Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, The Years of Sin The Real Bible Code Daniel Gregg

Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, The Years of Sin

The Real Bible CodeDaniel Gregg

To secure the chronology beyond all doubt, I will now give an account of the 40 years for the sin of Judah and the 390 years for the sin of Israel. Earlier we used the 390 years as a check on the years from the division of the kingdom to the date of Ezekiel's vision. I said then that this was not the primary significance of the 390 years. That the 390 years run from the division of the kingdom in 983 (and the introduction of Jeroboam's sin to Israel) to the date of the prophecy in 593 is a coincidence clearly of the divine sort for the purpose of fixing the chronology of the kings. However, this coincidence is not the primary sense of the text in the context of the prophecy.

The 390 years accounts for the years of sin for Israel from the time they entered the land of Canaan until the time they were exiled, and the 40 years accounts for just the sin of Judah after Israel was exiled. This must be so, since the prophet gives two separate figures. When Israel was in the land, it must be understood that the righteousness or wickedness of Judah was not the factor that determined a year of "sin". Rather it was the disposition of the majority of the nation, which before 720 B.C. was not determined by just the one tribe of Judah. We will find the years of sin for Israel between the entry into Canaan and their final exile in 720 B.C.

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We will find the years for the sin of Judah after the Kingdom of Israel was exiled; for only then does the sin of Judah count independently. Years of sin will be counted when the scripture tells us that Israel or Judah was in rebellion against God. We will locate these years in the times of foreign oppressions during the Judges, during the divided kingdom, and for Judah during the reigns of Manasseh, Amon, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, and Jehoiachin, who was exiled to Babylon in 597 B.C. We will find that the ability to locate these years further secures the correctness of the chronology beyond contradiction. The sin years will establish that it is correct to count 614 years from the Exodus to the 4th year of Solomon, and correct to date the division of the kingdom in 983 B.C.

Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, The Years of Sin


We will also show that in these 390 years of sin, and 40 years of sin are to be found all of the fallow years that Israel and Judah did not observe—seventy to be exact. It was these seventy years that served as the divine measure for the 70 year exile of Judah. No chronology except the correct divinely ordered true and historical one can account for all the data without contradiction and pass all these tests. Give me a set of well drawn charts and ten minutes with any other chronology and I will give you a list of fatal errors, and most of that time will be spent figuring out the chart makers notational method.



113 m

Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, The 40 Years of Sin


3499

3498

3444

642B.C.

696B.C.

55

1

Manasseh reigned 55 years

3500640B.C.

641B.C.

2

1Amon reigned 2 years

3531609B.C.

639B.C.

1

Josiah reigned 31 years

3501

608B.C.

Jehoahaz reigned 3 months.

3532

3543597B.C.

607B.C.

11

1Jehoiakim reigned 11 years.

3533

Jehoiachin reigned 3 months

31

a

• We now figure the 40 years• Hezekiah was a righteous king so he is not included at the top• We must delete Josiah because he was righteous.• Manasseh repented in the middle of his reign so we count backwards to see how many sin years Manasseh had at the start of his reign.

1m2m



113 m



3499

3444696B.C.

1


3500640B.C.

641B.C.

2


608B.C.


3532

3543597B.C.

607B.C.

11


3533


a

• We now figure the 40 years• Hezekiah was a righteous king so he is not included at the top• We must delete Josiah because he was righteous.• Manasseh repented in the middle of his reign so we count backwards to see how many sin years Manasseh had at the start of his reign.

1m2m

?

• The 3 months of Jehoiachin were in the same Tishri year as Jehoiakim's 11th year, so we count 11 years.• 2 months of Jehoahaz's reign and the accession year of Jehoiakim were in the same Tishri year. We count 1 year.• The first month of Jehoahaz's reign was in its own Tishri year. We count 1 year.• We count 2 years in the reign of Amon.



113 m



3499

3444696B.C.

1


3500640B.C.

641B.C.

2


608B.C.


3532

3543597B.C.

607B.C.

11


3533


a

1m2m

?

11 years 1 year + 1 year + 2 years = 15 years



113 m



3499

3444696B.C.

1


3500640B.C.

641B.C.

2


608B.C.


3532

3543597B.C.

607B.C.

11


3533


a

1m2m

?


All years are counted from Tishri 1, and a partial year is counted as a whole year, following the principle of inclusive counting.

40 – 15 = 25 years sin for Manasseh



113 m



3499

3444696B.C.

1


3500640B.C.

