Taken (modified) from:
http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5973
….
Having discussed the problems, and having proposed the need for a lowering of early Egyptian chronology, and of those nations chronologically tied to Egypt, I shall now focus upon my blueprint for an ‘alternative’ model. More specifically, I shall propose in outline here an ‘alternative’ set of chronological anchor points that are relevant to EOH and that, as far as possible, combine Egypt/Ethiopia, Israel and Mesopotamia.
65 Op. cit, Appendix, p. 392. D. Brewer, as late as 2005, gives Sothic-based dates for Egypt’s dynasties, e.g. 1782 for the end of the 12th dynasty. Ancient Egypt: Foundations of a Civilization, Table 1.1, pp. 9-11.
66 Histoire de la Civilisation Égyptienne, my translation, pp. 26, 27.
67 But revisionists disagree as to the degree of lowering required: some following Velikovsky and Courville in favouring the 500 year downward shift; others, like James and Rohl, now preferring to go about halfway between the early revision and the conventional scheme.
68 Op. cit, p. 272.
These points I shall elaborate upon in subsequent chapters.
My starting point and foundation will be:
1. THE FALL OF SAMARIA
This famous event has traditionally been dated to c. 722/21 BC69 and, according to the statement in 2 Kings, it occurred “in the sixth year of Hezekiah, which was the ninth year of King Hoshea of Israel” (18:10). While all this seems straightforward enough, more recent versions of biblical chronology, basing themselves on the research of the highly regarded Professor Thiele,70 have made impossible the retention of such a promising syncretism between king Hoshea and king Hezekiah by dating the beginning of the latter’s reign to 716/715 BC, about six years after the fall of Samaria. Moreover, there is disagreement over whether Samaria fell once or twice (in quick succession) to the Assyrians (e.g. to Shalmaneser V in 722 BC, and then again to Sargon II in 720 BC); with Assyriologist Tadmor, whom Thiele has followed, claiming a ‘reconquest’ of Samaria by Sargon II.71 Let us briefly touch upon these objections here, to be discussed and analysed in more detail in Chapter 5 (p. 127) and Chapter 12 (3.).
Firstly, regarding the Hezekian chronology in its relationship to the fall of Samaria, one of the reasons for Thiele’s having arrived at, and settled upon, 716/715 BC as the date for the commencement of reign of the Judaean king was due to the following undeniable problem that arises from a biblical chronology that takes as its point of reference the conventional neo-Assyrian chronology. I set out the ‘problem’ here in standard terms.
If Samaria fell in the 6th year of Hezekiah, as the Old Testament tells it, then Hezekiah’s reign must have begun about 728/727 B.C. If so, his 14th year, the year in which Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem, must have been about 714 B.C. But this last is, according to the conventional scheme, about ten years before Sennacherib became king and about thirteen years before his campaign against Jerusalem which is currently dated to 701 B.C. On the other hand, if Hezekiah’s reign began fourteen years before Sennacherib’s campaign, that is in 715 B.C, it began about twelve to thirteen years too late for Hezekiah to have been king for six years before the fall of Samaria. In short, the problem as seen by chronologists is whether the starting point of Hezekiah’s reign should be dated in relationship to the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C, or to the campaign of Sennacherib in 701 B.C.
A second reason for Thiele’s divergence from the traditional dating for Hezekiah, to be more fully discussed in Chapter 5, is that Thiele, following others such as Zöckler,72 had found no evidence whatsoever for any contact between king Hezekiah and king Hoshea.
69 E. Thiele dates it to 723/722 BC. The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, p. 162.
70 Ibid, ch. 9: “The Chronology of the Kings of Judah (715-561 BC)”.
71 H. Tadmor, ‘The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur’, p. 94. Tadmor here refers to Sargon’s “reconquest of Samaria”. For Thiele’s discussion of what he calls Tadmor’s “masterly analysis”, see Thiele, op. cit, e.g. pp. 167-168.
