This is Olam

This עלם - is olam

One of the unique things about language is its dependence upon its own beneficiary’s view of the world – not only to the immediately observable physical world in which they exist, but to the beneficiary’s greater concepts of time, space, and events in which their world’s journey is ultimately conceptualized. Language verbal systems (tense and aspect) are most sensitive to, and often directly reflect, the beneficiary’s concepts of time, space, and events. In fact, lingustical studies of current modern languages often speak in terms of “deictic center”, “event time”, and “reference time” in models developed for academic application.

Specifically for English, nearly the entirety of its verbal system can be explained as a function of tense and aspect relative to our current abstract view of linear and geometrical time, space, and event, according to many if not most of these models. And to a greater extent, extrapolation of these models to the English ancestral verbal systems – e.g., Latin, Indo-European, and Greek, such models are quite sufficient in establishing tense and aspect which are clearly defined; just as in English. The primary reason for this is that our English ancestral languages held very similar views of time, space, and events; that is – in the abstract sense. Without going into too much boring detail, suffice to say that our current modern views of time, space, and events are abstract based (that is to say, we presume space to be the primary dimension, and so time is described in terms of an abstract special phenomenon), allowing for metaphors such as “time line” and “point in time” as related to geometry - thus facilitating abstraction wherein time is now a construct independent upon its contents.

This primarily Greek way of conceptualizing time was quite alien to the ancient Hebrew way of thinking in regards to the world around them. Semitic languages are much older than Greek (based on the best information which we currently have in order to make such estimates), and the further back in time one goes, the further language departs from abstract views, and centers on the concrete. The Hebrew language of old, is very attached to the concrete – i.e., that which one can see, feel, hear, touch, or smell – the five basic human senses. In this sense, the phrase “concrete language” is often invoked. Hebrews did not say "I think, therefore I am," they said, "I am, therefore I think”. Nor did they see events stemming from cause, but rather cause, which stemmed from events.

To the concrete thinking Hebrew, there was no separation between an event, and the “time” in which it occurred – the distinguishing characteristic of the Hebrew verb forms is in fact the expression of continuity, rather than past, present, and future.

And to often, the above discussed linguistic models, which operate so well against the abstract based languages, fail miserably when extrapolated to the concrete languages. It possible to extrapolate from English to Greek, and even Latin, but quite difficult to do so to Hebrew. Case in point, because it concrete concept of time, space, and events, Hebrew verbs can refer to past, present, and future (tense) as well as events which are incomplete as well as complete. For all practical purposes, Hebrew lacks tense (a grammaticalized location in time) and aspect (in the English sense of the word) – yet aspectual qualities are indeed found. To further your confusion, the same words used to describe time, are also used to describe direction.

For example, the exact same Hebrew word, qedem, means both the ancient past, as well as the direction east – case in point, Genesis 3:24, “He drove out the man; and at the east [qedem] of the garden he placed the cherubim” as compared to say, Psalms 77:5, “I consider the days of old, I remember the years of long ago [qedem].”

And so we finally get to subject of this post – which is to consider one of my favorite Hebrew words – olam. Olam has a unique characteristic which so eloquently describes, in my opinion, how the Hebrew language works. While olam is most frequently translated into English as eternal, everlasting, or forever (abstract based concepts which were foreign to the Hebrew understanding of time, space, and event) – it means literally, a “distant time”, equally in the past, as well as the future. For example –


Psalms 77:5, “I consider the days of old [olam], I remember the years of long ago [qedem].” As compared to –

Genesis 9:12, “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you ad every living creature that is with you, for all future [olam] generations.”


The Hebrew word olam is most likely descendant from the Hebrew root alam (Laird Harris/Gleason Archer – TWOT, page 671-672) meaning specifically “to be hidden” and is most frequently used in the very literal sense of hiding to a place where one cannot be seen (one of the five senses in that details are not often clearly detected when looking off at the far distance – that to which is beyond the immediate horizon cannot be seen – or as relates to time, and olam, the distant past or distant future, like that which lies beyond the horizon, cannot be seen – hence, olams relationship to its parent root, alam. In this sense, the word if often conceptualize in the western, Greek based mind, as meaning a continual span of unending time. But the Hebrew did not see it that way, for as all nomads knew, as you walked towards the horizon, what was once hidden and unseen, becomes clearer, more focused, until you are upon it.

A common phrase in Hebrew is "l'olam-va'ed" and is sometimes translated as "forever and ever" but to the Hebrew it simply meant "to the distant horizon and again" - meaning "a very distant time and even further then" and is used to express the idea of a very ancient or future time.