Note: There is no "Year Zero" between BCE and CE dates. If there was a Year Zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to every BCE date. However, because there is not a Year Zero, this does not mean that you have to SUBTRACT 1. You simply do nothing.
Please do not view below as negative. However, as an archaeologist, could I kindly request you to please refrain from using terminology such as “almost 100% certainty”, given such would be an extremely erroneous representation on accuracy of current dating methodology.. Would it be possible to use “most likely” instead, to avoid have to spend hours explaining archaeological theory and problems with current dating methodologies, when we do outreach or have volunteers join excavations. Really enjoy your show, ergo, hope above is not viewed as being negative towards you work.
But surely there are only 419 years from the start of 350 BCE to the start of 70 CE because of the missing year 0? (Unless BCE years start at the end of the year and end at the start of the year!)
My accountant friend has at the bottom of his emails the following Fact: The Jewish year is 5782. The Chinese year is now 4719. This means that Jews had to exist 1,064 years without Chinese food. A time known as the “Dark Ages”…
As a matter of not-so-useful fact: The Chinese era here is actually Yellow Emperor era, based upon the mythical event of Yellow Emperor's ascention to throne. Its history was not long (created in late 19th century by Han nationalists). Yet there were two slightly different eras: The civil era is 4719, while the Taoist era (which had been in place longer) is 4718. It was deliberately made this way, because of a disagreement on how to interpret historical dates. The Yellow Emperor's ascension was supposed to be "the first Chinese New Year," yet the net effect of events from that and 104 BCE was to delay Chinese New Year by two months. The Taoist era kept track of the change in calculation methods, while the civil era just extended the current method of calculation; in the civil era, the ascension took place in the 11th month of Year 1, making Year 1 of this Chinese civil era only two months long.
As another matter of not-so-useful fact: No Chinese actually cares about the Chinese calendar other then to know when time for festivities such as Chinese New Year, mid autumn festival etc. Plus, within the Chinese nationalist philosophy, the origins of “China” started way way before the Yellow Emperor. To make it exact, it’s should be Fu Xi （伏羲）, the equally mythical King that starts off China, it’s just that there’s literally no way to do the exact calculations to find out when this king existed so they had to settle on the next great King, the Flame Emperor aka the godly farmer （炎帝/神農）, but no one could make a calendar from that either, mostly because the former two kings didn’t manage to come up with any calendar of sorts, only the Yellow Emperor did, at least according to the legend.
Both ancient calendars of civilizations and peoples going back into prehistory. The roughly 1100 year difference if you add the conflicting Hebrew interpretations might add 400 to 700 years making that roughly 1600 years less than Adam...which is the Hebrew tradition of the restart of world civilizations with Noah's three sons. The flood having wiped clean the worldy works of Cain to Tubal Cain. Several Indian subcontinent calendars also seem to start about the same time. Fascinating.
@@STho205 1656 After Adams creation 17.02 Beginning of the Great global Flood [Genesis 7,11] 2463 B.C Our year: October / November 17.07 The Arc rests on the Mount of Ararat [Genesis 8,4] Our year: March / April 01.10 The tops of the Mountains are visible [Genesis 8,5] Our year: June / July 1657 01.01 The waters dried [Genesis 8,13] 2462 B.C. Our year: September / October 27.02 The Earth is dry again [Genesis 8,14] Our year: October / November
My Dad passed away last December. He had a masters in Theology. We would speak over and over about so many of these kinds of topics, and he was very knowledgeable on many biblical topics outside Christianity. He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and taught himself Hebrew to do so. I miss talking to him and being able to ask him questions. Thanks for your series, it makes me feel that I can still find dependable explanations when biblical text and liturgy meet the underlying themes.
Sounds like a Goodman. Better than my father but. Equal to my Dad. (I have a excellent Step-Dad) My father never even been in my life. But if a person lacks a father that's what God/Allah is for he will put someone in your path. I hope to be the first modern priest who won't need to be a undergrad or need a bachelor's degree. Also make music to help spread the word. I hope to one day study the documents the Vatican holds and give people the secrets it holds
I miss my dad who was of great knowledge and I could ask him pretty much about anything. Since he passed away I missed it. I have found husband who also knows great deal if not more than my sad so it kind of helps
I used to be a biblical literalist. I actually was one when I first started following the channel. Some of your videos challenged me, but while remaining honest and objective, you never talked down to me and my opinions. Greatly appreciated.
Seconded. When he talked about how Abraham and Sarah were essentially an appropriation of the Hebrews, from the story of Brahma and Saraswati in Hindu mythos, that proved to be the first domino that kinda caused what little literalism I had left to come crashing down. It wasn't malicious, it was just pure historical fact, and it led to me realizing that I couldn't truthfully call myself a Christian anymore (if I ever could to begin with, as I never believed and tried to repress that fact). The way he contrasts what different religions hold as truth compared to what we know from the historical record is what sets him apart. He doesn't presuppose one or the other IS the way it is, he simply states "Here's what we understand from history, here's what the religious texts say." It's refreshingly dispassionate and even-handed.
@@axeldeporte4073 that is the view of most european christian churches, but in truth what keeps them alive is the pure sense of identity and community they provide.
@@axeldeporte4073 To some, yes. But I was raised in evangelical circles, where biblical literalism is almost required. Like UsefulCharts with Judaism, many Christians are able to accept that the Bible isnt meant to be taken literally at all with no conflict in their faith. I am not one of those people. Deep down, I never believed Christianity was true to begin with, and tried to force myself to buy in out of a combination of rapture anxiety and a desperate desire to be accepted. Even when I started letting go of the literalist things I was trying to make myself believe, I still clung on and refused to accept that I didnt believe. UC's video was what essentially paved the way for me to face that fact head on and ultimately come to terms.
@@hansolowe19 What is the universe made of? Why did humans split into different races? What is faith? Is the Bible figurative or literal? How do you know when God is answering your prayers? Why do you believe in something you can’t see? What’s the best thing about being a believer? There’s a lot of bad news on TV every day. The world is in chaos. So how can there be a God in this condition? Now please give me some reasonable answers for these reasonable questions.
Same.. I could listen to Matt talk about anything. When I click a video and it's HI IM JACK RACKAM I instantly close it, sorry my dude. I wish all the videos were still voiced by Matt.
That was the start of the Fourth Age. Tolkien conjectured we could be anywhere currently from the end of the Fifth to the beginning of the Seventh Age.
@@robertdullnig3625 you also have to take into account that each Age is getting shorter. And that a year in the pre-Ages Ages (years of the trees, etc) could be as long as 144 human years
Happy 5782! Fun fact: the new year is also the seventh year of the Shmita cycle (Sabbath year), so if the Temple was still standing, this would probably be the point where a foreign power or civil war faction would capture and loot it.
Shana Tovah, Dr. Baker. Even in Orthodox Judaism, when it comes to any use of the year in any meaningful settings, it comes with the phrase “according to the count that we use here.” Only the most ardent of literalists think that this number has any literal meaning.
According to Judaism, the years are counted from Adam, NOT from the creation. In fact, there are writtings that mention that there were over 900 generations before Adam. According to Judism, Adam was simply the first man who was given a soul.
I’ve always found it interesting that the 3500-4000 ish BC estimates for the beginning of the world does actually track pretty close to the start of the Bronze Age or the start of “History” at the advent of writing. It’s this basic wrong understanding that humans have always been as we are now and are more-or-less as old as all creation. A fun date. A good date. Just not the date you were looking for.
Yes, and human civilization seems to have exploded around that time, and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Suddenly the species seemed to show a little spirit! On the other hand, maybe it was just something they ate....
Coincidentally, or possibly no, 4000 BCE is also roughly the starting build date for the temple to Enki at Eridu, and thereby the start of the city building period in Mesopotamia and the Lavant.
Totally man! The Iliad and the Odessey, Bible, Torah, Quran, Mahabharata are all basically fan fictions of the Bronze Age Collapse, highly incorrect fiction.
Judaism doesn't really do separate denominations in the Christian sense. They're just different schools of thought, and the movement of people and ideas between them is pretty fluid. This is actually something I've been covering in my own video series on Jewish history, which has just reached the early 18th century.
"Judaism" split from "Christianity" because of its rejection of JC. And both these religions split from Islam because of their rejection of MHMD. Nothing much.
"One of [James Usher's] aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21th of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour." - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman 'Good Omens'
It's confusing only because there was a stretch of time when Canaan WAS Egypt, was within it's boundaries. Egyptian officials, generations of Egyptian families lived there and everything. I was just looking at an archeology program, and the variety of pottery for the time there. I don't know if and when this is factored in or not.
It's not factored in at all because this is about the Bible and the Bible preserves no living memory of Canaan under Egypt's rule during the New Kingdom. It's one of the many reasons why nobody except fundamentalists actually believe the Bible is historically accurate about events prior to the Iron Age.
Interesting. Aside from the chronology stuff, when this narrator makes the point that Gen 5 and 11 may have been additions to the text of Genesis simply because they weren’t found in the extant Dead Sea Scrolls, that is an argument from silence. But we do actually have Genesis 5:13 among the Dead Sea Scrolls, contrary to his claim (4QGenb). The Septuagint (LXX) also includes Genesis chapters 5 and 11 in its Greek translation of the Hebrew text, and that portion of the Septuagint dates to the mid-3rd century BCE, which is around 100 years before the Hasmonean period…which means the Hebrew Torah scroll the Greek translators were using included those chapters, and that pushes the antiquity of those chapters back even further. In addition, the Samaritan Pentateuch includes these two chapters of Genesis, as does the Syriac Aramaic translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew done in the 2nd century CE. Targum Onkelos (probably early 2nd-century CE) also includes these chapters in its Aramaic translation from Hebrew. Not to mention the allusion to Genesis 5:1 in Matthew 1:1 (“the book of the genealogies of…”), which is a 1st-century CE reference in the NT, as well as Luke 3 (another 1c CE reference) and 1 Chronicles 1, both of which also have the genealogy from Adam to Abraham. So, there is wide attestation of the text and content of Genesis 5 and 11 dating back to even before the Hasmonean period. (I imagine there are probably more references and allusions to these texts, rather than just the biblical chapters themselves, in ancient Jewish lit. at Qumran and elsewhere.) David Instone-Brewer describes the state of affairs with the Qumran manuscripts below. “Among the 25,000 fragments of 900 manuscripts found at Qumran, there are about 200 which are recognisable as Bible texts, ranging from the large Isaiah scroll to tiny fragments containing just a few letters. This represents only a fraction of the original collection. Alongside the four manuscript fragments found in cave 8 were leather tabs belonging to 68 scrolls which had either decayed or disappeared. This indicates that we now have only a tiny sample of the original library. We have fragments from most books but also large gaps - for example there is only one fragment from the whole of Chronicles. Therefore the fact that we have no fragments from two of the smaller Bible books - Esther and Nehemiah - should not be regarded as significant.” (David Instone-Brewer, “The Old Testament Text Beyond Qumran,” [Faith and Thought 52, April 2012]) So, just because something isn’t found among the DSS doesn’t mean it didn’t exist at the time. But even if the Qumran community didn’t include those two chapters-which seems to be an inaccurate claim since Genesis 5:13 is included-would that mean they weren’t included in the Standard Text of other Jews at the time? No, not necessarily. Instone-Brewer also points out: “The Dead Sea Scrolls are published in a series called Discoveries in the Judean Desert[7] a title which indicates that manuscripts were found at other sites as well as Qumran. Other important texts were discovered soon after at Massada, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Se'elim, Naḥal Ḥever and Murabba'at. Among these were 23 Bible manuscripts though these have received less attention because they are all Standard texts. However, this apparently uninteresting feature has prompted a re-evaluation of the Qumran biblical texts. “We now have a situation which looks completely different. Every site in Palestine where ancient Bibles have been found contains manuscripts which are Standard texts - ie they are almost or exactly like the Masoretic text. The collection of texts at Qumran now stand out as distinct from all the others in a country which was rejecting non-Standard texts. “This throws new light on the fact that half of the manuscripts at Qumran are similar to the Standard text, because it suggests that the other half are the odd ones and were perhaps already regarded as inferior. Our view of the variety of texts at Qumran was disproportionately influenced by the great Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) - the only complete scroll found at Qumran - which receive the most attention initially and clearly diverged from the Standard text. However, in retrospect, we could regard the Standard text as the de facto majority text at Qumran. The non-Standard texts form a very disparate group, and only very few can be categorised into other families of texts. Only about 4% are close to the Septuagint and another 6% are close to the Samaritan text,[8] which means that the Standard text family is represented by more than ten times as many texts than the next largest family of texts.” (Ibid.)
You beat me to it, and did a much better job, too. Thanks. I came here to comment on the same issue and mention the fragment from 4Q2 with an exact quote from Gen 5:13 "Kenan lived after he became the father of Mahalalel 840 years, and became the father of other sons and daughters." This is enough indication that all of Gen 5 and 11 must have been a part of original Texts and not later additions. Aside from this small error, I must say I love the video and greatly appreciate this form of Biblical analysis. Thank you Matt Baker.
Is he denying it existed? I thought he was suggesting they might originally have had different dates. He insinuates the Septuagint has different begat dates from the Masoretic text. So even if Gen 5 & Gen 11 existed, the dates might nonetheless have been massaged and manipulated by the Hasmoneans to make it 'fit' nicely.
From all that I've read, I suspect that the Exodus is based on a small group of Hebrews leaving Egypt during the early parts of the Bronze Age Collapse. These people joining Hebrews already in Canaan would make Numbers more believable, but still inflated for theological purposes. Plus, as far as I can tell, Egypt extended into Canaan at the supposed time of the Exodus. The Hebrews would have not needed to go anywhere near the Red (or Reed) Sea.
More likely it represents the escape from Egyptian surizanty of the groups in Palestine during the Bronze Age collapse misunderstood and misrepresented.
Exodus happened during the reign of Amenhotep II. Hatshepsut was Moses's adoptive mother. That's why there was an attempt to erase her from history. Because she raised the guy who caused mischief for Egypt.
@@sigana9115 If that were true, the absolute youngest Moses could have been at the time of the Exodus was 66. If Hatshepsut adopted him in 1493 BC, the very last year of her father's reign (i.e. the last year she is "Pharaoh's daughter"), and the Exodus occurred during the first year of Amenhotep II's reign, 1427 BC.
At one point you mentioned that they used a different calendar back then Have you ever done a video about different ancient calendars that we know about
Your videos actually give me much more respect for the religious traditions. When literalists try to tell us things that we know logically simply can’t be true, that is what makes us question everything.
Say, "O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you - that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah ." But if they turn away, then say, "Bear witness that we are Muslims [submitting to Him]." Qur'an 3:64
@@jordancobb7553 No. Allah and God are the same, He is One. Jesus (peace be upon him) never used the word God. He used the Aramaic word Allaha. The Christian view of Allah is falsehood. He never begot children, nor is He begotten.
Im christian, but im more secular than religious. I love this videos cause i learned a lot. In fact this channel introduced me to biblical archeology and my faith has shifted since. Thanks Matt for changing my life. Keep going.
