When the text was written
- 1 630 BCE — Nahum: composed somewhere between 663 and 612
- 2 604 BCE — Jeremiah dictates the scroll to Baruch (Jeremiah 36)
- 3 593 BCE — Ezekiel: the dated oracles begin
- 4 585 BCE — Lamentations: after the destruction it laments
- 5 545 BCE — Isaiah 40-55, on the mainstream critical dating
- 6 165 BCE — Daniel reaches its final form, on the critical dating
When the event happened
- 1 626 BCE — Nabopolassar takes Babylon; the Neo-Babylonian empire begins
- 2 612 BCE — Nineveh falls to Babylon and the Medes
- 3 605 BCE — Carchemish: Nebuchadnezzar defeats Egypt
- 4 597 BCE — Jerusalem taken; Jehoiachin deported to Babylon
- 5 586 BCE — Jerusalem destroyed and the temple burned
- 6 562 BCE — Nebuchadnezzar dies
- 7 539 BCE — Cyrus takes Babylon; the Persian period begins
Eighty-seven years, from the revolt that founded the Neo-Babylonian empire to the night it ended. It is the best-dated stretch of the Hebrew Bible’s world, and the reason is that Babylonian scribes kept a running record and some of it survived.
The chart above carries two bands. The lower one marks events that can be dated from records made outside the biblical tradition. The upper one marks when the relevant biblical texts are generally held to have been composed. Reading the gap between the two bands is the point of the exercise: for some texts it is decades, for others it is centuries, and for one of them the gap is the whole argument.
Why this period is different
For most of the biblical narrative the external record is thin, intermittent and hard to align. From the last quarter of the seventh century BCE it becomes dense. Babylonian chronicle tablets record campaigns by regnal year; administrative documents are dated to the day; astronomical diaries fix particular years against observable events. The result is that the fall of Nineveh, the battle of Carchemish, the first capture of Jerusalem and the fall of Babylon are dated with a precision that is not available for anything in the Bible before them.
That precision is borrowed, not biblical. The Bible dates events by regnal years of its own kings, and reconciling those with the Babylonian calendar is a technical problem in its own right. But once the two systems are aligned at a few fixed points, the alignment holds.
The fixed points
612 BCE — Nineveh falls. A Babylonian chronicle tablet records the siege and the capture of the city by the combined forces of Babylon and the Medes. This is the event announced by the book of Nahum, and it is the subject of a dossier on this site.
605 BCE — Carchemish. Nebuchadnezzar, then crown prince, defeats the Egyptian army. The chronicle records it, and it is the event that transfers control of the Levant from Egypt to Babylon. Jeremiah 46 addresses it.
597 BCE — Jerusalem taken, Jehoiachin deported. A chronicle tablet dates the capture of the city to a specific day and states that the king was replaced by one of Babylon’s choosing. This is the single most precisely fixed event in the Hebrew Bible: a day, from a document written by the other side. Ration tablets from Babylon subsequently list provisions issued to Jehoiachin and his sons by name.
586 BCE — Jerusalem destroyed. The temple is burned and the second and largest deportation follows. The chronicle series is broken for these years, so the date rests on biblical chronology aligned to the fixed points around it, and a minority of scholars argue for 587. The one-year uncertainty is real and should not be smoothed over.
539 BCE — Babylon falls to Cyrus. Recorded in a chronicle and celebrated in Cyrus’s own inscription. The Persian period begins, and with it the return described in Ezra.
What the upper band is doing
The text markers are placed according to the dating positions set out in the book overviews on this site, and every one of them is an argued position rather than a fact. Ezekiel’s oracles are placed by the book’s own internal dates, which is unusually secure. Lamentations is placed after the destruction it laments, which is nearly as secure. Isaiah 40 to 55 is placed in the exilic period, which is the mainstream critical position and is contested — the entire dispute about Isaiah’s authorship is the distance between where that marker sits and where the traditional position would put it.
Daniel’s marker sits far to the right of everything else, in the second century, for reasons set out in the topic study on its authorship. Placing it there is not a conclusion this chart establishes; it is a position the chart displays so that its consequences are visible.
How to use it
Pick any event marker and ask which text markers sit to its left. Those are the texts that, on the dating shown, were already written when it happened. Then ask which sit to its right, and what it would mean if one of them moved.
The reading plan The Exile in Order walks the same period in twenty-one readings, in the sequence the events occurred rather than the order the books are printed in.