Biblical literalist chronology
There is no consensus of which is right, however, without the additional 650 years in the Septuagint, according to Egyptologists[3] the great Pyramids of Giza would pre-date the Flood (yet show no signs of water erosion) and provide no time for Tower of Babel event.
The Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament) dates events either by simple arithmetic taking the creation of the world as the starting point, or, in the later books, by correlations between the reigns of kings in Israel and Judah.
[7] This way of thinking had its origins in Christian fundamentalism, an early-20th-century movement which opposed then-current non-supernatural interpretations of the life of Jesus by stressing, among other things, the verbal inspiration of scripture.
[28] This raises the prospect that the Books of Kings can be used to reconstruct a chronology for the monarchy, but the task has in fact proven intractably difficult.
"[31] Possibly the most widely followed attempt to resolve the problems is Edwin R. Thiele's The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (three editions between 1951 and 1983), but his work has been widely criticised for, among other things, introducing "innumerable" co-regencies, constructing a "complex system of calendars", and using "unique" patterns of calculation; as a result his following is largely among scholars "committed ... to a doctrine of scripture's absolute harmony" (the criticism is to be found in Brevard Childs' Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture).
[32] Subsequent scholars continue to propose alternative chronologies, but, in the words of a recent commentary on Kings, there is "little consensus on acceptable methods of dealing with conflicting data.
The arithmetic can be checked by starting at the bottom of the table with the date of the destruction of the Temple in 587 and adding the number of years in the Scriptures (books of the Prophets and Chronicles through Genesis) back up to the beginning.
Dates with events in italics appearing in small type for historical comparison are according to Bernard Grun's The Timetables of History.
The details and dates of events in tables derived by the method of mechanical arithmetic tabulation from the text of the Bible alone are not relied upon by scholars and historians as representing established historical facts.
