The Four Hundred and Eighty Years

The verse is one sentence, and half the dates on the early half of this timeline lean on it. In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, he began to build the house of the LORD. 1 Kings 6:1

The fourth year of Solomon is not written on an Assyrian prism. It is reached by stepping backward from kings who are. Ahab is at Qarqar in 853 BC. Jehu pays tribute around 841. Shalmaneser and Sargon take Samaria in 722. From those anchors, through the regnal totals in Kings, allowing the coregencies the numbers seem to require, Solomon's fourth year falls about 966 BC, and the split about 930. Subtract 480 from 966 and the exodus is about 1446. Add forty and the Jordan is about 1406. That is the early date, and it is only as calm as those steps.

The other reading says 480 is twelve generations of a round forty, a schematic number, not a tally a clerk would defend to the year. On that view the verse still ties the temple to the exodus, and it does not give a number you may subtract. The exodus then has to be dated from the name Raamses and from the archaeology of Canaan, which is how people arrive near 1260. Both readings are laid out in The Date of the Exodus, including what Merneptah does and does not settle.

A third issue sits inside the 480 itself. If you add every number in Judges, plus Eli, Samuel, Saul, and David, you can get more than 480. The answer is not to delete a verse. The judges' rests are regional and overlapping, which is The Years of the Judges. Saul's total is a damaged verse. Coregencies mean a father and a son share years, so adding every reign as if the son began at the funeral double-counts. Edwin Thiele's work on the Hebrew kings is the reconstruction most of these BC dates follow. It is a reconstruction. It takes the biblical numbers seriously enough to notice when they overlap, and it uses the Assyrian eponym lists as the outside rail. Where this timeline says "about 966" or "about 930," that is the rail. Where it says "aligned," a named king or a named event is actually on a foreign record from that year.

The temple verse remains the biblical clock for everything before Solomon. This page would rather show the hinge than hide it under one confident century.