Book review: Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff

The sixth book I read in 2016 was Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliff.  I picked it up in Half Price Books because I have enjoyed her Roman Britain books so much.

This is a very different book, however; rather than setting her own characters within a historic milieu, she sets out a straightforward retelling of the Greek epic from the original Homer.  I never read the Iliad straight through; but we did the Odyssey in 9th grade English, and the Homerisms are evident, from grey-eyed Athene to the wine-dark sea, as well as the interminable funeral games, which are thankfully abbreviated in this telling.

One is struck by the Trojans' dumb tactics, as they have various allies arriving throughout the seige and, instead of waiting until they're all there and launching a coordinated assault on the Greeks, one set of allies arrives, attacks, and is wiped out before the next group of allies shows up.  But the whole point of the Greek worldview is that mortals don't have any agency but serve as pawns of the gods, so I guess Troy was fated to fall anyway.  Thus Virgil would have one believe, at any rate.

This would make a good classroom text for a middle school study of Classical history.

Book review: Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards & Brandon J. O'Brien

The fifth book I read in 2016 was Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien.  Having already read Kenneth E. Bailey's books on reading the Bible through a lens informed by the culture of the Middle East, I expected this to be a similar work, written more for a layman's perspective, and I wasn't wrong.

This is certainly a simpler book, but it is also inferior to Bailey's works in more troubling ways.  For one, Bailey makes it clear that the Middle Eastern culture is unique and that to understand the biblical accounts as they would have been understood by their original writers and readers, one must have an understanding of their worldview.  Richards and O'Brien make a point in their introduction that human beings tend to be binary in their thinking -- Western/Eastern, good/bad, right/wrong -- but that reality often has more than two options; however, by choosing the "Western" worldview to denigrate, they absolutely do imply that the "Eastern" way is more biblical.  The book could more accurately and less sensationally have been titled Misreading Scripture with American, Evangelical Eyes.  I very strongly question the right of a couple of guys from a Baptist college in Florida to speak for Europe and North America as a whole, particularly when one of the blockbuster tidbits they drop is that Fanny is a girl's name in America but a rude, scatological term for female genitalia in England.  Apparently, they've never heard of Fanny Burney, one of the most famous woman authors in England, or Fanny Price, heroine of the British Jane Austen's celebrated novel Mansfield Park.  Such blatant ignorance does not predispose me to take their word on anything else they assert.

In addition, as opposed to Bailey's work, which is proffered in a spirit of humility and based on a lifetime of crosscultural immersion, there is a very strong sense of condescension toward American evangelicals in Misreading Scripture.  Richards and O'Brien repeatedly assume that American Christians (despite the misleading title of their book, the focus is only and always on Americans, not Europeans) are jingoistic, xenophobic racists.  "We won't even dare to consider the prejudice that some North American Christians might express [if a Korean missionary came to North America]."  Really?  Then don't consider it, and certainly don't put it in a snide endnote.

There is sadly more than a whiff of "I thank God I am not as other men, even these Americans" which pervades the whole book.  I would certainly recommend that readers pick up Kenneth E. Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes and Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes, despite their greater length and more intellectually demanding nature, before this book.