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Author Kaye, Lynn, 1981- author.

Title Time in the Babylonian Talmud : natural and imagined times in Jewish law and narrative / Lynn Kaye, the Ohio State University
Published Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2018
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 192 pages)
Contents Spatial, temporal and kinesthetic concepts of simultaneity -- Divine temporal precision and human inaccuracy -- Being fixed in time -- Retroactivity reimagined -- Matzah and madeleines
Summary "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"-- Provided by publisher
Notes Based on the author's thesis (doctoral - New York Univesity, 2012) issued under title: Lynn Kaye, "Law and Temporality in Bavli Mo'ed."
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Time in rabbinical literature.
Time -- Religious aspects -- Judaism.
Time (Jewish law)
RELIGION -- Judaism -- General.
Time in rabbinical literature
Time (Jewish law)
Time -- Religious aspects -- Judaism
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781108534369
1108534368
9781108525619
110852561X