Folk-lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law

This book contains all three volumes, abridged by the original author. “It was observed by Renan that to a philosophical mind, occupied with the investigation of origins, the human past offers, but three histories of primary interest — the history of Greece, the history of Israel, and the history of Rome… Taken together, these comparatively new sciences lift to some extent the veil which has hitherto hung over the infancy of mankind; they allow us to pierce, if I may say so, the dead wall which till lately appeared to block the path of the inquirer beyond the limits of classical antiquity; they open up a seemingly endless vista of man’s thought and activity as they existed in those dim and incalculable ages which elapsed between the emergence of our species on earth and its full maturity in civilized humanity. Hence the ardor with which the studies of folk-lore and prehistoric archaeology are pursued at the present day by ever-widening circles of inquirers. We may almost say that among the forces which are molding and transforming the enlightened opinion of our time these humanistic disciplines are beginning to exert an influence only second to that impulse which the amazing advances of the physical sciences within living memory have impressed on the general movement of thought; for the question of the validity of beliefs and the worth of institutions can hardly be divorced from the question of their origin, on which archaeology and folk-lore are continually throwing new light. “In the present work I have attempted, on the lines of folk-lore, to trace some of the beliefs and institutions of ancient Israel backward to earlier and cruder stages of thought and practice which, have their analogies in the faiths and customs of existing savages. If I have in any measure succeeded in the attempt, it should henceforth be possible to view the history of Israel in a truer, if less romantic, light as that of a people not miraculously differentiated from all other races by divine revelation, but evolved like them by a slow process of natural selection from an embryonic condition of ignorance and savagery.” - Preface to the Abridged Version Книга «Folk-lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law» автора Джеймс Джордж Фрэзер оценена посетителями КнигоГид, и её читательский рейтинг составил 8.00 из 10.
Для бесплатного просмотра предоставляются: аннотация, публикация, отзывы, а также файлы для скачивания.