Even after the call of Abraham, Hebrew chronology is equally uncertain. The length of life assigned to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is surprising, though not quite impossible, but the dates connected with it do not always agree together. How, for example, can Abraham have had six children after the death of Sarah (Gen. xxv. 1, 2), when the birth of Isaac nearly forty years before had been regarded as extraordinary on account of the patriarch’s age? Or, again, to quote the words of Professor Driver[144]: ‘Do we all realise that according to the chronology of the Book of Genesis (xxv. 26, xxvi. 34, xxxv. 28) [Isaac] must have been lying upon his deathbed for _eighty years_? Yet we can only diminish this period by extending proportionately the interval between Esau’s marrying his Hittite wives (Gen. xxvi. 34), and Rebekah’s suggestion to Isaac to send Jacob away, lest he should follow his brother’s example (xxvii. 46), which from the nature of the case will not admit of any but a slight extension. Keil, however, does so extend it, reducing the period of Isaac’s final illness to forty-three years, and is conscious of no incongruity in supposing that Rebekah, _thirty-seven_ years after Esau has taken his Hittite wives, should express her fear that Jacob, then aged seventy-seven, will do the same!’ The length of the period during which the Israelites were in Egypt has been the subject of endless controversy. The Old Testament statements in regard to it are clear enough. Abraham is told (Gen. xv. 13) that his descendants shall ‘serve’ the Egyptians and be ‘afflicted’ by them for 400 years. As a generation was counted at thirty years, this implies that the whole period spent in Egypt was 430 years, though the statement is not quite exact, since Joseph lived more than thirty years after the settlement of his brethren in the land of Goshen, and their servitude and affliction did not begin till after his death. In Exodus (xii. 40) we are informed explicitly that ‘the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was 430 years.’ Four hundred and thirty years, therefore, must have been the length of time during which Israel was officially regarded as having lived in Goshen.