Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature

Stefan Beyerle, Matthew Goff, Stefan Beyerle, Matthew Goff

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110705478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity.
Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time: " I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.

Part I: “Axial Ages:” The Construction of Time in Identity, History and Festivals

Time is on My Side: Concepts of Time and Jewish Identity

Benjamin Wright

Abstract

The last three decades have seen a resurgence in scholarly interest in the concepts of time and temporality in Jewish Studies, which has included a focus on ancient Jewish texts. In this paper, I examine the different ways that four texts which have not received a lot of attention employ concepts of time and temporality to help fashion a Jewish identity. Judith, the Letter of Aristeas, Baruch, and the Wisdom of Solomon take different approaches, which I call historiographical, translational, exilic, and thanatological time, to shape the identity of their audiences.

Keywords: time, temporality, Jewish identity, Judith, Aristeas, Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon

Time is on my side; yes it is.

Time is on my side; yes it is.

—Rolling Stones, 1965¹

1 Introduction²

The Rolling Stones sang “Time is on My Side” about a lover who has walked out of a relationship. The singer bides his time and waits for his wayward lover to come back. Wayward love is not why I chose to use the line in my title, however. The title and lyrics of “Time is on My Side” highlight how time can be thought to ally itself with someone and not with someone else and how time can be manipulated and constructed for specific purposes. In the Rolling Stones' song, even durative time does not simply pass in seconds, minutes, hours, and days; it forges an alliance with the singer against his lover. Time will do the convincing in the future that he apparently cannot in the present, and he expresses confidence that she will “come runnin' back to me.”

When Stefan Beyerle asked me to contribute to this conference, I had only a faint idea of what I would encounter in the scholarly literature. In the latter part of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the study of concepts of time and temporality in early Jewish literature has seen a vigorous resurgence. In a 63-page article, Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye have chronicled the interest of scholars in Jewish Studies in time and temporality, which was the subject of intense attention in the mid-twentieth century only to be displaced in the century's latter years by questions about place and space.³ Since the beginning of the millennium, however, the “temporal turn,” as Gribetz and Kaye call it, “has gradually grown into a burgeoning sub-field in ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies.”⁴ As one indication of this resurgence, they list in their bibliography more than 125 entries, just from the 1990s and 2000s, that treat some aspect of time in Early and Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Indeed, the conference in Greifswald came on the heels of conferences on time and temporalities in early Judaism held in 2016 at the University of Toronto and in 2017 at Harvard.⁵

In this essay, I want to look at four texts—Judith, the Letter of Aristeas, Baruch, and the Wisdom of Solomon—that, as far as I can tell, have not received extensive study with specific attention to time and temporality, although two of these texts were the subject of papers in Greifswald.⁶ I also want to think about some of the ways that time and temporalities in these texts play a role in constructing a Jewish identity. Of course, a person's identity is constructed of multiple aspects and can shift over time, both on the basis of internal affiliation or external ascription. People as well can maintain multiple identities simultaneously. In the same way, a single text might exhibit multiple concepts of time and temporality. So, in this essay, I make no claim that I am identifying essential features of time or identity that rule out other perspectives or even that I can isolate the most important aspects of these issues. I will not, for example, treat eschatology or apocalyptic ideas, which have received extensive treatment, especially with respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the community who lived at Qumran, nor will I discuss calendars for much the same reason; these, too, have been the subject of papers in Greifswald.⁷ I certainly do not try to be exhaustive, even for the texts I will discuss, since the articles in this volume and in the bibliography demonstrate how much can be said about any single text, such as Ben Sira on which six papers were given at Greifswald (see Part III of the present volume). Steve Winwood wrote, “Time is a river rolling into nowhere.”⁸ In this essay, I will make some soundings in that river by which I hope to highlight some of the ways that ancient Jewish texts employed time and temporality as mechanisms for shaping the identity of their readers.⁹

Before I get to my texts, however, I ought to make at least a few comments on the three critical terms I am employing: time, temporality, and identity. For time and temporality, I rely on the useful distinctions that Gribetz and Kaye make. “Time” generally denotes “the idea of continual change,” but it can also indicate a specific point in time or durative time. In this sense, then, the idea of time is not immutable or rigid, but it expresses “a conception that is itself continually constructed, relative, and local.” “Temporality,” then, can be distinguished from “time” as referring to “concepts, perspectives, orientations, or ideas related to time that do not necessarily operate with an explicitly defined idea of what ‘time’ is.” The term “presumes blurred boundaries and conveys greater conceptual instability and volatility than ‘time’.”¹⁰ So, for example, we will see that some texts exhibit temporalities that collapse time by translating a specific past time into the present, which actualizes that past moment in the “now” of the reader.

Like time, the idea of identity has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention in the last few decades. To take just three examples among the many possibilities, Shaye Cohen's Beginning of Jewishness, published in 1999, has become a standard reference point for discussions of Jewish identity. In 2004, Carol Newsom's The Self as Symbolic Space examined how the “speech community” of the Qumran texts and its discourses worked to form the subjectivities of the Qumran covenanters. More recently, in their 2018 monograph, Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi examine the discourses and practices surrounding the term goy in which they explicitly note that to configure an other is at the same time to configure oneself or one's own community.¹¹ When I refer in what follows to constructing “identity,” then, I am speaking generally about the way that the discourses of time and temporality in these texts contribute to the goal of fashioning how readers ought to understand themselves as being Jewish. How do time and temporality play a role in forming a subjectivity that we in the modern world label as Jewish? In this sense, my approach is related to Newsom's and Ophir and Rosen-Zvi's in which I am attending to the discourses of the text, which themselves only offer glimpses into the ways that ancient identities were formed, were shaped, were fluid, and were malleable, since, after all, in most cases we only have access to particular kinds of speech acts and we often cannot penetrate behind the curtain of those speech acts to a real person or persons.

2 Historiographical Time in the Book of Judith

The book of Judith tells the dramatic story of the rescue of the Jews from the Assyrian army at the hands of the widow Judith.¹² Scholars have placed the book, which dates to approximately 100 BCE, in different genres, but, like other Hellenistic texts, it bends and blends genre characteristics such that it transcends any single designation. It opens with a setting in history, although an obviously fictional one: “It was in the twelfth year of the reign of Nabouchodonosor, who ruled over the Assyrians from Nineue, the great city” (1:1).¹³ Scholars have long recognized the confused, even, nonsensical historical setting, characters, and situations that we find here and elsewhere in Judith. In Deborah Gera's view, the egregious historical mistakes are deliberate. As one piece of evidence for this conclusion, Gera points to the familiarity of Judith's au...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notions and Concepts of Time: Introduction
• Part I: “Axial Ages:” The Construction of Time in Identity, History and Festivals
• Part II: Specific Constructions of Time in Deuterocanonical Literature
• Part III: Terms of Time and Space in the Book of Ben Sira
• Part IV: The Construction of Apocalyptic Time
• Contributors
• Index of Sources
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects