The Assyrian Crisis
By Daniel Gregg
After the end of the Second World War, Edwin Thiele revised biblical chronology by deleting 52 years from the timeline. Previous chronologies correctly placed the division of the kingdom in 983/982 BC (Antsey 1913, Beecher 1907, Cooper 1940's) and some others based on the LXX in 975 BC (Ussher). Later Chronolgies return this way also (Tetley 2005; and Jones 2005). Thiele's revised compressed chronology has been adopted in almost every reference book, commentary, and study bible produced by the Evangelical Christian world since then. Because of this institutional monopoly, an accurate biblical chronology, established strictly on its own terms, is no longer easily available to the people.
Thiele took his Ph.d. from the University of Chicago, and his mentor was William Irwin, a higher critic who did not accept the historicity of chronological data in the book of Ezekiel, (The Problem of Ezekiel, 1943). The University was a major insitution for Assyriological Archaeology. Thiele himself ended up rejecting certain chronological data from the books of Kings using the same general criticsm that the German Higher Critical School used (The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings; 2 Kings 17:1; 18:1, 9, 10). The figures they did not want to believe were dismissed as late editoral remarks by an editor that did not understand how the chronology really should go. This apologetic proposing various editors is a theme of the orginal German Higher Critical theory attributing the Torah to a late mixture of disparate sources in the reign of Josiah cobbled together by Jewish Priests. This is referred to as JEDP or the "Documentary Hypothesis."
The debate is framed around the simple critical issue of whether to believe what the Scripture says its own chronology is, or whether to believe what the Assyriologists claim it should be based on their archaeological interpretations. Complicating this issue is that before Assyriology came to be dominated by secular academics who could easily dismiss the Scripture, the field was formerly pioneered by scholars who fully accepted the biblical accounts. Therefore, there was a period of time when scholars tried to harmonize the archaeological cuneiform discoveries with the unaltered long timeline of Scripture.
Even though these scholars had good arguments, some of which will resurface here, the field was completely taken over by scholars willing to regard scripture on the same level as documents the Assyrians wrote, or even more disturbingly with some to have a bias to rank Scripture even lower than their archaeological findings. This systemic corruption of the academic elites and the institutions was accomplished by the same strategem by which the former Creationist world view was overthrown by the Evolutionary dogma. While zealous individuals such as Darwin can be identified, the radical nature of the shift is to be attributed to catalyzation from the spirit world.
So what came from Assyrian archaeology that caused Thiele to reduce the timeline by 52 years? The Assyrians created eponym lists of men appointed for a year. The names of these men were used to represent years in Assyrian chronology, much like Consuls at Rome were used. These eponyms called for a chronology 52 years shorter than the biblical chronology.
Now Thiele was one of those scholars who wanted to harmonize Scripture with this new theory as much as possible. Therefore, he tried to keep his rejection of Scripture at a minimal exposure by showing respect for the text as much as possible. But in the end he had to admit to dismissing certain synchronisms in the book of Second Kings. Probably the reason for this seeminly hypocritical approach to the text was the belief that postulating errors at the level of editors was acceptable in his thinking, rather than just more conservative suggesting of simple scribal or vowel pointing mistakes in transcription.
The rejection, however, is worse than he represented, because he did not know the whole biblical chronology. Thiele confined his reaearch to the divided kingdom, and did not enter in on finding solutions to problems before. This is because prior to Abraham, academia had all but dismissed earlier biblical chronology, and the "kings" problem was where the debate had moved to. It is really difficult to study this complicated section of biblical chronology, and it is easy to loose perspective with so narrow a focus.
No. 1: there are 390 years from the divided Kingdom to the date of Ezekiel's prophecy. That such an era existed is confirmed in the reign of Asa (year 35 and 36), confirmed by the death year of the High Priest Jehoiada (year 130), and confirmed by Josephus's mention of the 361st year way point during the reign of Josiah (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 10, Chapter 5). So Thiele implicitly rejects this.
No. 2: The 390 and 40 years of Ezekiel 4 represent years that Israel and Judah sinned (cf. Eliezer Shulman, The Sequence of Events in the Old Testament. These years can be mapped out in the precise periods of their rebellions, a total of 420 years (cf. Seder Olam Rabbah, Chapter 26. So Thiele implicity rejects this.
No. 3: Reducing the chronology by 52 years prevents the finding of 70 years during which the land rested. And upon this basis the 70 year Babylonian Exile was based. So Theile implicitly rejects this.
