Robert Graves

Literalists who deny that the Bible contains any myths at all are, in a sense, justified. Most other myths deal with gods and goddesses who take sides in human affairs, each favouring rival heroes; whereas the Bible acknowledges only a single universal God.

but to the pious reader of the midrash it was no more than a fanciful metaphor of the lengths to which God could go in protecting His Chosen People.

Fanciful rabbinic expansions of the Genesis stories were still being

made in the Middle Ages: answers to such questions by intelligent students as—‘How was the Ark lighted? How were the animals fed? Was there a Phoenix on board?’ (see 20. i–j)

Professor Hadas of Columbia University has pointed out close correspondences between the Aeneid and Exodus—the divinely led exodus of refugees to a Promised Land—and concludes that Virgil borrowed from the Jews. It is possible, too, that Livy’s moral anecdotes of Ancient Rome, which are quite unmythical in tone, were influenced by the synagogue. Of

They were combined into a single transcendental deity at Jerusalem—as among the Heliopolitans, the Byblians, the Gallic Druids and the Iberians of Tortosa.

Just how powerful goddesses were under the Jewish monarchy can be seen from Jeremiah’s denunciation of his co-religionists who attributed Judaea’s downfall to their breach of faith with Anath and

The Baals, Astartes, Anaths and all the other old Canaanite deities were dead so far as the Judaeans returning from captivity were concerned.

whereas Oedipus, who saved his people from the Theban Sphinx, and had much the same nativity as Moses, died in miserable exile hounded by the Furies of Mother-right.

The giant Og survives Noah’s deluge, outlives Abraham, and is finally destroyed by Moses.