In the latter Caird explored, among many other concerns, the rich variety of metaphor and imagery used by the biblical writers to convey their meanings.

The paradox is that throughout this highly emotional involvement, no biblical writer ever defines what the soul is.

The biblical writers may, however, have conflated some attributes and titles of the two, as seems to have occurred throughout the 1st millennium Levant.

But the biblical writers are interested in truth in some larger dimension.

The biblical writers can tell us what they think those events meant.

It is therefore a term that was used by people on the west side of the Jordan, including the biblical writers.

There is some ambiguity about the status of the Transjordan in the mind of the biblical writers.

Now the first question to consider is whether the biblical writers intended their words to be taken as history or as myth.

Source criticism is the attempt to discover and define the written material on which the different biblical writers drew.

Again, this would be a very important question for us today but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers.