Can Biblical Chronology Be Trusted?

The Bible is not a book of philosophical or ethical principles, although it contains them. It is a book about how God has made himself known in history. Its message is timeless in that the nature of God and man has not changed. But the framework of that message, which holds it together and cannot be extracted from it, is the story of what God has said and done in history.

Chronology is the foundation of history; without it, history is a swarm of events with no relationship to each other or to us. Relative chronology places events before or after (or simultaneous with) each other. Absolute chronology relates events to us by fixing them on our conventional time line in terms of BC or AD.

The Bible is full of relative chronology. For example, we are told that Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born (Gn 21:5), that the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years (Ex 12:40), that Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years (Nm 32:13), and that Judah’s exile lasted for 70 years (Jr 25:11-12). But no absolute dates are given for any of these or other biblical events. Does this situation leave us unable to confirm or deny biblical chronology? This is not the case for two reasons.

First, the Bible’s relative chronology can be shown to be internally consistent. Israel’s time in Egypt, the wilderness, and the exile, for example, is consistently given in many different places. Chronological differences between Kings and Chronicles have been closely examined and have yielded to reasonable methods of harmonization.

Second, the historical accounts in both Old Testament and New Testament intersect at various points the histories of surrounding nations such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome, whose chronologies have been established to a high degree of accuracy. Assyrian chronology, for example, is set according to an eclipse known to have occurred on June 15, 763 BC.

Problems still remain. Differences between ancient and modern calendars, for example, often require the giving of alternate dates in the form 931/0 BC. Furthermore, different methods of harmonizing the dates of biblical kings yield slightly different results.

Even conservative scholars do not always agree on how a particular chronological reference should be interpreted. For example, some scholars argue that many numbers in the Bible are figurative, especially 40 and its multiples. These scholars prefer in some cases to give priority to archaeological clues in establishing biblical chronology. Thus the patriarchal period is often dated to the Middle Bronze Age between about 1800–1600 BC. It is also supposed that the Hebrews migrated to Egypt during the Hyksos period (about 1700–1500 BC), when Semitic people ruled Egypt. The exodus is then associated with the reign of Rameses II shortly after 1290 BC. Following the wilderness period, the conquest of Canaan would have begun about 1250 BC. Pharaoh Merneptah (1224–1214 BC) mounted a campaign against Canaan in the fifth year of his reign (about 1220). In his record of that campaign, he mentioned that, among others, Israel was utterly destroyed. Thus, by that date, the people Israel were a recognized group in Canaan.

Assuming a literal interpretation of 1 Kings 6:1, however, the exodus occurred in 1446 BC and the conquest period lasted about seven years around 1400 BC. Continuing backward, based on Exodus 12:40, Jacob’s migration to Egypt would have been in 1876 BC. Data regarding the ages of the patriarchs would place their births at 2006 BC for Jacob (Gn 47:9), 2066 BC for Isaac (Gn 25:26), and 2166 BC for Abraham (Gn 21:5). Because the genealogical lists in Genesis are believed by most to be intentionally incomplete or “open,” attempts are usually not made to establish historical dates prior to Abraham (see “Are the Genealogies Reliable?” in Genesis, p. 13).

The New Testament is not much concerned with when events took place, with Luke being somewhat the exception. Luke tells us, for example, that Jesus was twelve when his parents lost him in Jerusalem (Lk 2:42) and was about thirty at the beginning of his ministry (Lk 3:23). Both references are altogether reasonable. Luke 3:1 gives what appears to set the date for John the Baptist’s ministry—“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene.” There is nothing problematic about this date except the interpretation of Tiberius’s fifteenth year, the determination of which depends on the beginning point and which calendar Luke had in mind.

Due to an error by a sixth-century Scythian monk who was responsible for our current Western calendar, Jesus’s birth actually occurred in the BC era, perhaps in late 5 BC. We know that Herod the Great, who was alive when Jesus was born, died between March 12/13 and April 11, 4 BC.

Unfortunately the date of Jesus’s crucifixion is uncertain. Although the majority opinion is that it occurred in AD 30, a good argument can be made for AD 33. Our knowledge of Roman history allows us to determine that Herod Agrippa and therefore the events of Acts 12 occurred in AD 44.

There is no credible reason, then, to question the Bible’s historical chronology, even though at times we wish we had more information.