The Timeline

A hundred and fifty-three lives, reigns and events laid over a single axis. The spine is the dating historians actually work with; running beside it is the reckoning you reach by adding up the figures in Genesis and Kings, so that where the two agree and where they part is visible rather than argued about. Every entry carries the passages it rests on.

Two reckonings

History is the default. For the monarchy it follows Edwin Thiele’s reconstruction, which is the working standard. Kings and Chronicles date the reigns against each other — so many years of the one in such a year of the other — and those statements contradict one another at first sight. Thiele resolves that without altering a single figure: he lets father and son reign together for a time, and lets the two kingdoms begin their year at different points. Before the monarchy he gives ranges, because the evidence supports no more. Before Abraham he gives nothing at all.

From the text is the other axis: years of the world, counted forward from the figures in Genesis 5 and 11 and onward through the reigns, with AM 1 at 4022 BCE. On this reckoning the whole of Genesis becomes visible — Methuselah dying in the year of the flood, Shem still alive when Abraham is born — which is exactly what a reckoning in years BCE cannot show you, because it has no year for Methuselah or Shem at all.

Switch between them and some entries appear while others drop away. Forty of them have no historical dating; fifty-five have no year in the text. The count under the chart says how many — they do not disappear quietly.

What the drawing means

A solid bar is a span the sources fix. A hatched bar is approximate or disputed. A dot is a single year. The colours separate the lanes — empires, the kings of Judah, the kings of Israel, the prophets, people, events — and any lane can be switched off.

Click anything for its dates in both reckonings, how firmly the date is held, the passages behind it, and, where there is one, the argument.

The anchors

The chronology is not a chain of guesses. Six external records hold it in place, and everything else is measured from them.

The three places it is genuinely disputed

The exodus. Read 1 Kings 6:1 literally and the 480 years back from Solomon’s fourth year land on 1446 BCE. Read Exodus 1:11, where Israel builds Pi-Ramesse, as a sign that Ramesses II was on the throne at the time, and the date moves to about 1250. Most critical scholars hold the later date or regard the departure as a far smaller event than the narrative describes; more conservative scholarship keeps 1446. The chart draws 1250 and names 1446 on the entry, because pretending to a single answer here would be pretending.

The fall of Jerusalem. 587 or 586, turning on whether a king’s accession year counted as his first. One year; nothing else moves.

The crucifixion. Two years survive every constraint — 30 and 33 CE. Both sit inside Pilate’s ten years, both follow the fifteenth of Tiberius. Reading Matthew 12:40 as three days and three nights, with the resurrection on the Day of Firstfruits and therefore on a Sunday, puts the death on a Wednesday afternoon. Counted from the astronomical conjunction, as the Calendar counts, Pesach falls on a Wednesday in 30 and 33 CE — 27 drops out, since that year lies before the fifteenth of Tiberius; counted from the first visible crescent, as most reconstructions do, it falls on the Friday — the older reading, and the one behind Good Friday. Which convention you take decides both the day and the year.

Where the judges went

The oppressions and judgeships in Judges add up to some 410 years, and there is not that much time between the entry into the land and Saul. The ordinary reading is that each judge had his own region and that they overlapped in time: Deborah and Gideon both in the north, Jephthah in Gilead across the Jordan, Samson against the Philistines on the coast. The text points that way itself — half the tribes answer Deborah’s call and half do not. So the individual judges carry the lengths the text gives, but no place on the historical axis. Switch to the reckoning from the text and they appear.

Where the figures come from

The spreadsheet behind the second reckoning is Werner Vorstman’s own, worked out from the text. The chain runs like this: Genesis 5 and 11 for the lifespans; the 430 years of Galatians 3:17, counted from Abram’s entry into Canaan; the 400 of Genesis 15:13 from the weaning of Isaac; the 480 of 1 Kings 6:1 to Solomon’s fourth year; and the reign lengths of Kings and Chronicles thereafter.

Those 430 years do call for a choice. In Hebrew, Exodus 12:40 says the sojourn “in Egypt” lasted 430 years; the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch read “in Egypt and in Canaan”. Only on that second reading does the chain close, and that is the reading taken here.

The spreadsheet has two tabs that part company at one point: three years, over Abram’s birth. The chain the later totals rest on is the one drawn here.

In four places that chain runs a reign longer than the plain figure in Kings, so that the northern and southern lists still meet: Amaziah by thirteen years, Jeroboam II by twenty-four, Pekah by nine, Azariah by two. The spreadsheet records those differences in a column of its own rather than hiding them, and so does this instrument — each of those entries says what Kings gives and what the second reckoning uses. Thiele reaches the same reconciliation by another route, with co-regencies. They are two solutions to one problem, and the chart lets you look at both.

The historical dates are the standard ones: Thiele for the divided monarchy, the Assyrian eponym list and the Babylonian chronicles for the anchors, Josephus and the Delphi inscription for the first century. Where scholarship is divided, both cases are given on the entry.

The Calendar, for the day and the hour →  ·  Texts and datasets used →