Customer Reviews

Asimov's Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament

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I have been reading Dr. A's work for decades. I sincerely mourned his passing, and with that passing a mind that could have grasped some of the archaeological research bearing on the Bible in the last 25 years. But I hope he would also have taken advantage of other Bible related studies which blossomed in that same period.

The issue being that Dr. A's book is outdated and he's not here to fix it. In 1995 Ebla's archives were discovered. In 1992 Axel Olrik's seminal Principles of Oral Narrative Research was published in English for the first time. A little before that Ronald Whybray published Making of the Pentateuch. And the field of Oral Traditions study made great strides in those 25 years.

Since 1976, archaeology has new perspectives on some of the assertions in this book. Two of the Cities of the Plain have been identified in Ebla's archives, and their possible site has been located through satellite imagery and a dig shows they were destroyed before 2300 BCE. Archaeologists have determined that camels were domesticated about 2700 BCE instead of the date used to show that Avraham was invented during the monarchic period. Digs show that Pi-Tum had at best ambiguous signs of habitation during the reign of Ramses II, whom most people probably identify with the pharaoh of the Exodus. Pi-Tum was its name at the time of the Babylonian Captivity; it was inhabited during Hyksos times as was Avaris, later renamed for Ramses and now known as Tell El-Daba. Pi-Tum's modern name is Tell el-Maskhuta which corresponds amazingly to the Hebrew name given in the Bible: Sukkot.

These finds help up-end the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP), a cornerstone of this book. It claims the Cities were invented and that most if not all of Judaism originated relatively late, such as right before or during the Babylonian Captivity.

As with archaeology, I have gone on and studied a number of fields including Sapir-Whorf Theory (linguistics) and oral traditions (particularly the translation of Axel Olrik's work). It wouldn't be enough for Dr. A to just update the archaeological information.

Work in oral traditions by Havelock, Ong, and Olrik provide a way to analyze the Jewish Bible that explains the presence of duplications and the so-called contradictions, and shows that the DH consists of special pleading and fails the test of Occam's Razor.

Sapir-Whorf Theory, which underlies the structure of every dictionary entry, conflicts with two of the five "pillars" of DH.

What DH considers composites cannot be deconstructed without either violating the grammar of Hebrew (Sapir-Whorf) or producing an incoherent plot (Olrik).

Further, Olrik shows that you don't invent a city called Sukkot associated with a seminal cultural event (the Exodus) at the same time as you invent the culture. Only much later do you have to explain its location to audiences by giving the modern name of the location, Pi-Tum. This indicates that since Sukkot seems to have had no substantial permanent inhabitants during the time of Ramses II, likely the Exodus predates him.

And finally Whybray shows that the problems DH has with archaeology and unreasonable assertions dates right back to Julius Wellhausen. His work even helped me identify downright fallacies (presentism, historian's fallacy, Texas Sharpshooter fallacy to name a few) in the DH.

I bought a copy of Dr. A's book as soon as I could afford it after getting my first job. It's still on my bookshelf. But now it's a signpost showing how far we've come since 1976, not a resource useful to what I have written since 2002 on the subject. Dr. A, I wish you were here!

I bought this book on a lark: Isaac Asimov the science fiction writer? A secular history of the bible? Riiight...

Actually, Asimov was a very accomplished scientist, philosopher, and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His 2 volume book set on the Bible is, as he makes it clear from the start, NOT a criticism of the Bible nor is it new work. It is a scholarly exploration, chapter by chapter of the most up to date (at the time) understanding of the history of the Ancient Middle East and how that relates to the English language version(s) of the Bible.
Exquisite detail is used to identify, explain, and cross-reverence the empires, nations, battles, names, etc, necessary to make sense of these complex histories/stories. He swiftly sums up, without judging, several confusing differences in spelling and dynasty orders that clog up part of the OT. Dozens of maps help to make locations and relationships between nations much more clear. Even when he points out that a story cannot be historical, he does so with straightforward explanations and direct references to previous parts of the volume itself where they were discussed. Where appropriate he also compares different translations, book/chapter titles, and canon versions.

Personally, I found his exploration of the "apocrypha" most enlightening. He does not waste time on why something was included or not included by goes directly to whether it has anything to teach us about history or the societies that wrote it an criticized it.

Asimov did some great research to explain the history and cultural meaning of the Bible. He cites his sources. Enjoyable and educatonal reading. I highly recommend this and his Guide to the New Testament.