Valerius Coucke
Encyclopedia
Valerius Josephus Coucke, 1888–1951, was a Belgian scholar and priest who was professor at the Grootseminarie Brugge (Grand Séminaire de Bruges) in the 1920s. His importance to modern scholarship comes from his writings in the field of Old Testament chronology. His study of the methods of the authors of the books of Kings and Chronicles led him to conclusions that were later discovered, independently, by Edwin R. Thiele
. A distinctive of his approach was the use of citations in classical authors in order to obtain fixed dates in biblical history, most notably the date for the beginning of construction of Solomon’s Temple.
that was popular among European scholars in his day by starting with the working proposition that the chronological data of Kings and Chronicles represented authentic traditions that could be understood once the methods of the ancient scribes were determined. This was in contrast to the skepticism to such an approach inherent in the postulates of the prevalent higher-critical methodology, which assumed that the chronological and other historical data of the Bible’s historical books were the product of late-date editors, and hence were of little or no historical value. Coucke departed from this presupposition-based approach, using instead the data of the biblical texts as his starting place (an inductive approach). From those data, he came to the following conclusions: 1) During the period of the divided kingdom, Judah’s regnal year began in the fall month of Tishri, whereas that of the northern kingdom, Israel, began in Nisan. (Coucke also allowed that the northern kingdom may have begun its calendar in the Egyptian month of Thoth, since Jeroboam resided in Egypt for many years before becoming the first king of Israel, but Coucke was wrong in assuming that at the time of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period
, Thoth came in the spring at the same time as the Hebrew Nisan.) 2) For the first few years of the divided kingdom, Judah used accession reckoning for its kings, whereas Israel used nonaccession reckoning. 3) During the rapprochement between the two kingdoms in the ninth century BC, Judah adopted Israel’s nonaccession reckoning. 4) Later, both kingdoms used accession reckoning until the end of their respective kingdoms, and 5) In order to make sense of the biblical data, coregencies, both those expressed explicitly in the text and those implied by the data, must be taken into account. This last principle has been much criticized when espoused by Thiele, but it is widely used by Egyptologists in their computations of Egyptian chronology.
These five principles are identical to those later discovered by Edwin R. Thiele
, who was unaware of Coucke’s work when he published the results of his doctoral dissertation in 1944. It apparently was Thiele’s colleague, Siegfried Horn
, who introduced Thiele to the writings of Coucke when Horn came to America in 1946. In his subsequent writings, Thiele acknowledged the earlier work of Coucke, and he was gratified that the discovery of these basic principles by two scholars working independently served to authenticate the soundness of their respective approaches. The two authors, however, differed somewhat on how to apply the principles they had discovered, so that their chronologies disagree in several places. They are in exact agreement at the beginning of the divided monarchy, which both Coucke and Thiele placed in the year starting in Nisan of 931 BC. Coucke’s method of deriving this date differed radically from Thiele’s method, as explained in the next two sections. For the end of the kingdom period, Coucke placed the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in the summer of 587 BC, whereas Thiele put it a year later, in 586.
, at which Ahab was present, as the last year of Ahab, as Thiele did in assigning absolute (BC) dates to the first kings of Israel. His date for the battle, 854 BC, was also one year too early, although that was the date used by most Assyriologists when he wrote. He knew that it would be unwise to assign absolute dates to the kings in this time frame based on his proposed emendations of their reign lengths, and so he sought a more reliable method of finding a fixed date for the early monarchic period. He developed such a method in just three sentences of his Supplément article, using classical authors with no utilization of any biblical text. His starting place was the end of the Trojan War
, which the Parian Marble
dated to the year 1208 BC, seven days before the end of the month of Thargelion, that is, June 11, 1208 BC (Coucke mistakenly thought that the Marble gave the year as 1207 BC, but the correct year of 1208 BC, as given at the Ashmolean Web site, will be used in what follows). He then cited a statement of Pompeius Trogus/Justin
(18:3:5) that said that Tyre was founded (or refounded) one year before the fall of Troy, that is, in 1209 BC. From Josephus
, who apparently was using the archives of Tyre as his source, he determined that it was either 240 years (Antiquities
8:3:1/62) or 241 years (Against Apion
1:18/126) from Tyre’s founding to the 11th or 12th year of Hiram, King of Tyre, at which time Hiram sent assistance to Solomon at the beginning of construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Coucke therefore determined that Temple construction began in either (1209 BC – 240 =) 969 BC or (1209 BC – 241 =) 968 BC, depending on whether it was in the eleventh year of Hiram (so Antiquities) or his twelfth year (so Against Apion). The strange thing about this calculation is that it agrees rather precisely with the dates for Solomon derived from Thiele’s research, which was based on the biblical data as tied to the Assyrian Eponym List, which it turn is dated according to astronomically fixed data.
