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Bible Book Number 7—Judges“All Scripture Is Inspired of God and Beneficial”
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Time Covered: c. 1450–c. 1120 B.C.E.
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Bible Book Number 7—Judges“All Scripture Is Inspired of God and Beneficial”
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5. How may the time period of Judges be calculated?
5 How long a period does Judges cover? This can be calculated from 1 Kings 6:1, which shows that Solomon began to build the house of Jehovah in the fourth year of his reign, which was also “the four hundred and eightieth year after the sons of Israel came out from the land of Egypt.” (“Four hundred and eightieth” being an ordinal number, it represents 479 full years.) The known time periods included in the 479 years are 40 years under Moses in the wilderness (Deut. 8:2), 40 years of Saul’s reign (Acts 13:21), 40 years of David’s reign (2 Sam. 5:4, 5), and the first 3 full years of Solomon’s reign. Subtracting this total of 123 years from the 479 years of 1 Kings 6:1, there remain 356 years for the period between the entry of Israel into Canaan and the start of Saul’s reign.a The events recorded in the book of Judges, extending largely from the death of Joshua down to the time of Samuel, cover about 330 years of this 356-year period.
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Bible Book Number 7—Judges“All Scripture Is Inspired of God and Beneficial”
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a Most modern translations testify that the “about four hundred and fifty years” of Acts 13:20 do not correspond to the period of the judges but precede it; they would seem to cover the period from Isaac’s birth in 1918 B.C.E. to the division of the Land of Promise in 1467 B.C.E. (Insight on the Scriptures, Vol. 1, page 462) The order in which the judges are mentioned in Hebrews 11:32 is different from that in the book of Judges, but this fact does not necessarily indicate that the events in Judges do not follow in chronological sequence, for certainly Samuel did not follow David.
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