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Myth & Mystery: An Introduction to the Pagan Religions of the Biblical World
Jack Finegan
(grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989) 335 pp., $24.95.
This encyclopedic reference work on the pagan religions of the biblical world describes the religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, ancient Persia, Greece and Rome, as well as Gnosticism, Mandaeanism, and Manichaeanism. The latter three religions, dualistic and sectarian movements based on secret revelations associated with a variety of teachers, enlarge the scope of this book well beyond the biblical world. Relying on a wealth of biblical references, archaeological data, ancient myths and legends, and secondary literature embracing the full spectrum of scholarship, Finegan ranges widely over the fascinating terrain of religion in the ancient world.
Finegan’s greatest asset is his compendious knowledge covering more than 20 centuries. This knowledge is woven into a rich tapestry made up of a seemingly endless collection of citations from sacred literature, archaeological details, speculative observations and scholarly footnotes. Finegan has few peers as a wide-ranging historian of religion. He is a reliable and responsible scholar whose omnivorous appetite for details results in balanced and competent descriptions of the complex world of religious movements in the time of the Bible. Finegan has distilled this book from a lifetime of teaching and scholarship, and the results, insofar as this reviewer is competent to judge, appear to be generally accurate and up to date.
Several chapters are quite daunting for the nonspecialist—especially the long one on Zoroastrian religion—because they are packed with esoteric terminology, multisyllabic names and foreign language terms. At times the discussions of chronology, geography or specific details degenerate into tedious nitpicking of little consequence for the nonspecialist for whom this book is clearly intended. Only the most persevering reader will reach the end.
Finegan’s Myth & Mystery is like a sleek, polished antique automobile. This glittering array of facts, literary summaries and scholarly details is a useful, and in many ways admirable, example of vintage scholarship. Nevertheless, it is the product of an earlier era, when scholars collected and synthesized culturally and historically diverse data into background material for what was held to be more central, namely the Bible. For the most part Finegan avoids the pitfalls of this “biblical background” style of scholarship. Unfortunately, this is not the case when he dismisses recent scholarship on the origins of Israelite culture with the cavalier remark, “These theories, however, require radical reinterpretation of the plain meaning of the biblical accounts” (p. 132, n. 33).
In short, this book will provide the persistent reader with a wealth of information and a rich bibliography. This alone makes it a worthwhile reference work. It would be even more valuable, however, if the index were more complete, if the illustrations and maps were not so meager and if the extraneous details and pedantic discussions had been pruned.
The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History
Baruch Halpern
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988) 285 pp., $22.95
Despite its ornate dress, this book has a simple thesis: The Deuteronomistic Historian, author of the history of Israel found in Joshua through 2 Kings, was a real historian in the modern sense (well, almost). He was an antiquarian who had spent, much time reading inscriptions on royal tombs, researching royal records in libraries, both domestic and foreign, traveling from site to site to inspect victory stelae and sanctuary texts, and sitting by evening fires listening to storytellers. He cared too much about the past to distort it. The Deuteronomistic Historian, in other words, was not simply a redactor, mechanically splicing preexisting fragments of tradition into an amateurish collage; rather he was a forerunner of Herodotus.
Halpern argues this thesis in two ways: detailed, occasionally dense, analysis of specific passages, and theoretical discussion. He carefully examines the Deuteronomistic Historian’s methods in the story of Ehud (Judges 3:12–30), where the primary source was oral “romance”; in the prose version of Israel’s defeat of the Canaanite forces led by Sisera (Judges 4), a case in which the biblical tradition—perhaps the historian himself—preserves the source, namely the Song of Deborah in Judges 5; in the opening of the Book of Judges (1:1–3:6), introducing separate, earlier narratives of the “major” and “minor” Judges; in the account of Solomon’s reign 009(1 Kings 1–11), where the primary sources are archival; and in the traditions of Saul’s becoming king (1 Samuel 8–12), in which disparate sources are combined with a concern for logic and order. These analyses are learned, insightful and often brilliant, and they will repay careful reading. As one example among many, Halpern’s discussion of the Davidic covenant is especially convincing: what is conditional is the rule over all Israel, what is unconditional is the survival of the dynasty in Jerusalem.
In his more theoretical chapters, Halpern has read widely and well. He takes on previous scholars (Wellhausen, Noth, Cross, Richter and many others), subjecting their analyses to critical scrutiny. As he proceeds, Halpern develops his own, complex shorthand: thus, on page 187, we are told that “the text [1 Samuel 12] may stem from H(M+/M-) (equals H[Dtr]hex?).” Frequent reference to the list of abbreviations will be necessary for readers. Halpern’s goal is ambitious, ultimately to propose a new, or at least a renewed, historiography. But while his critique of others is often telling, I find his theoretical construction weak. It is anecdotal rather than systematic: There are repeated allusions to, and quotations from, both ancient and modern historians, from Thucydides to Collingwood, but these in the end do not amount to a cogent theory of historical writing. Did “the Israelite idea of history” really discourage “coherent political analysis” (p. 230)? The same weakness is evident in the more implicit literary theory underlying the discussion. Is a lyric necessarily incoherent (see p. 76)? Precisely how is the Ehud episode different from the stories of Joseph or Jonah or Ruth?
Halpern’s wit is quick, his wordplay pervasive. The chapter titles are especially clever, perhaps overly so: “A Mythed Metaphor: Miracle in Israelite Historiography,” for example, is the heading for chapter 10. With that as a pattern, apparent typographical errors give pause: Did Halpern really mean to write “Solomon sews the seeds of schism” (p. 144) or “Solomon… flunked the text of the conditional covenant” (p. 170)? These lapses remind us of the fallibility of historiographers as well as of historians, a factor Halpern recognizes. The Deuteronomistic Historian was not immune to such slips.
The title First Historians is misleading, and Halpern knows better. His Deuteronomistic Historian was not “first,” since the techniques he uses are found in more ancient works (see pp. 195, 199–200, 213, 215, 270–271); so with some certainty we can say that it was not Halpern who supplied the title: Some editors can be less than inspired!
All in all, this is a provocative, important book that persuasively demonstrates its main point. Ancient Israelite historians were no less logical, no less sophisticated and no less creative than are we.