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.

Chapter 4 focuses on naturalia from Europe. The naming of natural objects from the so-called Old World presented early modern natural scientists with major challenges. While European scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century were primarily concerned with the identification of minerals, plants, and animals mentioned in ancient texts, knowledge soon increased dramatically through systematic observation of nature, requiring new forms of description, cataloguing, systematisation, and naming. The chapter charts this development with a focus on naming and highlights specific processes through three case studies: the controversy between Fuchs and Mattioli over the identification of ancient plant names, the incorporation of German mining terminology into Latin scholarly discourse, and the role of misunderstanding and chance in the formation of technical terms.

Chapter 2 presents the relevant linguistic terminology, provides an overview of different forms of names, and addresses the question of which languages the names were based on. Two principal kinds of neologism can be distinguished: form and sense. The former denotes the coinage of new words and the latter the process of giving existing words a new meaning. In practice, they were not as distinct as they appeared, since most new words were coined from well-known roots and according to long-established rules. Although the texts that form the corpus of the monograph were predominantly written in Latin, many names were also taken from Greek, some from Arabic and Hebrew, and others from vernacular languages. The last part of Chapter 2 discusses processes of naming using four examples: Technica, Musa, the names of the moons of Jupiter, and Atlas. The case studies have been arranged according to their ever-increasing contingency, beginning with a term that had been chosen on purpose and ending with a term that was never meant to assume its present connotation.

In this chapter, we will expand our prophetic coverage, exploring the books of Jeremiah, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, and the second portion of Isaiah. Lengthy books like Jeremiah and Ezekiel are considered “major,” whereas the shorter books, such as the single-chapter Obadiah, are deemed “minor prophets.” Some books include personal details about the prophet, whereas others like Nahum are virtually devoid of such information. However, all of these writing prophets articulated Yahweh’s messages in the seventh century bceand through the crises leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 bceand the ensuing exile.

We will note how the traumatic events of Israel’s changing world impacted the urgency, tone, and even theological emphases of the prophets. For example, Second Isaiah contains one of the most explicit Old Testament statements of monotheism. In Ezekiel, we will observe the first focus on the role of individual responsibility for sin, along with an especially personal tone by means of the first-person voice. Finally, we will encounter the concept of the “Day of the Lord,” which represents Israel’s move toward eschatology.

Contracts awarded to brewers suggest the existence of local beer monopolies. However, the beer industry was a very decentralised sector, involving many brewers, as well as full- and part-time sellers supplying local markets. Such local networks were difficult for the state to penetrate, hence the use of local intermediaries who were themselves active in the industry. The fiscal contracts concerned the administration of state revenues derived from the village beer industry. Their most significant component was the farming of a craft and sales tax. In addition, contractors were involved with the distribution of state-supplied barley. A comparison with bakers shows that these artisans were not supplied with wheat, which could be profitably exported. The motivation for the sale of state barley was thus the conversion of revenue in kind into cash. Royal breweries existed, but their significance is unclear, and private individuals and temples owned breweries as well. Temples were, moreover, frequently the lessors of contracts, underscoring their role in the Ptolemaic economy and fiscal system. Missing variables complicate the assessment of the impact of the institutions on economic performance.

Chapter 6 explores what is arguably the most peculiar ‘world’ – that revealed by the microscope. The technical challenges and the fleeting nature of microscopic observations hindered the systematic study and naming of this hidden realm, leading to the use of rather vague or metaphorical terms, often diminutives. The first two case studies consolidate and extend findings gained in other contexts. The naming of the microscope itself illustrates that terms for technical innovations could be subject to processes similar to those of natural objects. Meanwhile, spermatozoa were long conceptualised and named as a type of animal. It was not until the nineteenth century that their true nature as a type of cell became widely accepted, yet the terminology persists, continuing to imply an animal-like nature. The third case examines how an assumed analogy between plant seeds and animal embryos led Malpighi to an erroneous description of plant seeds.

In this chapter, I argue that the first book of the Parts of Animals (PA) expresses a form of realism about animal species. While the claim that Aristotle was a realist about species may seem obvious to those coming to the PA from the Metaphysics, the current view among specialists is that Aristotle’s zoology was not working with a concept of species. Some have even gone so far as to avoid translating eidos as “species” throughout his zoological writings. In contrast to this, I argue: first, that indivisible species constitute the ousiai of Aristotle’s zoology; and, second, that the aim of Aristotelian zoological division is to identify and organize the features specified in the definition of those species. The latter (epistemological) claim is explicit in the discussion of division in PA I 2–3, while the former (ontological) claim is advanced in PA I 4.