Time In The Babylonian Talmud

Time in the Babylonian Talmud explores how rabbinic jurists' language, reasoning, and storytelling reveal their assumptions about what we call time.

"Time in the Babylonian Talmud explores how rabbinic jurists' language, reasoning, and storytelling reveal their assumptions about what we call time. By "time," I do not mean measurements of duration such as hours, minutes, or days. There are more elastic and capacious approaches to time in the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli). As Virginia Woolf wrote, "An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second." Considering imaginative writing by modernist writers like Woolf, as well as modern philosophical writings, allows us to break away from familiar presuppositions about time and to see temporal phenomena anew even in ancient cultural artifacts. This book turns to an ancient text, the Bavli, which remains a foundational text of Jewish law and culture, and uses it to think carefully about ancient and contemporary concepts of time. As we will see, temporality permeates the most intriguing legal concepts in the Bavli and it is equally central to the Bavli's storytelling. With this book, then, I hope to move a common debate about time in classical Judaism beyond the question of whether there was or was not a concept of time in rabbinic sources. Instead, I argue for examining in detail "time-like" phenomena in rabbinic texts. This approach sheds light on rabbinic thought in its late-antique intellectual contexts and reveals what Bavli temporal thinking can contribute to contemporary theories of time"--

Originally published in 1921, this book presents the text of the Talmud, Tractate Berakhot in an English translation, with a detailed introduction, commentary, glossary and indices. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Judaism, translations of the Talmud and theology.