Understanding ‘olām for Christian theology, after Auschwitz
I’m on a long and slow trip up the Mount of Olives, by which I mean Matthew 24–25. This is where we find the Mount Olivet Discourse in its most expanded form. You can also find the first half of that material, more or less, in Luke 21 and in Mark 13. But Matthew, alone, holds the second half. The trip is recorded here in a series of articles, all freely available, with the central hub for these explorations here.
A Long Personal Disclosure. Purgation.
The trip is one that I’ve been getting ready to do since childhood, ever since I encountered its fearsome conclusion, and thought it sounded like the most evil thing I’d ever heard:
Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ These will go away into eternal (aionion) punishment, but the righteous into eternal (aionion) life.”
I confess, I still believe that punishing people forever sounds like the farthest possible thing from love, or even decency. In comparison to this idea, even the most obscene stories of serial killers grow infinitely insignificant, like all infinitesimals against an infinite scale. So my interest in the ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic language of time is very much rooted in my own infinitesimal lifetime of wrestling with this passage.
I’ve provided a bit of context here at the start, because I do not want to give the impression that my obsessive efforts to evaluate this question on its historical and linguistic merits came from nowhere, or from everywhere. I also don’t want to suggest that my interest in this topic ends with careful and informed speculation about ancient semantics. Still, those findings are an important part of this reflection and they can be stated succinctly: I have become convinced that “aion” consistently means “lifetime” in Greek, including in the Gospel of Matthew, and that the meaning of “aionios” remains closely connected to this basic meaning. Relatedly, the phrases in Hebrew that deal with time that underly this translation, as documented in the Septuagint, routinely involve phrases that include the word “olam” and that also often talk about generations. A sequence of lifetimes is also a sequence of generations. The basic meaning of the phrases involving “olam”, however, is not “lifetime”. Instead it refers to an indefinitely long period of time, often opposed to a definitely limited period of time. By layering, repeating and expanding on this basic indefiniteness, Hebrew can also point towards even more expansive and encompassing concepts of time. An indefinite expanse of time may also be infinite, in principle or in fact or by implication, but this is not the basic meaning of the word on its own.
The linguistic dance between these languages as they have been woven into our own is fascinating and worthy of attention in its own way. However, I never would have put so much effort into learning these strange steps if it weren’t part of my tiny attempt to heal from a deep childhood horror that gave rise to traumatic personal experiences in my 20's. It is strange to be presented with something evil as a child, and told that it is the highest possible good. Stranger still to try to make it make sense. But I was raised Catholic and still am being raised Catholic, in all of my sojourns in the open communion. While I was never sexually molested by a priest myself, as an adult I have learned that I was dodging pedophile priests throughout my life. I’ve heard a priest who was close to me complain that the problem with the whole pedophilia scandal was that the media was acting as if 12-year-olds are children, but they aren’t. After all, he said, they’ve reached the age of reason. This pattern of attacking vociferously instead of repenting has become increasingly constant in our public life since then. The flailing overreach of the attacks has reached a fever pitch since the days of 1/6/2021.
It still makes me sick to think about that priest’s response. He should have been weeping, not gnashing his teeth. And I’ve seen still more of the soul rot in the institution that gave rise to so much systematic abuse in so many forms. If my parents had been more religious, and less suspicious of priests, there’s a good chance I would have been raped by the Order of the Sacred Heart as a child. They did a great deal of that out in South Dakota, where we were, especially in the boarding schools for the First Nations. So no one should be surprised that I live out my Catholicism at a safe remove: not renouncing my faith, but also not subjecting my family to the shattered remnants of that institutional church’s abusive religious authority claims.
Still, I take my Catholic confirmation seriously. My confirmation sponsor identified with the First Nations, and was the custodian of St. Michael’s Church in Canton, Ohio. I have my own tiny trace of documented First Nations ancestry. Algonquin. For whatever it is worth it means a lot to my mother, and I was raised with that awareness. Still, I’m not sure of what connection my sponsor or I really have to any First Nation. The question of whether we really are children of this continent is a fraught one. After a cultural and physical genocide, where does appropriation end, and where do the shattered remnants of the old nations begin? I’ll leave it to you to try to figure out where blood ends and stories begin after a genocide. Who knows if the tiny strand of breath that connects the ruddy iron in our veins might make, of me, a golem to protect the First Nations? Might my mother’s myth preserve, at least, some trace of living memory?
