Valerius Josephus Coucke[1] (2 February 1888 – 20 December 1951 (aged 63) ) was a Belgian scholar and priest who was professor at the Major Seminary, Bruges in the 1920s.
His study of the methods of the authors of the books of Kings and Chronicles led him to conclusions that were later discovered, independently, by Edwin R. Thiele.
Coucke broke from the approach of the Documentary Hypothesis that was popular among European scholars in his day by starting with the working proposition that the chronological data of Kings and Chronicles represented authentic traditions that could be understood once the methods of the ancient scribes were determined.
[5] These five principles are identical to those later discovered by Edwin R. Thiele, who was unaware of Coucke’s work when he published the results of his doctoral dissertation in 1944.
They are in exact agreement at the beginning of the divided monarchy, which both Coucke and Thiele placed in the year starting in Nisan of 931 BC.
For the end of the kingdom period, Coucke placed the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in the summer of 587 BC, whereas Thiele put it a year later, in 586.
Like the first approach that started from the Parian Marble’s date for the fall of Troy, his second method was also derived from classical writings, with no utilization of biblical texts.
In providing the list of kings, Josephus said he was taking his information from Menander of Ephesus, who translated the records of the Tyrian archives from Phoenician into Greek.
Although the individual reign lengths of the various kings in the list show considerable variation due to copying errors over the centuries since Josephus wrote, the total number of years given from the time that Hiram sent assistance to Solomon at the beginning of Temple construction to the flight of Dido/Elissa from Tyre, after which she and her associates founded Carthage, has been preserved intact due to its three-fold repetition.
This redundancy of expression has preserved the total of years in virtually all extant copies of the Tyrian King List, so that Coucke and other scholars have felt confident in using it in their calculations.