6000 years and the Jubilee

copyright 2008 Stephan Huller


By Rory Boid (personal correspondence)

So you now have as witnesses for the Jubilee Year being a full fiftieth year (as opposed to the Jewish calculation) (a) the Hebrew preface to the Tûlîda written in 1346; the liturgy going back at least to the same period; and the detailed information in the Commentary on the Torah.


Juynboll mentions without giving a reference that the Egyptian Jews counted time in units of seven years going back to creation according to the chronology of the LXX. He also mentions the end of the Fourth Book of Ezra in a sentence in the Ethiopic text but omitted from the Latin, in which Ezra dates himself by units of 49 years and then units of 7 years from Creation. The date is more than 5,000 years from Creation. That would make the first c. AD about 6,000 years from Creation. I think you should follow this up.

Indeed when I said 6,000 I wasn't being exact. The Syriac gives a date of 5,000
years from creation, in the seventh year of the 6th shemittah. The other
recensions have different figures. The version I have just says the figures
differ, but it is French, so the note would have to be superficial. Add
about 650 years to get to 1 AD. The point is you were wondering about the
belief people had that they were living nearly 6,000 years from creation. I
will try to find the other figures.