The Old Testament is first organized into the following three major sections without altering in any way the order in which the books already appear in the Christian Old Testament Bible.

• "Historical"---comprising the first 17 books from "Genesis to Esther"

• "Writings"---comprising the center 5 books from "Job to Song of Songs"

• "Prophets"---comprising the last 17 books from "Isaiah to Malachi"

Entire books within these major sections are then further grouped together according to the commonality of subjects found to be contained in them. Once again, this is done without altering in any way the order in which the books already appear in the Christian Old Testament Bible.

Each book in the Old Testament is reviewed and outlined according to its content. This step will provide you a cursory review of the entire Old Testament if you are not already entirely familiar with it, and additionally will allow you to check the rationale for the above topical sub-groupings.

The present division of Old Testament books and their particular placement in the Old Testament Bible is certainly not the only one used throughout history. The present day Jewish version of the Old Testament places the books of the prophets, i.e. Isaiah -- Malachi, immediately after II Kings. In addition, the books of Lamentations, Ecclesiates, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, I Chronicles, and II Chronicles are placed at the end of the Old Testament. Furthermore, early versions of both the Jewish and Christian Old Testaments grouped the topics together to form only 21 books instead of the present 39.

However, notice that this particular arrangement creates a certain symmetry with respect to the "WRITINGS" that fall at the center of the Old Testament, and that each grouping does discuss a topic distinctly different from the ones before or after.

In order to see the distinctive nature of this arrangement, you may review each of these three major groupings.

The New Testament is first organized into the following four major sections without altering in any way the order in which the books already appear in the Christian New Testament Bible.

"Gospels"---comprising the first 4 books from Matthew to John

"History"---the following book of Acts

"Church Letters"---comprising the next 13 books in the New Testament from Romans to Philemon

"Hebrew Letters"---comprising the last 9 books in the New Testament from Hebrews to Revelation

Entire books within the last two major sections are then further organized as appropriate into topical sub-groupings according to the commonality of subjects found to be contained in them. Once again, this is done without altering in any way the order in which the books already appear in the Christian New Testament Bible.

Just as with the Old Testament, all of the New Testament books are summarized and outlined separately for content and correspondence.

In order to see the distinctive nature of this arrangement, you may review each of these four major groupings.

For the purpose of studying Old Testament chronology, it will be divided into the seven segments shown above. It will be possible to assign specific dates and time periods to each of these segments, however to understand the way in which this is done will require that the segments must be studied in a particular order.

The Old Testament of the Bible is not an easy book to understand and it is made even more difficult by it's near absence of dates and time periods connecting many of the more important events. Those few events that are dated may be specified as a month or day in a Levitical calendar or according to the year of the reign of some ancient king, but never in a way that permits easy association with our modern-day calendar. Thus we are left guessing as to the time the event occurred or as to the elapsed time between it and some other important event.

A Calendar would be a great asset to Bible study, however several questions are frequently posed concerning the reliability of such a result.

• Is the Old Testament accurate when it specifies times when things occurred?

• Was the length of a year then the same as it is now?
  
  The Old Testament matter-of-factly records the ages of some of the men in ancient times to be hundreds of years! Such life spans are incredible to our thinking and cause people to question not only its veracity but the length of a year in ancient times.

• Is it possible to reconcile time periods within the Old Testament, specifically in the books of the Kings and Chronicles?
  
  A close scrutiny of certain Bible texts will reveal that some of the numbers don’t add up. In particular, the Old Testament books of the Kings and Chronicles give the reigns of the kings of Israel, but when the time spans within the books are compared or when the totals are added up they don’t always check out. Consequently, many people along with some Bible historians have concluded that Bible accuracy is suspect and precise dating impossible.

• How accurate were the ancient calendars used by Israel and the surrounding Gentile nations?
  
  Ancient peoples did not have the methods of modern astronomy and many thought that the earth was flat and at the center of the universe. Moreover, there was no unified calendar in use within different regions of the world.

• How could ancient calendars be meaningful today, since those people usually related events to the reigns of contemporary kings?
  
  This fact would require the recovery of the reigning dates for such kings.

• Even if ancient "calendars" existed, have they been preserved physically in a form that can be studied and understood?
  
  Certainly we should not expect ancient records to predate the time of the flood during the days of Noah, but even Abraham lived over 4000 years ago, king David reigned 3000 years ago, and the Old Testament was completed about 400 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

With such formidable obstacles as these, the construction of a reliable Calendar for the Bible seems highly unlikely. Yet such Calendars have been developed, typically to an accuracy of one year and sometimes to a specific date within a year! The ways that this has been done should be of interest to those who seek greater assurance that the Bible is truly the Word of God, and for those who want to relate it to secular history.

A Bible historian by the name of Edwin R. Thiele began to deal with these fundamental questions over 50 years ago. In the "Journal of Near Eastern Studies" (1944), he submitted an article titled "The Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel". That work continued until his recent book titled "The Mysterious Numbers Of The Hebrew Kings" first published in 1983. His research has become widely accepted and he is today possibly the foremost authority on the subject of dating the Old Testament kings of Israel. His studies now serve to provide some rather convincing answers to the above questions. Here are some of his findings.

• It is now a fact that the science of archaeology has enabled the recovery of large quantities of material pertaining to the cultures of ancient Near East civilizations, and that some of this written material was precisely dated at the time of its writing.

• It can now be certified that the ancients were not as ignorant in matters of astronomy as we might believe. Surprisingly, they were well aware of conjunctions of the sun and moon. The reigns of certain Gentile kings of the ancient Near East back to the time of the Assyrian Empire in the ninth Century BC were associated with those astronomical events. Consequently, it is possible with modern-day astronomy to simply "turn the clock back" and recover dates with respect to our present calendar easily accurate to within one year. In fact it is this very ability that enables historians and archaeologists to specify precise dates for those ancient Gentile kings.

