Contradictions in the time line
of the Bible

      There are many different ways to establish that the Bible is actually a document composed of multiple sources, and one way to establish this is to examine the chronological differences that emerge when we compare genealogies and historical time lines found in various source documents. The schools of thought which were combined to form the final document we know of as the Bible were diverse and even in conflict. For one of the simplest examples of this ideological division consult the page a Levite Scribe pretends to be the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah rejects the Moses myth and the entire Levitical temple system of sacrifice) or consult the Bible commentary on Matthew for an example of the same sort of thing in the documents of the church, and there are many other examples to be found on this, and other books and web sites.

      According to one strand of tradition the Israelites were in slavery in Egypt for about four hundred years.

"Then YAHWEH said to Abram, "Know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and will be slaves there, and they will be oppressed for four hundred years." Genesis 15:13

      The book of Exodus is found to be generally in agreement with this tradition, but insists that the time of bondage in Egypt lasted for four hundred and thirty years ‘to the very day'.

"The time that the people of Israel dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. And at the end of four hundred and thirty years, on that very day, all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt." Exodus 12:40

      The book of Acts is found to be in agreement with Genesis on this point while Paul, writing in Galatians, quotes the Exodus tradition.

"And God spoke to this effect, that his posterity would be aliens in a land belonging to others, who would enslave them and ill-treat them four hundred years." Acts 7:6

"This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void." Galatians 3:17

      The above chronological Biblical time line only diverges by thirty years in these separate historical sources. The most serious historical difficulties in the Bible become apparent only when we begin to take into account the information presented by genealogies and then compare these with history in the Bible as given in what are purported to be historical documents.

      The Gospel of Matthew opens with a genealogical list that is borrowed from the book of Chronicles, although the author of this list dropped four names from the earlier list for polemical reasons (in the Matthew version from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian exile, and from the time of the exile to the time of Christ was three perfect sets of fourteen, which is alleged to be a polemical proof of perfect timing (there may also be some polemical significance to the number fourteen itself-seven was held to be the number of God and thus we would have six sets of seven in this doctored version of the ancestry of Christ).

      Both the book of Numbers and the book of Exodus agree that Moses was the grandson of Levi, although they disagree on who was the father-in-law of Moses, with the Judges account found to be in agreement with the account in Numbers..

"These are the families of Levi: the family of the Libnites, the family of the Hebronites, the family of the Mahlites, the family of the Mushites, the family of the Korahites. And Kohath was the father of Amram." Numbers 26:58

"The name of Amram‘s wife was Jochebed the daughter of Levi, who was born to Levi in Egypt; and she bore to Amram Aaron and Moses and Miriam their sister." Numbers 26:59

"These are the names of the sons of Levi according to their generations: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari, the years of the life of Levi being a hundred and thirty-seven years ... The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel, the years of the life of Kohath being a hundred and thirty-three years ... Amram took to wife Jochebed his father‘s sister and she bore him Aaron and Moses, the years of the life of Amram being one hundred and thirty-seven years." Exodus 6:18

"Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God." Exodus 3:1

"And Moses said to Hobab the son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses‘ father-in-law, "We are setting out for the place of which the LORD said, ‘I will give it to you'; come with us, and we will do you good; for the LORD has promised good to Israel."" Numbers 10:29

"Now Heber the Kenite had separated from the Kenites, the descendants of Hobab the father-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far away as the oak in Zaanannim, which is near Kedesh." Judges 4:11

      The book of Chronicles is found to be in agreement with this genealogical information, and for some obscure reason the genealogy is repeated a number of times in the books.

