Biblical Chronology

Charts & Narration by Matt Baker

Animation by Syawish Rehman

Audio Editing by Jack Rackam

#roshhashanah #5782

[UsefulCharts]

Note: There is no "Year Zero" between BCE and CE dates. If there was a Year Zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to every BCE date. However, because there is not a Year Zero, this does not mean that you have to SUBTRACT 1. You simply do nothing.

[ChaseCetta]

My accountant friend has at the bottom of his emails the following Fact:
The Jewish year is 5782.
The Chinese year is now 4719.
This means that Jews had to exist 1, 064 years without Chinese food.
A time known as the “Dark Ages”…

[xmariner]

My Dad passed away last December. He had a masters in Theology. We would speak over and over about so many of these kinds of topics, and he was very knowledgeable on many biblical topics outside Christianity. He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and taught himself Hebrew to do so. I miss talking to him and being able to ask him questions.

Thanks for your series, it makes me feel that I can still find dependable explanations when biblical text and liturgy meet the underlying themes.

[CarlosRodriguez-dhmm]

I used to be a biblical literalist. I actually was one when I first started following the channel. Some of your videos challenged me, but while remaining honest and objective, you never talked down to me and my opinions. Greatly appreciated.

[Traek]

Im not religious but i really appreciate the way you present the history and appreciate the scientific approach you take when analyzing a topic

[thomasdixon]

Matt could u do a vid on the different denominations of Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Like what the differences are and when they split?

[ottolehikoinen]

Actually the world started when the One Ring was destroyed, there's a debate on this date as well. Before it the world was known as Middle-Earth.

[arimermelstein]

Shana Tovah, Dr. Baker. Even in Orthodox Judaism, when it comes to any use of the year in any meaningful settings, it comes with the phrase “according to the count that we use here.” Only the most ardent of literalists think that this number has any literal meaning.

[Red-in-Green]

I’ve always found it interesting that the 3500-4000 ish BC estimates for the beginning of the world does actually track pretty close to the start of the Bronze Age or the start of “History” at the advent of writing. It’s this basic wrong understanding that humans have always been as we are now and are more-or-less as old as all creation. A fun date. A good date. Just not the date you were looking for.

[SamAronow]

Happy 5782! Fun fact: the new year is also the seventh year of the Shmita cycle (Sabbath year), so if the Temple was still standing, this would probably be the point where a foreign power or civil war faction would capture and loot it.

[hebrewgreek]

Interesting. Aside from the chronology stuff, when this narrator makes the point that Gen 5 and 11 may have been additions to the text of Genesis simply because they weren’t found in the extant Dead Sea Scrolls, that is an argument from silence.

But we do actually have Genesis 5:13 among the Dead Sea Scrolls, contrary to his claim (4QGenb). The Septuagint (LXX) also includes Genesis chapters 5 and 11 in its Greek translation of the Hebrew text, and that portion of the Septuagint dates to the mid-3rd century BCE, which is around 100 years before the Hasmonean period…which means the Hebrew Torah scroll the Greek translators were using included those chapters, and that pushes the antiquity of those chapters back even further.

In addition, the Samaritan Pentateuch includes these two chapters of Genesis, as does the Syriac Aramaic translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew done in the 2nd century CE.

Targum Onkelos (probably early 2nd-century CE) also includes these chapters in its Aramaic translation from Hebrew.

Not to mention the allusion to Genesis 5:1 in Matthew 1:1 (“the book of the genealogies of…”), which is a 1st-century CE reference in the NT, as well as Luke 3 (another 1c CE reference) and 1 Chronicles 1, both of which also have the genealogy from Adam to Abraham.

So, there is wide attestation of the text and content of Genesis 5 and 11 dating back to even before the Hasmonean period. (I imagine there are probably more references and allusions to these texts, rather than just the biblical chapters themselves, in ancient Jewish lit. at Qumran and elsewhere.)

David Instone-Brewer describes the state of affairs with the Qumran manuscripts below.

