The Biblical Hero:

by Tara Smith

Every human hero, ancient and modern, has a flip side. A weak, impatient man founds a nation; a legendary soldier and leader is destroyed by his own arrogance; a venerated and deeply spiritual king is also deeply deceitful.

In The Biblical Hero (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Elliott Rabin ’86 explores these biblical heroes — Moses, Samson, and David — as well as Esther, Abraham, and Jacob. He compares them to literary heroes and asks why the Bible depicts its heroes less gloriously than other cultures. In so doing, he opens a critical conversation not only about the nature of heroism but also about our inherent need for “human-scale” heroes. Rabin’s original approach to these texts and his reconsideration of these characters yield fresh insights into power, achievement, failure, and identity that are profoundly resonant in our contemporary context.

Rabin, who holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Indiana University, attributes his lifetime interest in the field to his Swarthmore education. Swarthmore professors, he says, “cultivated my unkempt passion for books into a more disciplined study informed by generations of scholars and trained me to look for ways that verbal arts engage with currents in society, philosophy, history, religion, and more.”