imm brothers in their Kinder- and Hausmärchen in 1822 as "a literary form concerning stories of gods, which was to be distinguished from other literary types such as the legend and fairy tale" (14-15). Within the realm of biblical research, this form-critical approach was refined by Gunkel in the early twentieth century, maintaining that "myths
. . . are stories about gods. They are distinguished from sagas where the active persons are human" (15). Childs also sees this approach as inadequate for studying myth in the Old Testament for two reasons. First, it too narrowly defines myth as a literary product and fails "to penetrate to the essence of the myth" (14-15). Second, if myth is "misunderstood" as merely stories of gods, it is necessarily incapable of finding a place in the Hebrew Bible since the religion of the Bible is purely monotheistic (15).
Instead of accepting one of these two approaches over the other, Childs posits that the definition of myth "should be first of all a phenomenological one" if one is to conduct useful research. For this reason, Childs concludes that philosophical, historical, form-critical, and aesthetic definitions are not suitable as a starting point for tackling the problem of myth in the Old Testament (16). According to Childs, then, myth is the following:
An expression of man's understanding of reality[:] It stems from a thought pattern which differs in decisive points from the modern critical one. This is especially true in regard to the manner in which the world is conceived. Whereas the man of critical mind thinks of the world about him as passive and impersonal, the primitive man conceives of his surroundings as active and living, with powers which influence every area of his life (17).
To the phenomena of nature which encircle the "primitive man" must also be added the "whole mass of psychological stimuli arising from the human subconscious" such as dreams or hallucin...