“Among the 25, 000 fragments of 900 manuscripts found at Qumran, there are about 200 which are recognisable as Bible texts, ranging from the large Isaiah scroll to tiny fragments containing just a few letters. This represents only a fraction of the original collection. Alongside the four manuscript fragments found in cave 8 were leather tabs belonging to 68 scrolls which had either decayed or disappeared. This indicates that we now have only a tiny sample of the original library. We have fragments from most books but also large gaps – for example there is only one fragment from the whole of Chronicles. Therefore the fact that we have no fragments from two of the smaller Bible books – Esther and Nehemiah – should not be regarded as significant.”
(David Instone-Brewer, “The Old Testament Text Beyond Qumran, ” [Faith and Thought 52, April 2012])

So, just because something isn’t found among the DSS doesn’t mean it didn’t exist at the time. But even if the Qumran community didn’t include those two chapters—which seems to be an inaccurate claim since Genesis 5:13 is included—would that mean they weren’t included in the Standard Text of other Jews at the time? No, not necessarily. Instone-Brewer also points out:

“The Dead Sea Scrolls are published in a series called Discoveries in the Judean Desert[7] a title which indicates that manuscripts were found at other sites as well as Qumran. Other important texts were discovered soon after at Massada, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Se'elim, Naḥal Ḥever and Murabba'at. Among these were 23 Bible manuscripts though these have received less attention because they are all Standard texts. However, this apparently uninteresting feature has prompted a re-evaluation of the Qumran biblical texts.

“We now have a situation which looks completely different. Every site in Palestine where ancient Bibles have been found contains manuscripts which are Standard texts – ie they are almost or exactly like the Masoretic text. The collection of texts at Qumran now stand out as distinct from all the others in a country which was rejecting non-Standard texts.

“This throws new light on the fact that half of the manuscripts at Qumran are similar to the Standard text, because it suggests that the other half are the odd ones and were perhaps already regarded as inferior. Our view of the variety of texts at Qumran was disproportionately influenced by the great Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) – the only complete scroll found at Qumran – which receive the most attention initially and clearly diverged from the Standard text. However, in retrospect, we could regard the Standard text as the de facto majority text at Qumran. The non-Standard texts form a very disparate group, and only very few can be categorised into other families of texts. Only about 4% are close to the Septuagint and another 6% are close to the Samaritan text, [8] which means that the Standard text family is represented by more than ten times as many texts than the next largest family of texts.”
(Ibid.)

[pintpullinggeek]

"One of [James Usher's] aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21th of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.
This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour." - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman 'Good Omens'

[ArturoStojanoff]

"Why did the ancient scholars give the date 420 as that of the destruction of the First Temple? We'll never know"
*Ancient scholars, smoking a blunt* hahaha.... nice

[kaarlimakela]

It's confusing only because there was a stretch of time when Canaan WAS Egypt, was within it's boundaries. Egyptian officials, generations of Egyptian families lived there and everything.
I was just looking at an archeology program, and the variety of pottery for the time there.
I don't know if and when this is factored in or not.

[Mthundrd]

Oh, great work, but you missed the samaritan calendar - it has some differences.

You could make a entire video about the differences between the samaritan pentateuch and why they have different dates.

Keep up the good work <3

[jedgar]

From all that I've read, I suspect that the Exodus is based on a small group of Hebrews leaving Egypt during the early parts of the Bronze Age Collapse. These people joining Hebrews already in Canaan would make Numbers more believable, but still inflated for theological purposes. Plus, as far as I can tell, Egypt extended into Canaan at the supposed time of the Exodus. The Hebrews would have not needed to go anywhere near the Red (or Reed) Sea.

[uncinarynin]

Now I'm as atheist as it gets but somehow Matt Baker makes me get interested in the Bible ...

[SillyDan]

I’d love to see a video comparing other calendars which are still used today (the Chinese calendar, the Islamic calendar, etc.)

[LordMagden]

At one point you mentioned that they used a different calendar back then

Have you ever done a video about different ancient calendars that we know about

[explainabletech]

Your videos actually give me much more respect for the religious traditions. When literalists try to tell us things that we know logically simply can’t be true, that is what makes us question everything.