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The Mythology of Death in the Old Testament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
It is now some seventy-five years since the problem of myth in the Old Testament tradition was first formulated in any detail by Gunkel. He drew attention to mythological elements in the tradition of Israel which could not be explained merely in terms of fortuitous parallelism with other myths of the ancient orient. He saw that much of this mythology could be traced to Babylonian and Assyrian sources; but he set out to examine how the myth had come into the Old Testament and how it had been made to conform to the thought and understanding of Israel. He dealt with such various themes as the Creation, the Flood, Rahab and Leviathan and tehōm He noted how mythological figures, such as the Dragon in the Sea were linked to historical persons and events, e.g. the hubris of the sea-dragon is the hubris of Pharaoh and Egypt in Ezekiel 29 and 32.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1973
References
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page 327 note 2 Gunkel, op. cit., pp. 4ff.
page 327 note 3 ibid., p. 75.
page 327 note 4 ibid., p. 79.
page 328 note 1 McKenzie, J. L., Myths and Realities (Milwaukee, 1963), pp. 182, ‘Myth and the Old Testament’.Google Scholar
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page 331 note 3 Widengren, G., The Akkadian and Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation as Religious Documents (Uppsala, 1937), pp. 118ffGoogle Scholar. While this book is valuable for the listing of parallels between Akkadian and Hebrew psalms, it must be used with extreme caution owing to a tendency on the part of the author to ‘Akkadianise’ the psalms in the Old Testament.
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