What Are the Challenges of Ordering the Bible Chronologically?

Wide Range of Interpretation

To arrange the biblical text chronologically is quite a challenge because we don’t always know when a certain book of the Bible was written. For some books, we’re very confident. Some of Paul’s letters we know within a month or two of when he wrote them. But other books are open to a wide range of interpretations as to when they were written.

The prophet Obadiah is notoriously difficult to date precisely. We know he had to write after a certain date and before another date, but that span can be, according to which scholar you look at, between 150 or 200 years. There are at least twelve people in the Old Testament named Obadiah. We don’t even know which Obadiah it was. Or maybe the Obadiah that was the prophet is the thirteenth Obadiah. We simply don’t know. So the challenge is where to put that book since it’s kind of fuzzy.

The same thing goes on with the book of Psalms. For some of the psalms, we have a superscription that says, “David wrote this when he fled from his son, Absalom.” We can date that with fairly high confidence. But many of the psalms do not tell us when they were written. We have some indications, since the psalter is divided into five books, of when each book was compiled, so that gives us kind of an end date for each of the five books of the psalms. But it doesn’t tell us anything before that.

So, that’s one of the things, when I was editing the ESV Chronological Bible, I had to make decisions on. Where do we slot these psalms in where it makes fairly good chronological sense without being dogmatic about knowing exactly when a particular psalm was written.

We’re more confident of New Testament books at times than Old Testament books. Some Old Testament books we’re fairly confident of. We know Moses wrote the first five books during his forty years in the wilderness. So, that gives us a span of time. He couldn’t have written Deuteronomy much before he died because it was his last word. So, we can be very confident about dating some books like that.

Other books, like 1 and 2 Samuel, we know had to be written after David’s reign, but we’re not exactly sure how far after David’s reign. The thing that helps us with the book of Samuel is that we don’t really need to know when it was written; we need to know when the events in the book of Samuel took place. We can be more confident about that. So, that’s the big challenge is figuring out where to slot things, especially when some things simply are unknown and, in some cases, unknowable.

​​Andrew E. Steinmann is the editor of the ESV Chronological Bible.

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