[Avodah] How do Chazal calculate a king's reign?

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Arie Folger (responding to RDIsrael) wrote:

> Not necessarily. The dates in Tanakh could be according to how
> the respective surrounding cultures were proclaiming the years
> of their kings.

If we focus on how this was recorded in Tanach, then we lose the context of my question. Namely:

The goal of the Gemara Megilla 11b-12a is to document the 70 years of galus, by specifying when it began and ended, in relation to the reigns of the kings of the time. The gemara itself does the arithmetic, and the gemara itself catches some math errors, and Rava resolves the errors by pointing out that some years (i.e., the beginning and ending years of which kings) overlapped.

These are not questions raised by specific rishonim, but by the Gemara itself. The task remaining for the rishonim is to identify *which* are the overlapping reigns. The simplest answer to that question, as I and my chavrusa see it, is that *all* reigns overlap, except in the unusual case of where one king's reign ended at the close of a calendar year and the next year didn't begin until the start of the following year.

We find it strange that it is so difficult to find any commentaries who are bothered by this. We don't regard this as deeply b'iyun study. We see ourselves as learning this gemara in a most superficial manner. All we're trying to do is make some sense of the gemara's numbers. Throughout the gemara, Belshatzar's reign is given as three years, and that made some sense when the pompous Belshatzar and Achashverosh held their partial years to count as full years. But once Rava pointed out that we don't count that way, it should have been obvious to everyone that Belshatzar's reign was nowhere near three years long.

Akiva Miller

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