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Quotes from The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations — Cyrus H. Gordon

1908–2001 United States

← All quotes by Cyrus H. Gordon

37 quotes

If the entire aristocracy is of divine descent, Zeus (or El) cannot save the human son without upsetting the order of things.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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 Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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 Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

The conquerors were the fighting and ruling stratum; the conquered natives were degraded to the labouring class.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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 Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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 Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

The ancient theory of heroic genealogy... reflects paternity at two levels: human and divine.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

Isaac was conceived through divine agency. Like the Mycenaean Greek heroes, Isaac could claim paternity at two levels; the human and the divine.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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 Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

Archeological discoveries at sites like Ugarit prevent us from regarding Greece as the hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, or Israel as the vacuum-packed miracle from Sinai.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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).

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bible.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

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.

The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cyrus H. Gordon (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.