Abstract and Introduction

2006-01-06T00:25:00.000-08:00

Abstract

This article rejects the standard paradigm of the chronology of ancient history as fundamentally flawed by humanistic and uniformitarian assumptions. Using a timeline derived entirely from the Bible, the author briefly discusses his work on the chronology of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then reinterprets the archeological data of Syria-Palestine from the rise of urbanization (after the Sodom catastrophe, c. 1967 bc) to the period just following the Exodus (1561 bc) — dealing with Early Bronze II/III & IV, Middle Bronze I, and Middle Bronze IIA. The author proposes that these societies were segregated from each other more by culture than by time — that is, they were more coeval than consecutive, running more side-by-side than end-to-end. Robustness is demonstrated by the consonance achieved from using this theory to interpret the data from a number of sites; several examples are given where archeological data contradict the Bible when interpreted by the standard paradigm, but are in harmony when interpreted through the new paradigm.

Introduction

Ancient history is, I propose, wrong. The modernist paradigm by which evidence is interpreted was designed in large measure by 19th century humanists whose prime axiom seems to have been that the Bible is not primary historical documentation, but rather a mishmash of myth and fable. From this bias, historians proceeded to construct a chronological scheme based less on evidence than upon the philosophy of Evolutionism. We find the result not only in textbooks, but even in Bible encyclopedias, dictionaries and commentaries.

I maintain that there is no history at all prior to the year 4074 bc, the year of Adam's Fall, and there is no archeological artifact from before 2418 bc, the year of Noah's Flood (these precepts are, to say the least, extremely challenging to scholars familiar with the evidence of ancient history). Furthermore, I place the Tower of Babel event in 2192 bc, the Sodom catastrophe in 1967 bc, and the Exodus in 1561 bc. To accept these dates requires that virtually everything that is believed about the distant past be reevaluated.

I will be absolutely explicit: this reconstruction of ancient history requires nothing less than a total revolution, which must affect a spectrum of disciplines. All preconceptions about the order of the Egyptian Dynasties are suspect. All interpretations regarding the successiveness of Bronze Age cultures are open to debate. All calculations based on astronomical data are questionable. All standard assumptions about ancient dates are disputable.

The reason that I am so bold — so apparently arrogant or reckless — is that I have come to believe that the Bible is not vague or ambiguous in matters of chronology, but rather contains a clear and recoverable outline of dates (cf. Table I). Virtually all the dates which I propose are derived from the Bible, without any reference to the humanistic dating scheme advanced by previous scholars.

I have dismissed radiometric dating methods as utterly unreliable for the early post-Flood era. There are "serious problems" with carbon 14 dates of early periods. When calibrated to dendrochronological dates, C‑14 “dates in the fourth and third millennia b.c.e. appear to be too early when compared to dates ascertained through Egyptian chronology.” (A. Mazar, p. 28 — see my bibliographical note; cf. Weinstein, 1984b). The data from both C‑14 and dendrochronology are polluted by uniformitarian assumptions (JH, 1996a and 1995, ch. 9) such as of a constant rate of atomic decay, a constant amount of atmospheric C‑14, or of geologic and astronomic uniformity (see Aardsma, 1991); indeed, uniformitarianism is simply inimical to biblical catastrophism.

Again, dates extrapolated from the rare astronomical observations preserved in Egyptian documents are dismissed as invalid (JH, 1997a, ch. 5). Although the theory is not inelegant, the necessary assumption is rejected, that the heavens have never changed their course (that is, that the orbit and rotation of Earth have never been catastrophically altered). I maintain — along with Velikovsky (1950) and Patten, Hatch & Steinhauer (1973) — that in the past some significant gravitational mass periodically approached Earth and occasionally interfered with the length of the day and the year. Consequently, any astronomical "anchor" or "pillar" of ancient history is here considered to be effectively arbitrary, and even the work of such a courageous scholar as Read (1995) is, sadly, rendered invalid.

Rather than accept the philosophical musings and uniformitarian dogmas of humanists, I have started with the chronological clues embedded within the words of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. This starting point, I maintain, requires that the conjectures of the conventional system be utterly rejected. For this reason I must seem, to some, arrogant and reckless. There is never room for dogmatism in a discussion of this sort, but there is also no room for compromise between the antithetical assumptions of humanism and of biblical sufficiency. If the Bible does contain the framework of a clear chronology, then the standard presumptions must be rejected, and a revolution must ensue.

