The Chronography of Daniel 9 and Jubilees in the Shadow of the Seleucid Era

Abstract

The Levitical jubilee cycle was originally a chronological structure for marking the progress of sabbatical and jubilee years. In the second century B.C.E., the writers of Daniel 9 and the book of Jubilees were among the first to transform the jubilee cycle into a mode of conceptualizing the pro¬gress of history and the place of the Judean people in that history. In this article, I examine their adaptations of this cycle as a way to structure time and reflect on the progress of history. I argue that they employed this structure as an epochal mode of chronicling history in imitation of the Seleucid Era. In this context, the Levitical jubilee emerges, alongside other chronographic strategies such as the Danielic four empires schema and the ten weeks of the Apocalypse of Weeks, in order to construct an alternative to the Seleucid Era for understanding the history of Judea and its people.