72 Ibid, p. 169, with reference to O. Zöckler et al. in n. 20.
Not even when Hezekiah had, in his first year, sent his invitations throughout Hoshea’s territory for the great Passover in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 30). Thus Thiele could not accept that these two kings had reigned concurrently.
In regard to the first point, the true date of commencement of the reign of king Hezekiah, I should simply like to make the general comment here that this is in fact an artificial ‘problem’. The situation has arisen, as we shall find, from Thiele’s heavy reliance upon the conventional neo-Assyrian chronology, which, as I shall be arguing in Chapter 6, has been significantly over-stretched, thereby doubling the activities of the one Assyrian king: Sargon II/Sennacherib.73 Failure to recognize this - and a too confident reliance upon the conventional scheme in general - has caused Thiele, and those who have followed him, to turn the reign of Hezekiah of Judah into one of the most vexed problems of Old Testament chronology.
And, despite the undoubted merits of Thiele’s own chronological scheme, his treatment of the chronology of king Hezekiah, specifically, is perhaps the least satisfactory part of his entire work.
With Sennacherib found (as will be the case in Chapter 6, e.g. p. 146) to have been at work in connection with both the fall of Samaria and, of course, the campaign in Hezekiah’s 14th year, then it becomes necessary to date the Judaean king’s reign in relationship to both, and not merely to one, of these significant Assyrian campaigns.
Thiele’s other point, about the lack of evidence for contemporaneity of reigns between Hoshea and Hezekiah, is indeed a legitimate one, as is also Tadmor’s argument – in connection with the neo-Assyrian evidence - in favour of two actual conquests of Samaria by the Assyrians. I shall be returning to these two matters, to discuss them, in Part II and Part III; Thiele’s point in Chapter 5 (pp. 126-127) and Tadmor’s in Chapter 5 (pp. 127-128) and Chapter 12 (3.).
The biblical dating of the fall of Samaria in relation to Hezekiah, which I shall be defending - after having endeavoured properly to co-ordinate all of the relevant syncretisms - will turn out to be almost perfect for my multi-chronological purposes; though unfortunately lacking any unequivocal link with Ethiopia/Egypt. However, in my next ‘anchor’ point below, 2. ‘King So of Egypt’, I shall be proposing such a connection between the fall of Samaria and Egypt; one to be more fully developed in Part III, Chapter 8 and Chapter 12 (1.). But even without any reference to Ethiopia/Egypt, this famous incident - when properly co-ordinated - connects:
(i) a regnal year of a king of Judah and
(ii) a regnal year of a king of Israel, with
(iii) an Assyrian reference to the incident, biblically reinforced (see Chapter 5, p. 127), and
(iv) a chronological connection with Babylonia via the Assyrian records (see Chapter 5, p. 128). Moreover,
(v) it belongs within EOH.
73 See e.g. Thiele’s acceptance of the conventionally determined “701 [BC as] a precise date from which
we may go forward or backward on the basis of the regnal data to all other dates in our pattern”. Ibid, p.
174.
My entire thesis will in fact be built around this conventional date of c. 722 BC – though now in need of restoration - and the perspective that this incident offers in its relation to the reign of king Hezekiah of Judah.74 The fall of Samaria in c. 722 BC will enable me to develop a most satisfactory chronology for the 29-year reign of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:2); for, if the king’s sixth year fell in c. 722 BC, then I do not think that I shall err too far mathematically if I set down 727-699 BC as the period for king Hezekiah’s reign, from his accession year to death. (See Table 7, p. 393).
This is quite different of course from Thiele’s proposed chronology for king Hezekiah, which has sacrificed those vital biblical syncretisms.
Now, to the related incident concerning:
2. ‘KING SO OF EGYPT’
But the king of Assyria found treachery in Hoshea; for he had sent messengers to King So of Egypt … and offered no tribute to the king of Assyria as he had done year by year; therefore the king of Assyria confined him and imprisoned him. (2 Kings 17:4)
I need firstly here to introduce Velikovsky’s own proposed resolution to the identity of ‘King So of Egypt’, involving as it does the dismantling of one of the key ‘pillars’ of conventional Egyptian chronology, namely that Sosenk (Shoshenq) I = ‘Shishak’, and the establishment of an entirely new one, Sosenk (Shoshenq) = ‘So’; this last being of the utmost relevance to this thesis.
