or the identities of the people involved.
So let’s get started!
PLACES OF AGREEMENT
Most chronologers broadly agree about most things. Everyone agrees, for example, that Hammurabi’s dynasty, called the first (Amorite) dynasty of Babylon, lasted 297 years. Traditional historians, Bible scholars, myself, no one disputes anything about this to speak of.
The question is where to place that dynasty in relation to surrounding dynasties. Thus you should see history as movable blocks of kings, dates whose internal chronology – temporal relationship to each other – is generally agreed upon, but whose interactions with other kingdoms is a matter of greater or lesser disagreement among experts.
How these kings interact with one another – synchronisms – vary in quality, from the ideal “in the sixth year of King A, he killed king B in his 18th year”, to “the man of Uruk attacked in the 6th year”. Whose 6th? Which man of Uruk? There is a lot of room for interpretation, and therefore disagreement.
But when discussing history, there are places that are generally so solid we can skip past them to the next point of disagreement. And some of those disagreements are trivial, resulting in a difference of a few years at most – did Eshbi-erra declare independence from Ibbi-sin in his 8th year or his 16th? What’s 8 years either way, in the grand scheme of things?
Of course, some disagreements would move earlier kings forward or back in history by upwards of five centuries. So before we get started, I want to get you acquainted with what is agreed upon, and what is not.
First, ancient Sumerian history is presented as a long list of consecutive dynasties by the ancient sources, but we know for a fact that it is not – no one disagrees about this. Most of the dynasties in the ancient Sumerian sources were contemporary, at least part of the time.
Using this one fact, and replacing the more fantastic 1500-year-long reigns with more average 20 year periods, Thorkild Jacobson in 1939 published a highly influential and still-respected (though not wholly accepted) study on the Sumerian King List (henceforth SKL).
It’s only fair to say that some scholars reject the SKL entirely; however, since at least half of the kings on the list have been attested from archeology or other sources, I think that’s a bit harsh, as do the majority of scholars. In fact, as far as I can tell, there is no single piece of evidence that directly contradicts any claim on the SKL, which I think is pretty impressive.
So using Jacobson’s paper as a starting point, he estimated that from the first kings in Sumer to the aforementioned Hammurabi lasted approximately 1,000 years. After a century of new discoveries and a lot of new scholarship, this is still generally agreed upon.
And after extensive research, I have concluded that the same period lasted just under 900 years. My reasons will be given in detail at the proper time. And while no one believes exactly this, there are scholars who believe almost every piece of the story I’ll tell (where do you think I learned them?).
I differ from them mainly because I treat the Bible as history, and therefore can be guided to choose based on how it must fit with a known (Biblical) skeleton of history. So in a given situation, forced to choose between 40 years for a period (as one scholar believes) and 100 years for the same period (as another scholar believes), I see which one fits the Biblical narrative best; then see if the scholarship supports that conclusion at least to the point that it cannot be disproven, and then move on.
AFTER HAMMURABI
After Hammurabi there were nine more dynasties that ruled over Babylon. Now these dynasties are big block of kings which, at least mostly, have reign lengths and dynastic summaries – making them broadly agreed upon by everyone, myself included.
But here’s the disagreement; the dogma is that they are consecutive, even though historians are agreed that #1 and #2 overlapped and that at least part of #3, the Kassite dynasty, overlapped with them both.
We have firm dates for the later dynasties, which include figures like Nebuchadnezzar, and so if we add these dynasties sequentially – as historians do – we would get around 1,000 years of kings.
If we insert those before Nebuchadnezzar’s dynasty (let’s say 600 BC just for round numbers) then Hammurabi’s dynasty would have to end around 1600 BC. And that’s exactly what Historians do.
But if that is true, then the thousand years’ worth of ancient Sumerian kings get shoved back to around 2600 BC, which is hundreds of years before the Bible records the flood happening (-2314). This is no problem for historians, who think the Bible is a fairy tale anyway, but it’s a real problem for Christians.
And so this is where we diverge with them; not just because it won’t fit our timeline – although in all fairness, that’s what started us looking for a solution – but because the evidence indicates that a change must be made in how the dynasties are arranged.
And so the third (Kassite) dynasty of Babylon is removed from the sequence, and placed contemporary with dynasties 4-9, all the way up to the year 750 BC. Believe it or not there are solid reasons to believe this; in fact, synchronisms between kings work better with the Kassites in the 8th century than when those same Kassites were erroneously placed in the 13th century.
We will of course get to all of this in due time, I don’t expect you to take my word for it; this is just to acquaint you with the founding conclusions and assumptions that shape the dating process as we go.
But astoundingly enough, if you remove the Kassites from history, and add the later Babylonian kings to the earlier Sumerian ones, all of Mesopotamian history fits neatly, with no cramming or stretching, in the space after the flood of Noah – leaving a century or two for mankind to multiply enough to form cities.
When one change – in the end, a fairly minor one, although historians would disagree – makes everything wrong with chronology snap into place… you know you’re on to something.
THE HOLLOW REED
Invariably, traditional historians and traditional histories (henceforth, both referred to as TH) begin with Egypt and make everything else fit their chronology. The idea is that Egypt is a stable and very ancient empire, with immense amounts of detailed records, and we can date individuals in other empires in the ancient near east by their communication and interaction with Egypt.
