How the dates are worked out

What a date measures

Lifetime

Birth to death, where the text gives both or lets them be counted. Abraham lives 175 years (Genesis 25:7).

Reign

The years a king or queen ruled, including any years ruled alongside another king, most often a father or a son.

In office

The years a governor or a high priest held the post.

In the text

From the first year someone appears in the text to the last. It is not a lifetime, and it stops where the text stops. Acts leaves Paul in Rome about AD 62, so his date ends there and does not run on to the death later tradition records.

Three kinds of date

From outside records

From the kings of Israel and Judah on, the Bible’s years can be tied to records kept outside it. These are Assyrian and Babylonian lists of years and kings, an eclipse of 763 BC, and the reigns of Persian kings and Roman governors. The first firm tie is in 853 BC, and the reigns before it are counted back from there. Most of these dates are good to within a few years, and the widest gaps are listed below. The kings follow the reckoning of the scholar Edwin Thiele, which many study Bibles print.

Counted

Before that, the count runs back by the Bible’s own numbers. David and Solomon reign forty years each. 1 Kings 6:1 puts the exodus 480 years before Solomon’s fourth year, 966 BC, which gives 1446 BC. Exodus 12:40 gives 430 years in Egypt, and Genesis gives the ages of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Every translation in the app prints 480 and 430.

Approximate

Some people can only be placed by the story. Judges gives years of oppression and years of rest. Added end to end they are too many to fit, and readers arrange them in different ways. So each judge has a single year as a rough guide. People the text gives no age or year for are placed the same way.

The key years

What has no date

• Adam to the sons of Noah. Genesis 5 and 11 give each father’s age when the next man in the line is born. The Hebrew and the ancient Greek texts give different ages. Some readers add the ages up and some hold that the lists pass over generations, so the timeline shows the order and no years.
• Job, Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk and Malachi. Their books name no king and no year.

Where readers differ

• The exodus. Many scholars place it about 1260 BC. They point to the city of Rameses in Exodus 1:11 and take the 480 years as twelve generations, a round number. The ancient Greek translation has 440 in place of 480. On the later date Moses, Joshua and the first judges move by up to two centuries, and the patriarchs are usually placed later as well.
• The 430 years. The ancient Greek translation and the Samaritan text say they were spent in Egypt and in Canaan. On that reading the count starts when Abraham arrives in Canaan, and many readers take Galatians 3:17 the same way. That brings the patriarchs 215 years later.
• The kings. Other reckonings differ from Thiele’s by a year or two in the later reigns and by up to nine in the earliest. Thiele begins Hezekiah in 715 BC, from 2 Kings 18:13. 2 Kings 18:1 and 18:9-10 set his first years beside Hoshea of Israel, which points to about 729 BC, and some reckonings begin him there.
• Ezra. His journey is dated to 458 BC, the seventh year of Artaxerxes I. Some scholars place it under Artaxerxes II, in 398 BC.
• The fall of Jerusalem. Some give 587 BC and some 586 BC.
• The crucifixion. AD 33 is the other common year, and it moves the dates near it by up to three years. The birth of Jesus is placed between 6 and 4 BC.