This is the period beginning with the earliest urban settlement in the Land of Israel, and continuing up to the conquests of Alexander the Great (some sources end this period with either the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar, or the Persian conquest of Babylon, but for our purposes, we have adopted the widest definition).
Conventional history books give the beginning of the Bronze Age as anywhere from 4000 BCE to 3000 BCE. The JAH dates the beginning of the Bronze Age to after 2000 BCE.
The basis of the JAH is the realization that the history of the Land of Israel, from the earliest urban settlements until the Alexandrian conquest, is described identically by the archeological evidence and the biblical record. But that the conventional dating of the archeological levels (strata) has stretched the archeological record out, relative to the actual historical events, so that archeology and the Bible appear to conflict.
If you are interested in details about revision hypotheses in general, and the JAH in particular, I have written an article called "On the Care and Feeding of Revision Hypotheses". If you would prefer to receive an ASCII text file version of this article, you may request one by e-mailing me.
Additionally, if you are interested in biblical chronology as such, the Jerusalem Chronology of the Israelite Monarchies is a comprehensive chronology of the period of the kings of Israel and Judah. This period is contains the most chronological information of any related in the Bible, and is the backbone of biblical chronology.
The JCIM was first published in pamphlet form by B. Aaronson in 1989. Since then, I have taken over work on it, and incorporated corrections and fine-tuning. I plan to complete a full edition this year. In the meantime, I am working on an online edition of the work. As a first step towards this goal, I have put a graphic timeline of the period up on the Web.
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