'Years' in the Bible

Jehoram was thirty-two years of age when he became king, and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem.

Now it came about in the course of time, at the end of two years, that his intestines came out because of his disease and he died in excruciating pain. And his people did not make a funeral fire to honor him, like the fire for his fathers.

Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years; and he departed with no one’s regret (sorrow). They buried him in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.

Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Athaliah, a granddaughter of Omri.

Joash was hidden with them in the house (temple) of God for six years, and Athaliah reigned over the land.

Joash was seven years old when he became king, and he reigned for forty years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Zibiah from Beersheba.

Now when Jehoiada grew old and was full of days, he died. He was a hundred and thirty years old at his death.

Amaziah was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned for twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem.

Amaziah assembled [the men of] Judah and appointed them in accordance with their fathers’ (ancestors’) households under commanders of thousands and of hundreds throughout Judah and Benjamin. He numbered them from twenty years old and above and found there to be 300,000 choice men fit for war and able to handle spear and shield.

And Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah lived fifteen years after the death of Joash the son of Jehoahaz king of Israel.

Then all the people of Judah took Uzziah, who was sixteen years old, and made him king in place of his father Amaziah.

Uzziah was sixteen years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-two years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jechiliah of Jerusalem.

Jotham was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jerushah the daughter of Zadok.

He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem.

Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem. He did not do right in the sight of the Lord, as his father (forefather) David had done.

Hezekiah became king when he was twenty-five years old, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abijah the daughter of Zechariah.

without regard to their genealogical registration, to the males from thirty years old and upward—everyone who entered the house of the Lord for his daily obligations—for their service in accordance with their duties by their divisions;

as well as the priests who were registered genealogically according to their fathers’ households, and the Levites from twenty years old and upward, by their duties and by their divisions.

Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned for fifty-five years in Jerusalem.

Amon was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned for two years in Jerusalem.

Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned for thirty-one years in Jerusalem.

Joahaz was twenty-three years old when he became king, and he reigned [only] three months in Jerusalem.

Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem; and he did evil in the sight of the Lord his God.

Jehoiachin was eight[teen] years old when he became king, and he reigned for three months and ten days in Jerusalem, and he did evil in the sight of the Lord.

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem.

to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had restored its Sabbaths; for as long as the land lay desolate it kept Sabbath until seventy years were complete.

Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia [that is, the first year he ruled Babylon], in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah [the prophet], the Lord stirred up (put in motion) the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he sent a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing, saying:

In the second year of their coming to God’s house at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak began [the work], with the rest of their brothers—the priests and Levites and all who came to Jerusalem from the captivity. They appointed the Levites, from twenty years old and upward, to oversee the work of the house of the Lord.

They replied, ‘We are servants of the God of heaven and earth, and are rebuilding the temple which was erected many years ago, which a great king of Israel built and finished.

Moreover, from the day that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year to the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes, for twelve years, neither I nor my relatives have eaten the governor’s food allowance.

“Indeed, for forty years You sustained them in the wilderness; they lacked nothing,Their clothes did not wear out, and their feet did not swell.

“Yet You were patient with them for many years,And admonished them and warned them by Your Spirit through Your prophets;Still they would not listen.Therefore You gave them into the hand (power) of the peoples of the lands.

‘Are Your days as the days of a mortal,Are Your years as man’s years,

“The wicked man writhes with pain all his days,And numbered are the years stored up for him, the ruthless one.

“For when a few years are past,I shall go the way of no return.

“I thought age should speak,And a multitude of years should teach wisdom.

“If they hear and serve Him,They will end their days in prosperityAnd their years in pleasantness and joy.

“Behold, God is exalted, and we do not know Him;The number of His years is unsearchable.

After this, Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons and his grandsons, four generations.

For my life is spent with sorrowAnd my years with sighing;My strength has failed because of my iniquity,And even my body has wasted away.

You will prolong the king’s life [adding days upon days];His years will be like many generations.

I have considered the ancient days,The years [of prosperity] of long, long ago.

And I said, “This is my grief,That the right hand of the Most High has changed [and His lovingkindness is withheld].”

Therefore He consumed their days like a breath [in emptiness and futility]And their years in sudden terror.