Subsequent historians apparently found this reasoning of Coucke not worthy of mention, even to refute it. One explanation for this neglect may be his use of the Parian Marble’s date of 1208 BC for the fall of Troy, rather than the more commonly accepted date of 1183 BC. However, more recent scholarship has shown that there are other traditions beside the Parian Marble that support the earlier date. These alternate traditions are found in two entries in the Chronological Canons
of Eusebius
. The first entry gives an “Asiatic” version of the dates of the Trojan War that places its end in 1206 BC. The second entry in the Canons is a date for the founding of Tyre taken from a Greek author, Philistus, that agrees with the (re)founding of Tyre in 1209 BC. These two entries in Eusebius’s Canons appear to be independent of the Parian Marble’s testimony to the 1208 date for the fall of Troy, and also independent of each other. In contrast, the traditional date for Troy’s fall, as derived from Eratosthenes
, has only one witness, Thucydides
, (1:12) to a critical link, which is the number of years from the fall of Troy to the return of the Heracleidae
, a span of time that had many diverse figures given by other ancient authors. Here, as elsewhere in the writings of Coucke, his choice of data from classical authors has found significant support from later research and archaeological discoveries. But his work had been forgotten when this later research appeared, except for the footnote in Thiele’s Mysterious Numbers that pointed out its importance in verifying the soundness of the basic principles of the chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period that Thiele had independently discovered.
1:17/108 and 1:18/117–126. In providing the list of kings, Josephus said he was taking his information from Menander of Ephesus
, who translated the records of the Tyrian archives from Phoenician into Greek. Although the individual reign lengths of the various kings in the list show considerable variation due to copying errors over the centuries since Josephus wrote, the total number of years given from the time that Hiram sent assistance to Solomon at the beginning of Temple construction to the flight of Dido/Elissa from Tyre, after which she and her associates founded Carthage
, has been preserved intact due to its three-fold repetition. This figure is given twice as 143 years and eight months, and once as 155 years from the accession of Hiram, minus the 12 years until he began to help Solomon. This redundancy of expression has preserved the total of years in virtually all extant copies of the Tyrian King List, so that Coucke and other scholars have felt confident in using it in their calculations.
Coucke derived either 825 or 824 BC as the possible dates for the founding of Carthage, based on Pompeius Trogus’s statement that it was founded 72 years before the founding of Rome, for which Coucke accepted either 753 BC (Varro
) or 752 BC (Dionysius of Halicarnassus
). Using the statement of Josephus/Menander that placed the founding of Solomon’s Temple 143 years earlier than the founding of Carthage, Coucke derived 968 or 967 BC as the dates for the founding of Solomon’s Temple. Since only the first of these agreed with the two dates he had derived when starting from the Parian Marble (969 and 968), he decided on 968/67 BC as the time of foundation of the Temple. He assumed Tyre used Tishri-based years, since the use of Phoenician month-names (Ziv, Bul, Ethanim) in the time of Solomon suggested that Israel and Tyre were using the same calendar at this time in their histories. With this assumption, he then turned to the biblical datum that construction began in the spring month of Ziv, deriving the date for the beginning of construction as the spring of 967 BC, with Solomon’s fourth year (1 Kings 6:1) starting in Tishri of 968 BC.
