The Whole Number of Years

After the judges they had kings. The first was named Saul, who reigned 20 years; then David, our forefather, who reigned 40. So the whole count down to David’s reign is 498 years. After these Solomon reigned — the man who, by God’s will, was the first to build the temple in Jerusalem — for 40 years. After him Rehoboam, 17 years; after him Abijah, 7; after him Asa, 41; after him Jehoshaphat, 25; after him Joram, 8; after him Ahaziah, 1; after him Athaliah, 6; after her Joash, 40; after him Amaziah, 39; after him Uzziah, 52; after him Jotham, 16; after him Ahaz, 17; after him Hezekiah, 29; after him Manasseh, 55; after him Amon, 2; after him Josiah, 31; after him Jehoahaz, 3 months; after him Jehoiakim, 11 years; then another Jehoiakim, 3 months and 10 days; and after him Zedekiah, 11 years. [a]

After these kings, while the people went on in their sins and would not repent, the king of Babylon, named Nebuchadnezzar, came up into Judea, as Jeremiah had prophesied. He moved the people of the Jews to Babylon and pulled down the temple Solomon had built. The people spent 70 years in the Babylonian exile. So down to the sojourn in the land of Babylon the whole count is 4,954 years, 6 months, and 10 days.

And just as God had foretold through the prophet Jeremiah that the people would be carried off to Babylon, in the same way he signaled beforehand that after 70 years they would come back again to their own land. When those 70 years were finished, Cyrus became king of the Persians. In the second year of his reign, according to Jeremiah’s prophecy, he issued a written decree ordering every Jew in his kingdom to return to his own country and rebuild the temple to God that the king of Babylon just named had torn down. Cyrus also, at God’s prompting, gave orders to his own bodyguards Sheshbazzar and Mithridates that the vessels Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple in Judea should be carried back and set in the temple again. So in the second year of Darius the 70 years Jeremiah had foretold are fulfilled.

From this you can see how our sacred writings are shown to be older and truer than those of the Greeks and the Egyptians, or of any other historians. Herodotus and Thucydides, and Xenophon too, and most of the other historians, began their records at about the reign of Cyrus and Darius, because they were not able to speak accurately about older and earlier times. And what great thing did they say, if they told of Darius and Cyrus, kings of the barbarians, or of the Greeks Zopyrus and Hippias, or of the wars of the Athenians and the Spartans, or of the doings of Xerxes, or of Pausanias, who nearly starved to death in the sacred precinct of Athena, or of Themistocles and the Peloponnesian War, or of Alcibiades and Thrasybulus? [e]

My purpose is not to supply material for a great deal of talk. It is to make plain how many years there have been since the foundation of the world, and to expose the wasted labor and the nonsense of those writers. There have not been two hundred million years from the flood to the present, as Plato said, laying it down that so many years had passed; nor 153,075 years, as I said earlier that Apollonius the Egyptian claimed. Nor is the world uncreated, and things did not all come about of themselves, as Pythagoras and the rest have babbled. The world was made — and it is governed by the providence of the God who made all things; and the whole course of time and the years are made plain to those who are willing to be persuaded by the truth.

So that I do not seem to have made things clear only as far as Cyrus and then to have neglected the times in between, as though I could not set them out, I will try, with God’s help and as far as I am able, to give an account of the order of the times that follow.

Cyrus, then, reigned 38 years and was killed by Tomyris in the country of the Massagetae, in the 62nd Olympiad. From then on the Romans began to grow great, God strengthening them. Rome had been founded by Romulus, said to be the child of Ares and Ilia, in the 7th Olympiad, on the fifteenth of April, the year being reckoned in those days as ten months. Cyrus died, as I have already said, in the 62nd Olympiad, and that date falls 220 years after the founding of Rome — the same year in which Tarquin, surnamed Superbus, began to reign over the Romans. [h]

He was the first to banish certain Romans; he sexually abused boys, and made eunuchs of native-born citizens; and he violated unmarried girls and then gave them away in marriage. That is why he was fittingly called Superbus in the Roman language, which is translated “the Proud.” He was also the first to lay it down that anyone who greeted him should have the greeting returned by somebody else. He reigned 25 years.

After him came the yearly consuls, and military tribunes and aediles, for 458 years; listing their names I consider long and unnecessary. Anyone who wants to learn them will find them in the tables Chryserus the nomenclator compiled. He was a freedman of Marcus Aurelius Verus, and he wrote out clearly everything from the founding of Rome to the death of his own patron, the emperor Verus — the names and the dates alike. So the yearly magistrates ruled the Romans, as I say, for 453 years.

