Lynn Kaye – författare

In this book, Lynn Kaye examines how rabbis of late antiquity thought about time through their legal reasoning and storytelling, and what these insights mean for thinking about time today. Providing close readings of legal and narrative texts in the Babylonian Talmud, she compares temporal ideas with related concepts in ancient and modern philosophical texts and in religious traditions from late antique Mesopotamia. Kaye demonstrates that temporal flexibility in the Babylonian Talmud is a means of exploring and resolving legal uncertainties, as well as a tool to tell stories that convey ideas effectively and dramatically. Her book, the first on time in the Talmud, makes accessible complex legal texts and philosophical ideas. It also connects the literature of late antique Judaism with broader theological and philosophical debates about time.

Time permeates language, society, and individual lives, but time eludes definition. From grand scales of geologic time to the exasperation of waiting in endless bureaucratic lines, from the unifying sense of ancestral presence at an ancient monument to the imminent question of climate resilience, this volume presents conceptions of time through a kaleidoscope of cultures and disciplines. Accessible to students and scholars alike, the book demonstrates that far from natural, stable, or singular, time is culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed, and disciplinarily specific – and that multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations transform our understanding of time.

Time permeates language, society, and individual lives, but time eludes definition. From grand scales of geologic time to the exasperation of waiting in endless bureaucratic lines, from the unifying sense of ancestral presence at an ancient monument to the imminent question of climate resilience, this volume presents conceptions of time through a kaleidoscope of cultures and disciplines. Accessible to students and scholars alike, the book demonstrates that far from natural, stable, or singular, time is culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed, and disciplinarily specific – and that multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations transform our understanding of time.