It sounds good… Until you look closely. The chronology of Egypt is, without a doubt, the biggest mess of any nation in history. No ancient source agrees with any other about dating; many of the names, sometimes even the sequences of kings are different between sources.
We know what we know about Egypt from several ancient sources; chief among them is Manetho, who wrote a history in Greek around the 3rd century BC purporting to list all the dynasties of Egypt in order from 1 to 30.
And based solely on his say-so, every Egyptologist has dogmatically asserted that in every case, Dynasty 3 preceded Dynasty 4, which preceded dynasty 5, and so on. Manetho also, in most cases, gave us the reigns of each king and the duration of the dynasty. So far so good.
Only, the thing is… no Egyptologist actually believes Manetho. He is the backbone for the chronology of Egypt, but read any article about any king of Egypt and you’ll hear things like the following; let’s just pick Khufu, builder of the great pyramid, for example…
It is still unclear how long exactly Khufu ruled over Egypt. Dates from Khufu’s final years suggest that he was approaching his 30-year jubilee, but may have just missed it. … The highest known date from Khufu’s reign is related to his funeral. Four instances of graffiti from the western of two rock-cut pits along the south side of the Great Pyramid attest to a date from the 28th or 29th reignal year of Khufu: …
The Royal Canon of Turin from the 19th Dynasty, gives 23 years of rulership for Khufu. The ancient historian Herodotus gives 50 years, and the ancient historian Manetho even credits him 63 years of reign. These figures are now considered an exaggeration or a misinterpretation of antiquated sources. (Wiki, “Khufu”)
Does this seem like a chronology you want to build literally every other ancient chronology around?? It’s out of context, but I can’t help but think of the Bible’s warning to Judah:
Isaiah 36:6 Behold, you trust in the staff of this bruised reed, even in Egypt, which if a man leans on it, it will go into his hand and pierce it. So is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him.
This is literally what every TH has done, and with predictable results. The quote above mentioned the Turin canon; this is a list of ancient Pharoahs, which disagrees with Manetho on a number of points.
It’s also highly fragmented, and has been reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing half the pieces. This has left it highly susceptible to bias and error, because it was reassembled based on what they expected to see there, not necessarily what was actually there. There is another source, too, called the Abydos King list.
Besides providing the order of the Old Kingdom kings, it is the sole source to date of the names of many of the kings of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties, so the list is valued greatly for that reason. This list omits the names of many earlier pharaohs. The bulk of these appear to have been left out because although they claimed royal titles and rule over all Egypt, their actual authority was limited to only part of the country.
There are no dates attached to these Pharaohs, it is strictly a list of names. It was written in order to summarize all the divine ancestors (predecessors, really) of the then-current Pharaoh Seti I in order to invoke their blessings. So it’s useless for dating.
Egyptologists also base their dating on the monuments of a Pharoah, which often mention the year of his reign in which the inscription was made. This is reasonably reliable, at least to provide a minimum reign length although not entirely error-free; Pharoahs unfortunately had five different names which they used.
Some of their names were identical to other Pharaohs (there are 11 Pharaohs named Ramses, for example, plus a few princes who never became Pharaoh). And inscriptions which just say “Rameses” do not come with a handy IV after them, to identify them, so they can only be identified if a secondary name is used (which is common, to be fair); still, sometimes Egyptologists have to make an educated guess.
Plus, even Pharoahs not named Rameses believed themselves to be Rameses, literally Ra-me-su; which means “son of the sun”, which every pharaoh claimed to be. So any Pharaoh was Rameses, in a sense, even ones not technically named that.
Egyptian dating is also based on a highly speculative – but universally accepted – notion that the Egyptian calendar drifted through the seasons over a 1461 year cycle, called the “Sothic cycle”, after the Egyptian name for Sirius around which the calendar was supposedly based.
They claim that they can use this method with absolute security to calculate back to 1800 BC or so with precision. However, in order to make everything fit Egyptologists have to hypothesize occasional “resets” to the calendar cycle; thus rendering it completely useless as evidence since they can reset the cycle at will to make it fit their assumptions – the ultimate in circular reasoning.
Ask yourself this; if Egyptian chronology is really so scientific and trustworthy… why are there three different mainstream chronologies that scholars can’t agree on?
And finally, Egyptologists universally assume, based on Manetho, that there was only ever one king over all of Egypt. That dynasty 6, based on Memphis, came completely before dynasty 11, based in Thebes 300 miles to the south. In that example, it might be true; but the Bible specifically says there were, at times, multiple kings of Egypt:
2 Kings 7:6 For the Lord had made the army of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great army: and they said one to another, Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come on us.
I have no intention, at this point, of attempting to put the dynasties of Egypt in their proper order; for now, it’s enough to simply discredit the laughable notion that the chronology of Egypt is reliable. And to explain why we will, for now, be completely ignoring Egyptian dates.
Now we get to a rather major point of disagreement – although it’s not as large as some changes, it is immensely consequential. And that is the dating of the so-called Bur-Sagale eclipse in 763 BC, as recorded in the Assyrian annals.
See, rather than saying “in the year 763 BC”, (Christ not having been born yet), ancient cultures usually based their dating systems on the reign of the current king. There were two ways of doing this; you could say “in the fourth year of the reign of Hezekiah”, for example, like the Israelites did.
But what most very ancient cultures in the middle east did was to name the years; either after a succession of officials who were given the honor of naming the year after themselves or else after major events that happened that year, or both.
We have fairly complete lists of these year-names, called limmu lists, for the early part of the first millennium BC. And so in the reign of Ashur-dan III, king of Assyria, in his 9th year, which was named after an official named “Bur-sagale” an event was noted;
“[year of] Bur-Sagale of Guzana. Revolt in the city of Assur. In the month Simanu an eclipse of the sun took place.” (Wiki, “Assyrian Eclipse”)
The importance of this event to chronology cannot be overstated. Based on this one line, every date in Assyrian history has been calculated. And with it, every single chronology of the near east has been affected, as their chronologies were adapted to fit Assyria.
In 1867, Henry Rawlinson identified the near-total eclipse of 15 June 763 BC as the most likely candidate (the month Simanu corresponding to the May/June lunation), visible in northern Assyria just before noon. This date has been widely accepted ever since; the identification is also substantiated by other astronomical observations from the same period. This record is one of the crucial pieces of evidence that anchor the absolute chronology of the ancient Near East for the Assyrian period. (Ibid)
But here’s the thing. As I said, we have extensive records of limmu-lists. If this is an eclipse, it would be the only one mentioned in the entire list! A list that spans hundreds of years, and must have seen many solar eclipses, why mention only this one?
The answer is simple. They didn’t.
The phrase used – shamash (“the sun”) akallu (“bent”, “twisted”, “crooked”, “distorted”, “obscured”) – has been interpreted as a reference to a solar eclipse since the first decipherment of cuneiform in the mid 19th century. (Ibid)
Notice that it has been interpreted as an eclipse. Because chronologers were desperate for an astronomical event to date the Assyrian lists to. But it wasn’t an eclipse! Because the Assyrians have a word for Eclipse. And this is not it.
The Neo-Assyrian word for eclipse (particularly a solar eclipse) is antalum (also written antal, from the verb atalu, meaning “to obscure” or “to darken”). In astronomical and omen texts from the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 911–609 BCE), eclipses were carefully recorded and interpreted as omens, especially solar eclipses. They often used the phrase: “shamash anta” — literally “the sun was darkened” — to describe a solar eclipse. So, in cuneiform texts, an eclipse might be recorded using the term antalum or by describing the phenomenon metaphorically, e.g.: šamšam anta or šamšu antalu – “the sun was eclipsed” or “the sun was obscured.” (Chat GPT translation; I have confirmed from other sources).
So I find it mind-boggling that every date in the near east was fixed by an eclipse which didn’t even happen! Based on an Assyrian record which doesn’t even use the word!
In the year of Bur-Sagale, the sun was Akallu, whichmeans “twisted, bent, distorted, obscured”. These are not words that describe an eclipse, a relatively common occurrence for which they had a word, but some major event that obscures the sun in an unnatural, almost unique way. But what?
GREAT RA’ASH
After this event, the Assyrian year-names record decades of plague, famine, and revolt. Not long before this, Jonah went to warn Assyria of destruction; and not long before this, Amos wrote a book warning of some truly apocalyptic events, and dates his book as follows…
Amos 1:1 The words of Amos … which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake.
There was only a fourteen year overlap between these kings, which a literal reading of the Hebrew king lists establishes firmly at between 811-797 BC. Given that Amos specifically talks about the death of Jeroboam (Amos 7:9-11), who died in 797, it’s fair to conclude that the events of this book and their aftermath are directly responsible for his death. A contemporary prophet, speaking to Israel, adds the following:
Hosea 13:9-12 You are destroyed, Israel, because you are against me, against your help. Where is your king now, that he may save you in all your cities? And your judges, of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes?’ I have given you a king in my anger, and have taken him away in my wrath. The guilt of Ephraim is stored up. His sin is stored up.
As it happens, the Bible records a gap of 24 years after the death of Jeroboam where there apparently was no king. And this king was “taken away in God’s wrath”. Given this is pretty much the entire topic of Amos, I’ve chosen to date the earthquake in the same year as Jeroboam died, thus, 797 BC. Could be a year or two earlier, but definitely not later.
It’s important, because before this book is finished you’ll find that not one nation in the known world survived unscathed from this great Earthquake, and many nation’s timelines can be synchronized around their memories of this event.
But think about it for a moment; Israel is a fairly earthquake prone territory; severe earthquakes occur once a century, on average. Why does the Bible refer to this simply as THE Earthquake, or the GREAT earthquake?
The apocalyptic events of Amos are taken, as always, by historians as purely a metaphor, Christians take them purely as prophecy, but the events in Amos happened – for they were referred back to, three centuries later!
Zechariah 14:5 You shall flee by the valley of my mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach to Azel; yes, you shall flee, just like you fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Yahweh my God will come, and all the holy ones with you.
