The bible is tricky. It's one of those areas where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and this is the sort of thing that makes this cranky chronologist cranky. Take the chronology of the Israelites before the monarchy. (For convenience's sake the term "Israelite" includes those persons whom the biblical text present as descended from Abraham and ancestral to the people of the Iron Age kingdoms of Judah and Israelite). It might seem really easy to calculate this chronology using explicit statements from the biblical text. 1 Kings 6:1 tells us that the exodus occurred 480 years prior to the fourth year of king Solomon's reign. Since the fourth year of Solomon is usually dated to 966, and 480 plus 966 equals 1446, one might well conclude that the exodus occurred in 1446. Nice and easy. And since Exodus 12:40 tells us that Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, they must have immigrated there in 1876. Simple. Right?
Except not so fast. We've seen on this blog how according to Ruth 4:20–22, David is the fifth generation from Nahshon, son of Amminidab, whom Numbers 1:7 identifies as among the exodus generation. David of course is Solomon's father. Read together, Numbers and Ruth suggest that Solomon was six generations removed from the exodus. As I've indicated before, this can be reconciled with 1 Kings 6:1 only if a generation is upwards of eighty years. But the problem is amplified when we go back before the exodus. According to Ruth 4, Nahshon is himself comes five generations after Judah, the eponymous founder of the tribe of Judah and among those who went into Egypt along with his father Jacob and brother Isaac. Again: the 430 years between the arrival in and exodus from Egypt can cover six generations only if each generation was about seventy-five years long. If we imagine a more reasonable value for a generation—say, around thirty years or so—then we should probably think that given Numbers and Ruth 4 the exodus was only about 150 years before Solomon, and Israel's arrival in Egypt perhaps about 150 years before that. Even if we extend the length of a generation to say forty years, we'd still be looking at a length of time that is considerably far less than a total of the 910 years indicated by adding Exodus 12:40 and 1 Kings 6:1. Indeed, given the evidence of the genealogies, one would be inclined to date Israel's arrival in Egypt at around say 1275ish, the better part of two centuries later than the traditionalist date for the exodus. Or, to put it otherwise, if indeed there were nine centuries between Judah and Solomon, then no one thought to inform the genealogists.
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