Valerius Coucke

Valerius Coucke
Born (1888-02-02)2 February 1888
West Flanders, Belgium
Died 20 December 1951(1951-12-20) (aged 63)
Brugge/Bruges, Belgium
Nationality Belgian
Fields history, chronology
Institutions Het Grootseminarie Brugge/Le Grand Séminaire de Bruges, Belgium
Known for Derived date of start of construction of Solomon’s Temple using various classical (non-biblical) authors (Parian Marble, Tyrian King List, Pompeius Trogus) that agrees exactly with date later derived from biblical and Assyrian data.

Valerius Josephus (Latin; Flemish: Valeer Jozef; French: Valère Joseph) 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.

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 bachelor's 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.

Academic Contributions

Comparison of his chronology to that of Thiele

Coucke broke precedent with the approach of the Documentary Hypothesis 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.[1][2] 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] 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.[4]

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.[5] It apparently was Thiele’s colleague, Siegfried Horn, who introduced Thiele to the writings of Coucke when Horn came to America in 1946.[6] 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.[7] 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 Qarqar, 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, 10 June 1208 BC[8] (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,[9] 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)[10] one year before the fall of Troy, that is, in 1209 BC.[11] 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).[12] 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.[13] 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.[14] 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.[15] 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 Apion 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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18][19][20][21][22][23] (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."[24] 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.[25] This correction has been accepted in several recent studies dealing with chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period.[26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] 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.

Writings

Only two publications by Coucke are known. The earlier is the article "Chronologie des rois de Juda et d’Israël," Revue bénedictine 37 (1925), pp. 325–364. The ideas and chronology of this article were expanded and included in his contribution to the article "Chronologie biblique" in Supplément au dictionnaire de la Bible, ed. Louis Pirot, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1928), cols. 1245-1279. In late 2010, a search by the principal librarian of the Grootseminarie library, where Coucke had been principal librarian several decades previously, failed to find any further publications for which he was the author.