The Bible takes the events of Amos literally, and so should we – and reading the rest of Amos you’ll immediately see that this was no ordinary earthquake. In fact, the Earthquake was the least of the problems. Because, first of all… you don’t flee from an earthquake. There’s no where to go!
The word translated “Earthquake”, Ra’ash, means shaking, trembling, but it can also be translated in a broad meaning of disruption and chaos (Jeremiah 10:22, “commotion” in the KJV). Because “Earthquake” just doesn’t say it.
But what’s interesting for chronology is that this “Earthquake” of Amos’s prophesy, caused the sun to be blacked out at noon! But not in an eclipse!
Amos 5:8 seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns the shadow of death into the morning, and makes the day dark with night; …
Amos 8:9 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day:
The Bible never uses “the sun going down at noon” as a way of referring to an eclipse. It refers to solar eclipses as the sun being darkened (Joel 2:31) – a literal translation of the Assyrian word atalu, it’s worth mentioning – or as the sun “putting on sackcloth”, Revelation 6:12
“Sackcloth, usually made of black goat hair, was used by the Israelites and their neighbors in times of mourning or social protest.” (A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Jeffrey)
Yet Amos specifically says the sun will go down at noon; not to be eclipsed, but to disappear entirely. And that the “day would be dark with night”. Even in the most total of eclipses, it’s not as dark as night time – in fact, it’s 10 times brighter than a night under a full moon.
Amos 5:18, 20 “Woe to you who desire the day of Yahweh! Why do you long for the day of Yahweh? It is darkness, and not light. … Won’t the day of Yahweh be darkness, and not light? Even very dark, and no brightness in it?
This would be a very sloppy description of an eclipse. Because the darkest part – the totality – lasts a few minutes at most. But this describes a day “very dark, an no brightness in it”. Thus we can see why the Assyrian scribes described this as an “obscuring/twisting of the sun” but not an eclipse.
It was an epoch-defining event – there is a horizontal line drawn across the Assyrian record at this point, which usually means a major event is about to be mentioned, like the death of a king or some such.
So this event changed the world for the Assyrians; and while they didn’t know what it was, they knew what it wasn’t. So they avoided using the word “eclipse”, an event too common and unimportant to have been noted in the limmu lists anyway!
THE GREAT CATASTROPHE
So how do we explain this using lived human experience? Since we assume the sun didn’t completely cease to exist nor the Earth rotate half an orbit instantly, Amos must have referred to the sun being completely hidden by some form of pollution in the air. There is precedent for this in scripture:
Revelation 9:2 And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
This prophetic future event, stripped of mysticism, refers to a “bottomless pit” where there is a “great furnace” which belches out immense amounts of smoke which block out the sun and moon. If you think about it, that’s a perfect description of a volcanic eruption.
But it’s also a perfect description of what Amos says; for a massive eruption would indeed block out, color, and distort the sun! Not an eclipse, which is why the Assyrians deliberately did not use the word for eclipse!
Amos goes on to describe destruction by fire raining down on cities across the middle-east, such as might happen from a massive volcano (Amos 2:5, etc). And He describes the death toll in Israel being 90% of all people killed! (Amos 5:2-6).
Amos also describes tsunami (Amos 5:8, Amos 8:8); now you can’t run from an earthquake, but you can see a tsunami coming and run for high ground, as Zechariah recorded the Israelites having done in the days of the “great earthquake”.
Amos also describes the aftermath of famine, plague, and invasion; and very specifically, darkness in the daytime. Because this was so much more than an Earthquake! This was colossal volcanic eruption which caused immense tidal waves above 100 feet high, earthquakes, volcanic winter blocking out the sun with ash for years; globally colder temperatures killing crops along with acid rain further poisoning them.
And he is not the only witness to these events; no less than three Biblical prophets lived through these events, and Isaiah paints a vivid post-apocalyptic picture of the state of things in his present day… not just in the prophet future:
Isaiah 59:9-11 Therefore is justice far from us, neither does righteousness overtake us: we look for light, but, behold, darkness; for brightness, but we walk in obscurity. We grope for the wall like the blind; yes, we grope as those who have no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the twilight; among those who are lusty we are as dead men. We roar all like bears, and moan bitterly like doves: we look for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us.
Everyone knows prophets are… quirky, but can you imagine the ridicule Isaiah would have received if he said, in the name of the Lord, the following description of a prosperous and thriving country?
Isaiah 1:7-9 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. … Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.
The reference to Sodom and Gomorrha is interesting, because those cities were destroyed by fire and brimstone falling from heaven. Just as Amos predicted would happen in the “Great earthquake”, which we can all agree now is much more than that.
Nor is this mere metaphor and poetry; this was a epoch-defining event that was alive in the collective memories of the middle east for centuries. The cities burned with fire, marauders invading it, famine, the dead unburied, disease; displaced peoples roaming the countries desperately searching for food.
The 8th century BC was not a good time to live in the middle east. And it began with the Bur-sagale event where the sun was distorted by the ash cloud of an immense volcano, which we can synchronize with the “great earthquake” in the days of Uzziah which caused the sun to go down at noon, and men to stumble at noonday as in the night.
