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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'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 the
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 the
Hardcover
edition.
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4.1 out of 5 stars
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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Where did the Bible come from?
Nov 8 2000
By Isaac Rabinovitch
- Published on Amazon.com
Format: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.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Genesis' pre-biblical origins
Nov 19 2005
By Walter R. Mattfeld
- Published on Amazon.com
Format: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.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Graves on Genesis
Jun 20 2006
By David Adams
- Published on Amazon.com
Format: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.
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4.1 out of 5 stars
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