Table of Contents for Clepsydra
Introduction
This chapter presents, first an overview of the multiple landmarks used by the Jew to date an event. It then presents the idea of a "space-time" constructed by Jewish temporality. To do so, the chapter draws on the approaches to time built for history, and poses its own dialectic to grasp the present between "this world" and "the coming world."
1.Ad tempus universal. . . A Time for Everyone?
This chapter introduces the major debates about time which are discussed in the book. It tackles the idea of the existence of a universal time by presenting an overview of the common knowledge about time, using the Ancients (Aristotle, Platon, Plotinius, St. Augustine) to better apprehend their impact upon the historians (Gurevich, Pomian, Ariès, Le Goff, Braudel), anthropologists or sociologists (Durkheim, Mauss, Eliade), and Christian theologians (Cullman). The chapter proceeds then to a presentation of the debate about the relationship of Jews with history and memory (Y. H. Yerushalmi, A. Funkenstein).
2.Where Does Time Come From?
The chapter starts with an overview of the common knowledge constructed by the first generation of Christian biblical scholars about the "Jewish" sense of time taken from their own approach to the Hebrew Bible, while showing that the Jews shared the common views of their contemporaries. It discusses the components of time in the Bible with the tools of the narrative discourse elaborated by Ricœur and the circular time conceived of by Eliade. Using these tools allows the reading of the arrangement of the books in the Hebrew Bible as benchmarks for temporality, putting at their center the creation of the universe.
3.Where Is Time Going?
This chapter discusses the cliché stating that the Jews were concerned only by the future and the world to come. Thus, it presents an inquiry into the thought of the Jewish philosophers (Maimonides, Crescas, Gersonides, Albo) who dealt with the notion of time during the middles ages. The chapter asks the question what is temporality by using the contemporary approaches (Levinas and taking into account the fact that almost the entire western thinking about time is based mainly on Heidegger and Augustine.
4.God's Time, Humanity's Time
This chapter pursues the questions of the sacred and the profane times through the distinction made by Biblical scholars about "Hebrew time" that they found in the Hebrew Bible. A. J. Heschel saw Judaism as an "architecture of time," while von Rad saw, mostly in the Bible, a "religion of history."
5.The Time to Come
This chapter deals with the representations and narrative about the other world. It presents an overview of the linguistic meanings accorded to the different words which are expressing a conceptualization of time (zman, olam, mo'ed, et). It then describes the different approaches available in the Mishnah and the Talmud after the Destruction of the Second Temple.
6.Temporal Scansions
This chapter describes the scansions of time, the rhythm of its landmarks: days, weeks, months, years, festivals, fallow fields. It follows the changes introduced through time into the naming and counting of the years, from the Bible to the Talmud and the calendar, putting together a form of chronology of elapsed time.
7.Eschatological Scansions: Jubilees and Apocalypses
This chapter develops the idea that aside from the concrete signs of the temporal scansions, there are other markers, expressed in the apocryphal literature, that mark the making of time.
8.Historiographical Scansions: Between Adam and the Present Time
This chapter follows the emergence of the Greek chronographies built on biblical sources to shape a coherent narrative of Jewish history. It then describes the first rabbinical account of elapsed time, from the creation of the world until the great revolt of Bar Kokhba. The chapter focuses on the link existing between that chronography and the Jewish exegesis that one can find also in Josephus.
9.Mathematical Scansions: In What Era?
This chapter discusses the mathematical evaluation of elapsed time. It describes the two main eras in use in the Jewish world of late antiquity and early Middle Ages. It also presents the way these eras are understood and explained by rabbis, astronomers, and non-Jews witnesses.
10.Directed Time
This chapter analyzes how arithmetic of counted-down time meets with exegesis to fit into the scheme sketched by prophecies about the probable date of the coming of the Messiah. It presents a Talmudic view constructed with all the components inherent to the beliefs and conjectures on his coming. The chapter ends with a discussion of a possible Jewish millenarianism, which vanished or was eclipsed by the Christian one.
11.Exercises in Rabbinic Calculation
This chapter follows the emergence of dating the era: on tombstones displaying the era of the world, counted from the date of the destruction of the Second Temple, on divorce and marriages acts, displaying the Seleucid era, and the first attempts to make the dating fit together, combining all the systems in use in the Jewish world with the start of the almost unified use of the era of the world on colophons and other texts, and on Italian tombstones.
12.Exercises in Rabbinic Thought
This chapter starts with questioning the notion of an "event." Its aim is to grasp the way Jewish chronology might understand an important event as a time marker. To do that, it tracks history through a comparison of the narratives in the Books of the Maccabees and the Book of Daniel. Then it tries to figure out what may have produced the variations between the solar calendar and the lunisolar one, traces of which are discovered from analyses of the Bible, some Apocrypha, and from the documents found at Qumran. The chapter ends with the controversy on the calendar held between Palestinian and Babylonian Jewries during the tenth century.
13.A Fleeting Conclusion
The last chapter is an opening for further research. It first combines the elements discussed in the book into a threefold system of time references, presenting the "Jewish time" as one made of a universal and specific mixture. It then goes back to the debate presented in the first chapter about the awareness of history among Jews, to conclude by taking the case of Dei Rossi and David Gans who discovered, in the sixteenth century, the problematic of the biblical arithmetic based on the ages indicated in the Bible.