Footnote

a Man’s creation was placed in 4128 and sin’s entrance in 4126 B.C.E. Such chronology followed an incorrect manuscript rendering of Acts 13:20 in The Emphatic Diaglott, which said that God gave Israel judges “about four hundred fifty years, till Samuel the prophet.” A footnote stated that this was at variance with 1 Kings 6:1, where the Hebrew letter daleth (thought to represent the number 4) supposedly had been mistaken for the similar character he (5). Hence, it was suggested that 580 (not 480) years elapsed between Israel’s exodus from Egypt and the time that Solomon began building Jehovah’s temple. But the oldest manuscripts spell out all numbers. So a transcriber’s visual error could not have occurred at 1 Kings 6:1, which gives this period correctly as 480 years. This harmonizes with a correct reading of Acts 13:20, which indicates that the period of “about four hundred and fifty years” there mentioned preceded the era of the Judges.