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The books of Kings give the length of every reign in both kingdoms, and cross-reference them: this king of Israel came to the throne in the such-and-such year of that king of Judah. It reads like a chronologist's dream. Add the numbers up and they do not work.
The problem in one paragraph
From the division of the kingdom after Solomon to the fall of Samaria, the reigns of Judah's kings and the reigns of Israel's kings should cover the same stretch of time. Summed straightforwardly, they do not. The totals differ by several decades, and individual cross-references contradict each other.
For a long time this was taken as evidence that the numbers were unreliable — late, garbled, or invented. That is no longer the usual view, and the reason is worth understanding, because it is a good example of a problem that dissolves once you know how the people who wrote it were counting.
Two ways of counting a first year
A king dies in the middle of a year. His successor takes the throne. Whose year is it?
There were two answers in the ancient Near East, and both were in use.
Under accession-year reckoning, the remainder of the year belongs to the dead king. The new king's first official year begins at the next new year. His partial year is counted as a "year of accession" and does not appear in his total.
Under non-accession-year reckoning, the new king claims the remainder of the year as his own first year. It appears in his total, and it also appears in his predecessor's.
The difference is one year per reign. Over twenty kings that is twenty years of drift, entirely from bookkeeping.
Judah and Israel did not use the same system throughout, and at least one of them appears to have switched. That alone accounts for a large part of the discrepancy.
Two different new years
A second layer sits underneath the first. The two kingdoms did not start their years at the same point.
Judah appears to have counted regnal years from Tishri, in the autumn. Israel appears to have counted from Nisan, in the spring.
Six months of offset means that a synchronism between the two — "in the fifth year of king X of Judah, king Y began to reign in Israel" — can be correct and still look wrong to anyone assuming both scribes started counting at the same moment.
Combine a Tishri year with a Nisan year and an accession system with a non-accession system, and you can generate apparent contradictions out of two records that are both accurate.
Co-regencies
The third factor is the one that does the most work, and the one the text is quietest about.
A king would sometimes install his son as co-ruler during his own lifetime — to secure the succession, or because he was ill, or because he was away at war. Both men were king. Both had regnal years. Those years overlapped.
The record gives each his full total. Read as consecutive reigns, the same years get counted twice, and the kingdom appears to last longer than it did.
Scripture mentions some of these arrangements directly. Uzziah's leprosy leaves his son Jotham governing the house, which is a co-regency in everything but name. Others have to be inferred from the numbers refusing to close any other way.
That inference is where the argument lives. A co-regency is a powerful tool for fixing a chronology, and it is also a tool that can be reached for whenever a total is inconvenient. Used carefully it explains real features of the text. Used freely it can explain anything, which means it explains nothing.
The fixed points outside the Bible
None of this could be sorted out from the Bible alone. What made it tractable was Assyria.
Assyrian scribes kept eponym lists, naming each year after an official. The lists are continuous over the relevant centuries, and one entry records a solar eclipse. That eclipse can be dated astronomically to 763 BC, which pins the whole sequence to absolute years.
Several of those years mention Israelite and Judean kings:
- The Battle of Qarqar in 853 BC, where Shalmaneser III lists Ahab of Israel among the coalition facing him.
- Jehu paying tribute to Shalmaneser III in 841 BC, recorded and pictured on the Black Obelisk.
- The fall of Samaria and the end of the northern kingdom, around 722 BC.
- Sennacherib's campaign against Judah in 701 BC, which his own annals describe and which 2 Kings 18 and 19 also describe.
Babylonian records supply the other end: the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, in 587 or 586 BC.
These are not biblical dates. They are dates from other people's paperwork, which happen to mention the same kings, and they give the biblical numbers something external to be measured against.
Thiele, and what he showed
The reconstruction most chronologies now start from is Edwin Thiele's, published in the middle of the twentieth century as The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings.
Thiele's argument was that the numbers are not corrupt. They are accurate records kept under conventions that later readers had forgotten. Identify the conventions — the accession systems, the two new years, the co-regencies — and the figures fall into place against the Assyrian anchors with remarkably little violence.
That was a substantial result. A body of numbers that had been treated as unreliable turned out to be careful record-keeping, misread.
What is still unresolved
Thiele's scheme is a starting point, not a settled answer.
His handling of the later kings of Judah, particularly Hezekiah, requires adjustments that many scholars have found strained, and the synchronism with Sennacherib's 701 BC campaign is a long-running sore point. Alternative reconstructions exist, differing by a few years here and there and occasionally by more.
The fall of Jerusalem is given as 587 by some and 586 by others, on a technical argument about which reckoning the relevant records use. It is a one-year difference, and it has been argued about for a century.
So the divided monarchy is well dated by the standards of ancient history, and not perfectly dated. Most events are secure within a year or two. A few are not.
Why any of this matters
Two reasons, one practical and one not.
The practical one: this period is where biblical chronology becomes anchored to the wider ancient world. Everything before the divided monarchy is dated by working backwards from it. If these dates move, Solomon moves, and the Exodus moves with him.
The other reason is about how to read the record at all. The instinct when numbers disagree is to assume somebody was careless. Here the numbers disagreed for centuries and the carelessness turned out to be in the reading, not the writing.
That is worth carrying into every other chronological argument. A contradiction is sometimes a contradiction. It is quite often a convention you have not learned yet.
The related questions of how the earlier dates are built are in why Bible chronologies disagree and when did the Exodus happen. The kings themselves are drawn as overlapping bands on the scripture study page, under the Kingdoms tab.