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THE LITERARY MOTIF OF THE EXPOSED CHILD (cf. Ex. ii 1-10) BY DONALD B. REDFORD Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, University College, University of Toronto Toronto, Canada. Ancient Near Eastern man made his gods in his own image, and breathed into them his own spirit. It should come as no surprise that when he told stories about them his vocabulary and imagery were drawn entirely from his own, human, experience. The same literary motif which occur regularly in tales of human exploits, and are clearly derived from contemporary society, appear with equal regularity in the stories about the gods, the myths. There is no reason to give priority in this regard to the myth over the legend, and the statement "stories of the gods are in all nations the oldest narratives" 1) is surely in- capable of proof. Nor are there grounds for eliciting and underlying "mythological system" recognition of which provides the key to the forms of ancient Near Eastern literature. 2) The myth-maker and the story-teller are simply drawing on a common pool of devices, a common store of literary motifs. ) It may well be that a given motif through some extraneous circumstance comes to
Numen – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1967
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