We saw that Breasted, in thrall to the mathematical bonds of the Sothic theory, had astronomically fixed, to the C15th BC, two incidents in the first campaign of the warrior pharaoh, Thutmose III. Velikovsky however, unfettered by the tyrannical ties of ‘Sothicism’, was free to reconsider the place of Thutmose III in history. In Velikovsky’s re-setting of the 18th dynasty - with Egypt’s resurgent New Kingdom after the Hyksos era chronologically paralleling the emergence of Israel’s monarchy after the oppressive period of the Judges - Thutmose III newly emerged as a younger contemporary of king Solomon of Israel and a contemporary of the latter’s son, Rehoboam. In Velikovsky’s revised location this most potent of pharaohs, Thutmose III, whom Breasted had eulogized as a “genius which ... reminds us of an Alexander or a Napoleon ...”,75 had inevitably displaced the unlikely Sosenk (Shoshenq) I as the biblical ‘Shishak’.76
74 The actual numerical date 722, though, is a figure that I shall retain only for convenience’s sake as I do not consider it to be an entirely accurate mathematical figure that will stand the test of a full BC revision. To perfect the date for the fall of Samaria would require a complete revision of the final 7 centuries of the BC period, a task obviously well beyond the scope of this thesis.
75 As cited by E. Danelius, ‘Did Thutmose III Despoil the Temple in Jerusalem?’, p. 68.
76 Ages in Chaos, ch. 4.
It remained to be shown that Thutmose III had ‘Shishak’-like features, apart from his obvious military brilliance. Velikovsky was, as I see it, partly stunningly successful in his demonstrating of this, and partly rather inadequate.
On the positive side, Velikovsky had importantly created ‘a context’ for Thutmose III in his Theses and in his Ages in Chaos I, by his re-setting of the entire 18th dynasty, from its founder Ahmose (time of Saul), through Queen Hatshepsut (biblical ‘Queen Sheba’), Thutmose III (‘Shishak’),77 and on into the el-Amarna [hereafter EA] period of Amenhotep III and IV (Akhnaton); the latter being a richly documented era that Velikovsky had painstakingly integrated with the mid-C9th BC scene in Palestine and Mesopotamia; sometimes with brilliant results, sometimes with embarrassing gaffes. See my own detailed discussions of EA, in a significantly modified Velikovskian-based context, in Part I, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 and Part III, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10.
And Velikovsky had a trump card in his revisionist pack. For he was able to show, from a detailed comparison of the luxurious items that Thutmose III and his military officers had carried back to Egypt from the first campaign into Palestine, with items that the Bible attributes to the Temple of Yahweh built by Solomon, and to Solomon’s palace, that Thutmose III had indeed plundered Jerusalem of its fabulous Solomonic wealth.78
Less convincing though were Velikovsky’s attempts to link any name of Thutmose III with ‘Shishak’, or to reconstruct a geography for the pharaoh’s first campaign that showed Thutmose III had actually come unto Jerusalem. But these matters may have since, I think, been largely rectified by Velikovskian modifiers79.
Thus Velikovsky had, with some later astute help from colleagues, whether acceptable to him or otherwise,80 sent crashing to the ground one of the main chronological ‘pillars’ of the text book Egyptian history: namely, that Shoshenq I = ‘Shishak’. At the same time, Velikovsky had been careful to replace what he had snatched away. For not only had he established Thutmose III (= ‘Shishak’) as a resplendent new ‘pillar’ of biblico-historical chronology, and one that I think will stand the test of time, but he also took the pharaoh whom he had knocked down from his pedestal, Shoshenq I, and set him up, too, as a new
‘pillar’, likewise Bible-based, as ‘King So’.
