Appendix A - Artaxerxes 7th Year

Appendix A

The Date of Ezra’s Journey to Jerusalem

            The year of Ezra’s journey to Jerusalem has been concretely dated to “the seventh year of King  Artaxerxes” (Ezra 7:7, 8), but this regnal year has been said by scholars to have fallen in either 458 B.C.^R1 or 457 B.C.^R2 Since this is a crucial date for the overall chronological reckoning of the Seventy Week prophecy, it is therefore important to establish which of these two years is the correct one.

            The Jews and the Persians used what was called an “accession-year” system in determining when the first "official" year of a king would start. According to this method, if a king ascended to the throne on any day in the calender year other than "New Year’s day," then the rest of that calender year was considered as his “accession year,” and was labeled as “year zero.”

            The official "first year" of that king would only start when the next New Year’s day would come around. However, at the time of the writing of the books of Ezra-Nehemiah, the Jews and the Persian, were using two different calenders, which started at different times in the year, to reckon the regnal years of kings. The Persians used a spring-to spring calender which began on the first month of the year: Nisan (March/ April); while the Jews, used a fall-to-fall calender which began on the seventh month of the year: Tishri (September/October). (The neighboring Egyptian used a December-to-December Calender).

 

Jewish Spring (Civil) & Fall (Religious) Calenders

            This difference in calenders between them would cause a difference in the dates for King Artaxerxes’s regnal years.  Since King Artaxerxes ascended to the throne in late December 465 B.C., following the death (actually murder) of King Xerses (Esther’ husband), which had occurred around December 17 of that month,^R3 then the Persians, using their spring-to spring calender, considered Artaxerxes to be in his accession year for the following four-month period that led up to their New Year’s Day of Nisan 1, 464 B.C. On the other hand, the Jews, using their fall-to-fall calender, considered Artaxerxes to be in his accession year for the ten-month period that led up to their New Year’s Day of Tishri 1, 464 B.C.

            So the official first year of Artaxerxes according to the Persian spring-to-spring calender would have been from Nisan 1, 464 to Nisan 1, 463; his second year would have been from Nisan 1, 463 to Nisan 1, 462 and so on; and his “seventh year” would have then been from Nisan 1, 458 to Nisan 1,  457.  So since Ezra 7:7-9 says that Ezra began his four-month trip to Jerusalem in the first month (Nisan) of the seventh year of Artaxerxes, then according to the Persian’s reckoning, Ezra would have left for Jerusalem in Nisan (March/April) 458 and would have arrived in the fifth month, Ab, (July/August) of that same year.

            On the other hand, according to the Jewish fall-to-fall calender, the official first year of Artaxerxes would have been from Tishri 1, 464 to Tishri 1, 463 and therefore his “seventh year” would have been from Tishri 1, 458 to Tishri 1, 457. So Ezra’s four-month trip in the seventh year of King Artaxerxes would have been from Nisan 1, 457 to Ab 1, 457.^R4

The 7th Year of King Artaxerxes' Reign

  

            As we have already noted, the introductory material in the book of Ezra (7:1-10) was not written by Ezra himself but rather by the “arranger/composer” of Ezra-Nehemiah, and the key piece of evidence that helps to determine here what calender he was following is the method that Nehemiah himself had used in his Memoirs. It can be seen from the Biblical records that when Nehemiah was writing his Memoir, he used the Jewish fall-to fall calender. This is seen in the fact that he began his Memoir by stating that it was the month of Chislev (December), in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes (Neh 1:1), but then in chapter 2, he went on to mention the upcoming month of Nisan (April), and he said that it was also in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes (2:1). Since, according to the Persian spring-to-spring calender the month of Nisan would have started a new regnal year for King Artaxerxes, then if that was the calender that Nehemiah was using here he would have said that this month of Nisan was in the 21^st  year of the reign of Artaxerxes. But since according to the Jewish fall-to-fall calender, a new regnal for Artaxerxes would not begin in that month of Nisan but later, in the seventh month of Tishri, it then becomes self-evident that Nehemiah was here was using the Jewish fall-to-fall calender.

