The period of four hundred and eighty years cannot be reconciled with the genealogies any better than with the apparent chronology of the book of Judges. Between Nahshon, who was a contemporary of Moses, and Solomon, only five generations are given (Ruth iv. 20-22); and between Phinehas and Zadok, whom Solomon removed from the priesthood, there were only seven generations of priests (1 Chron. vi. 4-8). Doubtless some of the links in the ancestry of David have been dropped, but that can hardly be the case as regards the priests. Seven generations would give, at the most, not more than two hundred and ten years. That the number four hundred and eighty, however, has really been based on the number forty seems probable. Forty years in Hebrew idiom merely signified an indeterminate and unknown period of time, and the Moabite Stone shows that the same idiom existed also in the Moabite language.[145] Thus Absalom is said, in 2 Sam. xv. 7, to have asked permission to leave Jerusalem ‘after forty years,’ although the length of time was really little more than two years (2 Sam. xiv. 28 _sqq._), and Jewish tradition has supplied the lost record of the length of Saul’s reign with a date of forty years. The period of forty years, which meets us again and again in the book of Judges, is simply the equivalent of an unknown length of time; it denotes the want of materials, and the consequent ignorance of the writer. Twenty, the half of forty, is equally an expression of ignorance; and the only dates available for chronology are those which represent a definite space of time, like the eight years of Chushan-rishathaim’s oppression of Israel, or the six years of Jephthah’s judgeship. We can learn nothing, accordingly, from the books of the Old Testament about the chronology of Israel down to the time of David. For David’s reign we have the seven years of his rule at Hebron, followed by the thirty-three years of his sway over the whole of Israel. For the reign of Solomon we have again the indeterminate ‘forty years’; but since Rezon of Damascus, like Hadad of Edom, was ‘an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon,’ it is probable that the reign did not actually last more than thirty years at the most. Even the chronology of the divided kingdom after the death of Solomon, in spite of the synchronisms the compiler of the books of Kings has endeavoured to establish between the kings of Judah and those of Israel, has been the despair of historians, and scheme after scheme has been proposed in order to make it self-consistent. The Assyrian monuments, however, have now come to our help, and shown that between the time of Ahab and that of Hezekiah it is forty years in excess.