Four Hundred and Eighty Years: From the Exodus to Solomon's Temple
New, published 8 October 2026. What else is new
Kings dates Solomon's temple by the Exodus.
✝️ 1 Kings 6:1 (ESV)
1 In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the LORD.
That one number carries the whole site's timeline from Solomon back to Moses: the temple begun in 966 BC puts the Exodus in 1446 BC. The book of Judges, read straight through, seems to need more than 480 years. This study adds up its figures, sets them beside two genealogies, and shows where the extra years go.
In one sentence: 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years holds once the judges are read as regional and overlapping, as Judges itself places them, and Ruth's five generations as telescoped; the priestly line's ten generations and Ezra 7's compressed list both support that reading.
Key Takeaways
(This section follows the Key Takeaways format — see that page for what each part is for.)
Lessons about Jesus
The four centuries this study measures are the darkest stretch of Israel's history: "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25, ESV). Yet through them God kept one family line unbroken, from Nahshon in the wilderness to Boaz, Ruth, Obed, Jesse and David. Matthew traces the same line to Jesus (Matthew 1:4-6) and arranges his list in three fourteens (Matthew 1:17). Both lists skip names and lose none of the promise. Jesus is the King those lawless years were waiting for.
Memory verses
✝️ Joshua 21:45 (ESV)
45 Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.
Be Transformed
- Think. When Scripture's numbers seem not to add up, read where the events happen as well as how long they last. Judges 10:7-8 puts two oppressions on two sides of the Jordan in one verse.
- Attitude. Trust the text's summary when the details are partial. Kings states 480 years plainly, and Judges never claims to be a single national timeline.
- Do. Read Judges 10-16 with a map open, and mark which tribe and which region each judge served. Then thank God by name for the promise He kept through all those years: "Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed" (Joshua 21:45, ESV).
Prayer
Father, You kept Your promises to Israel through years when everyone did what was right in his own eyes. You kept the line of David through those years and brought Your Son Jesus from it. Teach me to read Your word on its own terms, to trust it where my sums fall short, and to wait for Your King as faithfully as You kept His line. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Where the genealogies stop
Genealogical age-data stops at Terah. From here to Solomon, the chronological evidence changes character entirely: instead of a systematic formula, Scripture gives one summary figure (1 Kings 6:1: 480 years from the Exodus to Solomon's 4th year) and a long list of individual judges' and oppressors' reign-lengths in between. Those two kinds of evidence don't agree with each other on a naive reading, and two different genealogies, one priestly and one royal, turn out to pull in opposite directions on how to resolve it.
The problem: the numbers don't add up to 480
Summing every individually-stated figure in Judges, in the order given:
| Event | Years | Verse |
|---|---|---|
| Cushan-Rishathaim oppression | 8 | Judges 3:8 |
| Othniel / land's rest | 40 | Judges 3:11 |
| Eglon (Moab) oppression | 18 | Judges 3:14 |
| Ehud / land's rest | 80 | Judges 3:30 |
| Jabin (Canaan) oppression | 20 | Judges 4:3 |
| Deborah/Barak / land's rest | 40 | Judges 5:31 |
| Midian oppression | 7 | Judges 6:1 |
| Gideon / land's rest | 40 | Judges 8:28 |
| Abimelech | 3 | Judges 9:22 |
| Tola | 23 | Judges 10:2 |
| Jair | 22 | Judges 10:3 |
| Ammon oppression (east, Gilead) | 18 | Judges 10:8 |
| Jephthah | 6 | Judges 12:7 |
| Ibzan | 7 | Judges 12:9 |
| Elon | 10 | Judges 12:11 |
| Abdon | 8 | Judges 12:14 |
| Philistine oppression (west) | 40 | Judges 13:1 |
| Samson (during the Philistine oppression) | 20 | Judges 15:20; 16:31 |
That's 410 years for Judges proper. Now add the rest. The wilderness wandering, 40 years and fixed. Roughly 7 years for Joshua's conquest, derived from Joshua 14:7, 10: Caleb was 40 at the spies' mission and 85 "45 years" later, and 38 of those 45 were the imposed wilderness delay, leaving about 7 for the conquest itself. Eli's 40 years judging Israel (1 Samuel 4:18). An unspecified stretch of Samuel's own ministry before the monarchy. Saul's reign. David's 40 (2 Samuel 5:4-5). And Solomon's 4 years to the temple. The sequential total comfortably exceeds 480 before Samuel's own years are even counted — by at least 100 years, likely more. This is a long-recognized problem, not a new one, and it has a name in the scholarly literature: the "Judges chronology problem."
