Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah – Part 8

Part 1

Gershon Galil and Kenneth A Kitchen

Gershon Galil

Since the death of Edwin R Thiele in 1986, Biblical archaeologists and scholars have on the whole been receptive to his chronology and the postulates that underpin it. Some, like Leslie McFall, have amended his system slightly, but for the most part Thiele’s dates have gained widespread acceptance. One prominent dissenter from this broad consensus is Gershon Galil, Professor of Biblical Studies and Ancient History at the University of Haifa. Like Thiele, Galil took Biblical chronology as the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and may even have chosen the title of his thesis as a deliberate challenge to his predecessor. The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah was subsequently published by E J Brill. (Thiele’s dissertation bore the title The Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel.)

Galil actually accepts most of the postulates on which Thiele constructed his chronology:

1. The practice of coregencies in both Israel and Judah

2. The existence of two different New Year’s Days: 1 Nisan (Sacred Calendar) and 1 Tishri (Civil Calendar)

3. The use of two different methods to calculate regnal years: antedating and postdating

4. The possible inclusion of a coregency in the total length of a king’s reign

   Galil rejects Thiele’s fifth postulate:

5. The regnal years of the Kings of Israel were sometimes expressed using the Judahite system, and the regnal years of the Kings of Judah were sometimes expressed using the Israelite system.

Like Thiele, Galil accepts the existence of two different calendars with two different New Year’s Days. But whereas Thiele postulated that Judah employed the Civil Calendar (Tishri-to-Tishri) and Israel the Sacred Calendar (Nisan-to-Nisan) when chronicling the reigns of their respective monarchs, Galil proposes that it was the other way round—hence his rejection of Thiele’s fifth postulate.

Although Galil accepts Thiele’s third postulate that two different methods—antedating and postdating—were used to calculate regnal years, he modifies Thiele’s application of it. If you read the previous article in this series, you may recall that Thiele postulated that Judah and Israel did not simply adopt one of these two methods and apply it consistently throughout the period of the Divided Monarchy.

To recap, the two methods were as follows:

• The Antedating, or Non-Accession-Year, System: A king’s 1st Year began on the first New Year’s Day of his reign (1 Nisan or 1 Tishri depending on which calendar is in use). The part of his reign that preceded this day was called his Accession Year and was not numbered.

• The Postdating, or Accession-Year, System: A king’s 1st year ran from his coronation to the first New Year’s Day of his reign, however short this period might have been. His 2nd Year began on the latter date and ended on the subsequent New Year’s Eve.

Thiele postulated that these systems were applied as follows by Judah and Israel:

• Judah
  Accession-Year System from Rehoboam to Jehoshaphat
  Non-Accession-Year System from Jehoram to Jehoash
  Accession-Year System from Amaziah to Zedekiah

• Israel
  Non-Accession-Year System from Jeroboam I to Jehoahaz
  Accession-Year System from Jehoash to Hoshea

Galil modifies this:

• Judah
  Accession-Year System from Rehoboam to Zedekiah

• Israel
  Non-Accession-Year System from Jeroboam I to Jehoahaz
  Accession-Year System from Jehoash to Hoshea

On the whole, Galil’s chronology is not radically different from Thiele’s. His date for the Schism that inaugurated the Divided Monarchy is the same as Thiele’s (931 BCE), his date for the end of the Kingdom of Israel is the same (722 BCE), as is his date for the end of the Kingdom of Judah (586 BCE). It is only the internal dates between these boundaries that differ. Galil should perhaps be included among those followers of Thiele who accept most of his chronology, though Leslie McFall, who reviewed Galil’s book, believes that Galil has broken new ground:

Galil’s approach is a cross between Thiele (Harmonist) and Hayes and Hooker (Restorationists) ... At those many points where Galil alters the biblical data to achieve harmony for his chronology he there introduces the greatest weaknesses into his scheme. Given that Thiele did not resort to altering the numerals to achieve harmony, one wonders why Galil needed to alter any of the biblical data when his overall totals agree with Thiele’s ... But more importantly his work is the first full-scale attempt to build on Thiele’s foundation and to modify his dates in the light of his own researches. To that extent it must be taken seriously in any future work on the chronology of the Hebrew kings. (McFall 1999:573-574)

In McFall’s terminology, a Harmonist is a scholar who tries to make sense of the Biblical text without having to emend it : a Restorationist is one who argues that errors have crept into the text, which must then be emended (restored to its original form) in order to make sense. But McFall is being somewhat lax in his use of the term when he refers to Thiele as a Harmonist. Although Thiele was a Harmonist at heart, and did his best to make sense of the Scriptures without altering them, he was finally forced to admit that some verses of 2 Kings 17-18 were corrupt.

