An alarming number of Jewish books on my bookshelf report the destruction of the first Temple as having occurred in the years 586-587 BC. It’s not just secular Jews; Orthodox writers in frum newspapers regularly use this dating. The Talmud, however, does not agree with this chronology.
According to Rabbi Yose ben Chalafta (139-165 CE) and his sefer Seder Olam, the first Temple was destroyed in the year 421 BC. Rabbi Yose was a disciple of Rabbi Akivah, and the reliability of his scholarship was such that whenever there is a conflict between him and his contemporaries Rabbis Meir, Judah and Simon, it is his opinion that is always adopted.
Why is this important? Because our very understanding of where we stand in Jewish time depends upon it. Is this the year 5765 or 5931? If the secular dating is correct and it is the year 5931, then we are a lot closer to the mystical year 6000 than we commonly think.
There are other problems as well. Chazal’s traditional understanding of the Prophet Daniel and his “70 Weeks of Years” (70 x 7) would have to be re-thought (Daniel 9:24-27). This was supposed to have been a period of 490 years – a time between the destruction of the first Temple (421 BC) and the second (70 AD) during which God, in his mercy, would answer the prayer of Daniel and change what was supposed to have been a punishment into an opportunity for the Jewish people to achieve their Messianic Kingdom with the second Temple.
This, as with so much else that comes under the broad heading of Torah knowledge, depends upon a reliable Jewish date – otherwise, the complications for Judaism would be enormous.
The crux of the problem is in the Persian period. Daniel the prophet speaks from the kingdom of Darius the Mead. It is in his royal court (Daniel 11:2) that Daniel predicts three more kings for Persia. According to Rashi these were Cyrus (sort of a George W. Bush figure who for religious reasons championed the Jewish cause and ordered the construction of the second Temple), Achashverosh (of Purim fame), and Darius the Persian. Then came the destruction of the Persian empire at the hands of Alexander the Great.
Conventional historians, however, insist there were ten Persian kings in this period. Chazal’s four Persian/Median kings ruled for a total of fifty-two years; the Persian kings of secular history ruled for 208. Since the Jewish calendar follows the Bible, if our sages were wrong we’ve lost 166 years.
Faced with what he believed at that time (1962) to be insurmountable scholarly evidence supporting the secular position, Rabbi Shimon Schwab, a gaon and historian, faced the issue head on in his controversial essay “Comparative Jewish Chronology.”
Rabbi Schwab laid out two choices for “believers in the veracity” of Torah:
One: Faithfully to put our trust in the superior wisdom of our inspired teachers of Torah who have arrived at the absolute truth…. Or Two: We might accept the unanimous opinion of secular historians as coming as close to the objective truth as that is possible, but make an ingenious attempt to interpret the Biblical data and to treat the traditional Rabbinic chronology as mere Aggadic homily which may lend itself to symbolic or allegorical evaluation…. Nothing short of a Divine command could have prompted our Chazal, those saintly “men of truth” to leave out completely from our annals a period of 165 years and to correct all data and historic tables in such a fashion that the subsequent chronological gap could escape being noticed by countless generations, known to a few initiates only who were duty-bound to keep the secret themselves. In the course of our inquiry, we do indeed find a Divine command conveyed by an angel to Daniel to “seal the words and close the book”….
