Softcover

ISBN 10: 009956310X ISBN 13: 9780099563105

Publisher: Doubleday Publishing, 1989

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.

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.

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.