I started reading this book, but I came to the conclusion that I needed to become for familiar with the Bible itself before continuing. ( )

Readers of the Bible may fall anywhere along a continuum. It starts with those who believe that every single word is literally true, having been dictated directly by God, or, in the case of the later histories, directly inspired by God. The other end of the continuum is made up of those who see it as a collection of myth, history, folk-tale, wisdom literature, poetry, and (at worst) as the stories of a tribal god now being used to justify the belief of that tribe's descendants that they and no one else has a right to a given portion of this planet. Fortunately, Tim Callahan does not have a political or religious agenda - his interest is purely academic and his goal is to demonstrate to the general reader how the stories in the Bible came to be, on what they were originally based, what they meant to the original authors and how that meaning changed over history. He adroitly demonstrates how the great mythic themes of the Middle East, Egypt, and Mesopotamia were adopted and adapted by the early Hebrews to tell a story that would hold a disparate group of people together. He explains and demonstrates how the same stories were told differently by different groups (such as the priests who traced their lineage to Moses and those who traced their lineage to Aaron) with different agendas and how both (or more than two) versions were merged into a single story. Callahan takes the Bible as a great archeological dig and discovers more than I can begin to describe and these discoveries do not reduce the Bible. To the contrary, they increase its importance, power, and its truly trenchant nature. All of creation, but most of all our consciousness, are mysteries that are beyond the ability of our minds to understand, so we must create myth and allegory that somehow provide us with insights that go beyond those that cold hard data can provide. Research such as Callahan's is as important as any being carried out today because it demonstrates both how our consciousness is evolving and how our ancestors understood and conceptualized this evolution. By studying this, we can come to a greater understanding of our perceptions of the evolution of our consciousness and how these perceptions can affect that evolution. ( )

Besides the provocative title, it's a scholarly history of the stories and legends that were consolidated into what's called the 'Old Testament' sometime around 800 BC. I've read much of this history elsewhere in pieces, this is a good consolidation of the information, and is well-written and footnoted. ( )