Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 125tendency of earlier Protestant scriptural scholarship to treat
first-century Judaism in the Near East as bizarrely isolated
from the larger Graeco- Roman culture in which it had long
been immersed. After three centuries of Hellenization, the lin-
gua franca of the entire region was koine Greek. Still, neverthe-
less, we can say with considerable confidence that, when he ad-
dressed the multitudes, who were principally the peasantry of
Galilee and Judaea, Jesus would certainly have done so in the
region's indigenous "vulgar" tongue, Aramaic. And so, if one
assumes that the teachings recorded in the gospels are indeed
faithful transpositions of the Semitic terms he used into their
recognized Greek equivalents, then one must ask precisely
which of the former lurk behind the latter in the texts of the
New Testament. Here, happily, the Septuagint provides some-
thing of a guide. In its pages, the words aion and aionios corre-
spond to various forms and uses of the Hebrew 'olam ( or alma
in Aramaic), which can mean an "age," or "epoch," or a time
hidden in the far past or far future, or a "world" or "dispensa-
tion," or even occasionally perhaps "forever," but which can
also mean simply any extended period with a natural term, and
not necessarily a particularly long period at that. In Deuter-
onomy 15:17, for example, where the Hebrew text uses 'olam to
indicate the lifespan of a slave, the Greek uses aion. And, to be
honest, there really was no ancient Hebrew term that naturally
carried the meaning of "eternity" in a precise sense, under-
stood either as interminable temporal duration or as atem-
poral changelessness. Rather, Hebrew texts used a number of
idiomatic phrases- metaphorical, hyperbolical, periphras-
tic- by which to convey an impression of extraordinary dura-
tion, sometimes so extraordinary as to suggest virtual endless-
ness. Some of these idioms are visible just below the surface of
certain repeated Greek usages in both the Septuagint and the