Rome and the four-empires scheme in Pre-Rabbinic Jewish literature

While it is well-known that the rabbis of the late Roman period often identified the Roman Empire with the fourth empire of Daniel’s visions, this paper deals with Jewish treatments of the Danielic scheme in an earlier era – following the Roman conquest of Judea and preceding the rabbinic era. This issue is complex given that the Romans themselves possessed similar traditions in which their empire constituted the fifth, everlasting empire. After exploring the differences between the Danielic and the Greco-Roman forms of the scheme, this paper examines the scheme’s re-interpretation, or reformulation (or lack thereof), in a variety of pre-rabbinic Jewish texts, spanning the mid-1st century BCE (a period almost immediately after the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 BCE), until the early 2nd century CE.