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Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs)

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In The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel, Ronald Hendel attempts to draw parallels between some of the Ugaritic epic materials and stories in the Bible, ultimately trying to pin them both to an oral tradition shared by both early Israel and other Canaanite groups. This is notoriously slippery territory; although almost all agree that much of the biblical materials began in oral form, it is unclear exactly what that form was. Hendel does an admirable job of trying to provide a wide frame for this work, using the term multiformity to explain how oral traditions can be expanded, changed, reworked, and spread over a length of time and space. His use of multiformity has its merits and demerits. On the merit side, it provides a rough outline of how stories coalesce and become a kind of running motif both within and outside of a culture. On the downside, there is little evidence to support this term's strong leg work (a common problem in biblical scholarship). But overall, Hendel's work has more merits than downsides. This work is certainly a well-written overview of comparative Canaanite mythology.