Bible and Time

Time in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew concept of time, as it had developed at that juncture in history, was concerned with the quality of time as it related to seasonal events like the rain in summer or an early autumn. In addition, the Hebrew calendar was based on the lunar cycle. The Hebrew day was one rotation of the earth on its axis; the month was one lunar cycle, or revolution of the moon around the earth; and the year was 12 lunar months, approximately the time required for the earth to travel around the sun. The Hebrew Bible divides the Jewish year according to each season of an agrarian society, such as when the women Naomi and Ruth traveled to Bethlehem to attend the barley harvest. Likewise, the concept of time centered on the hallowed events of God intervening in the Israelites' history. Time was related to an event that occurred in the natural world and how it was possibly linked to divine acts.

For the ancient Hebrews, time was concrete and real, not an abstraction. There is no evidence that they engaged in the sort of abstract philosophical speculation that is the hallmark of the ancient Greeks. Rather, the Hebrews would likely say, “The passage of time is a sequence of God's saving acts.” That is, real events occurred, and humanity measured and marked life by its relationships to those events. Ancient Hebrew culture cared little for discussions regarding whether time was real or whether it was a human invention. In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there a general word for “time” (at least, not in an abstract sense); it also has no special terms for past, present, or future. The most common or everyday expressions of time concerned the point at which some event occurred or will occur. The matter of precision in defining such moments, however, can seem vague or elusive. For example, First Kings 11:4 refers to the time “when Solomon was old,” but at no point does the author refer to a specific period when Solomon began becoming old, or at what point he became old, as though he were not old the previous day and then suddenly he was old.

...