The one highly debatable point in this construction is Coucke’s choice of 825 (or 824) BC for the founding of Carthage, rather than the more commonly accepted date of 814 BC given by Timaeus
. He offered no justification for his choice of Trogus’s date, so this may have contributed to the neglect of Coucke’s ideas in subsequent scholarship. That Coucke’s ideas fell into oblivion is demonstrated by the circumstances related to events following the publishing, in 1951, of an inscription mentioning tribute received from a Tyrian king to Shalmaneser III
, king of Assyria, in 841 BC. By associating the name given on the inscription, Baal-Manzer, with Balazeros (II)
, king of Tyre and grandfather of Dido/Elissa, several writers concluded that Pompeius Trogus’s date of 825 BC for the founding of Carthage was to be preferred over the 814 date of Timaeus. (Peñuela cited some fragments preserved from Greek writing as supporting that a period of years passed between Dido’s flight from Tyre until she and her party were able to lay the foundations of Carthage, so that Dido’s flight occurred in 825 but the actual founding of Carthage was in 814 BC.) With the exception of Lipiński, all of these writers combined this synchronism to an Assyrian king with the Tyrian King List of Josephus/Menander to arrive at 980 BC for the beginning of Hiram’s reign and 968 or 968/67 BC for the beginning of construction of Solomon’s Temple, in quite exact agreement with the date Coucke had derived several years earlier. Regarding the latter date, Barnes wrote, “extant extra-biblical sources point with a high degree of precision to the year 968 as the date of the founding of the Solomonic temple, and any future reconstruction of the biblical chronology of the Divided Monarchy must reckon seriously with this item.” None of these authors appealed to Thiele or any other biblical chronologist in arriving at this date. Neither did any of them mention Coucke, who had used the Tyrian King List and Trogus’s date for the founding of Tyre as a second method in determining the date of the foundation of Solomon’s Temple, independently of his method that started with the Parian Marble. Their scholarship vindicated Coucke, but he was forgotten.
Coucke’s fourth year for Solomon (968/67 BC) was one year earlier than the date in Thiele’s chronology, but it was in agreement with a one-year correction to Thiele’s dates for Solomon that was offered in a 2003 study by Rodger Young. This correction has been accepted in several recent studies dealing with chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period.
By assuming that the division of the kingdom occurred after Nisan in Solomon’s 40th year (the year beginning in Tishri of 932 BC), Coucke’s date for the division was the year beginning in Nisan of 931 BC, according to the northern kingdom’s Nisan-based calendar, in exact agreement with Thiele’s date.
The various scholars cited just above were unaware of Coucke’s work when they wrote, as evidenced by their failure to cite him when their own work went over the same ground and arrived at the same result. The importance of this for historians is not just that Coucke anticipated these later findings, but that his methods showed that it is possible to correlate classical sources with the chronology of the early Hebrew kingdom period. At the same time, the great diversity of chronological data found in classical literature implies that such sources must be used with care, and ultimately it will be the biblical and Assyrian data that establish whether a given classical source provides reliable chronological information, not the other way around.
Edwin R. Thiele
Edwin R. Thiele was an American missionary in China, an editor, archaeologist, writer, and Old Testament professor. He is best known for his chronological studies of the Hebrew kingdom period.- Biography :...
. A distinctive of his approach was the use of citations in classical authors in order to obtain fixed dates in biblical history, most notably the date for the beginning of construction of Solomon’s Temple.
