**1. Introduction: Experiencing Time**

After smelling the burnt offerings offered him by Noah after the flood,<sup>1</sup> YHWH decides that he will no longer curse the earth on account of humanity (Gen 8:22): "So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease."<sup>2</sup> The verse in Genesis paints a picture of a cyclical world, where one time or season follows another without end. The final item, day and night, is different from the other three in that it is about the daily cycle, while the others are about the yearly cycle.

The first pair, seed time and harvest time, happen in the autumn and spring respectively, and, they are the inverse of each other, since one harvests that which the other plants. The next two, cold and heat/summer and winter are ostensibly synonymous with each other, with the pairs being written one after the other in a boustrophedonic or chiastic pattern (ABBA). Thus, the verse presents the reader with three cycles that YHWH is promising not to interrupt: agricultural, seasonal, and astronomical.

As observed by Mercea Eliade, time can be experienced as linear or cyclical (Eliade 1959).<sup>3</sup> Modern calendars emphasize linear time. They begin from a fixed point (creation of the world, Mohamed's hijra

<sup>1</sup> It has been argued that the original context of this verse in the J story was not after a flood, but after a drought (Dershowitz 2016).

<sup>2</sup> All quotes from the Hebrew Bible follow the NJPS (New Jewish Publication Society) translation with some adjustments by the author.

<sup>3</sup> This dichotomy is somewhat artificial as humans likely always experience aspects of both, but it is a useful heuristic to paint human experience of time in broad strokes.

to Mecca, etc.)4 and continue from there. For instance, in the Gregorian calendar, the year 2018 is two thousand and eighteen years since the officially recognized birth of Jesus. But this linear conception of forward movement from a fixed point in the past is not the only way in which we experience time. In addition to imagining time as a line, humans also imagine it as an endless circling. This is what is being pictured by the verse about days and seasons.
