Rating: 
Summary: Another trite effort
Review: Cahill's works serve the purpose of introducing cultural perspectives in an easy to read format, but if you know anything about the subject go elsewhere. Mostly a boring re-hash of other, more interesting work.
Rating: 
Summary: Literate and readable
Review: Once again Thomas Cahill explores the idea that a small group of people out of the mainstream can have a powerful effect on history. This time he chooses one of the wandering tribes who never numbered many people and whose history includes more being conquered than conquering others - the Jews. He does a delightful job of presenting old stories in a new light. It is more of a survey than scholarly tome. I do not know if he includes every scholar or the absolute cutting edge of thought, but I do know that this book could lead someone to further and serious study.
Rating: 
Summary: Background for the Old Testament Reader
Review: The blurb about the author on the dust jacket shows this author knows his stuff. He has very good credentials for writing this book. He has a writing style that keeps the material interesting, and he appears to have a very good knowledge of the interpretation of Hebrew scripture. With all this, the reader will wonder why the author ever came up with the title "Gift of the Jews". The title is misleading when compared to the contents of the book. Every chapter except the final chapter of the book consists of background explanantions of major events in the Old Testament. His interpretation is interesting, but it is the final chapter that deals with the intended subject. How a nomadic desert tribe's world view came to be the dominant idea in Western culture. I would not agree with the
sub-title ...Changed the way EVERYONE thinks and feels. I believe the ideas are deeply ingrained in the Western world, but this did not affect every culture. Still I enjoyed the book as as average book. It is a fast enjoyable read with no real eyeopening ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Avraham
Review: In one way or another, names among the great and famous have sometimes changed. Leslie King Jr. became Gerald Rudolph Ford by choice and by law in Michigan in the 1930s. Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses Simpson Grant through the error of a congressman in a letter recommending Grant's appointment to West Point. When Walter Mondale's extended family comes together, Mondales mingle with Mundales, the consequence of an error by a U.S. government clerk issuing homestead titles. Leslie King Jr. was the name given the infant. It is unlikely a publisher would put a biography in print in which the author stubbornly held to the original name throughout his account, up to the administration of Pres. Leslie King - or, in the next example, to the administration of Pres. Hiram U. Grant. Everett Fox, a contemporary translator of the Torah and, with that, the Book of Genesis, determined the name Avraham, for the ancient patriarch, is closer to the Hebrew than is Abraham, the name known universally; the name employed in tens of millions of prints of Genesis through centuries; the name known to hundreds of millions of people, Jew and Gentile, through centuries; the name borne by myriads of males through successive ages, including Abraham Lincoln and sons of some Jewish and non-Jewish couples to this day. In his small 1998 volume, "The Gifts of the Jews," Thomas Cahill ought certainly to have included the finding of Fox in one of his typographical inserts. Rather, Cahill persists with Avraham, who is one of the close and ongoing focuses of his account. After Avraham comes Moses. Cahill insists on Moshe. Then on to a wrestle with Yahweh/YHWH. The stubborn insistence becomes a disturbing contrivance. Well - there are frequent reaches for erudition: "So to the audiences who first heard this story told, the phrase, 'Who is YHWH?' sounded the ominous notes of Pharaoh's doom - just as the famous five-note phrase in Bizet's Carmen foreshadows Carmen's violent end." Yes - just as the perception of Grandma's long teeth foreshadows the doom of Little Red Riding Hood. Cahill's account has not been well-remembered or widely-quoted through the passing of five years. No surprise.
Rating:
Summary: Culture tour
Review: I couldn't be more surprised at how absorbed I was in a book whose backbone is virtually a book-by-book, incident-by-incident retracing of the Old Testament. Cahill's twist is that he relates these familiar stories from the perspective of how modern man has been shaped. Without the linear perspective and the individualism developed in Judaism, even such modern bulwarks as the notion that "all men are created equal" wouldn't be possible. Provocative; deftly written; not too long so it doesn't wear out your interest.
Rating:
Summary: Not Just Another Turn of the Wheel
Review: With verve and his now familiar but own inimical semi-archaeological style, Cahill tells us that the Jews, by getting in on the ground floor of recorded history, were able to almost single-handedly shape Western Consciousness as we know it (Please also see his equally fascinating book "How the Irish Saved Civilization"). Using the Old Testament as his anchor, Cahill takes us on a grand seven thousand year romp through history, chronicling as he goes the events that led to Western Consciousness and our current cosmological worldview. It was the Jews that led us from the world of the wheel-where nothing was ever new and thus where there was no need for a past, present and future, or for individual self-consciousness for that matter--to the open-ended worldview we now share-in which for the first time, "time itself" was to include a past, present and a future, and novelty and progress became conscious possibilities. It was the Jews that taught us the idea that a god could be centered inside our head as a "spirit" instead of outside it as a "monument." Without the intervention of the ten nomadic tribes of Israel, we might still be worshiping idols gods and following the "ways of the wheel." Again Five Stars for Thomas Cahill.
Rating:
Summary: Don't overlook this little book!
