The chronology of Scripture is often seen as dry- standing at the margins of Biblical theology. Yet if Scripture is an integrated history and not a mere collection of imagery, its chronology matters. For this reason, the Biblical authors are intensely interested in the chronological structure of Israel’s story. That is, they are not merely interested in the timespans which concern the lives of individual persons- that Hezekiah was twenty-five years old when he acceded to the throne of Judah, for example (2 Kings 18:2). They are interested in the whole span of time which marks out one age in relation to another. We are explicitly told, for example, that four-hundred and eighty years passed between the exodus of Israel from Egypt and the laying of the foundation of the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6:1). In providing large-scale chronological seams linking Israel’s story to a narrative stretching back to the creation of the world, the Biblical authors reveal to us the fundamental cohesion of the Biblical story. We meet in the Scriptures a single, integrated program of cosmic redemption and glorification conceived in a single Mind- that of God. That the Mind which conceived the meaning of Biblical chronology is the same Mind who ordains and governs history suggests that we ought not play the symbolic meaning of numbers against their historical concreteness. 480 years is indeed twelve periods of forty years. But this is no reason to set aside the historical significance of this 480 year span of time. Indeed, other chronological information provided in the Scriptures can be shown to cohere beautifully with this span of time from.
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