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Before the Church · c. 220 BC; survives in fragments
On the Kings of Judea
Demetrius the Chronographer
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What it is
The earliest Jewish writer in Greek whose work survives, patiently calculating dates and answering awkward questions: how Jacob's children were born in so few years, and where the unarmed Israelites who left Egypt got their weapons.
Why it lasted
The first attempt by anyone to treat the biblical narrative as a chronology to be reconciled rather than a story to be retold — the beginning of a discipline that runs to Ussher and beyond.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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