This paper depends only on well-known, mainstream archeological evidence. I will not deflate the standard paradigm with any unmatched erudition. There is no obscure "aha!" fact, heretofore overlooked, which will clinch my case and blast the opposition head-over-heels. I depend entirely upon the elegance of the biblical paradigm, over that of the standard scheme. It is the ease, the elegance, the parsimony with which the evidence fits my time frame, to which I point as my greatest recommendation. The archeological evidence, I maintain, is ambiguous enough to have allowed the standard scheme to stand; but the data are less equivocal when seen from the biblical perspective. Given that an inductive approach is ambiguous, I have adopted deduction, referring first to the underlying assumptions, and then to the objective evidence. But always, I trust, and using public information, I support my case with facts.

From the Bible we may derive not just the correct outline of ancient history, but the very dates of seminal events. To demonstrate this I have included the relevant excerpt of my suggested Biblical Chronology (Table I), derived in its essentials entirely from the Bible. Once we have these dates it becomes clear that one or the other is wrong — the Bible, or Evolutionism. (My reasons for rejecting such compromises as theistic evolutionism or a local Flood of Noah are found in JH, 1995 and 1996a.) As for those readers who do not share my regard for the Bible as a historical source, I suggest that this lack of respect derives from a lack of due diligence.

Table I

Some years ago I set about correlating the empirical evidence of science and scholarship with the rigorous demands of a young-Earth interpretation of the Bible. I have written several books as a result of my investigation. In Idols of the Cave: the Arguments of Evolution (1995), I document the misrepresentations of the so-called objective evidence of the evolutionists. In The Pillars of Heaven: Creation, Fall and Flood According to Science and the Bible (1996a), I present the case for an abrupt creation by God, a literal six days for the refining of our planet, an actual Garden of Eden, and Fall, and Flood; I also examine such physical phenomena as continental movement, mountain building, and the geologic column. In Dragons in the Earth: Ark and Ice Age According to Science and the Bible (1996b), I continue the story, considering Noah and the details of the Ark, the diffusion and differentiation ("speciation") of his menagerie, and finally the Ice Age. In The Serpent in Babel: Fire-worship, Astrology and the Mystery Religion from Eden to Babylon, I address aspects of legend and myth as applied to paganism and the most ancient of the biblical texts.

But there remains the final area of history to be addressed. I have started with three assumptions: [1] that there are no chronologically significant gaps in the biblical genealogies, [2] that Abraham was born in 2066 bc, sixty years after his brothers, and [3] that the rule of Solomon ended in 931 bc. From this starting point, I have dated the Flood of Noah to the year 2418 bc. But if this is the case, how then do we read that the Sumerians and the earliest Egyptians built their civilizations at the end of the 4th millennium bc? What are we to make of the claims of a 10,000-year-old Jericho? — or of the Stone Age in general? How can any artifact at all, let alone whole cities, have survived a Flood which scrubbed the world down to bedrock? Obviously, either there was no such world Flood — or at least no historical Flood — or else the standard interpretation of the archeological data is grotesquely incorrect.

In my books, Most Ancient Days (1997a) and The Days of Brass and Iron (1997b), I have undertaken the reconstruction of ancient history using a young-Earth, catastrophic world-Flood, biblical paradigm. I have reconstructed virtually all of ancient history, from the apparent earliest human settlements, through the first civilizations of the Near East, until the days of the Persians and Greeks, by which time history has caught up with itself and there are no more egregious chronological errors.

In this brief article I cannot go into the relevant details and interactions of the Levant with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Instead, as representative of the whole, I present here a discussion of one narrow but important topic — dealing with the reconstructed history of Palestine in the era from Abraham to Moses. This article, modified from a chapter in Most Ancient Days, will consider the dating convention of Palestine's "Early and Middle Bronze Age" (abbreviated "EB" and "MB", and "Late Bronze" as "LB"). We will not debate the evidence of archeology, but we will vigorously debate the interpretation and arrangement of that evidence. My reconstruction specifically of the Bronze Age is explicitly laid out in Table II. For the benefit of any reader who anticipates the broader implications of this article, I have included Table III (Comprehensive Correlation of Timelines), which is an outline of the comprehensive reconstruction, including Palestine, Europe, Mesopotamia and Egypt; the details which demonstrate the validity of this table are given in Most Ancient Days and The Days of Brass and Iron.

