Chronology

Any historical chronology that attempts to pinpoint events much before Christ is wrong, my own included. There is a simple reason for that. We do not have all the data. And some of the data we do have is demonstrably wrong, as it conflicts with other data. Face it, God only knows all the myriad details of who did what when way back before computers. All we can do is piece together some semblance of a time-line, stretching it back and forth like a rubber band to try to fit all the incomplete bits and pieces of history that have survived the ravages of time.

Many people have done that, with more or less satisfactory results back even beyond the time God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. I think most honest people agree that call to be within 50 years of 1950 BC, roughly 4000 years ago. There are still arguments, such as with the lists of Pharaohs or kings which don’t seem to line up with each other, yet such arguments are at the most two or three hundred years either way. For a few hundred years out of 4000, let’s be charitable and agree that you could be wrong, or I could be wrong, but in going that far back, it’s not terribly significant. We do the best we can with the data we have and try to defend our position, but we’re probably both wrong at least to some extent.

When you tell a story (or write a history book) you must have a chronology to tie together the events. I’ve spent a lot of time developing the unique chronology for my book. Thousands of hours. Some of the most fun times in my life were when the chronologies of ancient history lined up with the events of Scripture so I could see the bigger picture behind the Bible story. Yet even there, I may have lined it up wrong. Even twenty years off with Egypt’s Pharaohs, for example, makes for a very different story, though it might still be a plausible one.

I’m not God. I’ve never seen a better “fit” between ancient history and the Bible than in the story I’ve told - that’s why I wanted to write it all out, so others could also enjoy the relationships I’ve discovered. Yet I’ve made errors, many of them. For example, just last month, long after my book was complete and posted on-line, I discovered new information regarding the Pharaohs around the Amarna period, the times of Samuel and Kings Saul, David, and Solomon. I had to re-write some major portions in Volumes 2 and 3 (which I just completed and posted).

So why is this controversial? We’re all in the same boat, struggling to line up inadequate data with the very few things we really “know” about ancient history. It’s controversial because we each have an agenda here, whether we acknowledge it or not. Even those who originated our source material had their agenda! I maintain that if our agendas are different, we will come up with different chronologies.

My agenda is to demonstrate that it is possible to tell the entire story of the universe in a way that does not conflict with the Bible, which I believe to be the inerrant Word of Almighty God in it’s original languages. Certainly other ways than mine exist, but at least it is possible to tell the story without falsifying history or breaking any scientific laws or denying the Bible. That does involve some rather dramatic changes from the evolutionist’s “uniformitarian” mindset, as the ancient world simply cannot have had all the same parameters we see around us and still match the Bible. A good example is Noah’s Flood - a uniformitarian simply cannot allow the Flood to cover the entire earth above all the mountains as the Bible says.

In line with my agenda, I at first tried to have my chronology line up with that of Archbishop James Ussher. He wrote the Annals of the World back in the 1650’s. It is a very scholarly work, with a huge body of ancient historical references and source material behind it. His agenda was the same as mine. Professor Hull drew out his timeline, which I also used. But more recent archaeological data (especially on Egypt’s Pharaohs) has made me push my timeline back 1102 years from theirs.

Archbishop Ussher was laughed at, ridiculed, for saying that the creation was in 4004 BC. Why? He did the best he could with the data he had, and it was really very good. I’ve got more data, thus a longer timeline, but I can only pray I will be as faithful as he to line it up so it fits the Bible story. I’m sure people will laugh at me, too, when more data yet is found. I suspect if all the facts were known from the Creation, we would be able to fill up a timeline back to about 10,000 BC.

What about those with a different agenda? Many deny the authority of the Bible, and start with “science” as their primary source of truth. They may believe in God, but they relegate Him to a back-room realm of “religion” and “spirit” where nothing can be known for sure, at least in this physical realm of “facts.” So their agenda, while it may not be to overtly disprove God, at the very least is only to line up their chronology with all the other “known facts” out there. The problem with this approach is, nearly all of what we “know” is either very limited or flat wrong.

Archaeologists have an “inside joke.” Archaeologist Gordon Franz said it best in 1998, “Absolute truth in archaeology lasts about 20 years.” So don’t you dare go back into books or essays more than 20 years old, or you might discover that all their ages and dates have changed. Of course the old information was flawed because they didn’t know what we now know. And nobody realizes that what we now “know” will be obsolete in another 20 years. So the only true “fact” is, that all our “accepted” archaeological dates have changed and are likely to keep changing.

Will Rogers is quoted as saying, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” It sounds funny to say it, but there’s more truth there than we admit. For example, scientists “know” that the Earth is billions of years old (currently 4.5 billion and climbing), so when they find a fossil, they try to fit it to that framework. But the fact is, that number is so full of invalid assumptions that at best it is only a series of guesses and at worst it’s a deliberate hoax designed to deny the truth of God’s Word. That “millions and billions of years” of evolution is actually millions of scholarly “guesses” building upon each other, but with not a single actual scientific fact to tie it down to a real chronology. 

Some historians claim that the sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 664 BC is the earliest non-controversial date, supported by much interlocking data. Others claim that 690 BC, when Taharqa began the 25th dynasty in Egypt, is the earliest non-controversial date. I tend to agree with both, but do you notice, they both come after 701 BC, when King Hezekiah saw the shadow on his sundial go backwards by 10 degrees. Before 700 BC was the Catastrophic Era, and things were very different back then. For example, the Hebrews claimed to have a 360 day year, and I have no reason to doubt them. They were not stone age savages scribbling their calendar on the side of a rock wall! Egypt’s calendar also had a 360 day year, and they had the mathematical and astronomical smarts to build the pyramids! China’s calendar also had a 360 day year, as did the Mayan’s and every other known calendar from before 701 BC. The only thing I know for certain about this is that a uniformitarian interpretation of chronology before 701 BC is always wrong.

