In his 1947 article, “Das judäische Königsritual,” Gerhard von Rad argued that the Judean enthronement ritual was heavily dependent on the corresponding Egyptian ritual. He argued persuasively that the of Ps 2:7, the of 2 Kgs 11:12, and the of Ps 89:40 were all simply different designations of the same reality, the Judean counterpart of the Egyptian nḫb.t, the royal protocol that the deity writes and presents to the new king along with the crown at the time of the latter's coronation. The Egyptian protocol contained the five names of the new pharaoh's titulary and the legitimation of his rule by the deity's acknowledgment of the king as the deity's child. Von Rad argued that both of these elements also appeared in the Judean ritual. Ps 2:7 quotes from the protocol marking Yahweh's legitimation of the new Davidic king as God's son, while Isa 9:5 reflects the king's divine sonship as well as his five-fold royal titulary.

In Minucius Felix's Octavius, the pagan Caecilius offers an intriguing critique of the Christian God. Having pilloried Christian faith as trust in a “solitary, forlorn God, whom no free nation, no kingdom, no superstition known to Rome has knowledge of,” he goes on to mock him as a voyeur:

[W]hat monstrous absurdities these Christians invent about this God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see! That he searches diligently into the ways and deeds of all people, yea even their words and hidden thoughts, hurrying to and fro, everywhere present at once; they make him out to be a troublesome, restless being, who has a hand in everything that is done, is shamelessly curious, interlopes at every turn, and can neither attend to particulars because he is distracted with the whole, nor to the whole because he is engaged with particulars.

One relates to existential reality through the lenses that one's culture supplies. The culture of each society, in turn, includes the way it relates to time and, as a result, to history. Time as a physical quantity would appear to be a neutral concept, but its measurement is arbitrary. Time is certainly not neutral in any culture. It assumes various qualities, depending on the symbolic meaning that persons attribute to it. One therefore finds different approaches to history or to the writing of history in different cultures. The Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic eras and the Romans in the ancient world attempted to write history for its own sake and to satisfy intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians wrote chronographies, but not history in the western sense. Ancient Israel lies between these: one finds historiography in the Bible, but not history for its own sake. The Bible presents a view of divine providence in history, with God's essence being visible through historical deeds. Great importance thus attaches to remembrance through various rituals, in prayers and in celebrations on the Shabbat, festive days, and mourning and fast days. These do not, however, require those remembering to be historians. On the contrary, a society that molds its members in accordance with unequivocal memory patterns does not permit them to examine its history in a critical fashion; it constructs in them a collective memory, which transmits a single incontestable message.

The Sefer Miṣwot Gadol (The Great Book of the Commandments) of R. Moses b. Jacob of Coucy (mid-thirteenth century), is one of the central works of halakhic codification stemming from Franco-German (Ashkenazic) Jewry in the High Middle Ages. It has long had a reputation for being one of the classic compilations of the tosafist age, a period of efflorescence of talmudic scholarship which spanned the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its influence both as a legal source and schoolbook was wide-ranging, as the large number of extant manuscripts of the work, as well as the intensive work of annotation and commentary that it inspired, bear witness.

In the years since the uprisings of the late 1960s swept the cultures of Europe and America, the emergence of a radical critique of modernity and the heralding of a corresponding transition into postmodernity have increasingly occupied the minds of many cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, and historians alike. These three decades have witnessed the development of a wide array of differing cultural, social, and conceptual possibilities: the academy, for example, has seen the growth of gender studies and inquiries dedicated to previously marginalized communities, as well as the advancement of postmodern theories of culture, action, and knowledge among practitioners of philosophy, sociology, and theology, among others. The story is by now familiar, and while cataloging these changes itself would be an interesting endeavor, suffice it here to underscore that the interests, orientations, foci, and theoretical approaches of the academy have all changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century.