Full 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
Andrew B. Perrin
The Four Kingdoms and Other Chronological Conceptions in the Book of Daniel
Michael Segal
Five Kingdoms, and Talking Beasts: Some Old Greek Variants in Relation to Daniel's Four Kingdoms
Ian Young
The Four (Animal) Kingdoms: Understanding Empires as Beastly Bodies
Alexandria Frisch
The Apocalypse of Weeks: Periodization and Tradition-Historical Context
Loren T. Stuckenbruck
Expressions of Empire and Four Kingdoms Patterns in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls
Andrew B. Perrin
The Four Kingdoms Motif and Sibylline Temporality in Sibylline Oracles 4
Olivia Stewart Lester
The Generation of Iron and the Final Stumbling Block: The Present Time in Hesiod's Works and Days 106-201 and Barnabas 4
Kylie Crabbe
The Four Kingdoms of Daniel in Hippolytus's Commentary on Daniel
Katharina Bracht
Persia, Rome and the Four Kingdoms Motif in the Babylonian Talmud
Geoffrey Herman
The Four Kingdoms of Daniel in the Early Mediaeval Apocalyptic Tradition
Lorenzo DiTommaso
The Four Kingdom Schema and the Seventy Weeks in the Arabic Reception of Daniel
Miriam L. Hjälm
Conflicting Traditions: The Interpretation of Daniel's Four Kingdoms in the Ethiopic Commentary (Tergwāmē) Tradition
James R. Hamrick
The Politics of Time: Epistemic Shifts and the Reception History of the Four Kingdoms Schema
Brennan Breed
Index of Primary Sources
Index of Modern Authors
