{"id":61836,"date":"2019-08-26T13:21:59","date_gmt":"2019-08-26T10:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=61836"},"modified":"2023-03-20T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T07:03:18","slug":"biblical-and-rabbinic-chronology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/biblical-and-rabbinic-chronology\/","title":{"rendered":"Biblical And Rabbinic Chronology"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[444,721,420],"acf":{"old_id":"61836","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":34243,"related_cahpter":"293","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Counting and accounting for 480 years","content":"

\u201cIn the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites left the land of Egypt, in the month of Ziv\u2014that is, the second month\u2014in the fourth year of his reign over Israel, Solomon began to build the House of the LORD\u201d(v. 1).<\/span><\/p>\n

Our chapter stipulates that construction on the Temple began 480 years after the Exodus. Our challenge is to see how many of those years can be accounted for by ordinary, textual, means.<\/span><\/p>\n

First of all, we know with certainty that the period between the Exodus and entering the Land of Israel was 40 years. We also know that Saul ruled for 2 years, and David for 40 years, which, along with Solomon\u2019s 4, account, with certitude, for 86 years. It is with the intervening period, reflecting, the era of Joshua and the Judges, that we run into a problem: Even if we had a record of how many years each judge ruled, we do not know whether they were all consecutive\u2014rather than overlapping\u2014nor do we know how long of a gap there may have been between even consecutive tenures.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, we do have a significant piece of chronological information, courtesy of Jephthah. The King of Ammon had raised the issue of the legitimacy of Israel\u2019s right to the land east of the Jordan, claiming that \u201cwhen Israel came from Egypt, they seized the land that is mine\u201d (Judges 11:13). In his reply, Jephthah argued that \u201cIsrael has been inhabiting [Trans-Jordan] for three hundred years, why have you not tried to recover them all this time?\u201d (26). That would close our gap to a bit less than a century, and we could assume that the outstanding time was subsumed in the period between Jephthah and the inauguration of Saul.<\/span><\/p>\n

An alternative explanation, albeit less traditional, would stipulate that the number 480 is not exact but symbolic, or representational (\u201ctypological\u201d). Given that 40 years is an oft-recurring number in biblical chronology (we have noted two such examples in our own brief accounting above), 480 could be understood as a formulaic way of saying 40 X 12\u2014another typological number. In fact, if we return to the priestly genealogy of 1 Chronicles 5 that we cited in chapter 4<\/a>, and we count backwards from Azariah \u201cwho was the priest in the House that Solomon built\u201d (36), we arrive at Phineas, son of Elazar, son of Aaron, a contemporary of the Exodus. 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