The Timeline
A hundred and fifty-three lives, reigns and events laid over a single axis. The spine is the dating historians actually work with; running beside it is the reckoning you reach by adding up the figures in Genesis and Kings, so that where the two agree and where they part is visible rather than argued about. Every entry carries the passages it rests on.
Two reckonings
History is the default. For the monarchy it follows Edwin Thiele’s reconstruction, which is the working standard: it reconciles the cross-dated reigns in Kings and Chronicles by allowing co-regencies and two different new-year conventions in the two kingdoms, rather than by emending the numbers. Before the monarchy it gives ranges, because ranges are what the evidence supports. Before Abraham it gives nothing at all.
From the text is the other axis: years of the world, counted forward from the figures in Genesis 5 and 11 and onward through the reigns, with AM 1 at 4022 BCE. On this reckoning the whole of Genesis becomes visible — Methuselah dying in the year of the flood, Shem still alive when Abraham is born — which is exactly what an absolute chronology cannot show you, because it cannot place those names at all.
Switching between them moves entries in and out of the chart. Forty of them have no historical dating; fifty-five have no year in the text. The count under the chart says which, rather than letting them disappear quietly.
What the drawing means
A solid bar is a span the sources fix. A hatched bar is approximate or disputed. A dot is a single year. The colours separate the lanes — empires, the kings of Judah, the kings of Israel, the prophets, people, events — and any lane can be switched off.
Click anything for its dates in both reckonings, how firmly the date is held, the passages behind it, and, where there is one, the argument.
The anchors
The chronology is not a chain of guesses. Six external records hold it in place, and everything else is measured from them.
| Year | What fixes it |
|---|---|
| 1208 BCE | Merneptah's victory stele names a people called Israel already in Canaan — the earliest mention outside the Bible. |
| 853 BCE | The Assyrian account of Qarqar lists Ahab the Israelite among the kings who fought Shalmaneser III. |
| 841 BCE | The Black Obelisk shows Jehu bringing tribute, in Shalmaneser's eighteenth year. |
| 763 BCE | A solar eclipse recorded in the Assyrian eponym list, which astronomy dates to 15 June — this is what dates the list, and through it the kings. |
| 597 BCE | The Babylonian Chronicle gives the day Jerusalem was taken and Jehoiachin deported: 16 March. |
| 51–52 CE | An inscription at Delphi dates Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia, and with it Paul before his judgement seat — the firmest date in the New Testament. |
The three places it is genuinely disputed
The exodus. Read 1 Kings 6:1 literally and the 480 years back from Solomon’s fourth year land on 1446 BCE. Take Exodus 1:11, where Israel builds Pi-Ramesse, to require Ramesses II, and the date moves to about 1250. Most critical scholars hold the later date or regard the departure as a far smaller event than the narrative describes; more conservative scholarship keeps 1446. The chart draws 1250 and names 1446 on the entry, because pretending to a single answer here would be pretending.
The fall of Jerusalem. 587 or 586, turning on whether a king’s accession year counted as his first. One year; nothing else moves.
The crucifixion. Two years survive every constraint — 30 and 33 CE. Both sit inside Pilate’s ten years, both follow the fifteenth of Tiberius. Reading Matthew 12:40 as three days and three nights, with the resurrection on Firstfruits and therefore on a Sunday, puts the death on a Wednesday afternoon. Counted from the astronomical conjunction, as the Calendar counts, Pesach falls on a Wednesday in 27, 30 and 33 CE; counted from the first visible crescent, as most reconstructions do, it falls on the Friday — the older reading, and the one behind Good Friday. Which convention you take decides both the day and the year.
Where the judges went
The oppressions and judgeships in Judges add up to some 410 years, and the period cannot hold them. The ordinary reading is that the judges were regional and overlapping — Deborah and Gideon both in the north, Jephthah in Gilead across the Jordan, Samson against the Philistines on the coast — which the text itself half-says: half the tribes answer Deborah’s call and half do not. So the individual judges carry the lengths the text gives and no place on the historical axis. Switch to the reckoning from the text and they appear.
Where the figures come from
The spreadsheet behind the second reckoning is Werner Vorstman’s own, worked out from the text: Genesis 5 and 11 for the lifespans, the 430 years of Galatians 3:17 from Abram’s entry into Canaan — which needs the Septuagint and Samaritan reading of Exodus 12:40, where the sojourn is “in Egypt and in Canaan” rather than the Hebrew’s “in Egypt” alone — the 400 of Genesis 15:13 from the weaning of Isaac, the 480 of 1 Kings 6:1 to Solomon’s fourth year, and the reign lengths of Kings and Chronicles thereafter. Where its two tabs disagree — they differ by three years over Abram’s birth — the chain the totals depend on is the one drawn here.
In four places that chain runs a reign longer than the plain figure in Kings, so that the northern and southern lists still meet: Amaziah by thirteen years, Jeroboam II by twenty-four, Pekah by nine, Azariah by two. The spreadsheet records those differences in a column of its own rather than hiding them, and so does this instrument — each of those entries says what Kings gives and what the second reckoning uses. Thiele reaches the same reconciliation by another route, with co-regencies. They are two solutions to one problem, and the chart lets you look at both.
The historical dates are the standard ones: Thiele for the divided monarchy, the Assyrian eponym list and the Babylonian chronicles for the anchors, Josephus and the Delphi inscription for the first century. Where scholarship is divided, both cases are given on the entry.
The Calendar, for the day and the hour → · Texts and datasets used →