There is a conflict between the face value reading of these passages that most Bible Literalists don’t want to face, and when they do they have oddly decided it’s Paul who needs to be reinterpreted.
1 Kings 6:1 says Solomon started building The Temple in the 480th year since the Exodus, while Paul says after the 40 years wandering and then the conquest of Canaan and then there were 450 years of Judges then 40 years under Saul then David who we know reigned 40 years.
Honestly people prefer just citing 1 Kings 6:1 because it’s convenient, they want to say it’s settled by one simple verse and not actually properly divide the Word of Truth, they don't want to actually check the difficult math.
Adding up the numbers in Judges on their own also agrees with Paul, it totals 450 years from the start of the first oppression to the Anointing of Saul. And it also vindicates Jephthah in Judges 11 by showing it was 300 years from the beginning of the first oppression to the beginning of the Ammonite oppression in Judges 10, meaning if anything Jephthah and Paul were rounding down.
I have long favored the approach that 1 Kings 6:1 is excluding the periods of oppression for some ceremonial reason. But as I've become more open to the Amenhotep II Edoxus model recently, I decided to revisit these matters and look into how apologists seek to reconcile this from the other angle.
First thing I found was someone arguing that Acts 13 only reads this way in the Textus Receptus and we should trust the Alexandrina Manuscripts. Naturally I am firmly opposed to that approach. I’m not a strict KJV Onlist but I am in agreement with them on the matter of the source texts. It looks like the Alexandrians sought to reword things so it could conform with a shooter timeline because they liked to shorten Biblical timeframes in Alexandria hence the LXX version of Exodus 12:40-41, or for that matter the LXX version of 1 Kings 6:1 which changed it to the 440th year.
That’s an issue for the Late Exodus, I imagine they say once you agree not to take a certain time period passage at face value obviously they would exaggerate to deflate. But since no serious scholar thinks the LXX is the original of 1 Kings 6:1 we see there is a willingness to deflate. But there are also times when if anything it would serve your agenda to find down, to say at least this much time had passed.
The other method was arguing that the various Judgeships in Judges overlap. This ignores how things are worded, they record oppression, then rest, then oppression again, then rest again. Some periods of Rest aren't claimed to be one single Judge, but the general period of rest between oppressions, like the 80 year rest that began with Ehud, it doesn’t actually lay he personally was alive that whole time, or the 40 years the began with Deborah.
Early Exodus proponents want this adding up of years in Judges to vindicate Jephthah; they cite him all the time as a second witness against the Late Exodus model. It is self serving to then read the text differently after that, and the room for overlaps will still not be enough to fix an over 90 year discrepancy.
I also think it is possible to conclude a 40 year reign for Saul from The Books of Sammuel alone, but it involves the matter of the controversially difficult to translate or even understand in Hebrew opening of 1 Samuel 13, which in Hebrew uses the word for Son but the KJV obscures that. Of Saul’s 4 sons by his wife, the youngest Ishbosheth is never referred to before Saul became King. I think 1 Samuel 13 is telling us Saul had a son in the first year of his reign and that is naturally Ishbosheth. And we’re later told Ishbosheth was 40 when Saul died and he began to reign in 2 Samuel 2:10.
I’ve also struggled with the fact that the model I favored in the past doesn’t have enough time between The Exodus and the first oppression for Joshua to die before the first oppression. Joshua 14:7 tells us Joshua was 40 when he spied out the land during the second year of the wandering in Numbers 13-40, and Joshua 24:10 and Judges 2:8 say he was 110 when he died. Which means he died about 31 years after the start of the conquest and 24 years after when initially the conquest is typically viewed to have ended. And Judges 1 and 2 clearly seem to place his death before the first oppression.
The Late Exodus proponents who argue against taking 1 Kings 6:1 at face value with the agenda of wanting a smaller time period typically argue it’s a symbolic number representing 12 generations of 40 years. They seek to roughly equate that to 12 generations of 20 years but I could translate it into 12 generations of 50, 60 or 70 years based on various Biblical significance those numbers have, but 50 is all I’d need, roughly 600 years. I find that logic interesting, but the language of 480th Year still has me feeling it means an exact count.
Which got me to wondering why the author of this part of Kings even thought he could know such an exact year?
Remembering the context that this is about The Temple, which will replace The Tabernacle once it’s finished. I think about The Tabernacle rituals that are done annually, particularly Yom Kippur near the middle of each Torah Year. They may have been keeping records of how many times they did each of those. And perhaps during the oppressions they were prevented from observing them by the oppressors.
And/or maybe they had stopped doing them for a while after the Philistines destroyed the Tabernacle Shiloh and took The Ark, The Ark and Tabernacle were not in the same place again till Solomon consecrated The Temple. Maybe they were in a sense Levitically in the 480th year until The Temple was consecrated.
So the weight of The Biblical Data definitely supports a longer view of the time from Exodus to Solomon, the face value reading of 1 Kings 6:1 stands on its own. It takes two or more witnesses to establish sometime, the face value reading of 1 Kings 6:1 has no second witness.
To bring some not inspired but still perhaps enlightening Extra Biblical Testimony into this, there’s Flavius Josephus. He was from a Cohen Family and had access to Temple Records. In Antiquities of the Jews Book 20 Chapter 10 he says based on counting the terms of the first 13 High Priests (Aaron to Abiathar) that it was 612 years from Aaron being consecrated in the same year as The Exodus till Solomon built The Temple.
Abiathar was deposed early in Solomon’s reign, but we don’t have the exact year, it seems to have been before The Temple construction started. So it could be 480 is really 612. Making a 132 year difference.
That makes the 16th Century BC date for the destruction of Jericho the most likely conclusion. If we had taken that approach to Biblical Chronology all along then Kathleen Kenyon’s discoveries would have never been a problem.
The Samaritan tradition actually places the entry into the Promised Land under Joshua in 1639 or 1638 BC. That’s too ancient to be reconcilable with the other data in my view.
Of course why Samaritans have that as a calendar start date in the first place is interesting. Perhaps another factor in 1 Kings 6:1 is in-spite of how it’s worded actually starting it’s found of whatever it’s counting with the entry into the land not actually the Exodus. Maybe in a sense they weren’t fully spiritually out of Egypt until they were in The Land?
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