This disclosure of my social location is all in good enough taste, in certain reflexive social circles today, and I think these norms about reflecting on our social locations are constructive and good. Still, there is much here that can only be in bad taste, because it truly is bitter. I am also discussing genocide and its traces because it must also be a central concern for us here, as we go on our journey up the Mount of Olives together. With such a direct plunge into the trauma and agony of history ahead of us, I don’t know what to do except to be overly polite, like a guest always just arriving. So please forgive me for apologizing if this inclusive “we-ing” and “us-ing” feels overly chummy and familiar to you. I do want to be clear, though, that if you choose to join me on this trip I will use this inclusive language of “we” and “us” and “our” throughout. If you aren’t coming with me on this journey then I assume that you aren’t coming along and so you won’t be reading this. The “we” is meant to include you as a fellow traveler, which I’m afraid you will have to be, or become, if you continue beside me on this darkly winding way.
And so in the time that remains we will be exploring this question: what happens to the cultural traces that persist through the attempts of empires to physically and spiritually annihilate a people? The question is unavoidable for anyone hoping to approach the Hebrew slopes of the Mount of Olives, because that’s just what the text is about. We can’t talk about what we’ve lost and what we still have of the world before 70 AD, when the Temple was desolated and then destroyed, unless we understand that the New Testament sprang from the kingdom of Judah in the wake of the Roman genocide, caesarian, like a child from a dying womb.
I’m drawn to this story, in no small part, because my personal experiences have shaped me to be the kind of person who cannot look away from this. Among other things, the trauma of history has forced me to learn to set my feet like rock on rock, and to have a spine of irony when facing the bluster of religious slander and defensiveness. The experience of becoming like this is agony, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s like having your lips burned with coal. But the result is this: in my body, I’m not afraid of even the grandest and oldest of religious authorities slandering me for speaking the truth, even about divine torture, to the best of my ability. And I’m even less afraid of all the little fractious splinters of the church coming at me, armed with their comical attempts to imitate the vastly more sophisticated spiritual, psychological, and physical abuse structure I grew up around. Sorry, little self-appointed anti-popes, the big Popes got here first. (I really do think the Popes are getting better, very slowly and in fits and starts, by the way.) So when we talk about people being endlessly punished, I don’t hesitate to clearly say that this is literally the most evil concept the human mind has ever conceived. Seriously, can you think of anything more evil? For example: even the catastrophe of priestly pedophilia, systematically covered up and facilitated by the world’s largest and oldest organization, is only a flickering instant of torment next to this. And with those torments, at least, you can find someone to say they are unjust, even if some priests feel the injustice is entirely on the other end. But endless punishment without even the hope of someone acknowledging that the abuse is wrong? Have we really thought, for even a moment, about what it is that so many self-proclaimed traditionalists have been trying to defend? (I don’t think the self-proclaimed traditionalists have taken the tradition seriously enough, by the way: I will gladly out-tradition them any day.)
So that’s part of why I’m climbing the Mount of Olives with you here. But it isn’t the whole story, and it doesn’t explain why I need to start talking about this in order to talk about ‘olām, the Hebrew fragment behind the close to Matthew 25. Addressing how priestly pedophilia has shaped me was the mild on-ramp into the much more searing discussion we need to have, if we would dare to be Christians talking about the Hebrew language today.
And, fool that I am, I do intend to be a Christian talking about Hebrew today. I am, of course, talking about what it means to do Biblical Studies after the Shoah, sometimes called the Holocaust. The problem is that our Christian lips are filthy with the ashes of the Shoah. In its wake, we need to always already be undergoing a searing purification of our ears and our typing fingers and our mouths if we hope to approach these topics with the utmost seriousness that they absolutely require. The question is precisely this: do you think that the Shoah was just a warm-up round? Do you believe that after Hitler was done with his Jewish victims and they escaped his grasp in the form of ashes … stop.
Breathe.
You’re still breathing.
Do you believe that they then fell into the arms of some infernal god who will then torment them forever for rejecting Jesus? Really pause and ask yourself: do you really think that the Shoah was just a warm-up round?
Even as it will surely raise an army of slanderers against me, I need to state this with utmost clarity. No. I absolutely do not believe that the Shoah was just a warm-up round, and to suggest otherwise is, as far as I can ever see, unspeakably vile. I simply can’t imagine a more wicked thought.
How about you? How are you doing?
Are you feeling challenged?
Hopeful? Excited? Afraid?
Angry? Annoyed? Bored?
Defensive?
Accused and slandered yourself?
Take a note of it, and I want you to know that I’m okay with whatever you might be feeling. We aren’t having some breezy little conversation, I know.
I just want to clarify that I’ve done all of this because I think it is all truly necessary. I don’t think we can face our own misappropriation of both the Greek and Hebrew behind the Olivet Discourse, today, unless we’re willing to face a long history of error on our part as Christians. There’s a whole lot of Empire in our churches and in us, and I think that God wants to uproot it and burn it away. But it can’t happen without our cooperation. It can’t happen unless we receive the burning away of our sins, including sins of slander against outsiders, as grace.
