The Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (Hardcover)

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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.

Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 600 pages
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd. (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 185754661X
• ISBN-13: 978-1857546613
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,222,263 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Isaac Rabinovitch (San Jose, CA) - 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.

6 of 6 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.

13 of 16 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)

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.