Our recensions of the Great Stemma are silent about the total number of years in these phases, but it seems likely that the information must have been present in the proto-Stemma, since the corresponding numbers are set out in the G recension of the Liber Genealogus. As I argue elsewhere, this recension is an eyewitness account of and commentary on the diagram.
So why does the Great Stemma show us a number of phases, 22, which is fewer than claimed by Hippolytus, but more than claimed by Eusebius?
I suspect the answer can be found by analysing what an editor who was operating in a kind of "information fog" might have done when confronted with material that did not harmonize with the system of Eusebius.
He might well have shrunk from a major revision of the Great Stemma, choosing a more cautious mode of correction. As I envisage this, he would have reduced the overall timespan of the Judges Period to 355 years, as ordained by Eusebius, but would have felt unable to completely trim the 24 phases down to 13. So he might well have eliminated only two phases while shifting nine phases into a kind of holding pattern at the side.
We can see from the glosses by Eusebius why the editor might have felt fully authorized to drop the phases in rows 7 and 15. But what restrained the editor from dropping the other phases? Let us deal with rows 4, 19 and 22 first, since these are phases of foreign rule or anarchy.
There is a reasonably obvious argument why row 4 might have been retained as potentially valid: Judges 3:12-30 describes the Moabite King Eglon's 18 years of overlordship and his assassination by Ehud in graphic detail, and Eglon is thus a real character, not an abstract phase, in the eyes of the bible reader.
In the case of rows 20 and 23, there is another reason for distrusting Eusebius, or at least for suspecting he was in error. First of all, Eusebius was silent about the phase in row 23, described as "pacem habuerunt", so that a cautious editor might have felt uncertain about high-handedly scratching it. But if it were left to stand, then the 40 years of control by foreigners (row 20) would naturally overlap with this phase of anarchy. One might rightly object that simultaneous control by foreigners and anarchy would be logically impossible and such a conflict could not have been seriously intended by Eusebius. Influenced by these misgivings, the editor may have decided to let Semera iudex and pacem habuerunt both stand.
The Great Stemma editor has also chosen to override Eusebius in respect of two other periods of foreign rule, each of which has a certain arguable validity: the eight years of Cusarsaton (Cushan-rishathaim) (row 3) are attested at Judges 3:8; the seven years of Midian (row 9) are attested at Judges 6:1.
Finally, there are four other phases that have been allowed to remain. These seem to involved old and probably undocumented errors and therefore posed utterly intractable text-critical questions for an editor with only limited exegetical competence.
One issue here is that of the two Shamgars, included not once but twice, at row 6 and row 22. This erroneous duplication of Shamgar is a distinctive feature of the Stemma/Liber Genealogus tradition. I have discussed this issue in more detail elsewhere. Given that Eusebius is entirely silent about Shamgar in either context, the editor may have felt scarcely empowered to eliminate one or the other, and therefore retained both.
Eusebius is also silent about Fua (Puah) in row 12 for the obvious reason that this is a mistake from very early in the Great Stemma's writing history. Once again, without any lucid explanation or criticism available, an editor would not have known how to escape from the fog of misinformation.
In the case of the 10 years of Elon of Zebulun (Ailom the Zaboulonite in the NETS translation), Eusebius inexplicably states (Helm 96b) there is no such person in the Septuagint, although our editor would have readily found the name at Judges 12:11 in his own Vetus Latina or Septuagint text. Once again he would have been in a dilemma: was he to rely on scripture or on Eusebius?
In all four cases, a conservative strategy would have been to let the names stand while suppressing the stated numbers of years attached to them. The result would indeed be a document retaining some of the chronology of Hippolytus in its structure while explicitly using the chronology of Eusebius in its commentary.
At the end of the Book of Genesis, all Christian chronographers ran into a serious problem: they could not find a detailed, year-by-year account to continue their timeline onwards from the Twelve Patriarchs and connect with the Judges period. Most relied here on the Apostle Paul's statement at Galatians 3:17 that the law came into being 430 years after God's promise given in Abraham's 75th year. This was regarded as conforming to the span of 430 years mentioned in the Septuagint Exodus 12:40 as the period of tenancy in Canaan and servitude in Egypt together. (In the Masoretic Exodus, the 430 years span the submission to Egypt only.)[*]See the note in Bauer/Helm, 23
However the historical books of the Bible are short of the detailed numbers that the chronographer needed: no ages are given for the line from Judah to Jesse; the lifespan of Joseph the Dreamer (110 years) does not connect to the other data and there is no indication of how many years intervened between the death of Joseph the Dreamer and the births of the brothers Aaron and Moses.
The dominant computation for this period was offered by Hippolytus, who followed a route via Levi and his descendants Aaron and Moses to Joshua, the first ruler in the Promised Land. Hippolytus claimed knowledge of the exact vital data for Aaron's ancestry so as to precisely apportion the 430 years from Abraham's journey to Canaan until the Exodus from Egypt. Hippolytus's dates have been reconstructed as follows in the critical edition of the Hippolytus Chronicon by Bauer and Helm:[*]Bauer/Helm, 152
- to birth of Isaac: 25 (when Abraham was aged 100: Genesis 18:10–12)
- to birth of Jacob: 60 (Genesis 25:20–28)
- to birth of Levi: 87
- to birth of Kohath: 40
- to birth of Amram: 60
- to birth of Aaron: 76
- to Exodus: 82
This computation, yielding 505 years (75 + 430) from the birth of Abraham to the Exodus, was evidently accepted by Julius Africanus, though this acceptance can only be deduced from his stated dates for the years before and after.[*]Gelzer, I, 56 It was also largely adopted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Chronological Canons, although we will see below that Eusebius used different reasoning.
