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In Folk Lore of the Old Testament, Sir J. G. Frazer has given us another set of studies of the thoughts and ideas of various people in the process of becoming civilized of the same kind as those already collected in Totemism and Exogamy, and the Golden Bough. It is delightful reading but needs the background of his earlier works for full comprehension. His sympathy is marvelous. This is no doubt what gives him such power to reconstruct the motives of primitive peoples. He makes them live and move and have a being, and his reader unconsciously regresses to the stage of his actors and becomes an integral part of what he is reading. Frazer's avowed aim as given in his introduction is “to carry on the Cambridge tradition of comparative Religion.” He illustrates and explains “a few relics of ruder times, as they are preserved like fossils in the Old Testament.” Although bound in three volumes, his work is divided into four parts.
Part 1. The Early Ages of the World, which contains folk-lore relative to man's creation, his fall and the loss of paradise, his destruction in the great flood, and finally his scattering on the face of the earth from the tower of Babel. This is virtually the Book of Genesis. He brings for comparison similar tales from every quarter of the earth, and almost every race, for when man began to grope backward for explanation of the things which puzzled him, the mind of the African, the Asiatic, the Indian, or the Semite worked with wonderful similarity.
Part. 2. The Patriarchal Age. Frazer introduces this with these words: “With the story of the Tower of Babel, and the dispersion of the peoples from that center, the authors of Genesis conclude their general history of mankind in the early ages of the world. They now narrow the scope of their narrative and concentrate it on the Hebrew people alone. The history takes the form of a series of biographies, in which the fortunes of the nation are set forth, not in vague general outlines, but in a series of