Page "Jubilee (biblical)" Paragraph 23

The reason for the fourteen-year delay in Seder ‘ Olam 11 is that Rabbi Yose ( primary author of the Seder ‘ Olam ) had the idée fixe that the total time that Israel spent in its land must come out to an exact number of Jubilee cycles.

If that had been the case, then we should have expected that 587 BC, when the exile began, would have been at the end of a Jubilee period.

However, Rabbi Yose cited Ezek 40: 1 as designating the time of the seventeenth Jubilee, and since he knew this was fourteen years after the city fell, he presumed that counting had been delayed for fourteen years so that he could account for the fourteen years between the fall of the city and the observance of the seventeenth Jubilee.

He also mentioned the previous Jubilee, in the time of Josiah.

As much as he would have liked to put these last two Jubilees fourteen years earlier in order to be consistent with his idée fixe, Rabbi Yose could not do it because he knew these were historical dates, not dates that came from his own calculation.