641B.C.

2


608B.C.


3532

3543597B.C.

607B.C.

11


3533


a

1m2m

?


All years are counted from Tishri 1, and a partial year is counted as a whole year, following the principle of inclusive counting.

40 – 15 = 25 years sin for Manasseh

253468

672B.C.

1

25

26

27

28

29

30

40

Or we may allot each king a number of years, rounding up to the whole number of years given in the text: 2 Amon, 1 Jehoahaz, 11 Jehoiakim, 1 Jehoiachin, and 25 left for Manasseh which must be computed.



65



3444696B.C.

1

Manasseh's 25 years of sin

?

Between the fall of B.C. 673 and B.C. 672 Manasseh joined in a revolt against Assyria. He was captured by Essarhaddon and taken to Babylon. In 671 B.C. he repented, and was restored to his throne. This is all according to George Smith's reconstruction of the Assyrian Eponym Canon and the Cylinder of Essarhaddon's military expeditions. In the same war, the remnant of the northern Kingdom of Israel left over from the exile of Samaria was deported and immigrants brought in so that Israel became "not a people" fulfilling the 65 year prophecy of Isaiah 7:8.

253468

672B.C.

1

Ephraim broken the same year Manasseh captured, so that the 65 th year (Isaiah 7:8) matches the 25th year of Manasseh's sin.

4/203404

736B.C.

The Isaiah 7:8 prophecy matches the 4th year of Ahaz (stated as the 20th year of Jotham, II Kings 15:30) when Pekah (cf. Isaiah 7:16) was slain by Hoshea.

1/173401

739B.C.

1st year of Ahaz



Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, 390 Years Sin for Israel


The 390 years of sin for Israel (Ezekiel 4:5) falls in the period from the entry into Canaan until their exile in B.C. 720. First let's do some rough calculations. There were 134 years of Servitudes, when Israel was in rebellion against the covenant. All the kings of the northern ten tribes followed the sins of Jeroboam. This period was from B.C. 983 – 720, or a period of 263 years. Add 263 to 134 to get 397. That's really close to the mark. Only seven years too many, and it is based only on counting the time of the servitudes and the rebellious kings of Israel after the division of the kingdom. This demonstrates that any attempt to shorten the periods beyond 7 years will leave a deficit in the number of years revealed to Ezekiel. Where then do we delete the excess of seven years of sin?

That's a very small number to worry about. Only God knows exactly where they go, but I can tell you range of years to look in. This is in the 23 year interregnum between the death of Jeroboam II in B.C. 792 and the short reign of Zachariah in B.C. 770. The Scripture is silent about the disposition of Israel at this time, allowing for a short reformation. Factors that would encourage a slight majority in Israel to tip the balance to repentance at this time: 1. The repentance of Assyria under Jonah, 2. The death of Jeroboam II. 3. Fear of the prophecy of the 4th generation, so they made no new king, 4. The powerful kingdom of Judah under Uzziah, 5. Judah and Israel were allies at this time. At least 374 sin years are explicitly accounted for, but there are no more than 397 years possible. The solution then is to omit just one seven year period in the ambiguous 23 years.



Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, 390 Years Sin for Israel


It will appear that being able to find 390 years of Israel's sin is confirmation that the kingdom was divided in 983 and that 134 years of sin must be found in the period of the Judges. As a result of the errant work of Edwin Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, the date of the divided kingdom was lowered to B.C. 931 to accommodate fragmentary Assyrian Eponym lists. This 52 year revision put the 390 years of sin beyond recovery. Further, many chronologists omit 20 years from the servitudes. Both Martin Anstey and David Cooper missed I Samuel 7:2-4, obtaining only 114 years instead of the full 134. This also puts the 390 years beyond recovery, as well as confusing the 450 years of Acts 13:20. Trying to explain the evidence after these errors is unparsimonious. There was no doubt as to the solution to the kings period before Thiele. Thiele just did not like it. Willis Judson Beecher gave us the solution in 1907.

In The Dated Events of the Old Testament, Beecher shows the divided kingdom at the 983/982 year. Thiele was able to lose 52 years by guessing at co-regencies. A co-regency is an overlap between two kings, where the son of one king begins his rule before the old king dies. Thiele's subtractions from the chronology were ad hoc, based on his extra-biblical opinions, and violate the principle that biblical chronology should be un-ambiguously solvable. What reason would God so meticulously provide all the data only to leave it to undocumented co-regencies to void the absoluteness of the solution? There is only 1 true co-regency in biblical chronology, and it is explained in II Kings 8:16. In two other cases, the reign total is not a true co-regency since the co-regent years are not numbered.

