Educators From The United States

"There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist—the taxidermist leaves the hide."

"In 1910 our attention was turned to what seemed a possibly useful educational effort against war, inaugurated at Stanford University by its president, David Starr Jordan. I knew Dr. Jordan slightly. His argument for opening the channels of world trade in the interest of peace had helped keep up my spirits when laboring against the tariff lobbies that so effectively closed them."

"Far away in the thirties and forties she (the girl you want to be) is waiting her turn. Her body, brain, her soul are in your girlish hands. She cannot help herself. What will you leave for her? … Will you throw away her inheritance?"

"If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But... our new sources are so rich that we have only begun... The years ahead bid fair to be the most fruitful in the annals of Classical and Biblical scholarship. Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves."

"The prevailing view is simply that the Judges were inspired, not hereditary leaders. But this misses the point; the Judges were normally from the ruling aristocracy, quite like the kings in Homer. ...The kings did not necessarily inherit rulership from their fathers but sometimes did, like Odysseus from Laertes, or Abimelech from Gideon. ...the kings came from the fighting and landed aristocracy..."

"Aristocrats (among Hebrews and Greeks) often had harems that included women of common or even servile origin, as well as well-born aristocratic ladies. Normally, the successors would be chosen from the sons born by ladies; but on occasion those born by servile or common wives achieved the ascendency. In the latter case, tradition could dwell on the phenomenon as "worthy of saga.""

"The central problem of the Greek tragedies is why we suffer so at the hands of God. The movement that evoked Greek tragedy in the fifth century B.C. was spread over the East Mediterranean evoking a parallel response in Israel. ...And as in Greek tragedy, Job deals with the problem of why man suffers so at the had of God."

"Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga."

"The Conquest of Joshua could not have been a primitive assault, because a civilized land like Canaan with well-fortified cities could easily have repulsed an attack that was militarily naïve. ...Spies were sent to search out the land and lay the groundwork."

"The function of reciting (actually chanting—for Scripture and national epic were sung, not read) Pentateuch and Homer at national reunions is the same in both cases. The narrative knits the segments of the nation together telling how they achieved their place in history in the course of a great event (The Exodus or the Trojan War). All of the tribes and their leaders are heroic. The text brings in each tribe by name. ...there must be an honoured place for all."

"The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. ...our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans."

"Scripture makes it clear that unlike the conceptions of Abraham and of Jacob, Isaac was conceived through divine agency. Like the Mycenaean Greek heroes, Isaac could claim paternity at two levels; the human and the divine. ...Normative Judaism has divested itself of this approach to the paternity of heroes, in spite of the tell-tale text in Genesis. Midrash does not hesitate to call Moses half-god and half-man. ...The Church tradition that connects the sacrifice of Isaac with the sacrifice of Christ apparently rests on a sound exegesis, for the sacrifice of Isaac would have meant not only the sacrifice of Abraham's son but of God's."

"The [Judaic] Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native lands."

"Like Helen, Sarah is wonderously fair and ageless. ...Like Helen, Sarah's name means "princess" in normal Hebrew, and "queen" in Akkadian. It is conceivable that (like David afterwards, whose name dāvîd means "leader, chief") her title came to be used as her name."

"Once we recognize the factor of royal epic in Genesis, we see that the Helen-of-Troy motif permeates the Patriarchal Narratives. ...Like Helen and Hurrai, Sarah and Dinah are heroines according to the standards of royal epic."

"The most important document at Ugarit for both Biblical and Homeric studies is the Epic of Kret. It anticipates the Helen-of-Troy motif in the Iliad and Genesis, thus bridging the gap between the two literatures."

"Heroic epic and saga (Indic as well as Greek and Hebrew, etc.) combine action with genealogy. This is necessary because the action is performed by aristocrats who require genealogies."

"The incorporation of... earlier sources does not mean that the Pentateuch or Former Prophets is the work of an editor who pasted together various docuements. Once we view the work as a whole, we see that it is a fresh creation though not a creatio ex nihilo. The same holds for Homeric Epic that has been subjected to the same kinds of modern literary criticism."

"The Book [of Judges] as a whole gives a coherent picture of an era and propounds the thesis that the institutions of pre-monarchic Israel were so chaotic... that centralized, hereditary kingship was necessary."

"Minos has rightly been compared with Moses. Both are greater-than-life-size figures who received the law from the supreme god on the sacred mountain (see Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2: 61 concerning Minos)."

"Only two people in East Mediterranean antiquity developed [parallel tendecies towards] "canonical" Scripture: the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bible. ...Hebrew and pagan Greek scriptures were each considered the divinely inspired guide for life."

"The older cultures did not develop the concept of canonical writings. There is no Bible in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Neither country had a collection of sacred writings that excluded other writings from comparable status. ...there was never an official "Book of the Dead" in Egypt."

"The ancients were not as denominationally minded as we in matters of their clergy. They were more concerned with obtaining services of a bona fide professional member of a priestley guild who was qualified to intercede between mortals and immortals, than with finding a religious leader whose sole qualification was like-mindedness."

"There is a large corpus of magical texts from Babylonia of the Sassanian Era, designed to exorcise demons. In these texts, which are mostly Jewish and Christian, the Indo-Iranian deities called daiva appear as demons. ...the demons of these texts are constantly appearing to women in the form of their husbands, and impregnating them. As a result, the names of the clients are always matronymic because no one could be sure of his paternity. ...both the Greeks and Iranians had such notions."

"When a new religion supplants an old religion, the gods of the old often survive as the demons of the new."

