Article of the Month

Critics of the Bible and in particular the historicity of the Old Testament, believe they have a long list of viable challenges to the claims of the Bible. However as we have seen repeatedly, these claims are easily rebuffed by anyone who knows more than the wafer thin secular history that is clumsily and poorly taught at schools today.

One of these challenges to the accuracy of the history of the Bible, is the argument that the writers of the Old Testament would not have had access to an accurate method of timekeeping. The argument goes that when Moses recorded in Exodus 12:40-41 that the Israelites were in Egypt for 430 years, it could not have been an accurate recording of time and is therefore merely symbolic.

Well anyone that knows of the amazing abilities of ancient man, is well aware that the Ancient Egyptians for example (whose methods of astronomy could’ve easily influenced the Hebrews during their oppression) used a complex and highly accurate method of timekeeping. They were highly proficient in the usage of lunar cycles and the annual flooding of the River Nile, as methods of time and season keeping.

Furthermore, over four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia (the ancestral home of Abraham, father of the Hebrews), sexagesimal timekeeping (a method where 60 is used as the base of timekeeping – think 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour as we use today) was commonplace. It is very probable that these time keeping methods were used by Abraham, a native of Mesopotamia, and then passed on to the following generations of the Hebrews.

In returning to the Ancient Egyptians, we know that they used the large obelisks that still stand today as a form of time keeping. They did this by dividing the day into two portions of 12 hours according to the shadows cast by the obelisk during the course of the day much like a sundial. 

They were able to calculate times of day and the summer and winter solstices. To counteract the problem of a lack of sunlight to determine the time during the night hours, the Egyptians developed hourglasses, tracking of star movements and even water clocks. The earliest example of a water clock recorded in history is from a Babylonian inscprition from 1700 B.C, a time not long before the Exodus itself. These water clocks used an intricately calibrated container which allowed water to flow out thus providing a measurement of time passed.

Therefore, bearing all this in mind and applying the Biblical account that the Hebrews came from a patriarch who was very likely familiar with the timekeeping methods of the ancient Mesopotamians (Ur, the birthplace of Abraham was renowned for it’s expertise in mathematics and astronomy); along with the expert education Moses would’ve received in the courts of Egyptian royalty, we must conclude that his ability to record time accurately is undoubted. 

Thus we can as always rest easy in trusting that the information recorded in the Bible is accurate history, and not myth or legend as propagated by critics and secular historians.