Two co-regencies, but the first year is just another case of inclusive counting.



Locating 70 Fallow Years Not Observed by Israel and Judah


The first two fallow years that Israel did not observe fall into the first servitude. 2569 divided by 7 = 367 remainder 0. So the seventh year begins.The first servitude was 8 years and includes 8 years of sin



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In the second servitude Israel did not observe three fallow years. The orange column in the middle counts the 9th-26th years of sin. The seventh years are counted 3,4,5 in the brown boxes.













Three years of sin are counted under Abimelech, but no seventh year fell during his oppression.









During the first Philistine servitude, Israel missed the 50th year also.

Samson judges "in the days of the Philistines" so his years are not charted separately.





The next slide covers all the kings of Israel. When it starts to scroll, you can pause the scrolling with a right mouse click.



B.C.

Anno Creation

Sum of 70Fallow years

Sin years

Fallow cycles



We reach the end of the kingdom of Israel.

This interregnum in the northern kingdom is the only place where a seven year reformation can exist, which is necessary to keep the total of sin years at 390.

The broken fallow years for Israel total 63. 7 more during Judah's 40 years to come.



Locating 70 Fallow Years Not Observed by Israel and

Judah


We move on to the 40 years for the sin of Judah. In the 25 years of Manasseh's rebellion, fallow years 64-67 are neglected. Manasseh was taken prisoner to Babylon by Essarhaddon between the fall of 673 and 672. After repenting, he was pardoned and restored.



Manasseh's successor, Amon, was wicked for the two years of his reign. The 68th fallow year fell in his regin.

A small part of Jehoahaz's reign falls in the Tishri year previous to the end of his 3 month reign. So that small part is the 28th year of sin. The 29th year of sin falls at the end of his reign and in the accession year of Jehoiakim. Finally, we reach the 70th land Sabbath (fallow) that Judah did not keep in the 40 years, and the 70 year exile comes immediately after.



The 390 years and the 40 years—Discussion


That 70 land sabbaths Israel did not observe occur in the 390 years and 40 years is no accident. These years were the score God was keeping against Israel. The match confirms what is implied in II Chronicles 36:21, and Leviticus 26:34-35, 46. It also secures the sum of 134 years of rebellion during the Judges separate from the 480 years that Israel kept the Exodus-Passover (a total of 614 years) and the original 938-720 B.C. chronology of the northern Kingdom before it was contaminated with the errors of Assyriologists, who thought their archaeological finds could hold a candle to the Bible.

Many chronologists try to count the oppressions in the during the righteous Judges when the land had rest. This is simply not possible for that very reason. Judges repeats the refrain, "And the land had rest" for the first four judges (3:11, 30; 5:31; 8;28). Gideon clearly died before the usurper Abimelech, who is introduced with Israel "turned again … after Baalim" Tola follows "after" him and "arose to save Israel". Jair also "arose [to save]" "after" Tola. The Ammonites are introduced with "Israel did evil again". The Philistines are introduced with, "Israel did evil again", and during the last 20 years Israel was doing evil (cf. I Sam. 7:2-4). It is always implied that Israel was serving God during the life of the judge except for Samson.

Appendix A: George Smith's Assyrian Eponym Canon


The B.C. 697-642 dates are correct for Manasseh's reign. The remnant of Israel was carried away between the fall of B.C. 673 and B.C. 672, Manasseh was taken prisoner to Babylon.



Manasseh repented and was restored in B.C. 671, the 26th year of his reign.



George Smith (1840-1876) became one of the world's leading experts in Cuneiform. He discovered the Gilgamesh Epic in the British Museum, a corrupted Flood tradition, and discovered more accounts excavating at Nineveh.





Plate XCVI at the left is from Bible Illustrations by Henry Frowde, 1896, Oxford University Press. Manasseh had to pay tribute to Assyria.

David L. Cooper in, Messiah: His First Coming Scheduled, quotes Smith with the introduction, "Ephraim broken after 65 years from prophecy of 738 [737] B.C. (Isa. 7:8). Esar-haddon transported immigrants from Babylonia and Elam to Samaria (Ezra 4:2-9). King of Assyria took Manasseh to Babylon (II Chron. 23:11-13). The Lord providentially had latter restored to his throne. 'In this war, B.C. 673-672, Esar-haddon carried the remnant of Israel into captivity, and sent Manasseh, king of Judah, to Babylon. In the following year, B.C. 671, Manasseh was pardoned and restored' —George Smith." This matches exactly with the 25 years needed to complete the 40 years for the sin of Judah.



