Biblical, and to some extent rabbinic, Hebrew requires six words to connote ‘time’: et, pa’am, mo’ed, olam, ketz, zman.1 This follows from the varied conceptions of time that Jewish thought makes use of and which are not always compatible with each other. But in the rejection of time as inexorable fate and in the acceptance of time as a human construct, susceptible in the human interest, to human manipulation and understanding, there is general agreement. This differentiates any Jewish conception of time from the idolater’ submission to fate, in what Bloch calls ‘the astral-mythic’ religions of paganism.2