Beautiful evidence of the Exodus from Egypt in 1446
I recently tried to find out when the counting of the number of shemitts for which the Babylonian exile was decreed began – without success. While searching, I came across an article (link below) about evidence that seems impressive but thought-provoking that the Exodus from Egypt was in 1446 BCE. Below is a summary of the argument for the benefit of Hebrew-speaking humanity.
The Babylonian Talmud mentions two events in biblical times, and only two, in which the Jubilee occurred. One in Erechin (12:12) about Ezekiel and the other in Megillah (14:12) about Josiah. The Gemara in Erechin deals with the fact that Rosh Hashanah mentioned in Ezekiel 40 occurred on the 10th of the month and concludes from this that it was of course a Jubilee year.
And it is written ( Ezekiel 40:1) ‘ In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, in the tenth month, in the fourteenth year after the city was smitten’ – What year is Rosh Hashanah in the tenth of the month? It says it is a jubilee.
Ezekiel dates the vision in this text in two ways. The first, the 25th year of his exile (the exile of Jehoiachin). According to the Babylonian chronicles, Jehoiachin was captured on the second of Adar 957 BCE, meaning that the first year of this exile was in the Jewish regnal year that began in Tishrei of 598 BCE, and it follows that the 25th year began in Tishrei of 574 BCE (hereinafter we will call the regnal year according to the Jewish year BCE in Tishrei with the addition of t, thus: 574t). The second dating that Ezekiel provides is “the fourteenth year of the other “which the city was struck down.” “Another” tells us that 14 full years had passed since the city’s fall, similar to the style of the genealogies in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible. Jerusalem was captured in Tammuz, summer 587 BCE, the year that began in Tishrei of 588 BCE (588t). 14 years later brings us back to 574 BCE, which is consistent with the first dating method.
In the second case, the Gemara is concerned with the question of where the great leader of the generation, Jeremiah, was while Josiah’s representatives went to consult with Hulda.
Rabbi Yochanan said: Jeremiah was not an innocent man who went to restore the ten tribes and to bring them back from the land of Hador, as it is written (Ezekiel 17:13). “For the seller will not return to the seller.” Is it possible for a Jubilee to be null and void and for a prophet to prophesy about it to be null and void? Rather, the Song of Songs teaches that the pig is a pig.
Although the idea that Jeremiah brought back the ten tribes is completely imaginary, its purpose is to explain how the Jubilee could have been celebrated that year. Rabbi Yochanan’s argument is that in order for the Jubilee to occur, the ten tribes must be in their proper place, and he tried to reconcile this with the fact that the Jubilee was celebrated in the year in which Josiah’s representatives consulted with the Hulda – on the 18th of Yashyah (2 Kings 22:3). This entire chain of events is of course wrong, but it should not be taken for granted that the fundamental assumption from which the Gemara began and which it tries to explain is also wrong. What the Gemara sees as the binding sources on which it offers its interpretations are those taken from the Bible and the idea that the Jubilee was celebrated on the 18th of Yashyah, and the different opinions are expressed around these sources. The assumption that the Jubilee was celebrated in the year of the meeting with the Hulda arises because it is mentioned in the “Seder Olam”, and the Talmud in principle sees the Seder Olam as a source of authority. Chapter 24 of the Seder Olam quotes from what is said in 2 Kings 22:3 about the 18th of Yashyah, stating that “that year a Torah scroll was found in the house of the Lord, and that year It was the beginning of a jubilee, and in that year Josiah inspected the house.” The passage from the Chronicles also simply shows that this is the source of these traditions, as the discussion there begins with three quotations from chapter 11 of the Seder Olam.
When was the jubilee celebrated? Scholar Edwin Thiele established the year of Josiah’s accession as 641 BC. His reign, 31 years in number, ended in 610 BC. The 18th of his reign was therefore
641t – 18 = 623t
Exactly 49 years before the date of the second jubilee mentioned in the Talmud, in 574t.
