ACCURATE DATES, OLD TESTAMENT

Archeology & Astronomy Prove Correct Dates

How we KNOW the dates for the Old Testament

Following is the Transcript for this video.

The Bible's chronology is amazing, like everything else about the Bible. It gives us all these measures of time throughout a chronology. The problem has been to tie that ancient chronology to the calendar that we use today, the Gregorian calendar. BC stands for before Christ, and so BC dates are tied to the Gregorian calendar. So how do we link the dates from the ancient calendars with the Gregorian calendar? This is very important. How did we get BC dates for the Old Testament?

So we've flown into Baghdad, and we have driven up, and now we are in the city of Mosul. We're quite excited about it because it's taken two months for us to get in here. We were here two months ago, and they wouldn't let us in, because we were Americans, and they were having all kinds of conflict up here. But they've lifted that, and so we're back, and we're very excited, because now we're in the city of Mosul. We're going to make our way over and spend some time in the ruins of Nineveh. So we are inside the ancient walls of Nineveh, and we're walking across Nineveh as Jonah did in ancient times. But we're walking across to the ancient mound of Cunic, where Austin Henry Layard started his excavations in 1849. After he retired, Hormuzd Rassam took over and made a discovery, and we're going to go look at where he made this discovery. This is my dear friend Omar, and these are our weapons for the wild dogs that are around here. He's a better shot than I am — we'll see.

All right, we are here on the North corner of the mound of Cunic, and we're going to go up on top. Now this is the North Palace of Ashurbanipal. This is the place where one of the rarest and most impactful archaeological discoveries of all time was made — the discovery of an absolute date. So in 1853, Hormuzd Rassam was over here on the north side of the mound of Cunic with a band of diggers, and they were digging down right in this area. They didn't know it at the time, but lining these walls that you see here were stone reliefs with all kinds of scenes carved into them. So the men were digging down, digging down, and once they got deep enough, what happened was there was a collapse of dirt that collapsed down and all of a sudden revealed this stone relief with a king standing there on a chariot. They didn't know which king this was at the time. It wasn't until much later that it was determined that this was Ashurbanipal.

But all the men started dancing around Rassam with their war cry, rejoicing because they had discovered another palace up on the mound of Cunic, which ended up being the Palace of Ashurbanipal. So after they realized that they were in a palace, they continued digging down deeper and deeper. On the floors, down in these rooms, they started finding literally tens of thousands of tablets of all different shapes and sizes. So these were shipped back to the British Museum and formed this huge pile of cuneiform tablets that needed to be studied and read and translated. It's been raining like crazy around here. Look at that — it's a storage jar. Look at these huge stone pavements just laying around here. This is amazing. This is the location of definitely, I would put it in the top three archaeological discoveries of all time — the discovery of the library of Ashurbanipal.

This is the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal II. He is the one who keeps a library in his Palace in Nineveh. So all these tablets that you see here are just a small sample of the documents that came out of Ashurbanipal's Library at Nineveh. As this pile of cuneiform tablets from Nineveh began to grow in the British Museum, one of the employees there was a scholar named Henry Rawlinson, who is known today as the father of Assyriology, because of his role in deciphering cuneiform. So he was going through these tablets, and on multiple tablets, he began to see this year-to-year chronology of Assyrian history. Rawl inson wrote in a newspaper article on May 31, 1862: "I am glad to be able to announce that, amid the many thousand crumbling tablets from Nineveh and now in the British Museum, there were a considerable number of fragments bearing lists of names and having the appearance of official documents."

These official documents that Rawlinson began to identify became known as eponym lists, or lamu lists. This is because each year was named after a person — the government official that was over that year. So this is an example of what are called the eponym tablets. This is an example of a published eponym list. What appears in the column labeled eponym is a list of names. Each is the name of a single year, and each year is the name of a person who is an official over that year. The second column is the title of the person the year is named after, and in the third column are the major events that happened in that year. Emerged from these lists was a year-to-year chronology for a period of Assyrian history. The problem, however, was that none of these years were linked to the more modern Gregorian calendar, and therefore none of the BC dates for these Assyrian years were known.

