Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis [Hardcover]

Robert Graves (Author), Raphael Patai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1964

This exhaustive exploration of the Hebrew myths and the book of Genesis resulted from a remarkable collaboration between one scholar raised as a strict Protestant and one raised as a strict Jew. It goes beyond Christian biblical and Judaic myth and incorporates midrashes, folk tales, apocryphal texts, and other obscure sources to extend and complete the stories. An intriguing view of the suppressed and censored pre-biblical accounts is the result, along with a rich sense of a culture consisting of oral and literary traditions, where the spiritual is deeply rooted in landscape and history.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'There is eloquence, wit and a formal shapeliness in abundance from first to last.' - Michael Glover, Financial Times. 'While poetry schools came and went, Graves went on writing until his death in 1985, in an elegant, classically inspired style.' - Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday. No one else offers his precise combination of eroticism, nightmare and epigram.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Robert Graves was the author of I, Claudius, The White Goddess, and Greek Myths. He was a poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic. Raphael Patai was an anthropologist, Jewish folklorist, and biblical scholar. He was the author of Man and the Temple and Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd; First edition (December 1964)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0304921483
• ISBN-13: 978-0304921485
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,984,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT GRAVES (1895-1985) was an English poet, translator, and novelist, one of the leading English men of letters in the twentieth century. He fought in World War I and won international acclaim in 1929 with the publication of his memoir of the First World War, Good-bye to All That. After the war, he was granted a classical scholarship at Oxford and subsequently went to Egypt as the first professor of English at the University of Cairo. He is most noted for his series of novels about the Roman emperor Claudius and his works on mythology, such as The White Goddess.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Where did the Bible come from?, November 8, 2000

By 

Isaac Rabinovitch (Portland, Or) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hebrew Myths (Hardcover)

The religiously correct belief is that Genesis was inspired by, even dictated by, the supreme being. But if you're interested in the Bible as part of our cultural heritage, you end up asking some very secular questions. These stories must have had some kind of existence before they were incorporated into the Judeo-Christian canon. Where did they come from?

Barring some extreme archeological breakthrough, the original sources for the Genesis myths are lost forever. But the authors make quite a serious attempt to reconstruct them from surviving literature, especially the Talmud. Robert Graves was particularly well qualified to attempt this, given his unorthodox take on mythology and his poetic approach to literary interpolation. By the same token, anything Graves did in this area is bound to be controversial -- is it literature, or scholarship?

In fact, it's both, and neither. Ultimately, it's another Gravesian attempt to give us a glimpse into a part of our history that's obscured by the very religious and literary monuments we most revere. Possibly not historically accurate, this is material that needs to be read, least we lose all sense of where we came from.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Genesis' pre-biblical origins, November 19, 2005

By 

Walter R. Mattfeld - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (Hardcover)

The authors do not reverently approach Genesis as a God-inspired Holy Text. From a "Secular Humanist" or Anthropological point of view, they attempt to identify Genesis' _pre-biblical_ origins in motifs identified with earlier myths of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians. This line of reasoning understands that the Hebrews at some later point in time transformed and reinterpreted earlier Mesopotamian concepts about Man's origins and his relationship with God from myths and literature (one case being the Epic of Gilgamesh). In addition to this investigation of pre-biblical myths (or pre-biblical literature), the authors also investigate later Jewish and Christian traditions, folklore, commentary on Genesis' themes.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graves on Genesis, June 20, 2006

By 

David Adams (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (Paperback)

Basically, Robert Graves does for the 61 stories he finds in the Book of Genesis what he did for The Greek Myths. This time he employs the aid of an eminent Jewish anthropologist and Biblical scholar, Raphael Patai (not Pata). It appears that this is a little difficult to find right now in 2006, but the search is worth the effort.