i) Calendars
We have in practice to deal with three distinct calendars: (1) the ancient and Hebrew spring-to-spring calendar (months Nisan to next Nisan), (2) the ancient and Hebrew autumn-to-autumn (“fall”) calendar (months Tishri to next Tishri), and (3) our modern winter-to-winter calendar (months January to December, next January), which we have to overlay upon the old calendars to “translate” them into our current usage. Any attempt to work out the two lines of Hebrew kings, assuming that they both used the same ancient calendar (whether spring/Nisan or autumn/Tishri), soon falls apart, as neither the regnal years nor the synchronisms given between the two kingdoms make sense on this procedure. It is clear that the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah used different calendars, one Nisan to Nisan, the other Tishri to Tishri. But which used which? The two best and most recent scholars on the whole subject, Thiele and Galil, differ on this point. Thiele assigned the Tishri calendar to Judah and the Nisan one to Israel, while Galil did the opposite. Thiele had respectable reasons in the Hebrew text for his choice (Solomon’s count of years, building the temple; Josiah’s enactment of cult reforms; Nehemiah’s [1:1; 2:1] datings), but they are not needfully decisive. Galil produced no clearly independent evidence for his opposite view (his adduction of Jer. 36:22, pp. 9f., proves nothing). Thiele’s choice of calendars leads to consistently one-year-too-high and one-year-too-low figures being given respectively for Israelite years for accession of Judean kings and for Judean years for accession of Israelite kings. He explained this as due to each kingdom citing the other’s years by its own count, not the years the other kingdom actually used. This is possible, but is considered by others complex, if consistent.
On Galil’s choice of calendar, the synchronisms fit, without any other adjustment, which may speak in favor of attributing (with him) a Nisan-based calendar to Judah and a Tishri-based calendar to Israel. But careful examination of the total regnal data (at least for 931–841) shows that Thiele’s treatment of coregencies is to be preferred to Galil’s failure to account for a good number of regnal and synchronistic data. Coregencies tend to reflect political events or threats of such.
From Manasseh (in mid-seventh century) to the end of the Judean monarchy, dates are largely agreed. Between 841 and Hezekiah’s reign, improvements on both Thiele and Galil can be made (cf. below), such that nearly all our data in Kings appear to be reasonably consistent.
(ii) Regnal Years
Again, any attempt to impose the same type of regnal year-count (accession or nonaccession) on both kingdoms overall is doomed to failure, and has to be discarded. Each used either form of year-count under particular circumstances.
But on this both Thiele and Galil are in close agreement; namely, that Israel used nonaccession dating in the tenth and ninth centuries but changed to accession-year dating in the eighth, and that, broadly, Judah held to accession-year dating throughout; here Thiele would attribute a brief use of nonaccessionyear dating under just three kings, which appears justifiable on political grounds (Jehoram, Ahaziah II, Joash under Israelite influence). Thus we assemble a practical dating for these kings in table 3, on the following pages. This table incorporates the fixed dates from external references (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon), here printed in bold figures. It also incorporates the entire corpus of years of reign and of synchronisms from 1-2 Kings (paralleled by Chronicles), nearly all of which fit well together, once the well-established Near Eastern usages are applied. Thiele’s “pattern twelve-thirteen” kind of anomaly and Galil’s dismissals of perfectly good data can now both be discarded. Only very minor miscopying need be assumed in (at most!) barely three instances out of scores of figures, and these may simply be correct figures not yet properly understood.
Coregencies usually have political significance, e.g., to affirm the succession under threats (real or potential) from within or without. And a new king might continue his old year-numbering at his accession to sole power, or choose to make a complete break to affirm that a different regime was now in power. A good example of the latter is Hezekiah starting a new year-numbering after the death of Ahaz, with whose pro-Assyrian policies he clearly disagreed.
Thus we find in Kings a very remarkably preserved royal chronology, mainly very accurate in fine detail, that agrees very closely with the dates given by Mesopotamian and other sources. Such a legacy would, most logically, derive from then-existing archives (such as the “book(s) of the annals of the kings of Judah” and “of Israel” mentioned in Kings), besides archives of administrative, legal, or other documents. It cannot well be the free creation of some much later writer’s imagination that just happens (miraculously!) to coincide almost throughout with the data then preserved only in documents buried inaccessibly in the ruin mounds of Assyrian cities long since abandoned and largely lost to view.[1]