"If the entire aristocracy is of divine descent, Zeus (or El) cannot save the human son without upsetting the order of things. ...Hera reminds Zeus that many sons of gods are fighting around Troy, and that if Zeus spares his son, other gods will do the same for their sons, so that the earthly system will cease (Iliad 16: 445-449)"

"The ancient theory of heroic genealogy... reflects paternity at two levels: human and divine. A man's inheritance comes from his human father, but his qualitative superiority among mortals comes from his divine father. When Odysseus is called Zeus-born (diognēs) this does not mean that the poet has forgotten... that he is the son of human Laertes. ...Zeus is often described as impregnating noble ladies, not so much to gratify his lust for women, but because divine parentage was a necessity among the claims of the aristocracy. Odysseus is a superhuman because he is diogenēs; but he is king of Ithaca because of his human father Laertes. Jesus is divine because of his heavenly Father; but he derives his kingship of the Jews from the mortal Joseph, who was heir to the throne (Matthew I). While normative Judaism has has tried to strip the Old Testament of this phenomenon, vestiges have nevertheless remained in the text."

"The fitness (physical and moral) of kings were serious matters, for they were believed to bring on a corresponding state of land and people."

"The warriors who constituted the aristocracy were awarded land grants to recompense them for their share in conquering the country. Both in Greece and in Israel, the theory of society was basically the same. The conquerors were the fighting and ruling stratum; the conquered natives were degraded to the labouring class. In Sparta the latter were called Helots. In Israel the Canaanites were the "hewers of wood and the drawers of water.""

"The notion of a language of the gods appears in Sanskrit, Greek, Old Norse and Hittite cultures."

"When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely."

"Despite the polytheism of the East Mediterranean nations, monotheistic trends were always present even in such crass polytheisms such as we find in Homer and in Egyptian literature."

"When Zeus' son Sarpedon meets his fate, Zeus expresses grief for his dead son by causing blood to rain (Iliad 16: 459-461). In Egypt, the function of rain is replaced by the Nile which fructifies the soil. Accordingly, the Biblical Plague of Blood (Exodus 7: 19-25) is the Egyptian equivalent of the bloody rainfall in the Iliad."

"Music was an art fostered by the mightiest of heroes. Achilles is represented as entertaining himself with his lyre. (Iliad 9: 185-6). We compare David, the warrior skilled in poetry, singing and musical instruments."

"Epic poetry is divinely inspired (Iliad I: I) and as such is just as true as oracles, and for the same reason. It is no accident that oracles (such as those at Delphi) were enunciated in the same dactylic hexameter as the epic."

"Homeric tradition has its own way of telling us that Minoan/Mycenaean civilisation was intertwined with the culture of the Semitic Phoenicians. Iliad 14: 321-322 makes Phoenix (named after the ancestor of the Phoenicians) the maternal grandfather of Minos. ...Archaeology bears out early cultural connections between the two."

"Historical, sociological, literary, linguistic, archeological and other techniques must be brought to bear when they are applicable to the material at hand."

"That both the Gilgamesh Epic and the Odyssey deal with the episodic wanderings of a hero, would not be sufficiently specific to establish a genuine relation between them. But when both epics begin with the declaration that the hero gained experience from his wide wanderings, and end with his homecoming, a relationship dimly appears. ...when we note that whole episodes are in essential agreement, we are on firmer ground. For instance, both Gilgamesh and Odysseus reject a goddess's proposal for marriage; and each of the heroes interviews his dead companion in Hades."

"Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece."

"The parallels that form the core of this book fit into a historical framework in the wake of the Armana Age during the closing centuries of the second millenium. Prior to the Armana Age (i.e., before 1400 B.C.) Egyptian, Canaanite, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean and other influences met around the East Mediterranean to form an international order, by which each was in turn affected."

"It would be foolhardy to swell the pages of this book with an exhaustive list of Greco-Hebrew differences. Everyone knows that Homer is very different from the Bible."

"The customs of both the Greeks and Hebrews in that heroic age were often alien to their respective descendants in the classical periods. We shall have to bear in mind that the gulf separating classical Israel (of the great Prophets) from classical Greece (of the scientists and philosophers) must not be read back into the heroic age when both peoples formed part of the same international complex."

"Just as Mycenaean civilisation is a development of the Minoan, so too the Philistines who came to Palestine from Caphtor were an offshoot of the same general Aegean civilisation. ...until David's victories around 1000 B.C., the Philistines dominated the Hebrews, so that, militarily at least, the Davidic monarchy was the Hebrew response to the Philistine stimulus. ...the Achaeans, Trojans, Philistines and Hebrews during the closing centuries of the second millennium belonged to the same international complex of peoples, sharing many conventions and institutions, specifically in military matters."

"The text of Homer about the Mycenaen Age with its memories of the Trojan War, and the Hebrew text covering from the Conquest through David's reign, cover ground with much in common geographically, chronologically and ethnically."

"Manslaughter was requited through blood revenge. Accordingly the offender, to escape the avenger, would be forced to flee, cut off from his land and people, at the mercy of strangers far from home. [Examples are] 2 Samuel (14: 5-7)... Iliad a6: 571-574... Odyssey (15: 271-278)... (Genesis 4: 14)... (Genesis 4: 15)"

"The priestly guilds were highly mobile, with the result that cultic practices crossed ethnic lines over wide areas."

"The Greeks viewed the Mediterranean not as a barrier but as a network of routes connecting people who dwelt along its shores. This is familiar to any student of Greece. ...the Hebrews express themselves similarly in passages like Psalm 8: 9 ("crossing the paths of the seas")."

"We absorb attitudes as well as subject matter in the learning process. ...the attitudes tend to determine what we see, and what we fail to see, in the subject matter. This is why attitude is just as important as content in the educational process."

"It seems strange that so many generations of Old Testament scholars, trained in Greek as well as Hebrew literature, have managed to keep their Greek and Hebrew studies rigidly compartmentalised."

"The prevailing attitude (which is gradually losing its grip) may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments... One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start."