Although the years are lacking in the Great Stemma, it is evident from the
arrangement of the roundels from Levi to Joshua, arrayed horizontally and
left-to-right, that it is precisely this timeline which the Great Stemma author
has in mind and is expounding. In Roda, for example, the phases are arranged
thus: 
Oddly, the copyist has not directly connected Aaron to his father Amran, nor Amran to Kohath (Gaat), but the intention is clear. Joshua (Ihs filius Nabe) is placed to the right of Aaron to indicate that he marks the next period.[*]Zaluska notes a peculiarity of the Sigma recension suggesting its editor may have seen a very old model: he places Moses at the start of the line of judges and makes Saul the final judge, the end of that line, but the Sigma editor then unaccountably breaks the sequence by moving the periods of foreign domination outside it. See Zaluska, Stemmata.
In the Plutei version, the roundels are actually connected by left-to-right
lines, and Moses, who lived longer than his brother Aaron (Numbers 20:22-29
and Deuteronomy 10:6) is inserted into the sequence, although of course he
is Aaron's brother, not his son: 
Given the Great Stemma's attention to synchronisms, it appears likely that this line to the brothers Aaron and Moses is being presented in the document as a chronological scale. The parallel line of descent from Judah, placed along the top of the page, was probably in step-by-step alignment with this descent from Levi. Thus, one would have had both a primary chronological baseline and a secondary genealogical line with which it could be compared.
It is plausible as well that the author wished to demonstrate a similar synchronicity with the family of Job, though this can be no more than a hypothesis.
It also seems likely that in 427, the Great Stemma contained a much more compact account of the Levites than the full page we see today. If the G recension of the Liber Genealogus is a reliable witness, and I have presented evidence that it is, then the only names along this baseline are likely to have been Levi, Kohath, Amram, Aaron, Moses and Miriam, with a mini-stemma possibly added to show four priestly sons of Aaron: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, followed by the grandson, Phineas.
It seems likely that it was only the subsequent editions of the chart which expanded the Levite offspring into a full stemma of their own. This more complex stemma is discussed in more detail on the page dealing with traverses.
It should be noted that this traditional Christian division of the 430-year timespan was deprecated in the Chronological Canons of Eusebius, which adopted the same overall interval up to the rule of Joshua but with different reasoning. Eusebius does not explicitly divide up the period by individual lives: whether Levi was born in the 168th year of the Promise, as calculated above by Hippolytus, or in the 170th year, as our manuscripts of Jerome's translation suggest, is unclear, and Aaron's ancestry is only mentioned once in Eusebius's note: "Amram fathered Moses when he was 70 years old."
Instead Eusebius divides up the 505-year period working with a calculation of the duration of Joseph's rule in Egypt. Beginning from the birth of Jacob, the Eusebius division proceeds:
- to start of Joseph's rule: 121;[*]Bauer/Helm, 40 (column total).
- Joseph's rule: 80;[*]Bauer/Helm, 40 (column heading).
- further Hebrew years among Egyptians: 144.[*]Bauer/Helm, 48 (column heading).
Moses was thus born in the 64th year of the servitude, making him 80 in the last year of the servitude, by Eusebius's reckoning.[*]Finegan, 264 sets this out compactly.
The roundel describing the short reign of the two Magi brothers has already been discussed. Its text offers circumstantial evidence of a link to Hippolytus. The Plutei manuscript says, "Two twins ruled for eight years," but other manuscripts say, "... for eight months," and it is likely that the author did indeed write "months", and that "years" is a copyist's mistake. The number eight, common to all the manuscripts, is also wrong.
As we know from Herodotus, Smerdis is supposed to have ruled for seven months, not eight, and Eusebius appears to reproduce this correctly: "3rd of the Persians, two magi brothers, for 7 months, after whom, 4th, Darius, for 36 years."
The author probably picked up this detail from Hippolytus. The number had already gone askew in some of the manuscripts of the Hippolytan tradition, since we find the usually reliable Liber Generationis II recension giving us the number seven, but the later Liber Generationis I recension corrupting the number to eight. It is likely that this is a simple transmission error, where a copyist mistakes a shadow or a play of the light on his model manuscript for an additional stroke, and as a result copies the number as VIII, thus increasing it to eight.[*]Helm's 1955 edition of Hippolytus sets out the data in a tabulation opposite page 178.
It is at least conceivable that the number had already been corrupted when the Great Stemma timeline was constructed, but more study will be needed to explore the significance of this.
Two more time-spans in the Great Stemma that stretch across the the history of Rome (the duration of the monarchy and the duration of the republic) are difficult to link to Hippolytus. The Roman section is not described at all in the G recension of the Liber Genealogus and one suspects the section was added later than 427. But where does the material come from? The numbers of years offered by the extant manuscripts of the Great Stemma either represent an autonomous Late Antique historical tradition or have been seriously corrupted during their transmission into the early medieval period. The numbers and possible ways to interpret them are discussed on a separate page.[*]It remains a matter of debate whether the Stemma originally agreed or not with the Canons on the age of the world up to the time of the birth of Abraham. Eusebius regarded all history prior to Abraham as uncertain and merely stated the pre-Abraham span in global fashion as a period of 2,242 years. An editor of the Great Stemma, has modified the Methusaleh time span given by the Septuagint and would seem to arrive at a new total of 2,262 years from Adam to the birth of Abraham, a plus of 20 years. However this does not seem to have been the intention of the Great Stemma's author.
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