References

  1. ↑ "Wellhausen has shown, by convincing reasons, that the synchronisms within the Book of Kings cannot possibly rest on ancient tradition, but are on the contrary simply the products of artificial reckoning." R. Kittel, A History of the Hebrews, (London, 1986), II, P. 234.
  2. ↑ "The numerical errors in the Books of Kings have defied every attempt to ungarble them. Those errors are largely the creation of the editors who set out to write a synchronistic history of Judah and Israel, using as sources two sets of unrelated court chronicles . . . the editors did not execute the synchronisms skillfully." Cyrus Gordon, The World of the Old Testament (New York: 1958), p. 194.
  3. ↑ Accession reckoning counts the partial calendar year in which a king came to the throne as his "zero" year, whereas nonaccession reckoning counts it as his first year. Both methods were used in the ancient Near East. When reckoning spans of time counted by nonaccession reckoning, one year must be subtracted from the total for each monarch.
  4. ↑ William J. Murnane, Ancient Egyptian Coregencies (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1977), esp. pp. 39, 44, 49, 81, 95, 169, 189–193, and 239.
  5. ↑ Edwin R. Thiele, "The Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 (1944), pp. 137–186.
  6. ↑ Siegfried H. Horn, "The Chronology of King Hezekiah’s Reign," Andrews University Seminary Studies 2 (1964), p. 44.
  7. ↑ Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (3d ed.; Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1981), p. 59, n. 17.
  8. ↑ For the determination of the Julian date, see Rodger C. Young and Andrew E. Steinmann, “Correlation of Select Classical Sources Related to the Trojan War with Assyrian and Biblical Chronologies,” Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 1.2 (2012) 235 n. 30.
  9. ↑ http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/faqs/q004/q004006.html
  10. ↑ Tyre was in existence in the Amarna period (middle of 14th century BC), as shown by letters from its king to the pharaoh. However, it apparently had become abandoned and was subsequently resettled at the time of the invasion by the Sea Peoples, according to W. F. Albright, "The Role of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization" in G. E. Wright, ed., The Bible and the Ancient Near East (New York, 1961), p. 340, and H. J. Katzenstein, The History of Tyre from the Second Millennium B.C.E. until the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 538 B.C.E. (Jerusalem, 1973), pp. 59–61. The first invasion of the Sea People was in the reign of Merneptah (ca. 1213–1203 BC). Coucke’s date of 1209 BC for the (re)founding of Tyre, as derived from Josephus, would place it in this first invasion of the Sea Peoples when, according to Pompeius Trogus, the people of Ashkelon were driven from their city, after which they occupied Tyre. The Merneptah stele from Merneptah’s fifth year says that "Carried off is Ashkelon."
  11. ↑ Coucke assumed that the founding of Tyre was in the summer preceding the fall of Troy. With his date of May 1207 BC for the fall of Troy, the founding of Tyre would be the summer of 1208 BC. Using the Tishri-based years that Coucke assumed for Tyre, this would be the year starting in Tishri of 1209 BC.
  12. ↑ V. Coucke, "Chronologie biblique" in Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible (ed. Louis Pirot; Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1928), Vol. 1, col. 1251.
  13. ↑ Alden Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition (London, 1979), p. 145.
  14. ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica, 1885 edition, article "Phoenicians." This states that "according to a very good MS. (Regin.)," of the Canons, the date for the founding of Tyre was "in 1209, which agrees with the date 1208 for the fall of Troy on the Parian marble."
  15. ↑ Mosshammer, Chronicle of Eusebius, p. 160.
  16. ↑ V. Coucke, "Chronologie des rois de Juda et d’Israël," Revue bénedictine 37 (1925), p. 327.
  17. ↑ F. Safar, "A Further Text of Shalmaneser III," Sumer 7 (1951), pp. 11–12, col. iv, 10–12.
  18. ↑ J. Liver, "The Chronology of Tyre at the Beginning of the First Millennium B.C.," Israel Exploration Journal 3 (1953), pp. 113-120.
  19. ↑ J. M. Peñuela, "La inscripción asiria IM 55644 y la cronología de los reyes de Tiro." Part 1: Sefarad 13 (1953), pp. 217–237. Part 2: Sefarad 14 (1954), pp. 1–39.
  20. ↑ E. Lipiński, "Ba‘li-Manzer and the Chronology of Tyre," Rivista degli studi orientali 45 (1970), p. 59–65.
  21. ↑ Frank M. Cross Jr., "An Interpretation of the Nora Stone," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 208 (1972), p. 17, n. 11.
  22. ↑ William Hamilton Barnes, Studies in the Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1991), pp. 29–55.
  23. ↑ Rodger C. Young, "Three Verifications of Thiele’s Date for the Beginning of the Divided Monarchy," Andrews University Seminary Studies 45 (2007), pp. 185–187.
  24. ↑ Barnes, Studies, p. 55.
  25. ↑ Rodger C. Young, "When Did Solomon Die?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 46 (2003), pp. 589–603. Young's paper shows no awareness of Coucke’s earlier work. Its thesis is that a calculation error in Thiele’s chronology of the first rulers of the southern kingdom can be corrected by dating Judean monarchs Solomon through Athaliah one year earlier than in Thiele’s system, and that this correction brings the reign of Solomon into line with the date for the construction of the Temple that can be derived from the Jubilee cycles.
  26. ↑ Bryant G. Wood, "The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005), pp. 477, 488.
  27. ↑ Douglas Petrovich, "Amenhotep II and the Historicity of the Exodus Pharaoh," The Master's Seminary Journal 17 (2006), p. 83.
  28. ↑ Douglas Petrovich, "The Dating of Hazor's Destruction in Joshua 11 by Way of Biblical, Archaeological, and Epigraphical Evidence," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51 (2008), p. 495, n. 24.
  29. ↑ Leslie McFall, "Do the Sixty-Nine Weeks of Daniel Date the Messianic Mission of Nehemiah or Jesus?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52 (2009), p. 690, n. 43.
  30. ↑ Leslie McFall, "The Chronology of Saul and David," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 53 (2010), chart on p. 533.
  31. ↑ Andrew E. Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2011), pp. 133-134.

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