For the source text click/tap here: Yevamot 82
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Our Daf introduces us to a baraita that appears in Seder Olam that teaches that the passage in Sefer Devarim (30:5) asher yarshu avotekha ve-yerishtah indicates that there are only two times that the Land of Israel is sanctified in history. In other words, aside from the sanctification that took place when Yehoshua brought the children of Israel in from the desert, the only other sanctification that was necessary occurred when Ezra brought the Jews back from exile. That second sanctification lasts forever.
Seder Olam is an ancient book compiled in Hebrew by Babylonian talmudists about 160 CE.
It gives a chronology of the history of the Jewish people and the world around them since the first man Adam until the Great Revolt against the Roman rule. Seder Olam means Order (or Chronology) of the World. Some 450 years later, another book called Seder Olam Zutta (the Small Seder Olam) was issued in Babylone to complete the former work until their time.
Mitchell First published a book, Jewish History in Conflict, describing rabbinic responses to the disagreement between rabbinic chronology in Seder Olam and that which emerges from Greek historians (and other sources).
Depending on how you look at it, there are approximately 160 years missing from rabbinic history, mainly during the rebuilding and early years of the Second Temple.
In particular, Seder Olam lists three Persian kings while Greek sources list over 10 kings.
We explore the recent scholarship on possible polemical reasons for these differences and the way Jews and Christians differed in their respective chronologies.