Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah – Part 4

Part 1

Bust of Josephus

The Romanized Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus lived in the 1st century of the Common Era and is best remembered for his account of the Jews’ revolt against the Roman Empire, The Jewish War, of which he was a witness. Josephus also authored the Jewish Antiquities, a general history of his people. The first twelve books of this apologetic work chronicle the history of the Jewish people from the Creation of the World to the death of Judas Maccabaeus in 160 BCE. For this part of his history Josephus relied heavily on the Hebrew Scriptures, but there are many details that are not to be found in the Bible. The remaining eight books of the Antiquities bring the chronicle down to 66 CE, at which point The Jewish War takes up the story:

The work naturally falls into two nearly equal parts, the dividing-line being the close of the exile reached at the end of Book X ... For the first half the author is mainly dependent on Scripture and traditional interpretation of Scripture. As a rule he closely follows the order of the Biblical narrative, but he has, with apologies to his countrymen, rearranged and given a condensed digest of the Mosaic code, reserving further details for a later treatise. In the history of the monarchy he has amalgamated the two accounts in Kings and Chronicles. (Thackeray xi-xii)

Josephus’s chronology does not agree with that of the Seder Olam. The latter was compiled about seventy-fives years after the Jewish Antiquities, so it was not available to him as a source. And as Josephus wrote his work for a gentile audience, it is unlikely that the rabbinic tradition was influenced by him. The discrepancy between the two chronologies is often pronounced. For example, Josephus reckons little short of 3000 years from the Creation of the World to the death of Moses (Josephus, Whiston & Havercamp 4:363), whereas the Seder Olam allots only 2487 years to this period (Johnson 1501-1504).

The chronology of Josephus was studied and critiqued more than two centuries ago by his English translator William Whiston, who noted that Josephus made no attempt to clear up the apparent discrepancies between the chronologies of the two kingdoms of the Divided Monarchy:

However, the sum of the years from the revolt under Jeroboam to the captivity of the ten tribes, which amounts to somewhat above 239 years, or, in the next round and decimal number, to 240 years, is plainly taken by Josephus [Jewish Antiquities 9:14:1] for the true number, without the least attempt for connecting the particular numbers to those of the kingdom of Judah, or allowing for either deficient or redundant months, or indeed for two interregna which seem here very material, and are esteemed no shorter than 20 years ... We may also note here, that Josephus never corrected this deficiency in the kingdom of Israel afterward. Nor ought the critics therefore to make any emendations here of 260 for 240 years; nor elsewhere [Jewish Antiquities 10:9:7] of 133 for 130, in the interval between the captivity of the ten and of the two tribes, although both may be more exact numbers in chronology than the other; since I think it pretty plain that Josephus did not in either of these places enter into such niceties; but gave us the gross numbers, as they stood in his copies, without any further adjustment or correction whatsoever. (Josephus & Whiston 964)

To be continued ...

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References

• Ken Johnson, Ancient Seder Olam: A Christian Translation of the 2000-year-old Scroll, Kindle Edition, Biblefacts.org (2006)
• Flavius Josephus, William Whiston (translator), Syvert Havercamp (editor), Complete Works of Josephus, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 4, Bigelow, Brown & Co, Inc, New York (1800)
• Flavius Josephus, William Whiston (translator), The Works of Flavius Josephus, George Virtue, London (1841)
• Henry St John Thackeray, Josephus, Volume IV, Loeb Classical Library L242, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA (1961)

Image Credits

• Bust of Josephus?: Wikimedia Commons, Anonymous, 1st Century, Public Domain
• William Whiston: Wikipedia, Public Domain