John H. Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible is broken up into fourteen chapters. Those fourteen chapters are each part of one of five sections. This book also contains over twenty historical images. Before the introduction, the author gives readers a full appendix of all images used in this published work. The author then gives his acknowledgements followed by a list of abbreviations.
Part 1- Comparative studies The first section of the book is titled comparative studies. This section is comprised of the first two chapters. Chapter one is aptly named history and methods. Chapter two has been dubbed comparative studies, scholarship, and theology. This section …show more content…

On the opposing side of this battlefield is confessional scholarship. Generally, confessional scholarship supports the theological side of the battle. Walton again goes back to the history of this division, by explaining how Darwinian Theory was the catalyst for this great rift in scholarly studies. This chapter then discusses the difference between critical scholarship and confessional scholarship in length. An in depth history of this battle of wits is given as well. One of the specific debates touched on is that of the flood account. The Bibles flood account has shown many parallels to the Gilgamesh flood account and the account in the Atrahasis Epic. However, the validity of this claim lies in the accurate dating of the Book of Genesis. Those on the secular side of this debate generally give Genesis a much later debate than those on the theological side. Scholars are now perplexed with the same conundrum from before. It is a classical version of “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” In this case the argument, the debate is which came first, the Bibles’ account of the flood or these other accounts of the flood? For several pages afterward, comparative study is spoken of in a slightly different context. This time it is explained how comparative study operates in both critical scholarship and confessional scholarship. More specifically, Walton spends a large portion of this idea dedicated to explaining the difficulties