Tags: egypt, exodus, conquest, jubilee, ebal, sabbatical, gerizim, chronology, 1 kings 6, shechem--> In a recent issue of JETS, Ralph Hawkins sidestepped the insurmountable problems associated with a late-date exodus-conquest[1] and offered five arguments which he suggested “may open up the possibility of a renewed consideration of the Late Date Exodus-Conquest as a viable choice for evangelicals.”[2] Three of the arguments are textual and two are archaeological. The present paper addresses these five issues. I. HAWKINS’S TEXTUAL ARGUMENTS: THE 480 YEARS OF 1 KGS 6:1 ARE SYMBOLIC OR ARTIFICIAL 1. First wrong textual argument: the 480 years are inconsistent with the chronology of Judges. The 479 years of elapsed time indicated in 1 Kgs 6:1[3] are entirely consistent with the chronology of the book of Judges, as Paul Ray, Andrew Steinmann,[4] and other authors have shown, whereas a thirteenth-century exodus cannot be reconciled with its timespans and sequences. The various pericopes of Judges can be divided into two classes, the sequenced and those that might be called unprovenanced, to use a term familiar to archaeologists. Sequenced stories are those that are connected to what immediately precedes or follows by a time-sequence phrase (some are connected at only one end). An example is Judg 10:1–2 (NIV), “After the time of Abimelech a man of Issachar, Tola son of Puah, the son of Dodo, rose to save Israel. . . . He led Israel twenty-three years.” Unprovenanced pericopes are those which are not related by a sequence-expression to either what precedes or to what follows. Examples are the story of Samson (Judg 13–16), the story of Micah and the Danites (Judg 17–18), and the final three chapters of Judges. The only chronological marker in the history of Samson states that he judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines (Judg 15:20; 16:31). This could have overlapped a part of the judgeships of Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, or Abdon, who also were active in the days of the wars against the Philistines.[5] Judges 13–16, then, provides an example of a pericope which is not in strict chronological order with what precedes and follows, and the proper way to determine the chronology of Judges is to distinguish between these unprovenanced sections and those that are sequenced. Sequences of years can be constructed from the latter, and the interpreter must then seek the most reasonable time to assign to the unprovenanced passages. It is completely improper to just add all the numbers together without this consideration, as Hawkins does in order to discredit the testimony of Judges as a chronological witness.[6] For Hawkins, it is essential that the credibility of the numbers in Judges be negated, because the numbers exceed the time that proponents of a late-date exodus can afford to give to the time of the judges. This is true even with a judicious approach to the chronological data instead of Hawkins’s and Hoffmeier’s artificial adding up of everything. The proper approach to Judges, then, is to carefully study which sections are sequenced and which are unprovenanced, taking note of the exact meaning of the various bridge passages and considering whatever extra information is available, such as the 300 years of Judg 11:26. Advocates of a thirteenth-century exodus cannot afford to take this approach, and so they must discredit the data. Or, in the case of Kitchen’s treatment of Judg 11:26, he defames poor Jephthah.[7] But with the proper literal approach to the text, the pericopes in Judges are compatible with the 480th-year datum of 1 Kgs 6:1. They cannot be made compatible with an entry into the land in the late thirteenth or early twelfth (per Hawkins; see below, sec. II.2.a) century bc. 2. Second wrong textual argument: the 480 years represent twelve generations. Hawkins repeats the familiar argument that the 480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1 are a symbolic representation of twelve generations of forty years each. He gives as his basis van Daalen’s comments in The Oxford Companion to the Bible.[8] As supporting evidence for 40 years = one generation, van Daalen cites Exod 16:35; Num 14:33, 32:13; Ezek 4:6 and 29:11.[9] The first three of these citations refer to the forty years that Israel wandered in the desert, while the Ezekiel passages refer to other forty-year periods that are irrelevant to the discussion. For the present purposes, Num 32:13 can be taken as representative of the texts that are sometimes used to support the equation of forty years with a generation (others that can be cited are Deut 2:14, Ps 95:10, and Heb 3:9–10). These texts relate that the Lord was angry with that generation (dōr in Hebrew, genea in Greek) for forty years while they wandered in the wilderness (in Deut 2:14, thirty-eight years, i.e. from the time of leaving Kadesh Barnea). In the passages cited the word “generation” is not equated with forty years, nor is it equated to the thirty-eight years in Deut 2:14. Instead, the forty or thirty-eight years are given as the time necessary for that dōr to die, excepting those under twenty years of age (Num 14:29). The word dōr in these passages does not refer to a lapse of time, such as the time from the birth of a father to the birth of his son, although that is one of its meanings elsewhere. This could not be the meaning in the case of Israel in the wilderness because every parent who had children twenty years old or older died together with those children; this would have been two generations dying in the wilderness if the meaning were a time lapse between the birth of the parent and the birth of the child. The lexicons recognize that there is another meaning of dōr, which is “simply ‘contemporaries.’”[10] An example is Gen 6:9, where Noah was a righteous man among his dōr. In the NT, the genea that tempted God in the wilderness in Heb 3:10 and the genea that sought a sign in Matt 12:39 indicate the same meaning: a group of contemporaries, not a measure of elapsed time. By failing to recognize the specific meaning of “generation” in these passages and taking it to mean a period of elapsed time, rather than a group of people, van Daalen and others have reached an erroneous conclusion. Moreover, Hawkins fails to deal with the arguments previously presented showing the incorrectness of this conclusion.[11] The reduction of the 480 years into twelve generations of forty years fails because of this wrong practice of equating the “generation” with a period of forty years. This does not mean that the number forty in general and a forty-year timespan in particular are not significant in the Scriptures. Nevertheless, there is no indication in the text of 1 Kgs 6 that the reader was supposed to derive a hidden meaning by dividing 480 by forty to get twelve generations. When 1 Kgs 6:1 states that Temple construction began in the 480th year of the exodus-era, the only conclusion that the reader was intended to draw was that 479 years had passed, and unfortunately many commentators and translators miss even this meaning of the verse.[12] 3. Third wrong textual argument: the 480 years are an artificial construct designed to put the Temple at the center of Israelite history. a. The attempt of Burney to show that the 480 years are artificial. In a further attempt to discredit the 480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1 as unhistorical, Hawkins appeals to the work of Charles Burney, published in 1903.[13] Burney repeated the notion of earlier authors that the author of 1 Kgs 6:1 artificially constructed the 480 years based on a “known” period from a later time in Israelite history: “[T]he author of our verse [1Kgs 6:1] . . . may thus have purposely approximated the length of the little-known period from the Exodus to the building of the Temple to the chronology of some subsequent period for the knowledge of which he possessed available sources.”[14] The theory that the 480 years are derived from the regnal data contradicts Hawkins’s first argument that they symbolize twelve generations of forty years each, but he seems to want it both ways.
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