Gesang der Jünglinge "complexes" structured statistically . The last category occurs in Stockhausen's electronic music for the first time in "Gesang der Jünglinge", and originates in the course of studies Stockhausen took between 1954 and 1956 with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. The text of "Gesang der Jünglinge" is from a Biblical story in The Book of Daniel where Nebuchadnezzar throws Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into a fiery furnace but miraculously they are unharmed and begin to sing praises to God. This text is presented in a carefully devised scale of seven degrees of comprehensibility, an idea which also came from
On the Reliability of the Old Testament the Old Testament. The book opens with an introductory chapter surveying the history with which it intends to deal, the continuous narrative in the Hebrew Bible from the Genesis creation narrative to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity in the early days of the Persian Empire in the 5th century BC. The author claims that this history was written at the same time as the events it describes in its various sections, and that this can be confirmed by comparing the Old Testament with non-Biblical sources, both written and archaeological. He clarifies by stating that