It is an ancient text, fairly well intact and studied by scholars for several thousand years producing a very literate Hebrew common man society, when most other cultures could count literates in the single digit percentage. It is a basis of many western civilization theories and principles... At least as strong or stronger than Plato's Republic, Aristotle, Ptolemy and the ancient Pharoahs influence. It is foolish for an educated modern man to dismiss it by refusing to read it... Like throwing Hammurabi, Josephus or the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the trash if you found one in front of you.
@@mg-ew2xf if that works for you. Koran was revealed text found in a cave hundreds of years after the ministry. Doesn't mean it is false, just that it climbs a accuracy hurdle of its own. Book of Mormon similarly with 1800 years hidden, then the paper copy lost and golden leaves taken back by Moroni. You know the revelation story of Joseph Smith is almost like it was rebooted from Mohammed... But I assume JS never read the Koran... But maybe he did.
What's actually quite interesting is that even though modern science has shown the world to be billions of years old and our species to have existed for much longer than 6000 years, the date given by the Bible for the creation of the world is amazingly close to the dates scholars have determined the first civilizations to have started.
The aboriginal Australians date back to 75k years. Their Dreamtime religion started about 65k years. They had societal hierarchical structure, shelters, and law for at least 7000-10000 years ago.
It is almost as if the writers of the holy books set the dates of their origin myths slightly before the date for the oldest civilizations they could find out about.
Funny thing is modern science is just a theory on when the world began. Ask any scientist and they will tell you it’s just a “best guess” and most likely they are wrong. Personally I think the universe and Earth is more likely between 10,000-100,000 years old
@@WoyBoy12 You don't have to believe in theories, although I said scientific theories are much more than just guesses you obviously have the right to not believe in something that isn't a true and proven fact, but at least don't spread misinformation about science
"Why did the ancient scholars give the date 420 as that of the destruction of the First Temple? We'll never know" *Ancient scholars, smoking a blunt* hahaha.... nice
@@jgr7487 I guess the meme was created some time between day 3 ("Let the earth bring forth grass", Genesis 1:11) and day 7 ("He rested on the seventh day", Genesis 2:2).
The Dog Star Sirius rolls with our 365.25 day year, for 70 days it drops blow the horizon, and 40 days it rolls with the Sun known as Canicula, and like Venus was known as the Morning Star, Venus retrogrades for 40 days every 77 weeks, 7 of those weeks are spent behind the Sun, the movement from morning star to behind the Sun to evening star is that of curled horns. The consort of the Moon god Thoth also known as Sin is Seshat whose Horned Headband was toped with a green 7 finger star is said to be her name. Place 3 7's (777) together and they from a 60 degree triangle, every 60 years the Dogon tribe celebrates the Dog Star for 7 years, 60x7=420, the Dogon love their marijuana they say it was a gift from the mother goddess. Must be where it's name came from, Mari is the Basque ancient goddess of the mountain, Jauna means Lord, Ianna/Ayana means "beautiful flower" Juana meaning "Gift from God". Shiva is Hebrew for 7 and Shiva is the pot smoking god of the Hindus, look close at the word "seven" and you see Eve between the S'N, "Sin Eve" played backwards says Venus, and "He Knows Dope" played backwards says "Four Twenty". If somebody has the Dope On You, they know your secrets. Mari's consort was Sugaar also known as Maju, the Akkadians spoke to Mari with a mouth full of resin, they called it Maqlu, the "Burning" A zodiacal month is 2,160 years, divide it by 4 for leap year, 2160\4=540 540\7=77. 77 weeks of leap days are added, 77 weeks of Venus, and 77 the gematria of Christ, or the Hebrew Oz, Ayin Zayin = 77 Me I was born 63 Pacheco Rd. Pacheco is slang for being Stoned, and my hospital was on flower St. and if that's not enough 6+3=9 and 63\9=7 of SEVEN. LMAO and if you play "Her Star" backwards you hear my name Roger, LOL, Rah-jeer, means "Famous Spear" but slang for your "One Eye Trouser Trout", LMAO. Why?. "Rog Envy Rog Genome" played backwards says "Morning Star Evening Star" On September 6th around noon time where I was born, it is the Star Alula at mid-heaven during the month of Elul day 29, 29th of February is Leap Day, "God Is New" played backwards says "29". Little more, the "cu" makes the "q" sound so Maqlu can be MaCulo, Culo is slang for Ass and the earlies image of Jesus was a Donkey head man on a cross, and you can call me Roger McCullough. Laughing My Culo Off. Who is the Messenger of the gods, they say it's Mercury. the words "Here Rah Come" played backwards says "Mercury". Mercury creates a pyramid with it's 3 retrogrades a year, 120 degrees apart, after 22 retrogrades 7 triangle in 7 years, 22\7=3.14 they call that Pi, and it's shape is Phi. Got so stoned writing this comment I don't know how to end it. LMAO, the word "Weird" came from the word "Wyrd" which means 'ones destiny' his Fate, and I'm about as weird as they come. LOL
DUDE!!!! That was amazing! Thanks so much for going so in depth on this. Honestly, the issue of how long the Hebrews were in Egypt has always been strange to me as, the genealogies didn't line up. But to see how each Timeline was made was so fascinating!
Well as an Egyptian many of us find it offensive as Egypt did not use slaves for hard labor, only house labor, and when slaves were used they were taken in conflict or were orphans. At the time there was no conflict with the Israelites so the story doesn’t add up. This is coming from a Coptic Egyptian too.
@@betrayal6231 See that's fascinating too, I know a tonne of people are raised to think the Israelites built the Pyramids. Which historically and even Biblically doesn't make sense. but often understanding nuance, or even reading the text isn't people's strong suit when you get your history from "Prince of Egypt". BTW I always love when I come across Coptic Perspectives on Scripture.
@@betrayal6231 Yeah, if the israelites were enslaved for 400 years, then they were the only ones! I take this as another one of their crying-wolf stories. However, IS - isis, RA - sun god, EL - canaanite father god...so, ISRAEL is most assuredly derived from Egyptian-Canaanite, not proto-hebrew, aramaic or whatnot. So Yah created His people and gave them a language, Hebrew, then later decides to give them a unique Hebrew name right? NO. It is an Egyptian word. Then there's the proposal that Moshe/Moses was actually Pharaoh Akhenaten, the "first" monotheist, also a bizarrely shaped human (mutant?) who was eventually turned on by the whole country. And if you really study his statue and think about it, he really does have a lot of the same common features of modern jews. I'm thinking his life history fits much better into the bible story and he certainly would have taken "his people" and fled Egypt to found a new country, a new culture, with a brand new religion. So he might have taken the European-route of invading a foreign land, killing whoever was living there (in the name of god) and taking all their stuff, then change their name/identity/language/culture and pretend that nothing ever happened. The israelites do this repeatedly throughout the Torah. Do some research into the subject and tell me what you think!
@@johnny5isalive2020 YO! That movie is a gem. Honestly one of the best animated films of all time. It's just super inaccurate, Personally I think it gets the spirit of the story right, but sacrifices Biblical or historical accuracy . :P
You’ve touched on them before in this and previous videos but I’d love for you to expand more on literal biblical chronology and their real-life inspirations! It’d be really interesting to hear what real life events inspired the stories like creation and the flood for example.
Such an excellent video, and almost as it was made for me as someone who is super interested in Bible Chronology and is Jewish and celebrating Rosh Hashanah at the moment! Shana Tova Umetukah to Matt and family!
Oh, great work, but you missed the samaritan calendar - it has some differences. You could make a entire video about the differences between the samaritan pentateuch and why they have different dates. Keep up the good work
“Academic consensus” in archaeology is a bogus argument. Many examples of simple people proving the academic world wrong. One professor teaches 600 new archaeologists to believe what he does. Those 600 then write all of their papers based on the teaching of the one, because after all, he can’t be wrong. If you question the one, then you are a rebel and all of your research is then thought to be unreliable. Happens more than you would think. Oh yeah, and if you don’t have a PHD, then any idea you have is undeniably invalid. Academic consensus used to be that we question everything. Unfortunately, questioning is no longer allowed.
I’m not sure you understand how any of this works. Archaeologists uncover PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. This evidence is examined by the archaeologist who forms a hypothesis to explain what that evidence tells us and attempt to explain and support their argument logically. This is what goes in a paper. Other archaeologists can look at the exact same evidence and either concur with the original archaeologist or propose a different interpretation. They don’t have to take the professor at his/her word. This happens all the time. As more scholars weigh in and/or more evidence is gathered, competing hypotheses are strengthened, weakened, or invalidated altogether. Academic consensus is when experts familiar with the competing hypotheses (if there is competition) all agree that one hypothesis is most likely. It has nothing to do with trust. The academic consensus CAN be incorrect. This almost always happens when new evidence is discovered that contradicts the commonly held viewpoint. That is not what is going on here.
@@JohnDoe-zh6cp I think it's hard when you come from understanding the world in a black and white fashion to understand doubt. Or the way people collect research and compare or change their minds. If an authority on a subject says, "Hey, wait, I got that wrong, some new information has come in etc." and they have a decent track record of honesty etc. I tend to see them as more trustworthy than someone who doesn't change their mind. I'll know that they are still engaged enough in the topic to find new information, and, most notably, they want to be accurate far more than they want to be seen as accurate. For people of a different background, changing your mind is a sign of dishonesty. Or even betrayal. It's why politicians have been scared of the accusation that they "flip flop" is so harmful. They can never admit a mistake; it's no way to lead
Academics definitely do not necessarily carry on with the theories of their Professors, or they never get anywhere. Questioning is allowed and mostly encouraged, but as someone who teaches first year university students, getting more difficult to start. The way media algorithms confine people to reinforcing relatively fringe ideas has drastically changed students in the last 10 years or so. Mostly people say questioning isn't allowed when they're Conservative students trying to get things through to academics who have heard the common arguments being made many times, don't see them as valid and just want to put them aside and move on so they're not occupying the rest of the class's time with multiple minutes of the refutations. Asking questions is good, asking questions when you presume you know the answers and want to challenge the academic is not such a good idea. Academics make their living off how well they can argue their points and assemble their evidence. Testing that is generally not going to go well for anyone. It's usually given away because the question is a tangent to the actual evidence or has an obvious attempt at critical analysis with a particular lens hidden in it. Genuine questions should apply to things the author or speaker doesn't say, questions about the use of certain methods, questions about how the data was analysed, or questions about the chain of logic that leads to the author's conclusion because if you don't agree with a premise, you can't agree with the conclusion. Anyone making extraordinary claims must provide extraordinary evidence and the peer review process in journals to get new ideas published is the process of people who probably disagree with you scrutinising your work and telling you why they think it's flawed. However, that said, you raise a valid point if you substitute journal editors for Professors as many journals refuse to publish new theories which dispute the main editors' own work. This kind of Peer censorship genuinely is a problem in all fields and is not limited to archaeology or any other form of academia. The same thing happens when a church Bishop tells the Deacons not to speak on something and they pass it down to the Priests and so on.
When converting a year AM to BCE, you need to adjust the forumula with one year: 1 CE followed immediately after 1 BCE, so there's no year 0 CE (or BCE).
If there was a Year Zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to every BCE date. However, because there is not a Year Zero, this does not mean that you have to SUBTRACT 1
@@UsefulCharts I'm sorry, but no. 5782AM = 5782-3761 = 2021 CE. Working backward, 3762AM = 3762-3761 = 1 CE. But 1 BCE is one year earlier, i.e. 3761AM. And 2 BCE is 3760 AM, etc. Your formula says that 3760 would be 3760-3761=-1,or 1 BCE. So for negative years, you need to adjust by one year to get 2 BCE. Not that it matters terribly, of course. Love your videos mixing modern science with a respect for all religions; I have your time line of the world and Europe on my wall: love them!
@@UsefulCharts The three different year numbers used by the Rabbis differ on exactly this point. One method (in common use today) counts the day of Adam's creation as the first day of Year 2, and the others consider it either the first day of Year 1 (used by Seder Olam) or the first day of Year 0. So this (new) year is 5782, or 5781, or 5780.
For any reason one could doubt and may argue about the preciseness of the Biblical timeline, but the fact of the matter is the two crucially important points for the reason the Bible is written for is absolutely impossible to deny or dispute! And those two points are: 1. AS it is clearly explained in Genesis chapter one there is the creator God for everything that came into existence; and as it is declared throughout the Bible this creator God is none other than the God of the Bible. 2. As it is clearly written in John 20:30-31, Luke 24:44-48 Jesus of the gospels indeed is the expected "Messiah" the savior and restorer of both the Jews and non-Jews people. We must read the Bible in the objective goal it is written for, not in seeking the accuracy of date numbers; and the objective goal it is written for is what is written in the scriptures mentioned above and in Acts 17:24-31. You said you are a Jew, if you are, you were supposed to know your God and lead people to the light of this truth, what is that which has blinded you? Get rid of it fast or else it will eternally cut you off from your root! May God have mercy to your soul and shine in your mind and heart His light of truth. May His fear make you tremble and draw you to His mercy.
I am a Christian but I appreciate the working of the dates and comparisons. We may disagree on history vs narrative, but you still did a great job on the video. Good luck and Jesus saves.
As an Orthodox Christian, I can say my brothers and sisters of the faith tend to be hard literalists (not all of them) which has brought me into conflict with them on rare occasion, cause I don't tend to really care if the world was made billions of years ago or 7000. I treat both as being equally correct (or rather... equally viable without picking a side?) It is just something so minor that I feel has no real affect on my academic or spiritual development, merely a distraction from what really matters in both.
Pretty much how I feel about this subject. Would this answer affect my day to day life in any way? The word doesn’t explain how he did it, or how long it took. Die on the hill that the world is X years old… doesn’t affect my prayer life, my studies, my interactions with people. It’s just one more piece of knowledge one can cement their decision on, and then feel superior… no matter what side of the fence you’re on.
If the world is billions of years old, then the Bible is not trustworthy. Reading carefully, the Bible shows clearly that this world was created by Jesus roughly 6,000 years ago.
I'm a hard Literalist and there's nothing you can do about that. These scholars take Ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek History literally so we can do the same with Ancient Israel
@@theduke6174 There is nothing I'm going to do about it, that's on you buddy. Also, that's cause they are talking about Greco-Roman and Egyptian Mythology from a literary and classicist's point of view. When Scholars discuss Greek Mythology, they don't think Hades stealing Persephone was an actual historical event.
I think you are glossing over the Septuagint a bit too much. It's clear that the Masoretic was edited during the Hasmonean period to create the numerological pattern you mention here as well as in your previous video. The Septuagint was created before this time and therefore does not reflect this alteration. It's likely that the Septuagint chronology is more original, and almost certainly a better source for trying to match up biblical events with archeology. Most of today's Bible translations are based on the Masoretic. This is important for Christian literalists, who have probably boarded the wrong flight!
Most Christians who accept the young creation timescale don’t take “everything literally”. We accept that there are metaphors and poetry in the bible, just not in the specific case of genealogies and other temporal elements to be literal.