Saul's own reign-length can't even be read off the Hebrew text as it stands: 1 Samuel 13:1 reads, transliterated, "Saul was a son of a year when he began to reign, and two years he reigned over Israel" — a well-known textual lacuna, not a translation choice. A number has dropped out of the Masoretic transmission at Saul's age, and "two years" for his whole reign is implausibly short given everything the text elsewhere attributes to it. The traditional 40-year figure comes not from Samuel but from Acts 13:21 (ESV), where Paul states it plainly: God "gave them Saul... for forty years." So the 40 used here comes from Paul and fills a gap in the Hebrew manuscript tradition. One verse earlier, the KJV has Paul give Israel judges "about the space of four hundred and fifty years" (Acts 13:20, KJV), which would leave no room for 480. That reading follows the later Greek manuscripts, which put the 450 years after "after that"; the earlier ones, followed by the ESV, put it before, so the 450 years cover the stay in Egypt, the wilderness and the conquest: "All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet" (Acts 13:20, ESV).
The text's own basis for overlap
The standard resolution treats several of these judgeships as regional, and therefore overlapping in time. The text supplies the grounds. Judges 10:7-8 (ESV) states that God "sold them into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the Ammonites" in the same breath, with the Ammonite oppression located "beyond the Jordan... which is in Gilead" (east) for 18 years, while Philistine pressure came from the west. Jephthah the Gileadite answers the eastern half (Judges 11:1; 12:7). The judges after him are westerners, Ibzan of Bethlehem, Elon the Zebulunite and Abdon of Pirathon in Ephraim (Judges 12:8-15), so their 25 years may run alongside the Philistine forty; the text does not say whether they do. Samson's 20 years explicitly take place "in the days of the Philistines" (Judges 15:20 ESV). He judges during the 40-year Philistine oppression. 1 Samuel's own narrative shows Philistine dominance continuing well past Samson's death, through Eli's era and into Samuel's early ministry. None of this requires inventing an overlap the text doesn't support. It requires taking the text's own geography seriously, instead of defaulting to a single linear national timeline the book of Judges never claims to be giving.
Genealogy check #1: the priestly line — broadly consistent with ~480 years
The high priestly line from Aaron to Zadok, David and Solomon's priest, is given twice in 1 Chronicles, and the two lists agree: Aaron → Eleazar → Phinehas → Abishua → Bukki → Uzzi → Zerahiah → Meraioth → Amariah → Ahitub → Zadok (1 Chronicles 6:3-8; 6:50-53). That's 10 generational steps from Aaron, a man of the Exodus generation, to Zadok (serving at the end of David's reign and the start of Solomon's). Over roughly 400-480 years, that's 40-48 years per generation. That is high for a strict father-to-son succession, though possible in an office where the heir need not be a firstborn son fathered young. This genealogy doesn't prove 480 years, but it doesn't strain against it either.
Ezra 7:1-5 traces Ezra's own ancestry back to Aaron through the same names, and shows how freely a priestly list could compress. It runs Zadok ← Ahitub ← Amariah ← Azariah ← Meraioth. Its Zadok is the later one, father of Shallum (1 Chronicles 6:12), and between Meraioth and that Azariah it leaves out six generations, David's Zadok among them (1 Chronicles 6:7-10). Ezra was not wrong about his descent. A line that proves descent is free to skip.
