Tutorial: The Hebrew Notion of History

Western civilization is one that has enjoyed a rich inheritance. But of all the differing and complex sources that have influenced the Western ‘way of thinking’, none are more significant than the Greeks, Romans and Ancient Hebrews. The latter are by far the most important with regard to how we generally perceive the passage of time, and the unfolding of history. This tutorial is a brief introduction into how the Jews endowed us with the very concept of history as we know it.

It may first be helpful to explain what other ideas of time existed before the introduction of that Hebrew idea to the West; of course, if there weren’t ideas already in place that could be revolutionized by the Hebrew one, than there wouldn’t be anything particularly special about it. That preexisting idea of time was cyclical time, a notion where time is repeated in perceivable intervals such as seasons or astronomical patterns and so on. This perception was largely associated with farming and the various seasonal characteristics of existence that accompanied the agricultural year. As ideas of cyclical time were tied to an activity essential for health and survival, religious rites or rituals often went along with these shifts in season to ensure beneficial results and the favor of relevant local gods.

Of course, if time repeats in cycles, then there is no real start or end point, and there is no notion of anything at all moving forward. This does not mean that societies that believed in cyclical time hadn’t any understanding of major events, or of chronology, but that those things didn't guide or define their understanding of history as an intellectual enterprise. The Hebrews could not have been more different.

First we must understand that the history of the Hebrews or nation of Ancient Israel began with an epic event: God’s call to Abraham. Basically, God instructs Abraham to drop everything he’s doing, and go to a place of His choosing, which Abraham knows nothing about. There, God tells him, he will find a land of “milk and honey,’ and he will found a great nation. For reasons know only to Abraham, he accepts this epic challenge of faith and trusts God. Ultimately, all Jews – as well as Muslims and Christians – draw their lineage back to this very event.

God’s revelation to Abraham begins with a promise, a notion of moving forward into the future; in this future, there is something that will come to fruition, or be realized. So not only does this create an idea of a history moving forward, as if in a straight line, but it is full of purpose, or intent. Thus, in some way, history and future are combined in a single concept, where each must exist for the other to be comprehensible.

So there are two important concepts here given us by the Hebrews: the first is linear time, or a time that moves forward directly, as if from point A to point B; notice how very different this is from the idea of cyclical time, which has no points at all, but which only seems to constantly reinvent itself in a similar form. The second concept is that the forward movement of time has purpose – it’s actually going somewhere. Maybe we know where that is, maybe we don’t, but we know it’s up ahead: this notion of history heading somewhere significant is called a teleological notion of history. The term comes form the Greek telos meaning 'end' or 'goal'. This idea of teleology has been applied not only to various understandings of history throughout the succeeding centuries, but to many branches and contexts of philosophy as well.

As the shared experience of the ancient Jews developed into a worldview, a theology and a canon of sacred literature, their understanding of the purpose of history also evolved in ever richer sophistication. The purpose of history was the fulfillment of the covenant God originally made with Abraham, and with the nation of Israel as a whole. But it was not just redemption and fulfillment at the end of history that was important, but the constantly unfolding relationship between God and his chosen people that developed along the journey there. And the Jews could come to know God better through a careful adherence to the laws they treasured in the Torah, and through acting justly and compassionately toward all people.

By 200 B.C.E., the Hebrew Scriptures, or Tanakh, were already translated into Greek by a body of scholars known as the Septuagint (the Seventy). This scripture, which was also the written historical record of the Jewish people, would soon become the official version adopted by the Catholic Church and would be poured over by the many scribes and scholars occupying the fortressed monasteries of the Medieval European landscape. Of course, the same notions of redemption, covenant, and fulfillment of prophecy also supplied the core elements for Christianity's idea of time in relation to the coming of Jesus, as it did for Muslims later on with the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. Since then, the customary timeline used by most historians and the abbreviations also used (B.C., Before Christ; A.D., Anno Domini / year of Our Lord; C.E., Christian or Common Era) reflect this religiously-centered sense of time and chronology.

Ancient Hebrew culture and learning has left Western civilization many things, and the linear notion history ranks among the most enduring. Not only does this idea structure how we think of the flow of time, but the purpose or ultimate direction we consider it to have – the very modern notion of progress would be bankrupt without it. Whether or not we choose to see any sacred design in the movement of history is unimportant; what is important is that the Hebrew idea of history is so engrained in our cast of mind, that we don’t even realize it’s there.