After that the men called emperors began to rule, in this order. First Gaius Julius, who reigned 3 years, 4 months, 6 days. Then Augustus, 56 years, 4 months, 1 day. Tiberius, 22 years. Then another Gaius, 3 years, 8 months, 7 days. Claudius, 13 years, 8 months, 24 days. Nero, 13 years, 7 months, 28 days. Galba, 7 months. Otho, 3 months, 5 days. Vitellius, 7 months, 22 days. Vespasian, 9 years, 11 months, 22 days. Titus, 2 years, 22 days. Domitian, 15 years, 5 months, 7 days. Nerva, 1 year, 4 months, 10 days. Trajan, 19 years, 6 months, 17 days. Hadrian, 20 years, 10 months, 28 days. Antoninus, 22 years, 7 months, 7 days. Verus, 19 years, 10 days.

So the time of the Caesars down to the death of the emperor Verus is 225 years. And from the death of Cyrus, which is also the beginning of Roman rule under Tarquin the Proud, down to the death of the emperor Verus I have named, the whole time comes to 741 years.

And from the foundation of the world the whole span of time is traced out this way, stage by stage. From the creation of the world to the flood: 2,242 years. From the flood to the time when Abraham our forefather had a son: 1,036 years. From Isaac, Abraham’s son, to the time when the people were living with Moses in the desert: 660 years. From the death of Moses and the rule of Joshua son of Nun to the death of David the patriarch: 498 years. From the death of David and the reign of Solomon to the people’s sojourn in the land of Babylon: 518 years, 7 months, 10 days. From the beginning of Cyrus’s rule to the death of the emperor Aurelius Verus: 741 years. All together, from the creation of the world, the whole comes to 5,695 years, besides the odd months and days. [p]

Take these periods, then, and everything said above, all together, and you can see the antiquity of the prophetic writings and the divine character of the message we hold: that the message is not recent, and that what we hold is not mythical and false, as some suppose, but older and truer than the rest. For Thallus mentions Belus, king of the Assyrians, and Kronos the Titan. He says that Belus, along with the Titans, made war against Zeus and the so-called gods on his side; and at that point he says: “And Gyges was defeated and fled to Tartessus.” At that time Gyges ruled that country, which was then called Acte and is now named Attica. As for the other countries and cities, and where they got their names, I think it unnecessary to run through them — especially with you, who know your histories. [r]

That Moses is shown to be older than every writer — and not he alone, but most of the prophets who came after him — and older than Kronos and Belus and the Trojan War, is plain. For according to Thallus’s history, Belus turns out to be 322 years earlier than the Trojan War. And I have shown above that Moses comes somewhere around 900, or even 1,000, years before the sack of Troy.

Since Kronos and Belus flourished at the same time, most people do not know which is Kronos and which is Belus. Some worship Kronos and call him Bel and Bal — the people who live in the eastern parts especially — and they know neither who Kronos is nor who Belus is. Among the Romans he is called Saturn; and they themselves do not know which of the two he is, Kronos or Belus. As for the beginning of the Olympiads, they say the observance goes back to Iphitus, though some say it goes back to Haemus, who was also called Ilius. The order in which the whole number of the years and the Olympiads stands I have set out above.

I think, then, that I have now spoken accurately, as far as I was able, both about the antiquity of what belongs to us and about the whole number of the periods of history. For even if some stretch of time has escaped us — fifty years, say, or a hundred, or even seventy — still it is not tens of thousands or thousands of years, as Plato and Apollonius and the rest have falsely written. Perhaps we do not know the exact number of all the years, because the odd months and days are not written down in the sacred books.

But as far as the periods I speak of go, I have the agreement of Berossus, who studied philosophy among the Chaldeans and made Chaldean writings known to the Greeks. He said some things in line with Moses about the flood, and in the course of relating much else besides. And with the prophets Jeremiah and Daniel too he spoke in partial agreement. He told what happened to the Jews under the king of the Babylonians, whom he calls Nabopolassar and the Hebrews call Nebuchadnezzar. He also mentions the temple in Jerusalem, how it was laid waste by the king of the Chaldeans, and that when the temple’s foundations had been laid in the second year of Cyrus’s reign, the temple was finished in the second year of the reign of Darius.

But the Greeks make no mention of the histories that give the truth. First, because they themselves only recently came to have any skill in letters — and they admit it themselves, some saying that letters were invented among the Chaldeans, some among the Egyptians, and others again that they come from the Phoenicians. And second, because they went wrong, and still go wrong, in making no mention of God, but only of empty and useless matters. [x]

That is how eagerly they celebrate Homer and Hesiod and the rest of the poets, while the glory of the imperishable and only God they not only forget — they speak against it. What is more, they persecuted those who worship him, and they persecute them every day. And not only that: they hand out prizes and honors to men who insult God in fine-sounding language, while those who press on toward virtue and practice a holy life they have stoned, and some they have put to death, and to this day they surround them with savage tortures. That is why men like these have inevitably lost the wisdom of God and have not found the truth.

If you are willing, then, read these things carefully, so that you may have a counselor and a pledge of the truth.