Saying the Bible is a product of its times takes us into the tricky (and, for most, mind-numbing) subject of biblical chronology. Taking the Bible on its own terms means coming to grips with the fact that biblical writers were influenced by current and past events.
The content of the Bible ostensibly spans from creation to the end of time as we know it, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m referring to the chronological boundaries for the writing of the Bible—the times in which its authors and editors lived. In round numbers, if one presumes Moses had a hand in writing any part (or all) of the Torah, the beginning of biblical composition would have occurred in roughly 1450 BC. The last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, would have been composed around AD 100. That’s roughly a 1,500-year span.
What was going on in that span? How do we get these numbers? Those questions are related. The Bible doesn’t provide us with “real time” dating of events. In other words, it doesn’t tell us explicitly that an Old Testament event occurred 700 years before Christ, or that Paul wrote something three decades after the resurrection. The Bible instead gives us relative chronology—what happened before or after what. In addition, the Bible doesn’t date events by astronomical events—the way true real-time chronology must be calculated, since time is measured by the motion of earth around the sun and the appearance of the moon and stars in relation to the earth’s own spin.
Absolute chronology—actual numerical dates—is assigned to biblical events on the basis of synchronisms between people and events in the Bible that can be correlated with the records of another ancient civilization that did keep time by astronomy. Thousands of such records have survived—tables of lunar cycles and celestial observations that modern astronomers can reproduce to align ancient records with actual time. When something in the Bible correlates to those ancient records, we can fix the Bible in real time.
Correlations have a progressively high degree of accuracy and certainty moving from about 1000 BC forward. Events earlier than 1000 BC have less certainty because astronomical records are fewer and less consistent. There’s also simply less chronological material from places like Mesopotamia and Egypt for reconstructing their own history. There are gaps, for example, in the lists of kings and the number of years they reigned.
Situating the Bible in real time allows biblical scholars to know how events in the Bible align with events in Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and other civilizations. Political upheaval, droughts, famines, wars, and natural disasters sometimes become factors in what biblical writers say and why they say it. Time is therefore an important context for taking the Bible on its own terms. We should not neglect it.