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Asimov's Guide to the Bible, by Isaac Asimov
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- Sales Rank: #2180416 in Books
- Published on: 1968-06
- Original language: English
- Binding: Hardcover
- 716 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Asimov, The Scientist and Historian For the Layman
By Nathaniel Craig
I bought this book on a lark: Isaac Asimov the science fiction writer? A secular history of the bible? Riiight...
Actually, Asimov was a very accomplished scientist, philosopher, and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His 2 volume book set on the Bible is, as he makes it clear from the start, NOT a criticism of the Bible nor is it new work. It is a scholarly exploration, chapter by chapter of the most up to date (at the time) understanding of the history of the Ancient Middle East and how that relates to the English language version(s) of the Bible.
Exquisite detail is used to identify, explain, and cross-reverence the empires, nations, battles, names, etc, necessary to make sense of these complex histories/stories. He swiftly sums up, without judging, several confusing differences in spelling and dynasty orders that clog up part of the OT. Dozens of maps help to make locations and relationships between nations much more clear. Even when he points out that a story cannot be historical, he does so with straightforward explanations and direct references to previous parts of the volume itself where they were discussed. Where appropriate he also compares different translations, book/chapter titles, and canon versions.
Personally, I found his exploration of the "apocrypha" most enlightening. He does not waste time on why something was included or not included by goes directly to whether it has anything to teach us about history or the societies that wrote it an criticized it.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Intelligent secular commentary on the Bible
By David Montaigne
Isaac Asimov may be best known for his extensive science fiction works, but he also wrote on many other subjects that drew his interest, and fortunately for us the Bible drew his interest. His commentaries analyze almost everything in the Bible that merits further attention, asking questions, re-evaluating meanings, discussing the context from many angles including historical, linguistic, archeological, and other scientific views. If you want a history of Alexander and the four generals that divided his empire or have questions on any "unsolved mysteries" from the Bible like the Star of Bethlehem or why various apochrypha (books like Enoch that were left out of the official Bible) were disputed, Asimov covers such topics. He does so in great detail, requiring two separate books on the Old and New Testaments of the Bible - but I am reviewing the pair as one because they go hand in hand and most readers interested in one will also want the other.
One item that really got my attention was his theory on Noah's Flood. On pages 40-42 of his Old Testament commentary, Asimov discusses the possibility that it was not all from rain: "There may have been a sudden rise in the water level of the Persian Gulf... It has occurred to me recently that a possible explanation for such an invasion of the sea would be the unlucky strike of a large meteorite in the nearly landlocked Persian Gulf..." He points out Genesis 7:11 notes that "'the fountains of the great deep [were] broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.' A tidal wave plus rain, in other words." Later he suggests: "The tradition that the ark came to rest in Ararat some six hundred miles northwest of Sumeria again speaks in favor of the tidal-wave theory of the Flood. Ordinary river flooding would sweep floating objects downstream - southeastward into the Persian Gulf. A huge tidal wave would sweep them upstream - northwestward towards Ararat." My copy of Asimov's book is from 1968. In 2006, the Holocene Impact Working Group announced their findings on Burckle Crater, a huge impact crater about 18 miles in diameter at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. They believe a huge meteorite or small comet crashed into the ocean approximately 4900 years ago, creating mega-tsunamis. When I read about that impact, I remembered what Asimov had written....
In his New Testament commentary, I found his section on Christmas quite informative. One easy way to tell that no one celebrated the birth of Jesus in late December until centuries had passed by is that all Hebrew holidays are based on a lunar calendar. This is why Passover, Hanukkah, and even Easter don't have a fixed date on our modern (solar) calendar. Roman holidays made use of the solar calendar used by Rome. Of course the Romans already had a holiday (several, actually) around the winter solstice in December, and as Christianity grew in numbers they simply claimed these holidays for Christ. "The mere fact that Christmas is celebrated on December 25 every year and that the date never varies on our calendar is enough to show that it was not established as a religious festival until after A.D. 300." (p. 272)
Countless Bible commentaries have been written by religious scholars. Asimov was not religious, just a very broadly educated, highly intelligent man who offers us a sensible, in-depth analysis of the entire Bible. I found it informative as a young man reading it long ago, and I found it useful when I read it again more recently, taking many notes while researching my own books on End Times prophecy: End Times and 2019: The End of the Mayan Calendar and the Countdown to Judgment Day and Antichrist 2016-2019: Mystery Babylon, Barack Obama & the Islamic Caliphate
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Time Passages
By Patricia Heil
I have been reading Dr. A's work for decades. I sincerely mourned his passing, and with that passing a mind that could have grasped some of the archaeological research bearing on the Bible in the last 25 years. But I hope he would also have taken advantage of other Bible related studies which blossomed in that same period.
The issue being that Dr. A's book is outdated and he's not here to fix it. In 1995 Ebla's archives were discovered. In 1992 Axel Olrik's seminal Principles of Oral Narrative Research was published in English for the first time. A little before that Ronald Whybray published Making of the Pentateuch. And the field of Oral Traditions study made great strides in those 25 years.
Since 1976, archaeology has new perspectives on some of the assertions in this book. Two of the Cities of the Plain have been identified in Ebla's archives, and their possible site has been located through satellite imagery and a dig shows they were destroyed before 2300 BCE. Archaeologists have determined that camels were domesticated about 2700 BCE instead of the date used to show that Avraham was invented during the monarchic period. Digs show that Pi-Tum had at best ambiguous signs of habitation during the reign of Ramses II, whom most people probably identify with the pharaoh of the Exodus. Pi-Tum was its name at the time of the Babylonian Captivity; it was inhabited during Hyksos times as was Avaris, later renamed for Ramses and now known as Tell El-Daba. Pi-Tum's modern name is Tell el-Maskhuta which corresponds amazingly to the Hebrew name given in the Bible: Sukkot.
These finds help up-end the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP), a cornerstone of this book. It claims the Cities were invented and that most if not all of Judaism originated relatively late, such as right before or during the Babylonian Captivity.
As with archaeology, I have gone on and studied a number of fields including Sapir-Whorf Theory (linguistics) and oral traditions (particularly the translation of Axel Olrik's work). It wouldn't be enough for Dr. A to just update the archaeological information.
Work in oral traditions by Havelock, Ong, and Olrik provide a way to analyze the Jewish Bible that explains the presence of duplications and the so-called contradictions, and shows that the DH consists of special pleading and fails the test of Occam's Razor.
Sapir-Whorf Theory, which underlies the structure of every dictionary entry, conflicts with two of the five "pillars" of DH.
What DH considers composites cannot be deconstructed without either violating the grammar of Hebrew (Sapir-Whorf) or producing an incoherent plot (Olrik).
Further, Olrik shows that you don't invent a city called Sukkot associated with a seminal cultural event (the Exodus) at the same time as you invent the culture. Only much later do you have to explain its location to audiences by giving the modern name of the location, Pi-Tum. This indicates that since Sukkot seems to have had no substantial permanent inhabitants during the time of Ramses II, likely the Exodus predates him.
And finally Whybray shows that the problems DH has with archaeology and unreasonable assertions dates right back to Julius Wellhausen. His work even helped me identify downright fallacies (presentism, historian's fallacy, Texas Sharpshooter fallacy to name a few) in the DH.
I bought a copy of Dr. A's book as soon as I could afford it after getting my first job. It's still on my bookshelf. But now it's a signpost showing how far we've come since 1976, not a resource useful to what I have written since 2002 on the subject. Dr. A, I wish you were here!
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