Christine Hayes continues Yale's Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) with a lecture on the Writings, the Bible's third major section. After going over requirements for the final paper, she introduces canonical criticism as a method for approaching this material and turns to the problem of dating these texts. She examines Ecclesiastes as a second sustained challenge to conventional religious optimism and piety, following Job. The lecture closes with an extended look at the Book of Psalms, covering its major genres, liturgical purposes, and formal poetic language, including how Hebrew poetry uses parallelism and imagery to structure meaning. Recorded in Fall 2006 as part of Yale's RLST 145 course, the lecture is organized into clear chapters moving from practical course matters into close textual analysis of biblical poetry.