More on “myth” by Hobbins

John Hobbins has an excellent post problematizing myth, “There are (no) myths in the Bible.” It would be useless to try and summarize it here, please go and read it in full, but I think the nubbins are here:

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.

More often in biblical literature, God or the gods intervene in human affairs. This is a typical feature of another literary genre: epic. In this genre, God or gods chiefly appear from the outside. The main arena of events is where humans are. What happens to human beings across a chain of events is the focus.

As expected the post is generating a good discussion so head on over and take a look.

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