For a thousand years in Your sightAre like yesterday when it is past,Or as a watch in the night.

You have swept them away like a flood, they fall asleep [forgotten as soon as they are gone];In the morning they are like grass which grows anew—

For all our days pass away in Your wrath;We have finished our years like a whispered sigh.

The days of our life are seventy years—Or even, if because of strength, eighty years;Yet their pride [in additional years] is only labor and sorrow,For it is soon gone and we fly away.

Make us glad in proportion to the days You have afflicted us,And the years we have suffered evil.

“For forty years I was grieved and disgusted with that generation,And I said, ‘They are a people who err in their heart,And they do not acknowledge or regard My ways.’

I said, “O my God, do not take me away in the midst of my days;Your years are [eternal] throughout all generations.

“But You remain the same,And Your years will never end.

For length of days and years of life [worth living]And tranquility and prosperity [the wholeness of life’s blessings] they will add to you.

Hear, my son, and accept my sayings,And the years of your life will be many.

Or you will give your honor to others,And your years to the cruel one,

For by me (wisdom from God) your days will be multiplied,And years of life shall be increased.

The [reverent] fear of the Lord [worshiping, obeying, serving, and trusting Him with awe-filled respect] prolongs one’s life,But the years of the wicked will be shortened.

If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they may be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he is not respected and is not given a proper burial [he is not laid to rest in the sepulcher of his fathers], then I say, “Better the miscarriage than he,

Even if the other man lives a thousand years twice over and yet has seen no good and experienced no enjoyment—do not both go to one place [the grave]?”

Yes, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. All that is to come will be futility.

Remember [thoughtfully] also your Creator in the days of your youth [for you are not your own, but His], before the evil days come or the years draw near when you will say [of physical pleasures], “I have no enjoyment and delight in them”;

For the head (capital) of Aram is Damascus and the head of Damascus is [King] Rezin (now within sixty-five years Ephraim will be broken to pieces and will no longer be a people).

My heart cries out for Moab;His fugitives are [fleeing] as far as Zoar and Eglath-shelishiyah.For they go up the ascent of Luhith weeping;For on the road to Horonaim they raise a cry of distress over their destruction.

But now the Lord speaks, saying, “Within three years, as the years of a hired man [who will not serve longer than the agreed time], the glory of Moab will be degraded along with all the great population, and the remnant [that survives] will be very small and of no account.”

And the Lord said, “Even as My servant Isaiah has walked stripped and barefoot for three years as a sign and forewarning concerning Egypt and Cush (Ethiopia),

For the Lord has said this to me, “Within a year, according to the years of a hired man [who will work no longer than was agreed], all the splendor of [the tribe of] Kedar will end;

Now in that day Tyre will be forgotten for seventy years, like the days of one king. At the end of seventy years it will happen to Tyre as in the prostitute’s song:

It will come to pass at the end of seventy years that the Lord will remember Tyre. Then she will return to her prostitute’s wages and will play the [role of a] prostitute [by trading] with all the kingdoms on the face of the earth.

“Go and say to Hezekiah, ‘For the Lord, the God of David your father says this, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; listen carefully, I will add fifteen years to your life.

I said, “In mid-lifeI am to go through the gates of Sheol (the place of the dead),I am to be summoned, deprived of the remainder of my years.”

“What shall I say?For He has spoken to me, and He Himself has done it;I will wander aimlessly all my years because of the bitterness of my soul.

“For your ruins and desolate places and your land [once the scene] of destruction—Certainly now [in the coming years] will be too cramped for the inhabitants,And those who once engulfed you will be far away.

For the Lord God says this, “My people went down at the first into Egypt to live there; and [many years later Sennacherib] the Assyrian oppressed them without cause.

“No longer shall there be in it an infant who lives only a few days,Or an old man who does not finish his days;For the youth who dies at the age of a hundred,And the one who does not reach the age of a hundredWill be thought of as accursed.

“For these twenty-three years—from the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, even to this day—the word of the Lord has come to me and I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not listened.

This whole land will be a waste and a horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.

‘Then when seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans (Babylonia),’ says the Lord, ‘for their wickedness, and will make the land [of the Chaldeans] a perpetual waste.

