es, to the religious orientation of the earlier stages of development; still, these new, more sublime speculations were experiments with the limitations of the older speculations. Taking a modern metaphor, the philosophers played jazz riffs on the established melodies of the official religious views - with varying degrees of insight and subsequent influence.
It is within such a context that one must understand that concepts of good and evil - and, indeed, humankind as a separate entity - have not been with us since the beginning of time, however much their persistence of presence in our contemporary world link us to the past. Speculation on those concepts is relatively recent, given the multi-millennial existence of mankind.
One of the earliest (Western) speculations on the nature of man as tied inextricably to the concepts of good and evil is found in the Book of Job. Scholars assign its original writing to sometime around the 5th Century B. C., with crucial additions (a forward and an epilogue) contributed in the centuries following. The myth of Job is far older than its writing into the Old Testament, however: its origins have been traced back to Egyptian texts of the 20th Century B. C. It is the 5th Century interpretation of Job's story - a man of moral strength and material substance reduced to abject misery - that demonstrates the speculative advances of Hebrew philosophy over the previous, concrete-reality based religious thought.
In the original myth, as in the central text of the Old Testament version, Job is rewarded by God with material success for his goodness; when those indications of divine bles
...