I also want to say that I respect disagreement and I certainly make mistakes, just like anyone. A sharp turn, I know, but now here we are. I truly appreciate pushback and efforts to correct me with sound reasoning, and I try to find out that I was wrong about something every day. Still, I hope we see eye to eye on at least one thing: this is serious business. And like a tree that’s planted by the water I’m ready to stand here patiently, providing shelter for people who have experienced spiritual abuse. And sure, I’ll throw the shade that’s needed for that for as long as it takes.
Feel free to take a break if you like, for as long as you like.
If you’re still here, in body and mind, let’s continue. I will insist on binding body and breath, theology and church, thought and practice, as we go.
My basic concerns about the theology of hell and the history of abuse by the church are inextricably connected. Insofar as we read the conclusion of Matthew 25 in the widespread and evil way that it is often read, this reflects our own willingness (as church or Church, congregation or the whole dysfunctional Christian family) to accommodate evil and project it onto God. We should be completely unsurprised if the people who champion this approach end up doing all kinds of evil, over and over and over and over again.
If you can rationalize endless torment as the highest possible expression of the highest possible good, you’ve passed the ultimate spiritual abuse loyalty test. From there, it is extremely easy to rationalize covering up some priestly pedophilia here and there, because surely that is nothing compared to the endless torment the priests are supposedly stopping. Seriously, consider the moral calculus: if you truly felt that disclosing priestly pedophilia would compromise a priest who could be someone’s gateway out of endless torment, wouldn’t you enable a ‘sacred’ rapist, too? And if you truly felt that the ‘lies’ of the Jews were leading them and others into endless torment, wouldn’t you, like Martin Luther, embrace their physical and spiritual eradication?
You don’t have to answer, because history already has. It has told us that for most of us in that sort of situation, the answer is “Yes.” Maybe you are one of the very rare and very foolish few who would face the self-righteous rage of civilization in all of its barbarity, and you would even go to your death to defy these sorts of things. But most of us, frankly, are not. You have to be truly willing to give up everything for that, and that is not at all the same as just posturing and preening, as if you are the sort of person who would give up everything to follow the next movement of God. This is why I say that endless punishment is the Urform, the prototype, of spiritual abuse in general.
Now you understand my interests in this project, but this tells you nothing about the rigor of my argumentation. It will, of course, be tempting to avoid an analysis of my arguments and instead accuse me of arriving at my conclusions because of my interests. It happens constantly in Biblical studies and theology, and it is an impediment to serious analysis of arguments. So it goes, wherever threat responses are activated. That’s why I need to pause and include this note as well:
I’ve shown you my interests and I know them. Do you know your own? Who do you want to impress? Who do you think you can’t afford to upset? Who might shun you if you dare to follow me down here? But ultimately, those are only the questions of whether discourse can begin. The other reality is that I’m going to offer some very powerful and concrete arguments here. If you want to challenge them, you’ll have to challenge the arguments instead of hypocritically accusing me of having interests, as if you don’t.
So to catch you up briefly on this project, we’ve already scaled the Greek side of this aionion mountain here. And I’ve applied these insights directly to the question of hell, universal salvation, and what the Bible has to say about both here. The point is that the Bible, arguably, teaches universal salvation much more clearly than it teaches the endless torment of some. I understand that this claim is bold and counter-intuitive for many. That’s why I’ve carefully written the pieces linked above.
In those essays, I’ve shown how aion can widely and illuminatingly be read as “lifetime” in Greek. I show how this meaning even makes for much better reading of Plato’s Timaeus, which is usually cited as the source for the meaning of “eternity”. However, I believe the research on this now shows how strange it is to suggest that Plato suddenly redefined a common Greek word in the Timaeus. Instead, he used the normal word for “lifetime” to talk about the “lifetime of the whole universe.” And then he invented a fascinating new word: “aionios.” Its first readers would have probably experienced the word as something like “lifetimeish.” I would suggest that like them, we should begin again and hear it that way as well. It was a strange and apparently novel term. In the context of the Timaeus, “lifetimeish” serves to bridge between the lifetime of the whole living universe, which is the original, as well as our own lifetimes and all the other lifetimes, which are seen as lifetimeish copies of its lifetimeish character. In short, the adjective serves as a mediating term between the Platonic form and the many lives that are cast from it, a bit like bronzes. Plato invents the funny adjective “lifetimeish” because all of the lifetimes, the big one and our little lives that copy or reflect it, can all be described as lifetimeish. What is happening in the Greek is just far more beautiful and interesting and sophisticated than we grasp, when we fail to read “aion” as it would have read in Greek. My other articles on this explain how it makes a great deal of sense to see the author of Matthew 24–25 engaging deeply with this tradition in a way that we have often missed: it makes enormous sense to read Matthew’s author as identifying the death of his own nation, Judah, as the original which is then copied in a judgment of all the nations. Read in this way, the parts of the Mount Olivet Discourse suddenly snap together into a coherent and highly intelligible whole that integrates the Hebrew prophetic tradition with popular Greek thought of the time.
