) The canonical text of the
Hebrew Bible is called the
Masoretic Text, a text preserved by Jewish rabbis from early in the 7th and 10th centuries CE. There are, however, two other major texts, the
Septuagint and the
Samaritan Pentateuch. The Septuagint is a
Koine Greek translation of earlier versions of the original
Biblical Hebrew holy books. It is estimated that the first five books of the Septuagint, known as the
Torah or Pentateuch, were translated in the mid-3rd century BCE and the remaining texts were translated in the 2nd century BCE. It mostly agrees with the Masoretic Text, but not in its chronology. The Samaritan text is preserved by the
Samaritan community. This community dates from some time in the last few centuries BCE—just when is disputed—and, like the Septuagint, their Bible differs markedly from the Masoretic Text in its chronology. Modern scholars do not regard the Masoretic Text as superior to the other two—the Masoretic is sometimes clearly wrong, as when it says that Saul began to reign at one year of age and reigned for two years. More relevantly, all three texts have a clear purpose, which is not to record history so much as to bring the narrative to a point which represents the culmination of history. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, the genealogies and narratives were shaped to ensure a chronology of 3000 years from creation to the Israelite settlement of Canaan. Northcote reports this as the "Proto-SP chronology", as designated by John Skinner (1910), and he speculates that this chronology may have been extended to put the rebuilding of the Second Temple at an even AM 3900, after three 1,300-year phases. In the Septuagint version of the Pentateuch the Israelite chronology extends 4,777 years from creation to the finishing of the Second Temple, as witnessed in the
Codex Alexandrinus manuscript. This calculation only emerges by supplementing Septuagint with the MT's chronology of kings. There were at least three variations of Septuagint chronology;
Eusebius used one variation, now favored by Hughes and others. Northcote asserts that the Septuagint calendrical pattern was meant to demonstrate that there were 5,000 years from creation to a contemporaneous
Ptolemaic Egypt, . The 2nd-century BCE
Book of Jubilees begins with the Creation and measures time in years, "weeks" of years (groups of seven years), and jubilees (sevens of sevens), so that the interval from Creation to the settlement of Canaan, for example, is exactly fifty jubilees (2450 years). Dating from the 2nd century CE, and still in common use among Jews, was the
Seder Olam Rabbah ("Great Order of the World"), a work tracing the history of the world and the Jews from Creation to the 2nd century CE. It allows 410 years for the duration of the First Temple, 70 years from its destruction to the Second Temple, and 420 years for the duration of the Second Temple, making a total of 900 years for the two temples. This schematic approach to numbers accounts for its most remarkable feature, the fact that it shortens the entire Persian Empire from over two centuries to just 52 years, mirroring the 52 years it gives to the
Babylonian exile. ==Christian use and development of biblical chronology==