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After considering why modern economists pay little attention to ancient thinkers, the chapter explores the views of Aristotle with particular attention to his views on the moral life. Aristotle’s view of happiness focuses on what is really good for people rather than what is desired at any given time. Morality for Aristotle was not religious. His views on social organization, exchange and pricing, money and interest, and all other economic matters focused on justice and true happiness. Hesiod’s portrayal of the common person is then contrasted with Aristotle’s idealized vision. The chapter also describes the contribution of the Hebrews and some of the biblical teaching on economic relationships as well as the Stoic philosophy that caught the attention of Adam Smith many centuries later. The vignette at the end of the chapter is titled “Aristotle and the Purpose of Life.”

An examination is made of the monotheistic theologies in the priestly work of Genesis 1, the wisdom of Proverbs 1–9, and the apocalyptic of Daniel 7. These are three monotheistic adaptations to the older model of the Israelite national god: respectively, a priestly model, the form of the figure of wisdom personified in female terms, and apocalyptic imagery, with its clear reminiscences of old monarchic theology. All three models involve old mythic material that spoke powerfully and was reused in new and varying circumstances. Mythic narratives and imagery were the chosen forms not only of educated classes such as the monarchy or priesthood; rather, these groups likely drew upon these materials precisely because they were well known among the educated and uneducated, rich and poor. After the treatment of these monotheistic presentations of the Israelite national deity, the author addresses the so-called demise of myth in Israel. Like the preceding chapters, this survey uses the Ugaritic mythological texts as a primary source.

There is substantial disagreement between scholars about what the proper focus for the study of ‘Hebrew Bible Ethics’ or ‘Old Testament Ethics’ should be. The subject of ethics in ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible is a difficult one to enter for a number of reasons. For example, there is considerable uncertainty about what we mean when we use an expression like ‘the ethics of the Hebrew Bible’. Are we interested in the beliefs of all or most ancient Israelites, the views of certain biblical authors, or indeed the ethical outlook of the whole Hebrew Bible? This chapter discusses ancient Israelite ethics in a social context, descriptive ethics and normative ethics, moral horizons and social groups, social stratification and moral worlds, and the social location of biblical literature.

This chapter considers the case of Yehezkel Kaufmann, often referred to as “the greatest and most influential Jewish biblical scholar of modern times.” He understood the Bible as a historical artifact produced in a particular setting of time and place. For him, the Bible was a text to be examined by means of the general principles and analytical tools of empirical investigation. Kaufmann has no doubt about discussing the history of the formation and transmission of biblical literature. The chapter presents two perspectives of reading Kaufmann's Toledot ha'emunah hayisre'elit (A History of the Israelite Faith). First, it is a classic that has shaped contemporary Jewish biblical scholarship; and second, it still has relevance for today's biblical and religious studies-especially for phenomenological analyses of biblical monotheism.

In this chapter, a detailed depiction is offered of the development of specific biblical figures and narratives in the Qur’an. Each figure reflects the Qur’anic reframing of the role of prophecy in general and the biblical figuration of prophecy and Prophets in specific. The depictions of these figures are set against the background of their evidence in the preceding Late Antique religious and literary traditions, including Alexander legends, Christian homilies, and the Jewish accounts of Josephus.

This chapter is concerned with the existence of secrets within the Torah during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It also focuses on the concepts of binah and derishah. These are two verbs that occur within biblical literature and have respective careers within the domain of Jewish esoterica.

This chapter illustrates examples of hospitality in biblical literature. In Paradise Lost, Milton reshapes the book of Genesis and describes how Satan perverts the principle of hospitality that later prompts Adam and Eve play host to Raphael, who came to warn them against Satan. The Old Testament features remarkable episodes of hospitality beginning with Abraham as host of the angels.

This chapter covers the phenomenon of piyut, which is one of the comprehensive designations of Jewish liturgical poetry and an archaeology of rabbinic tradition. The piyut's major classical and early post-classical creativity spans the fifth to eleventh centuries that originated in the Land of Israel and spread east and west. It mentions the work of Michel Foucault, ‘L'Archéologie du savoir’ and its methodological reflections on the complex relationships between the ‘things said’ in culture and the way their selection or re-combination organizes knowledge from a vast fund of data or the so-called cultural archive. The chapter uses Foucault's insights to clear some paths of approach to piyut. It also focuses on some of the ruptures and transformations of biblical and midrashic literature in the creation of liturgical epics in classical and early medieval piyut.

The fifth chapter of text analysis examines the main work of João Pinto Delgado, the Poema de la Reyna Ester, Lamentaciones del Propheta Ieremias e Historia de Rut, published in Rouen in 1627 and dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. In three subsections, this chapter analyzes the transformation of the three biblical stories of Esther, Ruth, and Jeremiah into poetic form. The tension inherent in these texts is described as the contrast between an “augmenting”, typological, Christian concept of history and a paradigmatic-serial, virtually recursive concept of history as it is common in the Jewish tradition with its still open messianism. Regardless of its relatively traditional character, Pinto Delgado’s text on an abstract level thus conceives a basic figure of modernity: the figure of competing interpretations of temporality.

This chapter describes the prerequisites of biblical literature. It first explains the difference between the general Israelite and Judahite scribal culture, on the one hand, and biblical tradition, on the other. Furthermore, the chapter assesses scribes, scribal schools, writing, and writing media. Finally, it provides an overview of relicts from the (pre-biblical or non-biblical) Israelite and Judahite scribal culture, both from inscriptions and—by analogy to the epigraphic material—from the biblical tradition itself. The examples presented here cover different dimensions of literature, such as economy and administration, judiciary, religious practice, magic and divination, temple and cult, royal chronicles and narratives, and—last but not least—wisdom.

This chapter focuses on the transition and transformation of the relicts of scribal culture in Israel and Judah into biblical literature and tradition. The terms “transition” and “transformation” signify the fundamental change and interpretative dynamics experienced by the sources of scribal culture in the process of their becoming specifically “biblical” literature. “Theologization” serves as a preliminary designation for this process of transition and transformation, which continued in an extensive, long-lasting process of interpretation and revision (Fortschreibung) of the biblical writings. This process did not begin simultaneously in all the various domains of tradition but developed quite differently in chronology and content alike. The chapter follows the main areas of biblical tradition and treats—in this order—the growth of the prophetic, narrative, legislative, psalmic, and sapiential literature.

This Conclusion presents some final thoughts. The Conclusion indicates that this book's detailed discussion on redaction criticism, historical and literary criticism, and other approaches hopes to have provided supplementary information for the interpretation presented here to complement scholarly criticism in the twentieth century.