The regular catastrophes slamming Earth every 30 years have had a rather dramatic effect on the estimated ages. For example, digging through the layered strata of the ancient city “tells” in the Middle East, archaeologists have assigned hundreds if not thousands of years between various types of layers, but it is quite possible that only 30 years elapsed before the next great celestial catastrophe, when the entire city was leveled and they had to start over. How do you think those “tells” built up like that in the first place? No city since 701 BC ever formed a “tell.”

I go into this at length in my book. For now, I just wanted you to know that:

A. I have an agenda for my story. I accept God’s Word as the only reliable source of absolute truth, and attempt to line up the rest of history with the Bible. Where the Bible seems to contradict itself (and it does), I try to find interpretations which resolve the differences, as my faith is in a God who does not make mistakes.

B. Everyone else has an agenda too. As with mine, this involves faith. Always. You have to decide what to believe, as no one alive has seen the Catastrophic Era. Those who “believe” (that’s faith) in an earth billions of years old – that’s their agenda, and they will try to stretch their chronology to fit. They will claim that it is based on “facts” but it is not. It is based on their interpretation of available data as guided by their faith. You must decide - does your faith match theirs? or mine? 

As I said, everyone pretty much agrees, plus or minus a few hundred years, back to the time of Abram’s call from Ur of the Chaldees. But before that, various chronologies diverge wildly. The Bible and a few other historical documents tell the story way back to Creation, but a lot is left out, yes, in the Biblical account, too. Every chronology extending before the Flood is really only a series of educated guesses. I freely admit, I made thousands of guesses in my chronology, working with it like putty in my hands to try to make it fit the Bible story and still line up with all the bits and pieces of historical and archaeological data we have. Be wary of those who tell you that their chronology of ancient history is strictly based on “science” and therefore is an “established fact.” That is a lie, right off the top. It is clear that science is their god, because true science does not settle on established facts without observation and verification, which is impossible before the Flood.

So if someone will lie to you about that, you can be quite assured they are lying about a lot of other things too. Even a secular science book, if the authors are honest, will never say, “The earth is 4.5 billion years old,” because that’s a flat out lie and they know it. An honest scientist might say something like, “We think the earth may be as old as 4.5 billion years, and this is why we think that, and these are the assumptions we made to get there… However, other scientists believe in a much younger earth, and these are some of the reasons they give…” Any “scientist” who will not admit his assumptions (ie, his “faith”) should have no credibility, because every guess at ancient history involves assumptions. And any “scientist” who gets dogmatic about his theories and tries to squelch debate is not a real scientist at all, because a real scientist welcomes debate whenever data exists that does not fit his hypothesis. And lots of data does not fit the evolutionary hypothesis. 

Every secular historical account has errors - some of them intentional! Kings often boasted of their accomplishments beyond all measure, and Pharaohs at times went to great lengths to eradicate the monuments, or even the very existence, of their predecessors. Rulers often deliberately tried to hide the evidence because they wanted history to look at them more favorably. Decisive battles at times ended with wildly differing accounts, depending on the perspectives of the opposing sides. At times two or more kings ruled simultaneously at different places in the country, and at times there was no king at all. Dating systems were sometimes different, even between close nations like Israel and Judah.

Tying a chronology to celestial events like an eclipse, a supernova, or a special alignment of the planets presumes an orderly solar system like we have now, which is a bad assumption during the catastrophic era. Names changed, not just the names of towns and local areas but also names of people and nations. Entire people groups migrated - look at all the different areas occupied by the Amalekites, for example. Some people groups were wiped out, or merged with other groups. The Philistines at the time of King Saul were a combination of at least four distinct people groups, including the Anakim.

Some processes that are slow today were very rapid at one time. The sliding of the earth’s crustal plates is agonizingly slow now, but at one period in our history it was very rapid. The Ice Age appears to have come and gone very slowly, but with my hypothesis it could have come very suddenly, and left just as suddenly. The glaciers at one time covered 3/4 of the planet. Scientists love to theorize what caused it, how long it lasted, what ended it, and even how many Ice Ages there were, but it’s all just guesses. In the coal beds we see evidence of a lengthy warm period followed by a world-wide catastrophe. Again, scientists take their guesses but they don’t know what caused it or what ended it, or how long it lasted.

I assert that my guess is as good as theirs. At least my hypothesis provides a single logical chain of events which explains how a world that God called “very good” could have become so tortured and deformed as we see now. And it explains the coal beds, the Ice Age, the arcing mountain ranges, the crustal cracks, the moving crustal plates, the fossil beds in their layered strata which is often tipped or folded, and many other details which evolutionary scientists struggle with. One example is the quick-frozen wooly mammoths which exist by the millions in Siberia and Alaska. Evolutionary scientists have no explanation; I do.

Yet it is still a hypothesis. This entire work is fiction. One reason I’ve put my book online rather than in print is that I expect it to keep changing. I want you, dear Readers, to help me. If you have data of which I was unaware which changes the story, let me know - I may have to rewrite that section, again. Maybe after it’s been online a few years and I’ve rewritten it a few more times, a publisher will help me to get it into print. In the meantime, it makes exciting reading for those who want to see how the Bible may line up with ancient history and the sciences.