• There are several events described in the Bible that happen to be related to those Gentile kings, so Biblical dates also accurate to within one year may be set for those cases.

• Although the ability to set a date for a single event does not prove that the Bible is actually correct, when many such events are correlated over the entire span of Old Testament history, it is found to produce a result that is highly credible.

You may review Thiele's approach in more detail at "Thiele's Summary".

Edwin Thiele's extensive work to determine the reigns of the kings of Israel during the period of the the Divided Kingdom becomes the natural starting point in constructing calendars for the Old Testament. Here are the steps used to develop a chronology for the Divided Kingdom Period.

• Edwin Thiele was able initially to tie two recorded events in the Old Testament to specific dates recorded in eponyms of the ancient Assyrian empire. One was the death of Israel's king Ahab in the sixth year of Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, and the other was the payment of tribute 12 years later to that same Assyrian king by Israel's king Jehu.

• Using the two dated events associated with Ahab and Jehu, Edwin Thiele was then able work forward and backward through the entire period of the Divided Kingdom, determining dates for the reigns of all of the kings. These results were verified by cross-checking them against several other events in which the Assyrians and Babylonians had dealings with Israel that were also recorded with astronomical precision.

• By this means, the reigns of all the kings in both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah were specified, and the entire Divided Kingdom was found to span a period from 931/30 BC to 586 BC.

It will probably be agreed that the most interesting reading in the Old Testament is found in those times prior to the period of the Divided Kingdom. Those were the times when colorful personalities like Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Samuel, David, and Solomon lived. Many of the spiritual foundations of God’s dealings with mankind are best illustrated by their lives and the situations they confronted. Consequently, it is crucial that their lives and stories be connected in time, so that we might fully appreciate the flow of history through those Bible times.

Unfortunately a special problem exists prior to the period of the Divided Kingdom. Archaeology has produced a wealth of material from those earlier times, but precise chronological synchronism between Biblical events and contemporary Gentile records are rare. For example, the people mentioned above who are famous in the Bible are not mentioned in any of the Gentile records. Nor is this particularly surprising since only Moses, who grew up in Egypt, and Solomon, who reigned over Israel at the height of its glory, would likely have had extensive dealings with the major Gentile powers of their times.

For these reasons, it is necessary to construct the chronology before the period of the Divided Kingdom from the Bible itself, without the benefit of direct corollary secular dating. A way to accomplish this is by extrapolating back from the 931/30 BC start of the Divided Kingdom, using the time intervals specified in the Bible that happen to connect the Divided Kingdom period with earlier ones. Of course, those holding to a belief of Bible inerrancy will probably find this perfectly acceptable, but others might regard the results as suspect.

Were the Bible simply a history book, there would probably be no satisfactory solution to the problem. However, we are benefited by the way the Bible interconnects historic events with both spiritual and prophetic principles. By using some unique connections between Biblical chronology, the historical record, and Bible prophecy, it will be demonstrated in Coming Glory, the prophetic section of Olive Tree Studies, why chronology constructed from the Bible itself not only produces internal Bible consistency, but ultimate agreement with the historical record when the results are first projected into New Testament times and then into the 20th century.

This approach is also described in more detail in "Thiele's Summary".

This time period is by far the easiest to reconstruct for two reasons.

1. Since Israel's kingdom no longer existed, there are no complications stemming from overlapping coregencies between the two competing kingdoms within Israel, differences in the calendars used between the kingdoms, and even different methods for counting the initial year of a reigning king.

2. There are numerous secular dates provided by eponyms from the Medo-Persian empire that may be related to specific events described in the Bible books related to those Post-Kingdom times.

There are two ways you may approach this study of Old Testament chronology.

1. If you are primarily interested in WHAT the dates and times were for people and events, simply pick the relevant time period below and go directly to it. You will find a calendar in each of the periods highlighting key people and events.

2. If you are also interested in HOW the calendars are related to one another, and the underlying assumptions required to tie them together, the chronology of the Old Testament will be more understandable by studying the time periods in the specific numerical order given below.

For the purpose of studying New Testament chronology, it will be divided into the four segments shown above. It is possible to assign specific dates and time periods to each of these segments in the following way.

• Statements taken directly from New Testament texts that reference events in secular history are used to construct a set of calendars from the birth of Jesus Christ through most of the Apostolic period.

• Dated events including the destruction of Jerusalem and taking of Masada are then added to the above Biblical history from the records of early historians.

We do not usually think of the New Testament as an historical document, since it is revered for its spiritual truths that can be life changing if heeded. Nevertheless, its pages contain many references to individuals and events also mentioned in secular history. This fact enables us to connect the entire New Testament with known history from other sources. In so doing, it is possible to more fully understand the culture and circumstances of that time for richer meaning.

However, the greatest value of such an effort lies in a unique characteristic of the Bible not discerned at first glance. The Bible is primarily God's Redemptive Plan and not a history book, so those historical features it does contain are often subtly slanted toward God’s perspective on the matter. Unfortunately, this view is not often studied or even realized in Bible study, so it will be the chief purpose here and in Coming Glory, the prophetic portion of Olive Tree Studies, to highlight that perspective. It is hoped that the significance of such an emphasis will become appreciated as you review this material.

There are two ways you may approach this study of New Testament chronology.

1. If you are primarily interested in WHAT the dates and times were for people and events, simply pick the relevant time period below and go directly to it. You will find a calendar in each of the periods highlighting the key people and events.

2. If you are also interested in HOW the calendars are related to one another, and the underlying assumptions required to tie them together, the chronology of the New Testament will read more easily by studying the time periods in the specific numerical order given below. This also happens to be the chronological order of events as they actually occurred.