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SEDER OLAM AND THE SABBATICALS ASSOCIATED WITH

THE TWO DESTRUCTIONS OF JERUSALEM

PART I

RODGER C. YOUNG

Much has been written about the religious meaning of Israel's system of

Sabbatical years and their associated Jubilees, as well as about the social and

economic significance of these institutions. Comparatively little has been written

about their chronological significance; that is, their usefulness in providing

checks on any historical reconstruction that is derived by other methods such as

the reign lengths of kings or synchronisms to the histories of surrounding

nations. In order to provide this chronological function, it is necessary to

recognize allusions to the occurrence of a Sabbatical year in the Scriptures or

other writings. These Scriptures are the following:

And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and gather in the increase

thereof; but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie fallow, that

the poor of thy people may eat; and what they leave the beast of the

field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and

with thy oliveyard (Ex. 23:10,11). Leviticus 25:1–8 is similar.

At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And

this is the manner of the release: every creditor shall release that

which he hath lent unto his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his

neighbor and his brother; because the L

ORD

's release hath been

proclaimed. Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it; but whatsoever of

thine is with thy brother thy hand shall release (Deut. 15:1–3).

And Moses commanded them, saying, 'At the end of every seven

years, in the set time of the year of release [shemitah], in the Feast

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of Tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord

thy God in the place which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law

before all Israel in their hearing' (Deut. 31:10, 11).

The observance of a seven-day week has spread to all areas of the world. The

observance of the seven-year Sabbatical cycle, however, has always been

restricted to the land of Israel, since the commands relative to this institution

have been interpreted to refer only to a situation where the people of Israel are in

their land. In the 19th Century, Jewish colonists began counting again the

Sabbatical cycles. Israel's next Sabbatical year is due to begin in the fall of 2007.

Sabbatical years are of interest to the historian because they can offer a check

on any system of chronology that is based on the customary deductions from

Scriptural reign lengths and cross-synchronisms between Judah and Israel or

between either of the Hebrew kingdoms and other kingdoms. If even a single

Sabbatical year can be fixed in the time of the First Temple, then any chronology

that agrees with the consequent calendar of pre-exilic Sabbatical years should be

preferred over any other chronology that does not agree with such a calendar,

other factors being equal.

The usefulness of the Sabbatical years for chronological purposes arises from

their regularity. The seven years allotted to each cycle represented a short

enough time so that, as long as the people were in the land, there was no danger

of losing track of when a Sabbatical year was due. Consequently, if we have two

references to Sabbatical years, these years must be an exact multiple of seven

years apart. This principle has been used by various scholars in checking the

chronology of the Second Temple period, where it is applied to references to the

observance of Sabbatical years in Josephus and in I and II Maccabees. In the

course of this paper it will be shown that this principle, in conjunction with

certain remarks about Sabbatical years in the Seder Olam, is also useful in

corroborating the 587 date for the burning of the First Temple versus the 586

date, and for establishing Wacholder's calendar of Sabbatical years in the time of

the Second Temple.

Although the Scriptural passages that refer to the

destruction of the First Temple (II Kgs. 25; II Chron. 36; Jer. 39, 52) make no

direct reference to a Sabbatical year, there are some comments in the Seder

Olam that associate Sabbatical years with the destructions of both Temples.

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Seder Olam, written in the latter half of the second century CE, is attributed by

the Talmud (Niddah 46b, Yebamot 82b) to Rabbi Yose ben Halaphta, a disciple

of the famous Rabbi Akiba. A modern translator of the text, Heinrich

Guggenheimer, says of this work:

The authoritative Rabbinical interpretation of the historical passages

of the Bible is given in Midrash Seder 'Olam. Seder 'Olam is a

composition of Tannaitic material, a companion to the Mishneh. It is

the basis of the historical world view of the Babylonian Talmud and of

our counting of years "from the Creation."

The Seder Olam (hereinafter SO) is quoted or referred to several times in the

Babylonian Talmud and once in the Jerusalem Talmud. Most quotations of the

SO in the Babylonian Talmud do not begin with "Rabbi Yose said"; the

omission of the name of the authority is usually regarded as a sign that the

following quotation was accepted as authoritative by the scholars of the Talmud,

with no need for the presentation of alternative views.

