Cyrus H. Gordon Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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...

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Prior to 1952, when M. Ventris first published his decipherment of the 'Linear B' tablets from Crete and Greece, showing that they were Greek, everyone assumed that Hebrew was recorded in writing before Greek. But now... we are reading Linear B Greek texts, written before the birth of Abraham (let alone before the date of any known Hebrew text).

Cyrus H. Gordon
Traders (like the Phoenicians) carried their methods as well as their wares to Europe by ship.

Cyrus H. Gordon
For every mound excavated in the Near East, a hundred remain untouched.... most of the excavated mounds have been dug only in small part.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Transjordan, or Palestine east of the Jordan Rift is not sufficiently known and has therefore been in need of archeological study.... these nations in antiquity belonged to a group of people called the Canaanites. Culturally and linguistically they were practically identical with the Judean and Israelite 'Canaanites' west of the Rift.

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

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Homer and Bible... towered above their predecessors and contemporaries.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The nomadic Semite... roves as a herdsman, partaking of Allah's hospitality.

Cyrus H. Gordon
It was Yawhism that distinguished the two Hebrew nations from the other Canaanites and it was the great Hebrew prophets who transformed their little 'Canaanite' people into one of the great factors of world history.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
While Ugarit is revolutionizing the problem of Old Testament origins, the Dead Sea scrolls are doing the same for the New Testament. How fortunate is this generation to live at a time when the sources of our culture—sacred and profane—are illuminated in a brighter light of history than our forefathers imagined possible!

Cyrus H. Gordon
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").

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

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
That Homeric epic and the earliest Hebrew poetry were the results of long and rich developments should have been apparent to anyone who realizes that artistic perfection is never created ex nihilo.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
At Aqaba we were received in the most hospitable manner of the Arabs. We were put up in the police station there. The prisoners, oddly enough, were walking about enjoying apparent freedom. They were used as waiters and servants instead of being shut up in cells.... I could detect no trace of bullying of even of discourtesy to the prisoners.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

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

Cyrus H. Gordon