testimony.doc
13
Nov. 16, 2005
SOME REFINEMENTS TO THE THIELE/MCFALL SYSTEM
In speaking of the Thiele/McFall chronological system, I was careful to say that it was
consistent with all the texts that McFall used to build his chronology. However, there
were some texts out of the approximately 124 that are the clues for this period that
McFall did not use. Among these are the texts in Ezekiel dealing with the siege and fall
of Jerusalem. These texts show that non-accession years are to be used for Zedekiah,
contrary to the assumption of Thiele and McFall that Zedekiah's years are given by
accession counting. A continuation of this analysis shows that all the Scriptures in
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 2 Kings, and 2 Chronicles are in harmony for Zedekiah's reign, and all
indicate that Jerusalem fell in 587
BC
. This shows again the importance of using the right
approach and a tool such as Decision Tables to handle all the chronological texts of
Scripture in a consistent manner.
The implications from the ability to harmonize all the chronological data in six major
books of the Bible are drawn in my paper in the June 2005 issue of JETS.
17
In that article,
I made the argument that theories of limited inspiration would have predicted that the 124
pieces of the puzzle could never be put together in a harmonious fashion, whereas the
doctrine of inerrancy would predict that there was a solution for the puzzle. The
production of a reasonable solution is therefore a strong argument against theories of
limited inspiration and in favor of the doctrine of inerrancy. Skeptics may assert that the
harmony of these scriptures is all an artifact of the method of Thiele and those who
followed him, but that would be like maintaining that a logic puzzle of 124 clues could be
put together in an arbitrary way that did not agree with the original design. If anyone
doubts this, let him try to make up clues for the simple puzzle in Figure 1 without
knowing the answer. The clues will generally fail to fit together unless the person giving
the clues knows the answer and is very careful to make all clues consistent with that
answer. Similarly, the chronological puzzle could never have been put together by Thiele
and those who followed him if the original data were not authentic, i.e. true to history.
Errors in the original data, such as would be predicted by any theory of limited
17
Young, Tables of Reign Lengths.