TIME REFERENCE
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And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: Revelation 10:5, 6
One sees that the Hebrews of the Old Testament and even the Christians in the New did not think of “everlasting life” or “eternal life” as a timeless life with no beginning and no ending (except when referring to God, and Christ in the New). Those living in a more scientific age think of eternity with no beginning nor ending. (Symbolically, eternity is like a circle. A sphere is an even better symbol because it has an infinite number of circles cutting through each end of a diameter.)
In the ancient sense, eternity had a beginning, with mortality being a short experience at first and then eternity extending one age or aeon after another indefinitely. Symbolically, it is like a straight line starting at birth and extending through time with the line continuing to lengthen indefinitely. (To the modern mathematical or scientific mind such a line with a starting point actually has an end at the other end: the end is just changing or being stretched further in time.) The idea of just more aeons after more aeons helped the ancients in their imaginations of something lasting longer than what they could comprehend. (Sources: Harper’s Bible Dictionary, 174-175; The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 4: 644-645.)