Here, in this vision of a world that had both a beginning and a history, linear and irreversible, lay an understanding of time in decisive contrast to that of most peoples in antiquity. To read Genesis was to know that it did not go round in endless cycles. Unsurprisingly, then, scholars of the Bible had repeatedly sought to map out a chronology that might reach back before humans. ‘We must not suppose,’ Luther had declared, ‘that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.’3 Increasingly, though, enthusiasts for what by the late eighteenth century had come to be termed
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