            Archeological discoveries and calender reconstruction of dated papyri from the late 5^th century B.C., have revealed that in about 420 B.C., a Jewish military garrison in the Persian army which was stationed on a Nile island in Upper Egypt called Elephantine were also using the Jewish fall-to-fall calender to count the regnal years of Persian kings despite the fact that their Egyptian and/or Persian neighbors used different calenders.^R5 This was particularly seen in a double-dated Aramaic Papyri (Kraeling 6) where one of the dates on there was from either the Egyptians or the Persian calender, and was given as “the 8^th of Pharmuthi” while the other equivalent date was from the Jewish calender and was given as “the 8^th of Tammuz, in the 3^rd year of Darius the king.”^R6 In 420 B.C., these dates equaled July 11/12, but this date would only have also fallen in the “3^rd year of Darius the king” on the Jewish calender if the Jews, at that time were using their fall-to-fall calender.^R7 (See the following illustration).^R8

 

Aramaic Papyri (Kraeling 6)

            Now since this calender analysis shows that the Jews used their fall-to-fall calender around 420 B.C. to reckon the regnal years of a foreign king, and since Nehemiah, who wrote the first part of his Memoir in 444 B.C. (Neh 1:1; 2:1) and then the rest of it sometime after 432 B.C. (Neh 13:6), used the Jewish fall-to-fall calender when he was reckoning the regnal years of this Persian king; and also since it has generally been agreed that the composition of Ezra-Nehemiah was done around 400 B.C.,⁹ it would then seem very unlikely that the (Jewish) composer of Ezra-Nehemiah would not have also used this (Civil) fall-to-fall calender when giving the regnal year of King Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:7, 8) in what was then the introduction of his work. It is indeed more reasonable to conclude that he would have harmonized his dating method with the method of Nehemiah than the contrary, since this would come to affect the other key dates (Neh 1:1, 2:1, 13:6) in his Ezra-Nehemiah work. (That is if he hadn’t already subscribed to this calender himself even before writing this book).^N10

            Therefore, based on all of this, it can be firmly concluded here that the “seventh year of King Artaxerxes” mentioned in Ezra 7:7, 8, was reckoned according to the Jewish fall-to-fall calender and thus was from Tishri 1, 458 B.C. to Tishri 1, 457 B.C., and therefore Ezra’s trip to Jerusalem in that year was specifically from March 27, 457 B.C. to July 24, 457 B.C.^R11

Notes to Appendix A

1. E.g., Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, xliv;  Blekinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah, 144; F. C. Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 101; J. G. McConvile,  Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Daily Bible Study (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1985),. 2, 3; Mark A. Throntveit, Ezra-Nehemiah.  Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1992), 1, 2, 12.

2. E.g., Carl G. Tuland, "Ezra-Nehemiah or Nehemiah-Ezra?" AUSS (1974): 49; Shea "When Did the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9:24 Begin?" JATS  2 (1991): 127-136; Hoehner, Chronological Aspects, 124; W.F.M. Scott, "Nehemiah-Ezra?" ExpTim 58 (1947): 263, 266.

3. See Aramaic Papyri 6 in: Cowley, 15-18; H. H. Figulla, ed., Ur Excavations: Texts IV (London: By Order of the Trustees of the Two Museums, 1949), 15, No. 193; cf. Owusu-Antwi, 296, 297.

4. The following chart is based on the chart of S. H. Horn and L. H. Wood in: The Chronology of Ezra 7. 2d ed. (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association., 1970), 126, 127.

5. See Horn and Wood, "The Fifth-Century Jewish Calender at Elephantine." JNES 13 (1954): 1-20. idem. The Chronology of Ezra 7, 129-156.

6. See Emil G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri New Documents of the fifth Century B.C. from the Jewish Colony at Elephantine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953),  191-194.

7. Horn and Wood, The Chronology of Ezra 7, 109-116; Owusu-Antwi, 297, 298.

8. The following chart is based on the chart of Horn and Wood in: The Chronology of Ezra 7, 87.

9. See e.g., Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah. xxxv-xxxvi; Myers, lxviii-lxxi .

10. These evidences given here about the prevailing use of the Fall-to-Fall calender by the Jews in the days following their restoration is quite significant, due to the fact that the Jews seem to have been using a Spring-to-Spring calender while they were under direct Persian control as a comparison of the dates in the writings of the prophet Haggai shows (Hag 1:1 and 2:20). He was wrote in days of King Darius I Hytaspes (522 B.C.-486 B.C.), in specifically the year 520 B.C., to the Jews who had returned with Zerubbabel back in 537 B.C. to encourage them to finish their work on the Temple (cf. Ezra 5:1).

11. Cf. Horn and Wood, The Chronology of Ezra 7, 117-127; Owusu-Antwi, 298-299. [Julian Calender dates based on the work of Parker and Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.-A.D. 75,  46].