Biography
Coucke was born on 2 February 1888, in Poperinge, in the province of West-Flanders in Belgium. He studied in Leuven, where he obtained a bachelors degree in theology (S.T.B.). He was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in 1912 and was appointed to several parishes: Bredene, Staden, and Hooglede (all in the diocese of Bruges in Belgium). In 1919, he became a professor at the Grootseminarie in Brugge/Bruges (Le Grand Séminaire de Bruges), where he taught sacramental theology and moral theology. In 1927 he became the seminary’s librarian and also bursar, responsible for the finances of the seminary. In 1928, he was appointed canon of the Holy Savior’s Cathedral of Bruges. He died on 20 December 1951, in Bruges.Comparison of his chronology to that of Thiele
Coucke broke precedent with the approach of the Documentary HypothesisDocumentary hypothesis
The documentary hypothesis , holds that the Pentateuch was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors...
that was popular among European scholars in his day by starting with the working proposition that the chronological data of Kings and Chronicles represented authentic traditions that could be understood once the methods of the ancient scribes were determined. This was in contrast to the skepticism to such an approach inherent in the postulates of the prevalent higher-critical methodology, which assumed that the chronological and other historical data of the Bible’s historical books were the product of late-date editors, and hence were of little or no historical value. Coucke departed from this presupposition-based approach, using instead the data of the biblical texts as his starting place (an inductive approach). From those data, he came to the following conclusions: 1) During the period of the divided kingdom, Judah’s regnal year began in the fall month of Tishri, whereas that of the northern kingdom, Israel, began in Nisan. (Coucke also allowed that the northern kingdom may have begun its calendar in the Egyptian month of Thoth, since Jeroboam resided in Egypt for many years before becoming the first king of Israel, but Coucke was wrong in assuming that at the time of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period
Third Intermediate Period of Egypt
The Third Intermediate Period refers to the time in Ancient Egypt from the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI in 1070 BC to the foundation of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty by Psamtik I in 664 BC, following the expulsion of the Nubian rulers of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty....
, Thoth came in the spring at the same time as the Hebrew Nisan.) 2) For the first few years of the divided kingdom, Judah used accession reckoning for its kings, whereas Israel used nonaccession reckoning. 3) During the rapprochement between the two kingdoms in the ninth century BC, Judah adopted Israel’s nonaccession reckoning. 4) Later, both kingdoms used accession reckoning until the end of their respective kingdoms, and 5) In order to make sense of the biblical data, coregencies, both those expressed explicitly in the text and those implied by the data, must be taken into account. This last principle has been much criticized when espoused by Thiele, but it is widely used by Egyptologists in their computations of Egyptian chronology.
These five principles are identical to those later discovered by Edwin R. Thiele
Edwin R. Thiele
Edwin R. Thiele was an American missionary in China, an editor, archaeologist, writer, and Old Testament professor. He is best known for his chronological studies of the Hebrew kingdom period.- Biography :...
, who was unaware of Coucke’s work when he published the results of his doctoral dissertation in 1944. It apparently was Thiele’s colleague, Siegfried Horn
Siegfried Horn
Siegfried Herbert Horn was a Seventh-day Adventist archaeologist and Bible scholar. He is perhaps best known for his numerous books and articles and for his excavations at Tell Hesban in Jordan. He was Professor of History of Antiquity at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Berrien...
, who introduced Thiele to the writings of Coucke when Horn came to America in 1946. In his subsequent writings, Thiele acknowledged the earlier work of Coucke, and he was gratified that the discovery of these basic principles by two scholars working independently served to authenticate the soundness of their respective approaches. The two authors, however, differed somewhat on how to apply the principles they had discovered, so that their chronologies disagree in several places. They are in exact agreement at the beginning of the divided monarchy, which both Coucke and Thiele placed in the year starting in Nisan of 931 BC. Coucke’s method of deriving this date differed radically from Thiele’s method, as explained in the next two sections. For the end of the kingdom period, Coucke placed the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in the summer of 587 BC, whereas Thiele put it a year later, in 586.
His use of the Parian Marble to date construction of Solomon’s Temple
Coucke had some difficulty in determining dates for Ahab, king of Israel, and so he did not place the Battle of QarqarBattle of Qarqar
The Battle of Qarqar was fought in 853 BC when the army of Assyria led by king Shalmaneser III encountered an allied army of 12 kings at Qarqar led by Hadadezer of Damascus and King Ahab of Israel...
