Old Testament Chronologies
Posted: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 | Updated: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 | Tagged: news, chronology.
At some point in the last year, an interesting — even curious — site disappeared from the web. It was a valuable albeit eccentric compilation of tables relating to the chronology of ancient Israel. The URL was http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/richardmallett1/OTChron1.html, and Justin Taylor even featured it in a blog post. Now, however, not only is the site gone, but the host has shut down.1
As it happens, I wanted to make use of these charts during some teaching last year. The lecture room had very flakey wireless, so I saved a few pages for use off-line just in case I couldn’t connect. I am now glad that I did, and regret not grabbing more! There is an odd mix of the old and the new, the academic and the popular, the mainstream and the eccentric. But there is no doubt that a lot of work went into compiling the data in HTML tables.
If anyone recognizes the name in the URL, or remembers the screenshot and has information about the author, or knows whether the site has moved, do please let me know, either in the comment thread, or from the contact page. It seems, however, that the original pages were last updated around May, 2000, so my hunch is that they had been long abandoned in any case.
The rescued pages have not been left in their original state. I have quietly corrected some errors, styled the HTML, and added full bibliographic information for sources. In the pages devoted to individual scholar’s work, I have added internal links, a listing of reviews, and some extracts from them to indicate something of the nature of the work being presented.
I might well add to this from time to time, although I hope the information rescued and the format it is now available in will itself be of some use.
1 Update. The pages now are available from the site captured by the Wayback Machine. All the chronology pages appear to be preserved.
