First published in 1998, The Bible Myth was acclaimed for its scholarship and insight. Examining the troubling questions of why ancient Israel has no archaeological or documentary presence prior to and just after the Exodus from Egypt, Greenberg asks who were the earliest Israelites, where did they come from and under what circumstances did they come to power in Canaan? Challenging conventional wisdom in this field, he posits a radical new model for the study of biblical Israel. Provocative, polemical and erudite, this is essential reading.

The truth behind the biblical stories of the Old Testament.

The facts your college professor doesn't want you to know . . . Record numbers of high school and college students are giving up on God and the Christian faith . . . unable to defend their faith against the onslaught of academic 'facts' from their instructors that 'prove' there is no evidence to support the historical accuracy of the Bible. This explosive book exposes the claims against the Bible as a gross distortion of the evidence. Dr. Tom Tribelhorn brings a lifetime of experience and intensive study in Israel to bring students and their parents face-to-face with the real facts. You'll be surprised to learn that some of the strongest advocates of the Bible's historical accuracy are not Christians - but agnostic scholars who allow the archaeological evidence to speak for itself. Tribelhorn contends that God never intended for faith to be 'blind' ... but to include logical reasoning and historical evidence as part of the equation. The compelling defense he presents here has the power to change your life - and, if you already have doubts, to salvage your faith.

Since the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Gilgamesh epic, we have known that the Bible imports narratives from outside of Israelite culture, refiguring them for its own audience. Only more recently, however, has come the realization that Greek culture is also a prominent source of biblical narratives. Greek Myth and the Bible argues that classical mythological literature and the biblical texts were composed in a dialogic relationship. Louden examines a variety of Greek myths from a range of sources, analyzing parallels between biblical episodes and Hesiod, Euripides, Argonautic myth, selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Homeric epic. This fascinating volume offers a starting point for debate and discussion of these cultural and literary exchanges and adaptations in the wider Mediterranean world and will be an invaluable resource to students of the Hebrew Bible and the influence of Greek myth.

In Lloyd Graham's study, he claims his uncovering these deceptions and myths will help everyone acquire sufficient enlight-enment and knowledge to discover what is false. Mr. Graham believes it is time this scriptural tyranny was broken so that we may devote our time to man instead of God and to civilizing ourselves instead of saving our souls that were never lost. Book jacket.

A once devout Christian, I dedicated myself to studying the Bible in an attempt to write the perfect argument for why the Bible is the word of God. Instead my studies led me kicking and screaming to the conclusion that the Bible is mythology. This book is a collection of essays detailing how I came to the conclusion that the Bible is mythology and Christianity does more harm than good in the world.

The Old Testament, and biblical scholarship itself, distinguishes between mythical and historical. This book argues that only historical thing in the Bible is the Bible itself, a superb product of Jewish thought. What is narrated in the Bible is only myth. But this myth about Israel's past was still built with fragments of history, or rather with written traditions that were different from those expressed in the actual text, and obviously more ancient. These essays follow in the spirit of his controversial History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, which combine detailed philological reseaerch, a wide knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature and Biblical Archaeology--and a radical way of understanding what the biblical text is really telling us. This is an erudite and thought-provoking book, which should not be ignored by anyone who finds the origin of the Bible a fascinating and still largely unknown phenomenon.

Sixty years ago, most biblical scholars maintained that Israel’s religion was unique—that it stood in marked contrast to the faiths of its ancient Near Eastern neighbors. Nowadays, it is widely argued that Israel’s religion mirrors that of other West Semitic societies. What accounts for this radical change, and what are its implications for our understanding of the Old Testament? Dr. John N. Oswalt says the root of this new attitude lies in Western society’s hostility to the idea of revelation, which presupposes a reality that transcends the world of the senses, asserting the existence of a realm humans cannot control. While not advocating a “the Bible says it, and I believe it, and that settles it” point of view, Oswalt asserts convincingly that while other ancient literatures all see reality in essentially the same terms, the Bible differs radically on all the main points. The Bible Among the Myths supplies a necessary corrective to those who reject the Old Testament’s testimony about a transcendent God who breaks into time and space and reveals himself in and through human activity.

!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" html meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type" body An interdisciplinary collection for scholars and students interested in the connections between myth and scripture In this collection scholars suggest that using “myth” creates a framework within which to set biblical writings in both cultural and literary comparative contexts. Reading biblical accounts alongside the religious narratives of other ancient civilizations reveals what is commonplace and shared among them. The fruit of such work widens and enriches our understanding of the nature and character of biblical texts, and the results provide fresh evidence for how biblical writings became “scripture.” Features: Essays that explore how myth sheds light on the emergence of scripture Examples drawn from the Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Greco-Roman world Articles by experts from a range of disciplines