Chronology and The Biblical Flood – Was it a Global Flood?

For more than two thousand years, biblical scholars have reckoned that the account of the Flood in Genesis 6-8 was both literal and historical.  Because the word of God was considered the definitive statement on the Flood, it went unquestioned for centuries…until science began catching up, and posing uncomfortable questions.

Now, antiquarianism – the study of the monuments and artifacts of the past – has also existed for centuries.  Even in ancient Rome, a strong feeling of traditionalism motivated a study of such things.  However, there was no systematic method for studying and dating such artifacts until the mid 1800’s, with the rise of archaeology.  Before archaeology, so-called “historians” based most of their research on the written works of others, and often didn’t distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources.  Sometimes they did travel to investigate specific sites or events, but more often, they got the rest of their information second-hand from travelers, traders or merchants that had visited the places in question.

The interest in antiquarianism, during and after the 1600’s, was driven in large part by a strongly Christian worldview.  Such antiquarians would dig up artifacts with a spade in one hand and a bible in the other, so to speak, looking for evidence of the historical reality of Scripture.  However, what they found didn’t always back up the biblical account.

Beginning in 1922, Sir Leonard Woolley began his famous excavations at the site of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.  Among other things, he found a gigantic, 15-foot silt layer that he interpreted as evidence for the biblical Flood.  By that time, the techniques of archaeology had sufficiently advanced to the point where dating a flood layer was possible – and it did appear to line up with the commonly accepted date for the Flood of 2350 BC.

Unfortunately, such flood layers weren’t found at other nearby sites in Mesopotamia.  Or if they were, they were dated to different times.  Suddenly, the evidence appeared to contradict the biblical Flood.

That was only the beginning.  As archaeologists began a more systematic study of archaeological sites in Israel and Egypt, other problems began to emerge.  For instance, the ruins of Jericho seemed to be strong evidence for the Israelites’ entry into the land of Canaan…until Kathleen Kenyon claimed that Jericho was destroyed 150 years too early to fit the biblical chronology.

Conventional scholarship does admit that ancient Israel existed, but disputes that the early history of Israel and Judah happened the way the bible describes.  Rather than a triumphant exodus from Egypt and a conquering of the land of Canaan, archaeologists instead claim that the Israelites might actually be native to the land of Israel.  If anything, they emigrated and mingled peacefully with the existing Canaanite inhabitants.  Not only that, but archaeologists claim that the wealth and prestige of David and Solomon are entirely fictional.  King David might have been a real king, but one who presided over a much more humble kingdom than the bible describes.

Alternative scholars have attempted to piece together proof for the historical accuracy of the earlier parts of Scripture, from the reigns of David and Solomon all the way back to the biblical Flood, and beyond.  Naturally, there are some very sharp disagreements on how to construct their respective solutions for reconciling secular history and archaeology with the bible.

Now, in order to determine what the Flood was and when it occurred, we would need to correlate several things:

To do this, I’m going to list a LOT of secular evidence to make my point, but I’ll summarize that point here. When we correlate all of these things, we get to a particular point in time – roughly 2350 BC – and find absolutely ZERO EVIDENCE for a global cataclysm. So, what do we do with that?

We can’t just reject plain statements in the bible to the contrary, but neither can we ignore the scientific evidence. There has to be an answer.

First, let’s review the evidence showing the time setting when we should expect to find the Flood, and don’t.  Afterwards, we’ll look at several different approaches that different alternative scholars have proposed for “finding” the Flood.

Let’s begin by looking at the documented history of ancient Egypt. According to the Egyptian priest Manetho, Egypt had thirty dynasties, and he gives reign lengths for each pharaoh. We can add up the reigns for all of the pharaohs in all of the dynasties, and get the total length of Egypt’s history. All told, his chronology places the beginning of Egyptian history at about 3100 BC.

There are certain fixed points in Egypt’s history that we can be absolutely sure of, because Egypt interacted with other nations at that point in time and we have multiple “checks” on the count back to that year. One of those fixed points is 664 BC, when the Assyrians, under Ashurbanipal, sacked the Egyptian city of Thebes. That was during the 25th dynasty of Egypt.

