Order of authority
- Scripture in the original languages — absolute weight. Hebrew/Aramaic: Westminster Leningrad Codex (Masoretic Text). Greek NT: SBL Greek New Testament.
- Highly literal translations — secondary (BSB bundled here; links to the ESV at esv.org).
- Extra-biblical sources — a distant third, always labelled (e.g. the ≈BC scale derived from Ussher, 1650). The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint are shown as secondary textual witnesses, never as the primary chronology.
Texts bundled on this site
- Westminster Leningrad Codex — public domain. Morphology & lemmas: “Original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb”, CC BY 4.0.
- Berean Standard Bible — “The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible, BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee. This text of God's Word has been dedicated to the public domain.” berean.bible/terms.htm
- Byzantine Text (Robinson–Pierpont 2005), Acts only, used to show the Acts 13:20 variant. Public domain. github.com/byztxt/byzantine-majority-text.
- Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b–15a: third-tier, extra-biblical tradition only, quoted briefly in the Book Authorship entries. The English is the William Davidson Talmud (Koren Noé) from Sefaria, CC BY-NC. Its use here is non-commercial.
- Derived BC anchor: E. R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, dates the division of the kingdom at Solomon's death to 931 BC (summary). The temple-anchored BC scale counts back from there. It is extra-biblical, approximate (±1), and labelled.
- SBL Greek New Testament — Copyright 2010 Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, CC BY 4.0. sblgnt.com (unmodified; provided without warranty).
- Samaritan Pentateuch — Text-Fabric dataset DT-UCPH/sp (C. C. Højgaard, M. Naaijer, et al.; text from the Samaritanus project, S. Schorch, MS Dublin Chester Beatty 751), github.com/DT-UCPH/sp, CC BY-NC 4.0 (non-commercial use only).
- Septuagint — H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint (Cambridge, 1909; public domain). Digital text: eliranwong/LXX-Swete-1930 (GPL-3.0 repository).
- Strong's Hebrew Dictionary — openscriptures/strongs, CC BY-SA. It is used only by the build, to match each English name in the family trees to the Hebrew proper noun in the cited WLC verse. The Hebrew shown is always the WLC's.
- Kings of Israel and Judah: scholarly date tables (Albright, Thiele, Galil, Kitchen) — from Wikipedia, "Kings of Israel and Judah", CC BY-SA. Third tier, comparison only, shown in the Kings tab next to the text-only reconstruction K1. Nothing on the AM scale is taken from it.
- bibleageoftheearth.com / thesacredcalendar.com (D. Profka & J. Liles) — third tier. The site's 364-day "Sacred Calendar" is summarized and assessed in the Calendar tab, with links. Nothing from it is used to date any event.
- Persian, Hellenistic and New Testament dates — third tier, labelled “assumed” on every item. Ptolemy's Canon of regnal years, as tabulated by R. A. Parker & W. H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.–A.D. 75 (1956), cross-checked by the Elephantine papyri. One anchor carries these dates onto the AM scale: Cyrus's 1st year (Ezra 1:1) = 538 BC, so AM = P − BC = P − 1 + AD (see the Timeline sidebar, “≈ BC / AD — Cyrus-anchored”). Hellenistic dates follow the standard chronology (Polybius, Diodorus, 1–2 Maccabees, Josephus), with Daniel 8 and 11 identified as in Baldwin (Tyndale), Miller (NAC) and Archer (EBC). Roman, Herodian and NT dates come from Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio and inscriptions such as the Delphi Gallio inscription, as summarized by Hoehner (1977), Finegan (1998), Steinmann (2011) and Schnabel (2008). Herodian family links known only from Josephus are marked ③ in the family trees.
- vis-timeline — MIT / Apache-2.0. The family trees and the Kings & Governments view are hand-written SVG and use no library.
Family trees
Each person on family.html is named in a cited verse. The Hebrew is pulled from that verse in the WLC: OSHB proper-noun morphology, with multi-word names joined. The English name is checked against the BSB text of the same verse. Wives and concubines follow the wording of the verse. Selective genealogies and uncertain identifications are flagged, not resolved.
ESV
This site does not display ESV text; it links to www.esv.org for each passage. ESV® is a registered trademark of Crossway.
Derived dates
All dates are Anno Mundi (AM), computed from the ages written in the Masoretic Text, with the creation of Adam as AM 0. The optional “≈ BC” scale is BC = 4004 − AM, following James Ussher, Annales Veteris Testamenti (1650) — an extra-biblical synchronism, approximate to ±1 year.