This seminar explores ancient Jewish memory-making and historiography through a doubled focus on [1] the shifting ideas about time and the normative past in Second Temple Jewish and late antique Jewish and Christian sources and [2] modern scholarly approaches to the periodization of ancient Judaism and the transition from Second Temple Judaism to post-70 Judaism and Christianity in particular. In the process, we consider the theorization of temporality, forgetting, and cultural memory within and beyond Religious Studies--and ask what test-cases from ancient Jewish sources might contribute to them.