ASSYRIA AND ISRAEL
Another major point of disagreement between this and TH, also small in effect but major in significance, is related to the one above. Historians have known for years that something is wrong between Israel and Assyria. This is not in dispute.
The Bible and the annals of Assyria mention each other frequently, but if you date Assyria based on the Bur-Sagale non-eclipse in 763 BC – but trust the Bible’s record-keeping – then the kings of Israel lived thirty or more years before the events in which they are said to have participated.
For example, Jehu paid tribute to Shalmanezer III. The Bible’s internal chronology has Jehu reigning from 899-871 BC. Assyrian chronology, based on Bur-Sagale, has Shalmanezer beginning to reign in 859 BC and taking tribute from Jehu in his 18th year.
So how did Jehu pay tribute 30 years after he died? There are other problems, in a similar vein, connecting between Israel, Syria, Tyre, and Assyria which show a similar divergence of about 30 years between what the Bible says must be true, and what Assyrian records show.
And there are two ways to solve this. TH, and sadly most Christians, do the obvious; say the Bible’s chronology is wrong, and simply reduce it to fit the sacred cow of Assyrian chronology. The foremost example of this is the chronology of Edwin Thiele, who wrote a massively influential book synchronizing Assyrian and Israelite kings, in every case in favor of Assyria.
This required him to assume no less than nine co-regencies and in some cases simply to change the lengths of reigns as given in the Bible in order to collapse the Bible’s timeline to fit the Assyrian one.
Needless to say we won’t be following his chronology, but you should be aware that every TH scholar, every Wikipedia page, and sadly most revisionist historians (people like me, but not me) rely on his work because it’s the only way they can find to make it agree with Assyrian records.
And I agree, we do have a problem somewhere. But I contend that it’s not with the Bible. I’m not alone in this, though definitely in the minority; other scholars have proposed various solutions, such as lengthy co-regencies in the Assyrian king list; which almost certainly happened, and which do solve a few problems, but leave the thorniest one – Jehu – untouched.
Because to solve Jehu it would require a 35 year co-reign, which is unheard of; few indeed are the kings who have a sole reign this long. So the Christian apologists are forced to say things like “this was a retelling of an earlier event, ancient historians confused the name, etc”.
But if we give ancient historians a little more credit, and assume the story is true as told… we could fix the problem easily by aligning Bur-Sagale with the Ra’ash!
Because if we leave Israel’s dates alone but move Assyria’s entire king list back in time 34 years, moving the obscuring of the sun from -763 to -797, suddenly Jehu’s tribute falls four years before he dies in -875; as it necessarily must.
This solves most of the earlier chronology problems between these two kingdoms instantly. However, it creates a new one; for if we move everything in Assyria back, it breaks later synchronisms the Bible itself affirms.
The Bible’s own internal chronology which puts the fall of Samaria in 721 BC, and attributes the fall after a three-year siege to Shalmanezer V and Sargon II, just as Assyrian king lists place it. Thus, at this point there is total agreement between Assyria and Israel.
Further, in 739 BC Tiglath-Pilesar arranged for the deposing of Pekah, king of Israel, at the request of Ahaz. Still, the Assyrian years and the Bible agree perfectly. But earlier in the time of Jehu… they don’t.
This means that all of history isn’t wrong. Just that something happened between 739 and “763 BC” to mess up the timeline of Assyria. And now that we understand that the world was in an unprecedented state of chaos after the Bur-sagale event, the question is obvious:
Can we insert 34 years into the Assyrian annals before Tiglath-Pileser and after Ashur-Dan V year 9? Or are the records really that tight and reliable?
INSERTING YEARS
As it turns out, they’re not. This is not as impossible as Assyriologists would have you believe; Assyrian kings of this time were very poorly documented because of the political upheaval and social unrest. They made few if any inscriptions, and were solely occupied surviving – and some of them probably failed to survive.
Historians simply say “Assyria was in a period of decline” at this point. The fact is, they really have no idea what happened between the end of Ashur-Dan V and the beginning of Tiglath-Pileser. No one knows how he came to the throne, nor under what conditions.
This period in history was one of revolution and upheaval, so there is no difficulty at all in hypothesizing that the Assyrians had more important things to do than name years and write down what was happening while they were trying to survive what was happening. So would we really be so surprised if there were a gap in their records spanning a generation?
And so when you insert a gap of 34 years between them Ashur-Dan V and Tiglath-Pileser, no one can contradict it because there are no records of any kind! Later Assyrian historians, when compiling the limmu lists, simply copied down the information they had. No gap was listed because they didn’t know (or perhaps, care) if one existed.
Wikipedia says of Ashur-Dan V “
Of course, we’d have to find a similar gap in Babylonian kings, since there are many recorded synchronisms between later Babylonian and Assyrian kings. So if one moves, both must move. Is this the death knell for our theory? Are Babylonian kings of this period well documented and solidly connected to one another?
As luck would have, there is a “interregnum” (a period with no known kings), lasting for an unknown period, but no less than 4 years. We simply expand that to align with Assyria, and suddenly all kings known to have interacted still interact… but do so 34 years farther into the past.