Since Rabbi Yose and his disciples who may have contributed to the SO were

in the mainstream of early rabbinic scholarship, and since they lived close

enough to the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, the comments of the

SO on this event have been given considerable weight by modern scholars. The

reference in SO Chapter 30 to a Sabbatical year associated with the fall of

Jerusalem has therefore figured largely in discussions regarding the chronology

of the Sabbatical years during the time of the Second Temple. The other sources

that must be studied in determining the dates of post-exilic Sabbatical [shemitah]

years are I and II Maccabees, some passages in Josephus, and various legal

documents found in the caves of Wadi Murabba'at in the Judean desert.

The

first definitive study of these sources (except those of Wadi Murabba'at) was that

of Benedict Zuckermann, who argued from the known movements of Alexander

and the passage in Josephus referring to Alexander that a Sabbatical year was

observed beginning in Tishri of 332 BCE.

Zuckermann's consequent calendar of

Sabbatical years, published in 1857,

was accepted by the Jewish settlers in

Israel in the late 19th Century. Thus a Sabbatical year was observed beginning in

Tishri of 2000 CE in Israel; from 332 BCE to 2000 CE is 2331 years, or 333

Sabbatical cycles, remembering that there was no year zero at the BCE/CE

divide.

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Not all scholars, however, accepted Zuckermann's dates. The most significant

challenge has been from Ben Zion Wacholder, who placed the shemitah

associated with Alexander one year later than did Zuckermann.

For the time

associated with the fall of the Second Temple, Zuckermann's calendar began a

Sabbatical year in the fall (Tishri) of 68 CE, whereas Wacholder's calendar

began it in the fall of 69. Since the destruction of the city and the Temple

occurred in the summer of 70 CE, this would have been within the Sabbatical

year by Wacholder's calendar of shemitot, but in a post-Sabbatical year by

Zuckermann's calendar. Which of these two options does the SO support?

To answer this question, it is necessary to examine the relevant passage in SO

30 with some care. It will first be given in Guggenheimer's translation:

R. Yose says: A day of rewards attracts rewards and a day of guilt

attracts guilt. You find it said that the destruction of the First Temple

was at the end of Sabbath, at the end of a Sabbatical year, when the

priests of the family of Yehoiariv was [sic] officiating, on the Ninth of

Ab, and the same happened the second time.

Wacholder used the following translation of this same SO passage:

Rabbi Jose says: 'Favorable judgment forbode favorable days and

guilty judgments guilty days. You find it said: When the Temple was

destroyed for the first time, that happened on a day after the Sabbath

(Sunday), during a post-Sabbatical year, and during the Watch of

Jehoiarib, and on the ninth of Ab; and so also when the Second

(Temple was destroyed).'

The first translation says that the destructions were within a Sabbatical year

and on a Sabbath day, whereas the second translation says they were in a year

after a Sabbatical year and on the day after the Sabbath. Since both translations

started from the same text (in rabbinic Hebrew), it is necessary to examine that

text to see which translation is correct. The relevant passage is oto ha-yom

motsae shabat hayah, ve-motsae sheviit haytah.

The important difference between these two translations centers on the word

motsae. The destructions were in the motsae of a Sabbatical year and in the

motsae of a Sabbath day. Should motsae be translated as "at the end of"

(Guggenheimer), or in some sense as "the day/year after" (Wacholder)?

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Motsa (plural construct motsae) is the participial form of the common verb

yatsa, which has the basic meaning "to go out, to go forth." A literal rendering of

motsa is therefore "the going-out" or "the going-forth." This understanding

definitely favors Guggenheimer's translation, since it is easy to see how the

"goings-out" of a year or a day could express the latter part of the time-period,

but a time still within the period. The only way that the meaning "after" would

be justified would be if there were some idiomatic usage that could be found

which suggested this meaning. Are there any such idiomatic usages?

We first look in the Scripture, where the word motsa occurs twenty-seven

times. In Psalm 19:7 (19:6, English Bible) it refers to the "going forth" of the

sun. In Psalm 107:33,35 and II Kings 2:21 it is translated as "watersprings" or

"spring of the waters." All of the usages in Scripture can immediately be

associated with the idea of going forth or going out. None can be associated with

any idea of "after" or "the thing after."

As to rabbinic writing, we can confine the search to the meaning of motsa to

the places where the passage in question is quoted and also to references in the

SO itself.

The SO passage is quoted in Tosefta Taanit 3:9, where the translation into

English is as follows: "When the Temple was destroyed the first time, it was the

day after the Sabbath and the year after the Sabbatical year."

