★★★★★ 4
Excellent analysis, decent theorizing
Format: Kindle
While the analysis and argumentation presented in The Bible among the Myths is outstanding, the early chapters of the book suffer from a few problems. First - and this is mainly a complaint given my own preferences - the style of writing in chapters 1-4 differs noticeably from that of the rest of the book. While the introduction and chapters 5-10 reflect a learned, academic style, the first four chapters are written more casually, without quite the same rigor that characterizes most of Oswalt's writing. I am not entirely sure of the reason for this difference, and I wouldn't mention it if it were not for the second issue.
These same chapters reflect their writing style in their content, so much so that I nearly gave up on the book after the first three chapters. While I appreciate the author's need to provide background information, definitions, and an overarching theoretical framework, his methodology as laid out in the text is much less rigorous than I would prefer to see. The first few chapters are much less heavily annotated, with fewer scholarly references and a great number of offhanded summaries. He labels his approach to the definition of "myth" as phenomenological, that is, examining the common characteristics of a variety of myths in order to summarize what is essential about them. However, his listings of these common characteristics are vague and poorly related to actual bodies of mythology that survive to the present day. Examples, when cited, are drawn almost exclusively from the Greek and Egyptian traditions. For the understanding of Israelite culture as it relates to its neighbors, this is certainly a fair beginning; for the definition of myth, which is a worldwide phenomenon transcending culture and geography, it seems very far from adequate.
As someone who has a thorough knowledge of Christianity and Greco-Roman mythology and at least a nodding acquaintance with Egyptian, Norse/Germanic, and Celtic mythologies, I can at least begin to fill in some of the gaps in Oswalt's analysis. His generalizations, although sweeping, are not particularly problematic, but I am concerned that he embarks upon such a grand theoretical project without doing at least a little more specific analysis of various individual mythologies to demonstrate his points. More problematic in my opinion is that he groups all these various mythologies into a single worldview. Any number of scholars have tried to broaden the interpretations of myths to demonstrate that all cultures revert to the same basic narrative (The Golden Bough being the most famous example, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces being a more recent one); none of them has succeeded particularly well from a scholarly perspective.
Despite this early weakness, Oswalt's work undergoes a dramatic improvement starting in chapter 5. His basic point - that the essential view of reality in Israel is demonstrably opposed to the view held by any of its neighbors - can be made without resorting to the sweeping claims of the earlier chapters, and he does an excellent job of presenting and analyzing the evidence for his view. His terminology (of "continuity" and "transcendence"), while not quite adequate to present an overarching definition and theory of what constitutes a myth, is certainly well-suited to his specific analysis.
In particular, the analysis of the supposed parallels between the Enuma Elish and Genesis 1 is outstandingly done. After presenting a table with the usual outline of the Enuma Elish against the outline of Genesis 1, he simply proceeds to list the major plot events and how much time it takes to relate each one in the text itself. From this alone, it is readily apparent that the prevailing "outline" has intentionally been generated to encourage comparison to the Genesis account of creation. Such spurious efforts - minimizing the events of over 500 lines of poetry, while selecting 5 which bear questionable similarity to a verse in Genesis - are not honest scholarship, and kudos to Oswalt for pointing this out. I agree with a previous reviewer that it would have been helpful to append the text of the Enuma Elish in parallel with Genesis for readers to compare for themselves would have been a nice touch, but Oswalt's claims are not so elevated that they could not be disproven by direct appeal to the text.
One final note. A previous reviewer noted that many of the authors Oswalt discusses wrote between the 60's and 80's, and complained that this made the book seem "dated." I am a graduate student in classics, and can assure those who are concerned that in any field dealing with antiquity, "dated" sources are often some of the most important. Unlike quantum physics, which has less than a century of history, the classic writings of antiquity and the history of those eras has been studied for over two millennia. Meaningful research begins, in fact, with the scholars of Alexandria who worked around 300 BCE; often the work they have done is not duplicated anywhere else. In the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies and Biblical studies in particular, there is likewise a long history of scholarly and interpretive effort. Sources less than a hundred years old are not dated - in the grand scheme of things, they are actually quite recent. It is also worth noting that many of the very recent books, which the reviewer presumably has in mind, are written for a popular audience and would not be considered truly scholarly efforts. Some are written by scholars, but those specific books are unlikely to come up in a serious academic analysis of the subject. The views entertained by those books, however, are very clearly addressed in The Bible among the Myths - largely because the scholarly arguments they were based on are much older than most people assume. Just because Oswalt does not mention names of popular authors does not mean that his argument fails to cover all its bases.
All in all, the book is well written and persuasive. The earlier chapters might be found in any popular book on the subject, but the later chapters are more clearly of a scholarly bent, with corresponding vocabulary; readers who are looking for more of a lay approach to the issues may want to look for another author. However, the analysis of parallels between the Old Testament and the surviving Ancient Near Eastern literature is well-presented and balanced, and Oswalt's treatment of other scholars in the field seems to be fair. (I have not read any of their works myself, but Oswalt presents both strengths and weaknesses when considering whether an author's position is sufficiently explanatory and praises some aspects of works he disagrees with. He also is willing to point out when he agrees with some of the author's data, but draws a different conclusion. All of this strikes me as favorable.) The later chapters are thoroughly referenced in endnotes and draw from a variety of sources.
Chapters 1-4: 3.5 stars
Chapters 5-10: 5 stars
Overall: 4.5 stars
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Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2014
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