A WORD ON ECLIPSES
If you talk to historians, they will tell you they “certain” of their dates because “they have been confirmed with astronomy”. This sounds amazing until you do your own research, then you realize that there are more unknowns in ancient eclipses than knowns.
First of all, the records themselves; ancient cultures recorded eclipses as omens. Sometimes they provided some detail, like “in the 12th month, a lunar eclipse happens in the evening”. Sounds good, right? Find an eclipse in the right month, and boom, you have a year date.
Only, using such an event to date the year, over a span of hundreds of possible years, provides literally dozens of candidates. Lunar eclipses are commonplace, happening every year or two or three, occasionally several times a year, in a given place.
So you can basically always find a suitable eclipse in the range of years you’re looking for; then cherry pick the one that supports your date best. But is that really science?
Solar eclipses, to be fair, are more rare; however, there are not that many clearly defined solar eclipses in ancient history.
Many ancient “eclipse records” speak of things like “a bad omen of the sun”. Now that could be an eclipse… or it might have been a dust storm, or sun-dogs, or a bird flying across it. I’m not saying there is no value to them – they must be used with caution.
And even with solar eclipses, even where the records are probably actually describing eclipses, historians always present 2-3 candidates that might fit, across a century, then choose the one that supports their preferred dating schema, then say “the date is proven with Science!”. But that’s not science – that’s cherry picking data.
Then there is the fact that every ancient culture used a different calendar – sometimes two or three at the same time, a civil, religious, and old religious, calendar, like Egypt – and we’re often not sure which of these calendars the “twelfth month” was calculated in.
Plus the calendars changed over time, as they were reformed or reset. Some began in the spring, some in the fall, some in summer. Without some confirmation, the twelfth month could be literally any month in our calendar.
And that’s not all: the scientific part of calculating eclipses isn’t as exact a science as you’ve been told. The earth’s rotation seems to be slowing down, and the moon is pulling away from the Earth, and it’s orbit varies more than you might think from year to year.
Which means that the farther back you go in history, the less certain you can be of exactly when the moon precisely blocked the sun; and a difference of a few hours means a certain area saw the eclipse in the morning, or didn’t see it at all.
Now this is possibly true; but how do they know for sure? And even if it is true, how do they know by how much it’s changed in the past? Well obviously, they compare it with known, dated eclipses… like Bur-Sagale!
Historians, based largely on dated ancient eclipses like the Bur-Sagale non-eclipse – have calculated the rate of the earth’s slowing, and estimated – based in part on eclipses that never happened – a number called “Delta time”.
There is considerable disagreement among scientists about this number, and in all fairness it is remarkably difficult to prove because you have to know the actual date of an event from another source, and have precise measurements about the time of day it began, the direction you saw it in, that sort of thing. Very little of that survives, and what has is to some extent subjective as it was written 2,000 years ago in a dead language.
Regardless, the delta time adjustment ranges from a few minutes for recent years to over 10 hours for 3,500 years ago, depending on how far back in history you go; this number is used to “adjust” eclipse calculations.
But it has the effect of totally changing whether an eclipse was seen in a given area at all, or whether it was total or partial; in short, by fiddling with this number you can make an eclipse do almost anything in the name of science.
RADIOCARBON DATING
Lots of other authors have written critical things about radio-carbon (RC) dating. There are many reasons to distrust it, and I won’t repeat them here, I’ll only add a few observations of my own; first, I’ve noticed in reading scientific literature that whenever a test result shows an unexpected date, it is simply explained away. They only use it when it suits them.
Second, how do you think they calibrated carbon dating in the first place? They compared it to artifacts from Egypt. From the TH standpoint, Egypt was perfect; it was rich in organic artifacts, had remained dry and protected for thousands of years, and most importantly of all artifacts can be dated securely using the “known” chronology of Egypt.
It follows therefore that if Egyptian dates are wrong by up to 1,000 years in some cases, the radio carbon dating which was calibrated based on it will also be wrong by the same amount. So for the purposes of this book, I ignore it.
SUMMARY
So that’s about it. If you accept that Egypt is, chronologically, a big hot mess (also politically, economically… but I digress) and ignore Egypt completely for now; ignore eclipses and ignore carbon dating, both on methodological grounds;
Then arrange the SKL using known synchronisms, remove the Kassites and put them parallel, insert 34 years in Assyrian dates before 747 BC or so… and then everyone on earth would agree about chronology.
And the coolest part – with only those changes, of which by far the Kassites are the most consequential – the timeline fits precisely with what one would expect by a literal reading of the Bible’s chronology.
And so within that framework, we are now going to tell a story of history like no one has ever told before. A story that doesn’t just dismiss ancient records as fables, nor does it dismiss scholarly research on history and say “I believe the Bible and that’s that”.
No, this will attempt to reconcile Biblical history with what you read in the textbooks; it will attempt to show you that the burden of evidence is on our side, not on theirs. It will attempt to make you proud of your faith in the Bible, proud that the science supports you, and does not support the narrative you’ve been told since your first day of school.
Above all, it will attempt to be interesting. Whether that attempt succeeds, dear reader, will be for you to judge.
CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW
I find I learn things best if I know about what I’m learning before I start. So I’m going to tell you a story, with no evidence or attempt at elaboration, sketching in the broadest way possible the history of the world.
