Lynn Kaye

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.

_ Source: _Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 127 - 160 This article illuminates rabbinic concepts of temporality through examining metaphorical uses of the root qbʿ. The root has both concrete and metaphorical meanings, describing the physical attachment of objects as well as temporal ideas of permanence, stability, and endurance. While it has been argued that rabbinic texts do not display concepts of time in the modern sense, a combination of philological and conceptual analysis shows how rabbinic images of temporal themes can be elicited from rabbinic texts. Moreover, attention to the multivalence of words can clarify complex Bavli passages that engage overlapping but distinctive metaphorical meanings of the root