testimony.doc
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Nov. 16, 2005
discuss it in the final two editions of his book. The time of Ahaz and Hezekiah was the
one place that he declared that the Scriptural texts dealing with chronology were in error.
It remained then for others to complete the application of principles that Thiele used
elsewhere and thereby to provide a chronology for the eighth-century kings of Judah that
is in complete harmony with the reign lengths and synchronisms given in 2 Kings and 2
Chronicles. The most thorough work in this regard was Leslie McFall's 1991 article in
Bibliotheca Sacra.
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McFall made his way through the reign lengths and synchronisms of
Kings and Chronicles, and using an exact notation that indicated whether the years were
being measured according to Judah's Tishri years or Israel's Nisan years, he was able to
produce a chronology for the divided monarchies that was consistent with all the
Scriptural texts chosen. This was the logical outgrowth of Thiele's work, and it attained a
kind of holy grail that had been sought for twenty-three centuries, namely a rational
explanation of the chronological data of the Hebrew monarchies that was consistent with
the various scriptural texts that were used to construct that chronology, and also
consistent with several fixed dates from Assyrian and Babylonian history.
SIGNFICANCE OF THE SUCCESSES OF THE INDUCTIVE METHOD
The significance of Thiele's work and its logical extension in McFall's article can hardly
be overestimated. One way of emphasizing the significance is to consider just how
improbable such an accomplishment was when starting from the premises of the critics
who were cited earlier in this paper. They, and many others who could be quoted,
believed that it was impossible to construct a coherent and rational chronology from the
data given in the received text. The primary reason for this belief (or unbelief) must have
been because they saw little reason to pursue all the hard work that Coucke and Thiele
had to struggle with before they determined the methods of the biblical authors; why
spend time trying to determine if there was a reasonable explanation of the texts when
they were sure that late-date writers, such as they supposed were the authors of the
Scripture, could not have produced an accurate chronology for long-past events?
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McFall, Translation Guide 345.