Stories in scripture and inscriptions

The recovery of numerous narratives of many types from throughout the Near East has encouraged scholars to compare these texts with those found in scripture. Most such comparisons have set biblical stories up against various Near Eastern mythic-epic poems. In order to draw valid conclusions about the distinctiveness of biblical materials, says Parker, we must compare them with more analogous texts. He illustrates this thesis by juxtaposing selected biblical narratives with similar prose narratives from Northwest Semitic inscriptions recovered from ancient Israel and its Syro-Palestinian environment and dating from the two hundred and fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem. Through careful comparisons Parker is able to eliminate some widely accepted yet false generalizations about the uniqueness of the scriptural narratives and at the same time shed important new light on the formal, sociopolitical, and theological dimensions of both sets of texts.