Time in the Babylonian Talmud Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative

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.

1. Spatial, temporal and kinesthetic concepts of simultaneity; 2. Divine temporal precision and human inaccuracy; 3. Being fixed in time; 4. Retroactivity reimagined; 5. Matzah and madeleines.

Lynn Kaye is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. Her research in rabbinic literature combines historical and textual analysis with literary theory, poetics, phenomenology and legal theory. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the law schools of Yeshiva University and New York University.