 His approach towards Scripture followed suit. Patristic, medieval and Renaissance authors, including again Ficino, held that Hermes Trismegistus had lived at the same time as or shortly after Moses. This explained the many similarities between the Old Testament and Hermes’s writings. Bruno reversed the chronology. He was not the first Renaissance author to do so, but he was the first to draw out the implications. The daughter of the Pharaoh had taken Moses into her household as “her son” (Exodus 2:10, KJV), and he had become “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22, KJV; BOI II, 369). This “wisdom of the Egyptians” was the wisdom recorded in Hermes’s works. In other words, the Pentateuch, which conventionally was believed to have been composed by Moses, and hence Scripture as a whole were tributaries of Egyptian lore, rather than vice versa. Bruno made this point circumspectly, as well he might. Sometimes he disguised his interpretation by referring to Scripture as the “Kabbalah”. Such wisdom, he declared, as there was in the Kabbalah of the Jews “derived from the Egyptians, by whom Moses was educated” (BOI II, 362; 369). Read literally, this statement was uncontroversial. Though purportedly Mosaic in origin, the Kabbalah was not an authoritative repository of Christian doctrine. By “Kabbalah”, however, Bruno surreptitiously meant Jewish lore as recorded not only in the originally oral tradition of the Kabbalah, but also in the parallel written tradition, that is, the Pentateuch, and hence in the Old and New Testaments generally. The crucifixion was a “Kabbalistic tragedy” (BOI II, 263).