How have we missed the skill and nuance and brilliance sleeping there in the language? I think that accepting evil doesn’t just make us more evil. It makes us more blind as well. Countless people have persisted in misreading this passage, and it is an indictment of our willingness to praise and glorify the highest possible evil that the human mind can conceive: endless punishment. We should also note that this position usually goes alongside the highest possible collective narcissism that the human mind can conceive. Those who embrace it almost always believe in endless torment for thee, but not for me. Interestingly, in Romans 11 Paul teaches that all of Israel will also be saved, and he does it so that the church, his infinitesimal band of those called out, won’t become conceited. He was right about the conceitedness, at least. To teach otherwise does make us conceited. As Christians, we’ve been telling on ourselves and flaunting our conceitedness for an awfully long time. Biblical studies is helpful here, in part, because it tells us that we’ve told on ourselves, and that we’ve been blinded to our own Scripture by our wicked hearts. Living here and now, after Auschwitz, I firmly believe that we need to repent of blasphemy against God and against God’s image-bearers for how we have abused our sacred texts.
I’ve been clearing a lot of air here. Or throwing a lot of shade. Still, this trip up the Mount of Olives isn’t just an air-clearing exercise. It is, first and foremost, an attempt to glean what can be gleaned from this revelatory text, in a time when we sure could use a lot more revelation and a lot less concealment. Among the many things I’m contemplating here, I’m also thinking about Putin and his many Trumpist supporters. They, too, have been telling on themselves an awful lot lately, and today they literally threaten the survival of life on Earth thanks to the possibility of nuclear war.
In my own context I’m thinking about the Vineyard movement’s culpability in the false prophetic movement that contributed so extensively to the attack on the US Capitol on 1/6/2021, in the Year of our Lord. (One part of the church that I remain connected to is the Vineyard.) My informed suspicion is that the same spiritual sickness that fed that attack is also playing a role in the loss of our Vineyard mother church in Anaheim this week, much as so many of us have lost our parents to QAnon and anti-vax hysteria and then COVID over the last several years. Some of them have died. Some of them have simply become impossible to reach, lost in webs of delusion and deception that have trapped them in a seemingly endless loop of slander. It is heartbreaking.
Hopefully these loops only last indefinitely and not forever. Over in Anaheim, authoritarian teachings on things like a “culture of honor” (for the leaders, that is) and other epistemic capture systems threaten to bring us to a future that is much worse than our present. Torture, including the social torture of humiliation, have a way of shutting down the mind and the senses, and replacing this with a blind obedience rooted in terror. The threat of endless torture is especially useful for this.
My concerns here are personal, and include concerns for my local congregations as well as denominational associations. They also extend to the national and global level. Authoritarianism is on the march in Russia and in our churches in North America. We are far past the time when we need to clarify that every single human being is an image-bearer of God, and that this requires a deep and abiding egalitarianism in how we structure everything in our lives and society. Leaders don’t get special deference because of their power, but must instead be faced with special courage and must be held to higher levels of accountability because of their power. Their teachings, too, must be confronted in a forthright way when they are deceptive and harmful.
Okay. I hope that my mouth is seared enough to talk about Hebrew now, even now, after Auschwitz. Hopefully your ears have, likewise, burned enough to hear me.
Approaching ‘Olām and the company it keeps. Illumination.
This brings us to the Hebrew language behind that “eternal” punishment: ‘olām and lᵉ’olām and ad’olām. The terms have come to seem aionion because of Alexander’s Empire, which forged the context where the various scriptures canonized as New Testaments emerged from a profound Greco-Hebrew synthesis, drawing deeply on the Septuagint that worked to bridge between Hebrew and Greek.
As elsewhere on this journey, we will continue to draw from Heleen Keizer’s deep study of the key terms, especially in light of how they were translated in that context. It is the best work on the subject currently available, in my view. With the loss of only a little precision, I think it is fair to say that ‘olām phrases can speak beautifully about the same sorts of things as our aionic language when it comes to life. But ‘olamic language speaks to whole periods of time, often including lifetimes, in a distinct way. The primary difference lies in the perspective that the language encourages us to take: the ‘olamic perspective is internal, while the aionic is more external. Let me explain.