So assigning BC dates to the biblical chronology also was a problem, and biblical chronology is a big subject. I just want to take a bite of it in this video. I want to focus on the chronology of a single verse in the Bible, and that verse being First Kings 6:1. If we can understand how chronology works for First Kings 6:1, then we can take that understanding and apply it out to biblical chronology for the rest of the Bible. First Kings 6:1 says, "In the 480th year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the Temple of the Lord." So, the whole Bible gives us these different measures of time across the whole biblical chronology. A great example of this is First Kings 6:1, which gives us a measure of time of 480 years between these two significant events: the Exodus and the building of the temple in Jerusalem. We know what year the temple began to be built in Jerusalem. It was the fourth year of Solomon. We know what month. The problem is, we don't know what BC date is the fourth year of King Solomon's reign. The way that they measured time in ancient times is different than the way that we measure it today. So, how do we get a BC date for the fourth year of King Solomon's reign? Because if we have one, then all we have to do is add 480 years, and then we'll have a BC date for the Exodus.

So, the one who came up with a chronology that had a solution to this dilemma was the Archbishop and scholar that lived back in the 17th century AD named James Usher. In 1650, he published a book on his chronology of the world. So, what he did is he went way back in later history when dates were known and correlated with the ancient calendar. Then, from those known dates, he counted backwards through time into the Old Testament period. In this way, he was able to estimate BC dates for the Old Testament, and so he came up with the year 1012 BC as being the fourth year of Solomon's reign. Then, since Solomon began to build the temple in the 480th year (meaning 479 full years had passed), he added 479 to 1012 BC and came up with the date of the Exodus: 1491 BC. This then became the generally accepted date for the Exodus: 1491 BC, and that was the case for the next over 200 years.

With this big pile and all these inscriptions and all these tablets, Rawlinson was overwhelmed, and so he hired a young man named George Smith, because George Smith had mastered cuneiform. So, Rawlinson had identified seven of these eponym canons, none of them were complete, and so one of the tasks that George Smith had was to go and do a translation of each one of these eponym lists and then draw the information from all of those incomplete lists to make a master eponym list that listed out year-to-year chronology for the Assyrian history. Smith would eventually publish his work in 1875 in his book entitled The Assyrian Eponym Canon. Starting on page 57 is the list of Assyrian eponyms with the dates and events drawn up from the seven copies of the canon and other sources. I want to use this list to illustrate how Smith developed it over time. So, he was in the process of doing this in 1867. He was translating the eponym canon number five out of these seven, and he was going through and making his translation of it. This is the Assyrian Eponym Canon 5, today labeled as K51 in the British Museum collection. The name Smith translated as "Asduserab," which was later changed to "Burale," was the name of the year named after the governor of Goen, and in the next column, the events that took place in that year, including that the sun was eclipsed.

So, it was 1853 that Rassam found that tablet in this hole, and then it wasn't until 1867 that George Smith is sitting, reading it, translating it in the British Museum, and he read about the solar eclipse. He just needed to know two things: Where was that solar eclipse observed? From Nineveh, Assyria. And when? Just generally when, around the 8th century BC. Then he could go look at the solar eclipses that had happened in and around the 8th century BC and easily find the one that would have engulfed Nineveh in darkness. And so, he found something very rare in archaeology. He found a date that was known with certainty, and that date was June 15th, 763 BC.

So, what is a solar eclipse, and how does it give us a specific date? Hey everybody, this is Barry here. As you may be able to tell, I am not in the Middle East this time, but I am here in the middle of nowhere, Texas, watching the April 2024 eclipse. As you can see, or well not see, I guess, it's gotten a lot darker, and we've almost reached the point of totality when the moon is completely covering the Sun. So, I don't even know — you probably can't even see me right now because of how dark it is. That would be so freaky if I was just an ancient Assyrian dude sitting around not expecting that, and then all of a sudden it goes pitch black on you. You can't see anything. I can understand why that would be taken as a bad omen. That makes sense. That was crazy. I will see you guys back in Iraq.

So, why does it matter that George Smith found a tablet talking about a solar eclipse? Well, I was just in Texas and saw the solar eclipse, and the thing is, everybody knew when it was going to be. Everybody knew that it was going to be April 8th. They knew down to roughly the minute that it was going to be, depending on where you were at. So, why can we predict eclipses so accurately? Well, first, let's talk about what an eclipse actually is. An eclipse occurs when the moon comes between the Earth and the Sun and basically casts a shadow on the Earth. Now, you can see from the moon orbiting the Earth that this actually happens quite frequently, about once a month. So, why don't we get an eclipse every month? Well, from a two-dimensional view, it looks like we should, but we get the answer when we look at the third dimension. You see, the moon's orbit around the Earth is actually at a tilt. That means that the moon not only has to be between the Sun and the Earth, but it also has to be at the right place in its orbit, height-wise. Otherwise, it's too high or too low to cast a shadow on the Earth. Now, there are a couple more factors if you really want to get into the details, but that's roughly how eclipses work.

Because we know pretty much exactly how the moon orbits the Earth and how the Earth orbits the Sun, we can predict pretty much down to the second when eclipses will occur. Not only can we predict when it'll occur, but we can also predict where it'll be on the surface of the Earth. Just like we can look forward and predict when eclipses are going to occur, we can look backwards and tell when they occurred. In fact, NASA has a page on their website dedicated to future and past eclipses. If you go to -762, then you'll see the one that went over Nineveh. The reason it's negative 762 instead of 763 BC is because they're using astronomical years, and we use Gregorian years, but it's the same eclipse. So, because George Smith knew roughly when the eclipse happened — around the 8th century BC — and he knew where it was seen from — Nineveh — he could look back and, using astronomical data, pinpoint the exact eclipse that was recorded in that tablet. That was the eclipse on June 15th, 763 BC, and that is incredibly significant because it gave an absolute date to at least part of Assyrian chronology and, ultimately, biblical chronology.

Because my son and I were working on this project, we had the NASA catalog of solar eclipses. This lists out the solar eclipses that are still to come in the future, all the way out to about the year 3000 AD, and the ones that have already happened, all the way back in time to about 2000 BC. So, I have this catalog, and I remember that I saw a solar eclipse when I was a kid. To identify this in the catalog, I needed to know where I saw it from, and I knew that it was from Saudi Arabia. That's where I grew up. My dad worked for the oil company there. Then, the general time period — I knew that I had seen it at some point in the 1970s, though I didn't know the exact year, much less the month or the day. So, it was a simple process of going back in this catalog to the 1970s, start looking at the solar eclipses that happened in that decade, and then identifying the solar eclipse that was observable from Saudi Arabia.

I found it easily. I saw that solar eclipse on April 29th, 1976. It was an amazing thing for me to find personally in my own life an exact date that I could attach memories to. This is exactly, I realized, how George Smith did it. Now, Smith knew the eponym year mentioning the eclipse of the Sun was 763 BC because there was a complete list of years. This one known year meant that all the other years could be worked out up and down the chronology. In other words, the one date led to working out all the other dates. In this way, over a span of some 244 years of Assyrian history, every year became known, from about 892 through 648 BC. The result was that now the BC dates for the Assyrian chronology were known.

The question then was: Now that the Assyrian chronology had been worked out with BC dates, was there any way to sync the Assyrian chronology together with the biblical chronology? In order to do this, you need a shared event between those two histories. Now that Smith knew that the year the Assyrian King Sennacherib had ascended the throne at Nineveh was 705 BC, he therefore also knew that four years later, when the record says Sennacherib led an expedition to Palestine, that this was 701 BC. Now, keep in mind that in the 1800s, when Smith was compiling and publishing his material, ancient Judah was known as Palestine. So, he translated Sennacherib's expedition to Judah as an expedition to Palestine so that the readers would know where the text was referring to.