Table II

Palestine: Early Bronze / Middle Bronze Timeline

2100-2081	EB I	Canaanites		Amorites
80-61
60-41
40-21
20-01
2000-1991	EB IIA
90-81
80-71				MB I
70-61
60-51
50-41
40-31
30-21
20-11
10-01
1900-1891		EB IIIA
90-81
80-71
70-61
60-51
50-41
40-31
30-21
20-11
10-01
1800-1791
90-81
80-71			?		MB IIA
70-61
60-51
50-41
40-31
30-21			?
20-11
10-01
1700-1691
90-81
80-71			?
70-61
60-51
50-41			EB IIIB
40-31
30-21
20-11
10-01
1600-1591
90-81
80-71
70-61 EXODUS
60-51
50-41
40-31
30-21
20-11
10-01	Invasion and conquest of Joshua and the Israelites
1500-1491

Table III

The vocabulary of the historiography for the ancient world varies from region to region. Thus, the eras of Mesopotamia are called after places (e.g., Uruk, Akkad or Old Babylon), the eras of Egypt are called after governments (Dynasties and "Kingdoms"), and the eras of Palestine and Syria are called after technological characteristics (cf, the triptych of "Stone Age," "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" — composed by Danish archeologist C.J. Thomsen, and used since 1819 ad). For each of these three regions — Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine — history has been artificially inflated to extend back well over a millennium beyond what I hold to be its proper starting point. For ease of reference, and to allow the reader to gain perspective and make comparisons, I prefix an asterisk "*" to all standard but incorrect dates and terms; when an asterisk appears in a quotation, it is my addition. All chronological references which have no asterisk are my corrected dates; furthermore, note that where scholars generally use the word "period", the preferred word is often "culture".

To establish the context, note that in Mesopotamia the pre-literate period of history is presumed to have ended around *3100 bc, while I maintain it ended around 2000 bc. There is no question but that the successive periods of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Old Babylonians are in the correct order — and for the most part the duration of each era is also correct. However, where the standard paradigm has the civilization of these ancient Mesopotamians lasting about 1,500 years (c. *3100 to c. *1600 bc), I give this epoch slightly over a thousand years (c. 1900 to c. 800's bc). The standard model hides its distortion by exaggerating the duration of the periods known as "Jemdet Nasr" and "Early Dynastic I & II" (abbreviated "ED") — and at the more recent end, the distortion is hidden in the so-called "Kassite Dark Age" (cf. JH, 1997b).

In Egypt, the labeling system involves dynasties, I through XXX, which are assumed to have run consecutively, while I propose many of them ran side-by-side, holding power over different nomes ("provinces"). The dynasties are for the most part numbered not for their successiveness in time, but rather for their dominance in a given region. My solution does not seem as pleasing in terms of simplicity, but this is because it is not I who invented the nomenclature. I am forced to use an essentially inappropriate vocabulary, which is biased toward the invalid system.

Finally, the Early and Middle Bronze Ages of Palestine and Syria are also considered to have been successive, while the new paradigm presented here has them as different but contemporary societies — not segregated by time but by culture (cf. Table II). An analogy would be of colonial America, where European and native societies existed side-by-side, separated by language and custom, with only peripheral mixing and interaction; this state of affairs lasted in one form or another for some three centuries.

Suppose some befuddled archeologist of the distant future concluded that a vast span of time separated the indigenous population of North America from the European peoples who settled the continent. Suppose he convinced his colleagues that those ancient natives lived and became extinct long before the Europeans arrived, and had no contact with them. He would imagine that the differences in culture and technology were due to this supposed interval. Were such a misguided scholar to separate what we know were contemporary societies, he would be interpreting the American scene through the same paradigm which present-day archeologists actually use to interpret the archeology of the ancient middle east.

In the land of Canaan: different languages, religions, morés — different preferences and technologies in architecture, ceramics and metallurgy — all combined to define and separate the cultures which we know as Early and Middle Bronze. Modern scholars have mistakenly distributed the evidence across time, instead of across topography. We will look at this key point in more detail, shortly.

Archeology deals with artifacts — with things man-made. History deals with writing. In Palestine there is virtually no writing until the Late Bronze Age (contemporaneous with the New Kingdom in Egypt) which I discuss in The Days of Brass and Iron (JH, 1997b). (There are a few EB/MB cuneiform scraps, which are devoid of any historical content, and so not relevant here.) In the tombs and ruined cities of the Early and Middle Bronze Age, we have only artifacts, and no hint of literature, to guide us. Thus, we have no history, only an interpretation of archeological data.

