In Extra Help you will find some optional notes to help you with the final topics of ENTG. As we have reached the end of ENTG, we offer an extended passage from an early Christian text, completely unedited.

In Extra Help, you will meet different Greek verb ‘moods’. In the Extra Material we’ll examine the contexts for the aorist tense.

In the Extra Help, you will see how relative clauses are similar to the ‘branches’ we have met, and find some help with morphology. In the Extra Material you will meet other ways of expressing indirect speech and some patterns that help us to learn a lot of these ‘little words’.

The preface explains why I have chosen realism and reference as a framework for studying Jewish theology, and how this approach is related to the model of Jewish theological language I developed in my first book.

The significance of the Old Testament for human history and culture is undeniable. Whatever our personal convictions regarding its content, the Old Testament contains the origins of nearly everything we think about God. Variously labeled as the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak, the First Testament, and the Old Testament, among others, this library of texts from ancient Israel has been preserved for more than two thousand years.

Emerging from the polytheistic context of the ancient world, the enduring significance of the Old Testament is to be found in the concept of monotheism. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share in this unique religious legacy. We will discover in this chapter what lies behind the terminology we use when we speak of monotheism, and how the Old Testament perceives and develops the understanding of a singular God. Known to ancient Israel as Yahweh, Israel’s God came to be understood as Creator, source of all, and sovereign over all. Only in time would Israel come to believe that Yahweh was not only its God, and the God Israelites were called to worship, but the one and only God.

Because the consensus view is that rabbinic theology is not theoretical, it is necessary to show that the rabbis prized knowledge of God. Using a range of literary, rhetorical, and epistemological approaches, the chapter firmly establishes the place of theology in rabbinic Judaism.

At this point, the discussion turns to the calendar’s role in regulating the internal operations of the polity. The year was an essential administrative and legal unit. From the end of the fourth century, one can detect a persistent tendency to subordinate crucial operations to the calendar itself, which often had a shifting relationship to the solar cycle and the cycle of the seasons, and to construct cycles of years which were to operate with great regularity. The chapter examines in greatest detail the consular year, the census, and the saeculum or century. The same tension between ideal and practice can also be detected here. The third and early-second centuries represented the high point of this effort, although it would long remain an ideal.

After sorting out a half-dozen forms of the problem of evil , the chapter examines several particularly striking facets of Jewish discussions of evil, such as “protest literature,” “afflictions of love, ” and “antitheodicy” (according to which it is wrong in some way-- religious, moral, pragmatic-- to engage in theodicy).

leads us to realize that historians who look back from the present always do so, having responsibility for the future.

This chapter examines the subsequent fourteen suras by MVL. It studies Q 53 closely, finding evidence therein of a heightened confrontation in Mecca between Muhammad and the polytheists, and it traces prominent themes in the fourteen suras such as the imminence of the Hour and the exalted status of the Qur’an; it points also to indications at this stage of an increasing number of believers.