, at which Ahab was present, as the last year of Ahab, as Thiele did in assigning absolute (BC) dates to the first kings of Israel. His date for the battle, 854 BC, was also one year too early, although that was the date used by most Assyriologists when he wrote. He knew that it would be unwise to assign absolute dates to the kings in this time frame based on his proposed emendations of their reign lengths, and so he sought a more reliable method of finding a fixed date for the early monarchic period. He developed such a method in just three sentences of his Supplément article, using classical authors with no utilization of any biblical text. His starting place was the end of the Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
, which the Parian Marble
Parian marble
Parian marble is a fine-grained semitranslucent pure-white and entirely flawless marble quarried during the classical era on the Greek island of Paros in the Aegean Sea.It was highly prized by ancient Greeks for making sculptures...
dated to the year 1208 BC, seven days before the end of the month of Thargelion, that is, June 11, 1208 BC (Coucke mistakenly thought that the Marble gave the year as 1207 BC, but the correct year of 1208 BC, as given at the Ashmolean Web site, will be used in what follows). He then cited a statement of Pompeius Trogus/Justin
Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus
Gnaeus Pompēius Trōgus, known as Pompeius Trogus, Pompey Trogue, or Trogue Pompey, was a 1st century BC Roman historian of the Celtic tribe of the Vocontii in Gallia Narbonensis, flourished during the age of Augustus, nearly contemporary with Livy.His grandfather served in the war against Sertorius...
(18:3:5) that said that Tyre was founded (or refounded) one year before the fall of Troy, that is, in 1209 BC. From Josephus
Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
, who apparently was using the archives of Tyre as his source, he determined that it was either 240 years (Antiquities
Antiquities of the Jews
Antiquities of the Jews is a twenty volume historiographical work composed by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the thirteenth year of the reign of Roman emperor Flavius Domitian which was around 93 or 94 AD. Antiquities of the Jews contains an account of history of the Jewish people,...
8:3:1/62) or 241 years (Against Apion
Against Apion
Against Apion was a polemical work written by Flavius Josephus as a defense of Judaism as a classical religion and philosophy, stressing its antiquity against what he perceived as more recent traditions of the Greeks.-Text:Against Apion 1:8 also defines which books he viewed as being in the Jewish...
1:18/126) from Tyre’s founding to the 11th or 12th year of Hiram, King of Tyre, at which time Hiram sent assistance to Solomon at the beginning of construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Coucke therefore determined that Temple construction began in either (1209 BC – 240 =) 969 BC or (1209 BC – 241 =) 968 BC, depending on whether it was in the eleventh year of Hiram (so Antiquities) or his twelfth year (so Against Apion). The strange thing about this calculation is that it agrees rather precisely with the dates for Solomon derived from Thiele’s research, which was based on the biblical data as tied to the Assyrian Eponym List, which it turn is dated according to astronomically fixed data.
Subsequent historians apparently found this reasoning of Coucke not worthy of mention, even to refute it. One explanation for this neglect may be his use of the Parian Marble’s date of 1208 BC for the fall of Troy, rather than the more commonly accepted date of 1183 BC. However, more recent scholarship has shown that there are other traditions beside the Parian Marble that support the earlier date. These alternate traditions are found in two entries in the Chronological Canons
Chronicon (Eusebius)
The Chronicon or Chronicle was a work in two books by Eusebius of Caesarea. It seems to have been compiled in the early 4th century. It contained a world chronicle from Abraham until the vicennalia of Constantine I in 325 AD...
of Eusebius
Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea also called Eusebius Pamphili, was a Roman historian, exegete and Christian polemicist. He became the Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine about the year 314. Together with Pamphilus, he was a scholar of the Biblical canon...
