Book Review: The Biblical Hero

The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility by Elliott Rabin (Philadelphia: JPS; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2020), 304 pp. + xxiii. Reviewed by David J. Zucker.

This work is a study of certain biblical heroes and a discussion about the nature of heroes in contemporary life. Rabin considers Moses, Samson, Esther, Abraham, Jacob, and David, and then adds a chapter devoted to God. He suggests that “the Bible teaches us five consistent messages about its heroes . . . 1. Through their thoughts and actions, we can glimpse the qualities of God . . . 2. All biblical heroes are collective heroes . . . 3. Biblical heroes are as human as we are . . . 4. Many different people can be heroes, and heroes can embody different roles . . . 5. The Bible’s heroes are meant to serve as forerunners for our own tortuous moral lives” (pp. 269-272). Early on Rabin explains that heroes “hold such potent appeal because they evoke our universally felt human longings to transcend the boundaries drawn around our lives” (p. xiv). This work is a mixture of biblical scholarship, literary studies, sociology, and philosophy, comparing biblical heroes to ancient and American paradigms. Each hero is linked to a short descriptive: Moses, Prototype; Samson, Strongman; Esther, Queen; Abraham, Pilgrim; Jacob, Trickster; David, King; and then God, Archetype or Antitype?

One of the problems surrounding heroes, and certainly biblical heroes, is that they are “marked by flaws, doubts, and ambiguities, just as one would expect to find in real life . . . they harbor lust and ambition; they can also be self-centered, deceitful and vengeful . . . Nor do they improve noticeably with age” (pp. 3-4). This is one of the difficulties addressed in the book, and it is explored across Moses, Samson, and Esther just as much as across Abraham, Jacob, and David’s checkered careers.

In his analyses Rabin draws on a mixture of rabbinic sources such as Talmud, midrash, Rashi, and Rashbam, and traditional literary sources — Homer, Virgil, Scheherazade, Shakespeare, Milton — as well as diverse figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Agatha Christie, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 figure, Yossarian. At times he draws interesting parallels to the intertextuality of characters such as Esther and Joseph, and Joseph and Mordecai (pp. 112-113), known from other biblical studies as well.

In the chapter devoted to God, Rabin asks rhetorically whether “God [is] a heroic biblical character . . . only in a greater way? Or is God . . . so removed from human constraints that the notion of a ‘hero’ cannot apply?” (p. 245). Rabin leans toward the latter conclusion, finally suggesting that in the Bible “God and people are true partners in heroic action.” He goes on: “God’s heroism resides in envisioning and modeling a world of harmony and justice, but God also needs people to execute a harmonious and just world” (pp. 266-267). However, it is surprising and disappointing that Rabin eschews gender-neutral language when referring to God. It would have been easy to use words like ruler, monarch, or sovereign in place of “king” (for example, pp. 254-255). The book is enhanced by suggestions for how it can be used in a variety of settings, including a study guide with a URL (pp. xix-xx). As befits a work of serious scholarship, it also contains indices, a full bibliography, and endnotes.