Valerius Josephus Coucke (2 February 1888 – 20 December 1951 (aged 63) ) was a Belgian scholar and priest who was professor at the Major Seminary, Bruges in the 1920s. His importance to modern scholarship comes from his writings in the field of Old Testament chronology. His study of the methods of the authors of the books of Kings and Chronicles led him to conclusions that were later discovered, independently, by Edwin R. Thiele. His approach was distinctive for the use of citations in classical authors to obtain fixed dates in biblical history, most notably the date for the beginning of construction of Solomon's Temple.
Biography
Coucke was born on 2 February 1888, in Poperinge, in the Belgian province of West Flanders. He studied at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he graduated Bachelor of Sacred Theology (S.T.B.). He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1912 and was appointed to several parishes: Bredene, Staden, and Hooglede (all in the diocese of Bruges in Belgium). In 1919, he became a professor at the Major Seminary in Bruges, where he taught sacramental theology and moral theology. In 1927 he became the seminary’s librarian and also its bursar. In 1928, he was appointed a canon of St. Salvator's Cathedral in Bruges. He died in Bruges on 20 December 1951.
Academic contributions
Comparison of his chronology to that of Thiele
Coucke broke from the approach of the Documentary Hypothesis that was popular among European scholars in his day by starting with the working proposition that the chronological data of Kings and Chronicles represented authentic traditions that could be understood once the methods of the ancient scribes were determined. This was in contrast to the skepticism to such an approach inherent in the postulates of the "higher criticism" then prevalent, which assumed that the chronological and other historical data of the Bible's historical books were the product of late-date editors, and hence were of little or no historical value. Coucke departed from this presupposition, using instead the data of the biblical texts as his starting place (an inductive approach). From these data, he came to the following conclusions: 1) During the period of the divided kingdom, Judah’s regnal year began in the fall month of Tishri, whereas that of the northern kingdom, Israel, began in Nisan. (Coucke also allowed that the northern kingdom may have begun its calendar in the Egyptian month of Thoth, since Jeroboam resided in Egypt for many years before becoming the first king of Israel, but Coucke was wrong in assuming that at the time of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, Thoth came in the spring at the same time as the Hebrew Nisan.) 2) For the first few years of the divided kingdom, Judah used accession reckoning for its kings, whereas Israel used nonaccession reckoning. 3) During the rapprochement between the two kingdoms in the ninth century BC, Judah adopted Israel’s nonaccession reckoning. 4) Later, both kingdoms used accession reckoning until the end of their respective kingdoms, and 5) In order to make sense of the biblical data, coregencies, both those expressed explicitly in the text and those implied by the data, must be taken into account. This last principle has been much criticized when espoused by Thiele, but it is widely used by Egyptologists in their computations of Egyptian chronology.
These five principles are identical to those later discovered by Edwin R. Thiele, who was unaware of Coucke’s work when he published the results of his doctoral dissertation in 1944. It was apparently Thiele’s colleague, Siegfried Horn, who introduced Thiele to the writings of Coucke when Horn came to America in 1946. In his subsequent writings, Thiele acknowledged the earlier work of Coucke, and he was gratified that the discovery of these basic principles by two scholars working independently served to authenticate the soundness of their respective approaches. The two authors, however, differed somewhat on how to apply the principles they had discovered, so that their chronologies disagree in several places. They are in exact agreement at the beginning of the divided monarchy, which both Coucke and Thiele placed in the year starting in Nisan of 931 BC. Coucke’s method of deriving this date differed radically from Thiele’s method, as explained in the next two sections. For the end of the kingdom period, Coucke placed the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in the summer of 587 BC, whereas Thiele put it a year later, in 586.