In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.

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.

These are fully worked answers (mostly) to a selection of the drills in Appendix A; they are marked there by a down arrow. Those without answers here can be used in class exercises or tests.

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’.

This chapter examines bipartite systems, focusing on residual uncertainty and the role of conditional entropy.

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.

Although the text avoids (deliberately) the necessity of understanding logic, even only propositional logic, given here is material for explaining in more detail the role it plays and how it works. Again, the aim is to provide instant access for readers who want to dig a bit deeper: they do not have to seek a further text at this point; they can rather just look here in the book they already have. Again an example program is used to help with that. Also important is the intimate connection between program idioms and the idioms of logic, so often now mentioned: how Booleans in programs correspond to sets, how local variables in programs correspond to bound variables in logic etc.

This chapter summarises what Part II has introduced, showing by example how there are systematic rules that maintain correctness of a data encapsulation as it is transformed from one form to another. The key principle –and method– is that by encapsulating the data and presenting it in a simple form, the correctness of any surrounding program can be checked in those simple terms.

This chapter examines the three foundational strands that shaped early Christianity and, in turn, western thought: Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman culture. It begins with Judaism, emphasizing its monotheism, prophetic self-criticism, and teleological view of history – features that deeply influenced Christian theology. The Book of Isaiah is central, offering themes of justice, suffering, and messianic hope later interpreted as prefiguring Christ. The chapter then turns to Hellenistic philosophy – especially, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism – which informed Christian ideas about the soul, virtue, and the good life. These schools stressed moral discipline and the pursuit of wisdom, values that Christianity absorbed and reinterpreted theologically. The Roman contribution centered on imperial power, civic virtue, and especially the Latin language, which became Christianity’s primary medium in the West. Roman thinkers like Cicero and Virgil helped transmit Greek ideas, emphasizing duty, eloquence, and destiny. These strands – Jewish, Greek, and Roman – were not seamlessly integrated, but their dynamic interaction laid the groundwork for a western intellectual tradition rooted in moral inquiry, historical depth, and a universalizing spiritual vision.

A large shared-variable concurrency case study is presented here: “Garbage collection on the fly”. It is a perfect target for concurrent reasoning, and has been attacked many times in many different versions by many prominent researchers. This chapter takes one of those (Dijkstra, Lamport et al. and later Ben-Ari and van der Snepscheut) and develops it step-by-step and in relentless detail using the techniques explained throughout the text up to this point: assertions, loop invariants, the Owicki–Gries method, auxiliary variables, specifications “refined later to code”, elimination of multiple assignments etc. Conspicuously it does not use await statements, because efficiency is also a prime concern: including await statements would make the algorithm potentially too slow. This case study brings everything together.

This chapter addresses the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in shaping social behavior, reviewing both human and animal studies. The chapter critiques the early optimism around oxytocin’s ability to foster trust and emotional understanding, providing evidence from failed replication studies and highlighting the effects of sex, context, and brain region-specific interactions. It also assesses clinical research on oxytocin as a potential treatment for autism spectrum disorder, pointing out the limitations of current approaches and the complexity of translating animal research into human applications.