The Four Kingdoms Motif and Sibylline Temporality in Sibylline Oracles 4

Abstract

The best-known example of the four kingdoms motif in the Jewish-Christian Sibylline Oracles can be found in Sib. Or. 4. The fourth sibyl prophesies a succession of kingdoms, also framed as ten generations, that will each end in destruction: Assyria (4.49–53), Media (4.54–64), Persia (4.65–87), Macedonia (4.88–101), and finally, Rome (4.102–151). This text has attracted scholarly attention primarily in debates about the source(s) for the four kingdoms motif, especially as that motif occurs in Daniel.1 Secondarily, scholars have turned to the four kingdoms motif in Sib. Or. 4 as providing data about the compositional layers of the book, arguing that an earlier four kingdoms oracle underlies the final five kingdoms Jewish oracle.2 Recently, the four kingdoms motif has been re-examined within a brilliant study by Paul Kosmin on periodized time in the Seleucid empire.3 Sibylline Oracles 4, however, did not appear in this analysis. This chapter will review the source and redactional conclusions of John Collins and David Flusser on the four kingdoms motif in Sib. Or. 4, and place them in conversation with Kosmin’s proposal, which reads the motif primarily as an anti-Seleucid response to imperial periodized time. This chapter argues that although our historical knowledge of the four kingdoms motif in Sib. Or. 4 is reconstructed, scholarly speculation about the date and focus of the oracle call the universality of the motif as a thirdand second-century bce anti-Seleucid trope