The author of the article elaborates on the fact that the ancient sources provide decisive evidence that the Jubilee cycle lasted 49 years and not 50. Although post-Talmudic sources such as Rashi and Maimonides generally settled on 50, the pre-Talmudic sources lean heavily towards the fact that it was actually a 49-year cycle. These sources include the Book of Jubilees (2nd century BCE), the Qumran fragments known as 11QMelchizedek or 11QMelch (early first century), and more. The Book of Jubilees could not have been credible in the eyes of its target audience if they thought in the 2nd century BCE that a Jubilee could be 50 years. The “seventy weeks” of Daniel (9:24) are simply interpreted in the Qumran fragment as seventy shemitahs, and the 490 years as 10 Jubilee cycles. In Samaritan history, the jubilee cycles were kept as cycles of 49. In addition, there is no biblical source that suggests two consecutive years in which the field is not sown. All these problems are solved at once once one assumes that the 49th omission is identical to the jubilee. The author of the article refers to additional evidence.
So on the one hand, we have here the fact that the two jubilees mentioned in the Talmud are placed exactly 49 years after each other, in accordance with the various evidence that bases the jubilee cycle on 49. On the other hand, it is clear that the Talmudists were not able to arrive at the fact that the 18th of Joshua was exactly 49 years before Ezekiel’s vision using the computational methods available to them. In the Talmudic calculation, the last year of a king was counted twice, once for him and once for his successor, so that when calculating the duration of a reign, one year must be subtracted from the years indicated in the Bible in order to determine the total time. The origin of the method is in the ‘Seder Olam’ (as is evident from chapters 4, 12), and only through it is it possible to refer to the number of years that “Israel spent in the land from the time they entered it until they left it” (Seder Olam 11) as 850. The Talmud accepts this number (Gittin 5, Sanhedrin 30) without question. Still, he knows that the 18th of Josiah was a jubilee.
The author of the article calculates how, according to the method of calculation in the Gemara and the Seder Olam, the length of time between the two jubilees comes out to be 47 (and not 49 – the time based on modern research, and as confirmed by the Babylonian chronicles). From this he derives clear evidence that the Talmud and the Seder Olam did not base Josiah’s jubilee on any calculation, and if anything, such a calculation should have prevented them from being attributed in this way. The only plausible alternative, which also explains why the difference in years between them is precisely 49, is that the date for both was established independently in tradition due to the very historical memory of the events. This was possible because the priests were still counting shemitts and jubilees at that time. Of course, this does not mean that the people kept them, but only that the priests – Ezekiel among them, as well as Jeremiah – remained faithful to their commitment to preserving meticulous documentation of the cycles of shemitts and jubilees. As in other societies in the Near East, such things were part of the priest’s duty.
The author speaks of the Jubilee as an extraordinary device for measuring time over long periods of time. The mutual combination of the two cycles, 7 Sabbaths of years that together form a Jubilee cycle, was a device for ensuring the accuracy of the count for the hundreds of years that Israel lived on its land. Due to the shortness of the Shemitic cycle, the resulting method of counting years prevents errors of even one year, while the longer Jubilee cycle combines this to record long periods of time. If the priest preserved time in this way, then this is a system that surpasses in its accuracy even the Assyrian Limmo records that are generally considered the backbone of ancient Near Eastern chronologies. This is probably how Jephthah the Judge knew that 300 years had passed from the conquest of Transjordan to his time (Judges 11:26), and this also explains how the author of Malachi 1 (6:1) knew that 479 years had passed from the Exodus to the laying of the foundations of Solomon’s Temple, so that he could determine that this occurred in the 480th year of the Exodus. Evidence for this is also found in Sanhedrin 40, where it is stated that during the time of the Judges, the courts used to check which Shemitah was part of the Jubilee and which year the Shemitah was. This is joined by the Book of Jubilees from the second century BCE, whose descriptions are analogous to those described in the Talmud.
Further confirmation that priests were still counting Shemittas towards the end of the Jewish monarchy can be seen from the date of Zedekiah’s release of the slaves (Jeremiah 34:8-22). According to the calculation we have presented, the release occurred exactly on Shemittas (when the Jubilees were in 574t and 623t, which means that 588t was a Shemittas year), exactly the year that is also the year of Zedekiah’s release of the slaves according to other calculations, which arise from reference to events described in the Bible (William Whisto, Cyrus Gordon., Nahum Sarna).
Further evidence from the Order of the World. In chapter 11 it is said there:
“And so he says (Ezekiel 40:1): “In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year and the third,” when was he told? At the beginning of the jubilee.”
