A remote or unbounded stretch of TIME — 'forever', 'of old', 'the age'; in later Hebrew it drifts toward THE WORLD (the sense modern Hebrew keeps). ⚠ Ecclesiastes 3:11 is the crux: 'he has put ha-OLAM in their heart' is read as ETERNITY (ASV, TNM; NWT's 'time indefinite') or as THE WORLD (KJV, RV). And repointed, the same consonants give he'elem, from alam, TO CONCEAL — 'he has put hiddenness in their heart', which no version on the shelf prints and which alone makes the two halves of the verse agree, since it continues 'yet without man's ever finding out the work God has done'. Psalm 139:24 closes on derekh olam, and the same range applies: KJV 'the way EVERLASTING', NWT 'the way of time indefinite', TNM 'el camino de la eternidad' — but olam looks backwards as readily as forwards, so 'the ANCIENT way', the road that was always there, is equally defensible. ⭐ Deuteronomy 15:17 puts the word on a person: a slave who refuses his release has his ear put through against the door and becomes an eved olam. This translation keeps ‘forever’ there, as at Exodus 21:6, because that is the range the Hebrew has — and because settling it costs information. The older shelf agrees (KJV, ASV, Geneva ‘for ever’), the NWT 1984 hedges to ‘to time indefinite’, and the moderns decide it is a lifetime (NIV ‘servant for life’, NVI ‘de por vida’). ⚠ On Leviticus 25:40’s reckoning the jubilee would end it in any case, so even the strongest sense of olam here is bounded by another law. → first discussed at Ecclesiastes 3:11