2 Kings 18:13 says, "In the 14th year of King Hezekiah's reign, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them." So, bam, that was it. The 14th year of King Hezekiah's reign in the Bible is the same year as Sennacherib's fourth year in the Assyrian chronology. This is the Taylor Prism, and this gives Sennacherib's own account of his invasion of the kingdom of Judah. 701 BC transferred over to the biblical chronology, and in the same way, it had worked with the Assyrian chronology. By knowing the one date, now the other dates for the biblical chronology could be worked out from that one date. Now, I should mention that there is more than one shared event between the Assyrian and biblical chronologies, but I am only using one as an example so you can understand how it works. I hope to cover the others in future videos.

So, all you have to do is take the 14th year of King Hezekiah's reign, 701 BC. Then, the Bible gives us how many kings ruled over Judah, how many years they reigned, and so you just count that number of years back to the fourth year of Solomon, when he began to build the temple, which was 966 BC. Then, all you have to do is add 480 to the 966, and then you have the biblical date of the Exodus in 1446 BC. Up to this point, the generally accepted date for the Exodus was 1491 BC. That was overturned because of this discovery. And the generally accepted date for the Exodus became 1446 BC. Now you know, James Usher deserves a lot of credit. I mean, it's pretty amazing that in 1650 AD, he gave a date of the Exodus that was within 50 years of the actual date. Hats off to James Usher. But there's a difference between James Usher's date, which was an estimate, and this new date, which is not an estimate but is based off of the exact date known from a solar eclipse and then the numbers that are given in the Bible itself. This is why it's called the biblical date of the Exodus.

Now here is the question: Did the 763 BC total eclipse of the Sun that engulfed Nineveh in darkness accompany the preaching of the prophet Jonah when he was sent here by the Lord to preach to the Ninevites? Second Kings 14 describes Jeroboam II, who reigns in Israel for 41 years. The biblical dates for the reign of Jeroboam II are 793 through 753 BC. This means that the solar eclipse of 763 BC took place in the latter part of his reign. This is very interesting, because Jonah is active as a prophet during Jeroboam II's reign. Verse 25 says the God of Israel spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai.

The Book of Jonah begins: "Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 'Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.'" I don't believe that it's a coincidence that we have the total eclipse of the Sun visible from Nineveh and engulfing it in darkness at the same time that we have God call an Israelite prophet to go to the city of Nineveh and preach to them a message of repentance. We don't know for certain; we can't know it for sure because the Bible doesn't say it specifically. But it makes a lot of sense since we know that that eclipse happened during the ministry of Jonah.

In the Bible, the darkening of the Sun is a sign of coming judgment. Isaiah 13:9-10 says, "See, the day of the Lord is coming — a cruel day with wrath and fierce anger — to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it." One of the signs of this judgment day is the rising Sun will be darkened. In Matthew 24, we see the future fulfillment of this prophecy with one of the signs of the end times being that the Sun will be darkened. Jonah Chapter 3 says Jonah went to Nineveh, proclaiming, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown." The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

It is not unusual for an Israelite prophet to come with a message of coming destruction and doom and calling people to repentance. What is very unusual is that those people respond to that message by repenting. This is what the Ninevites did. Even the king repented. So, what was it that caused that repentance? What were they terrified about? Was it the actual message of Jonah, or was it something else that accompanied that message? When we think of the 763 BC total eclipse of the Sun happening at the same time that that message is being brought, it makes a lot of sense. Barry, you were just in Texas, and you saw a solar eclipse. I mean, what do you think? Do you think that the solar eclipse of 763 BC accompanied the preaching of Jonah? I think that if I were an ancient Assyrian and a dude came and told me to repent, and then all of a sudden the Sun got dark, I would be pretty freaked out. Makes sense, doesn't it? It does.

What Jesus says in Luke 11 is really incredible because we can contrast the city of Nineveh, the Gentile city of Nineveh at the time of Jonah, with the city of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus. Both Jonah and Jesus are preaching about a coming destruction of that city and calling the people to repent. The Ninevites respond to that message, repent, and the city is spared. However, the Jerusalemites, for the most part, reject the message of Jesus, who is preaching, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near." So, the city is destroyed, as Jesus predicts in AD 70. We want to be like the Ninevites. We want to respond to the message of who Jesus is and what he has accomplished, so that our sins can be forgiven and so that we can receive salvation instead of destruction.