The Missing Years of Rabbinic Chronology

I’ve been trying to read through the Talmud, one of the key texts of Rabbinic Judaism, through a 7 year 5 month cycle called daf yomi. (Admittedly, I’ve fallen about a month behind and am trying to catch up by reading two days worth of reading each day.) A while back, I read something in one of the footnotes to the text which indicated that the traditional Rabbinic chronology doesn’t match that of academic historians, especially around the history of the Persian Empire, which plays a big role in the later books of the Jewish Scriptures.

I did a little research, and this is apparently a serious issue, sometimes referred to as the “Missing Years”. So, for instance, mainstream academic history tends to date the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel to the 8th century BCE, around 722 BCE. According to the traditional Jewish Rabbinic chronology, though, it occurred in 555 BCE. Similarly, the destruction of the first Jewish Temple is usually dated to 587 BCE, but calculating it based on the Talmud and other Rabbinic sources results in a date of 421 BCE.

The source of this discrepancy seems to be rooted in different accounts of the history of the Persian Empire. Relying on ancient Greek, Babylonian and Persian sources, academic historians identify ten Persian kings whose reign covered 208 years. According to the Talmud, however, there were only four Persian kings, and their reign only covered 52 years. This seems an odd thing for the Rabbis to have gotten wrong, since the Babylonian Talmud was written in Babylonia during the 3rd-6th centuries CE, a period when Babylon was under the control of a revived Persian empire (though admittedly not the same Persian Empire as the one we’re talking about here).

So it seems likely that the source of the problem is trying to squeeze 200 years of Persian history into 50 years of time, which results in the entire Rabbinic chronology being a bit off-kilter.

There have been a number of reactions to this problem among modern Jewish thinkers and historians. Many, starting as early as the 16th century, realized that the traditional dates were off and began to prefer the secular dating. Some have even suggested that the Rabbis might have intentionally introduced these errors into their chronology because they were interested in having the date of the redaction of the Mishnah (the codification of Rabbinic “oral law” that formed the first layer of the Talmud) match up with the year 4000 in the Hebrew calendar (to better align with traditional views about the year 4000 marking the end of the “era of Torah”). One Jewish scholar suggested (but later retracted) the idea that perhaps the Rabbis intentionally “covered up” a period of history by divine command. He pointed to a passage in the Book of Daniel where God orders Daniel to “seal the words and close the book”, relating to a passage where Daniel had prophesied about, among other things, the history of the Persian Empire.¹ But there are some even today who defend the traditional Rabbinic dating and argue that secular, academic historians are the ones who’ve gotten it wrong.

1. Check out the article by Rabbi Simon Schwab. The whole thing is a great overview of this problem, and his suggestion occurs on p. 7 of the PDF.