Or at least Velikovsky took a pharaoh ‘Shoshenq’, though he appears to have identified him in his Theses preferably with Shoshenq IV, whom he nonetheless connected with Shoshenq I:81 “Pharaoh So who received gifts from Hoshea was Sosenk IV, and his bas-relief scene pictures this tribute. Sosenk regularly placed as I (first) was IV (last)”.
77 This colourful phase of Velikovsky’s revision has since been greatly modified and developed by revisionists, including E. Metzler’s ‘Conflict of Laws in the Israelite Dynasty of Egypt’, and my own ‘Solomon and Sheba’.
78 Ages in Chaos, pp. 148-154. Courville fully endorsed Velikovsky’s reconstruction in this regard. Op. cit, I, pp. 271-272.
79 E.g. (a) geographically, by Danelius, op. cit; and (b) the name factor, by K. Birch, who proposed that the name ‘Shishak’ may have been taken from one of Thutmose III’s other names, Tcheser-kau, or Sheser-kau,
‘Shishak Mystery?’, p. 35.
80 It should be noted for instance that Velikovsky himself, as much as he claimed to have admired the research of Dr. Danelius, did not actually accept her geographical modification of his thesis. ‘A Response to Eva Danelius’, p. 80.
81 Velikovsky, as quoted by A. Dirkzwager, ‘Pharaoh So and the Libyan Dynasty’, p. 19.
King Hoshea of Israel’s decision to woo Egypt would turn out to be a most fateful one for the northern kingdom. The narrative of 2 Kings continues on to tell of what followed subsequent to Hoshea’s imprisonment by the Assyrians:
Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. (vv. 5-6)
One can easily see from the course of this narrative that the involvement of pharaoh ‘So’ in the affairs of Israel, and the consequent siege of Samaria by the king of the Assyrians, were closely related events and could not therefore have been far apart in time. In other words, Hoshea’s turning to ‘So’ must have coincided very closely to c. 725 BC, the generally estimated date for the commencement of Assyria’s siege of Samaria. Hoshea would have sent his ambassadors to pharaoh ‘So’ not long prior to that date; hence, very close to c. 727 BC, our estimated year of commencement for the reign of Hezekiah.
Possibly there may even have been a connection between Hoshea’s revolt against Assyria and Hezekiah’s far-reaching first-year reform; a reform that would go counter to his father Ahaz’s policies (2 Chronicles 29:3-31-21) - perhaps including the latter’s pro-Assyrian stance, since Hezekiah’s own reform was immediately followed by Sennacherib’s invasion (32:1).
Thus there is an undeniably close connection between ‘anchor’ points 1. and 2, with the latter now likely providing us with our hitherto lacking Egyptian contemporary for the fall of Samaria. I shall look to identify and consolidate this candidate in Chapter 12.
The next anchor point that I shall propose for EOH belongs to a most climactic year midway through the reign of king Hezekiah.
It is:
3. HEZEKIAH’S FOURTEENTH YEAR
This Hezekiah-linked date is spelled out in grand terms, in almost exactly the same words in fact, in 2 Kings 18:13 and Isaiah 36:1: “In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them”.
….
We are going to find also that this was the year that Merodach-baladan [II] of Babylonia sent presents to Hezekiah, making this a year that links up Judah, Assyria and Babylon.
Once again Ethiopia/Egypt is missing from the scenario. But this is such a key incident in the reign of king Hezekiah, and one that is dated, that it cannot be left out. By biblical reckoning, taking c. 722 BC to be Hezekiah’s sixth year, then his “fourteenth year” when Sennacherib invaded Judah must have been c. 714 BC.
But what do we find in the conventional history? And indeed in Thiele’s chronology?
Certainly not Sennacherib, whose reign is estimated to have commenced at 704 BC, but Sargon II, who is supposed to have reigned until 705 BC,82 almost a decade after Hezekiah’s fourteenth year! No wonder that Thiele had found himself stranded between two non-harmonious points of reference for Hezekiah!
