Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
A Good Read
By J.M. Cameron
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
by Northrop Frye
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 261 pp., $14.95
The Art of Biblical Narrative
by Robert Alter
Basic Books, 195 pp., $13.95
Evans-Pritchard once wrote, having in mind the fog in which, so he thought, the discussion of primitive religion had been plunged by Frazer, Durkheim, Marett, and others, that anyone who wanted to do fieldwork on this topic ought to have 'a poetic mind which moves easily in images and symbols.'[1] Such a prerequisite seems even more obviously needed for the study of the Bible. The materials in the Biblical writings (the Bible, in what I have to say about Frye's book, is the Christian Bible, the so-called Old and New Testaments, with the apocryphal—deuterocanonical—books, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, I and II Maccabees, and others) include most of the traditional kinds of oral and written work: epic, chronicle, folk tale, myth of origin, epithalamion, songs of exile, collections of proverbs, letters, biographies, proclamations of salvation, apocalyptic visions.
Review, 5313 words
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