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This chapter examines the evidence for writing, issue, and storage of documents, administrative and legal, in official bureaux: in particular the bureaux of the vizier, of the herald, and in ‘places of writing’. It discusses the role of seals and sealed documents, and examines the evidence for storage of documents and reference to old texts. It argues that such reference is typically a literary motif emphasizing high cultural values, but that reference to legal or administrative archives for purposes of business was largely impractical, in the absence of clear evidence for effective and deliberate archive storage aimed at such processes of reference to file. The importance of private archive, and of the control of official documents by the scribes who wrote them, is emphasized, as is the lack of evidence that would point to any form of public record archive. The deliberate destruction of writing represents a social rejection of hierarchical authority as well as the deliberate destruction of evidence of property rights.

Developments in feminist biblical study and the sociohistorical analysis of ancient Israel have paved the way for rediscovering Eve and her Israelite sisters. This interdisciplinary project clearly requires the integration of several kinds of materials: the Hebrew Bible and other ancient writings, archaeological information, and anthropological studies and interpretive strategies. Each kind of evidence poses difficulties, and this chapter considers their problems as well as their potential.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to provide the reader with a contextualized overview of texts that fit the qualifications of an apology, instead of operating from a master list of apologists and their works. The relatively loose definition applied to this literature makes it impossible to provide a comprehensive treatment of all such texts. While this book mentions a number of ancient writings that have been considered apologies, it also shows that they better fit the broader category of polemic that in varied ways address Christian-pagan conflicts, but are not responding to a particular threat. The remainder of the chapter discusses titles of apologies, premodern apologia, and pagans and paganism.