GodzillaFreak Hi. Once literalists start accepting "that there are metaphors and poetry in the bible" they are on a slippery slope. Which verses are to be taken literally and which not? Who decides? Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I cannot recall any built-in instructions to this end. Why is it just "the specific case of genealogies and other temporal elements" that HAVE to be treated literally? Perhaps this is a case of the belief (in a young earth) coming before the interpretation. Then, of course, there is the vast majority of believers who are NOT literalists. I wonder why this is the case? Common sense. I expect. You know, treating ancient literature with respect rather than dogmatic certitude.
@@alanthompson8515 I don't think that "literalist" is even a good label for most young earth creationists. Textual analysis can indicate whether something is meant to be historical or metaphorical, and the text in support of a young creation seem to be literal. I also think that certain elements do not make sense in respect to a metaphorical view. For example, the ages of the patriarchs following Noah decrease in an exponential manner; something which is expected of biological creatures, not of symbolic stories. The non literal approach to the biblical timescale are largely due to the paradigms of the culture. Parts of Greek philosophy beckoned some to view the world as eternal. Modern cosmology, uniformitarian geology, and evolutionary theory have led people to believe in billions of years. I reject these idea and as such am not compelled to hold to long ages. Church fathers going back to Augustine and beyond held to young earth views. Believers believing in vast ages is generally not motivated by the text.
@@GodzillaFreak Your: "the text in support of a young creation seem (sic) to be literal" Well, until you can justify this claim, allow me to differ. You need to consider who wrote it and when. Even allowing for later redactions, the text is over 2 thousand years old. Even educated people back then were pig ignorant by today's standards. However, I think we must assume that they were of the same average intelligence as we are and thus were able to write in a range of literary genres - fiction included. Bronze age intellectuals did pretty well IMO in fashioning the various etiological myths found in Genesis. WhyTF must you assume these stories HAVE to had been literal accounts (and moreover accounts that remain accurate to this day!) rather than simply the best explanations available at the time? It has also been well argued that the genre we call History (a record of past events) did not exist at that time. Much of the original material was sourced from longstanding oral traditions, hence the duplicate (and contradictory) versions of Creation and The Flood). Oral traditions are able to change though time (=evolve) to adapt to changing circumstances. Only when written down (=fossilised) can they start to be misunderstood as some sort of immutable dogma ("set in stone"?) From now on any further changes are top-down ones made by the controlling elites, rather than the bottom-up changes that occur in oral traditions (and folk music!) Literalism seems to me a poor way to approach scripture. Your "evidence" is so limited! You limit yourself to just the one source treated in just the one way. Even non-believers like me can appreciate it as great literature, but literlaists are the folk in a restaurant who read the menu, then eat it instead of the meal.
@@alanthompson8515 I don't believe that scripture is written merely by ancient people. As a believer I hold that it is inspired by the omniscient creator who would know the true history of the world, sending a message to people through the ages. Personally I actually came to believe in the historical events of Genesis 1-11 prior to accepting the theological implications. You mention the existence of various contradictory flood accounts. The ark in the biblical account has realistic proportions which are even used in ships today. Along with other factors such as the time it took to flood the earth and the time it took for the waters recede I will contend that the biblical account sounds realistic rather than fantastical. Genesis 1-11 lacks the elements commonly found in Hebrew poetry. It also follows sort of a "boring" plot, moving from one event to the next focusing on the rigid details rather than emotion. Other parts of the bible do contain the elements of Hebrew poetry and can be distinguished as fictional stories. Literalism makes little sense, but one need not be a literalist to believe in a young creation.
Hi Matt! Today I bought your book on the world’s history. I am super excited to get it delivered tomorrow because I’ve been fascinated by history all my life. Edit: Today I got the book and it is definitely worth the money. Tons of info, pictures, etc. And the charts are incredible. 👏
Thank you. I am Roman Catholic and thus not and never have been a biblical literalist. I feel your videos represent my biblical approach but also expose me to new ideas, so I appreciate them.
Shana Tova Matt! Thank you for all the enriching content. Would love to see you do a video on how the Jewish calendar is calculated, I've never been able to get a grasp on it.
I find it so hard not to be condescending and dismissive to literalists, but that type of attitude only causes them to dig in their heels; I think the respective approach of this channel has done a lot of good towards bringing religious people around to a more scientific perspective
I was hoping you'd highlight the Septuagint's record of ages in Genesis. Thanks! From a kind of archaeological-historical perspective, it seems to have the best standing as the most likely record of what the original text/tradition contained.
18:58 I know you mentioned in another video about this 4000 year history before and it's driving me insane trying to find it. I remember you making the suggestion that the Tanakh was written with this timeline in mind so that by the Second Temple period, 100 generations of Jewish history would have passed. I want to do a cross reference between these videos but I can't find it and it's making me go crazy! Can anyone help me?
The separation of dates for the temple seems to align with the numbers 7 and 70. I believe you said in a video about New Testament authors that they made the number of ancestors between Adam to David to Jesus divisible by 7 in a different way twice. It seems like the rabbis did that again, making the separation of these major events by 7 * 10 years.
Both 7 and 13 were important numbers to the writers of the bible it seems. Both numbers show up a lot. 7 kinda makes sense, 7 days in a week. But I can’t recall the importance of 13. But these two weren’t just important to the Jews, but also Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
What is the likelihood that the genealogy between Adam and Noah is based on a lunar calendar? According to the Bible, Methuselah was 969 when he died. If you assume this is lunar months instead of the years we use today, Methuselah ends up being 74, which is a bit more believable.
As someone who has used a Mass Spectometer to determine that a rock had 1.7 billion years, it's wild that a person could believe this planet was only 4000 years give or take.
My uncle's argument about God creating the world in 7 (6) days, is that a day for God isn't necessarily the same as a day for a human 🙄 I've resigned myself to "agree to disagree" for the sake of family harmony....
@@annejeppesen160 The interesting thing about the idea that time passes differently for god is that it lines up with the modern understanding of relativity. We know in physics that time does not flow the same everywhere, it's dependent on the mass and energy of the subject, and objects around the subject, in its own reference frame. I am not a christian, but I was raised in a roman catholic school. I remember reading a verse where, I think it was an angel, that was saying that time flows at a different rate for god. I also remember reading an article on the translation of the word's used, and that in some contexts and historical uses, those words were used to mean steps, as in steps for a process, rather than a literal day. So like the 1st step, instead of the 1st day, etc.
@@annejeppesen160 My dad is the same way. At least I can talk science with him, which I'm less certain I could do if he thought it was a literal 6/7 days.
Nice presentation and very informative, I do agree that it's really hard to estimate the actual age of the earth because Genesis 1:1 do not suggest an exact span of time.
Hey Matt, I was wondering - the Temples were likely not built in a single year considering that Wikipidia says that for example the Parthenon or the Colosseum were being build for almost 10 years (and the contemporary Sagrada Familia isn't even finished after 139(!) years of construction). Could this possibly account for some discrepancies in the chronology? Great video as usual!
18:21 the difference is 1151 years. That is assuming 215 years for the exodus in the Septuagint and 430 years for the Masoretic. The Septuagint also adds 3 years to the reigns of the monarchs of Judah (9 if you take the overlaps and interregnums of Judah and Israel literally). So it is actually either 1154 or 1160 years.
The thing about 2451AM being the Jubilee of Jubilees literally blew my mind. I learn new things every time I watch one of your videos, but this is definitely my favorite new bit of knowledge.
One very big point that I must bring forward: There is no Year 0 in either AD or CE, and the year before 1AD/CE is 1BC/BCE. So the negative years by raw number calculations would be off by exactly 1. Did you take that into account, or are the BCE years in this video all off by 1?
@UsefulCharts: Hi. I'm at 2:04 on the video, and I'm seeing the following top line: 3761 BCE ← 3761 → Birth of Jesus ← 2021 → 2021 You made an error that comes about because there is no year 0 in the BCE/CE system and because you didn't specify a year for Jesus' birth. Let me do a different top line which should make this clearer: 3762 BCE ← 3761 → 1 BCE ← 1 → 1 CE ← 2020 → 2021 I hope this helps.
If there was a year zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to all the dates. Without a year zero, you don't have to do anything. No adding 1 but no subtracting either.
@@UsefulCharts Hmm…. My understanding is that AD/BC and CE/BCE have always lacked a year zero in historical scholarship. **Astronomers** started applying a year 0 (mainly because they're doing a lot more calculation than the historians and the lack of a year 0 makes calculations much more difficult than necessary), but that didn't work its way back into historical scholarship. However, my understanding may be wrong or outdated. In particular, it occurs to me that as computers have proliferated and the cost of doing calculations and storing data has gone down, historians likely have been doing a lot more calculations which would drive them down the same road as the astronomers. In any case, it does appear that you were aware of the issue, so my apologies for offering an unneeded correction.
Is it possible the Maccabees changed some of the dates in the rest of the Hebrew Bible to get those nice round figures? Is that one of the things you were hinting at?
I find it very interesting that using the date 1876 for Israel going into Egypt puts Joseph right at the height of the 12th dynasty and their agricultural developments. His death around 1806 also coincides with the last pharaoh of the 12th dynasty and the subsequent rise of a divided kingdom (if you accept Ryholt's dates for the early 14th dynasty pharaohs) with the northern kingdom centered at Avaris and heavily influenced by the Hyksos. My thought is that the Hyksos were not exclusively Israelite, but included some other Semitic peoples as well. When Ahmose I claims to drive out the Hyksos later in the 1500s, I suspect he also enslaved a group of them (the Israelites) who would eventually come out of Egypt during the reign of Thutmose III. A few decades wandering in the wilderness bring them into Canaan prompting the events recorded in the Amarna tablets. I'm particularly impressed by the fact that the Bible records no conflicts with the people around Shechem in central Canaan. In the Amarna tablets, Labayu of the mayor of Shechem allies himself with the Habiru. Upon further inspection of the Biblical account, the Gibeonites with whom the Israelites made a treaty and the Shechemites are both Hivites which could mean that the treaty was not only with those at Gibeon, but also through that whole central area.
Thanks for mentioning D.Rohl - I have his documentaries, and I think of his work as a challenge to established timelines (but I don't have the professional authority to judge how right or wrong his theories are). Just an interesting idea....btw - Happy New Year!
IT's actually easy for anyone to come up with theories that sound like they could be plausible, the only different with Rohl's is most people don't work so hard to make feature length docs to convince people to believe them. IT's human nature to want to believe in the conspiracy because the truth is often mundane.
Thank you, I recently started reading the Bible to better understand the dominant beliefs in my area, and this saved me the hours I know I would have spent poring over those genealogy chapters crunching numbers, lol. I hope you had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and have another wonderful one in a few months!
The Jewish year is NEVER 365. A standard year is on average 354 days (plus/minus one day, depending on the months Cheshvan and Kislev), and a leap year is on average 384 days (plus/minus one day)
@@AbbySteinAS thanks! I was just asking because the video made no distinction between Gregorian calendar year, Julian, then whatever was before that. Unless the hard work conversion of year lengths is already done, it's seems odd to assume the length of royal reigns are measured by the same years as ours?
The scholars that came up with year 966 after "fixing" the regnal dates for the monarchy period did take the calendar differences into consideration. However, when it comes to the chronology as a whole, it doesn't really matter because the extra months that are added to the Jewish calendar every now and then make the average year almost identical to the length of a solar calendar.
@@UsefulCharts Thanks! I had always wondered if it was safe to assume years were practically the same length through history or not. Cleans up some of the messiness
Egyptology as a science is rather suspect, and has been long before Rohl's book. There are enough discrepancies and contradictions between the dates allocated and the artifacts and writings to suggest a rewriting of Egyptian chronology, and an awful lot of people who have built their careers fighting for the current one, and who will look a bit silly should their foundation give way.
Except it matches dates from around it. So either you have to assume there was a vast conspiracy involving multiple nations, or maybe the people asserting some rewrite are wrong.
I'm not sure alterations in chronology are really enough to undermine the entire field of Egyptology. The vast majority of the time, chronology is less important than relative time. E.g. You can write books and books on a particular pharaoh, his predecessor, his family, the works he sponsored...etc, with the precise date he lived being much less important than his relative position in Egypt's history. The vast majority of sources that exist will be dated with relative methods, as opposed to absolute ones, with the exception of radiocarbon dating, so shifting everything forward or back by a hundred years wouldn't necessarily undermine all existing work nor would be it glaringly obvious from the evidence alone.
@@merrymachiavelli2041 I agree totally with your comment especially when Egyptian history is addressed in isolation. However, when trying to tie in events from other cultures, whether real or legendary, then the problem requires a flexibility that neither side of the argument seems to evince, especially if we are discussing "Bibilical" ones.
@@davidstokes8441 Trying to tie in Egyptian history with most biblical events is foolish given the sheer gap in time that exists between the Ancient Egyptian civilization and when the Bible was written. It would be like trying to reconcile William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar with the Roman records of Julius Caesar.
Another amazing video! I wonder if there is any connection between the ancient Israelites and the Hyksos. The Hyksos entered egypt in 1782 BCE, and they were a semitic people from the levant. This date is kind of close to the Christian date of when the Israelites entered Egypt. Secondly, archaelogists have dated a layer of river sediment which covered lower mesopotamia to about 2900 BCE, and this was a result of a flood which may have inspired the mesopotamian flood myths which later influenced the hebrew flood myth. Thirdly, the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel had different calendars. The Israelites celebrated their new year in the month of Abib/Aviv (Spring), which is also when they celebrated passover. Their calendar was a native Canaanite/Levantine system. The Judahites had their new year during Rosh Hashanah (same as today) and followed a calendar system similar to the mesopotamian system (inspired by the Assyrians and Babylonians).
It's quite likely in my opinion that Hyksos rule is the origin of the stories of Joseph in the Egyptian court, and the expulsion of the Hyksos is the source of the pursuit of the Israelites by the Egyptian army.
@@fluffysheap when you look at the generations passed between Joseph and Moses there are only three generations. Also Joseph is said to have met his father riding a chariot. Chariots did not exist in Egypt before the arrival of the Hyksos.
The story of Joseph happened during the 12th dynasty of ancient Egypt, during King Sesostris II and III. Exodus happened in the Thutmosis dynasty, possibly under Amenhotep II
@@Emcee_Squared According to biblical chronology, the exodus happened in 1446 BC . Jacob and his family came to dwell in Egypt 430 years before the exodus (Ex 12:40.) Therefore, Jacob settled in Egypt in 1876 BC during the reign of Sesostris III who reigned 1878-1843 BC. Joseph may have been brought to Egypt during the reign of Sesostris II his father. He may have been brought to Egypt as a slave during the processions of the Amu peoples who were bringing goods to Egypt from the levant. They included many peoples from the levant including Ishmaelite or Bedouin traders as mentioned in Genesis. This is depicted in the tomb of Khnumhotep II. The children of Jacob settled in Goshen in lower Egypt and because of Joseph, were friendly to the rest of the 12th dynasty, and the 13th dynasty which was a female lineage continuation of the 12th dynasty. At the same time, an independent dynasty of people from the levant, was developing which later became the Hyksos 15th dynasty after they took control of the whole lower Egypt including where the Hebrews settled. The Hebrews were in good standing with the Hyksos because they had common area of origin, as the descendants of Jacob were from the levant and some of them had Canaanite and other Levantine peoples as wives as mentioned in Genesis. The native Egyptians continued to rule from Thebes until they finally conquered lower Egypt and expelled the Hyksos by Ahmose I. By this time, centuries had passed since the Hebrews settled in Egypt and their population increased since they were given a city to settle by the native pharaoh court of the 12th dynasty.