When we hear the word “lifetime,” which is what aion means, we start thinking about a whole life as a completed thing. The word “lifetime” makes us feel almost like we could hold a lifetime in our arms, because it is a smaller thing that we’re looking at from the outside. In contrast, ‘olām phrases focus our attention on the edges of some period of time. So olām does not mean “lifetime” in the basic way that aion does. Precisely for that reason, it can beautifully and achingly describe how we see the limits of our lifetimes from a personal, lived vantage point. We live and we see all that we can see in life, and then our lifetime vanishes from our view precisely where we might behold it from outside, because death marks its end. As Andy Warhol described this standpoint on death in the midst of the AIDS crisis, so flat and so deep: “I don’t believe in [death], because you’re not around to know that it’s happened.” Phrases associated with ‘olām speak precisely to that edge, the boundary at which we might behold our lifetime, or some other completed time, but can’t. It is important to note that I’m definitely not offering some sweeping claim that “the Hebrew Mind” couldn’t conceive of whole lives. It’s just that the common Hebrew terms translated as “aion” in Greek were distinct in how they described a lifetime, or some other whole period of time. ‘Olām phrases put us in the position of one looking toward the edges of some time from within, while “lifetime” causes us to imagine a whole life from without.
In a sense, this could be enough for us to begin to explore Matthew 25 from the standpoint of the background concept work of ‘olām, considering what it would mean for a life or a punishment/correction to be olamic. However, internalizing language isn’t just about reading a definition. A definition is just a first rough sketch. The real point of semantic study is to catch language like we’d pick up a habit, letting meanings seep into us, lead our attention to new places, and illuminate dark passages with blazing light. That’s why this series is a slow and meandering walk.
The trouble today is that so many of us have read and heard the Bible so much that we can’t hear it at all anymore. And there’s so much defensiveness around bad old interpretations, however devastatingly bad they might be, because we’ve been trained in the bad habits they produce. Even those of us who are open to the idea that aion and ‘olām phrases have been badly misconstrued can’t easily shake the uneasy feeling that the familiar is just right and the unfamiliar is just wrong, even though we’ve been familiarized with the wrong. The same problem arises for victims of abuse in all kinds of situations: we have been formed to think that abuse is normal, and so health feels abnormal and strange at first. So the goal here is first to show the scholarly basis for questioning those impulses.
But much more importantly, my goal is to meander and tarry and waste time with the other meanings, to explore them and use them over and over until we live inside of the truer language. Language is acquired by holding it and being in it, like a child is held and nursed by a mother, like a child plays with toys. We don’t truly get it by seizing it from outside as if to possess it. Definitions are just a hasty first sketch of the work we need to do. So we’re going to waste a bunch of time on ‘olām as we get ready to head up the Hebrew side of the Mount of Olives. Because wasting time playing around with language is precisely the way to truly grasp it.
To get us started, we’ll take a quick look at Keizer’s long conclusion on ‘olām and its main associated phrases, from pages 147–150 of Life, Time, Entirety. First, though, I’ll share the texts she is referring to as [1], [2] and [3], and draw out my own points about the texts in ways that are salient for our discussion. Her other citations have been removed to help you focus on the flow of the argument itself. If you want to examine her extensive analysis of many relevant texts as well as her highly informative citations and footnotes, that can be found in the study itself, which is freely available online and is linked above. I’ve found that some people who are engaged in these discussions try to cite this work, but they simply cherry pick it or fail to understand it. Here, I’ll try to fill the gap between what she is saying and the inability of a lot of people, including a number of people who I’ve encountered who read a lot of Biblical Studies scholarship, to internalize its significance.
Origin and Method
[1] Genesis 3:22
And the Lord God said:
The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.He must not be allowed to reach out his hand,
and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live lᵉ ‘olām.
Here as elsewhere, it is easy to take our assumptions into our reading and see lᵉ ‘olām as meaning “endless.” However, notice that it can just as easily mean “indefinitely” here, and there’s reason to see it meaning that in this context as well. The overall conclusion of Keizer’s study provides us with strong grounds for seeing the text as having an indefinite, rather than endless, span of time in view. However, at this point in the study we should only note that it is an option. The difference between “endless” and “indefinite” is massive … potentially infinite, in fact. That line can be drawn sharply if we focus on the distinction. However, if we aren’t actively working to draw out the difference, the two tend to blend together in normal thinking and in normal communication.
Consider that unlike a human, a nation doesn’t have a known maximum life span. It goes as long as its institutions and traditions and practices and holidays and symbols happen to persist, but it doesn’t have an expiration date. In principle, maybe a nation could go without end. Whether we’re talking about the ‘eternal flame’ at the tomb of the forgotten soldier, or the Fourth of July celebrations in the United States, or the United States itself, these kinds of things have an indefinite life that can seem as good as endless at a glance, or from the standpoint of our own brief lifetimes. We are ants in a world of giants, and the most apparent of those giants are the nations.
