DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
The Assyrians named each year after an official and kept lists of them. One entry records a solar eclipse — astronomically datable to 763 BC — which locks the whole sequence to real years. Where Assyrian kings meet biblical ones, the Bible's timeline gets anchored too.
Why it’s interesting
So an eclipse over ancient Assyria is part of why we can say Samaria fell in 722 BC. Biblical chronology isn't free-floating — it's pinned to the wider records of the ancient world.
Scholarly consensus
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.