They were a distinct people from the Hyksos but with common geographical origins with some historical intermingling. After expelling the Hyksos, Ahmose may have seen that the Hebrews would ally themselves with the Hyksos and overrun lower Egypt in an attempt to reconquer. So he put them in hard labor. Thus being the Pharaoh who did not know Joseph he started oppressing the Hebrews with hard labor. According to Egyptology, Ahmose undertook many massive construction projects after expelling the Hyksos. He may have used Hebrews as hard labor in mortar and brick as stated in Exodus 1:14.
Dr. Baker, Thank you for this series. it has opened my eyes to a lot of understanding and other ways of looking at things. The series is well thought out and objective. This series made me want to look into what was said and make my own conclusions. It is like you are a guide and you show us paths but we are the ones that need to go down the path. Thank you for the great books you had put in the descriptions, I like deeper dives in the subjects you talk about. I enjoy your channel immensely and I appreciate your thoughts and works and I hope you will continue this journey through history!
It’s obvious from Biblical records that Israel was in Egypt 215 years and this should be applied to both timelines, so this should be applied to the Christian timeline as well. I recommend searching for video “how long were Israelites in Egypt” which explains this in detail. Another issue with lost years is record of genealogy of some earlier Biblical characters where Septuagint says 130y and Masoretic text 30y as example
Being a literalist, I disagree with some of the presumptive context, nevertheless I always appreciate a well presented and put together lesson. Thank you for your input. FYI, literalist does not mean there cannot be "missing in translation". Academic consensus has nothing to do with reality if the whole is deliberately wrong. Again thank you for your videos
As a literalist, do you believe the earth is less than or equal to 10,000 years old and how do you reconcile that with archaeological evidence and our modern understanding of physics?
When you call into the question the whole of the academic world just to justify your belief perhaps it's time to reexamine your beliefs. I'm a believer but I'm also an academic and you cannot refute the verifiable facts of history based on the writings in one book.
@@JohnDoe-zh6cp According to the literalists God intentionally messes with the laws of physics and the archaeological/geological record as a test of faith. In other words, God let Satan plant dinosaur bones that are millions of years old just to test our faith in Him. I know, it's strains logic and credulity.
Just got the world history chart book for my birthday. Amazing work Matt. Love the channel and plan to support for a long time. When we gonna get a cause and effect chart.
I don't think you are especially looking for validation from King Bolo, but I just wanted to say that your channel is chock-full of absolutely topic quality stuff. Kudos!!! I will be showing all this to my kids.
I took note of the numbers and maybe lucky enough to finance my retirement savings. Amazing time used to make a timeline. Thank you, a good reading. I learned something new everyday.
Great video! I'm not sure that literalists would say that "everything" in the Bible is literal history though. Even my fundamentalist pastor would laugh at the idea that the seven headed leopard, bear, lion turtle in Revelation is an actual, literal creature that will rise out of the sea at the End of Days. I think a better definition might be "literalists believe that most things in the Bible are literal history."
Here is a take about the Bible. The first woman rabbi said once that the Bible should be taken as a lesson to life. Whether it should be taken as actual history is up to you but also doesn't matter as long as you learn from it. History or not, it was written for people in the future to read.
Thanks for this deep dive. Since I'm a religious person who places 0 weight in the literalists and young earth people, I thought this would be boring, but actually there were several historical things that I found fascinating. The 166 year gap was really interesting, and it is fascinating that between about 600 and 0AD a lot of historical dates get much "firmer" but before that time, there are still often debates that place events decades or centuries apart. The clean number of years is also interesting and these too clean and exact symbolic dates are pretty strong evidence that for many of the ancient Jewish religious leaders numerical symbolism was more important than exact records of history. Yet, despite its imperfections the stories recorded are still some of the most complete, to survive until the modern day, and are frankly more likely to contain kernals of truth, than those from a similar time that contain only stories of gods, demi-gods, and superhumans.
There is a discussion by Talmudic scholars (ancient scholars not modern day) that because Alexander came and the Jews started using a different Callender for years that when they came back the counting got messed up, this is followed by a student trying to figure out the date and his teacher telling him it is supposed to be unknown so that the year 6000 stays a mystery. 6000 is supposed to be the year the world ends and the post messianic world begins
When the Talmud states that (Rosh Hashana p.3b) "Cyrus is Darius is Artaxerxes" when it is clear that they're seperate characters, you get a discrepancy: ten kings ruling 200 years become a single king ruling for just 50...
Great Work Sir. Wow. You have a refreshing talent. These are great. TH-cam needs to offer check marks to channells with factual and logical aims. Your channel is just so far above what out there.
Shana Tova! Watching this got me thinking. The or A great flood is spoken of in legends myths and religions all over the world. Here you have a year it may have happened based on Jewish / Christian chronology. It would be interesting to see if the chronology of writings of other religions legends myths come any close to this. Or a comparison of any other major events that are similar. Mammoth task, but if you ever stuck on a topic, I know I'd be interested in it 😁 Edit - or you could just do the same topic of creation based on chronology of other religions (don't know why I didn't think of that first 🙄😂)
And.....if the flood actually happened as the bible says....then all people are descendants of Noah and thus all civilizations have a story of the flood.
Nope. The flood legend found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and embedded in Mesopotamian mythology and hence found in the mythology of Judaism/Christianity/Islam is fundamentally different from the flood legends found in for example in Northern European mythology. For instance the Gilgamesh flood is a rain induced riverine flood as fits in an area with high levels of alluvial deposition and retreating coast lines. In Northern Europe the floods that destroyed the Land of Lionease in the Arthurian legends for example are sea inundations as befits a folk memory of lands lost to rising sea levels after the end of the last ice age in a region where sea levels were generally rising until rebound effects took over in the last 1000 years or so.
Oh also note we have written records from the supposed period of the “flood” in both Mesopotamia and Egypt neither of which mentions a flood except in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Great video as usual! I only had one little pet peeve of mine. I know its more politically "in" to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD (even though it really is kinda dumb because 2021 CE is just 2021 AD and you'd be pretty dull to not see there is a religious undertone to the year anyway), but I would think it would be more appropriate to use BC and AD in this video. My reasoning is this video is directly about religious text and is in that sort of context. So to me it seems a little weird to essentially go, "Now the Bible would suggest the world was created by God in the year xxxx SECULAR DATING SYSTEM." Anyways, I hope that made a semblance of sense!
If this video was about Christian chronologies only, I would have used BC/AD. However, it was about both Christian and Jewish chronologies. Therefore, the more neutral term seemed more appropriate.
@@UsefulCharts I understand. I hope I didn't sound aggressive about it or anything, I just figured I'd share a thought. I enjoy pretty much all your videos Matt, keep it up!
@@UsefulCharts My mild objection to BCE/CE is that the two abbreviations are easily confused. We should change CE to AV, for "Anno Vulgaris", (or whatever the correct Latin is for "Common Era") :-)
@@UsefulCharts Stick with the BCE/CE even when discussing xtian chronologies. We need to get our thinking about time out of the context of a hypothetical historical event.
I'll probably go along with the younger dryas impact as a go-between creation and the flood myths. As in the creation being a time of great turmoil and rebirth of "humanity", and not the literal creation of the world.
@@jakeaurod I would actually like to think that the increase in temperatures from meltwater 1a would have given us what we could interpret as a more legendary (as in plausible but overly embellished) "Adam and Eve" setting where there could be rapid growth in vegetation and the events during meltwater 1b as more of a time for Noah.
And then there's the theory that Abraham's "years" were 6 months long, based on the rainy/dry cycles where he lived, and that Noah counted his age in Lunar Months, since that was the most easily recognized cycle in his time/region. Counting age by solar years probably started with Jacob, as a result of Egyptian influence.
The Flood may have occurred when a warming Earth and rising sea levels after the last ice age flooded through the Bosporus and Dardanells flooding the Black sea area .
I read about a theory years ago that the destruction of the minoan civilisation might be a smoking gun for the great flood. The santorini supervolcano eruption would have created a super tsunami that would easily have reached and inundated the middle east, egypt, anatolia
@@derekscanlan4641 It depends what you mean by 'innundated'. The tsunami would have been limited to coastal areas and islands, not the entire region. Even the largest tsunamis on record haven't tended to travel _that_ far inland - even if they are theoretically tall enough, the wave loses energy quickly once it comes ashore.
I've always seen the Bible more as a history book. You forgot to add how in the Bible it says like 'a day with the Lord is a thousand years of man.' With that, you'd need to add several thousand years to the beginning.
I've never been a Christian but I was raised as one - I always found my science books more interesting. I always liked the idea of the creation story being a metaphorical retelling of the Big Bang and the gradual formation and evolution of the Earth and life on it. It's obviously slightly off as it's written from a geocentric view of the universe, and a "day" varies dramatically in length from millions to billions of years, but if you simply moved day 4 (creation of the Sun and stars) to day 2, it would be a perfectly accurate (and extremely condensed!) summary of the history of Earth. The Bible IS a history book but filtered through thousands of years of oral history and embellishments and exaggerations and mixed with a few fables and popular stories. A lot of the events can be tied to something historical, even if the years and details are way off. They're ancient stories passed down like Chinese whispers, like "my grandfather told me that when his grandfather's grandfather was about 30 years old..."
The thing is, the Bible was written for humans to understand, not for god. So a day should be considered by how we understand it to mean, not how god understands it.
@@ZatannaZataraGrayson Most of the really ancient stuff in the Bible likely originated in oral tradition - like stories around the campfire or at bedtime. Even the later stuff was written at a time way before we really understood cosmology or prehistoric timescales. It's not a case of years as God understands it, but more a case of "Daddy, how did everything start?", "Well I was always told that on the very first day, the creator said "Let there be light!"...". The dates were never going to be anywhere near perfect, and before we developed archaeological, geological and cosmological sciences, there was no way of knowing how much time had passed before the first human awoke, or even how long had passed since then.
@@BambiTrout Yeah, that's what I mean. None of it is supposed to be literal, so it wouldn't make sense to add 1000 years for each day because it's just a way to explain to people that it was just a Really Long Time. They don't actually mean that 1 God Day = 1000 years. And when they say that, they're comparing a human day vs. a god day, so it's still centered around human understanding of time.
Feel bad for the scribe who sucked at the abacus, but ended up being the cited source for all temple records. I'm sure his rabbi is just kicking himself.
Note: There is no "Year Zero" between BCE and CE dates. If there was a Year Zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to every BCE date. However, because there is not a Year Zero, this does not mean that you have to SUBTRACT 1. You simply do nothing.
I really hate the lack of a year zero.
DC Comics lied to me.
Please do not view below as negative. However, as an archaeologist, could I kindly request you to please refrain from using terminology such as “almost 100% certainty”, given such would be an extremely erroneous representation on accuracy of current dating methodology.. Would it be possible to use “most likely” instead, to avoid have to spend hours explaining archaeological theory and problems with current dating methodologies, when we do outreach or have volunteers join excavations. Really enjoy your show, ergo, hope above is not viewed as being negative towards you work.
@@newname8988 Good point. Thanks.
But surely there are only 419 years from the start of 350 BCE to the start of 70 CE because of the missing year 0? (Unless BCE years start at the end of the year and end at the start of the year!)
My accountant friend has at the bottom of his emails the following Fact:
The Jewish year is 5782.
The Chinese year is now 4719.
This means that Jews had to exist 1,064 years without Chinese food.
A time known as the “Dark Ages”…
As a matter of not-so-useful fact:
The Chinese era here is actually Yellow Emperor era, based upon the mythical event of Yellow Emperor's ascention to throne. Its history was not long (created in late 19th century by Han nationalists). Yet there were two slightly different eras: The civil era is 4719, while the Taoist era (which had been in place longer) is 4718.
It was deliberately made this way, because of a disagreement on how to interpret historical dates. The Yellow Emperor's ascension was supposed to be "the first Chinese New Year," yet the net effect of events from that and 104 BCE was to delay Chinese New Year by two months. The Taoist era kept track of the change in calculation methods, while the civil era just extended the current method of calculation; in the civil era, the ascension took place in the 11th month of Year 1, making Year 1 of this Chinese civil era only two months long.
As another matter of not-so-useful fact:
No Chinese actually cares about the Chinese calendar other then to know when time for festivities such as Chinese New Year, mid autumn festival etc. Plus, within the Chinese nationalist philosophy, the origins of “China” started way way before the Yellow Emperor. To make it exact, it’s should be Fu Xi （伏羲）, the equally mythical King that starts off China, it’s just that there’s literally no way to do the exact calculations to find out when this king existed so they had to settle on the next great King, the Flame Emperor aka the godly farmer （炎帝/神農）, but no one could make a calendar from that either, mostly because the former two kings didn’t manage to come up with any calendar of sorts, only the Yellow Emperor did, at least according to the legend.
Both ancient calendars of civilizations and peoples going back into prehistory. The roughly 1100 year difference if you add the conflicting Hebrew interpretations might add 400 to 700 years making that roughly 1600 years less than Adam...which is the Hebrew tradition of the restart of world civilizations with Noah's three sons. The flood having wiped clean the worldy works of Cain to Tubal Cain.
Several Indian subcontinent calendars also seem to start about the same time.
Fascinating.
@@STho205 1656 After Adams creation 17.02 Beginning of the Great global Flood [Genesis 7,11] 2463 B.C
Our year: October / November
17.07 The Arc rests on the Mount of Ararat [Genesis 8,4] Our year: March / April
01.10 The tops of the Mountains are visible [Genesis 8,5] Our year: June / July
1657 01.01 The waters dried [Genesis 8,13] 2462 B.C. Our year: September / October
27.02 The Earth is dry again [Genesis 8,14] Our year: October / November
When does sanxindui civilization fits ?
My Dad passed away last December. He had a masters in Theology. We would speak over and over about so many of these kinds of topics, and he was very knowledgeable on many biblical topics outside Christianity. He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and taught himself Hebrew to do so. I miss talking to him and being able to ask him questions.
Thanks for your series, it makes me feel that I can still find dependable explanations when biblical text and liturgy meet the underlying themes.
He's up there looking down he never really left
Sounds like a Goodman. Better than my father but. Equal to my Dad.
(I have a excellent Step-Dad) My father never even been in my life. But if a person lacks a father that's what God/Allah is for he will put someone in your path. I hope to be the first modern priest who won't need to be a undergrad or need a bachelor's degree. Also make music to help spread the word. I hope to one day study the documents the Vatican holds and give people the secrets it holds
nice memory ..thanks for sharing
I miss my dad who was of great knowledge and I could ask him pretty much about anything. Since he passed away I missed it. I have found husband who also knows great deal if not more than my sad so it kind of helps
this is chart video not therapy video
4004 World not found
Happy 6026
Very clever 👍
😂😂😂
I’m here in 6056, whose with me
😆🤘
I used to be a biblical literalist. I actually was one when I first started following the channel. Some of your videos challenged me, but while remaining honest and objective, you never talked down to me and my opinions. Greatly appreciated.