. The first entry gives an “Asiatic” version of the dates of the Trojan War that places its end in 1206 BC. The second entry in the Canons is a date for the founding of Tyre taken from a Greek author, Philistus, that agrees with the (re)founding of Tyre in 1209 BC. These two entries in Eusebius’s Canons appear to be independent of the Parian Marble’s testimony to the 1208 date for the fall of Troy, and also independent of each other. In contrast, the traditional date for Troy’s fall, as derived from Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, poet, athlete, geographer, astronomer, and music theorist.He was the first person to use the word "geography" and invented the discipline of geography as we understand it...
, has only one witness, Thucydides
Thucydides
Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
, (1:12) to a critical link, which is the number of years from the fall of Troy to the return of the Heracleidae
Heracleidae
In Greek mythology, the Heracleidae or Heraclids were the numerous descendants of Heracles , especially applied in a narrower sense to the descendants of Hyllus, the eldest of his four sons by Deianira Other Heracleidae included Macaria, Lamos, Manto, Bianor, Tlepolemus, and Telephus...
, a span of time that had many diverse figures given by other ancient authors. Here, as elsewhere in the writings of Coucke, his choice of data from classical authors has found significant support from later research and archaeological discoveries. But his work had been forgotten when this later research appeared, except for the footnote in Thiele’s Mysterious Numbers that pointed out its importance in verifying the soundness of the basic principles of the chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period that Thiele had independently discovered.
His use of the Tyrian King List to refine this date
Coucke had another avenue of approach to the date of construction of Solomon’s Temple. Like the first approach that started from the Parian Marble’s date for the fall of Troy, his second method was also derived from classical writings, with no utilization of biblical texts. It made use of the list of Tyrian kings recorded in Josephus’s Against ApionAgainst Apion
Against Apion was a polemical work written by Flavius Josephus as a defense of Judaism as a classical religion and philosophy, stressing its antiquity against what he perceived as more recent traditions of the Greeks.-Text:Against Apion 1:8 also defines which books he viewed as being in the Jewish...
1:17/108 and 1:18/117–126. In providing the list of kings, Josephus said he was taking his information from Menander of Ephesus
Menander of Ephesus
Menander of Ephesus was the historian whose lost work on the history of Tyre was used by Josephus, who quotes Menander's list of kings of Tyre in his apologia for the Jews, Against Apion...
, who translated the records of the Tyrian archives from Phoenician into Greek. Although the individual reign lengths of the various kings in the list show considerable variation due to copying errors over the centuries since Josephus wrote, the total number of years given from the time that Hiram sent assistance to Solomon at the beginning of Temple construction to the flight of Dido/Elissa from Tyre, after which she and her associates founded Carthage
Carthage
Carthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
, has been preserved intact due to its three-fold repetition. This figure is given twice as 143 years and eight months, and once as 155 years from the accession of Hiram, minus the 12 years until he began to help Solomon. This redundancy of expression has preserved the total of years in virtually all extant copies of the Tyrian King List, so that Coucke and other scholars have felt confident in using it in their calculations.
Coucke derived either 825 or 824 BC as the possible dates for the founding of Carthage, based on Pompeius Trogus’s statement that it was founded 72 years before the founding of Rome, for which Coucke accepted either 753 BC (Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro was an ancient Roman scholar and writer. He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.-Biography:...
) or 752 BC (Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus. His literary style was Attistic — imitating Classical Attic Greek in its prime.-Life:...
). Using the statement of Josephus/Menander that placed the founding of Solomon’s Temple 143 years earlier than the founding of Carthage, Coucke derived 968 or 967 BC as the dates for the founding of Solomon’s Temple. Since only the first of these agreed with the two dates he had derived when starting from the Parian Marble (969 and 968), he decided on 968/67 BC as the time of foundation of the Temple. He assumed Tyre used Tishri-based years, since the use of Phoenician month-names (Ziv, Bul, Ethanim) in the time of Solomon suggested that Israel and Tyre were using the same calendar at this time in their histories. With this assumption, he then turned to the biblical datum that construction began in the spring month of Ziv, deriving the date for the beginning of construction as the spring of 967 BC, with Solomon’s fourth year (1 Kings 6:1) starting in Tishri of 968 BC.