Review: Cahill's work in "Gifts of the Jews" is much more literarily entertaining and captivating than Volume I in the "Hinges of History" series. Cahill starts his book by linking Hebrew descendancy to Sumerian culture, which, as some reviewers erroneously assumed, is correct. Although scholars diverge to some extent about Abraham's influences, a Sumerian background has not been openly proved or demonstrated, but it is a plausible theory. I believe Cahill points this out in a footnote, which is fine, but this reader would like to have seen this point preempted within the text itself. Secondly, and this is a warning to conservative Christians and Evangelicals, Cahill's perspective on Biblical inerrancy is VERY LIBERAL (see pages 129-131, 243). Although I am not an Evangelical, I do associate with them daily (I'm a seminary student), and so I would say that the sort of brandish manner which Cahill writes about the text of the Bible and its origins would probably chap the hide of most conservative Christians. Cahill also challenges modern evangelical theology by demonstrating past use of the allegorical method of biblical interpretation, which most evangelicals have abandoned as heretical. Cahill also tries to show that Jewish theological evolution was epigenetic, or that God's revelation to his people was increasing over time, something most liberal theologians condone, but most conservatives do not (even "via media" theologies may disagree with the epigenetic model). All in all, if you're a conservative Christian, you might be offended by this book's contents. Personally, I found this book refreshing and quite praiseworthy of the Jews; a class of people that have been marred and singled out for centuries. This book gives them their due recognition in more ways that one. Cahill convincingly shows that much of Western thought and culture stems from this "little tribe of desert nomads," which he apellates "the dusty ones." I recommend it with 5 stars (if you're open to liberal theology and biblical-cultural interpretation).
Rating: 
Summary: Cliff's Notes for the Old Testament
Review: This is in part a simplified version of the Old Testament for those of us who didn't have to go through Bar Mitzvah; in fact it might be considered a modern version of the Old Testament, with some introductory chapters about the Jews' antecedents, the Sumerians.(As they needed a newer version in King James' day, perhaps we need this one today.) All the major Jewish patriarchs and kings and myths are here; certainly at least some of it must be considered mythological in character. Cahill attempts to explain what is and was unique about the Israeli God as compared to the previous gods; his main point is that previous religions everywhere in the world had been cyclical whereas Jewish history is uniquely historical and allows for progress in the world, including scientific progress. Also, the Jewish religion allowed from the beginning a personal relationship with God, who actually revealed himself and created and influenced history(often, at least in the beginning, in a quite vengeful way)so that the frequent use of the pronoun "I" could be incorporated into the Psalms of David. Beforehand,he claims, there had been no possibility of individual psychology. Cahill's interpretation of the Sumerians' myths of Gilgamesh are interesting and similar to his treatment of Irish prehistoric myths in "How The Irish Changed Civilization" which is also an interesting read.
Rating:
Summary: In the beginning...
Review: Thomas Cahill's second outing as author of the hinge-histories is a worthy follow-up, if a bit more simplistic. This book was a very easy read for me, both in content and in style, and I think the general reader will enjoy this book, too. I am used to, in my seminary training, to having weighty tomes to journey through -- this was a refreshing walk in a park. Unlike his previous subject about the Irish, this book covers a subject on which almost everyone has an opinion, so Cahill's interpretations on the Hebrew Scriptures and history (Old Testament times) will undoubtedly not satisfy everyone. He does a very good job, though, of steering clear of interpretive controversies. He presents this history as a history of what is important in its legacy for us -- no sense in asking questions such as 'Were these really the first monotheists?' &c., because it is a fact that our cultural tendency toward monotheism in the West derives from this band of people. This is the people from whom much of our Western sensibility is derived. 'This gift of the Commandments allows us to live in the present, in the here and now. What I have done in the past is past mending; what I will do in the future is a worry not worth a candle, for there is no way I can know what will happen next. But in this moment--and only in htis moment--I am in control.' The very idea of regulations, justice, and communal living (beyond the whims of the powerful), and of self-discipline exerted from within, rather than from without, derives largely in our society from these writings. Again, it is not worth haggling over who had the earliest codification of regulations and civil laws--those did not get handed down to us as a living, working text. These texts were, in many respects, the informing texts behind much of Western civilisation. He covers the history well, neither discounting the Biblical authority nor assuming that seeming contradictions in archaeological evidence is either right or wrong. Cahill begins with the pre-history of the Jews, talking about the societal, political and geographic realities that would have influenced the ancient Sumerian named Avram, who set out for the land of Canaan. Cahill examines the period in Egypt as being pivotal for societal development, the era of the judges and kings as experimentations with polity, and the diasporic period as one of deepening identity in the face of massive external pressure and, in the end, threat of extermination. This book is a good sequel, and an important work for the non-historian and non-theologian into some aspects of the history of the Jews that are otherwise often overlooked. 'The Jews gave us the Outlook and the Inside--our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact--new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice--are the gifts of the Jews.'
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: This book made me believe more in my religion. It's a great book and I love the author.
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