Portfolio diversification is the most fundamental concept of risk management. The allocation of financial resources in stocks, bonds, riskless, assets, oil and other assets determine the expected return and risk of a portfolio. Taking account of covariances and expected returns, investors can create a diversified portfolio that maximizes expected return for a given level of risk. An important mission of financial institutions is to provide portfolio-diversification services.

Statistics and mathematics underlie the theories of finance. Probability Theory and various distribution types are important to understanding finance. Risk management, for instance, depends on tools such as variance, standard deviation, correlation, and regression analysis. Financial analysis methods such as present values and valuing streams of payments are fundamental to understanding the time value of money and have been in practice for centuries.

In this lecture, two final books of the Bible are examined and their attitudes towards foreign nations compared. In contrast to Daniel’s reliance on divine intervention to punish the wicked, the book of Esther focuses on human initiative in defeating the enemies of Israel. Finally, the book of Jonah–in which the wicked Assyrians repent and are spared divine punishment–expresses the view that God is compassionate and concerned with all creation. Professor Hayes concludes the course with remarks regarding the dynamic and complex messages presented in the Hebrew Bible.

This lecture continues the discussion of the psalms, and the genres and forms in which they appear, such as psalms of praise and thanksgiving, divine kingship, lament and petition, blessing and cursing, or wisdom. Another poetic book of the Bible is the Song of Songs, an erotic work the sexually explicit content of which has been piously reinterpreted over the centuries. The second half of the lecture turns to the period of the Restoration when the Judean exiles returned to what was now the province of Yehud under Cyrus, the Persian ruler.

This lecture begins with the Book of Lamentations, a short book of dirges that laments the destruction of Jerusalem and moves on to introduce the third and final section of the Hebrew Bible - the Ketuvim, or “Writings.” This section of the Bible contains three books that exemplify the ancient Near Eastern literary genre of “Wisdom” – Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. Proverbs reinforces the Deuteronomistic idea of divine retributive justice according to which the good prosper and the evil are punished. The conventional assumption of a moral world order is attacked in the Book of Job.