Of course, from the nativity of Abraham until Moses and the exodus of Israel from Egypt, there are counted 505 years: from Moses down to Solomon and the first building of the temple, 479 years, according, however, to the smaller number which the third book of Kings contains, -- for according to the volume of Judges 600 years are computed -- from Solomon however down to the restoration of the temple, which happened under Darius, king of the Persians, 512 years are counted: further, from Darius down to the preaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, and down to the 15th year of Tiberius the first citizen of the Romans, 548 years are completed.
And so likewise 2044 years happen from Abraham until the 15th year of Tiberius:
similarly 505 years from Ninus and Semiramis until Moses and Cecrops;
from Cecrops until the capture of Troy, 329 years;
from the capture of Troy until the first olympiad, 406 years;
from the first olympiad until the second year of Darius and the restoration of the temple, 256 years;
from the second year of Darius and the restoration of the temple until the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, 548 years.
Likewise there happen from Ninus and Semiramis until the 15th year of Tiberius 2044 years, which we have also shown counted from Abraham until Tiberius: from the 15th year of Tiberius, however, until the fourteenth year of Valens, in which he died, there are numbered 351 years. And so there are in all 2395 years of this history.
And, in case the long series of numbers should perhaps cause some confusion, we have separated the whole mass of years into decades, which, gathering together out of the histories of the individual nations in turn, we have placed opposite each other, so as to provide a simple method of discovering in which era, Greek or barbarian, the prophets, kings, and priests of the Hebrews existed, likewise when falsely-believed gods of various nations existed, when demi-gods, when any city was founded, concerning illustrious men, when philosophers, poets, princes, and writers of various works appeared, and any other ancient event, if it was thought deserving of recording. All of which we shall put in their proper places with the greatest brevity.
Footnotes
1. Word-order reversal, for emphasis.
2. instrumenta. Lewis & Short: "II.Trop. A. Of writings... B.Ornament, embellishment: felices ornent haec instrumenta libellos. Ov. Tr. 1,1,9."
3. Jerome is here referring to the parallel translations from Hebrew into Greek in the columns of Origen's Hexapla. The separate columns circulated separately.
4. Horace.
5. This paragraph is a later interpolation. One family of the manuscripts was reformatted by a later scribe, who wrote this paragraph as an explanation of the new format. His system placed all the columns of numbers on the left, and all the text at the right. Which column of numbers the text related to is controlled by colour coding. This paragraph describes the system, albeit obscurely. Manuscript L is of this family, and this translation is provisional, pending a visit to the British Library.
1. number=bright red; first letter of text=bright red
2. number=? (Probably black); first letter of text=mixed red/black
3. number=? (probably bright red); first letter of text=middle bright red , rest black
4. number=black; first letter of text=bright red
5. number=red; first letter of text=mixed red/black
6. Like #2
7. Like #3
8. Like #4, two colour
9. number=black; first letter of text=black
The 'probablies' I get by alternating the colour of the numbers.