However, the apparent (and only merely apparent) endlessness of the indefinite has more than normal imprecision and human limitation going for it. Will the Fourth of July be celebrated without end, or will it just recur for some indefinite period of time? In the throes of patriotic passion, it feels like blasphemy to suggest that it’s just an indefinitely repeated event. But in truth, how can it be truly endless? Or consider the various eternal flames that some countries (including the US) keep at the tombs of unknown soldiers. Even here, where our word is in fact “eternal,” what we must mean, on reflection, is almost always “indefinite.” In English today, it turns out that it is easy to truly mean “indefinite” on reflection, but to seem to mean “endless” at a glance.
To this, I’d add that on Keizer’s account, lᵉ‘olām doesn’t exactly mean indefinite. The feel of it, although lacking a precise translation in English, is the sense of looking at something that goes as far as we can see, but the language is compacted more densely than “as far as can be seen.” So “indefinite” lacks the kind of poetic beauty we would expect in a passage like this, and doesn’t feel great as a translation. However, if we internalize Keizer’s sense of lᵉ ‘olām and allow it to define this distinct sense of a perspectival limit concept, I think the poetry of the passage comes through even more clearly. Humanity is given a definitive end, rather than the capacity to persist as far as we can see, and there may be a hard mercy of sorts in this. After all, when an impressive but vicious Empire falls, we can be glad that its days were limited, even if we (at least) didn’t know when its number would be up. And we can be still more grateful that the days of an individual tyrant are even more limited. The fall of vicious, though impressive, Empires happens to be just what the Torah is constantly fascinated by.
So I’d encourage you to consider the possibility that Keizer very carefully argues to: that “indefinite length” works as well as “endless” here, and so the passage doesn’t resolve that for us. What it does help us do is establish some connection between lᵉ ‘olām and life, even as it doesn’t simply mean lifetime. And now we need to take a step back and notice what we are doing here, methodically and carefully, with our minds. We are (1) acknowledging multiple theories that can hold the particular data of this text well (endless/indefinite), and then we are (2) acknowledging that both theories can work, and then we are (3) drawing what we can more definitively draw from this particular text. Even if it seems like a small thing, it is useful to nail down the small gains we get from a text without settling on a concrete resolution. This kind of thing is challenging to do, because our minds crave clarity. People often fail to do it in Biblical studies in any kind of rigorous way, precisely because we have very powerful psychological drives toward reducing the problem as quickly as possible.
To learn this sort of mental discipline, I think it is helpful to train yourself with mathematical approaches. I’m going to discuss a recent problem I did with my daughter from the fantastic Beast Academy curriculum, because the kind of problem-solving involved here is closely related to the kind of problem-solving we need for ancient semantics. I think people in Biblical Studies need to be trained on this sort of math curriculum, because so much of their work is a more semantically rich and complicated variant of this sort of problem.
The basic idea behind these puzzles is that you need to move the knight through all of the positions on the board in order. So 1 indicates the first move, and so on. Take a look:
The trouble here, just as with ‘endless’ and ‘indefinite’, is that sometimes multiple moves can work. Problem 54 introduces the student to a single ambiguity, which they need to resolve by looking at the problem as a whole. Sure, an initial move to spot 5 (let’s call it ‘endless’) or to spot 1 (let’s call it ‘indefinite’) is possible, if the puzzle isn’t considered as a whole. However, on closer inspection it becomes clear that only spot 1 allows you to solve the whole puzzle. The beauty of Keizer’s approach is that she notices (with text [1]) that you might move to either spot 1 or spot 5.
But to solve the puzzle as elegantly as possible, we need to look further. What tends to happen a lot in the field is this: people think that spot 5 (‘endless’) is the place to go and so they never bother to see if fits with the most elegant total analysis. This introduces the principle, but the complexity of Biblical studies overall is probably a bit closer to problem 56.
Now of course, semantics is squishier than this, less strictly determined. The main adjustment that needs to be made is still fairly simple: instead of talking as definitely as we must about these puzzles, we need to compare the relative plausibility of various readings, and we need to be more abidingly humble and self-aware. Still, when the whole body of texts is considered together, just as the puzzle is considered as a whole, clearer pronouncements can be made. We can become increasingly confident, if never certain. When we use the Bible to teach this sort of rigor, patience and humility, it becomes useful for instruction in righteousness.
Becoming more definite
[2] Genesis 6:3
And the Lord said:
My Spirit will not remain in / contend with man lᵉ ‘olām, for he is flesh;
his days will be a hundred and twenty years.
(LXX: eis ton aiona — NIV: for ever)
[3] Genesis 6:4
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterwards — when the sonds of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.