Now, archeological correlations give us relative dating — that is, they tell us which civilizations were contemporaneous with each other. But what of "absolute" dating, which fits these cultures into our numerical dating system? Is it not a fact that carbon 14 dating excludes any significant error? Well, I have dealt with the problems of radiometric "dating" elsewhere (JH, 1995 & 1997a). But with regard specifically to EB artifacts, it is highly interesting that C-14 “tests relating to EB I come from only four sites; some of the tests point to a high date in the first half of the fourth millennium.” (Mazar, p. 147, note 28.) So, first we find that there are scarcely any data at all, and next we see that they are disharmonious. Likewise, C‑14

dates from EB II-III contexts are known only from Jericho, Bab edh‑Dhra` and Numeira. They appear to be problematic, as calibration based on dendrochronology provides a wide range of dates in the third millennium b.c.e., many of which appear to be too high when compared to those based on Egyptian correlations. (Mazar, p. 147, note 31.)

Again, only three sites provide data, and these too are disharmonious. We may conclude, then, that "absolute" dating is not as secure, not as grounded in objective and unambiguous evidence, as we may wish to believe.

If not on writing or C-14 data, then on what basis is Canaanite chronology decided?

From ca. *3000 b.c.e. the absolute chronology of Palestine is based to a large extent on that of Egypt. . . . The dependence on Egyptian chronology is so strong that any change in the latter necessitates a parallel shift concerning Palestine. The Egyptian finds may, however, be misleading, as scarabs, statues, and other Egyptian artifacts were considered precious or sacred objects and may have been kept as heirlooms for generations. (Mazar, pp. 28‑29.)

The study of specifically Egyptian chronology is outside our scope; I discuss it in great depth in Most Ancient Days — most specifically in chapter five (but consider Table III for my general conclusions). Aside from Egyptian data, “Imported pottery and other artifacts from Cyprus and Greece also play a significant role in chronological studies, but sometimes one forgets that absolute dates in these countries are based to a large extent on those in Egypt and the Levant, making the danger of circular argumentation great.” (Mazar, p. 29.)

Table IV

Early Bronze:

EB I (*3100-2900)

EB II (*2900-2700)

EB III (*2700-2250)

EB IV (*2300-2000)

Middle Bronze:

MB I (*2000‑1800)

MB IIA (*1800-1750)

MB IIB (*1750-1550)

MB IIC (*1575-1500)

Table IV

Be that as it may, unfortunate circumstances — of effective illiteracy in the Levant, and of the surprising unreliability of C-14 data — have allowed the monstrous misunderstanding to arise, of the standard chronological scheme, presented in Table IV. Although I will use the same labels, I will not follow these dates, with their presumption of successive cultures. Instead, I will use the outline in Table V, which of course is not as elegant as the standard version, but as with the Egyptian dynasties, this is because it is not I who defined the nomenclature. I am using a vocabulary which has a built‑in bias against substantive innovation, but what I am proposing is revolutionary enough, without introducing an entirely new jargon.

Table V

Table V — Bronze Ages in Palestine

Correct ages

Standard designations

c. 21st cent. bc

Nimrod to Amraphel

Early Bronze I

*3100-2900

c. 2000-1650

Amraphel to Bondage

EB II

*2900-2700

c. 1820-1500

Sesostris III thru Joshua

EB III

*2700-2250

20th-14th cent. bc

Abraham thru Deborah

Middle Bronze I

*2000-1800 (*2000 = Sodom)

18th-16th cent. bc

Joseph to Conquest

MB IIA

*1800-1750

16th-14th cent. bc

Exodus to Deborah

EB IV

*2300-2000

1500's-1050

Judges

MB IIB

*1750-1550

1300's-1020

Deborah to Saul

MB IIC

*1575-1500

Late Bronze Age . . .

This treatment is limited to the period from Abraham to Moses, dealing only with EB II/III & IV, and MB I &amp;amp;amp; IIA. I ignore the Copper Age and EB I, which have more to do with Nimrod than Abraham; I also ignore MB IIB and LB, which by my reconstruction have to do with the time of the Judges and the Kings of Israel. This article is divided into the preceding Introduction, and three other parts, dealing with the Early Bronze, the Middle Bronze, and the re-evaluated archeology of various cities. The overall discussion of archeology is not meant to be exhaustive — I will just give some of the more important evidence, and interpret it through our new paradigm. Each reader must judge for himself as to which is more convincing, the standard model or the biblical.

The Age of Base Metal

Index

Abstract and Introduction

EB I

Canaanites

Amorites

EB IIIA