School of Suspicion

Category: The Bible and Its Neighbours

The Hebrew scriptures did not arrive out of nowhere. These articles set Genesis, the prophets and the law beside the Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Canaanite material they grew up among, and ask what their writers were answering, borrowing and refusing.

  • Noah — Prophet and Builder

    Noah — Prophet and Builder

    Lamech named his son for rest. Noah built a chest sealed with the letters of atonement, fed every creature in it for a year, sent out the dove, and woke from his wine to curse a grandson. Read beside the giants of 1 Enoch, the birds of Gilgamesh, Peter’s eight souls, the dove at the…

  • Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    The prophet who drew Israel’s border is sent to save the city that will erase it. The whole book of Jonah with its Hebrew: four descents, a fish on an errand, five words that come true twice and a question he never answers, beside Jesus asleep in the storm, Caiaphas, the sign of Jonah, Inanna’s…

  • Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Apollo forces Creusa in a cave under the Acropolis, has their son raised in his temple at Delphi and hands him to her husband as the husband’s own. Euripides’ Ion beside Joseph and the supposed father of Luke’s genealogy, the boy Jesus in his Father’s house, Rebekah and Jacob, and the question Athens put to…

  • Cassandra and Jesus — Prophets of a Doomed City

    Cassandra and Jesus — Prophets of a Doomed City

    Apollo gave Cassandra true sight and took away belief. Jesus wept over a city that would not hear him. Aeschylus and the Gospels side by side, with Ovid’s Paris taking her fire for love, Josephus’s other Jesus crying woe on the walls, the Locrian girls sent to Troy for a thousand years and the lampstand…

  • Cain and Abel — The Farmer and the Shepherd

    Cain and Abel — The Farmer and the Shepherd

    Eve says she has gotten a man from the LORD. He ploughs, his brother keeps sheep, and God looks at one offering only. Read beside Josephus on the plough, the Targum’s argument in the field, the smiths called Cain and Romulus at his wall, with the prodigal’s elder brother, seventy times seven and Pilate’s basin.