They were the heros of mē‘olam, men of renown.
From here, we have a pair of ‘olāms that also deal with the limitation of life. Texts [2] and [3] address the Nephilim, and they represent a Jewish critique of Babylonian hero-gods like Marduk. (The Assyrian Pentapolis of Goliath was also an outpost of Babylonian culture, which is why you find things like a twelve-fingered giant there.) However, the text pointedly does not view the human-gods identified with Babylonian rulers as immortal beings of respect and wonder. Just the opposite, they are seen as the result of divine transgression and failure. This theme carries through in Hebrew literature through the Second Temple period, when Jesus lives. Amy Richter’s Enoch and the Gospel of Matthew shows how these motifs continued to be used to critique Empire, with its wars and use of sex (including prostitutes) to control both men and women. To put it in its historical context, then, Genesis 6 is cutting Babylon down to size and suggesting that it (and its big men) are worthy of horror more than honor.
We can also find something suggestive of indefiniteness here. The opposite of contending with man lᵉ ‘olām is the creation of a definite limit on the human lifespan: 120 years. The contrast suggests (but does not require) that indefiniteness is what is in view here. Here the definiteness of 12*10 years (itself an interesting play on Babylonian base-60 math) pairs especially beautifully with a lᵉ ‘olām that suggests the indefinite lifespan of Empires and nations. The higher a view we have of text [2], I think the more likely we are to see lᵉ ‘olām integrating and playing off of the theme of “definite vs indefinite” here, because it illustrates a tighter level of conceptual and linguistic integration than “endless”.
This brings us to text [3], which continues to play with ‘olām. According to Keizer mē‘olam here refers to the distant past. We see how the phrase now looks back to an indefinite vanishing point before, while [2] was looking forward to an indefinite vanishing point in the future. And with that, I think we can start the process of nailing down how the language is working in Hebrew. Keizer’s approach takes its lead from the earliest attested uses within the scriptural text as it was received during the Second Temple, which happens to be our interest here. This helps us whittle things down, pointing towards a simple and elegant definitional approach, an approach that maximizes consilience with the least possible effort: “indefinite” can work in all three instances, while “endless” cannot.
Of course, Keizer doesn’t stop there. She goes on to conduct a thorough study of usage, which continues to illustrate the elegant power of her solution while it also illustrates the inelegance and weakness of “endless.” Nonetheless, as with aion, ‘olām might sometimes be stretched to suggest endlessness. But it needs to be stretched to fit that purpose.
We’ll close with Keizer’s conclusion to the section on ‘olam. You might enjoy listening to this instrumental piece while you read it, in stereo if possible. I think they also quote it very briefly in the video about Andy Warhol above. In English, we might translate the title as “Mirror in mirror.” When we set the mirror of ‘olam before the mirror of aion, we might begin to see the form of the indefinite.
We will need it if we are to confront the plague of spiritual abuse that has arisen out of our loss of this past.
For establishing the meaning of ‘olām, the first three instances of the word in the Torah already offer us a lot. From text [1] we learn that ‘olām bears relation to life, from text [2] that it has to do with time, from [1], [2] and [3] that it is projected both forwards into the future and backwards into the past.
Text [1] teaches us that ‘olām in principle is inherent to “life” — life in its truest sense, i.e., free from death. However, in the condition of man and the world as we know them, there is no deathless life but only life passed on from generation to generation that may amount to ‘olām. Many texts therefore have ‘olām in parallelism alongside “generation and generation” (dor wādor).
Along the same lines can be interpreted the name of the LORD “God of ‘olām” in Genesis 21:33: God for all time, i.e., of generation after generation. Analogously in Exodus 3:15 God reveals himself with his name LORD (YHWH) as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (generations), saying that this is his name “le’‘olām — from generation to generation”.
Behind us is ‘olām (past) and ahead of us is ‘olām (future). This future in some cases may not reach further than the lifetime of a person.
While the use and meaning of ‘olām as it is found in the Torah is continued in the Prophets and the Writings, these latter parts of the Hebrew Bible also show new usages. First there is the usage of ‘olām in the plural. God is called the rock of ‘olāmim (plural) — but also god of ‘olām. His kingdom is a kingdom of all ‘olāmim. The plural, ‘olāmim, has a dividing-and-multiplying, that is, intensifying import. We do not have any indication (should should have been found in the contexts) that the plural implies a restricted meaning of the singular, i.e., that ‘olāmim would denote a plurality of distinct ‘ages’. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is any (distinct) ‘olām set against another (distinct) one — as will happen later, notably in the New Testament.
In the Prophets and Writings the noun ‘ad turns up, stretching, even transgressing, the limits of ‘olām.
