Seder Olam Rabbah: the count of years from Creation set down as a book

Thirty chapters carry the count from the first day of creation to the Bar Kochba revolt.

While the Temple stood the count kept itself: years were reckoned by reigns, by jubilees, by the destruction. After the second destruction the footholds crumbled, and the generation that remembered the old order was passing. It was then that Rabbi Yose ben Halafta, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, gathered the count into a book.

The Talmud names him plainly: "Who taught Seder Olam? Rabbi Yose" (Yevamot 82b, Niddah 46b). The book runs by years from Adam: how long each of the ten generations before the Flood lived, how many years in Egypt, how long the judges, how long the kings of Judah and of Israel separately, how long Persian rule—and it ends with the destruction of Betar.

Its method is its own and strict: where Scripture gives a number, the number is taken; where it does not, the count is derived from agreements between books. Hence its famous decisions: the seventy years of exile are counted from the destruction of the Temple, Persian rule occupies fifty-two years, and Ahasuerus reigns between Cyrus and Darius. Academic history differs from that last count by about a hundred and sixty-five years—and that is the source of the divergence this timeline shows as a separate layer.

The book does not give the year of its own composition; we place it towards the end of Rabbi Yose's life, a generation after the crushing of Bar Kokhba, when the sages had gathered at Usha and were restoring the order of things together with its memory.

Later came Seder Olam Zuta, a brief list of the exilarchs; to keep the two apart, the first came to be called Rabbah, the Great.