Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel | Date: 28 April 2011, 04:31
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Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel
By Frank Moore Cross
* Publisher: Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages: 394
* Publication Date: 1997-09-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674091760
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674091764
Product Description:
Directed toward a synthesis of the history of the religion of Israel, the essays in this volume address key aspects of Israelite religious development. Frank Moore Cross traces the continuities between early Israelite religion and the Caananite culture from which it emerged, explores the tension between the mythic and the historical in Israel's religious expression, and examines the reemergence of Caananite mythic material in the apocalypticism of early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Summary: Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic
Rating: 4
I bought this book because I am totally ignorant about the history of this area. I found it very interesting, but am not adequate to the task of reviewing the information. I learned a lot and also skimmed through a lot that I had no clue about. It is easy for a beginner to get bogged down, but worth the attempt.
Summary: resource rich substance poor
Rating: 2
This book is overburdened with pointers to other works which may not be familiar to the reader. It is also very poor on drawing conclusions from the bewildering amount of insubstantial information that it contains. Lets face it, if language describing Yahweh is virtually the same as that describing Baal we should be able to draw a reasonably clear conclusion that the writers share a very similar religious culture. Way too cautious for my liking although obviously very well researched.
Summary: Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel
Rating: 5
Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel
This is one of the most influential, informative, scholarly works - one of the most important on the subject of Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic and has a prominent place in my personal library.
The Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel are absolutely fantastic - an awesome read - Frank Moore Cross does an absolutely fabulous job with detailed footnotes and a thorough treatment of this all important topic - the ancient council of the gods, the names of deity, their meaning and their influence on the Canaanites and Hebrew people - and on the formation of religion as we know it today, both Jewish and Christian.
A top notch book and one I will highly recommend to all who want to understand GOD more and HIS influence as portrayed through his epitaphs.
Summary: Difficult but indispensable
Rating: 5
This book treads roughly the same ground as Mark S. Smith's The Early History of God and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. It is a tour de force of historical reconstruction from biblical sources. It deals with many of the thorny problems of the disparate historical books of the Bible (Chronicles and Joshua-2Kings). It includes the crucial paper on the dual redaction of the Deuteronomic History (Deuteronomy and Joshua-2 Kings). That paper alone is worth the purchase of the book, because it has been so influential over the years. Furthermore, he shreds the fashionable Jebusite hypothesis regarding the origins of Zadok, David's high priest, although his own theory has holes as well.
In order to fully appreciate this book you will need a solid grounding in Biblical Hebrew grammar, ancient Near Eastern history and mythology, and Biblical literature. Some of his discussions get extremely technical regarding paleography, epigraphy, and West Semitic grammar.
Summary: Still groundbreaking, although some reconstructions pf the premonarchic cultus are questionable
Rating: 4
As it was written in the 70s, Canaanite Myth is a little behind the times- it assumes, for example, that monolatry was present in Israel from the premonarchic period, and that later prophetic polemics and reforms were directed against "syncretism." We now know that this is probably not the case, and that most of the gods condemned as "foreign" by the prophets and Deuteronomists- Asherah, Astarte, Baal, and the Heavenly Host- were simply pan-Levantine gods that Israel had inherited from its Canaanite ancestors. It is Cross's work that has, in large part, prepared us to deal with this however. Cross's book meticulously examines a wide variety of biblical and extrabiblical texts, early and late, and observes many continuities between Israelite and Canaanite beliefs and modes of worship; poetics, theophanic language, and so on are largely identical between the two cultures, the only real difference being that Israel's public religion was overwhelmingly focused on a single deity (but not, as Cross assumes, completely excluding others, at least until the late monarchy). Cross's reconstruction of the Judean monarchic cultus is based on a lot of evidence both biblical and comparative; the chapters on the development of apocalyptic language are where the analysis really shines. When he extends this reconstruction into the premonarchic period, however, it becomes problematic. His assumption that the Israelite league was a solid and largely unified politco-religious unit, rather than a loose, shifting coalition of tribes as even the Bible itself suggests (the list of tribes in the Song of Deborah includes ten tribes, not twelve, two of which are demoted to the status of sub-tribal "clans" in later lists) largely distorts his analysis. Nonetheless, the book is still a must-read for those interested in understanding the biblical world.
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