God created Adam and Eve in -3971 BC. They had sons and daughters, who multiplied and filled the Earth. They lived very long lives, but never more than 1,000 years long, God having set that as hard limit to our lifespans for “A thousand years is with God as one day”, and God had warned Adam “in the day you eat the fruit, you shall die”.
Humans did a lot more bad than good, until God became fed up and decided to start over, and arrange humanity’s government differently after the flood, starting from one “breeding pair” of humans and their three sons and their wives.
This was in the year -2434, 120 years before the flood, when God started grooming Noah to build the Ark. He built it, collected two of every animal, but seven of clean (eating) animals; the flood came and went, and then the ark settled on Ararat in eastern Turkey in -2313.
Noah’s children grew, multiplied, and eventually migrated down to the valley of Sumer, where they built cities, Nimrod rebelled against God, God confused the languages, and people finally began to leave Sumer and settle around the world.
In most of the world, we have little if any history of this period so we have to rely on the Bible and Sumer (and later, a little bit, Egypt). No one else left records to speak of. Those settlers who remained in Sumer, in the south of Mesopotamia, warred more or less constantly with each other.
The key players in this part of the story are the cities of Kish, where the first city was built; then Uruk, Nimrod’s first successful city (they stopped building Babel mid-way); then Ur, Lagash, Umma, Adab, and others.
Eventually some of these cities came out on top and established a semblance of an empire, reaching from the Persian gulf to the mediterranean sea; this is now about -1950 BC. It’s at this stage that Chedor-Laomer of Genesis 14 invaded Canaan, only to be later killed by Abraham after kidnapping lot, which plunged his empire into chaos.
He was not the first, nor the last emperor in this chain – the names are not important for now – but the empire rolled over from one conqueror to the next until Sargon of Akkad took over. During his long reign (56 years) he managed to consolidate the empire and leave a stable throne to his sons.
They unfortunately faced constant rebellions and invasions by barbarians from the east called the Gutians, and gradually lost power over about a century – we’re around -1750 now – until finally succumbing to a one-time vassal of theirs who had been governor of Elam, Puzur-Inshushinak.
His success was short lived, and he – and the other barbarians – were overcome by Utu-Hegal of Uruk and his (probably) brother Ur-Nammu of what’s called the Ur III empire. His reign and that of his successors was a golden age in Sumer, and lasted about a century.
Meanwhile, Abraham was in Canaan, his descendants Isaac and Jacob and Joseph were having various adventures I’m sure you already know (but will hear about later anyway), and the family of Jacob wound up migrating to Egypt around the time of Ur III, in -1733, where they would stay until Moses led them out of Egypt in -1507.
Back in Sumer, all good things must end and Ur III faded under it’s final king, Ibbi-sin, who was beset by rebellions and invasions by new barbarians – the Amorites this time – and who gradually lost power until his city of Ur was overcome by Elamites and burnt, and then occupied by the Elamites for a handful of years starting in -1603.
One of Ibbi-sin’s generals, Eshbi-erra had basically extorted his own independence early on in Ibbi-sin’s reign to become king of Isin. Ibbi-sin had also appointed Naplanum, a wealthy merchant, to be governor of Larsa. When Ibbi-sin died, Naplanum became king if he hadn’t been before.
It was Eshbi-Erra who chased out the Elamites and recovered and rebuilt the city of Ur, which would stay under his dynasty’s control for about a century until Gungunum, king of Larsa, took it from him.
The cities of Isin and Larsa competed for control for above two centuries, and this is known as the Isin-Larsa period. In the end, the king of Larsa, Rim-Sin, killed the king of Isin ending his dynasty;
Then just 30 years later, Rim-sin was killed himself by the young Amorite king Hammurabi in his quest to dominate Sumer, this in what is now -1356 BC. As a quick side note, Hammurabi is famous for his law code, which skeptics say predated and therefore inspired Moses’ law.
By removing the Kassites, we have incidentally moved Hammurabi to a place about a century after Joshua invaded the promised land (-1467) where there were many Amorites. Some of these Amorites, being faced with imminent invasion and an apparently unstoppable enemy in Israel, fled east where they formed part of the emerging Amorite dynasty.
Having had contact with Israel, they certainly could have had contact with their laws; which certainly could have inspired Hammurabi; what is certain is that if this timeline is correct, it could not have been the other way around – Hammurabi wasn’t even born when Moses died.
Regardless, as so often happens after a great king creates an empire, his descendants are unable to hold it. So it was with Hammurabi whose son Samsi-iluna gradually lost the territory his father had gained, and over the course of the next century declined to the point that, in -1189 the Hittites sacked and destroyed Babylon, ending his dynasty.
Meanwhile, the second dynasty of Babylon, called “the first sealand dynasty”, since it ruled over the coastal southern regions of Sumer, has two clear interactions with the Amorite dynasty; first, when Samsi-iluna wanted to kill Ilum-ma-il, it’s first king; and last, when Gulkishar of Sealand wrote a nasty letter to Samsi-ditana, the last king of the Amorite dynasty.
