In this chapter, we will explore Israel’s book of worship – Psalms. These “songs,” collected over hundreds of years, nevertheless convey timeless expressions of Israel’s faith. This Old Testament collection has been organized into five books, and many of the individual psalms have titles, musical notations, or historical details.

Scholarship in the discipline of form criticism has furthered our understanding of how the original materials (sources behind the present texts) may have functioned in Israel’s life situations (German, Sitz im Leben). In general, we can identify larger categories of praise and lament, and of individual and corporate psalms. Specific forms include hymns, communal and individual laments, thanksgiving songs, and royal psalms. Thus, for example, the form of lament corresponds to a crisis situation; a royal psalm form is situated in events surrounding the king. These forms, preserved and presented as the collected psalms, represent an overview of Israel’s religious worldview. We will not necessarily observe statements of strict monotheism, but we will hear Israel “sing” of Yahweh, who alone is worthy of praise.

The nundinal and intercalary cycles were probably intended to operate with great regularity, and scholars often assume that they did so. Ancient calendars, however, were often managed calendars, and officials often intervened in their operations for a variety of purposes. There is virtually no evidence for the nundinal cycle, but the pontiffs, who were in charge of the calendar, intercalated with some irregularity. One can also find traces of criticism of pontifical practice, which was often conducted in terms of speculation about ideal political orders and the gods. In this way, it reveals a long-term tension between ideals and the actual conduct of public and cultic activity.

This chapter examines the essential links between antiquarianism, the writing of histories, and jurisprudence, for all were concerned in varying degrees with clarifying the essential nature of institutions and with ordering the rules associated with them. Roman writers produced a history of the calendar which they tied to other crucial institutions and to the lunar and solar cycles. Close examination reveals that they knew only of the calendar that governed the republic’s last centuries and that they wrote of its links to celestial phenomena through the lens of Caesar’s reform and the resulting Julian calendar. In this way, core features of the structure of the republican calendar, such as its intercalary and nundinal cycles, remain unaddressed.

First and Second Kings continue the stories of monarchic rule. Textual sources from the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires aid us considerably in the historical reconstruction of these centuries, but we will quickly observe that a religious agenda is central. First, the narrative accounts are connected by a recurring literary formula that evaluates each king – not primarily on political and military achievements but on the basis of that king’s faithfulness to Yahweh. Insertions of the so-called Elijah and Elisha cycles further demonstrate a concern to emphasize prophetic authority, which demands exclusive loyalty to Yahweh.

Second, content bears out the overriding religious motivation. For example, Solomon is associated with the great wisdom tradition in Israel. Nevertheless, for these biblical authors success is measured by obedience to Yahweh, and Solomon’s devotion to Yahweh is compromised because of his many wives and religious unfaithfulness. His downfall is also Israel’s – the United Monarchy is divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Religious unfaithfulness, exhibited by most of the kings, accounts for the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in 722 bceand of Jerusalem (Judah) to the Babylonians in 586 bce.

In Rome, as elsewhere in the ancient world, formal timekeeping practices were deeply embedded in views about the proper relationship between political orders, the surrounding world, and the powers that governed them. Ancient polities were cultic communities, and central practices within them were aimed at securing the favor of gods who were linked in various ways to events in the visible world. Rites were the chief instruments for securing this favor, but they rested on rules, either written or oral, that were intended to ensure their proper performance. At a more fundamental level, however, were ideas and assumptions, some more coherent and explicit than others, about the ways that the world worked. Here, it was widely assumed that polities should function in some form of alignment with rhythms that were revealed in the heavens.

We have already encountered prophets in the historical books. We will look now at four of the Old Testament’s writing prophets: Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah. Eighth-century Israel witnessed increased accessibility to writing and an expanded role for the prophet. The recurrent phrase, “Thus says Yahweh” (messenger formula), epitomizes the primary role of the prophet as a messenger speaking on behalf of God.

Sources from Mari in the eighteenth century bceand others from seventh-century Assyria verify the antiquity of divination practices, of which prophecy is a type. Israel demonstrated opposition to certain divination practices, but its prophets consistently delivered messages from Yahweh, distinguished by their ethical and moral vision. Of the three basic types of Old Testament prophetic speech, prophecies are the most common and represent messages to an individual or corporate entity. Utterances are the confessions or prayers of the prophet to God, and narratives offer historical details corresponding to the prophet. Two important features will become evident as we explore the content of these books: covenant loyalty to Yahweh and the international extent of Yahweh’s authority.

