Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past
Eviatar Zerubavel (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
A sociologist of knowledge maps the structure of memory-making, connecting the individual and collective. Zerubavel sketches out major cognitive patterns commonly used to organize the past and string events into meaningful narratives, while also considering the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history.

The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality
David Couzens Hoy (MIT Press, 2009)
A philosopher offers an accessible introduction to various approaches to time in post-Kantian continental philosophy, sketching a genealogy of the concept of temporality and theorizing the past, present, and future—including grapplings with history from G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin.

Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History
Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
This wide-ranging collection of seventeen essays showcases examples of how power is constituted through the shaping of time and temporal regimes, spanning history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science in global perspective.

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire
Paul J. Kosmin (Harvard University Press, 2018)
In a stunning erudite, and creative work of ancient history Kosmin here posits the Seleucid Empire’s innovation of a linear conception of time and explores the ramifications of this imperial innovation and indigenous reactions to it, including those of ancient Jews.

Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature
Stefan Beyerle and Matthew Goff, eds. (De Gruyter, 2022)
This collection of articles from specialists in Biblical Studies and Second Temple Judaism explores the theme of time across an array of “apocrypha” and “pseudepigrapha,” considering varied temporalities expressed within ancient Jewish apocalypses, wisdom literature, and historiography.

Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ
L. Ann Jervis (Baker Academic, 2023)
Taking seriously the theological implications of time, this book proposes a new reading of Paul on the temporal implications of Jesus’ messianism and his followers’ union with Christ. In Jervis’ reading of Paul, living Christ’s time is an experience of nonsequential tenses that transforms experiences of suffering, sin, and death.

Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective
Andrew B. McGowan (Baker Academic 2014)
Those who wish to unravel the ancient origins of Christian festivals and worship practices are faced with a bewildering complexity of ancient sources. This book offers a lucid yet precise survey of the roots of Christian ritual practices in their earliest recoverable settings, including in relation to their Jewish and “pagan” precedents and counterparts.

Time and Difference in Ancient Judaism
Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Princeton University Press, 2020)
Shedding new light on the central role that time played in the construction of Jewish identity, subjectivity, and theology, this book explores the rhythms of time that animated Rabbinic cultures of Late Antiquity, revealing how these Jewish sages conceptualized time as a way of constructing difference between themselves and imperial Rome, Jews and Christians, men and women, and human and divine.

Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative
Lynn Kaye (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Leading the reader through fascinating close readings of key passages from the Babylonian Talmud, this book examines how rabbis of Late Antiquity thought about time through their legal reasoning and storytelling. Kaye compares Rabbinic temporal ideas with related concepts in ancient and modern philosophical texts, cautioning against the retrojection of modern assumption on these premodern sources.

The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely
Elizabeth Grosz (Duke University Press, 2004)
This philosophical exploration uses the theme of temporality to revisit the thought of Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri-Louis Bergson and reassess them as resources for modernity and the present, across politics and biology.

Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction
Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye, eds. (De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2023)
Time can feel natural, stable, and singular. This collection of essays compiles multidisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations that transform our understanding of time, reminding us of its culturally dependent, historically contingent, socially constructed features as well.

Reimagining Apocalypticism: Apocalyptic Literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Writings
Lorenzo DiTommaso and Matthew Goff, eds. (SBL, 2023)
Apocalypticism has been the feature of ancient time that has most baffled modern scholars. This collection draws upon the Dead Sea Scrolls to reassess apocalyptic literature, apocalyptic expectations of the End-Times, and their place within ancient Judaism.

The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise
Mark Currie (Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
This book is an innovative intervention in narratology and a striking general argument about the cultural significance of surprise. Developed by a range of new readings in philosophy and theory, and focusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, it argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience.

Perceptions of Jewish History
Amos Funkenstein (University of California Press, 1993)
What are the dynamics of Jewish history? In this classic work of historiography, one of the 20th century’s foremost Jewish historians explores this question across ancient, medieval, and modern examples. Important interventions include concepts of “historical consciousness” and “counter-history.”

Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History? On Jews and Judaism before and after the Destruction of the Second Temple
Daniel R. Schwartz and Zeev Weis, eds. (Brill, 2012)
Both popular and scholarly approaches to Judaism take for granted that the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple 70 CE catalyzed major religious changes that shaped Judaism as we now know it. Judaism, before and after 70 CE, has been traditionally studied by different scholars with different questions. This volume collaboratively revisits the significance of 70 CE from perspectives of liturgy, law, literature, magic, art, and institutions.