Seconded. When he talked about how Abraham and Sarah were essentially an appropriation of the Hebrews, from the story of Brahma and Saraswati in Hindu mythos, that proved to be the first domino that kinda caused what little literalism I had left to come crashing down. It wasn't malicious, it was just pure historical fact, and it led to me realizing that I couldn't truthfully call myself a Christian anymore (if I ever could to begin with, as I never believed and tried to repress that fact).
The way he contrasts what different religions hold as truth compared to what we know from the historical record is what sets him apart. He doesn't presuppose one or the other IS the way it is, he simply states "Here's what we understand from history, here's what the religious texts say." It's refreshingly dispassionate and even-handed.
@@raetekusu1 which video was that?
@@axeldeporte4073 that is the view of most european christian churches, but in truth what keeps them alive is the pure sense of identity and community they provide.
@@axeldeporte4073 To some, yes. But I was raised in evangelical circles, where biblical literalism is almost required. Like UsefulCharts with Judaism, many Christians are able to accept that the Bible isnt meant to be taken literally at all with no conflict in their faith. I am not one of those people. Deep down, I never believed Christianity was true to begin with, and tried to force myself to buy in out of a combination of rapture anxiety and a desperate desire to be accepted. Even when I started letting go of the literalist things I was trying to make myself believe, I still clung on and refused to accept that I didnt believe. UC's video was what essentially paved the way for me to face that fact head on and ultimately come to terms.
@@silvanogonzalez2971 Biblical Family Tree 1 - Adam to David.
He released it about a year ago.
Im not religious but i really appreciate the way you present the history and appreciate the scientific approach you take when analyzing a topic
Same here.
I just wish I knew more about the books, I should read the bible again, maybe the other books, too.
Ditto
Samesies
@@hansolowe19 What is the universe made of?
Why did humans split into different races?
What is faith?
Is the Bible figurative or literal?
How do you know when God is answering your prayers?
Why do you believe in something you can’t see?
What’s the best thing about being a believer?
There’s a lot of bad news on TV every day. The world is in chaos. So how can there be a God in this condition?
Now please give me some reasonable answers for these reasonable questions.
Same.. I could listen to Matt talk about anything. When I click a video and it's HI IM JACK RACKAM I instantly close it, sorry my dude. I wish all the videos were still voiced by Matt.
Actually the world started when the One Ring was destroyed, there's a debate on this date as well. Before it the world was known as Middle-Earth.
That was the start of the Fourth Age. Tolkien conjectured we could be anywhere currently from the end of the Fifth to the beginning of the Seventh Age.
@@robertdullnig3625 dam
But the elves were leaving earth. What of all their years before? :-0
@@robertdullnig3625 you also have to take into account that each Age is getting shorter. And that a year in the pre-Ages Ages (years of the trees, etc) could be as long as 144 human years
@@anduril2695 could the years have been longer due to the day being shorter?
We know 65 million years ago, an Earth day was only 22 hours.
Happy 5782! Fun fact: the new year is also the seventh year of the Shmita cycle (Sabbath year), so if the Temple was still standing, this would probably be the point where a foreign power or civil war faction would capture and loot it.
שנה טובה שם
שנה טובה ומתוקה לשניכם
שנה טובה לכולכם
Cute letters you got there
שנה אזרחית טובה
Shana Tovah, Dr. Baker. Even in Orthodox Judaism, when it comes to any use of the year in any meaningful settings, it comes with the phrase “according to the count that we use here.” Only the most ardent of literalists think that this number has any literal meaning.
According to Judaism, the years are counted from Adam, NOT from the creation. In fact, there are writtings that mention that there were over 900 generations before Adam.
According to Judism, Adam was simply the first man who was given a soul.
I’ve always found it interesting that the 3500-4000 ish BC estimates for the beginning of the world does actually track pretty close to the start of the Bronze Age or the start of “History” at the advent of writing. It’s this basic wrong understanding that humans have always been as we are now and are more-or-less as old as all creation. A fun date. A good date. Just not the date you were looking for.
Yes, and human civilization seems to have exploded around that time, and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Suddenly the species seemed to show a little spirit! On the other hand, maybe it was just something they ate....
Coincidentally, or possibly no, 4000 BCE is also roughly the starting build date for the temple to Enki at Eridu, and thereby the start of the city building period in Mesopotamia and the Lavant.
If all these ancient civilisations just knew the stone age and cavemen were a thing, they'd be far more accurate than most modern people think.
Good to know I’m not the only one who noticed that the beginning of the world tracks close to the beginning of civilisation (Sumerian one at least).
Totally man! The Iliad and the Odessey, Bible, Torah, Quran, Mahabharata are all basically fan fictions of the Bronze Age Collapse, highly incorrect fiction.
Matt could u do a vid on the different denominations of Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Like what the differences are and when they split?
Not sure when but yeah, definitely going to do that.
Protestants will need its own episode
Judaism doesn't really do separate denominations in the Christian sense. They're just different schools of thought, and the movement of people and ideas between them is pretty fluid. This is actually something I've been covering in my own video series on Jewish history, which has just reached the early 18th century.
@@DevSarman yeah, all 40,000+
"Judaism" split from "Christianity" because of its rejection of JC. And both these religions split from Islam because of their rejection of MHMD.
Nothing much.
"One of [James Usher's] aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21th of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.
This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour." - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman 'Good Omens'
It's confusing only because there was a stretch of time when Canaan WAS Egypt, was within it's boundaries. Egyptian officials, generations of Egyptian families lived there and everything.
I was just looking at an archeology program, and the variety of pottery for the time there.
I don't know if and when this is factored in or not.
It's not factored in at all because this is about the Bible and the Bible preserves no living memory of Canaan under Egypt's rule during the New Kingdom. It's one of the many reasons why nobody except fundamentalists actually believe the Bible is historically accurate about events prior to the Iron Age.
Interesting. Aside from the chronology stuff, when this narrator makes the point that Gen 5 and 11 may have been additions to the text of Genesis simply because they weren’t found in the extant Dead Sea Scrolls, that is an argument from silence.
But we do actually have Genesis 5:13 among the Dead Sea Scrolls, contrary to his claim (4QGenb). The Septuagint (LXX) also includes Genesis chapters 5 and 11 in its Greek translation of the Hebrew text, and that portion of the Septuagint dates to the mid-3rd century BCE, which is around 100 years before the Hasmonean period…which means the Hebrew Torah scroll the Greek translators were using included those chapters, and that pushes the antiquity of those chapters back even further.
In addition, the Samaritan Pentateuch includes these two chapters of Genesis, as does the Syriac Aramaic translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew done in the 2nd century CE.
Targum Onkelos (probably early 2nd-century CE) also includes these chapters in its Aramaic translation from Hebrew.
Not to mention the allusion to Genesis 5:1 in Matthew 1:1 (“the book of the genealogies of…”), which is a 1st-century CE reference in the NT, as well as Luke 3 (another 1c CE reference) and 1 Chronicles 1, both of which also have the genealogy from Adam to Abraham.
So, there is wide attestation of the text and content of Genesis 5 and 11 dating back to even before the Hasmonean period. (I imagine there are probably more references and allusions to these texts, rather than just the biblical chapters themselves, in ancient Jewish lit. at Qumran and elsewhere.)
David Instone-Brewer describes the state of affairs with the Qumran manuscripts below.
“Among the 25,000 fragments of 900 manuscripts found at Qumran, there are about 200 which are recognisable as Bible texts, ranging from the large Isaiah scroll to tiny fragments containing just a few letters. This represents only a fraction of the original collection. Alongside the four manuscript fragments found in cave 8 were leather tabs belonging to 68 scrolls which had either decayed or disappeared. This indicates that we now have only a tiny sample of the original library. We have fragments from most books but also large gaps - for example there is only one fragment from the whole of Chronicles. Therefore the fact that we have no fragments from two of the smaller Bible books - Esther and Nehemiah - should not be regarded as significant.”
(David Instone-Brewer, “The Old Testament Text Beyond Qumran,” [Faith and Thought 52, April 2012])
So, just because something isn’t found among the DSS doesn’t mean it didn’t exist at the time. But even if the Qumran community didn’t include those two chapters-which seems to be an inaccurate claim since Genesis 5:13 is included-would that mean they weren’t included in the Standard Text of other Jews at the time? No, not necessarily. Instone-Brewer also points out:
“The Dead Sea Scrolls are published in a series called Discoveries in the Judean Desert[7] a title which indicates that manuscripts were found at other sites as well as Qumran. Other important texts were discovered soon after at Massada, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Se'elim, Naḥal Ḥever and Murabba'at. Among these were 23 Bible manuscripts though these have received less attention because they are all Standard texts. However, this apparently uninteresting feature has prompted a re-evaluation of the Qumran biblical texts.
“We now have a situation which looks completely different. Every site in Palestine where ancient Bibles have been found contains manuscripts which are Standard texts - ie they are almost or exactly like the Masoretic text. The collection of texts at Qumran now stand out as distinct from all the others in a country which was rejecting non-Standard texts.
“This throws new light on the fact that half of the manuscripts at Qumran are similar to the Standard text, because it suggests that the other half are the odd ones and were perhaps already regarded as inferior. Our view of the variety of texts at Qumran was disproportionately influenced by the great Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) - the only complete scroll found at Qumran - which receive the most attention initially and clearly diverged from the Standard text. However, in retrospect, we could regard the Standard text as the de facto majority text at Qumran. The non-Standard texts form a very disparate group, and only very few can be categorised into other families of texts. Only about 4% are close to the Septuagint and another 6% are close to the Samaritan text,[8] which means that the Standard text family is represented by more than ten times as many texts than the next largest family of texts.”
(Ibid.)
You beat me to it, and did a much better job, too. Thanks. I came here to comment on the same issue and mention the fragment from 4Q2 with an exact quote from Gen 5:13 "Kenan lived after he became the father of Mahalalel 840 years, and became the father of other sons and daughters." This is enough indication that all of Gen 5 and 11 must have been a part of original Texts and not later additions.
Aside from this small error, I must say I love the video and greatly appreciate this form of Biblical analysis. Thank you Matt Baker.
Is he denying it existed? I thought he was suggesting they might originally have had different dates. He insinuates the Septuagint has different begat dates from the Masoretic text. So even if Gen 5 & Gen 11 existed, the dates might nonetheless have been massaged and manipulated by the Hasmoneans to make it 'fit' nicely.
Yall be blowin my mind with information overload 😂
From all that I've read, I suspect that the Exodus is based on a small group of Hebrews leaving Egypt during the early parts of the Bronze Age Collapse. These people joining Hebrews already in Canaan would make Numbers more believable, but still inflated for theological purposes. Plus, as far as I can tell, Egypt extended into Canaan at the supposed time of the Exodus. The Hebrews would have not needed to go anywhere near the Red (or Reed) Sea.
That would also explain their rivalry with the Philistines, who probably descended from one of the groups of Sea Peoples.
More likely it represents the escape from Egyptian surizanty of the groups in Palestine during the Bronze Age collapse misunderstood and misrepresented.
@@davidwright7193 We'll probably never know for sure how the story originated.
Exodus happened during the reign of Amenhotep II. Hatshepsut was Moses's adoptive mother. That's why there was an attempt to erase her from history. Because she raised the guy who caused mischief for Egypt.
@@sigana9115 If that were true, the absolute youngest Moses could have been at the time of the Exodus was 66. If Hatshepsut adopted him in 1493 BC, the very last year of her father's reign (i.e. the last year she is "Pharaoh's daughter"), and the Exodus occurred during the first year of Amenhotep II's reign, 1427 BC.
At one point you mentioned that they used a different calendar back then
Have you ever done a video about different ancient calendars that we know about
He should do one about the calendar of the Roman Republic. It. Was. WEIRD.
I’d love to see a video comparing other calendars which are still used today (the Chinese calendar, the Islamic calendar, etc.)
Your videos actually give me much more respect for the religious traditions. When literalists try to tell us things that we know logically simply can’t be true, that is what makes us question everything.
Well said🐚
True it made me appreciate the text more than those who outright want to lure you in their belief.
Say, "O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you - that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah ." But if they turn away, then say, "Bear witness that we are Muslims [submitting to Him]."
Qur'an 3:64
@@TheRealMikeMichaels Allah is just another version of the Abrahamic God, the 3rd version after Judaism and Christianity
@@jordancobb7553 No. Allah and God are the same, He is One. Jesus (peace be upon him) never used the word God. He used the Aramaic word Allaha. The Christian view of Allah is falsehood. He never begot children, nor is He begotten.
Im christian, but im more secular than religious. I love this videos cause i learned a lot. In fact this channel introduced me to biblical archeology and my faith has shifted since. Thanks Matt for changing my life. Keep going.
Now I'm as atheist as it gets but somehow Matt Baker makes me get interested in the Bible ...
It is an ancient text, fairly well intact and studied by scholars for several thousand years producing a very literate Hebrew common man society, when most other cultures could count literates in the single digit percentage.
It is a basis of many western civilization theories and principles... At least as strong or stronger than Plato's Republic, Aristotle, Ptolemy and the ancient Pharoahs influence.
It is foolish for an educated modern man to dismiss it by refusing to read it... Like throwing Hammurabi, Josephus or the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the trash if you found one in front of you.
@@STho205 fart.
@@STho205 I'd go with the Koran over Josephus considering the forgery issues.
@@mg-ew2xf if that works for you.
Koran was revealed text found in a cave hundreds of years after the ministry. Doesn't mean it is false, just that it climbs a accuracy hurdle of its own.
Book of Mormon similarly with 1800 years hidden, then the paper copy lost and golden leaves taken back by Moroni.
You know the revelation story of Joseph Smith is almost like it was rebooted from Mohammed... But I assume JS never read the Koran... But maybe he did.
@@user-nd7rg5er5g no sound or odor.
Skills.
What's actually quite interesting is that even though modern science has shown the world to be billions of years old and our species to have existed for much longer than 6000 years, the date given by the Bible for the creation of the world is amazingly close to the dates scholars have determined the first civilizations to have started.
The aboriginal Australians date back to 75k years. Their Dreamtime religion started about 65k years. They had societal hierarchical structure, shelters, and law for at least 7000-10000 years ago.
It is almost as if the writers of the holy books set the dates of their origin myths slightly before the date for the oldest civilizations they could find out about.
Egypt is much older than 4000 bc
Funny thing is modern science is just a theory on when the world began. Ask any scientist and they will tell you it’s just a “best guess” and most likely they are wrong. Personally I think the universe and Earth is more likely between 10,000-100,000 years old
@@WoyBoy12 You don't have to believe in theories, although I said scientific theories are much more than just guesses you obviously have the right to not believe in something that isn't a true and proven fact, but at least don't spread misinformation about science
"Why did the ancient scholars give the date 420 as that of the destruction of the First Temple? We'll never know"
*Ancient scholars, smoking a blunt* hahaha.... nice
420 was a meme even before blunts were being smoked. nice.