No. 4: Thiele erased the interregnums between Amaziah and Uzziah, and Jeroboam II and Zechariah. He rejected the plain sense interpretation of the synchronisms creating these interregnums, which prior to him careful biblical chronologies had included.
No. 5: Thiele's reductionism rejects on principle that the Scripture meant to account for a complete and unambiguous chronology of itself. The witness to this is his arbitrary interjections of coregencies used to make the biblical data yield to the changes he wanted to make.
So we see that despite pretending to uphold Scripture, he was far from it. Because of the pretense, however, all the academic publishers of Christian Study Bibles and reference material were deceived into adopting Thiele's chronology. The Gemini AI summed this up like this, "Your text highlights the tragic consequence of Edwin Thiele's work: institutional deception. By presenting his system as a conservative 'rescue mission' that harmonized the text with archaeology, Thiele created a persuasive pretense. This veneer allowed his reductionist framework to bypass the defenses of evangelical publishers, quietly capturing the very institutions trusted to safeguard the integrity of the Word of God." I have to say that is a good way of putting it.
The truth is that the simple assumption that the Assyrian Eponym Canon was correct was regarded as the unassaiable evidence that should overrule the Scriptural chronology.
However, this assumption is vulnerable to the counter argument that the Assyrians rewrote their history, because this history was written by court scribes beholden to the Assyrian State with every reason to suppress any embarrasment of Assyria, and to exalt the glories of its kings.
The Scripture is not vulnerable to this claim of rewriting history. It was written by prophets who were highly critical of the Israeli State when criticism was called for. And the outcome of the biblical chronology speaks perfectly of divine structure and guidance that no one prophet or school of prophets could engineer on their own. Rather they were trusted to handle the human part of a divinely guided chronological description of history.
So even without having a narrative to explain the Assyrian data other than that they rewrote their history, one should be suspicious of the results coming from Assyria.
Now here is the probable explanation. When Assyria was in periods of civil war, no eponyms that would be recognzied were appointed. If the civil war was embarassing enough, the court scribes would simply abridge the history.
There are two such periods to be noticed.
When Shalmaneser III died at the end of 36 years of reign in 875 BC, the crown prince was Shamshi Adad V, and his brother entered into a civil war against him. The war was so bad that 27 principle cities joined with the brother of the crown prince. This war lasted for six years until the Babylonian King entered the conflict on the side of Shamsi Adad V, and forced him to accept a humiliating treaty of submission to the Babylonian King. The court scribes were faced with a period of six years for which there were no eponyms appointed. So what they did was skip over those six years, by assigning three of them to revolts in the end of Shalmanesser III's reign and three years at the beginning of Shamshi Adad V's reign. In this manner the revolt years were assigned to eponym years that actually had eponyms, and the years without eponyms were simply skipped and dropped into a black hole to be forgotten.
It is possible that the canon scribes united their history to the eponym list at a later date. The process was like this. The only way the Assyrians tracked time was by lists of eponymous years used for economic purposes. Most of the tablets did not have any eponymous year names, and so when a period of civil unrest occurred, and no eponyms were appointed, none of the tablets for that period would have eponymous labels. When the court scribes came to compile a history, they had only the lists of existing eponymous tablets to work with. If a historical event occurs in a period of only non eponymous tablets, there was no place in the list to put it except in the known eponymous years. By this process all the historic memories from periods for years outside the lists were placed in years with eponymous names by the court scribes.
More specifically, the revolt years themselves were without eponyms, but the court scribes wanted to both erase the six years and acknowledge that a revolt had taken place while treating their king as the legitimate king. They therefore added "revolt" to the notations of 3 previous eponyms that existed before the revolt, and 3 following eponyms that existed after the revolt. This way a notation of the the six years of revolt was preserved, but the six years during which they actually happened disappeared.
It is hard to know whether to accuse these scribes of outright conspiracy or conspiriatorial neglect. The failure to do due diligence in building a history, to make sure the timeline is not off, is conspiratorial neglect. The evidence of the cuneiform tablets themselves is that ancient Assyria did not write proper histories like we find in Scripture, because the Assyrian gods did not want them to have a proper history! The corruptions brought on Assyria by their gods were so great that the Assyrians themselves were incapable of accurate preservation unless their gods saw to it. The God of Israel, on the other hand, saw to it that Israel's prophets preserved a true and accurate history. Modern Assyriology is basically sitting at the feet of Assyrian gods who did not give a damn about the corruption they caused Assyria.
