5.2.1 - Accession Year

The year in which a king assumed the throne. Accession year reckoning is a chronological method of numbering a king’s years that does not count his first partial (accession) year. “Since a king would be unlikely to die on the exact day ending a particular year and his successor take the throne on the first day of the following year, it was likely that the last year of a king’s reign was a partial year, and the rest of that year was served by the following king. Since both kings served part of a year, to whom was that year assigned? In some systems used in the ancient world, the year was assigned to the end of the reign of the previous king, and the partial year was not counted in the reign of the new king. Instead this was a sort of ‘year zero’ for the new king, called his accession year. This i accession year system was typically used by the Assyrians and Babylonians. The i non-accession year system was used by the kings of Israel, whose first dynasty was founded by Jeroboam I.”¹ By way of contrast, “Non-accession numbering means that when a king died, that year was counted as part of his reign, but it was also counted in the total number of years of the king who succeeded him. In this way, a king who died one year after he started would be given [a reign of] two years instead of one which is the reason that reign length formulas use a number that is one less than the non-accession number.”² “One general principle is that non-accession years are used when the years are measured from the start of a king’s coregency with his father.”³ See Counting Years.

Notes

¹ Andrew E Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2011), 38-39.

² Roger C. Young, “Tables of Reign Lengths from the Hebrew Court Recorders,” in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 48 no. 1 (Evangelical Theological Society, June 2005), 226.

³ Ibid.