I must include a note here on Assyrian Chronology. Assyria cannot be said to have a consistent history. In fact, the archaeological remains cannot even qualify as history, certainly not on the level of the archaeological remains from Babylon and Persia. It's only value is were it only confirms what we already know from the biblical chronology. There is no carefully tabulated Assyrian history because Assyrians were not concerned with history or its accuracy. The concern for accurate history in the modern age is due to the influence of the Judeo-Christian world view. During the biblical period, only the prophets inspired by God were concerned with keeping history straight. Left to man, there would be no biblical history either. After the biblical period, the concern for accurate history among the nations was almost entirely due to Christian authors inspired by the biblical prophets.



The kings of empires like Assyria habitually erased or distorted their own records and the records of their predecessors. Why were Babylon and Persia exceptions? Probably because they were influenced by the Jewish dispersion, and notable examples are Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Mordecai, Ezra, and Nehemiah, who became chief scribes and administrators. Assyrian chronology was not confirmed by Ptolemy's Canon, because where it agrees with Ptolemy's Canon, it also agrees with the biblical chronology. So we must say that the biblical chronology has confirmed Ptolemy's Canon. But then where biblical chronology disagrees with the results that Assyriologists have put forth, we must defer to the bible, which is history in the true sense. We must resist all attempts to impute the historical integrity of modern historians under the influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview to pre-Christian pagan Assyrian scribes.



The collective actions of sinful man would sooner destroy their own history than preserve it. Assyria was an immoral imperialistic power that existed on the prowess of its military conquests. It's religion and propaganda were much less influenced by the truth than say Soviet Propaganda or Hitler's Propaganda, and those nations had some Judeo-Christian influence to straighten the record. The only reason that Babylon and Persia can deliver us an accurate chronology is that God intervened and saw to it that they kept accurate records. This was really the first intervention in history were God set the bar, and the nations that came afterward tried to imitate it, but even Greece and early Rome let even there own basic chronologies fall into uncertainties. As late as 44 B.C. the Roman calendar was in chaos, and the Greek calendar as uncertain as a year either way.



When it comes to evaluating ancient records of pagan nations, Christians are their own worst enemies. For they give too much credit to the morals of ancient scribes and kings the way they would credit modern scholars with Christian morals. Modern scholars only have integrity because they value historical truth or because they are made to by a culture and system that was built by Bible believing people. The validity of Assyrian chronology, such as it is, must be evaluated from the biblical chronology, and not the other way around. The only reason that biblical chronology and history exist at all is that God was continuously intervening to see to it that events were recorded the right way. This is what makes the Bible superior in every way to contemporaneous records.



The Assyrian Eponym Canon is only valid to within ±2 years back to 747 B.C., since it agrees to that extent with the Scripture and Ptolemy's Canon. The main reason for this is that Nineveh was destroyed and plundered in 612 B.C., 135 years from the point where Assyrian Chronology begins to have gaping holes in it according to the biblical testimony. One would expect a single generation to be able to recall its own chronology, but things in those days naturally deteriorated, and the ability to record or rightly remember three or four generations back, without modern record keeping that itself is the result of a biblical moral system, is too much to ask. To this tendency, we can bring the witness of the Scripture itself, preserved by divinely inspired Prophets. How long did it take Israel to forget the mighty exploits of the LORD? How long did it take them to fall into apostasy?



Was it too much to ask Israel to listen to God's version of events for three generations? So with this preface, let us enumerate the problems with extending the Eponym Canon beyond 747 B.C.

• It contradicts biblical chronology.• It is only a list, not an historical narrative.• It is compiled from broken fragments.• There are obvious copy errors.• There are added and omitted names.• The 763 eclipse record is ambiguous.• The generation Nineveh repented is omitted.• Too many unbelieving Assyriologists are involved with the original data.• The public reads an edited and interpolated translation of the lists which do not disclose that fact.• The Assyrian records are compiled by the same parties that those records exalt and glorify.



Biblical Chronology Solved, Part IV, The Years of Sin The Real Bible Code Daniel Gregg

Documents

sin years

years accounts

fallow years

sin of israel

sin of judah count

year of sin

kingdom of israel

wickedness of judah