@@jgr7487 I guess the meme was created some time between day 3 ("Let the earth bring forth grass", Genesis 1:11) and day 7 ("He rested on the seventh day", Genesis 2:2).
I'm sorry I destroyed the perfect 69 likes.😂I'm the 70th like😂😂😂😂
The Dog Star Sirius rolls with our 365.25 day year, for 70 days it drops blow the horizon, and 40 days it rolls with the Sun known as Canicula, and like Venus was known as the Morning Star, Venus retrogrades for 40 days every 77 weeks, 7 of those weeks are spent behind the Sun, the movement from morning star to behind the Sun to evening star is that of curled horns. The consort of the Moon god Thoth also known as Sin is Seshat whose Horned Headband was toped with a green 7 finger star is said to be her name.
Place 3 7's (777) together and they from a 60 degree triangle, every 60 years the Dogon tribe celebrates the Dog Star for 7 years, 60x7=420, the Dogon love their marijuana they say it was a gift from the mother goddess. Must be where it's name came from, Mari is the Basque ancient goddess of the mountain, Jauna means Lord, Ianna/Ayana means "beautiful flower" Juana meaning "Gift from God". Shiva is Hebrew for 7 and Shiva is the pot smoking god of the Hindus, look close at the word "seven" and you see Eve between the S'N, "Sin Eve" played backwards says Venus, and "He Knows Dope" played backwards says "Four Twenty". If somebody has the Dope On You, they know your secrets.
Mari's consort was Sugaar also known as Maju, the Akkadians spoke to Mari with a mouth full of resin, they called it Maqlu, the "Burning"
A zodiacal month is 2,160 years, divide it by 4 for leap year, 2160\4=540 540\7=77. 77 weeks of leap days are added, 77 weeks of Venus, and 77 the gematria of Christ, or the Hebrew Oz, Ayin Zayin = 77
Me I was born 63 Pacheco Rd. Pacheco is slang for being Stoned, and my hospital was on flower St. and if that's not enough 6+3=9 and 63\9=7 of SEVEN. LMAO and if you play "Her Star" backwards you hear my name Roger, LOL, Rah-jeer, means "Famous Spear" but slang for your "One Eye Trouser Trout", LMAO. Why?. "Rog Envy Rog Genome" played backwards says "Morning Star Evening Star"
On September 6th around noon time where I was born, it is the Star Alula at mid-heaven during the month of Elul day 29, 29th of February is Leap Day, "God Is New" played backwards says "29". Little more, the "cu" makes the "q" sound so Maqlu can be MaCulo, Culo is slang for Ass and the earlies image of Jesus was a Donkey head man on a cross, and you can call me Roger McCullough. Laughing My Culo Off. Who is the Messenger of the gods, they say it's Mercury. the words "Here Rah Come" played backwards says "Mercury". Mercury creates a pyramid with it's 3 retrogrades a year, 120 degrees apart, after 22 retrogrades 7 triangle in 7 years, 22\7=3.14 they call that Pi, and it's shape is Phi.
Got so stoned writing this comment I don't know how to end it. LMAO, the word "Weird" came from the word "Wyrd" which means 'ones destiny' his Fate, and I'm about as weird as they come. LOL
@@MrBlazingup420 I think I need to be high to read this😂😂😂
I love saying "happy new year" every September and confusing everybody since I'm pretty much one of the only Jewish people where I live.
Shanah Tovah!
Same! 🤣 G‘ mar chatima tovah!
DUDE!!!! That was amazing! Thanks so much for going so in depth on this. Honestly, the issue of how long the Hebrews were in Egypt has always been strange to me as, the genealogies didn't line up. But to see how each Timeline was made was so fascinating!
Well as an Egyptian many of us find it offensive as Egypt did not use slaves for hard labor, only house labor, and when slaves were used they were taken in conflict or were orphans. At the time there was no conflict with the Israelites so the story doesn’t add up. This is coming from a Coptic Egyptian too.
@@betrayal6231 See that's fascinating too, I know a tonne of people are raised to think the Israelites built the Pyramids. Which historically and even Biblically doesn't make sense. but often understanding nuance, or even reading the text isn't people's strong suit when you get your history from "Prince of Egypt".
BTW I always love when I come across Coptic Perspectives on Scripture.
@@betrayal6231 Yeah, if the israelites were enslaved for 400 years, then they were the only ones! I take this as another one of their crying-wolf stories. However, IS - isis, RA - sun god, EL - canaanite father god...so, ISRAEL is most assuredly derived from Egyptian-Canaanite, not proto-hebrew, aramaic or whatnot. So Yah created His people and gave them a language, Hebrew, then later decides to give them a unique Hebrew name right? NO. It is an Egyptian word. Then there's the proposal that Moshe/Moses was actually Pharaoh Akhenaten, the "first" monotheist, also a bizarrely shaped human (mutant?) who was eventually turned on by the whole country. And if you really study his statue and think about it, he really does have a lot of the same common features of modern jews. I'm thinking his life history fits much better into the bible story and he certainly would have taken "his people" and fled Egypt to found a new country, a new culture, with a brand new religion. So he might have taken the European-route of invading a foreign land, killing whoever was living there (in the name of god) and taking all their stuff, then change their name/identity/language/culture and pretend that nothing ever happened. The israelites do this repeatedly throughout the Torah. Do some research into the subject and tell me what you think!
@@sdastoryteller3381 Hey, don't knock my favorite movie! (Even if it's completely wrong.)
@@johnny5isalive2020 YO! That movie is a gem. Honestly one of the best animated films of all time. It's just super inaccurate, Personally I think it gets the spirit of the story right, but sacrifices Biblical or historical accuracy . :P
3:23 "-and the second temple for 420 years-"
So you mean the second temple is the dankest temple? ;)
I read or heard somewhere that some ancient altars found in the Levant have been tested and found to have cannabis residue.
You’ve touched on them before in this and previous videos but I’d love for you to expand more on literal biblical chronology and their real-life inspirations! It’d be really interesting to hear what real life events inspired the stories like creation and the flood for example.
Probably real life events like creation and the flood.
Such an excellent video, and almost as it was made for me as someone who is super interested in Bible Chronology and is Jewish and celebrating Rosh Hashanah at the moment! Shana Tova Umetukah to Matt and family!
btw i just got your book, it's amazing! and the charts are really good, and the fact you included the Ramabam was so suprisng and made me really happy
Oh, great work, but you missed the samaritan calendar - it has some differences.
You could make a entire video about the differences between the samaritan pentateuch and why they have different dates.
Keep up the good work
Shana tova Matt. I’ve really enjoyed your videos this year!
Highly engaging and very informative video Matt. Love your chronological approach to making a point and telling the story in each video.
“Academic consensus” in archaeology is a bogus argument. Many examples of simple people proving the academic world wrong. One professor teaches 600 new archaeologists to believe what he does. Those 600 then write all of their papers based on the teaching of the one, because after all, he can’t be wrong. If you question the one, then you are a rebel and all of your research is then thought to be unreliable. Happens more than you would think. Oh yeah, and if you don’t have a PHD, then any idea you have is undeniably invalid. Academic consensus used to be that we question everything. Unfortunately, questioning is no longer allowed.
I’m not sure you understand how any of this works. Archaeologists uncover PHYSICAL EVIDENCE. This evidence is examined by the archaeologist who forms a hypothesis to explain what that evidence tells us and attempt to explain and support their argument logically. This is what goes in a paper.
Other archaeologists can look at the exact same evidence and either concur with the original archaeologist or propose a different interpretation. They don’t have to take the professor at his/her word. This happens all the time. As more scholars weigh in and/or more evidence is gathered, competing hypotheses are strengthened, weakened, or invalidated altogether. Academic consensus is when experts familiar with the competing hypotheses (if there is competition) all agree that one hypothesis is most likely. It has nothing to do with trust.
The academic consensus CAN be incorrect. This almost always happens when new evidence is discovered that contradicts the commonly held viewpoint. That is not what is going on here.
@@JohnDoe-zh6cp I think it's hard when you come from understanding the world in a black and white fashion to understand doubt. Or the way people collect research and compare or change their minds.
If an authority on a subject says, "Hey, wait, I got that wrong, some new information has come in etc." and they have a decent track record of honesty etc.
I tend to see them as more trustworthy than someone who doesn't change their mind. I'll know that they are still engaged enough in the topic to find new information, and, most notably, they want to be accurate far more than they want to be seen as accurate.
For people of a different background, changing your mind is a sign of dishonesty. Or even betrayal.
It's why politicians have been scared of the accusation that they "flip flop" is so harmful. They can never admit a mistake; it's no way to lead
Academics definitely do not necessarily carry on with the theories of their Professors, or they never get anywhere. Questioning is allowed and mostly encouraged, but as someone who teaches first year university students, getting more difficult to start. The way media algorithms confine people to reinforcing relatively fringe ideas has drastically changed students in the last 10 years or so. Mostly people say questioning isn't allowed when they're Conservative students trying to get things through to academics who have heard the common arguments being made many times, don't see them as valid and just want to put them aside and move on so they're not occupying the rest of the class's time with multiple minutes of the refutations. Asking questions is good, asking questions when you presume you know the answers and want to challenge the academic is not such a good idea. Academics make their living off how well they can argue their points and assemble their evidence. Testing that is generally not going to go well for anyone. It's usually given away because the question is a tangent to the actual evidence or has an obvious attempt at critical analysis with a particular lens hidden in it. Genuine questions should apply to things the author or speaker doesn't say, questions about the use of certain methods, questions about how the data was analysed, or questions about the chain of logic that leads to the author's conclusion because if you don't agree with a premise, you can't agree with the conclusion.
Anyone making extraordinary claims must provide extraordinary evidence and the peer review process in journals to get new ideas published is the process of people who probably disagree with you scrutinising your work and telling you why they think it's flawed.
However, that said, you raise a valid point if you substitute journal editors for Professors as many journals refuse to publish new theories which dispute the main editors' own work. This kind of Peer censorship genuinely is a problem in all fields and is not limited to archaeology or any other form of academia. The same thing happens when a church Bishop tells the Deacons not to speak on something and they pass it down to the Priests and so on.
When converting a year AM to BCE, you need to adjust the forumula with one year: 1 CE followed immediately after 1 BCE, so there's no year 0 CE (or BCE).
If there was a Year Zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to every BCE date. However, because there is not a Year Zero, this does not mean that you have to SUBTRACT 1
@@UsefulCharts I'm sorry, but no. 5782AM = 5782-3761 = 2021 CE. Working backward, 3762AM = 3762-3761 = 1 CE. But 1 BCE is one year earlier, i.e. 3761AM. And 2 BCE is 3760 AM, etc. Your formula says that 3760 would be 3760-3761=-1,or 1 BCE. So for negative years, you need to adjust by one year to get 2 BCE. Not that it matters terribly, of course. Love your videos mixing modern science with a respect for all religions; I have your time line of the world and Europe on my wall: love them!
Maybe it's because I'm assuming an Anno Mundi year zero? Some rabbis interpreted it that way and some did not
@@UsefulCharts The three different year numbers used by the Rabbis differ on exactly this point. One method (in common use today) counts the day of Adam's creation as the first day of Year 2, and the others consider it either the first day of Year 1 (used by Seder Olam) or the first day of Year 0. So this (new) year is 5782, or 5781, or 5780.
For any reason one could doubt and may argue about the preciseness of the Biblical timeline, but the fact of the matter is the two crucially important points for the reason the Bible is written for is absolutely impossible to deny or dispute! And those two points are:
1. AS it is clearly explained in Genesis chapter one there is the creator God for everything that came into existence; and as it is declared throughout the Bible this creator God is none other than the God of the Bible.
2. As it is clearly written in John 20:30-31, Luke 24:44-48 Jesus of the gospels indeed is the expected "Messiah" the savior and restorer of both the Jews and non-Jews people.
We must read the Bible in the objective goal it is written for, not in seeking the accuracy of date numbers; and the objective goal it is written for is what is written in the scriptures mentioned above and in Acts 17:24-31.
You said you are a Jew, if you are, you were supposed to know your God and lead people to the light of this truth, what is that which has blinded you? Get rid of it fast or else it will eternally cut you off from your root!
May God have mercy to your soul and shine in your mind and heart His light of truth. May His fear make you tremble and draw you to His mercy.
God Bless you Matt.
Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge with us.
Extremely interesting
As a joke I started a college paper "Since the creation of the world in 4004 BC..."
My Prof just crossed out my first sentence.
Probably because you forgot to cite Ussher as your reference. :)
I am a Christian but I appreciate the working of the dates and comparisons. We may disagree on history vs narrative, but you still did a great job on the video. Good luck and Jesus saves.
On a different note you must watch Billy Graham pretty powerful
@@felicitytaylor3764powerful BS
As an Orthodox Christian, I can say my brothers and sisters of the faith tend to be hard literalists (not all of them)
which has brought me into conflict with them on rare occasion, cause
I don't tend to really care if the world was made billions of years ago or 7000. I treat both as being equally correct (or rather... equally viable without picking a side?)
It is just something so minor that I feel has no real affect on my academic or spiritual development, merely a distraction from what really matters in both.
Pretty much how I feel about this subject. Would this answer affect my day to day life in any way? The word doesn’t explain how he did it, or how long it took. Die on the hill that the world is X years old… doesn’t affect my prayer life, my studies, my interactions with people. It’s just one more piece of knowledge one can cement their decision on, and then feel superior… no matter what side of the fence you’re on.
If the world is billions of years old, then the Bible is not trustworthy.
Reading carefully, the Bible shows clearly that this world was created by Jesus roughly 6,000 years ago.
I'm a hard Literalist and there's nothing you can do about that.
These scholars take Ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek History literally so we can do the same with Ancient Israel
@@theduke6174 There is nothing I'm going to do about it, that's on you buddy.
Also, that's cause they are talking about Greco-Roman and Egyptian Mythology from a literary and classicist's point of view. When Scholars discuss Greek Mythology, they don't think Hades stealing Persephone was an actual historical event.
Thanks!
Great work
Damn, I'm watching this video during the 3 days when it isn't outdated yet
I think you are glossing over the Septuagint a bit too much. It's clear that the Masoretic was edited during the Hasmonean period to create the numerological pattern you mention here as well as in your previous video. The Septuagint was created before this time and therefore does not reflect this alteration. It's likely that the Septuagint chronology is more original, and almost certainly a better source for trying to match up biblical events with archeology.
Most of today's Bible translations are based on the Masoretic. This is important for Christian literalists, who have probably boarded the wrong flight!
Except Septuagint numbers don't add up and have signs of tampering/editing whereas Masoretic numbers do add up.
the septuagint has methuselah dying after the flood... not reliable
Most Christians who accept the young creation timescale don’t take “everything literally”. We accept that there are metaphors and poetry in the bible, just not in the specific case of genealogies and other temporal elements to be literal.