These dynasties were, therefore, contemporary. And historians are correct in believing that the Kassites prospered from the weakness of the Amorites, establishing themselves at some point in this period as overlords of both the Sealand and Amorite dynasties.
They would continue in this role, after the fall of Babylon, as sovereigns over dynasties 4-9, ruling hand-in-glove over them from their capital of Dur-Kurigalzu, while the Babylonian puppet kings ran the day to day things and pretended to be important.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Assyrians grew in power starting in around -1550, and later competed with Kassites for control over land, going back and forth; sometimes being stronger, sometimes weaker.
Also meanwhile, to the north west, the kingdom of Mari which had been a significant player in the -1900 Sargonic era had been replaced with the Mitanni, who gradually grew to become a greater player; meanwhile, even farther west, the Hittites controlled eastern turkey and northern Syria, even after the conquest of Joshua.
The scope and power of these empires waxed and waned, but for now it’s enough to mention that they existed. And meanwhile Israel was going through the Judges period for about 350 years, which ended when Saul was crowned king in -1111.
Back in Sumer, there was always drama but nothing worth noting until after the turn of the millennium. But to get to that, we have to make a brief detour to Egypt. If you know anything about history, you’ll notice that the following events are dated about five centuries later than TH places them; this is to be expected, based on what I told you about Egyptian history. For now bear with me and we’ll prove these dates much later.
After the Exodus, Egypt was in tatters for some time, and the Amalekites – known to history as the Hyksos – took the opportunity to invade and rule for some centuries, finally being chased out by the 18th dynasty around the time of Saul, who faced the Amalekite refugees fleeing Egypt and conquered them once and for all.
Israel then entered a golden era, under David and Solomon, who pushed back their Hittite, Mitanni, Syrian and Egyptian neighbors and took tribute from most of them, making them immensely wealthy. Solomon in particular was insanely rich.
2 Chronicles 1:15 The king made silver and gold to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the lowland, for abundance.
It also tells us that the queen of Sheba came to visit him and was awed. Now Jesus called her “the queen of the South”, which basically has to be Egypt. The only queen of Egypt who was ever powerful enough to really be a candidate for this person was Hatshepsut, who according to the chronology we’ll work out later, ruled contemporary with Solomon.
After Solomon died, Israel split into two countries, the northern ten tribes in Samaria, and the southern three based in Jerusalem. The northern tribes were ruled over by Jeroboam, who had fled to Egypt under Solomon and came back after his death and was anointed by God to be king.
The southern three tribes were ruled by Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, which was thenceforth called the kingdom of Judah. About 5 years after the split, “Shishak” king of Egypt invaded and plundered Judah and both Rehoboam and Jeroboam became his vassals.
Scholars think they know who this is, but as we’ll discuss later they are wrong. It was actually Thutmoses IV, who boasted of “conquering Syria” which is what the Egyptians called anyone to the NE of them, basically.
Now interestingly, his son Amenhotep III is known as being the richest Pharoah in the history of Egypt. But how? Did they suddenly discover more gold mines? No, his dad stole it from the piles Solomon had heaped up “as stones”.
But this leads us to another fascinating story; his son was Akhenaten, the heretic monotheist. He instituted religious reforms that were deeply unpopular, for no apparent reason. He worshipped one god, the sun-disc, and penned a hymn that is eerily similar to Psalms 104 but directed at the worship of the sun God.
Now this, of course, leads historians to say “Look!” the 13th century Pharoah Akhenaten wrote a hymn to his pagan God Aten, and David shamelessly stole it and addressed it to his cult of Yahweh!
But the 10th century Pharaoh Akhenaten was the grandson of the man who sacked the city of Jerusalem, pilfering it of everything of value! It’s not hard to believe that a copy of David’s psalms was among those things.
Indeed, historians are at an utter loss to explain how and why Akhenaten enacted such radical changes, unprecedented in Egyptian history. But his grandfather had stolen tons of things from Jerusalem; what if he really did have a come-to-Jesus moment because of something he read in the copies of the books of Moses that Shishak probably stole?
People who have an interaction with the true God have a history of coming away from it changed – even if they don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, it makes them scared enough to try to do something.
Consider Nebuchadnezzar, a little bit later in -550 who after his madness changed his name to Nabonidus, and devoted himself likewise to monotheism and became the world’s first archeologist. We’ll get to that story in due time.
Meanwhile, in the -800s Assyria was growing stronger and reaching west, controlling more and more territory until finally conquering the entire middle east in the -700s, including the fall of the Kassite dynasty, their Babylonian 9th dynasty vassals, the Hittites, Syrians, and so on.
For Christians, a defining event was the fall of Samaria in -721 and the exile of the northern ten tribes. It was standard Assyrian policy to move conquered peoples to new lands, to reduce the risk of rebellions by putting them in strange territory. So the Israelites were scattered in various cities along the northern edges of their empire, along the black sea coast of turkey, in Armenia and Georgia, and farther east.
In their place, the Assyrians imported the newly conquered Elamites, who were settled in Samaria, and became known later as Samaritans. After some back luck, they oddly enough, adopted the local religion of Yahweh, importing some priests to teach them how to do it, despite having no relationship to the Israelites or Jews.