Chapter 1 opens with a description of the different peoples of the Americas in 1492 and the earliest contacts with Europeans, and outlines the process of Spanish penetration and settlement. It then explores indigenous reactions to Europeans at first contact, and analyzes the roots of the apotheosis of Europeans in Spanish America, arguing that it is misleading to distinguish too sharply between religious and rational considerations, and indicating that native peoples did not bow before the strangers as gods. The chapter then shifts the focus to the intellectual framework employed by Europeans to situate native peoples within a European worldview (European Mythology of the Indies I). Europeans interpreted indigenous peoples according to their own mythological concepts, such as the myth of the Earthly Paradise, the myth of the Reconquest of Jerusalem, the myth of the Marvelous East, and the myths of the Classical Tradition. The chapter ends with a summary of Spanish expansion into the Pacific.

The similarities between the Timna tent sanctuary and the Israelite tent of meeting corroborate the Midianite ascendancy over the early Israelite religion related in the Bible. The Arabian origin of the volcanic theophany attached to YHWH in the Bible and the representation of the Garden of Eden (and the temple of YHWH) as an oasis both support this conclusion. These interactions demonstrate a desert influence on the two foremost singularities of the Israelite theology: (i) the idea of man–god closeness and even interdependency free of the metallurgical traditions and inspired by the oasis-shaped representation of Eden and (ii) the idea of YHWH intervening on earth by means of explosive and destructive events related to the volcanic activity in Northwestern Arabia.

Maimonides never wrote a commentary on the Hebrew Bible or on any part thereof. That literary choice is belied by the influential legacy of Maimonides’ biblical hermeneutics as developed in the Guide. For the Guide is a work that is declaredly about Scripture. This claim merits emphasis: The Guide is first and foremost an exegetical work. In the general introduction, Maimonides writes that the two primary purposes of the Guide are: first, to explain the meaning of certain terms that appear in the Bible; second, to explain the meaning of meshalim, or parables that appear in the Bible. However, in terms of form, the expected approach for an exegetical work, in light of Maimonides’ intellectual background, would have been to compose a commentary on all or part of the Bible. Jewish biblical commentary was a sophisticated art by Maimonides’ time, originating as far back as Saadia Gaon’s (882–942) commentary on the book of Job, which adapted the genre of formal commentary for Hebrew biblical texts. In such formal commentaries, which harken back to models of ancient Greek and medieval Arabic philosophical commentary, three features stand out. One, there is a clear division between text and commentary, between chunks of text (lemmata) and their interpretation, between author and commentator. Two, the commentator follows the order of the text as a structural principle for the commentary. Three, the commentary is the product of one interpreter and reflects an individual reading. Often the commentator adds a preface of some sort, whose structure and themes were guided by a number of conventions. Saadia’s commentary features all of these elements, including an extensive introduction. As far as Greek commentaries on the philosophical-scientific canon, it is a matter of some contention whether Maimonides was familiar with commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias. We do know that he was familiar with Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ aphorisms, in Arabic translation, since he himself authored a commentary on Galen’s commentary.