This provides no

new information to help settle the meaning of the original Hebrew, because we

are relying on a modern interpretation. The Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 4:5) uses

exactly the same translation,

which is not surprising because it is by the same

translator. The Babylonian Talmud quotes the passage from SO 30 three times,

in Arakin 11b, Arakin 12a, and in Taanit 29a. In Arakin 11b it is translated as

follows: "The day on which the first Temple was destroyed was the ninth of Ab,

and it was at the going out of the Sabbath, and at the end of the seventh

[Sabbatical] year."

Similarly, Arakin 12a quotes Rabbi Yose as saying "at the

first time it was at the end of the seventh year."

All that has been shown by this is that the SO passage has been interpreted in

different ways by modern translators, and we still have not produced any

instance showing that motsa has any idiomatic meaning that would allow it to be

interpreted as "sometime after," which is necessary to justify those translations

that place the two destructions in post-Sabbatical years. There are, however,

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some passages in the rabbinic writings that allow us the settle this question

definitively. The first of these is in Abodah Zara 9b. In this passage, Rabbi Huna

ben Joshua gives a formula that allows calculating the year of a Sabbatical cycle

for any year subsequent to the destruction of the Second Temple. His formula is

to count the number of years since the destruction, add one, and then (in

essence) to divide this number by seven. The remainder after dividing gives the

year of the Sabbatical cycle. The important information that this conveys is that

year one after the destruction of the Temple was considered year one of a

Sabbatical cycle, so that the Temple was destroyed in a Sabbatical year. This

shows how one of the contributors to the Talmud understood the SO 30 passage

regarding the Sabbatical years associated with the two destructions of Jerusalem.

It is a matter of some interest that Wacholder

cited the formula as given by

Rabbi Huna to support a Sabbatical year in 69/70, thus verifying his calendar vs.

that of Zuckermann, which put the Sabbatical year one year earlier.

At least one passage in the SO itself shows that SO 30 must be translated so as

to place the fall of the First and Second Temples in Sabbatical years. In SO 25,

Jehoiachin's exile is said to begin in the fourth year of a Sabbatical cycle. The

city fell ten years later, in his 11th year of captivity, which was also the 11th

(non-accession) year of Zedekiah's reign. This was therefore 14 years after the

Sabbatical year from which the beginning of Jehoiachin's captivity was

measured. Consequently that year, the year of the fall of Jerusalem, was also a

Sabbatical year.

This is perhaps the most definitive text that can be found that

shows that motsae did not have any connotation of "after" to the people who

wrote the SO, and so it cannot be translated that way in SO 30. The SO 30

passage must be interpreted to say that both destructions of Jerusalem occurred

on a Sabbath day and in a Sabbatical year.

NOTES

1. B. Z. Wacholder, "The Calendar of Sabbatical Cycles During the Second Temple and the Early

Rabbinic Period," Essays in Jewish Chronology and Chronography (New York: Ktav Publishing

House, 1976).

2. H. Guggenheimer, Seder Olam - The Rabbinic View of Biblical Chronology (Northvale NJ and

Jerusalem, Jason Aronson Inc., 1998) p. ix.

3. Wacholder, op. cit.

4. B. Zuckermann, "Ueber Sabbatjahrcyclus und Jobelperiode," Jarhesbericht des juedisch-

theologischen Seminars "Fraenckelscher Stiftung" (Breslau, 1857), cited in Wacholder, p. 4.

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Vol. 34, No. 3, 2006

179

5. Wacholder, p. 8.

6. Wacholder, p. 20. Wacholder cites Seder Olam Rabbah, ed. Ratner, for the translation.

7. The Tosefta, Translated from the Hebrew With a New Introduction, J. Neusner translator and

editor (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002) Vol. 1 p. 632.

8. Taanit 4:5 in The Talmud of the Land of Israel, tr. J. Neusner (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1978) Vol. 18 p. 273.

9. The Babylonian Talmud (London: Soncino Press, 1938). The word "Sabbatical" and its square

brackets are part of the translation.

10. Wacholder, p. 23.

11. A complete treatment of the chronology of the Sabbatical years in SO would also need to

examine the Jubilee periods mentioned in five chapters of the SO. Such a treatment is beyond the

scope of this article.

End of Part 1. Part 2 is scheduled for the Oct-Dec 2006 issue.