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The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths explores and compares the most influential sets of divine myths in Western Culture: the Homeric pantheon and Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.
List of contents
Preface; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1: Introduction; Part One Brothers (and Sisters) from a Different Mother; Section I Texts with a History; Chapter 2: Assembling Resemblances; Section II Yahweh and Other Olympians; Chapter 3: Homer’s Gods; Chapter 4: Biblical Polytheism I: Yahweh’s Divine Competition; Chapter 5: Biblical Polytheism II: Yahweh’s Little Helpers; Chapter 6: Biblical Anthropomorphism: Yahweh’s Da Man; Part Two Diverging Deities: Where Homer Got It Right; Section I Theological (Dis)Honesty; Chapter 7: Cleaning up Yahweh; Chapter 8: Homer’s Perfectly Fallible Gods; Section II Creating Meaning; Chapter 9: Homeric Creation; Chapter 10: The Failure of Genesis, the Genesis of Failure; Section III The Demands of Finitude; Chapter 11: Cheating Death, Squandering Life; Chapter 12: We All Have it Coming; Section IV Finding Justice; Chapter 13: Waiting for God. Oh. The Myth of Iliadic Justice; Chapter 14: Living Without the Gods: The Myth of Theistic Justice; Section V Heavenly Sex; Chapter 15: Divine Eros, Biblical Celibacy, and God’s Little Punching Bag; Chapter 16: Conclusion; Appendices; Appendix 1: Short summaries of the Iliad and Odyssey; Appendix 2: Who Are the Homeric Gods?; Appendix 3: Iliadic Justice: Making Sense of the Trojan War; Appendix 4: Divine Justice in the Odyssey?; Bibliography; Index
About the author
John Heath is Professor of Classics at Santa Clara University, USA. His previous books include a study of the literary adaptations of classical myth (Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder, 1992), a popular defense of the study of classics (Who Killed Homer? co-authored with Victor Davis Hanson, 1998), an examination of the links between speech, animalization, and status in Greek literature and society (The Talking Greeks, 2005), and an exploration of the common themes underlying American bestselling books (Why We Read What We Read, co-authored with Lisa Adams, 2007).
Summary
The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths explores and compares the most influential sets of divine myths in Western Culture: the Homeric pantheon and Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.
