Bible Review

In ancient Greece, for example, bulls were led to the altar and made, by various devices, to nod in assent to their own death.

Saul’s determination to know in response to divine opacity has much in common with the drives the hero in Greek tragedy. In Oedipus the King, for example, the king’s compulsion to discover the cause of the plague suffered by Thebes leads to the revelation of his guilt. When he then blinds himself, divine wrath is averted and the plague is lifted.

In the tragedies of classical Athens, for example, sacrifice appears prominently as a metaphor for social dissolution and integration. For more on this, see Helene Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1985); and Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society 96 (1965), pp. 463–508.

Many scholars believe that the writer of 1 Samuel incorporated sources with diverse perspectives on the Israelite kingship and often speak of a “pro-monarchical source” and an “anti-monarchical source.”

See D.R. Sharpe, Walter Rauschenbusch (New York: Macmillan, 1942).

The best book on Loisy is in French: Raymond de Boyer de Sainte Suzanne, Alfred Loisy, entre la foi et l’incroyance (Paris: Centurion, 1968).

These are the “Five Points,” held to be “essential and necessary” teachings of the Church by the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1910. See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).