Periodically, about once a generation, someone awakens the slumbering giant of ancient chronology, the discipline that tells us when the pyramids were built, Troy was destroyed, and Hannibal crossed the Alps.

This person calls into question the collection of ancient dates assembled by scholars of various specialties, mainly over the last century. Often, but not always, the revisionist manages to win a large following by seeking to amend the standard chronology to square with the Bible.

Certainly the most colorful of these establishment-bashers was Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979), an expatriate Russian physician and Freudian psychoanalyst. Soon after immigrating to the United States in 1939, Velikovsky had an epiphany: “I came upon the idea that the Exodus took place during a …