can be problematic for the modern historical concern that wants to distinguish different historical periods, the merging of historical horizons in traditional storytelling is a readily comprehensible process and is none the worse for representing a practice supposedly uncharacteristic of the modern West. The whole question of the historical age of the patriarchal world, however, needs to be pressed more closely. For we saw that a story such as ch. 22 stands at such a remove from a second millennium