WHEN DID JERUSALEM FALL?

The Babylonian records describing the destruction of Jerusalem by the army of Nebuchadnezzar have not been found. As a consequence, all dates for that event must be derived from the scriptural record, as tied to the last events prior to the destruction that are described in the Babylonian archives. These are the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BC and the initial capture of the city and its ruler Jehoiachin in the spring of 597 BC. l The time between the earlier of these two events and the final destruction of Jerusalem was less than twenty years. Since the period is fairly well documented in the Scriptures, it might be expected that it would not be difficult to establish the year in which the city was destroyed and the Babylonian Exile began.

Such, however, has not been the case. Although the Scriptures state that the end came in the fourth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, scholars are divided on whether this refers to 586 BC or 587 BC. Jeremy Hughes listed eleven scholars who preferred the first date and eleven who preferred the second.2 Edwin Thiele was among those preferring 586, and this seems to be the date most widely used in the popular literature. However, to Hughes's list of those favoring 587 should be added the names of Donald Wiseman and Kenneth Kitchen.3

The present study offers no new insight into the Babylonian records that established the last fixed dates before the fall of Jerusalem. Neither does it offer any significant new exegesis of the individual texts that bear on the problem. If the reader cares to skip the analysis and jump forward to the conclusions at the end of the article, he will see that the deductions there use the same principles of Nisan versus Tishri starting months and accession versus non-accession counting that were laid out by Coucke and Thiele, and which all others since them have had to use if they were to construct a reasonable chronology for the kings of judah and Israel.

The main contribution of the present paper is in a different area. It introduces analytical methods from a field that might seem to have little to do with matters of history or biblical interpretation. What is offered here is a means of analyzing and organizing complex sets of ideas that are related to each other in such a way that the assumptions made for one idea have consequences for the other ideas in the set. Although the application of this methodology will be new to the reader, he will find it is built on sound principles of logic, and the results it produces bring forth harmony where there had been confusion. It will also be demonstrated that this confusion arose not so much from the data itself as it did from approaches that imposed various presuppositions on the interpretation of the data.

I. SIFTING OUT WRONG PRESUPPOSITIONS

After suitable contacts were found linking Hebrew history to the fixed dates of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, the greatest problem remaining was to determine the methods used by the authors who gave us the chronological data in the Scriptures. What did these authors mean when they wrote, "In the Xth year of Y king of judah, Z became king over Israel, and he reigned W years?" Presuppositions about the method of the author will affect the interpretation of every part of such a sentence: Was the Xth year of king Y measured from his sole reign, or from his coregency? Was the year measured in an accession (non-inclusive) or non-accession (inclusive) sense? Were the years considered to start with Nisan in the spring or Tishri in the fall? all these questions apply to the second half of this hypothetical verse as well, along with the additional complication: Did the scribe apply the same methods to the king of judah in the first part of the verse that he applied to the king of Israel in the second part of the verse, or did he apply the current method used in judah to the first half of the verse and the current method used in Israel to the second half of the verse?

The possibilities are multiplicative. The first step toward a solution must be to eliminate as many alternatives as possible, thereby reducing the number of combinations to something manageable. Examples of this would be to show that no coregency was possible because king X killed his predecessor, or to demonstrate that the use of non-accession years is inconsistent with some synchronism.

Having done the preliminary reduction of the number of possible presuppositions, there will remain some that need constant re-examination, given the well-demonstrated fact that the two kingdoms changed their reckoning methods at least once during their existence. The usual situation is that an initial sifting can reduce the questions that must be asked regarding a particular writer or a particular period of the monarchies to just three, which are: (1) Does this writer start the year in Tishri or Nisan? (2) Does he use accession or non-accession years? and (3) Does he apply the same method to the other kingdom (whether it be Israel or Babylon)? With these three questions there will generally be eight possible combinations.