A similar sort of anachronism arising from the conventional estimation of Sargon II’s reign has emerged in the past few years with the publicising of the Iranian Kurdistan insckription of Tang-i Var, showing neo-Assyrian history to be significantly out of harmony with the 25th Ethiopian (or Cushite) dynasty of Egypt. (See Chapter 6, p. 144, and Chapter 12, 2, for further consideration of this important text). The Tang-i Var inscription pertains to the revolt against Assyria of one Iamani of ‘Ashdod’ (who figures also in anchor no. 4. below), and I suspect that its contents will require Egyptologists to revise their current absolute chronology for Egypt’s 25th dynasty.
Thus there appears to be both biblical and non-biblical support for the view that neo-Assyrian chronology (like the Egyptian chronology) has not been properly constructed.
My fourth anchor point for EOH will be:
4. SARGON II’S ‘ASHDOD’ CAMPAIGN
Redford has actually called this campaign, that he dates to 712 BC, “an anchor date”. Here is his account (my dating of these events will be slightly different from his):83 Thanks to a variety of studies over the last 25 years, the year 712 B.C. has emerged as an anchor date in the history of the Late Period in Egypt. The general course of events leading up to and culminating in the Assyrian campaign against Ashdod in that year is now fairly sure, and may be sketched as follows. Sometime early in 713 B.C. the Assyrians deposed Aziri [Azuri], king of Ashdod on suspicion of lese-majeste, and appointed one Ahimetti [Akhi-miti] to replace him. Very shortly thereafter, however, and probably still in 713, a spontaneous uprising of the Ashdod populace removed this Assyrian puppet in favor of a usurper Yamani [Iamani].
82 These dates are the ones given for instance by M. van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 292, and by G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, ‘Chronological Tables, vii: Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Periods (744-539 BC)’.
83 ‘A Note on the Chronology of Dynasty 25 and the Inscription of Sargon II at Tang-i Var’, pp. 6-7.
Throughout the fall and winter of 713 Yamani contacted the other Philistine cities and the inland states of Judah, Moab, and Edom in an effort to organize an anti-Assyrian coalition, and sent to “Pharaoh (Pir’u) king of Egypt” for aid.
In the spring of 712, however, Sargon dispatched the tartan [Turtan] with a detachment of troops against Ashdod, and Yamani fled in haste to Egypt. Unable to find a safe haven in Egypt, Yamani passed clean through the land ana ite Musri sa pat Meluhha, “to the frontier of Egypt which is (contiguous) to the territory of Kush.” At this point he fell into the hands of the king of Kush who, at an unspecified later date, extradited him to Assyria.
The incident discussed here will become a crucial one in this thesis (see Chapter 12, 2, 5.), serving a truly multi-chronological purpose for EOH, with Assyria, Palestine, Egypt and Ethiopia (‘Kush’) all being involved here.
My final anchor point for EOH will be:
5. THE DEFEAT OF SENNACHERIB’S ARMY
This is really still a work-in-progress at this stage, since this most famous incident has not yet been established, but still needs to be found, and securely dated. To achieve this end will be one of the primary tasks of this thesis (culminating in VOLUME TWO), as this event would have to be considered as being the pinnacle of Hezekiah’s entire reign. The defeat of Sennacherib’s army, the when, how and why of it, will be the climax of the tense drama that will be found to emerge from VOLUME TWO, Part II of this thesis.
To give the reader a date preview, though, I shall be dating the defeat of Sennacherib’s army of 185,000 troops, in correlation with my previous dates for king Hezekiah, to approximately 703 BC.
Now, arranging these five anchor points for EOH into their proper chronological order, we find that they range very nicely through almost the entire (revised) reign of king Hezekiah of Judah (c. 727-699 BC):
727 BC. KING SO (HEZEKIAH YEAR 1).
722 BC. FALL OF SAMARIA (HEZEKIAH YEAR 6).
714 BC. SENNACHERIB INVADES JUDAH (HEZEKIAH YEAR 14).
712 BC. SARGON II’S ‘ASHDOD’ CAMPAIGN (HEZEKIAH YEAR 16).
703 BC. SENNACHERIB’S ARMY DEFEATED IN PALESTINE (HEZEKIAH YEAR
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