Whichever derivation is chosen

the main point is that the 480 years cannot be trusted because according to Wellhausen, whom Burney and Hawkins are following here, the regnal data for Solomon and his successors were manipulated to produce a fictitious 480 years.[15] Hawkins apparently agrees with Wellhausen’s assessment that the regnal data have been falsified, because he writes, “When the books of 1–2 Kings are viewed as a whole, therefore, it seems clear that its author(s) wanted to place the building of the Temple at the center of the biblical history.”[16] The implication is that the regnal data of Kings are not genuine history and cannot be used to create a proper chronology of the kingdom period. To demonstrate this supposed artificiality in the regnal data, Burney added the balance of the years of Solomon’s reign after the initiation of the construction of the Temple (37), to the lengths of reigns of the succeeding kings of Judah (393), to the duration of the exile (50, presumably from the fall of Jerusalem in 587 to the first return in 537), thus obtaining an interval of 480 years.[17] In Burney’s summation there are three mistakes: First, the thirty-seven years assigned from Solomon’s fourth year to his fortieth year should be thirty-six. Second, six years are assigned to Athaliah, from 2 Kgs 11:3, which is the accession equivalent for the seven years of non-accession reckoning that is given to her in the next verse, and which should have been used in keeping with the non-accession system being used at that time in Judah.[18] Third, fifty years are assigned from the exile to the return under Cyrus, instead of the proper forty-nine years (587 to 538 bc). Moreover, we know from modern investigations that this whole procedure is fallacious, a fact Hawkins acknowledges.[19] Timespans in Judahite history cannot be determined simply by adding the lengths of reigns of kings, due to coregencies and non-accession reckoning.[20] The actual duration from Solomon’s fourth year (967 bc)[21] to the end of Zedekiah’s reign (587 bc) was 380 years, not 430, and the total to the first return under Cyrus in 538 bc (Ezra 1:1) was 429 years, not the artificial 480 years calculated by Wellhausen and Burney and cited by Hawkins. It is Wellhausen and Burney who are playing games with the numbers, not the authors of 1 and 2 Kings. The thesis of Wellhausen and Burney that Hawkins follows is premised on an exilic or post-exilic authorship of 1 Kgs 6:1, and depends upon the further presupposition that an author who was recording chronological data in the time of Solomon, or shortly thereafter, had no way to accurately compute long periods of time over the course of Israelite history. This presupposition and the presupposition of exilic or post-exilic authorship of 1 Kgs 6:1 are both false. This will be demonstrated in secs. c and d below. b. The attempt by Barnes to show that the 480 years are artificial. Another attempt to demonstrate an artificial span of 480 years is given by William Barnes. By examining his approach, we can see how arbitrary these schemes are. Like Wellhausen and Hawkins, Barnes does not seem to be aware that the Hebrew text of 1 Kgs 6:1 means that 479 years, not 480, had passed between the exodus and Solomon’s fourth year. He writes: As the reader will no doubt recall, the book of Kings ends on a rather quiet note: in the 37th year of the exiled king Jehoiachin, the Judahite monarch was freed from prison by the Babylonian king Evil-merodach (= Amel-marduk); every day, we are then told, he dined at the king’s table. Now, it is undoubtedly not coincidental that according to the Judahite regnal totals as extant in Kings, exactly 480 years separated this event from the original coronation of King David over Judah. (Once again, the actual historical situation need not concern us at this point, although it would seem that only some 449 years actually separated these two events.)[22] Barnes shows how he gets this calculation of 480 years in a table on p. 145 of his book. Here, each reign length is reduced by one in order to conform to the non-accession reckoning of rabbinic scholarship. Thus David is given 39 years, Solomon 39 years, Rehoboam 16, down to 10 years for Jehoiakim. He then adds thirty-six years to get to the thirty-seventh year of the captivity of Jehoiachin. The sum is indeed 480 years, even though, as Barnes notes, this does not represent actual elapsed time. In his view, however, it shows that the numbers have been manipulated to give an artificial total. This approach is similar to that of Wellhausen cited earlier, as followed by Burney and Hawkins, even though the methods of Wellhausen and Barnes contradict each other: one uses accession years, the other non-accession years; one starts with the construction of the Temple, the other with David’s accession; one ends with the return from exile, the other with Jehoiachin’s release from prison. But both conclude to their own satisfaction that they have shown that either someone has manipulated the reign lengths so that they do not reflect historical reality, or that the 480-year figure of 1 Kgs 6:1 is contrived and artificial. c. The integrity of the chronological data of 1 and 2 Kings shows they are authentic, not artificial. A problem with these schemes is that they are just too clever. The late-date deuteronomists that these scholars posit as the authors of Kings would lack any motive to put together a scheme like this, since it took until the nineteenth century ad (for Wellhausen’s scheme) or the twentieth century (for Barnes’s scheme) for someone to figure it out. And it is not because no one was trying to find numerical schemes in the Scriptures. An example of such searching for patterns is found in the Seder ‘Olam (second century ad), where Rabbi Yose calculated 850 years from the exodus to the exile. He did this by starting with the 479 years from the exodus to Solomon’s fourth year, and then adding, in a non-accession sense, all Judean reign lengths from that time to the last year of Zedekiah. The sum comes to 851, but Rabbi Yose adjusted this to the round number of 850, which he interpreted as seventeen times fifty.[23] Perhaps he got rid of the extra year by taking six years for Athaliah instead of seven, as Burney did. The Seder ‘Olam’s 850-year figure is accepted as authoritative at several places in the Talmud, where no explanation is given for how it was derived; indeed the Seder ‘Olam itself does not explain the derivation, nor does Guggenheimer in his recent translation and commentary.[24] It shows that Rabbi Yose was looking for patterns to impose on the Scripture, but he failed to see the scheme of either Wellhausen or Barnes that covers the same time period. If schemes like this were inherent in the text, why did the Seder ‘Olam, the most extensive and detailed document from antiquity devoted to OT chronology, fail to recognize them? But the main, indeed insuperable, obstacle that confronts the idea that the regnal data of Kings and Chronicles are artificial and late is the fact that these data have all been successfully integrated into a chronology that has every indication of reflecting the actual history of the times. This is more than can be said for the chronologies of Wellhausen and Barnes; their chronological schemes (which are different between the two scholars) have not found any wide acceptance among historians, whereas the Thiele/McFall chronology that accepts these data as authentic is the most widely accepted of any chronology of the divided kingdom.[25] In particular, Thiele’s date of 931 bc for the beginning of the divided monarchy is accepted by the majority of scholars who are most influential in this field, including Jack Finegan, Kenneth Kitchen, T. C. Mitchell, Gershon Galil, Leslie McFall, and Eugene Merrill.[26] This date was derived by accepting the chronological data of Kings and Chronicles as genuine history, not the manipulations of a late-date deuteronomist and his kin to come up with an artificial and obscure numerological puzzle. Furthermore, it is additionally established by two independent methods

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