Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel

Description

The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras. Contents Abbreviations Introduction to the Four Kingdoms as a Time Bound, Timeless, and Timely Historiographical Mechanism and Literary Motif The Four Kingdoms and Other Chronological Conceptions in the Book of Daniel Five Kingdoms, and Talking Beasts: Some Old Greek Variants in Relation to Daniel’s Four Kingdoms The Four (Animal) Kingdoms: Understanding Empires as Beastly Bodies The Apocalypse of Weeks: Periodization and Tradition-Historical Context Expressions of Empire and Four Kingdoms Patterns in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls The Four Kingdoms Motif and Sibylline Temporality in Sibylline Oracles 4 The Generation of Iron and the Final Stumbling Block: The Present Time in Hesiod’s Works and Days 106–201 and Barnabas 4 The Four Kingdoms of Daniel in Hippolytus’s Commentary on Daniel Persia, Rome and the Four Kingdoms Motif in the Babylonian Talmud The Four Kingdoms of Daniel in the Early Mediaeval Apocalyptic Tradition The Four Kingdom Schema and the Seventy Weeks in the Arabic Reception of Daniel Conflicting Traditions: The Interpretation of Daniel’s Four Kingdoms in the Ethiopic Commentary (Tergwāmē) Tradition The Politics of Time: Epistemic Shifts and the Reception History of the Four Kingdoms Schema Index of Primary Sources Index of Modern Authors