That olam may refer to limited time is evident when a verdict “until ‘olām” is qualified by an “until …”.
A signal that ‘olām admits of determination may be its use with the definite article.
Olam can be the past or the future or both together; while it thus comprises all of time, it does not go above or outside time. God, however, is above ‘olām while at the same time being present in it: he is God of ‘olām, God from ‘olām until ‘olām, his kingdom a kingdom of all ‘olāmim. “From/since ‘olām and until/so long as ‘olām”: thus is described the temporal range of the created world. This description implies a view from a position ‘inside’, in the center.
‘ālam, the Aramaic version of ‘olām, builds the cumulative and superlative expression “to the ālam of ālams”, describing the boundless horizon of the future Kingdom of the Most High. This future indeed is the most definite and the most unfathomable.
The word ‘olām (or ‘ālam) is used either adverbially or adnominally, but not as a subject or object all by itself. The single, and notable, exception is Qoh.3:11, where ‘olām is the direct object in a sentence which comes closest to an explicit reflection about olām: God has given the ‘olām to the hearts of men. The context brings out that the olām is the maximum of what is given to the human view. Man is aware that there is also a ‘beyond’, but this indeed his beyond his view: it is God’s domain (“the work of God from beginning to end”).
We now come to the following definition: olām is time constituting the (temporal) horizon of created life (men) in the created world. Saying that ‘olām is something of a ‘horizon’, we do justice to the fact that the word is always used in an adverbial or adnominal way, and that the Hebrew Bible never says that we are at the ‘olām. The Hebrew Bible does not use the preposition bᵉ, “at, in” (rest), in combination with ‘olām — accordingly it does not speak in terms of (present) ‘olām in which we are now. The term horizon (Greek horizon [kuklos], “delimiting [circle]” denotes the outermost limit of our view: as viewers we are always inside but never at this limit. By saying “time constituting the horizon” the definition is meant to imply that ‘olām refers to the temporal horizon including all time enclosed by, or extending up to it: ‘olām includes what is inside the (always receding) borderline. Jenni calls ‘olām an Extremebegriff [extreme concept, my note] or Grenzbegriff [border concept, my note].
Expressed in more practical terms, ‘olām designates time of which the limit is not known, in the sense either that the limit, though sure, cannot be fixed, or that a limit is not envisaged. In practice, we may render ‘olām most often by “all time”, “always”, “ever”.
Comparing the meaning of ‘olām in the Hebrew Bible with the meaning of aiōn in Greek literature, we observe that aion has several connotations without parallel in the meaning of ‘olām. The usage of aion in Greek literature showed us that the meaning of aion is constituted by the notions of ‘life’, ‘time’, and ‘whole’, among which the notion of ‘life’ appeared to be the earliest one. An ensuing connotation was that of a defined ‘lot’ (moira). The word ‘olām as such does not convey a notion of ‘life’. Although both ‘olām and aion denote time which bears relation to life, the implied ‘views’ of time (and life) are different. When ‘olām is a Grenzbegriff [border concept], aion might rather be called a Totalbegriff. In aion, life and time is seen as a whole (total, complete), which implies a view ‘from outside’. ‘Olām too refers to all of time, this in a view from inside the temporal, and human, horizon. Thus, while aion can stand for a determined life-lot, ‘olām makes the ‘scope’ for life to be full.
In short, ‘olām denotes time constituting a (temporal) horizon which can be far (e.g. the remote past) and rather near (e.g. the end of one’s life), purposed-but-postponed (life for-‘olām) as well as decided-but-diminished (until- ‘olām until…). In its widest sense, ‘olām in the Hebrew Bible describes all time, i.e., time as given with creation.
I carry Keizer’s conclusions forward in more depth when I look at 1–2 Samuel as plausible background for Matthew 12. You can find that here. And if you’d like to orient yourself to the whole project, of which this essay is a part, you can find the main trunk of the tree here.
If you’re still here, I wanted to offer a helpful resource for anyone wanting access to yet another review of usages of ‘olamic phrases that is comprehensive and broadly considered authoritative. Linked at the name of its author below, you’ll find the current entry from the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament on this topic. The discussion here is broadly and deeply compatible with Keizer’s work, even as Keizer advances a theory that adds some interesting and significant nuances within this broad domain. Resources like this shouldn’t be taken as a definitive final word, and their provenance in Germany warrants additional critical reflection on the enduring influence of antisemitism (for example) in Christian theology. Still, it is worthwhile to compare Keizer’s work to standards in the field.
Here is the citation, with all of its longing for the text that it signifies:
Horst Dietrich Preuss, “עוֹלָה and עוֹלָם,” ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 530–545.
And this is the hook, whether or not we can make the ‘olamic hills.