Like Thiele, Galil too has been forced to conclude that several pieces of chronological data in the Bible are simply incorrect:

All that can be established with certainty in the study of the chronology of the period from the Schism to the Exile is that a number of Biblical data are clearly erroneous, and only a limited number of dates can be determined with any degree of confidence. (Galil 8)

McFall’s Restorationists, John H Hayes and Paul K Hooker, have rejected Thiele’s coregencies and his postulates concerning the use of antedating and postdating. Their New Chronology, however, is still quite close to Thiele’s. They begin the Divided Monarchy in 926 BCE, five years later than Thiele, but their dates for the fall of Israel (722 BCE) and the fall of Judah (586 BCE) are in agreement with both Thiele’s and Galil’s chronologies.

Kenneth Kitchen

The last mainstream chronologist I want to look at is the Scottish Egyptologist Kenneth A Kitchen. Although Egyptology is his main field of research, Kitchen is an evangelical Christian and has more than once entered the field of Biblical archaeology to defend the historicity and reliability of the Scriptures. In 1966 he publicly endorsed Thiele’s chronology in his book Ancient Orient and Old Testament:

For the 350 years from Rehoboam of Judah to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC, some ninety-five per cent of the long series of reigns and cross-datings in Kings and Chronicles have been brilliantly worked out by E. R. Thiele—and that not by arbitrary juggling but by full use of proper Ancient Near Eastern procedures, objectively documented. At only two main points have difficulties persisted: the interpretation of certain data from the reigns of Ahaz and Hezekiah, and certain dates linked with the capture and fall of Jerusalem in the period 609-587/6 BC. New data and close study may well eliminate even these quite limited problems. (Kitchen 1966:76)

In his more recent tome, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003), Kitchen presents the latest version of his own chronology. Like Galil, Kitchen’s dates agree with Thiele’s on the three most important events in the history of the Divided Monarchy, those that occur at the boundaries of the two kingdoms:

• 931: The Schism between Rehoboam and Jeroboam that inaugurates the Divided Monarchy
• 722: The fall of Samaria and the Kingdom of Israel
• 586: The fall of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah

It is only internally that Kitchen differs from Thiele or Galil, and then usually by no more than one or two years (though there are few places where the difference is as much as nine or ten years). A promise to provide more detailed charts and annotations for this period of history (Kitchen 2003:508) has, to my knowledge, not yet been fulfilled.

In Summary

On the whole, then, there is relatively little disagreement among the chronologies of William Foxwell Albright, Edwin R Thiele, Gershon Galil and Kenneth Kitchen. They all place the period of the Divided Monarchy in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE, and assign it a duration of approximately 350 years (ie from the Schism to the Exile).

And if we include the chronologies of other mainstream scholars—such as Hayes & Hooker or Leslie McFall—none of the broad brushstrokes changes. We are still arguing about a year here or, perhaps, a decade there. For a radical redating of this period of ancient history, we must turn to the Short Chronology.

To be continued ...

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References

• William Foxwell Albright, The Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Number 100 (December 1945), pp 16-22, Boston MA (1945)
• Gershon Galil, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah, Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, Volume 9, E J Brill, Leiden (1996)
• John H Hayes and Paul K Hooker, A New Chronology for the Kings of Israel and Judah and Its Implications for Biblical History and Literature, John Knox Press, Atlanta (1988)
• Kenneth Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament, Tyndale Press, London (1966)
• Kenneth A Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids MI (2003)
• Leslie McFall, Review (Gershon Galil: The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah), Vetus Testamentum, Volume 49, Issue 4 (4 October 1999), pp 572-574, (1999)
• Leslie McFall, A Translation Guide to the Chronological Data in Kings and Chronicles, Bibliotheca Sacra, Volume 148, pp 3-45, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas TX (1991)
• Edwin R Thiele, The Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Volume 3, Number 3 (July 1944), pp 137-186, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1944)
• Edwin R Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, Third Edition, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids MI (1983)

Image Credits

• Gershon Galil and Kenneth A Kitchen:
  Kitchen: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
  Galil: © Faculty of Humanities, University of Haifa, Fair Use
• Edwin R Thiele: © Andrews University, Fair Use
• Leslie McFall: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
• Kenneth A Kitchen: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use