religions Article Rebels in Biblical and Chinese Texts: A Comparative y Study on the Interplay of Myth and History Aryeh Amihay 1,* and Lupeng Li 2,* 1 Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA 2 School of Foreign Languages, Xidian University, Xi’an 710126, China * Correspondence:
[email protected] (A.A.);
[email protected] (L.L.) We collaborated on this study while Lupeng Li was a visiting scholar at University of California, y Santa Barbara, enabled by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). We are grateful to the CSC and to Fabio Rambelli, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB, for their support. At our early stages of research, we were fortunate to receive advice and encouragement from Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Jianshu Liu, and Lydia Lee. We thank them all, as well as the anonymous readers for the journal. Received: 27 July 2020; Accepted: 16 October 2020; Published: 1 December 2020 Abstract: This study offers a new approach for studying biblical myth in two directions: first, by expanding the scope of investigation beyond the clearly mythological elements to other areas of biblical literature, and second, by drawing comparisons to classical Chinese literature. This article thus reconsiders the relationship between myth and history in both biblical and Chinese literature, while seeking to broaden the endeavor of the comparative method in biblical studies. Two examples are offered: (1) the story of Moses’s call narrative and his relationship with Aaron in Exodus in light of the story of Xiang Liang and Xiang Ji in the Shiji; (2) the story of Saul and David in 1 Samuel compared with the story of Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.