The hinge of prophecy
By rejecting the past-worshipping, polytheistic tradition, the prophet-led Hebrews would transform our experience of time
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next week: The Hebrews ‘discovery’ of one god (2 of 7 essays about Judaism)
HOW WE SENSE the passage of time shapes how we live.
If we think of time as linear, we imagine our lives as ‘moving forward’. To what? To where? And for what purpose? We have no real answers, but we press on regardless.
If we think of time as circular, as our ancestors did, we measure our lives by the seasons, the sowing and the reaping, the phases of renewal and decay.
Bronze Age societies (3300–1200 BCE) lived in circular time, measured by nature, the stars, the transit of the planets and, later, by shadow and water clocks, the earliest of which appeared in Egypt around 1500 BCE.
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