This chapter examines the introduction of the calendar ca. 300, which it makes part of the broad reconfiguration of the civic order that took place around this time. The calendar’s structure was probably appropriated from Pythagorean circles in southern Italy. Many of its features were intended to regulate the comitium, one of the most significant places in the city, which was also reconfigured in these years to link it firmly and directly to the heavens. The cycle of market-days or nundinae is also an important element. The logic behind it remains largely unexamined, and it has usually been viewed as having no cultic significance. Instead, the nundinal cycle was linked to formal intercalary cycles of the kind that in the Greek world were often associated with speculation about ideal political orders and their relationships with the gods.

Having examined the nature of Old Testament poetry, we will now explore two books by way of example. Proverbs and Job are unique in that they are most often identified as portions of the Old Testament’s wisdom traditions. Wisdom was a highly valued and enduring concept well attested across the ancient Near East. Here you will learn a general definition of the concept and learn why scholars disagree on whether there existed a distinct literary category, “Wisdom literature,” in the ancient world. Certain literary materials from Egypt’s wisdom traditions represent primarily “standard wisdom,” characterized by proverbial sayings. These aphorisms embody predictable patterns born of everyday life experience and observation. From Mesopotamia, we have wisdom traditions that are generally more speculative and less optimistic, and willing to wrestle with the difficult question of theodicy.

The Old Testament book of Proverbs is a collection of standard expressions of wisdom, presented as an educational curriculum and commonly based on the principle of retribution theology. The book of Job is a literary masterpiece representative of speculative wisdom. Although it displays a critique of retribution theology, Job’s message honors the tension between a loving God, a righteous individual, and retributive justice. In Israel’s wisdom traditions we will observe in particular a distinctive moral and ethical dimension that results from Israel’s relationship to Yahweh.

This chapter will lay some historical groundwork in preparation for our consideration of Old Testament books included in the Primary History. As we attempt to reconstruct Israel’s history, we will discover several challenges. The first is how best to relate the historical accounts in the biblical texts with the evidence of modern archaeology. One example, excavation at the ancient settlement of Jericho (featured in the conquest narrative of Joshua), will demonstrate the difficulty of the endeavor and the need for a balanced interpretive approach.

A second challenge is that of Old Testament chronology, which must be relative since we lack evidence for fixed dates prior to the seventh century bce. Only as we move through the Old Testament to later events can we confirm dates of biblical accounts with parallels in ancient Near Eastern sources. Finally, we will consider what we can know of Israel’s history of religious ideas. Although biblical texts were written and preserved by members of the “official” religion, we can detect the vestiges of “local” and “family” religion from earlier sources used to compile the Old Testament.

In previous chapters, we focused on the structure and content of the books in the Pentateuch. Here, we will explore the religion of Moses that emerges from these materials. Specifically, we will observe the way in which divine revelation developed from direct communication with individuals such as Abraham and Moses to mediated revelation through a written Torah and the priesthood. We will explore the significant concepts of holiness, covenant, and practical monotheism, particularly as compared to the religion of the ancestral narratives (Genesis) and that of surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures.

It will be important that we consider the characteristics of Mosaic religion against the backdrop of the ancient Near East at a time when certain polytheistic cultures are known to have elevated a single deity above their other gods – known as a “theology of exaltation.” Furthermore, we will explore some possible influences and origins for the Yahwistic faith – the religion so foundational for the remaining Old Testament and whose roots belong to monotheistic religions down to the present.

This chapter foregrounds the case of disputation and debates about borrowing, theft, and intertextuality. Al-Jāḥiẓ succinctly argues that a certain appealing saying would suffer use and modification over time until no one could claim it, although everyone regards it as its new host’s property. Thus, when al-Āmidī, and later al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī, argue that theft applies only to unique inventions, the property of a specific person, disputation was to calm down, but not to disappear. The shift in discussion centered on invention and, by implication, away from ʿamūd al-shiʿr (the standardized poetry canon). While previous debates relate to Abū Tammām and his detractors’ critique of the presumed excessive stylistic contrivance found in badīʿ (inventiveness in meaning, figuration, and expression), the discursive tenth-century debates shift more toward al-Mutanabbī, as the strongest poet who was bound to gather his defenders and detractors, a two-camp situation, carefully studied by al-Qāḍī al-Jurjānī in his al-Wasāṭah, where he provides a concise terminology that is to feed generations of critics like Ibn Rashīq (d. 456/1064), whose short chapter on thievery undermines al-Ḥātimī’s significant, albeit convoluted, lexicon.

First and Second Samuel narrate Israel’s transition from a tribal confederation to a dynastic monarchy, beginning with the leadership of the prophet Samuel. Saul is anointed Israel’s first king, and although eventually rejected, his reign functions to define kingship under Yahweh, including submission to Torah and to the authority of Yahweh’s prophets. David becomes Israel’s second king and eventually the “ideal” for all kings in the Old Testament. We will also observe during David’s leadership an emerging understanding of Yahweh as “God of Israel.”

Since early Israel was a theocracy under Yahweh, we will explore the issues surrounding Israel’s need for and the legitimacy of a human king, the person and role of a suitable king, and finally, the importance of the prophet in assessing the king. Although Israel’s transition to statehood is somewhat difficult to reconstruct historically (ca. 1050–970 bce), we will examine evidence for similar transitions in other cultures. Archaeological evidence from Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer suggests the notion of a state and its correlating centralized administration.