"The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel. The children of Amram: Aaron, Moses, and Miriam. The sons of Aaron: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar." 1 Chronicles 6:2

"The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel." 1 Chronicles 6:18

"The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel, four. The sons of Amram: Aaron and Moses. Aaron was set apart to consecrate the most holy things, that he and his sons for ever should burn incense before the LORD, and minister to him and pronounce blessings in his name for ever." 1 Chronicles 23:12

      Up to this point when considering only these genealogies it might seem that the Bible is presenting a consistent picture of history, aside from a few minor discrepancies in historical detail, and thus represents a single source that is simply reiterated in multiple documents. But the problems become apparent when you compare historical accounts with genealogical lists. We are told that during the lifetime of Levi the people went into slavery in Egypt and then remained there either 400 or 430 years. That the people were in Egypt for a considerable number of generations is a point made in the Exodus account where generation after generation the people became so numerous that they soon outnumbered the Egyptians.

"All the offspring of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation. But the descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong; so that the land was filled with them. Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens; and they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they made the people of Israel serve with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigor." Exodus 1:5

      According to what purports to be the history of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt, they were there for around 400 years, which is consistent with the description given above, but according to the genealogical list they were in Egypt for only two generations. Now the lives of these partriarchs are given as about 120 years, and even if we stretch and manipulate facts and figures (they could each have become a father the day before they dropped dead) we are still not going to arrive at a figure of 400 or 430 years of slavery. (As well we would have to invent, out of thin air, more miraculous extremely old age births among their wives to be able to stretch the genealogy to fit the historical time line in the Bible, which would be speculative, since no such thing is mentioned in the books.) Now according to the genealogy Moses was the great- grandson of Levi. This is significant because the time of slavery in Egypt began during the lifetime of Levi, and Levi was already well into adulthood when the family moved to Egypt (so even attempting to stretch the genealogy to somehow reach 400 or 430 years to arrive at the time of his great-grandson Moses is going to be problematic to say the least. As an example of what I mean, I come from a very long lived family - my great-grandfather and grandmothers both lived into their mid nineties, and the genealogy in this case covers a period of about 140 years.)

      The problems are compounded when we consider the testimony from other historical sources. The book of Acts gives us the following interpretation of the Biblical time line.

"And when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance, for about four hundred and fifty years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. Then they asked for a king; and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king; of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.'" Acts 13:19

      The author of Acts also tells us that Moses was eighty years old when he brought the people out of the land of Egypt, and then led them for forty years before passing the torch to Joshua who destroyed ‘seven nations'. The author does not specify the time line for the period of the judges. However if we total up the information given in the book of Judges itself we get two hundred and fifty seven years, and then we find that when Jephthah was quarreling with the Ammonites, they say that at that time three hundred years had passed (which indicates that either this is a generalization or we have a gap of forty three years), and then after this we are given the chronology for another one hundred and eleven years, which date the time line of the period of the judges to be between three hundred and sixty eight to four hundred and eleven years.

      So then, to attempt to summarize this historical information, the Israelites were in Egypt for four hundred (or four hundred and thirty years), and then ‘about four hundred and fifty years passed' and ‘after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet,' which would indicate that another 400 years or so had passed, and then, according to Acts, Saul was king for forty years, and David was king for forty years, and then Solomon came to the throne. Now it should be pointed out here that the book of Acts is one of the least reliable historical documents in the Bible. One must wonder what the Israelites were doing during the time between Joshua and the time of the judges ‘about four hundred and fifty years later'. (This is the same book that tells us that Abraham bought the burial ground from Hamor, although Genesis tells us that this took place long after his death during the days of his great grandsons. This is also the document that contradicts Paul in Galatians, as well as the testimony of Mark and Matthew, among so many other differences. Acts and Luke are late compositions, and completely polemical in nature and not in any way historical documents describing the ‘life of Christ' or ‘the life of the apostles'.)

