Meme Alert: Five Books that Changed How We Read the Bible

Theophrastus of the famous What I Learned from Aristotle blog has tagged us to the meme about books that influenced how we read the Bible...

Books that influenced my reading of the Bible ...There is one of those memes going around in which people volunteer a list of books that influenced their readings of the Bible.  The rules say that works are not limited to Biblical studies literature, but can include religious works or works of literature.  The list is nominally set at 5 books, but that is obviously an arbitrary number, and I have more than 5 books to list ...

We try not to disappoint, so here we go for the Torah:

• Genesis: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
• Exodus: Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
• Leviticus: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
• Numbers: Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays
• Deuteronomy: Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History

 ...and we could go on for each remaining book of the Tanakh... no explanations now, too much on our plate.

Dear reader-bloggers. Kindly continue the meme, as you see fit ...