A side from the stories of Noah and Jonah, two chapters of Ezekiel, and a handful of passages in the Psalms and Job, sailors receive very little notice in the Old Testament. But in The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times, Raphael Patai contends that sea travel was no rarity for the Children of Israel. Rather, once they gained access to the coast, the Hebrews “learned to use the sea as a path to other lands in a manner no different from that of other circum-Mediterranean cultures.”

Raphael Patai, who died in 1996, was an anthropologist, a Talmudic scholar, and an ordained rabbi who wrote more than thirty books — large, definitive studies with such titles as Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, The Kingdom of Fordan, The Messiah Texts, and The Jewish Alchemists. In Gates to the Old City he compiled a major compendium of Jewish legends, while his Hebrew Goddess, a scholarly investigation of the persistence of the mother goddess in Talmudic and cabalistic guises, informed Robert Graves’s more widely known study, The White Goddess. (Graves and Patai subsequently collaborated on a book about Hebrew myths.)