From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel

please see my review of cross's companion volume, canaanite myth and hebrew epic.

This book is a worthy and very interesting successor to "Canaanite Myth And Hebrew Epic", exploring a number of issues relating to the history of Israel that were not addressed in the earlier work. Essays cover the relation of kinship to covenant, traditional narrative, the dubious fortunes of Reuben, the old gods of the ancient near east, OT descriptions of the tabernacle tent and temple in context, highly technical essays on Hebrew verse, two essays on the post-exilic restoration with an emphasis on the rift between Samaria and Jerusalem, two essays on the fixation and stabilization of the canonical text, and kind of an afterthought essay on pottery sherds and alphabets.For me, the most interesting articles were the 'olden gods' essay, which places a number of themes present in the Bible firmly in the context of Canaanite mythology, and the the Samaria essay, which brings a lot of insight to the "Samaritan Problem". Just about as compelling are the essays dealing with the canonization of the Biblical texts, which brings the Dead Sea Scrolls and other contemporary evidence in to clarify the conerns and procedures. The most difficult and arcane (and beyond my interest) were the essays dealing with Hebrew verse.My reservations stem from what seem to me to be omissions in the argument. Cross regularly makes the statement "there is no reason to doubt" one thing or another which is by no means proven, either in this work or any other that I know of, regarding practices and institutions of the "tribal league" and the "empire". He alludes to the existence of tribal leagues and their distinct religious forms from the Bronze Age to the modern era without much discussion of evidence. He also attests that at Ugarit patriarchal and specifically urban forms co-existed. This is interesting and I would like to know more about it. If the tribal and urban practices mingled throughout history, this does not give us "no reason to doubt" the historical accuracy of a Biblical account in which patriarchal religion and politics totally gives way to some national type of religion, nor does it help secure the dating of patriarchal narratives, or the dating of the conversion to Yahwism of Canaanite mythic themes. Cross's assertion of an orally transmitted prose epic seems unlikely, and no evidence is presented here to change my mind.My reservations do not decrease the value of this book, however. In fact, they increase it, because of the issues raised. Overall, a must read.

The author is a very learned man and not a bad writer, but unless you are an expert in the field, this book can be hard to follow. I am a fairly knowledgable amateur in the field of old testament history, but often found this book very tough going. I don't think I got everything out of this book that a scholar would. There are better books available for the layman than this book. Old testament history is a fascinating subject, so find the other books. Amazon will lead you to them, but you can start with Israel Finkelstein and William Dever and that should lead you to the rest very easily.