The day was the most important legal unit, for it was linked most directly to actions. Surviving sources make the relationship between days and action appear much more straightforward than it actually was. Roman jurisprudence assigned days to clear classes which might then be associated with permissible or impermissible activities. But classes sometimes overlapped with others, producing situations when particular days possessed different assemblages of norms. Unique events affected the significance of particular dates, a practice close to calendrical divination. Concern for the accumulation of norms on particular dates also affected record-keeping. Inscriptions and literary sources from at least as early as the beginning of the second century reveal a practice of placing events on definite months and days, but exhibit no concern for identifying years.

In addition to the Old Testament’s Primary History, we have a Chronistic History comprised of 1–2 Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah. The two histories contain some of the same materials. We will see that the Chronistic History, however, includes events of the postexilic community down to the late fifth century bce. With the Persian Empire as the background, we will note also a different perspective, characterized by different themes, stylistic devices, portions written in Aramaic, and particular emphases on the Davidic dynasty and Israel’s religious practices associated with Jerusalem.

Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah are sequenced differently in various canons, indicating independent collections, but we will see that they are linked literarily by the edict of King Cyrus. This historical event marked the return of Israelite exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem, now part of the Persian province Yehud, and the subsequent restoration and rebuilding of a community. Indeed, these books are significant in the Old Testament for the way in which they confirm the postexilic community as the legitimate successor of preexilic Israel.

In this chapter we will move into the heart of the Pentateuch and explore narrative highlights from the books of Exodus and Numbers. The story begins in Egypt, where God’s people are enslaved. Yahweh reveals himself through a burning bush to Moses and instructs him to confront the pharaoh. Ten plagues challenge the Egyptian pantheon, but they also reveal the unique nature of Yahweh. He delivers his people and leads them into the desert wilderness, en route to the promised land. The journey is punctuated by episodes of Israelite rebellion, Yahweh’s responses, and tabernacle plans, but most importantly, by another covenant – Yahweh’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai.

We will observe that archaeology does not provide answers to many historical questions we might have regarding this ancient people and their wilderness sojourn, but it has brought to light Near Eastern political treaties remarkably similar to those of Israel. In striking contrast, no other nation perceived of its deity as a treaty partner. Yahweh, the all-sufficient covenant-making God, demanded a loyalty and exclusivity that marked the radically new idea of Israel’s monolatrous henotheism, and ultimately its concept of monotheism.

This chapter focuses on the Julian reform and its place under Augustus. Scholars sometimes take Caesar’s shift to a solar year to be obvious, and they often view his new calendar as marking a complete break with its predecessor. Instead, his reform should be viewed as a proclamation of his extraordinary position in the polity, and in it, he took great care to maintain the significance of the old calendar’s dates. Augustus gave the calendar an important role in his new order, for he used it as the basis of his efforts to make the political and religious order. Scholars sometimes view his efforts as an attempt to assert a monarchical vision of the polity or of some larger, more universal order. Instead, his use of the calendar reveals considerable continuity with the republican past.

The project’s focus is on the calendar of republican Rome and the Julian reform, and its chief concern is its cultic and juristic significance. Cult rested most directly on rites, but it also involved law, which identified who might legitimately perform certain acts and where and when they might do so, and ideas about how the world worked, which might be implicit and poorly defined. The calendar’s days, months, and year were the crucial units, and all were tied in complicated ways both to the heavens and the activities of Rome’s priests and magistrates. In the ancient world, polities often sought to establish a homology with the heavens, ruled by the gods, and here calendars were crucial instruments. Studies of the Roman calendar often obscure these relationships, and studies of cult often devalue the importance of law.

In this chapter, our attention will shift from narratives to the law materials present in the Pentateuch. These portions include the Book of the Covenant, tabernacle instructions, purification laws, holiness legislation, and a collection of priestly laws. The laws of Torah, better understood as instruction, represent the central feature of living in covenant relationship with Yahweh. Most notable are the Ten Commandments, whose value has remained virtually unsurpassed in the human history of ethics. These “Ten Words” (Hebrew), combined with Israel’s narrative story and covenant with Yahweh, set the trajectory for the rest of the Bible.

The form in which the independent lists of laws were originally preserved in ancient Israel closely parallels that of other known law codes in the ancient Near East. Israel’s Torah instruction also exhibits certain affinities with later Greek developments, particularly in its expansion and placement within the narrative framework. Importantly, the emphasis on the writing of the covenant law marks a turn from preliterate ancestral religion to a literate Mosaic faith, and helps ensure the preservation of a sacred text for all time.

This chapter surveys the structure of the republican calendar and the ways that it was tied to actions. It also seeks to establish its relationship with various celestial phenomena, which has often been contested; this link will prove to be highly abstract, which was sometimes the case with other ancient calendars. The lack of an obvious tie between the calendar and the heavens has also obscured the degree to which Roman practice sought to link public and cultic activities to a range of abstract models of the celestial order, each of which was attached to a different priestly college.