Rolling Rivers, Turning Planets

Time, like an every rolling stream, bears all its sons away. Healing all wounds and wounding all heels, it buries heroes in oblivion and restores the forgotten to their rightful honor. The ancients noted this process and called truth the daughter of time. Should the fancy strike you on a rainy afternoon, you may open the pages of a history book to watch historians chase time’s daughter through the ages. We all bring different equipment on this venture—some carry a guidebook (perhaps the Holy Bible, perhaps the Communist Manifesto, perhaps Virginia Woolf), some march with a patriotic flag upon a stick, some lug a heavy case of scientific instruments with which to quantify humanity. For better or for worse, none of us can look through time without using the spectacles of our presuppositions. One may be surprised by the vehemence with which we assert contrary conclusions from the same evidence, but that is only because our lenses are so very different.
It is such a human impulse to chronicle one’s deeds for the benefit of posterity, and just as human to look to one’s fathers for tales that give identity. Yet the chroniclers and truth-seekers of mankind have not looked at time in the same way. The Greeks, believers in fate, watched a series of epicycles in which mankind repeated itself with the predictability of orbiting planets. Their great Thucydides wrote history in order to foretell the future.
Israel received history from their God, a creator who was not limited to the generation being addressed but who called himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Hebrews stood on a straight path and looked down the line of time to the fulfillment of Yaweh’s purpose. Unlike in the Greek cycle of evolving gods, the Israelite beliefs showed exactly when time had begun. Unlike the Greeks, Hebrews had no need to dread time’s passing and to strive desperately, Achilles-like, for the immortality of an undying name. They trusted that eternity stood outside of time.
Monumental forever, Athens and Jerusalem guided the chroniclers for many years. Then came the Enlightenment and another definition of the world’s aging. Mankind was seen in a great procession of progress from primitive to intermediate to glorious. Each decade of time struck fetters away, crushing ignorance and superstition, until at last freedom from the old faiths (of Jerusalem and even of Athens) led to the liberty of a new utopia. With the irony of a god’s sense of humor, it took only the passing of yet more years to disillusion mankind with its own progress. You will find many historians of today who have returned to either Greek or Hebrew view. Others have lost themselves so thoroughly in the mists of changing eras that they prefer vague confusion and refuse to make the choice. Yet the hill of time, higher than Olympus, still offers a fascinating view. You may stand on the hill, searching for truth, and hope to follow the pointing hand of time’s daughter. (Anna I. Beck)