Prior to 311 BC, time was marked by local events or consulships or years since the start of a monarchy. Beginning in 311 BCE, the Seleucids began counting history going forward as “n+1,” forever and ever. Paul J. Kosmin proposes that this innovation in time-keeping was a necessary condition for the emergence of apocalyptic thinking and writing:
The theological and political roots of ‘apocalyptic eschatology’, as this end-times literature is known, are complex and multiple. An entire subfield of Second Temple and early Christian scholarship is devoted to this problem of emergence. But the Seleucid Era has played no role in existing research within either classical ancient history or biblical studies. I suggest that the ubiquitous visibility and bureaucratic institutionalisation of an irreversible, interminable and transcendent time system provoked, as a kind of reaction-formation, fantasies of finitude among those who wished to resist the Seleucid empire. The only way to arrest the open-futurity and endlessness of Seleucid imperial time was to bring time itself to a close.
Paul J. Kosmin, “A Revolution in Time,” Aeon magazine
Given the possibility that the Pentateuch was composed after 311 BCE, one must wonder if the authors of the Pentateuch applied this new idea of linear time to periods of Judean history that did not use it…