Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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* It is possible that the categorisation of the various Jewish holy books – what Jews today call the Tanakh and Christians the Old Testament – derived originally from the way that they were catalogued in the Library of Alexandria.

† At this stage, the Jewish collection of sacred writings was yet to correspond fully to what Jews today would recognise as the Tanakh. The phrase ta biblia ta hagia first appears in 1 Maccabees 12.9.

* The worship of Yahweh in the form of a bull is attested by 1 Kings 12.28 and Hosea 8.6. The description of Yahweh coming from Edom appears in the Song of Deborah – a hymn that most scholars identify as one of the oldest passages in the Bible.

* It is telling, perhaps, that the author of Chronicles, a history of Israel written in the fourth century BC, does not describe an Israelite conquest of Canaan. ‘Israel’s presence in and right to the land is presented as an unproblematic and established fact’ (Satlow, p. 93).

† Jericho, the walls of which supposedly came tumbling down before the trumpets of Joshua’s army, had in reality been lying abandoned for centuries before the supposed date of the Israelite army. Gibeon, which in the Book of Joshua supplies the Israelites with ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (9.21), was founded well after the Bronze Age.

* In Deuteronomy, Sinai is referred to as Horeb.