The one highly debatable point in this construction is Coucke’s choice of 825 (or 824) BC for the founding of Carthage, rather than the more commonly accepted date of 814 BC given by Timaeus
Timaeus (historian)
Timaeus , ancient Greek historian, was born at Tauromenium in Sicily. Driven out of Sicily by Agathocles, he migrated to Athens, where he studied rhetoric under a pupil of Isocrates and lived for fifty years...
. He offered no justification for his choice of Trogus’s date, so this may have contributed to the neglect of Coucke’s ideas in subsequent scholarship. That Coucke’s ideas fell into oblivion is demonstrated by the circumstances related to events following the publishing, in 1951, of an inscription mentioning tribute received from a Tyrian king to Shalmaneser III
Shalmaneser III
Shalmaneser III was king of Assyria , and son of the previous ruler, Ashurnasirpal II....
, king of Assyria, in 841 BC. By associating the name given on the inscription, Baal-Manzer, with Balazeros (II)
Baal-Eser II
Baal-Eser II , also known as Balbazer II and Ba‘l-mazzer I, was a king of Tyre, the son of Ithobaal I.The primary information related to Baal-Eser II comes from Josephus’s citation of the Phoenician author Menander of Ephesus, in Against Apion i.18. Here it is said that “Ithobalus, the priest of...
, king of Tyre and grandfather of Dido/Elissa, several writers concluded that Pompeius Trogus’s date of 825 BC for the founding of Carthage was to be preferred over the 814 date of Timaeus. (Peñuela cited some fragments preserved from Greek writing as supporting that a period of years passed between Dido’s flight from Tyre until she and her party were able to lay the foundations of Carthage, so that Dido’s flight occurred in 825 but the actual founding of Carthage was in 814 BC.) With the exception of Lipiński, all of these writers combined this synchronism to an Assyrian king with the Tyrian King List of Josephus/Menander to arrive at 980 BC for the beginning of Hiram’s reign and 968 or 968/67 BC for the beginning of construction of Solomon’s Temple, in quite exact agreement with the date Coucke had derived several years earlier. Regarding the latter date, Barnes wrote, “extant extra-biblical sources point with a high degree of precision to the year 968 as the date of the founding of the Solomonic temple, and any future reconstruction of the biblical chronology of the Divided Monarchy must reckon seriously with this item.” None of these authors appealed to Thiele or any other biblical chronologist in arriving at this date. Neither did any of them mention Coucke, who had used the Tyrian King List and Trogus’s date for the founding of Tyre as a second method in determining the date of the foundation of Solomon’s Temple, independently of his method that started with the Parian Marble. Their scholarship vindicated Coucke, but he was forgotten.
Coucke’s fourth year for Solomon (968/67 BC) was one year earlier than the date in Thiele’s chronology, but it was in agreement with a one-year correction to Thiele’s dates for Solomon that was offered in a 2003 study by Rodger Young. This correction has been accepted in several recent studies dealing with chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period.
By assuming that the division of the kingdom occurred after Nisan in Solomon’s 40th year (the year beginning in Tishri of 932 BC), Coucke’s date for the division was the year beginning in Nisan of 931 BC, according to the northern kingdom’s Nisan-based calendar, in exact agreement with Thiele’s date.
The various scholars cited just above were unaware of Coucke’s work when they wrote, as evidenced by their failure to cite him when their own work went over the same ground and arrived at the same result. The importance of this for historians is not just that Coucke anticipated these later findings, but that his methods showed that it is possible to correlate classical sources with the chronology of the early Hebrew kingdom period. At the same time, the great diversity of chronological data found in classical literature implies that such sources must be used with care, and ultimately it will be the biblical and Assyrian data that establish whether a given classical source provides reliable chronological information, not the other way around.