Java is ten years younger than Erlang. When Java was marketed into the new hot thing in 1996-1997 Erlang was widely used within Ericsson, and in 1997-1998 someone in Ericsson had swallowed the Sun bait and forced the start of a transition to Java. Joe Armstrong and others went to management and convinced them that since Erlang was now useless it should be released as free software, and it surprisingly was.

Which meant that some of them promptly resigned from their jobs and started a company doing freedom Erlang. It took until 2005 or so for Ericsson to confess that they had made a mistake in trying to Java all the things and got around to using Erlang again.

Bytecode based runtimes and compiler toolchains predate both, and Erlang came to life in 1986, a couple of years until Oak.