Against the Gods by John D. Currid

Unbelief is amazing. Though the book is dealing with the relationship between the Old Testament and the religious beliefs of nations surrounding Israel, the real issue at hand is unbelief. Currid takes accounts from the text of the Bible and show that the authors were not plagiarizing other religions,

Though perhaps not intended, the book is a good case study in presuppositions. The unbelieving scholars come to the evidence with the presupposition that the Bible is merely literature, so everything they see is going to confirm their unbelief. So it is always Israel borrowing from the pagans and never the other way around. I appreciate the evidence Currid brings to the table, but no amount of evidence is going to convince the unbeliever. I also was struck by the supposed “parallels” in some of the cases. Some of these pagan myths were hardly parallels, but at best, similar in some regard.

The problem that I had with the book was in some cases, he takes the polemic problem too far. In a comparison of the rod of Moses and the rod of Pharaoh were “linguistic parallels” and “the very events and objects of the episode as a critique of Egyptian practice. What a masterful, skillful, and profound way to argue! It truly stands as a monument to the literary genius of the Exodus author.” What a strange argument to make. There are other places where he asserted Biblical authority and condemned those who condemned the Scripture. But “literary genius”? Imagine if I found a parallel between an ancient myth and the Battle at Gettysburg. Would I describe an historians account of the battle to be “literary genius”? Certainly, God may have and likely, in His providence, mocked the gods of Egypt in the plagues and in the rod, but that is God in His power, not a literary device of the inspired author.

I prefer a more full-throated apologetic, especially from a book that is on the polemics of the Old Testament. I will refer back to this work, especially as reference to the pagan myths. Since much of the archeological finds have been in the last 200 years, so there is a lot of new information about these ancient civilizations. I appreciated the stress and the defense of the polemic nature of some of the Old Testament. But all truth is God’s truth. If something is true, then even those imaginary myths will borrow from what is true. Of course there are flood myths from different cultures. The flood really happened and all cultures descended from Noah’s family, who survived the flood. As Currid pointed out, a person who denies God will seek to find anyway to pervert known truth to deny the true God.


but in many cases, simply mocking their beliefs and their gods.