 Travesty though it therefore was for the most part, Holy Scripture, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies, had inherited some truths from pre-Mosaic wisdom. Bruno duly quoted from Scripture on many occasions—examples feature in the following sections—to support his metaphysical, cosmological and ethical ideas. The Book of Job was especially valuable in this respect. Job had lived in the Land of Uz and so recorded, not Jewish lore, but “profound mysteries of the Chaldeans” (BOL I.2, 390, 418), ones that, like the wisdom of the Egyptians, the Magi, Orphics and Pythagoreans, constituted a strand of “the ancient philosophy” (BOI I, 460). Chaldean wisdom, like that of the Egyptians, owed nothing of importance to the “Jewish Kabbala”, which had been composed by a people, the “excrement” of Egypt, who had never governed a land of their own (BOI II, 377). Whether these and other aspersions  (see also BOI II, 438, and  Section 7),  stereotypical by his day, represent prejudices discredited by objections voiced by other interlocutors or ones that he shared is a moot point. One way or the other they served to convey his conviction that what truths there were in scripture derived from a philosophical tradition that had originated in ancient Egypt.