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Evidence for a Lost Millennium in Biblical Chronology1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

G. E. Aardsma
G. E. Aardsma*
Affiliation:
Institute for Creation Research, 10946 Woodside Ave. N., Santee, California 92071 USA
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Abstract

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Biblical and secular data seem to tell entirely different stories about Near Eastern history prior to the first millennium bc. Most modern critical scholars in Bible-related fields regard this as proof of the nonhistoricity of the premonarchical biblical narrative. However, the incongruity between biblical and secular data seems also to be explainable by the postulate that exactly 1000 yr were accidentally dropped from traditional biblical chronology just prior to the first millennium bc. I evaluate this postulate relative to extra-biblical data for the exodus, Joseph's famine and Lot's observation that the Jordan valley was “well watered” in his day. The repeated success of this postulate in integrating much archaeological, historical and geophysical data with the biblical narrative offers support for the historicity of the premonarchical biblical narrative. Biblical chronology, when corrected by the restoration of the lost 1000 yr, promises to reduce present uncertainties in secular historical chronologies in the 3rd and 4th millennia bc by at least an order of magnitude.

Type
II. 14C in Archaeology
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , 1995 , pp. 267 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © the Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona 

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