If you know very much about the story of the Bible, you've probably heard that Jesus offers eternal life. Sounds nice, but what does Jesus mean by eternal life?
Well, Jesus adopted this phrase from the Hebrew Scriptures. In English, it's translated "eternal life" or sometimes "everlasting life," but the phrase literally translated from Hebrew is "life unto the age." Life unto the age. What does that mean? Yeah, it's a dense phrase, and to understand it we need to first talk about what an age is in The Bible.
Let's do it. So the Hebrew word for age is "olam" and it refers to a period of time. What length of time?
Well, any length of time actually, and it can be in the past or in the future. What matters is that it's a period of time with some common attribute that remains constant.
So for example? So like the time of Abraham and his descendants all the way up to Moses.
The common attribute is it's the time of Moses' ancestors. And so Moses can say, remember the days of the age, the years of past generations and elders. Okay.
Or an age can be shorter and in the future, like Samuel who's going to spend his whole life serving in the temple. During his dedication, his mother Hannah calls this an age.
So an age is a period of time that has a unique and constant characteristic. Exactly.
And there could be all sorts of different ages depending on what you wanna focus on.
You got it. And so someone could live in two ages at the same time if those ages happen to overlap.