No way the great flood happened bruh
GodzillaFreak Hi. Once literalists start accepting "that there are metaphors and poetry in the bible" they are on a slippery slope. Which verses are to be taken literally and which not? Who decides? Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I cannot recall any built-in instructions to this end.
Why is it just "the specific case of genealogies and other temporal elements" that HAVE to be treated literally? Perhaps this is a case of the belief (in a young earth) coming before the interpretation.
Then, of course, there is the vast majority of believers who are NOT literalists. I wonder why this is the case? Common sense. I expect. You know, treating ancient literature with respect rather than dogmatic certitude.
@@alanthompson8515 I don't think that "literalist" is even a good label for most young earth creationists. Textual analysis can indicate whether something is meant to be historical or metaphorical, and the text in support of a young creation seem to be literal.
I also think that certain elements do not make sense in respect to a metaphorical view. For example, the ages of the patriarchs following Noah decrease in an exponential manner; something which is expected of biological creatures, not of symbolic stories.
The non literal approach to the biblical timescale are largely due to the paradigms of the culture. Parts of Greek philosophy beckoned some to view the world as eternal. Modern cosmology, uniformitarian geology, and evolutionary theory have led people to believe in billions of years. I reject these idea and as such am not compelled to hold to long ages. Church fathers going back to Augustine and beyond held to young earth views. Believers believing in vast ages is generally not motivated by the text.
@@GodzillaFreak Your: "the text in support of a young creation seem (sic) to be literal" Well, until you can justify this claim, allow me to differ.
You need to consider who wrote it and when. Even allowing for later redactions, the text is over 2 thousand years old.
Even educated people back then were pig ignorant by today's standards. However, I think we must assume that they were of the same average intelligence as we are and thus were able to write in a range of literary genres - fiction included. Bronze age intellectuals did pretty well IMO in fashioning the various etiological myths found in Genesis. WhyTF must you assume these stories HAVE to had been literal accounts (and moreover accounts that remain accurate to this day!) rather than simply the best explanations available at the time?
It has also been well argued that the genre we call History (a record of past events) did not exist at that time. Much of the original material was sourced from longstanding oral traditions, hence the duplicate (and contradictory) versions of Creation and The Flood).
Oral traditions are able to change though time (=evolve) to adapt to changing circumstances. Only when written down (=fossilised) can they start to be misunderstood as some sort of immutable dogma ("set in stone"?) From now on any further changes are top-down ones made by the controlling elites, rather than the bottom-up changes that occur in oral traditions (and folk music!)
Literalism seems to me a poor way to approach scripture. Your "evidence" is so limited! You limit yourself to just the one source treated in just the one way. Even non-believers like me can appreciate it as great literature, but literlaists are the folk in a restaurant who read the menu, then eat it instead of the meal.
@@alanthompson8515 I don't believe that scripture is written merely by ancient people. As a believer I hold that it is inspired by the omniscient creator who would know the true history of the world, sending a message to people through the ages.
Personally I actually came to believe in the historical events of Genesis 1-11 prior to accepting the theological implications. You mention the existence of various contradictory flood accounts. The ark in the biblical account has realistic proportions which are even used in ships today. Along with other factors such as the time it took to flood the earth and the time it took for the waters recede I will contend that the biblical account sounds realistic rather than fantastical.
Genesis 1-11 lacks the elements commonly found in Hebrew poetry. It also follows sort of a "boring" plot, moving from one event to the next focusing on the rigid details rather than emotion.
Other parts of the bible do contain the elements of Hebrew poetry and can be distinguished as fictional stories.
Literalism makes little sense, but one need not be a literalist to believe in a young creation.
Hi Matt! Today I bought your book on the world’s history. I am super excited to get it delivered tomorrow because I’ve been fascinated by history all my life.
Edit: Today I got the book and it is definitely worth the money. Tons of info, pictures, etc. And the charts are incredible. 👏
Thank you, now if my homie comes by tomorrow I can wish him “Happy New Year!” and get the year right. Also, Happy New Year!
Thank you. I am Roman Catholic and thus not and never have been a biblical literalist. I feel your videos represent my biblical approach but also expose me to new ideas, so I appreciate them.
Shana Tova Matt! Thank you for all the enriching content. Would love to see you do a video on how the Jewish calendar is calculated, I've never been able to get a grasp on it.
It's calculated via awkward pauses and desperate Googling, in my experience :P
It takes both the moon and Sun into account.
I find it so hard not to be condescending and dismissive to literalists, but that type of attitude only causes them to dig in their heels; I think the respective approach of this channel has done a lot of good towards bringing religious people around to a more scientific perspective
Or maybe the Bible writers were recording history and inspired by God. Guess we can ask in heaven
Deductive approach will never substitute the real impression from the exist subject.
I was hoping you'd highlight the Septuagint's record of ages in Genesis. Thanks! From a kind of archaeological-historical perspective, it seems to have the best standing as the most likely record of what the original text/tradition contained.
Your speech has the right speed for me. And your videos are quite interesting!!
18:58 I know you mentioned in another video about this 4000 year history before and it's driving me insane trying to find it. I remember you making the suggestion that the Tanakh was written with this timeline in mind so that by the Second Temple period, 100 generations of Jewish history would have passed. I want to do a cross reference between these videos but I can't find it and it's making me go crazy! Can anyone help me?
The separation of dates for the temple seems to align with the numbers 7 and 70. I believe you said in a video about New Testament authors that they made the number of ancestors between Adam to David to Jesus divisible by 7 in a different way twice. It seems like the rabbis did that again, making the separation of these major events by 7 * 10 years.
Both 7 and 13 were important numbers to the writers of the bible it seems. Both numbers show up a lot.
7 kinda makes sense, 7 days in a week.
But I can’t recall the importance of 13.
But these two weren’t just important to the Jews, but also Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
There are several places where Jeremiah speaks of 70 years. Jewish chronology considers these prophesies to have been fulfilled accurately.
@@ryanvoll7088isn't it 12 tribes plus the woman?
What is the likelihood that the genealogy between Adam and Noah is based on a lunar calendar? According to the Bible, Methuselah was 969 when he died. If you assume this is lunar months instead of the years we use today, Methuselah ends up being 74, which is a bit more believable.
As someone who has used a Mass Spectometer to determine that a rock had 1.7 billion years, it's wild that a person could believe this planet was only 4000 years give or take.
My uncle's argument about God creating the world in 7 (6) days, is that a day for God isn't necessarily the same as a day for a human 🙄 I've resigned myself to "agree to disagree" for the sake of family harmony....
@@annejeppesen160 The interesting thing about the idea that time passes differently for god is that it lines up with the modern understanding of relativity. We know in physics that time does not flow the same everywhere, it's dependent on the mass and energy of the subject, and objects around the subject, in its own reference frame. I am not a christian, but I was raised in a roman catholic school. I remember reading a verse where, I think it was an angel, that was saying that time flows at a different rate for god. I also remember reading an article on the translation of the word's used, and that in some contexts and historical uses, those words were used to mean steps, as in steps for a process, rather than a literal day. So like the 1st step, instead of the 1st day, etc.
@@annejeppesen160 My dad is the same way. At least I can talk science with him, which I'm less certain I could do if he thought it was a literal 6/7 days.
@@CrypticCarbon Time slows down in the presence of large mass. Because time for god is slower than time for the rest of us, god must be very dense.
@@CrypticCarbon that is true... However there's this little detail called evolution that separates us... And Big Bang... And dinosaurs...
Shana Tova - thank you for this I really enjoyed it
I do appreciate the time and effort it took you to present this video. Thank you.
Whenever I hear of Hanukkah, I imagine of Ross in Holiday Armadillo costume.
Thank you, FRIENDS.
Nice presentation and very informative, I do agree that it's really hard to estimate the actual age of the earth because Genesis 1:1 do not suggest an exact span of time.
Hey Matt, I was wondering - the Temples were likely not built in a single year considering that Wikipidia says that for example the Parthenon or the Colosseum were being build for almost 10 years (and the contemporary Sagrada Familia isn't even finished after 139(!) years of construction). Could this possibly account for some discrepancies in the chronology? Great video as usual!
18:21 the difference is 1151 years.
That is assuming 215 years for the exodus in the Septuagint and 430 years for the Masoretic.
The Septuagint also adds 3 years to the reigns of the monarchs of Judah (9 if you take the overlaps and interregnums of Judah and Israel literally).
So it is actually either 1154 or 1160 years.
The thing about 2451AM being the Jubilee of Jubilees literally blew my mind. I learn new things every time I watch one of your videos, but this is definitely my favorite new bit of knowledge.
One very big point that I must bring forward: There is no Year 0 in either AD or CE, and the year before 1AD/CE is 1BC/BCE. So the negative years by raw number calculations would be off by exactly 1. Did you take that into account, or are the BCE years in this video all off by 1?
If there was a year 0, you'd have to ADD 1 to everything. Without a year zero, you don't have to add or subtract anything.
@@UsefulCharts You got that completely flipped. Without year 0 you HAVE TO SUBTRACT 1 from intervals, and HAVE TO ADD 1 to year numbers.
@UsefulCharts: Hi. I'm at 2:04 on the video, and I'm seeing the following top line:
3761 BCE ← 3761 → Birth of Jesus ← 2021 → 2021
You made an error that comes about because there is no year 0 in the BCE/CE system and because you didn't specify a year for Jesus' birth. Let me do a different top line which should make this clearer:
3762 BCE ← 3761 → 1 BCE ← 1 → 1 CE ← 2020 → 2021
I hope this helps.
I'm now at 4:44, and I'm seeing similar off-by-one errors in BCE dates: 830, 420, and 350 should be 831, 421, and 351.
That's why I kept saying "plus or minus" one year. Some people follow your method. Some don't.
@@UsefulCharts I'm with David on this one. Can you point to a calender that uses BC/BCE and HAS a year zero?
If there was a year zero, you'd have to ADD 1 to all the dates. Without a year zero, you don't have to do anything. No adding 1 but no subtracting either.
@@UsefulCharts Hmm…. My understanding is that AD/BC and CE/BCE have always lacked a year zero in historical scholarship. **Astronomers** started applying a year 0 (mainly because they're doing a lot more calculation than the historians and the lack of a year 0 makes calculations much more difficult than necessary), but that didn't work its way back into historical scholarship. However, my understanding may be wrong or outdated. In particular, it occurs to me that as computers have proliferated and the cost of doing calculations and storing data has gone down, historians likely have been doing a lot more calculations which would drive them down the same road as the astronomers. In any case, it does appear that you were aware of the issue, so my apologies for offering an unneeded correction.
As a Jew, who deals a bit with this topic, I found your explanation to be quite good. And I am happy to see you are proud of your heritage 🙂
I really enjoy your videos, and this was no exception. L'shana tova umtukah.
Is it possible the Maccabees changed some of the dates in the rest of the Hebrew Bible to get those nice round figures? Is that one of the things you were hinting at?
Yes.
Is a Christian literalist the same thing as a young earth creationists?
Basically, yeah.
He was trying to be polite...
I find it very interesting that using the date 1876 for Israel going into Egypt puts Joseph right at the height of the 12th dynasty and their agricultural developments. His death around 1806 also coincides with the last pharaoh of the 12th dynasty and the subsequent rise of a divided kingdom (if you accept Ryholt's dates for the early 14th dynasty pharaohs) with the northern kingdom centered at Avaris and heavily influenced by the Hyksos. My thought is that the Hyksos were not exclusively Israelite, but included some other Semitic peoples as well.
When Ahmose I claims to drive out the Hyksos later in the 1500s, I suspect he also enslaved a group of them (the Israelites) who would eventually come out of Egypt during the reign of Thutmose III. A few decades wandering in the wilderness bring them into Canaan prompting the events recorded in the Amarna tablets. I'm particularly impressed by the fact that the Bible records no conflicts with the people around Shechem in central Canaan. In the Amarna tablets, Labayu of the mayor of Shechem allies himself with the Habiru. Upon further inspection of the Biblical account, the Gibeonites with whom the Israelites made a treaty and the Shechemites are both Hivites which could mean that the treaty was not only with those at Gibeon, but also through that whole central area.
Thanks for mentioning D.Rohl - I have his documentaries, and I think of his work as a challenge to established timelines (but I don't have the professional authority to judge how right or wrong his theories are). Just an interesting idea....btw - Happy New Year!
IT's actually easy for anyone to come up with theories that sound like they could be plausible, the only different with Rohl's is most people don't work so hard to make feature length docs to convince people to believe them. IT's human nature to want to believe in the conspiracy because the truth is often mundane.
Thank you, I recently started reading the Bible to better understand the dominant beliefs in my area, and this saved me the hours I know I would have spent poring over those genealogy chapters crunching numbers, lol. I hope you had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and have another wonderful one in a few months!
Has the Jewish year always been 365 days (with the 366day leap year)? And the Israelite/Hebrew?
Sorry if length of year's already been addressed.
The Jewish year isn't 365 days it is in fact less as the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar and not a solar calendar.
The Jewish year is NEVER 365. A standard year is on average 354 days (plus/minus one day, depending on the months Cheshvan and Kislev), and a leap year is on average 384 days (plus/minus one day)
@@AbbySteinAS thanks! I was just asking because the video made no distinction between Gregorian calendar year, Julian, then whatever was before that.
Unless the hard work conversion of year lengths is already done, it's seems odd to assume the length of royal reigns are measured by the same years as ours?
The scholars that came up with year 966 after "fixing" the regnal dates for the monarchy period did take the calendar differences into consideration. However, when it comes to the chronology as a whole, it doesn't really matter because the extra months that are added to the Jewish calendar every now and then make the average year almost identical to the length of a solar calendar.
@@UsefulCharts Thanks! I had always wondered if it was safe to assume years were practically the same length through history or not. Cleans up some of the messiness
Egyptology as a science is rather suspect, and has been long before Rohl's book. There are enough discrepancies and contradictions between the dates allocated and the artifacts and writings to suggest a rewriting of Egyptian chronology, and an awful lot of people who have built their careers fighting for the current one, and who will look a bit silly should their foundation give way.
Except it matches dates from around it. So either you have to assume there was a vast conspiracy involving multiple nations, or maybe the people asserting some rewrite are wrong.
@@keith6706 Fair call Keith. The only way we'll really know is if Dr Who takes us back.
I'm not sure alterations in chronology are really enough to undermine the entire field of Egyptology. The vast majority of the time, chronology is less important than relative time. E.g. You can write books and books on a particular pharaoh, his predecessor, his family, the works he sponsored...etc, with the precise date he lived being much less important than his relative position in Egypt's history. The vast majority of sources that exist will be dated with relative methods, as opposed to absolute ones, with the exception of radiocarbon dating, so shifting everything forward or back by a hundred years wouldn't necessarily undermine all existing work nor would be it glaringly obvious from the evidence alone.
@@merrymachiavelli2041 I agree totally with your comment especially when Egyptian history is addressed in isolation. However, when trying to tie in events from other cultures, whether real or legendary, then the problem requires a flexibility that neither side of the argument seems to evince, especially if we are discussing "Bibilical" ones.