Now, some fundamentalist biblical scholars will tell you that even if you have fixed dates like this, you can’t reliably count backwards and be sure of when the first Egyptian pharaoh of the first dynasty, ruled, because the Egyptians didn’t keep accurate records and archaeologists aren’t REALLY sure of their constructed timeline. Right?

Wrong.  Firstly, it’s true that Manetho’s chronology APPEARS to be somewhat inaccurate, because all we have are second-hand copies – copies which differ from one another, and also differ from the reign lengths we can reconstruct from actual inscriptions found in ancient Egypt. But…and this is a huge but…it turns out that the ancient historians who copied Manetho’s chronology, failed to understand some of his summation lines, and misread them as other pharaohs, etc. Gary Greenberg wrote some excellent articles on “Rehabilitating Manetho” that prove that Manetho’s chronology is actually highly accurate, once we correct for the copyist errors.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Manetho had everything right. One thing that isn’t at all clear from Manetho’s list of thirty dynasties is that some of those dynasties ruled at the same time, because there were time periods in Egypt when there were different pharaohs ruling over different parts of Egypt. In other words, when Egypt wasn’t strong enough and unified enough to have one, single pharaoh ruling over all of Egypt.

Secular Egyptologists know when these “intermediate periods” are, and there are three main ones. The “first intermediate period” that spans the seventh through part of the eleventh dynasties, the “second intermediate period” that spans the fifteenth through the seventeenth dynasties, and the “third intermediate period” that spans the 21st through the 26th dynasties.

Now, conventional Egyptologists STILL reckon that the 21st and 22nd dynasties were one after the other, despite serious instability in Egypt at the time. However, archaeologist David Rohl found evidence that the tomb of the 21st dynasty pharaoh Psusennes I was built around an earlier, pre-existing tomb of the 22nd dynasty pharaoh Osorkon II. In other words, the 21st and 22nd dynasties overlapped after all!

That means that instead of counting back all of the years of the 22nd dynasty, and then all of the years of the 21st dynasty, we’re instead counting back LESS years. At least 150 years less, by Rohl’s reckoning.

Now, interestingly enough, when we “fix” the chronology of the third intermediate period of Egypt this way, all of a sudden all sorts of biblical synchronisms start showing up. For instance, secular archaeologists will tell you that the city of Jericho fell about 150 years too early for it to have been the result of the Israelites entering into the land of Canaan. With this “fix,” it’s right on time!

In addition, with this “fix” in place, we can date the actual Exodus to the late 13th dynasty, under the reign of the pharaoh Dudimose. We can date the entry into Egypt by Jacob and his family to the reign of Amenhemhat III in the 12th dynasty.

Other scholars have reconstructed when the Exodus and when the entry into Egypt happened, quite differently. Some have placed the Exodus in the 18th dynasty, and a few have even placed it as early as the 6th dynasty. (If it were as early as the 6th dynasty, some scholars think, then the beginning of Egypt’s history would leave “room” for the Flood to still be a global flood.)

The problem is, the chronology of ancient Egypt simply doesn’t have that much “play.” It might be off by a few hundred years here or there, but it’s NOT off by a thousand years or more – and it would have to be, in order to set the Exodus during the 6th dynasty.

We have multiple ways of “checking” this – not the least of which are seeing dozens and dozens of things that match up between the biblical timeline and Rohl’s reconstructed chronology of the 12th and 13th dynasties of Egypt. Not just the fall of Jericho!

That means that the Flood – whatever it might have been – happened DURING A TIME WHEN EGYPT EXISTED. And there’s simply no huge flood layer that interrupts the history of Egypt, at any point during those thirty dynasties.  So, what do we do with that?

Let’s keep counting backwards, from the time of Jacob, and see where we DO end up. Rohl actually did this, and describes his theories in a book called Legend: the Genesis of Civilization.

