Ancient History from a Biblical Perspective
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” - Proverbs 1:7
This website contains a series of historical proofs that develop a chronological framework for the history of the ancient world. Once such a chronological framework has been established, it should become possible to write histories about this period with greater confidence.
The articles and proofs here are written with the presupposition that the Bible is the divine revelation of the true Creator to humanity. Without the Bible we cannot know anything with certainty.
The problem that we face as Christians is that the history of the ancient world that we are taught in schools and universities directly contradicts the history given to us in the Bible. Even though it is very well dressed, the academically accepted ancient chronology for the era before Nebuchadnezzar is fraught with contradictions.
Many of the civilizations and events we know from the Bible and ancient historians cannot be found by archaeologists. These missing events include the destruction of the walls of Jericho as described in the Bible. Archaeologists discovered that the ancient walls of Jericho had indeed fallen outward from an earthquake, but they say this happened at the end of the Early Bronze Age III, centuries before Joshua. Likewise, the site of Ai, believed to be the mound called Et Tell today, was found to be completely destroyed and never rebuilt as described in Joshua. However, Et Tell was also destroyed at the end of the Early Bronze Age III. In order to solve this enigma, biblical Archaeologists have been looking for an alternative site for Ai that matches the expectation that it was destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
Another example is the city of Shechem. The Bible says Abimelech burned the people of Shechem who had taken shelter in a tower of the city's temple of the god, "Berith." (Judges 9) Archaeologists found a burned temple and tower in Middle Bronze Age Shechem, but this is believed to predate Abimelech by several centuries.
There are countless examples of events described in the Bible that supposedly left no archaeological evidence. Yet, archaeologists have repeatedly found evidence of nearly identical events which they date to centuries or millennia before the time it was described in the Bible.
Many events described by the Bible and ancient historians are claimed to be myths. The confusion about the chronology of ancient history creates confusion about the validity of the Bible. This in turn has undermined the faith of many young people who go to college where they encounter seemingly concrete facts that contradict the Bible.
Were the ancient historians really so wrong? Is the Bible full of mistakes? Or is it possible that both ancient history and archaeology can agree in harmony together?
The premise of this site is that the crisis of ancient history is caused by the errors of historians in interpreting the data available to us. They arrived at these errors because they began with false presuppositions about history. These false assumptions began around the time of Josephus and have been multiplied since then. We believe that when properly understood the ancient historians, the Bible, and the archaeological data will agree together in harmony.
The testimonies of ancient historians from Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Ireland, India, and China have been handed down to us from the ancient world. Some of these are merely fragments, while other texts are nearly complete.
In many cases these ancient chroniclers asserted that they had access to original records in their temples which dated back to the founding of their nations.
Some of these include Manetho of Egypt and Berossus of Babylon, both of whom were priests. Other chroniclers such as Herodotus visited the nations they wrote about, and interviewed the priests of those nations to learn their history. Still others such as Diodorus had access to the Library of Alexandria and other repositories of ancient records.
We have combed the writings of twenty-three ancient chroniclers, listed in Appendix X, and found that they gave over two hundred durations of years from events in the ancient past to known dates. These durations are our primary data source for building the chronological framework.
We believe the academic establishment arrived at its current schizophrenic state because of three errors.
First, beginning with Ptolemy of Mendes who some believe edited and published the king lists of an Egyptian priest named Manetho as a book called “Aegyptiaca”, Roman Era historians misinterpreted Manetho’s Dynasties of Egypt as a single sequential list.
Early church fathers then attempted to find the Pharaoh of the Exodus in Manetho’s list by counting back from the end of the list to a candidate with a similar sounding name, such as Rameses sounding like the city of “Pi Rameses” built by the slave labour of the Israelites.
The problem, we assert, is that Manetho’s dynasties overlap heavily and were never intended to be understood as a single chronological sequence, at least not by the initiated Egyptian priests.
Second, modern academics have discarded the testimonies of history by the Bible and by ancient chroniclers in favor of inscriptions alone. This has needlessly discarded much of the data and historical context required to solve the historical problems.
For example, Berossus recorded eight dynasties that ruled Babylon from 2233 BC down to the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus in 539 BC. Archaeologists dug up the Sumerian and Babylonian King Lists which appear to contradict Berossus. Therefore Berossus has been discredited.
Likewise, the testimonies of Manetho and Eratosthenes have been discredited in favor of the Turin Papyrus and Royal Annals of Egypt found on the Palermo and Cairo Stone.
