January 29th, 2010 Myth in the Bible

John Hobbins asserts that there is (no) myth in the Bible.

He means the literary genre of myth — as distinguished from epic (of which he says there is much in the bible) and history. He adds two caveats: (1. myth does sometimes crop up in the background, as it were, where a myth seems to be the assumed explanation for what is written about:

Nonetheless – an important caveat – myths inform the content of brief biblical passages and are understood to be true and to provide an explanation of specific realities.

For example, several passages in the Bible contain what is known as the Chaoskampf motif in which the order that characterizes creation is described as the outcome of a struggle between God and the forces of chaos. This is what one finds in Ps 74:12-17, 89:9-14, and Isa 51:9-10, to cite well-known passages.

Mythological narrative narrowly defined is relatively hard to come by in the Bible. Where it crops us, the protagonist is singular on the God side of the equation and multiple on the forces-of-chaos side of the equation. The genre is deployed in the service of conveying truth of the highest order. The genre occurs rarely.

And (2. myth (in what Hobbins calls the anthropological sense) as “narrative ideology” connects with myth as a literary genre, in that the continuum of myth-epic-history does not mean that history contains no mythic elements. Instead, Hobbins asserts, “All historiography worth reading has a mythic dimension in the anthropological sense of the term.”

These are valuable distinctions — and two interesting reading suggestions emerged from the post. One is The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions and Archival Documents from the Biblical World which evidently contains a great number of examples of ANE myths (and epics and various other genres); the other is Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship which deals with myth as narrative ideology.