Abraham did participate in a battle of five kings, in Genesis 14 – which I won’t get into here. You can read my article here, describing when I think the Tower of Babel was, as described in Genesis 11. I link it with the reign of Amar-Sin, which began in 2042 BC, during the Ur III period of Sumer.  So if we count backwards from 2042 BC to 2350 BC, what time period do we end up in?

To explain exactly when we end up, I’m going to describe the known history of Sumer. Sumer wasn’t a country that was necessarily ruled by one single king. Instead, there were kings over different cities in a specific region of the world, that all shared the same culture. We call these kings over individual cities, city-states, because the size of the “state” or country, is just one city.

The very first city of Sumer, called Eridu, was founded in approximately 5400 BC. We know this, not from history, but from archaeological evidence that has been reconstructed. Over the next few thousand years, Sumerian civilization grew and spread out, encompassing several different cities – including Uruk (the biblical Erech), Kish, Nippur, etc. In roughly 2334 BC, a new, rising power named Akkad conquered the last remaining independent Sumerian city – Lagash. From 2334 BC until 2042 BC, Sumer remained dominated by the foreign Akkadians and Gutians.

Just before 2334 BC was a time of intense violence and warfare that spread across the land. Now, we DO have an actual flood that took place around this time in the city of Ur, leaving behind the 15-foot silt layer that Sir Leonard Woolley found and speculated MIGHT have been the biblical Flood. But, we don’t have a global cataclysm.

Could it be that the Flood wasn’t fully literal, but AT LEAST IN PART symbolized the violence of this period of time, when Akkad conquered Sumer?

It might be interesting to know that the land area that the Akkadian empire occupied, later became the empires of Assyria in the north and Babylon in the south. So not only might there be a repeat in terms of violence and warfare, but it happened in the exact same geographical area.

But, what if the biblical Flood was actually earlier than 2350 BC?  What if the chronology given in the Septuagint is accurate?

The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was undertaken by a group of Jewish scholars living in Alexandria, Egypt, between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.  It has many similarities to the accepted biblical text that we have today (called the Masoretic text) as well as some significant differences.  Among those differences are a longer chronology of the patriarchs in Genesis 5 and 11, allowing for a much earlier Flood.

But, we can demonstrate that the longer chronology of the Septuagint was simply an attempt by the translators to “fix” the numbers, because they were living in Egypt and had access to Egyptian records covering the entire history of Egypt, showing that the Flood couldn’t have happened in 2350 BC.

There’s a book called “The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings” by Edwin Thiele which analyzes the Israelite and Davidic reign data in the bible. If you just casually read through the historical books of 1 and 2 Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, you might not notice what seem like contradictions, but any systematic attempt to create a biblical chronology will run into major problems. What Thiele did was to analyze all of the places where we’re told that X king started ruling during year Y of Z king’s reign, then made some educated guesses as to what was going on and why there are seeming contradictions.

What he found was that the kings of Israel and Judah counted their years differently. There are two different year-counting schemes used:

For Judah, their “new year” was the seventh month. That’s how they counted the years of their kings. For Israel, it was the first month.

What this means is that if you add up a series of biblical reigns that use the accession year system, you’re going to come up with LESS YEARS than if you add up a series of biblical reigns that use the non-accession year system, because the non-accession year system includes parts of years!

Thiele realized that Israel and Judah used different systems, and even CHANGED their usage when they made an alliance with each other at one point. But, he based his reconstruction of the actual chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah on the Masoretic text.

He did look at the Septuagint, but could plainly see that the translators of the Septuagint tried to “fix” the seeming contradictions and his reconstruction just wouldn’t work with the Septuagint’s dates.

Now, if the translators of the Septuagint tried to “fix” dates during the monarchies of Israel and Judah, what do you think they might have done with the ages of the patriarchs in Genesis 5 and 10?

That’s right. They tried to “fix” them, too.  So we can’t trust the longer chronology of the Septuagint, when trying to establish when the Flood might have occurred.

Here’s a comparison of different attempts to “find” the biblical Flood: