Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dates of Ezra and Nehemiah
  • Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:26:29 +0100

On 18/09/2006 15:44, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

... While your
identification of arrival at "1/5, 3 days rest, and 55 days building" is
interesting, there are still problems:

1) Nehemiah is consistent in relating the year 20 to Artaxerxes,
especially in Neh 5:14, where it is pretty much spelled out.
2) Nehemiah 2's Nisan after before Nehemiah 1's Kislev on the same
year. Either you conclude that the year 20 in Neh 1 is a different
convention from Neh 2's year 20, or you conclude that Nehemiah
used an autumnal calendar. An autumnal calendar would make
the calculations of the start of work in Ab equivalent to the 11th
month, not the 5th. The autumnal calendar bit is further elaborated
and discussed here:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/bibs/DJACcurrres/Postmodern1/Autumn.html
(point 7)

Thanks for your reminder about this, which I received earlier but didn't have time to respond to immediately.

Thanks for the article from Clines (I presume). I note that he supports me and Young in taking numbered months as starting in spring even if the new year was celebrated in the autumn, for he writes:
late in Jehoiakim's fourth year, say in September, Jeremiah is bidden to write his scroll, and Baruch gives a public reading in December (Kislev, the ninth month) of the fifth year. ...
some advocates of the autumn new year claim that the year was still regarded as beginning in the autumn even when the months were numbered from the spring.

The implication of this is that even if Nehemiah was using an autumnal calendar he left Susa in spring, arrived in Jerusalem in midsummer, finished the wall in Elul in late summer, and the "seventh month" dedication (8:2) was at the autumn new year festival. And Ezra's travel seasons were similar.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page