ACCORDING to the authors of Jubilees and the Apocalypse of Weeks, not only does cyclic time, as represented in the calendar, flow in an eternal sevenfold rhythm through the sabbaths of the year—but the whole of history, from beginning to end, marches forward in recurrent cycles of sabbaths, years, sabbaticals, jubilees, and ages (kitsim). Heaven and earth have thereby been linked together since the seven days of Creation, through signs, covenants, and oaths that constitute bonds between God and man, through the sacrifices that man offers God, in a fixed, sevenfold progression governed by the solar calendar and observed by the angels.

Alongside cultic time, reflected in the solar calendar with its subdivision into sabbaths of days, i.e. weeks, there is a concept of deterministic, historical, linear time, measured in past, present, and future in terms of sabbaths of years and jubilees, which add together to form long periods known in Qumran terminology as kitsim (sing. kets) or ages: ‘Interpretation considering the ages made by God, all ages for the accomplishment [of all the events, past] and future. Before He ever created them, He determined their works age by age, and it was engraved upon the heavenly tablets, the ages of their domination’; ‘all their appointed t[imes] in their ages, … [ag]e of your marvel, for from old you have engraved for them His judgement until the ordained time of judgement in all the eternal predestinations’.

In the book of Jubilees, a jubilee is a period of forty-nine years, and a ‘week [of years]’ or ‘sabbatical’, Heb. shavua, is a period of seven years. The author divides history, from Creation to the theophany at Sinai, into forty-nine jubilees, or fortynine periods of seven shavuot, ‘sabbaticals’, each.