With this chapter, we arrive at five final books in our Old Testament collection. They have been brought together in the Jewish canon as the “five scrolls,” related to each other by their use in the Jewish liturgical calendar.

Our survey will begin with the Song of Songs, a collection of Israel’s love poetry. We have numerous ancient parallels, but we will note in these the particular imagery drawn from everyday life in Syria–Palestine. Second, Ruth is an exquisite narrative about ordinary Israelites. Their uncommonness is on display in their exemplary characters and their genealogical connection to Israel’s beloved King David. A third book, Lamentations, is a collection of five poems presented in acrostic form. Recounting the tragedies incurred in Jerusalem’s destruction, the poetry nevertheless exhibits some of the Old Testament’s most glorious expressions of Yahweh’s mercy. Ecclesiastes, another unique poetry collection with ancient Near Eastern parallels, offers reflections on the human experience. Finally, we will examine Esther. God is never mentioned in the book of Esther, yet this story merited inclusion in the canon, and we will note its subtle but important contribution to Old Testament theology.

The chapter argues for a reading of Parts of Animals I.1, 639b11–640a9 as a continuous argument, divided into 3 main sections. Aristotle’s point in the first section is that teleological explanations should precede non-teleological explanations in the order of exposition. His reasoning is that the ends cited in teleological explanations are definitions, and definitions – which are not subject to further explanation – are appropriate starting points, insofar as they prevent explanations from going on ad infinitum. Aristotle proceeds in the following two sections to criticize certain non-teleological accounts offered by his predecessors on the grounds that they are explanatorily defective: those accounts – unlike teleological explanations – neither begin from appropriate starting points nor entail the phenomena that they purport to explain. Along the way, the chapter proposes an alternative way to understand what “hypothetical necessity” refers to, for Aristotle.

In this chapter we turn from the Primary and Chronistic Histories to the books that make up roughly the second half of the Old Testament. We will observe a dramatic shift in content from historical narrative to largely poetry. Furthermore, these books are much less linked editorially to one another. Rather, we will discover that superscriptions and content help us to group them literarily and, in most cases, to relate them chronologically to one another and to the Primary History.

Because of the preponderance of poetry, we will spend time in this chapter on the nature and characteristics of ancient Hebrew poetry. There are certain aspects that we do not know, such as original pronunciation or meter. However, we will readily observe one major feature – that of parallelism. This “symmetry of thought” is recognizable in three primary types: synonymous, antithetical, and synthesizing parallelisms. We will explore plenty of examples and discover along the way that ancient Hebrew poetry is rich in content and artistic skill.

Extra Help introduces you to the remaining two variations on the -ω verbs, and the -μι verbs. In the Extra Material you’ll meet the few contexts in which the future tense can be found.

In Extra Help you will see that we can save a lot of effort in understanding the middle and passive voices, because of the way that we have understood the Greek verb so far. In the Extra Material you’ll think further about the middle voice.

Chapter 3 discusses the designations for the classes of objects (i.e. animals, plants – including flora and fauna – and minerals), as well as for the respective disciplines. In the early modern period, historia naturalis/natural history was the name applied to the study of natural objects, later to be known as biology and geology/mineralogy. The names for these and other subdisciplines emerged in the early modern period but at different stages and sometimes with divergent intentions and meanings.

In Parts of Animals II.10, Aristotle introduces an approach to studying the nonuniform parts of animals: “to speak about the human kind first” (656a10). This chapter asks why Aristotle adopts this strategy and how he goes about implementing it. I argue that he selects it because he holds that human bodies offer particularly clear illustrations of some of his scientific concepts, including the relationship between parts and the ends they are for the sake of. As a result, he thinks that beginning with the causal explanations of human parts helps us to develop such explanations for the parts of other animals, especially when it is difficult to do so.

The Ptolemaic ’oil monopoly’ shows extensive control of local economic processes over at least a century and a half. The so-called Revenue Laws lay out strict state control of cultivation, production and distribution, which is confirmed by many other Greek and Demotic papyri. The entire harvest of oil crops had to be sold to the state, oil was produced exclusively in state workshops, and retail was subject to exclusive local concessions. Import restrictions and severe penalties were introduced to safeguard the revenues from this system, which were leased out to private contractors. Although it contributed to the monetisation of the countryside, the ‘oil monopoly’ was a rather inefficient form of organisation. The parallel bureaucracy of officials and contractors created red tape, the confiscation of capital eroded trust, oil crop cultivation proved unpopular, and the resulting shortages in concert with high fixed oil prices led to considerable black market activity, which further disrupted the official circuit. Evidence from the Late Period and the reign of Ptolemy I shows that the ‘oil monopoly’ was a creation of Ptolemy II, representing a remarkable experiment in fiscal policy.

The analogies Aristotle employs in Parts of Animals (PA) are indispensable to the scientific investigation he undertakes in that work. This is because many analogies in PA express relations strong enough to ground a unique variety of unity. What is analogical unity? What sort of relationship must an analogy capture to ground such a unity? What role does analogy play in the scientific study of animals and their parts? I first contrast analogical unity with two different varieties of unity: formal unity and generic unity. I then examine the analogies in PA to discern which of the proportional relationships they express yield analogical unities. The most promising interpretations of these passages risk analogical unity’s collapse into one of the other varieties of unity Aristotle accepts. I argue that Aristotle employs the same concept of analogy in PA and in the Metaphysics and that this consonance allows us to preserve analogical unity’s unique explanatory role.