The well-watered and fertile arc of land where early civilizations developed and prospered; it extends upward from the Nile valley in the west, through Palestine and Syria, and down the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to the Persian Gulf. See Introduction.
(sometimes called the Five Megillot) A sub-group of books within the Writings section of the Hebrew Bible consisting of the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther; each book or scroll is associated with a festival occasion in the life of Israel. See Part 3, Chapter 16.
The watery inundation during the time of Noah that destroyed all life on earth, except for Noah and the representative sample of created things that survived in the ark (Genesis 6-9). See Chapter 1.
(also called form critique) The analysis of literary units to discover the typical formal structures and patterns behind the present text in an attempt to recover the original sociological setting or "setting in life" (German Sitz im Leben) of that form of literature. See Part 2, Chapter 14.
(sometimes called synthetic parallelism) The type of poetic parallelism where the second line of a poetic couplet completes the thought of the first line.
The technical name for the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings-possibly because it was assumed that prophets had written them. See Part 2 Introduction, Part 2 Former Prophets.