The Gifts of the Jews

The second volume of the Hinges of History series. Cahill’s claim is about time: that the surrounding religions of the ancient Near East understood existence as a cycle that repeated, and that the Hebrew scriptures introduced instead a line — a history going somewhere, with individuals who have particular callings inside it. He traces the consequences forward to the idea of a person with a destiny and to the expectation that the future can differ from the past.

This is a thesis book by a popular historian rather than a work of biblical scholarship, and the sweep of the argument is broader than the evidence any single specialist would claim.

Context: The curator’s framing for the adult band is civilizational inheritance, and this is the volume that supplies the Hebrew half of it — paired here with Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea on the Greek half.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Thomas Cahill — the author.
• Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea and Mysteries of the Middle Ages — the companion volumes on this list.
• Christianity — the tradition that carried the linear account of time forward.
• Progress — the modern descendant of that account, and the book’s real subject; time as a line rather than a wheel is the claim the whole book rests on.