@@davidstokes8441 Trying to tie in Egyptian history with most biblical events is foolish given the sheer gap in time that exists between the Ancient Egyptian civilization and when the Bible was written. It would be like trying to reconcile William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar with the Roman records of Julius Caesar.
Another amazing video! I wonder if there is any connection between the ancient Israelites and the Hyksos. The Hyksos entered egypt in 1782 BCE, and they were a semitic people from the levant. This date is kind of close to the Christian date of when the Israelites entered Egypt.
Secondly, archaelogists have dated a layer of river sediment which covered lower mesopotamia to about 2900 BCE, and this was a result of a flood which may have inspired the mesopotamian flood myths which later influenced the hebrew flood myth.
Thirdly, the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel had different calendars. The Israelites celebrated their new year in the month of Abib/Aviv (Spring), which is also when they celebrated passover. Their calendar was a native Canaanite/Levantine system. The Judahites had their new year during Rosh Hashanah (same as today) and followed a calendar system similar to the mesopotamian system (inspired by the Assyrians and Babylonians).
It's quite likely in my opinion that Hyksos rule is the origin of the stories of Joseph in the Egyptian court, and the expulsion of the Hyksos is the source of the pursuit of the Israelites by the Egyptian army.
@@fluffysheap when you look at the generations passed between Joseph and Moses there are only three generations. Also Joseph is said to have met his father riding a chariot. Chariots did not exist in Egypt before the arrival of the Hyksos.
The story of Joseph happened during the 12th dynasty of ancient Egypt, during King Sesostris II and III. Exodus happened in the Thutmosis dynasty, possibly under Amenhotep II
@@sigana9115 To make such claims you must provide evidence and reasoning.
@@Emcee_Squared According to biblical chronology, the exodus happened in 1446 BC . Jacob and his family came to dwell in Egypt 430 years before the exodus (Ex 12:40.) Therefore, Jacob settled in Egypt in 1876 BC during the reign of Sesostris III who reigned 1878-1843 BC.
Joseph may have been brought to Egypt during the reign of Sesostris II his father. He may have been brought to Egypt as a slave during the processions of the Amu peoples who were bringing goods to Egypt from the levant. They included many peoples from the levant including Ishmaelite or Bedouin traders as mentioned in Genesis.
This is depicted in the tomb of Khnumhotep II. The children of Jacob settled in Goshen in lower Egypt and because of Joseph, were friendly to the rest of the 12th dynasty, and the 13th dynasty which was a female lineage continuation of the 12th dynasty.
At the same time, an independent dynasty of people from the levant, was developing which later became the Hyksos 15th dynasty after they took control of the whole lower Egypt including where the Hebrews settled.
The Hebrews were in good standing with the Hyksos because they had common area of origin, as the descendants of Jacob were from the levant and some of them had Canaanite and other Levantine peoples as wives as mentioned in Genesis.
The native Egyptians continued to rule from Thebes until they finally conquered lower Egypt and expelled the Hyksos by Ahmose I. By this time, centuries had passed since the Hebrews settled in Egypt and their population increased since they were given a city to settle by the native pharaoh court of the 12th dynasty.
They were a distinct people from the Hyksos but with common geographical origins with some historical intermingling. After expelling the Hyksos, Ahmose may have seen that the Hebrews would ally themselves with the Hyksos and overrun lower Egypt in an attempt to reconquer. So he put them in hard labor.
Thus being the Pharaoh who did not know Joseph he started oppressing the Hebrews with hard labor. According to Egyptology, Ahmose undertook many massive construction projects after expelling the Hyksos. He may have used Hebrews as hard labor in mortar and brick as stated in Exodus 1:14.
I was surprised to see that David Rohl got a mention. Maybe because I'm old enough to consider him an Immanuel Velikovsky wannabe.
Dr. Baker,
Thank you for this series. it has opened my eyes to a lot of understanding and other ways of looking at things. The series is well thought out and objective. This series made me want to look into what was said and make my own conclusions. It is like you are a guide and you show us paths but we are the ones that need to go down the path. Thank you for the great books you had put in the descriptions, I like deeper dives in the subjects you talk about.
I enjoy your channel immensely and I appreciate your thoughts and works and I hope you will continue this journey through history!
It’s obvious from Biblical records that Israel was in Egypt 215 years and this should be applied to both timelines, so this should be applied to the Christian timeline as well. I recommend searching for video “how long were Israelites in Egypt” which explains this in detail. Another issue with lost years is record of genealogy of some earlier Biblical characters where Septuagint says 130y and Masoretic text 30y as example
Being a literalist, I disagree with some of the presumptive context, nevertheless I always appreciate a well presented and put together lesson. Thank you for your input. FYI, literalist does not mean there cannot be "missing in translation". Academic consensus has nothing to do with reality if the whole is deliberately wrong. Again thank you for your videos
As a literalist, do you believe the earth is less than or equal to 10,000 years old and how do you reconcile that with archaeological evidence and our modern understanding of physics?
When you call into the question the whole of the academic world just to justify your belief perhaps it's time to reexamine your beliefs. I'm a believer but I'm also an academic and you cannot refute the verifiable facts of history based on the writings in one book.
@@JohnDoe-zh6cp According to the literalists God intentionally messes with the laws of physics and the archaeological/geological record as a test of faith. In other words, God let Satan plant dinosaur bones that are millions of years old just to test our faith in Him. I know, it's strains logic and credulity.
@@DominicNJ73 I know that’s what some literalists believe but I wanted to hear his answer from him.
@@JohnDoe-zh6cp I am a literalist who believes the earth is 4Bn (+/-) years old.
Just got the world history chart book for my birthday. Amazing work Matt. Love the channel and plan to support for a long time.
When we gonna get a cause and effect chart.
What program for animation do you use? @UsefulCharts
Adobe After Effects
I don't think you are especially looking for validation from King Bolo, but I just wanted to say that your channel is chock-full of absolutely topic quality stuff. Kudos!!! I will be showing all this to my kids.
I took note of the numbers and maybe lucky enough to finance my retirement savings. Amazing time used to make a timeline. Thank you, a good reading. I learned something new everyday.
Great video! I'm not sure that literalists would say that "everything" in the Bible is literal history though. Even my fundamentalist pastor would laugh at the idea that the seven headed leopard, bear, lion turtle in Revelation is an actual, literal creature that will rise out of the sea at the End of Days. I think a better definition might be "literalists believe that most things in the Bible are literal history."
@Grant Sherrill Fair enough 😆
If you are a literalist..it's all true or or all up to be questioned. You can't just pick and choose.
@@vdoggydogg3922 Well they do pick and choose. Whether or not that's legitimate is a separate discussion
Exodus 12:40 is a corrupted verse and should include Canaan. Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch and Josephus back this up
Shana Tovah, Thank you for all the effort you put into your work. Bless to be here ❤️
Here is a take about the Bible. The first woman rabbi said once that the Bible should be taken as a lesson to life. Whether it should be taken as actual history is up to you but also doesn't matter as long as you learn from it. History or not, it was written for people in the future to read.
Have you ever done a chart for who were people in power along biblical time-lines? Such as, who was Pharoah during the time of Joseph?
Thanks for this deep dive. Since I'm a religious person who places 0 weight in the literalists and young earth people, I thought this would be boring, but actually there were several historical things that I found fascinating. The 166 year gap was really interesting, and it is fascinating that between about 600 and 0AD a lot of historical dates get much "firmer" but before that time, there are still often debates that place events decades or centuries apart. The clean number of years is also interesting and these too clean and exact symbolic dates are pretty strong evidence that for many of the ancient Jewish religious leaders numerical symbolism was more important than exact records of history.
Yet, despite its imperfections the stories recorded are still some of the most complete, to survive until the modern day, and are frankly more likely to contain kernals of truth, than those from a similar time that contain only stories of gods, demi-gods, and superhumans.
I absolutely love these videos! Thank you for the hard work
First time I've heard about the 166 "missing years." I'm going to have to research that.
There is a discussion by Talmudic scholars (ancient scholars not modern day) that because Alexander came and the Jews started using a different Callender for years that when they came back the counting got messed up, this is followed by a student trying to figure out the date and his teacher telling him it is supposed to be unknown so that the year 6000 stays a mystery. 6000 is supposed to be the year the world ends and the post messianic world begins
When the Talmud states that (Rosh Hashana p.3b) "Cyrus is Darius is Artaxerxes" when it is clear that they're seperate characters, you get a discrepancy: ten kings ruling 200 years become a single king ruling for just 50...
That was a great vid, I really enjoyed it. I always appreciate it when religious view are compared but not diametrically opposed to one another.
Great Work Sir. Wow. You have a refreshing talent. These are great. TH-cam needs to offer check marks to channells with factual and logical aims. Your channel is just so far above what out there.
Shana Tova! Watching this got me thinking. The or A great flood is spoken of in legends myths and religions all over the world. Here you have a year it may have happened based on Jewish / Christian chronology. It would be interesting to see if the chronology of writings of other religions legends myths come any close to this. Or a comparison of any other major events that are similar. Mammoth task, but if you ever stuck on a topic, I know I'd be interested in it 😁
Edit - or you could just do the same topic of creation based on chronology of other religions (don't know why I didn't think of that first 🙄😂)
And.....if the flood actually happened as the bible says....then all people are descendants of Noah and thus all civilizations have a story of the flood.
Like the Thunderbird and Whale story in the Pacific northwest thought to be based on the megathrust earthquake and tsunami of January 26 1700?
Nope. The flood legend found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and embedded in Mesopotamian mythology and hence found in the mythology of Judaism/Christianity/Islam is fundamentally different from the flood legends found in for example in Northern European mythology.
For instance the Gilgamesh flood is a rain induced riverine flood as fits in an area with high levels of alluvial deposition and retreating coast lines. In Northern Europe the floods that destroyed the Land of Lionease in the Arthurian legends for example are sea inundations as befits a folk memory of lands lost to rising sea levels after the end of the last ice age in a region where sea levels were generally rising until rebound effects took over in the last 1000 years or so.
Oh also note we have written records from the supposed period of the “flood” in both Mesopotamia and Egypt neither of which mentions a flood except in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
@@nooneyouknowhere6148 or descendents of Manu if you're from India. Or descendents of the first Chinese empire if you're from China.
Great video as usual! I only had one little pet peeve of mine. I know its more politically "in" to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD (even though it really is kinda dumb because 2021 CE is just 2021 AD and you'd be pretty dull to not see there is a religious undertone to the year anyway), but I would think it would be more appropriate to use BC and AD in this video. My reasoning is this video is directly about religious text and is in that sort of context. So to me it seems a little weird to essentially go, "Now the Bible would suggest the world was created by God in the year xxxx SECULAR DATING SYSTEM."
Anyways, I hope that made a semblance of sense!
If this video was about Christian chronologies only, I would have used BC/AD. However, it was about both Christian and Jewish chronologies. Therefore, the more neutral term seemed more appropriate.
@@UsefulCharts I understand. I hope I didn't sound aggressive about it or anything, I just figured I'd share a thought. I enjoy pretty much all your videos Matt, keep it up!
No problem. Thanks 🙂
@@UsefulCharts My mild objection to BCE/CE is that the two abbreviations are easily confused. We should change CE to AV, for "Anno Vulgaris", (or whatever the correct Latin is for "Common Era") :-)
@@UsefulCharts Stick with the BCE/CE even when discussing xtian chronologies. We need to get our thinking about time out of the context of a hypothetical historical event.
I'll probably go along with the younger dryas impact as a go-between creation and the flood myths.
As in the creation being a time of great turmoil and rebirth of "humanity", and not the literal creation of the world.
But Meltwater Pulse 1a happened a lot longer ago than the current flood date estimate.
@@jakeaurod I would actually like to think that the increase in temperatures from meltwater 1a would have given us what we could interpret as a more legendary (as in plausible but overly embellished) "Adam and Eve" setting where there could be rapid growth in vegetation and the events during meltwater 1b as more of a time for Noah.
I love this Channel, this is so helpful and useful. Thank you very much Matt ❤
And then there's the theory that Abraham's "years" were 6 months long, based on the rainy/dry cycles where he lived, and that Noah counted his age in Lunar Months, since that was the most easily recognized cycle in his time/region. Counting age by solar years probably started with Jacob, as a result of Egyptian influence.
The Flood may have occurred when a warming Earth and rising sea levels after the last ice age flooded through the Bosporus and Dardanells flooding the Black sea area .
I read about a theory years ago that the destruction of the minoan civilisation might be a smoking gun for the great flood. The santorini supervolcano eruption would have created a super tsunami that would easily have reached and inundated the middle east, egypt, anatolia
@@derekscanlan4641 I heard it used to explain the Exodus too.
@@derekscanlan4641 It depends what you mean by 'innundated'. The tsunami would have been limited to coastal areas and islands, not the entire region. Even the largest tsunamis on record haven't tended to travel _that_ far inland - even if they are theoretically tall enough, the wave loses energy quickly once it comes ashore.
I've always seen the Bible more as a history book. You forgot to add how in the Bible it says like 'a day with the Lord is a thousand years of man.' With that, you'd need to add several thousand years to the beginning.
I've never been a Christian but I was raised as one - I always found my science books more interesting. I always liked the idea of the creation story being a metaphorical retelling of the Big Bang and the gradual formation and evolution of the Earth and life on it. It's obviously slightly off as it's written from a geocentric view of the universe, and a "day" varies dramatically in length from millions to billions of years, but if you simply moved day 4 (creation of the Sun and stars) to day 2, it would be a perfectly accurate (and extremely condensed!) summary of the history of Earth.
The Bible IS a history book but filtered through thousands of years of oral history and embellishments and exaggerations and mixed with a few fables and popular stories. A lot of the events can be tied to something historical, even if the years and details are way off. They're ancient stories passed down like Chinese whispers, like "my grandfather told me that when his grandfather's grandfather was about 30 years old..."
The thing is, the Bible was written for humans to understand, not for god. So a day should be considered by how we understand it to mean, not how god understands it.
@@ZatannaZataraGrayson Most of the really ancient stuff in the Bible likely originated in oral tradition - like stories around the campfire or at bedtime. Even the later stuff was written at a time way before we really understood cosmology or prehistoric timescales. It's not a case of years as God understands it, but more a case of "Daddy, how did everything start?", "Well I was always told that on the very first day, the creator said "Let there be light!"...". The dates were never going to be anywhere near perfect, and before we developed archaeological, geological and cosmological sciences, there was no way of knowing how much time had passed before the first human awoke, or even how long had passed since then.
@@BambiTrout Yeah, that's what I mean. None of it is supposed to be literal, so it wouldn't make sense to add 1000 years for each day because it's just a way to explain to people that it was just a Really Long Time. They don't actually mean that 1 God Day = 1000 years. And when they say that, they're comparing a human day vs. a god day, so it's still centered around human understanding of time.
@@ZatannaZataraGrayson I get you now :)
Clearly they were stoners and went with the 420 joke.
Feel bad for the scribe who sucked at the abacus, but ended up being the cited source for all temple records. I'm sure his rabbi is just kicking himself.
Chag Sameach all! I hope every one has a happy, healthy, and sweet new year.