Then Seder Olam mentions that that jubilee completed 17 jubilees, a number that the Gemara repeats in Arakhin (12:1). Is it possible that here too we are talking about a specific remembrance according to tradition, as with the jubilees during the time of Josiah and Ezekiel, and not a retrospective calculation?
You can simply do the calculation. If the 17th Jubilee falls in 574t, then the first Jubilee, 16 rounds earlier, should have fallen on
574t +(49 x16) = 1358t
The year that began in Nisan 1358 BCE was therefore the 49th year of the first jubilee cycle, according to Leviticus 25:8-10. That is, the first year of this cycle, 48 years earlier, was the year that began in Nisan 1406 BCE. The reference to the 17th jubilee in the Seder Olam and the Talmud therefore allows us to place the entry into the land in Nisan 1406 BCE. Therefore, the Exodus, 40 years earlier, occurred in Nisan 1446 BCE. All of this is in exact accordance with the date that many scholars have already determined previously and independently according to the Book of Exodus, based on the statement in Malachi 6:1 that the construction of the Temple began in the 480th year of the Exodus, which was also the 4th year of Solomon’s reign, and also based on Edwin Thiele’s date that 931n (Nisan 1406 BCE) was the year of Solomon’s death and the beginning of the divided kingdom. Thiele’s calculation, published over 50 years ago, has stood the test of time and survived the scrutiny of scholars. How can the exact match be explained unless we admit that 623t was really the 16th Jubilee and 574t was really the 17th Jubilee?
Certainly, no author before Thiele’s time could seriously establish 1446 BCE as the date of the Exodus. The critical date for the beginning of the division of the kingdoms was simply not given to us before his work in the mid-20th century. And of course, the writers of the Seder Olam and the Talmud, with their methods of calculation, could not have imagined that this was the date. It seems that the only plausible alternative we have here is that the counting of the Shemitts and Jubilees began in 1406 BCE and that there were priests in Israel who faithfully observed the proclamation of the Shemitts and Jubilees throughout the generations, blowing the shofar every 49 years to a largely indifferent audience, until the tragic event 14 years after the destruction when the time for the Jubilee had come but could no longer be observed on foreign soil even if they had wanted to.
Summarize
The Talmudic method of calculating chronologies was unable to correctly determine the two jubilees during the time of Josiah and Ezekiel, so it had to be based on historical memory rather than calculation. The fact that a jubilee occurred in 574 BCE can be deduced just from looking at Ezekiel even without the Talmud, but the Talmudic consideration supports the insight that the Hebrew text draws our attention to the fact that it is a jubilee. The other jubilee in the Talmud, in 18 Yehoshua, is dated 49 years earlier, in accordance with the evidence and considerations that establish 49-year jubilee cycles. The Talmud and Seder Olam describe Ezekiel’s jubilee as the 17th jubilee, which indicates that the count began at the time of the entry into the land in 1406 BCE, and hence 1446 BCE as the year of the Exodus, in full accordance with Thiele’s dating for the beginning of the division of the kingdoms and the chronological note in Malachi (6:1). It is difficult to imagine how such an extraordinary correspondence to the date of the Exodus, which is independently derived by two different methods of calculation, can be explained by theories that assume a date other than 1406 for the entry into Canaan, or that deny that the laws of Leviticus dealing with the Shemitah and Jubilees were already before the people of Israel at the time in question. The Talmudic Jubilees are consistent with Ezekiel (40:1), and the dates derived from them confirm that the 480 years that the Bible attributes to the Exodus and the year of the Exodus derived from this number reflect authentic historical reality. It is hard to believe that all the facts are coincidental: Zedekiah’s Shemitah corresponds to Ezekiel’s Jubilee, the mention of another Jubilee (during Josiah’s time) comes exactly 49 years before Ezekiel’s Jubilee, but later writers were unable to calculate this correctly, the fact that it just so happens that the Jubilee times during Josiah’s and Ezekiel’s times make 1406 BCE – the time of entry into Canaan according to 1 Kings 6:1 – the first year of the first Jubilee cycle, and the extreme coincidence that 1406 BCE marks the beginning of the first cycle when one takes into account the tradition that Ezekiel’s Jubilee is the 17th Jubilee.