There were economic cuneiform texts with just the name of the eponym on them to date texts. But these were without the historical notes of the court scribes. The phrase 'revolt' did not appear on them. The supposed ties to historical events like a 'revolt' are only in court generated Eponym Chronicles, the offical state documents, which were created years later. Only the economic texts are contemporary with the year they were created in. The lack of historical notations in them shows that the later Eponym Chronicle is a reconstruction, and not a contemporary record, making it subject to state propaganda.
The second such period began at the end of the reign of Ashur Nirari V. A revolt began at the end of his reign. And a Babylonian King named Pul decided to take advantage and make himself king of Assyria also. Pul was not interested in administering the Assyria State. Rather he ruled by plunder, rewards, and payoffs. Therefore, no eponyms were appointed for 46 years. When Tiglath Pileser III came to power, Pul was evicted from the land, and the court scribes under Tiglath Pileser III again glued the existing eponyms of the canon together and erased the 46 year disruption by the Babylonian king who made himself king of Assyria also.
This is not a novel theory, but it was proposed by Jewish Assyriologist Jules Oppert. Note that we are not claiming records are missing or were destroyed. We are claiming that the records were never created in the first place because eponyms were not appointed during these periods of civil unrest. For this reason, the missing years cannot be "found". Even if a master list had not edited out the missing years, a loose archive of economic texts with eponym names would only have enough names to account for the years of the shortened chronology.
There are in fact a majority of tablets with no eponymous names on them to date them at all. These tablets may well belong to years for attested eponyms, but they may also well belong to years for which no eponym was appointed.
The Babylonians appear to have seen what the Assyrians did to their history. For Berossus of Cos reports that Nabonassar took of the previous records of the kings of Babylon and destroyed them, so that Babylonian chronology would begin with him. Except for Nabonassar's rival in south Babylonia Nabu-shuma-ishkun who ruled for 13 years, there is a huge gap in our knowledge of Babylonian chronology for century prior to Nabonassar.
Considering the braggadocious pride of the Assyrian Kings and their scribes that chronicled the campaigns of the Assyrian Kings, it is completely believable that they omitted major periods of embarrassment. The Assyrian state ethos was built on its king conducting an annual campaign against foreign nations. But sometimes internal revolt or foreign kings turned the tables and disrupted the year naming system. When the year lists were compiled it served the narcissism of the state to simply fail to provide an accounting of the missing years.
The modern perspective is influenced by Christianity which has an ethos of truthful history-telling, even if it does not shed a good light on one's own behavior. This modern way of thinking blinds us to how ancient Assyria thought about these matters. Rather than projecting our modern expectations backward, we should realize that when things did not go the way their gods wanted, it was considered appropriate to cleanse the timeline; it was a religous duty to restore cosmic harmony. So the cursed embarassment was erased. One can see this ethos pop up in science fiction, where the characters want to change the timeline from disagreeable to agreeable. One can also see this in modern progressives who want to rewrite history or retell it with a new narrative.
There are several additinal points that can be made that show the deletion of 52 years was a mistake due to trusting the Assyrian scribes vs. the Biblical Text.
No. 2: The 763 BC eclipse, which we were assured maps the 9th year of Ashur-Dan also maps, and correctly so to 809 BC. During this time there is space in the geopolitical situation of Assyria for the province of Nineveh to repent for a generation.
No. 3: After the 46 years of missing eponyms, that the court scribes skipped, they borrowed the last two eponyms from Ashur Nirari V for the beginning of Tiglath Pileser III's reign. This would make sense if the scribes were remapping the eclipse when they made the reduction. The new eponyms under Tiglath Pileser III were of an entirely different character. They were not powerful Assyrian princes, but were vitual nobodies. The academic debates about this abrupt shift and poor accounting of eponyms are evidence that the astronomical synchronism did not just happen by accident. It was observed that when the cannon was glued together that there was an eclipse just two years away from a simple joining of eponyms. Adjustments were then made to make the 9th year of Ashur Dan aligned with the recent eclipse.
The 763 eclipse was shortly enough before 745 BC to be exactly one 18 year saros cycle before Tiglath Pileser III. Somebody in the court, it seems, apparently knew that if the 9th year of Asshur Dan did not target that year, that the abridgment would be exposed. For this reason they borrowed two eponyms from Ashur Nirari V, or made some adjustment that looked like this.
We need not assume these final adjustments were made by scribes of Tiglath Pileser III. They could have been made in the court of Ashur-banipal, because the lists we have are actually copies of copies. It may be that the scribes edited two eponyms because they thought they were correcting and error. So they made the 9th year of Ashur-dan agree with the 763 BC eclipse they had calculated.