The problem with this method is that archeology alone cannot provide a detailed historical context. Inscriptions are rare, and most archeological finds are pottery fragments deposited in layers called “strata.” The strata can tell us the order in which events on the site occurred, but cannot give us absolute dates or historical context. Attempts to place archaeological finds into history when divorced from the testimony of ancient chroniclers of history have resulted in wild guesswork.
Historians discredit the testimonies of the ancient chroniclers, asserting that much of their testimony is myth. Biblical chronologists, each fully convicted of their personal interpretation, offer over one hundred different chronologies based upon the sacred texts, none of which are comprehensively correlated with the ancient histories of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria.
The third error has been the adoption of Darwinism by academia, which removed the bookends of history. The Flood and the Tower of Babel were starting points for human history that the ancient chroniclers and the Bible agreed upon. Discarding the bookends, evolutionist historians claim ages of over one hundred thousand years to the earliest human settlements.
In summary, we find that errors made in the first century have been transmitted by Christian historians who did not use a systematic approach to the ancient sources. More recently, those errors have been compounded by Darwinism which has discarded both the witness of the ancient chroniclers, and the constraints on the beginning of history.
The result is that ancient history appears to have been stretched out to several times its actual length by the conventional chronology of academia. Additionally, some parts of history have been duplicated as a result of misreading the king lists as a sequence instead of parallel dynasties of different cities.
Consequently, when we look for Biblical characters and events in ancient history, we do not find them, because they have been shifted back by centuries or millennia.
There are several ways that Christian scholars have attempted to resolve the apparent contradictions between the Bible and ancient history.
Denying the Flood was global allows for Egypt, Babylon, and Sumer to be older than the Flood. This approach has been taken by historians such as David Rohl, who advocates a local flood near the Black Sea.
Accepting the flood as global, some scholars assert the ancient buildings in Egypt and Sumer survived the flood, presumably underwater. Therefore the early histories of Egypt and Sumer predate the Flood. Of course, the problem then becomes where to draw the line of the Flood causing a discontinuity in their historical timeline. None of the advocates of this position have actually attempted to do that.
In addition to the lifespan numbers given in the Latin Vulgate and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible, there are several variant manuscripts such as the Septuagint with different numbers, which add about eight centuries back to the Flood, and another five centuries before the Flood. Adopting the longer chronogeneologies pushes the Flood back to before the conventional founding dates of Egypt and Sumer. This has been the approach of some creationist groups such as the Associates for Biblical Research.
A minority of scholars such as Hoeh, Bimson, Down, and Courville have concluded that the conventional history is in error and needs to be shortened by several centuries. These scholars are called “revisionists.” This is the position that is required, even if not explicitly stated, by scholars such as Ussher and Jones who use the short chronology of the Masoretic Text, and also believe in a global Flood.
This is an important question, because what we are really asking, is which is the real Bible, and which are the corruptions? How can we know?
The Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), the oldest copy of which is only eight hundred years old, gives the shortest set of numbers for the ages of the Patriarchs when they sired their sons. However, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was translated directly from Hebrew in the fourth century, and has the same numbers, indicating that the Hebrew text has been stable for at least 1600 years.
The Septuagint, or LXX, was a Greek translation of the old testament created by seventy Jewish scribes in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus in the third century before Christ. The LXX gives ages that are 100 years higher for each of the patriarchs, adding 750 to 789 years to the time between the Flood and Abraham, depending on which manuscript we use.
The third major variant is the Samaritan Text, which apparently dates to the founding of the Samaritan religion on Mt. Gerazim by Manasseh the apostate priest in the days of Nehemiah. This text pushes the Flood back by 650 years.
The question is complicated because the Apostles in some New Testament passages seem to quote the Septuagint. While in others they seem to be quoting and translating directly from Hebrew.
We will present some evidence elsewhere on this site that the original numbers were the ones preserved in the Vulgate and MT. The corrupted numbers in the other traditions appear to be the result of the translators attempting to reconcile the biblical text with the supposed science of their time.
The ancients believed the Flood occurred when the Vernal Equinox was departing the constellation Taurus and entering Aries. Estimates of precession in the third century before Christ were about 1 degree per century in Greece and Egypt. That has an error about 28% higher than the real value of 1 degree per 71.6 years. Attempting to calculate the date of the Flood using a precession value of one degree per century, therefore pushes the Flood back by 39.7 years per century that has elapsed since the Flood.
Using the Ussher-Jones MT chronology, the Flood ended in 2347 BC, and incidentally, the Vernal Equinox was also at the cusp of Taurus and Aries at that time. If a scholar attempted to estimate the years to the Flood by measuring the degrees of precession of the equinox from the cusp of Taurus, his answer will be a function of the date at which he made the measurement. And the error in his answer will be a function of the date, as well as the error in his estimate of the rate of precession. We know from Hipparchus that the rate of precession was estimated by the third century Greeks at 1 degree per century. Now we can back calculate from the Septuagint numbers to estimate when the calculation was made.
If we divide the 789 extra years of the Septuagint by the 39.7 extra years per century caused by using 1 degree per century as the rate of precession, we arrive at 19.87 centuries. Subtracting that value from the Ussherian date of the Flood, should give the date that the calculation was made. 2347 - 1987 = 360 BC. If we assume +/- 1 degree of error in measurement of the Equinox, we obtain a range of 431 to 288 BC for the computation of the Septuagint numbers. The latter part of that range falls in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was the monarch who sponsored the translation of the Septuagint by the seventy elders.
This strongly suggests that the Septuagint numbers were altered from the MT originals in order to make the date of the Flood conform to the best scientific theories of the time. This is the same motivation that has driven many Bible scholars in the twentieth century to attempt to reconcile the Bible with Darwinism, which is the supposed science of our own time.
Our belief that the values of the Masoretic Text are the original and true numbers is our own bias. However, we will present the evidence and leave the answer to this question for the readers to decide for themselves.
As Biblicists, we should begin with the assumption that the Bible is true, and that its history is correct. However, even if we agree that the Masoretic Text numbers are the correct ones, there are seven chronological passages where interpretive differences give different results.
If we assume only two choices for each of the seven passages, there are 128 possible Biblical chronologies. If we assume three possible choices for each of the seven passages, the number of possible Biblical chronologies rises to 2,187. We found that over one hundred different chronologies have been proposed by Christian researchers in the past two centuries. Our own research of the number of possibilities for each passage leads to 864 possible chronologies from the Masoretic Text.
We believe there is only one correct Biblical chronology, which is the result of correct interpretation of all the relevant passages. We do not want to take the position that external chronological data from the ancient chroniclers should dictate the interpretation of Scripture. Edwin Thiele made that error in his work on the chronology of the Divided Kingdom. He assumed that the Assyrian eponym list was absolute; and then he forced the Scriptural chronology of the Kings to fit.
We really have two problems. First, we must find the correct Biblical chronology through accurate interpretation of Scripture. Second, we must find the correct external chronology of the ancient kingdoms through interpretation of the available data.
The sign that we have found both the correct interpretation of Scripture and the correct chronology of the ancient kingdoms is that the two will be in harmony with each other.
If they disagree with each other, then the error could be in our interpretation of Scripture, or our interpretation of the ancient kingdoms, or we could have them both wrong.
Our second declared bias is that we believe the Chronology of the Old Testament by Floyd Nolan Jones is the most accurate chronological interpretation of the Bible, with the possible exception of his solution for the 70 sevens of Daniel 9. We do not intend to rehash his interpretive work here, but we do address some of the arguments in Appendix A - The Scriptural Durations. Our primary work here is to find a correct chronology of the ancient kingdoms. We refer to Jones’ modification of Bishop Ussher’s chronology as the “Ussher-Jones Chronology.” However, we find that Jones, like Ussher before him, completely misidentified the Egyptian pharaohs mentioned in Scripture because he stepped out of his primary area of expertise and simply accepted the Egyptian chronology of academia without question.
In 2001, Darrell White formed a project to create a software program called “History Player” to visually present history as animation on home computers. To do that he needed to create a database of historical events. It quickly became obvious to him that Biblical history and the accepted chronology of the ancient world were hopelessly at odds. Therefore he began researching this problem, and was influenced by an article by Larry Pierce called “In the Days of Peleg” which showed several durations from the ancient chroniclers to the founding of the nations that seemed to agree with Ussher.
From there we attempted to review the ancient chroniclers and build a comprehensive list of durations from ancient events to dates in known history. Combining this information with the triangulation method developed by Floyd Nolan Jones, we found 54 different chronological paths to Babel and the Flood, from nine ancient cultures, which agree with each other and the Ussher-Jones chronology. Our sources come from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, Ireland, and China.
The results of our research have allowed us to correlate the ancient kingdoms to the Bible and to each other.
Ken Griffith joined the project in 2008 and spent thirteen years extending the research to Assyria, the Hittites, and Babylonia, and fleshing out the manuscript to create this reference.
Returning to our original question, can the real history of the ancient world be known, we conclude that the answer is a definitive, yes.