I happened to pick up a volume of ArtScroll on a book of the Bible and saw that the authors relied on the chronologies of Jewish events contained in an ancient book called Seder Olam.
While many Jews, including rabbis, consider the chronologies in Seder Olam as sacrosanct, as if they are true ancient rabbinic traditions handed down from one generation to the next, or as revelations from God, this is not true. As Moshe Tzvi Segal points out in his “Sifrei Shmuel,” Kiryat Sefer, 1976, page 211, “kol hacheshbon b’seder olam hu malchuti u’meyusad al derashot haketubim,” “all the chronologies in Seder Olam are artificial, based on sermonic readings (derash) of the texts.” Scholars have different chronologies, and it makes sense to rely on the scholarly views. Rejecting the chronologies in Seder Olam does not make a person irreligious; all it means is that the view of a single man or several men, humans subject to human strengths and weaknesses, is thought to be wrong.