Genealogy check #2: the Davidic line — in real tension with 480 years
Ruth 4:18-22 gives David's own ancestry from Judah's son Perez: Perez → Hezron → Ram → Amminadab → Nahshon → Salmon → Boaz → Obed → Jesse → David. Nahshon isn't a random name — Numbers 1:7 names him as the tribal leader of Judah during the wilderness census, firmly placing him in the Exodus generation. From Nahshon to David is only 5 generational gaps (Nahshon-Salmon-Boaz-Obed-Jesse-David). Spread across the same 400-480 year span the priestly line tolerates, that's 80-96 years per generation — not plausible for ordinary human fathering, by a wide margin.
This doesn't mean Ruth's genealogy is wrong; it means it's very likely telescoped — skipping generations the way ancient genealogies regularly do. Ezra 7 does it above; Matthew 1 does it too, dropping three known kings to reach a structuring number. Telescoping is a well-attested biblical pattern, and Ruth's list is short enough to need it.
Rahab fixes where one end of the gap sits. She hid the spies at Jericho in 1406 BC as a woman with her own house and her parents still living (Joshua 2:13), and she "has lived in Israel to this day" (Joshua 6:25, ESV). Matthew names her as Salmon's wife: "Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab" (Matthew 1:5, ESV). Salmon therefore belongs to the conquest generation. To enter the land at all he had to be under twenty at the census of 1445 BC (Numbers 14:29-30), and the Prophetic Timeline places his birth about 1455 BC and Rahab's about 1430 BC. Boaz is dated from the other end, by Obed and David, about 1197 BC. On those dates the skipped names fall between Salmon and Boaz, and Matthew's "father" means forefather, the sense in which the same chapter calls Jesus "the son of David" (Matthew 1:1, ESV). Where exactly the gap falls is contested. Some place it lower in the list, between Obed and Jesse. Rahab's place at Jericho fixes her generation on either reading.
Where this leaves the reconstruction
Two genealogical checks point in different directions. The priestly line is compatible with something close to 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years. The royal line, taken at face value, is not. It all but requires accepting that Ruth's list omits names. Put that together with the judges-overlap evidence above, and the most defensible reading has two parts. 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years is plausible as a real total, achieved by real regional overlap among the judges rather than strict national sequence. That overlap is textually supported. And Ruth's five-generation genealogy for David almost certainly telescopes, the same compression Ezra 7 shows in the priestly line. Nothing here fixes an exact year-by-year allocation of which judge overlaps which by how much; that level of precision isn't recoverable from what the text actually states, and claiming otherwise would overshoot the evidence in the same way summing the numbers naively does.
Discussion questions
- The text in its context. In one verse God sells Israel "into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the Ammonites" (Judges 10:7, ESV), and the next places the Ammonites "beyond the Jordan" in Gilead (Judges 10:8, ESV). Judges reads as one story, but its judges come from different tribes and regions. How does reading it as overlapping local histories change the way you picture that period?
- Christ. Ruth 4:18-22 runs from Perez to David in ten names, and Matthew sets the same line in three fourteens running "to the Christ" (Matthew 1:17, ESV). Both lists skip generations. What does each one show about the King it leads to?
- The hard part. 1 Kings 6:1 dates the temple "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt" (ESV). In the KJV, Paul says God gave Israel judges "about the space of four hundred and fifty years" (Acts 13:20, KJV); the ESV reads "All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet" (Acts 13:20, ESV). How does each reading of Paul's 450 years sit beside the 480 of 1 Kings 6:1?
- Be transformed. Joshua records, "Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass" (Joshua 21:45, ESV). Through the years of the judges, God kept David's line going while Israel kept falling away. Where have you seen God keep a promise through a stretch of your own life that felt like Judges?
