The multiplicity of the mentioning of time in the Bible, according to Paul Ricceur

At the end of the study about the answers of the poetics of narrative function to the problems with the ways of saying the time (in his three volumes Time and Narrative), Paul Ricceur treats the apories of the temporality. Among them, the correlation between "the time" (collective singular) and the diverse "ecstasies of time" (present, past, future) is not only the fruit of the narrative: it implies to appeal to the other literary devices which are found in the Scriptures and which each reveal a modality of temporality. It is necessary to add to the anteriority of narrative and law (in the Torah) the irruption of prophetic eschatology and the permanence of Wisdom and hymns. Through the intersection of these diverse temporal modalities, the intertextual plural paradigm called "biblical time" grows it would be necessary to add the apocalyptic time, what Ricceur doesn't study in detail. To this intertextual model of the (above all) Old Testament temporality corresponds a threefold identity of the addressed subject: stable with the landmarks of the Torah, shaken and re-assured with the prophets, singular and universal with the Wisdom writings. Through this un-exceeded plurality, the poetics of narrative paves the way for the mystery of time and the Bible gives the testament of human temporality in its relations to the divine eternity.