The Bible without theology

"In this volume, Robert A. Oden Jr. advocates stripping away the theological and historiographic biases that underlie modern biblical scholarship in order to arrive at a nontheological historical reading of the Bible. Oden calls into question a scholarly tradition that accepts biblical writers' views of themselves and their neighbors at face value and that reproduces a view of Israelite religion as divinely guided and inherently superior.". "Using cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methodology, Oden investigates three biblical issues - the clothing of Adam and Eve, Jacob's name chance to Israel, and ritual prostitution and Deuteronomy - in light of extra-biblical evidence. He also challenges scholars' assumptions of Scripture as monotheistic and proposes treating biblical narrative as myth rather than as historical fact."--BOOK JACKET.