testimony.doc
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years in Nisan.
9
He also determined that the reign lengths of the first kings of Judah and
Israel were in harmony with each other if these first kings in Judah used accession
reckoning while their counterparts in Israel were using non-accession reckoning to
measure their years of reign.
Some years later an American scholar, Edwin Thiele, discovered these same principles,
although when he began publishing his findings he was not aware of Coucke's earlier
work. Thiele was able to determine the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah in a
more satisfactory way than Coucke, and his principal work, The Mysterious Numbers of
the Hebrew Kings, went through three editions. The chronology of the northern kingdom,
Israel, remained the same through these three editions, and the only refinement that later
conservative writers like McFall and myself have had to offer for the chronology of the
northern kingdom has been to narrow the date for the fall of Samaria and the end of
Hoshea's reign to the first half of the year beginning in Nisan of 723
BC
, rather than
allowing for the full year as did Thiele. Thiele's chronology of the northern kingdom has
stood the test of time, and in particular his date for the beginning of the divided
monarchies is widely accepted by conservative and non-conservative scholars alike.
10
However when it came to the southern kingdom, Judah, Thiele failed to recognize that
the synchronisms of Hezekiah of Judah and Hoshea of Israel in 2 Kings 18 imply that
Hezekiah at this time was coregent with his father Ahaz. This was a blind spot on
Thiele's part, because he recognized that Hezekiah's father, grandfather, and great-
grandfather had coregencies with their fathers, and Hezekiah had a coregency with his
son; why then rule out a coregency of Hezekiah with Ahaz? But even though Thiele's
colleague Siegfried Horn and many other scholars pointed out this explanation of the
synchronisms in 2 Kings 18, Thiele refused to accept this solution and did not even
9
V. Coucke, Chronique biblique in Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible, Louis Pirot ed., vol. 1
(1928), cited in Thiele, Mysterious Numbers 59 n. 17.
10
Among the many scholars who have accepted Thiele's date for the beginning of the divided monarchies
are T. C. Mitchell, Israel and Judah until the Revolt of Jehu (931841 B.C.) in Cambridge Ancient
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) III, Part 1, 44546; John H. Walvoord and Roy B.
Zuck, editors, The Bible Knowledge Commentary, Old Testament (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1983) 632; Leslie
McFall, A Translation Guide to the Chronological Data in Kings and Chronicles, BSac 148 (1991): 12;
Galil, Chronology 14; Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (rev. ed.; Peabody, Mass.:
Hendrickson, 1998) 246, 249; Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2003) 83.