Group study sheet for a 40-minute group: two A4 sheets, or one with the guided path
The point, the passage, the questions and the response, from this study. Print on both sides of two A4 sheets, flipping on the long edge. While this block is open, printing the page prints the sheet; close it to print the study.
Four Hundred and Eighty Years: From the Exodus to Solomon's Temple
1 Kings 6:1The point 1 Kings 6:1's 480 years holds once the judges are read as regional and overlapping, as Judges itself places them, and Ruth's five generations as telescoped; the priestly line's ten generations and Ezra 7's compressed list both support that reading.
Ask: what comes to mind when you hear Four Hundred and Eighty Years
? Hear a few answers before anyone reads.
1 Kings 6:1 1In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, the second month, he began to build the house of the LORD.
Also read:
Four Hundred and Eighty Years: From the Exodus to Solomon's Temple
Four Hundred and Eighty Years: From the Exodus to Solomon's Temple
1The text in its context. In one verse God sells Israel "into the hand of the Philistines and into the hand of the Ammonites" (Judges 10:7, ESV), and the next places the Ammonites "beyond the Jordan" in Gilead (Judges 10:8, ESV). Judges reads as one story, but its judges come from different tribes and regions. How does reading it as overlapping local histories change the way you picture that period?
2Christ. Ruth 4:18-22 runs from Perez to David in ten names, and Matthew sets the same line in three fourteens running "to the Christ" (Matthew 1:17, ESV). Both lists skip generations. What does each one show about the King it leads to?
3The hard part. 1 Kings 6:1 dates the temple "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt" (ESV). In the KJV, Paul says God gave Israel judges "about the space of four hundred and fifty years" (Acts 13:20, KJV); the ESV reads "All this took about 450 years. And after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet" (Acts 13:20, ESV). How does each reading of Paul's 450 years sit beside the 480 of 1 Kings 6:1?
Four Hundred and Eighty Years: From the Exodus to Solomon's Temple
4Be transformed. Joshua records, "Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass" (Joshua 21:45, ESV). Through the years of the judges, God kept David's line going while Israel kept falling away. Where have you seen God keep a promise through a stretch of your own life that felt like Judges?
- Think. When Scripture's numbers seem not to add up, read where the events happen as well as how long they last. Judges 10:7-8 puts two oppressions on two sides of the Jordan in one verse.
- Attitude. Trust the text's summary when the details are partial. Kings states 480 years plainly, and Judges never claims to be a single national timeline.
- Do. Read Judges 10-16 with a map open, and mark which tribe and which region each judge served. Then thank God by name for the promise He kept through all those years: "Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed" (Joshua 21:45, ESV).
Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.
Joshua 21:45 (ESV)Father, You kept Your promises to Israel through years when everyone did what was right in his own eyes. You kept the line of David through those years and brought Your Son Jesus from it. Teach me to read Your word on its own terms, to trust it where my sums fall short, and to wait for Your King as faithfully as You kept His line. In Jesus' name. Amen.
References & Recommended Reading
- ESV Bible (Crossway) — 1 Kings 6:1, Judges 10:7-8, 15:20 and 21:25, Joshua 21:45 and
Acts 13:20-21 quoted from the ESV, verified against
study-notes.db. - King James Version and SBL Greek New Testament (
bible-text.db) — the KJV's reading of Acts 13:20, and the transposition SBLGNT marks in that verse. - ESV Study Bible (Crossway), note on Acts 13:20 — the 450 years as Egypt, wilderness and conquest.
- Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 13:1 (Westminster Leningrad Codex, via
bible-text.db) — the missing numbers in Saul's regnal formula. - Genealogy and Times — the parent study this one was forked from, covering the genealogies from Adam to the Exodus.
- Chronology Anchors — the 966 BC temple date this count runs back from.
- Why Not 4004 BC? — Ussher read the same verse as 479 elapsed years; this site counts 480.
- The Prophetic Timeline — the 480 years plotted, from the Jordan crossing in 1406 BC to the temple.