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This introductory chapter assesses the way in which religious missionaries have been dealt with—and often ignored—in the historiography of modern French colonialism. Missionaries defy many of the categories commonly used to study the history of empires. Religious workers complicate concepts like modernity, nationalism, and even empire since they regularly portrayed themselves as inheritors of a biblical tradition of evangelizing across national and imperial borders for the greater glory of God. The myriad struggles created by missionary work in the age of secular empires only became accentuated with the rise of anticolonialism and national independence movements in the wake of the Second World War.

This chapter provides a sketch of the literary history of the Hebrew Bible with the narrative tradition in Genesis–Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah as the most conducive guideline for both relative and absolute chronologies. The outline therefore combines and synthesizes Parts A (history) and B (tradition), thus structured according to the most distinctive caesura and significant epochs in the history of Israel and Judah. The chapter begins with the distinction between historical and biblical Israel and further relates the history of the biblical tradition and its changing picture of “Israel” with the course of Israelite and Judahite history in the era of the two kingdoms, after the end of Israel (722 BCE) and of Judah (597/587 BCE), and in the era of the two provinces, concluding with an extensive view of the para-biblical tradition in the Hellenistic–Roman period.

This is a book about wisdom. It is an inquiry into the beginnings of a particular way of thinking about life in the world. Seen in terms of wisdom, the world is not a meaningless array of disconnected things but something that is experienced as an ordered reality. This holistic way of understanding life in the world characterized pursuits of wisdom in a two-sided classical and biblical tradition that exercised a profound influence on Western culture. This book examines the development of that tradition in a wide range of texts from Homer to Plato and in the writings of early Jewish and Christian authors.

This chapter investigates how biblical traditions emerged partly as responses to imperial domination and ideology. It refers to a dialectic of opposition and rejection and imitation or mimesis in the Book of Isaiah or Deuteronomy. It also covers ancient authors who elaborated fantasies of Israel's universal rule over the nations at the end of days, which run from the writings of the prophets through apocalyptic texts and late Talmudic accounts. The chapter looks at some cases of mimesis that are in fact examples of mimicry, implying derision or subversion of the dominant model, instances of acculturation, unintended reproduction of the dominant power's norms. A recurring feature of Israelite, Judean, or Jewish attitudes toward empires is their complexity as they cannot be reduced to a dichotomous, oppositional discourse.

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 chapter discusses the treatment of medical matters in the Biblical and Talmudic tradition. It talks about the way in which the holy books, as well as the midrashic, ethical, and kabbalistic literature based on them, influenced curative practices in Jewish society. Among the many customs of Jewish society, there are many examples of instrumental treatment of books. The Bible and Talmud created a system of laws regulating all aspects of a Jew's life, and contained many detailed pronouncements on health-related issues, including physical cleanliness, procedures designed to help maintain physical health, and the correct diet. So many and such varied matters were regulated in various places scattered throughout the extensive treatises and chapters that it seemed impossible to know them all fully. Assistance was at hand in the form of the halakhic codes but the rabbinic authorities of Ashkenaz discouraged study of halakhic matters from sources other than those written in Hebrew as they did not trust translations. The wealth of Bible-related resources grew larger the further one departed from a literal interpretation of words and quotations. The Bible constituted a boundless reservoir of quotes which might be used in conjurations against illnesses or on amulets. These were seen not only as guidance for action, but also as integral elements of sorcery.

Classical and biblical tradition, with its distinctive pursuits of wisdom, is today culturally contested and intellectually marginal. It no longer serves as the basis for educational programs, as it once did; it is out of step with modern philosophies and forms of life in which distinctive fields of human concern—sacred obligation, scientific understanding, social order, and personal morality—are programmatically held apart from one another. As classical and biblical literacy fades, it is nevertheless possible to discern the spectral presence of traditional wisdom in modern culture and to see new bids for wisdom, not as a simple rejection of the tradition but rather as a sign of its enduring relevance.

Religion plays a major role in the history of Israel and Judah, as in any culture of the ancient Near East. Chapter IV provides an overview of the development of Yahwistic religion in Israel and Judah from its beginnings in the land to the changes it underwent in the post-exilic period. It shows there was no unilinear development of religious history for Israel and Judah. Rather, a certain (common) form of Israelite and Judahite religion remained more or less constant, whereas the biblical tradition emerged in the late eighth and seventh century BCE and flourished over the following centuries within or rather alongside the common religious practice, creating a new form of religion in the process. Exactly when (and how) the biblical tradition and the Jewish religion based on it began to gain wider acceptance and become the normative, common practice of the Judahite (Israelite) religion remains an open question.

This chapter looks at Paul of Tarsus and how he played a major role in the coming together of biblical tradition and Greek philosophy. While he may not be so dramatic a figure as either Socrates or Jesus, Paul did play a major role in what can be called the birth of the Western mind, shaping events and being shaped by them. There was a predominated question in the mind of those Jews in and around Jerusalem at that time, and this involved the question of meaning. A Judaizing account of Jesus would place him in the tradition of the major Prophets, while for Hellenizing Jews, Jesus became intelligible through the lens of Greek philosophy. In a sense, both the Judaizing and Hellenizing Jews sought out a context of meaning in order to grasp and understand what had happened to Jesus. As a result, Paul attempted to effect in his own mind a synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem.

Acts 1: 23–26 describes the selection of Matthias to replace Judas; use of an allotment to select a priest had Jewish, apostolic precedents. Commentators reference Biblical authorities and precedents for a divinely affirmed allotment. The appointment of Christian bishops in the third century CE, however, shows a popular election procedure. This chapter first considers the Christian turn away from allotment to select priests and examines allotment from the Republican into the imperial period, including Roman contexts in the first–fourth centuries CE; second, it summarizes what Christians said about allotment and particularly Matthias’s appointment by lot in the early centuries CE when Christians developed the office of the bishop and there was little evidence for the actual appointment of bishops. How Christian thinkers wrote about allotment and its use in appointing bishops allows us to track Christian appropriation or translation of ancient, classical religious practice.

Humans have increasingly endowed themselves with transformative powers, guided by a vision that is secular, progressive, and redemptive. In contrast to this utopian vision, this chapter looks further back, offering a narrative history of Western culture, from its Greco-Roman roots, through the biblical traditions, to modern and contemporary times. Throughout this history, the author thematically queries the place and value of suffering in human existence. In these more long-lived cultural traditions, suffering has given rise to pity, sorrow, lament, supplication, and pleasure; it has occasioned judgment, punishment, and war; and it has shown itself as a source of forgiveness and the grounds for mercy. Acknowledging the power of the post-Enlightenment quest to reduce suffering through medical, scientific, and technological means, the author repeatedly declares suffering’s power to affirm, value, and consecrate personal and communal life.