Introduction

There has been a long history of avoiding the word “myth” when discussing the Hebrew Bible. Yet the stories about Yahweh often have remarkable resemblances to those found in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Why, then, have the stories about the God of the Tanakh had so much more influence in Western culture to this day – and at what cost? The value of traditional tales cannot derive from the number of believers, the antiquity (or novelty) of the faith in which they are embedded, or their purported “truth.” The honest question is, rather, which vision of the divine is most helpful in our search for meaning and human flourishing? Which set of divine myths should demand one’s attention, not because it supposedly reveals the truth about the gods or because our parents dumped it in on us, but because it is true to our experience and provides sustenance for our continuing wrestling match with life? The answer suggested in this book is that the gods found in Homer’s epic provide better, more honest and useful answers than the ones standardly presented in the Judeo-Christian interpretive tradition.