The “Tradition of Elijah’s House”: Astronomy, Chronology, History

Abstract

The Talmudic prophecy known as “ the tradition of Elijah’s house” concedes to the world and to history a maximum duration of something less than six thousand years, distributed in three periods of similar length according to the ‘Void’, the ‘Law’ and the ‘Messiah’. This article focuses on the diffusion of this prophecy in Protestant Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, mainly in Germany, in connection with contemporary eschatological expectation. It also considers the connections with astronomy (great conjunctions, celestial novelties –mainly the nova of 1572 in Cassiopeia– and the decrease of solar eccentricity), chronology and history. In the final analysis, our focus turns to the topic in the work of Helisaeus Röslin and the appropriation of Röslin’s Tabella des Welt Spiegels by Johann Heinrich Alsted in his table Speculum mundi of 1624.