The last half-century has seen a welcome flowering of scholarly interest in parallels, interactions and influences between Greek traditions and those of the Near East. While the first generation of work made the case that these influences existed at all, more recent scholarship has taken up the invitation to explore the complexities of influence and interaction and undertaken to apply those nuances to our understanding of particular texts and traditions. D.'s volume constitutes a valuable contribution to this conversation. D. gathers a set of pentateuchal narratives and motifs under the heading of ‘origin stories’, each of which he identifies as ‘a genealogically structured narrative that gives a historical account extending from the first human beings until the nation's forefathers’ (p. 36). He argues that this category constitutes an as-yet-unrecognised genre absent from the traditions of the second-millennium great kingdoms, but present in biblical, Greek and other eastern Mediterranean traditions, pointing to their participation in a shared cultural sphere. The argument is learned and admirably interdisciplinary, with an extensive bibliography that demonstrates both the value and the challenge of the author's line of inquiry.

D. argues that the genre of origin stories emerges in the early first millennium bce in the context of the fall (or diminishment) of the great kingdoms of Egypt, Hatti and Mycenae. In the wake of these political and cultural changes D. identifies the development of a new cultural sphere rooted in the eastern Mediterranean and characterised in part by the dissemination and adoption of the Phoenician alphabet. Within this broad cultural milieu, which includes the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the Greek city-states, the genre of origin stories took root as communities sought to claim a place in the contemporary and mythical world and to define their own identities. The introduction develops a clear and careful methodology for comparative work, cautioning against the pitfalls of ‘parallelomania’ and requiring two complementary considerations: the existence of a set of unique motifs shared between traditions and a way of understanding the variables that exist within each iteration. For the latter D. draws on C.W. von Sydow's idea of ecotype, a model for thinking about how traditions adapt when transplanted to foreign environments. Each chapter of the monograph examines one of these motifs, exploring the parallels and variables between biblical, Greek and other eastern Mediterranean, especially Phoenician, traditions, demonstrating the absence of the motif in Mesopotamian and other earlier traditions, and highlighting the contexts within which these traditions were disseminated. For those reading the book from cover to cover, the structure may come to feel a little repetitive, but it has the advantage of consistently stating and demonstrating its thesis and will certainly contribute to the understanding of those who approach the text with an interest in one or two particular chapters.

The first section, ‘After the Flood and Before It’, takes up motifs associated with the flood myth including ‘The Dispersion of the Peoples after the Flood’, ‘The Planting of the First Vineyard after the Flood’, ‘The Creation of the First Woman and the Origin of Evil’ and ‘The Destruction of the Generation of Heroes’. This selection highlights one of the great values of the study for Classicists, namely that it demonstrates the connections and patterns between motifs in a way that invites us to appreciate underlying patterns of Greek traditions differently. The first chapter, for instance, draws connections between the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) and Greek genealogical traditions preserved in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and prose genealogies, showing that both depend on descent from a flood hero and describe the peoples of the world through a series of genealogical sequences. D.'s argument that these genealogical traditions derive from a common source, separate from Mesopotamian flood traditions in which the flood hero is removed from the human sphere, is convincing, and the subsequent analysis of Greek genealogical work encourages a new and more unified perspective on traditions that can seem hyper-local. ‘The Destruction of the Generation of Heroes’ offers an interpretation of the perpetually-perplexing Nephilim (Gen 6:1–4) as a reflex of genealogical traditions in which intermixing between mortals and immortals was punished with cataclysm, a tradition then linked with the flood narrative. Here, D. demonstrates the interpretative value of Greek traditions for understanding Genesis, looking to epic poetry in which, he argues, war has been substituted for flood as the means of cataclysm, but the underlying motif of a sharp generational distinction marked by the end of mating between mortals and immortals is the same. The approach yields a persuasive account of the place of the Nephilim in the biblical narrative, though the concern with the flood as the mode of destruction in the Greek traditions feels somewhat over-emphasised, when the shared motif of putting an end to mortal/immortal pairings stands as the clearer contrast to other ancient traditions.

In the monograph's second part, ‘From Man to Nation: Literary Patterns’, D. seeks to outline ‘a series of parallel literary patterns that form the unique cornerstones of the origin stories and genealogical writing, the fundamental focus of which is the beginning of human civilization and ethnic identity’ (p. 139). These literary patterns include ‘First Inventor’, ‘Two Brothers – Two Nations’ and ‘The Founding Father as Settler’. These chapters collect numerous and detailed examples of these parallel patterns, though at times some further synthesis would have been welcome. The ‘First Inventors’ chapter turns to a motif familiar from Greek tradition, the protos heuretes, and makes a case that human first inventors in Greek tradition are bound up with the development of genealogical literature as they are in the biblical and Phoenician sources, in contrast to divine first inventors in Mesopotamian traditions as well as earlier Greek literature, especially the Homeric Hymns. As D. recognises, the first inventor motif becomes widely popular in Greek thought outside of genealogical traditions, but the possibility of reading such figures within genealogical contexts and in conversation with the other traditions offers a new angle on familiar material. D.'s work with Philo of Byblos constitutes an important platform of this argument and a welcome invitation to work more closely with this material, though also a reminder of the difficulties of distinguishing earlier and later elements. The ‘Founding Father as Settler’ chapter stands out because of the clear rubric it develops for the literary pattern it proposes and the elegant use D. makes of this pattern to analyse the narrative of Jacob and Esau, especially the ways in which different strands of tradition locate Jacob in Canaan vs Egypt. This chapter will be of particular interest to anyone working on Greek foundation narratives, which D. recognises as an overarching category, but within which he distinguishes a colonisation pattern from a founding-father-as-settler pattern. For the latter he adduces Xuthus, Cadmus and Danaus, with Xuthus presenting a particularly effective demonstration of the pattern, though further discussion of Euripides’ manipulation of the material would have been of interest. The section examining the cross-linguistic evidence for MPŠ/Mopsus offers evidence for this motif in Cilicia, a welcome glimpse of the way in which this genre functioned beyond Greek and Israelite contexts.

D. makes a persuasive case that persistent parallels exist between biblical and Greek traditions absent from the traditions of the earlier Egyptian, Hittite and Mesopotamian kingdoms; these points of distinction are clearly argued in each chapter. He also makes a persuasive case for the eastern Mediterranean of the early first millennium as the context in which these traditions emerged. For readers most familiar with Greek traditions, his readings offer an opportunity to reconsider the way in which we categorise our texts and some encouragement to appreciate the complexity of Greek genealogical writing and the conversations in which they were engaged. Readers will undoubtedly find specific points to question in their areas of specialisation, an inevitability in an argument of this breadth and complexity, but the work as a whole offers a valuable hypothesis about relationships between these traditions and the methodologies that let us ask these types of questions.