      Now even if we throw out the ‘history' in the book of Acts we are still left with serious chronological problems in the rest of the books of the Bible. We are told in the book of Samuel that,

"David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years." 2 Samuel 5:4

      We are also told that Saul reigned for ‘two years' but it is agreed that this passage is garbled. Now there are serious historical problems with the tale of David and Goliath (it is heavily edited and, like the entire books of Samuel, is actually composed of two contradictory and conflicting Biblical sources) but if we, for the sake of argument, assume that David was a young boy (perhaps about twelve years old) when he killed Goliath (if it was in fact David who killed Goliath, but that is another matter) then we can assume that Saul must have been king for at least two decades (although the unreliable book of Acts insists that it was ‘forty years') and that Samuel must have been the prophetic judge over Israel for at least that long. We are told that,

"And the time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem." 1 Kings 2:11

"In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the LORD." 1 Kings 6:1

      Now to summarize all this we are told that the Israelites were enslaved for about four hundred years. They then had judges for about 400 years (or over 800 years passed if you want to treat Acts as history) and then Samuel was prophet and Saul was King for perhaps two decades, and then David was King for forty years and then Solomon came to the throne four hundred and seventy six years after the people came out of Egypt. Problems are going to emerge at this point if we try to be historically exact (for example if we assume the period of the judges was the higher figure of four hundred and eleven years and the slavery lasted for the higher period of four hundred and thirty years, add on the (indeterminate) reign of Saul, and then another forty years for the rule of David, we will have gone past the dates stated and if we use the lower figures we will undershoot, and given the impossible historical problems in the book of Samuel itself it is never going to be possible to be exact in any case. Nevertheless we might be able to find something ‘approximately' accurate in the historical sense in just considering the above.

      However the genealogies completely destroy any pretense of historical accuracy in the Bible. According to genealogies the people were in slavery for only two generations and left during the third generation, by which time, according to the history, over four hundred years had passed and the people outnumbered the Egyptians. According to the grossly exagerated figures given in the book of Numbers about two million Hebrews left slavery in Egypt. Then, once again, according to the genealogies, three generations passed after the people had conquered the land, and we arrive at the time of David, a time span according to the historical accounts, spanned close to four hundred years (or over eight hundred according to the books of Acts) and thus many more generations than the three listed. Now if we were to assume that the genealogies were the problem, we could throw them out, and then claim to have an historical time line from the Bible based on ‘historical documents' but this is problematic since the historical documents are also in conflict.

      The gospel of Matthew follows the genealogy found in the opening chapters of 1st Chronicles in the Bible and for the purposes of illustrating the chronological problems in the Bible I use this genealogy in a simple chart below to summarize the problems indicated above.

Abraham
Isaac
Jacob
Judah (70 Hebrews go to Egypt, slavery in Egypt for 400 years)
Perez
Hezron
Ram (generation of Moses in genealogy, 2,000,000 Hebrews leave Egypt)
Amminadab (conquest of Canaan? four hundred years of the Judges?)
Nashon (Exodus? 2,000,000 Hebrews leave Egypt?)
Salmon (married Rahab, conquest of Canaan, four hundred years of Judges?)
Boaz (married Ruth)
Obed
Jesse (Samuel the prophet, reign of Saul)
David (reigned forty years)
Solomon (came to throne 473 years after the Exodus)

      What this chart proves is that Biblical genealogies are worthless in determining ‘the age of the earth' and appear to be polemical political documents (Levite priests got their authority from ‘Moses and Aaron', Abraham ‘walked the land' thus establishing precedent, certain unsavory nations were birthed from the loins of some disgusting ancestor, and so on). The inconsistencies and the chronological contradictions in the ‘historical' books of the Bible are problematic enough, but introducing worthless (and contradictory) genealogy into the mix only creates problems that no amount of fiddling or apologetics can ever hope to reconcile. What this all demonstrates is that the Bible is a multiple source document, and the myth of ‘inerrancy' of the Bible is just that, a polemical myth promoted for political and social reasons (priests and preachers and prophets get their authority from the Bible, which, it is claimed, is ‘inerrant' and thus unquestionable, which means that evangelism and church doctrines, not to mention preachers, are also authorities not to be questioned and that their dogmas and beliefs are also ‘infallible and inerrant'. The polemical connection is so obvious that little more needs to be said about it.) What passes for history in the Bible is actually religious and political polemic as the contradictions in chronology and the historical time line of the Bible so clearly indicates. The Bible is a multiple source document, not the ‘single voice inerrant word of God'.

Related pages:

Matthew's genealogy

Conflicting Genealogies

Conflicting history of Joshua and Judges