The 4th-century theologian and scholar St Jerome is best remembered today for the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible which he coauthored. He was also a prolific correspondent, with over 150 letters to his name. In one of these, Letter 36, which was addressed to Pope Damasus I, he noted the following discrepancy (as he saw it) in Biblical chronology:
Indeed, Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, became king in the forty-first year of his life and reigned in Jerusalem for XVII years, although his father, who reigned for forty years from the age of twelve, was surely unable to father a son at the age of eleven. (Hilberg 54:276-277, my translation)
Nowhere in the Bible are we actually told how old Solomon was when he became king, though in 1 Kings 3:7 he calls himself a little child. It is merely a rabbinical tradition—one recorded in the Seder Olam—that he was twelve years old:
Absalom’s Rebellion started in the 37th year of David’s reign. Rabbi Nahorai, speaking for Rabbi Yehoshua, said: “It was exactly 40 years from when Israel demanded a king, in the tenth year of the prophet Samuel, to when Absalom started his rebellion. One can also use this to calculate that Solomon became king at the age of 12.” (Johnson 2041-2047)
As we saw in an earlier article, however, there is another king who seems to become a father at the age of eleven if the Bible’s figures are taken at face value:
In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah Ahaz the son of Jotham king of Judah began to reign. Twenty years old was Ahaz when he began to reign; and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem ... Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. (2 Kings 16:1-2 ... 18:1-2)
If Ahaz was thirty-six years old when he died, and his son Hezekiah was twenty-five when he succeeded him, then Ahaz must have been eleven when Hezekiah was born.
Some years later Jerome was asked about these discrepancies by the presbyter Vitalis, to whom he replied (Letter 72):
Read again all the books of both the Old and New Testaments and you will find so many discrepancies in the number of years between Judah and Israel, i.e. between both kingdoms taken together, that to devote oneself to questions of such a kind befits not so much the studious as the idle man. (Hilberg 55:12, my translation)
It is clear that Jerome and his adherents assumed that the rabbinical scholars knew what they were talking about. Jerome accepted the inerrancy of the Scriptures as a matter of faith, but he was reluctant to put them or the Holy Spirit to the test by scrutinizing their figures too closely.
Eusebius of Caesarea
Curiously, Jerome was not uninterested in the study of chronology. His Temporum Liber [The Book of Times] is a Latin translation of the second book of the Chronicon, or Universal History, of Eusebius of Caesarea, with a supplement bringing the chronicle down to Jerome’s time (379 CE). But neither he nor Eusebius attempted to clear up the apparent discrepancies in the Biblical texts. For example, they both put the death of Jehoram of Israel four years after the death of Ahaziah of Judah, even though 2 Kings 9:21-28 describes how Jehoram was killed by Jehu shortly before the death of Ahaziah (Jerome 132).
The Seder Olam synchronizes these two deaths:
Jehu killed both Jehoram and Ahaziah on the same day. (Johnson 2557)
In the first book of his Chronicle, which Jerome did not translate, Eusebius was quite happy to choose one Bible chronology and set aside a conflicting one:
[The chronology] from the death of Moses to the time of Solomon’s construction of the temple is described differently [by the available sources]. The Book of Judges, as well as the blessed Apostle Paul in Acts of the Apostles calculate it one way, while the Book of Kings and Hebrew tradition calculate it another way. It will be best to describe both and then select [the account] which proves truest. (Eusebius & Bedrosian 31)
For the period of the Divided Monarchy, Eusebius simply listed the Kings of Judah with the appropriate lengths of their reigns. He did not even mention the rival Kingdom of Israel.
The only part of the Bible in which Eusebius actively sought to explain away apparent discrepancies was the New Testament. His fragmentary Gospel Problems and Solutions, was written to address some questions raised by two fellow-Christians, Stephanus and Marinus (Pearse et al).
To be continued ...
References
- Eusebius, Robert Bedrosian (translator), Eusebius’ Chronicle: Translated from Classical Armenian by Robert Bedrosian, Sources of the Armenian Tradition, Long Branch NJ (2008)
- Isidor Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Volume 54, Volume 55, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (1910)
- Jerome, The Chronicle of St. Jerome, Translated by Robert Pearse et al, The Tertullian Project (2005)
- Ken Johnson, Ancient Seder Olam: A Christian Translation of the 2000-year-old Scroll, Kindle Edition, Biblefacts.org (2006)
- Roger Pearse (editor), David J Jr Miller (translator), Adam C McCollum (translator), Carol Downer (translator) et al, Eusebius of Caesarea: Gospel Problems and Solutions, Chieftain Publishing Ltd, Ipswich (2010)
Image Credits
- St Jerome in his Study (Albrecht Dürer): Wikimedia Commons, Albrecht Dürer (engraver), Public Domain
- Seder Olam: © 2006 Ken Johnson, Fair Use
- Eusebius of Caesarea: Based on Eusebius of Caesarea, Anonymous, Public Domain
- Caesarea Maritima, Bishopric of Eusebius: © DerHexer, Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-sa 4.0
