CHKONOLOGY OF THE KINGS OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH. 265 



this year may be omitted, and the years of Athaliah reduced to 

 six. Xo injury will thereby accrue in any way to my main 

 argument. 



In transferring a chronological reckoning from regnal years 

 to dates B.C. an apparent difference of one or two years may 

 arise for three reasons: firstly, the regnal months not being 

 given, it is not possible to tell whether the years slated are in 

 excess or defect of the true amount of years and months : we 

 do not even know how many months were considered necessary 

 to justify their being set down as a year ; secondly, we do not 

 know the epoch from which the kings' reigns were reckoned : 

 it may have been from the day of accession, it may have been 

 from the Xew Year's day of the accession year : thirdly, the 

 new years in the Jewish lunar reckoning and in the modern 

 chronologers B.C. begin at different annual epochs. In the 

 absence of more definite data it is impossible to harmonise 

 more closely than to a difference of two years on either side. 

 Much ingenuity lias been wasted in attempting to evade this 

 impossibility. I have thought it sufficient to delete those cross 

 references of the compilers which are palpably mistaken in their 

 reckoning. Those in the reign of Uzziah are of course due to 

 my proposed shift of Pekah's position : the others are inherent 

 in the text and cannot be got rid oi without conjectural 

 alterations on any hypothesis w^iatever. These calculations are 

 therefore too inaccurate to be of much help, and the only use I 

 have made of them is to reckon the reigns of Baasha, Elah and 

 Omri as ending in current years not after complete ones ; a 

 course which has been taken by all my most important 

 predecessors in this investigation. 



If my scheme is correct, one or two passages in the 

 prophetic writings have a new light thrown on them. The 

 year that king Uzziah died," Isaiah vi, 1, is 740 or 739 B.C. 

 "The two years before the earthquake," Amos i, 1, becomes 

 identified with the narrative in Josephus (Aiitiq. ch. ii) and 

 fixes the date of Amos to 761 B.C., in exact accordance with the 

 results of modern criticism : and the " three shepherds cut off 

 in one month," Zechariah xi, 8. that is to say, before the expiry 

 of the second month, will be Jotham, Pekah and Shalluiii. This 

 requires the invasion of Pekah to be extremely short, only of a 

 few weeks, and in no other way can I understand how the 

 invasion of Pekah and Eezin, which " began " in the time of 

 Jotham (2 Kings xv, 27) and was so successful in the 

 commencement of the reign of Ahaz (2 Chron. xxviii), could have 

 been brought to a close so sudden and resultless than bv the 



s 2 



