Dates in the Old Testament

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JoeFreedom

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Hi all. Been a while since I’ve posted a topic, at least since the new CAF interface has been up and running. I no longer see where it shows my religion, like it used to, and I think it bears weight in my posting. So I’m Catholic in full communion with the RCC.

I was reading 1 Maccabees (NAB) today, and in chapter two, verse 54, it starts “On the fifteenth day of the month Chislev, in the year one hundred and forty five…”, and it struck me, how would the author know what year it was? Certainly they were not counting down to the birth of Jesus, since they obviously couldn’t have known when he was to be born

I’m certain that there is an obvious answer to this and I’m just clearly ignorant of it, and when someone tells me I’ll simply say “DUH!”, but right now, the answer is evading me. Did the copiers of the original or copied sources simply insert the date later on when canonizing the Bible?
 
@JoeFreedom
They weren’t saying 145 as in years before Christ.

They were counting from the number of years since a certain King had reigned. This is the traditional ancient way of tracking years - Romans, for example, would date the year according to AUC - that is, Ab Urbe Condita, “[years] from the founding of the City [Rome, by King Romulus]”.

This dating methodology is used prolifically in the Sacred Scriptures, for example in 2 Kings 14:1 we read “In the second year of Joash…”, which roughly corresponds to 837 B.C. Aside from dating things according to the beginning of the reign of a King or an era marked by that Kings ascension, they would also commonly mark eras either by the founding of a City (like with the founding of Rome I just illustrated), or by a significant event in their history (in the Bible for example they often count years from the Exile in Babylon). We still count years in this way by marking them as occuring either post or prior to the First Advent of Christ.

From the comment on 1 Mac 1:10 in the NABRE:

“Dates are given in this book according to the beginning of the Seleucid era. Jewish Priests accepted April of 311 B.C. as the commencement of the era”

This roughly corresponds to the 6th/7th year after the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the beginning of the reign of Seleucus I Nicator.
 
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Yes the dates were determined by the rule of emperors or rulers.
In Japan, for instance, this still happens with their emperor, so there’s two dating systems, the common one and the one by how long the emperor has been emperor.

So I hope it makes sense why we date with Christ, King of the Universe.
 
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