The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 393–395 B O O K R E V I E W S GERSHON BRIN. The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 39. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001. Pp. xii Ⳮ 389. In a series of interrelated word studies, Gershon Brin explores the biblical perception of time in all its variety: general concepts of time, from moments to eons; human experiences of time, in life spans and generations ; sacred time, including Sabbaths and festivals; and cosmic time, from creation to end times. This discussion of what he calls the ‘‘entire complex of issues relating to time’’ (p. 1) pays close attention to the textual evidence of the Hebrew Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls, making only occasional forays into the larger implications of his findings. Brin’s expansive study (comprising 30 brief chapters, five of which had been published previously) begins with and in some ways is driven by a discussion of the biblical day (µwy). This term—which appears more than 2,300 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is the fifth most frequent word (p. 1)—provides a conceptual grounding for many of Brin’s discussions. Chapters spin outward from this conceptual center to discuss the marking of time as such (brief periods of less than a day, chapter 9; longer periods, chapters 10, 12; the day itself, chapter 11), as well as more abstract concepts relating to relative time (chapters 1, 4, 7, 8, 13, 26); historiography (chapter 5), and the duration of human life and generations (chapters 3, 14, 15, 18, 27). The Dead Sea Scrolls chapters (16–28) are underscored by a second major theme: the centrality of predestination and the place of God in the scrolls’ conception of time. These chapters also note changes in meaning of some biblical language as it appears in the scrolls (≈q, in chapter 20; µlw[ in chapter 21) and the increasing flexibility of some key terms, whose meanings might be either general or specific (d[wm in chapter 19; t[ in chapter 22). As Brin’s presentation demonstrates, focus on a limited group of related words can lead a reader toward more generalized insights into biblical composition and linguistic development. He notes, for example, that the book of Chronicles demonstrates a tendency to use one expression (µynpl) in prose editorial references to global events of the distant past and another (hnwçarb) in poetic references to events of Israelite history (pp. 73–74). From here it is a short step to a more extensive discussion of the composition of Chronicles and its redactional layers. Similarly, a discussion of ‘‘day of . . . ’’ and ‘‘days of . . . ’’ language (chapter 5) leads 394 JQR 94:2 (2004) to an observation about textual composition more generally; namely, that the ability to think in terms of a ‘‘period of judges’’ (clustering disparate leaders together) reflects a historical consciousness, ‘‘a certain comprehensive perception’’ on the part of the Bible’s historical writers (p. 5). Also of interest is what Brin describes as the ‘‘attrition’’ of meaning (p. 278), which led authors to use time words in clusters, one after the other, in an effort to underscore the intensity of concepts of time that had become conventionalized through everyday use (synchrony on p. 40; eternity on p. 278). The chapters on the Dead Sea Scrolls offer additional insights, beginning with the observation that the predestinarian sense of the scrolls is absolute, such that time can neither be hastened nor slowed. It can only proceed in the pattern that God has fixed. Brin contrasts this fixity with a pattern in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, in which God does hasten the approach of the end times (p. 245). Predestination in the scrolls involves not only the order of time but the specific actions associated with any given time, as Brin demonstrates in an insightful reading of the term d[wm in the Community Rule, Hodayot, and War Scroll (p. 262). In the course of his word studies, Brin...