The First Book of Samuel: A Literary Study of Comparative Structures, Analogies and Parallels

by Moshe Garsiel

Hardcover

Reviews

[Brett Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garsiel sees 1 Samuel as an artistic creation of an editor who, with much skill, weaves together the characters and events of 1 Samuel with each other (and those that preceded) to invite the reader into a comparative reading of the Hebrew Bible. One of the main tools of comparison is shared language. While I believe that repetition and shared language are heavy indicators of comparison by authors, I wished Garsiel spent more time responding to different explanations, as he merely acknowledged their existence and moved forward. While this a stated limitation of the work at hand, I still believe this book is a great resource for anyone interested in seeing how the Hebrew Bible is more than a random collection of stories, but it is artistically designed.

Too bad it is out of print and impossible to find…