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Imagery of harvest and vintage in the Bible: relation to the dying god religions studied by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Fertility figures of death and rebirth, later spiritualized, an enormous influence on literature from Virgil to Eliot’s Waste Land, with its footnotes from Frazer.

The Bible’s vision of history is neither linear and progressive nor cyclical, but a unique combination of the two called typology, in which Old Testament types foreshadow New Testament antitypes that fulfill them. Hence what Northrop Frye calls the “double mirror” structure of the Bible, seen most clearly in the Exodus-Gospel parallel.

The unique organization of the Bible exists because of its vision of history, in which events symbolically recur, but clarified, fulfilled, moving towards and end. Each figure or event in the Old Testament is a type, of which something in the New Testament is its antitype, which is its clarified, revealed, fully realized form.

The Exodus is not conventional history but sacred history, not factual but not just a fiction. Its patterns are mythical and metaphorical. The myth of the journey or the “way” that begins here and runs through the rest of the Bible.

The Bible has been used to reinforce an authoritarian ideology of obedience to an elite, but in fact the Exodus, the defining event of the Old Testament, is a revolt against authority, and has had a powerful influence: “Let my people go.” The Biblical vision as historical and progressive rather than as endless cycles of death and renewal.

The movement of religious thought from sacrifice as atonement to sacrifice as at-onement, outward legalistic act to an inward movement of the heart, from placating God or a god’s wrath to a self-sacrifice in the name of love. The two medieval theories of Christ’s Atonement as the sacrificial Lamb of God.

A remarkable pattern runs throughout the Bible of the subverting of the normal line of succession, and its significance. The pastoral imagery of sheep and shepherds in the earlier books of the Bible, and the imagery of animal sacrifice, which we struggle to understand.

The heroic tradition tends to be tragic, its heroes ending in a downfall that is part of the greatness. The Bible is a divine comedy, and its figures are unheroic, often underdog figures. Their God is an invisible Trickster God who subverts the rules and champions those who lack power. Like all Tricksters, he can be troubling in his defiance of conventional morality.

The later exploits of Theseus after the Minotaur, featuring trouble with a succession of women. The Bible distrusts the heroic, which is human pride. Instead of the heroic individualist, the Bible values faith and loyalty to the real hero who achieves the happy ending: God himself.

The tales of the earlier generation of heroes are less realistic and closer to myth and folktale than those of the Trojan generation of heroes. The tragic life and death of Herakles, yet his double fate, taken up to Mt. Olympus. Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Daedalus and Icarus. If you're interested in this podcast, you may also want to have a look at the Expanding Eyes newsletter on Substack. The essays there do not repeat the content here, although the themes are similar.

The two generations of Greek heroes. The Trojan War heroes look back, in Homer and elsewhere, to an earlier, greater generation of heroes. The comic or happy-ending myth of Perseus, a Trickster hero. The tragic story of Herakles or Hercules.

There are many hero myths the world over, but they tend to share common features. In Greek mythology and epic, there was an earlier, greater generation of heroes before the Trojan War heroes. The exploits of Perseus, the first of these.

The warrior hero is only one type of hero, one that some people dislike. But historically there have been other models of the heroic: spiritual heroes, romantic heroes, artistic heroes. The tension between the elegiac view that the age of heroes is past and a sense of the heroic as an always-possible idea.

The Bible (unlike medieval Christianity) is not obsessed with sexual sin. The worst sin in the Bible is “idolatry,” which really means the worship of power instead of love. This is unfortunately symbolized by a female figure, the harlot. A typology of female figures in the Bible: ideal, fallen but redeemable, and demonic.

Ovid explores the feminine psychology of love. Loss of the mother in the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Female narcissism. Women alone: Artemis, Diana, the Amazons. Incestuous love: Myrrha seducing her father.