Twofold, as I admonished before, was the division — the Gilgal [Galgalea] and the Shiloh [Siluntina]. In the former, [there is] to be considered the beginning and the end. That it [the Gilgal division] began before the fifth year from the Jordan crossing, and the first entry of the whole people into the land, Josephus does not indeed affirm, but hints. For he will [have it that] in the year
(col. 1121)
[they should] subtract; and so [that there] should remain 39, which — exempted from the 45 residual [years] of Caleb — leave only 6, which can be granted. But the end of that same Gilgal division is fixed by the Rabbis (in the same Seder Olam), and by Genebrardus, who assented to them (bk. 1 Chron., p. 35), in the other seventh year — that is, in the 14th year after the Jordan crossing. Now they gather this thus: the Israelites, from that time when they began to fix [their] seat in the promised land, persisted in it 17 solid Jubilees, that is, 850 whole years. But after the last emigration from that land — or after the Nabuchodonosorian destruction of the city of Jerusalem — in the 14th year the eighteenth Jubilee was being kept. For at its beginning Ezekiel said (ch. 40, v. 1): “In the 25th year of our transmigration, in the beginning of the year, on the tenth [day] of the month, [in] the fourteenth year after the city was smitten.” [It is] necessary, therefore, [that] the Jubilees began to be counted after the 14th year of the entry into the land; or at least [that] the people, not [yet] settled in the land, [did] not [complete] the full 17 Jubilees, but only 16, and moreover the 46 years of the 17th Jubilee. But I cannot bring my mind to believe [that] a septennium was consumed in that division. For to what [purpose] so much time? [Was it] that the lots should be cast into the urn, and drawn from it? But this could be done in one day, or certainly in not many days. [Was it] that surveyors should be sent, and [that] they should bring back descriptions? But this [was] done before the beginning of the division; nor, if it had not been done, would seven years have had to be posited in that matter. [Was it] for going to the portions, and placing domiciles in them? But since the enemies were routed from those [places] which the first tribes obtained from the earlier casting-of-lots, and [since] the regions which were approached were not so vast, nor so remote from Gilgal — this immigration into new seats could be done in a few weeks or months. But besides — by what [argument] is it gathered from Scripture [that there] was a stay of full Jubilees, or of 850 years, in the promised land? Whence, likewise, is it gathered [that] that year which Ezekiel noted [as] the fifteenth from the Jerusalem destruction was the first of a Jubilee — and indeed of the eighteenth Jubilee? Into my own opinion, therefore, they rather draw me, who judge [that] an end was imposed on the prior division before the eighth year. But of the posterior division [more] afterward (ch. 18).