Within two years I am going to bring back to this place all the articles of the Lord’s house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon.

Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the people, saying, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Even so within two full years I will break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations.’” Then the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

“For thus says the Lord, ‘When seventy years [of exile] have been completed for Babylon, I will visit (inspect) you and keep My good promise to you, to bring you back to this place.

“At the end of seven years each of you shall set free his Hebrew brother who has sold himself [into servitude] or who has been sold to you and has served you six years, you shall release him from [serving] you; but your forefathers did not listen [submissively] to Me or obey Me.

“The command which Jonadab the son of Rechab gave to his sons not to drink wine has been observed [as a custom for more than two hundred years]. To this day they do not drink wine, for they have obeyed their father’s command. But I have repeatedly spoken to you, yet you have not listened to Me.

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.

For I have assigned you the years of their wickedness and punishment, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days [representing three hundred and ninety years]; in this way you shall bear [symbolically] the wickedness and punishment of the house of Israel.

In the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth of the month [after the beginning of the exile in Babylon], certain of the elders of Israel came to inquire of the Lord and sat down before me.

You have become guilty by the blood which you have shed, and you are defiled by the idols which you have made. Thus you have caused your day [of judgment and punishment] to approach and have arrived at [the completion of] your years; therefore, I have made you an object of scorn to the [pagan] nations and a thing to be mocked by all countries.

No man’s foot will pass through it, no animal’s foot will pass through it, and it will not be inhabited for forty years.

So I will make the land of Egypt a desolation [plundered and ruined] among desolated lands; and her cities, among cities that are laid waste, will be desolate forty years. I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations and [I will] disperse them through the lands.”

‘For thus says the Lord God, “At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the nations among whom they were scattered.

“Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon made his army work hard [at My command] against Tyre; every [soldier’s] head became bald and every shoulder was worn and peeled [from carrying loads of dirt and stones for siege works]. Yet he had no wages from Tyre [in proportion to the time and labor expended during the siege], either for himself or his army, for the work that he had done against it [for Me].”

After many days you will be summoned [for service]; in the latter years you shall come into the land that is restored from [the ravages of] the sword, where people have been gathered out of many nations to the mountains of Israel, which had been a continual wasteland; but its people were brought out of the nations, and they are living securely, all of them.

‘Thus says the Lord God, “Are you the one of whom I spoke in former days through My servants, the prophets of Israel, who prophesied in those days for many years that I would bring you (Gog) against them?

And [when you, Gog, no longer exist] those who live in the cities of Israel will go out and make fires with the weapons and burn them, both the [large] shields and the bucklers (small shields), the bows and the arrows, the war clubs and the spears; and for seven years they will burn them.

The king assigned a daily ration for them from his finest food and from the wine which he drank. They were to be educated and nourished this way for three years so that at the end of that time they were [prepared] to enter the king’s service.

And Daniel remained there until the first year of [the reign of] King Cyrus [over Babylon; now this was at the end of the seventy-year exile of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) in Babylonia, as foretold by Jeremiah].

“Let his mind and nature be changed from a man’sAnd let an animal’s mind and nature be given to him,And let seven periods of time pass over him.

In that the king saw an angelic watcher, a holy one, descending from heaven and saying, “Cut the tree down and destroy it; but leave the stump with its roots in the earth, but with a band of iron and bronze around it in the new grass of the field, and let him be wet with the dew of heaven, and let him feed with the beasts of the field until seven periods of time pass over him,”

that you shall be driven from mankind and your dwelling place shall be with the beasts of the field; and that you be given grass to eat like the cattle and be wet with the dew of heaven; and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know [without any doubt] that the Most High [God] rules over the kingdom of mankind and He bestows it to whomever He desires.

and you will be driven away from mankind, and your dwelling place will be with the animals of the field. You will be given grass to eat like the cattle, and seven periods of time will pass over you until you know [without any doubt] that the Most High God rules over the kingdom of mankind and He bestows it on whomever He desires.”’

“But at the end of the days [that is, at the seven periods of time], I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my understanding and reason returned to me; and I blessed the Most High [God] and I praised and honored and glorified Him who lives forever,For His dominion is an everlasting dominion;And His kingdom endures from generation to generation.