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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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V. Bérard attributed the [Greece and Israel] links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic.... but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them, and indeed the problem itself, into disrepute among critical scholars. The history of the problem has been ably documented by W. Baumgartner...
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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.
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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).
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Traders (like the Phoenicians) carried their methods as well as their wares to Europe by ship.
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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...
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The competent archeologist can date pottery much as some of us can date cars or dresses of our own century.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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The Sabbath, perhaps the most important labour legislation next to the abolition of slavery, is a Hebrew institution.
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The [Judaic] Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native lands.
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The fitness (physical and moral) of kings were serious matters, for they were believed to bring on a corresponding state of land and people.
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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)
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When a new religion supplants an old religion, the gods of the old often survive as the demons of the new.
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The thesis of this book is simply that Greek and Hebrew civilisations are parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterranean foundation.... the evidence is so abundant that our problem is one of selection and arrangement.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely.
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By examining the pottery on any given site you can tell during which periods it has been occupied.
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Cyrus H. Gordon
Born:
June 29, 1908
Died:
March 30, 2001
(aged 92)
Bio:
Cyrus Herzl Gordon was an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages.
Known for:
Bible and the ancient Near East (1997)
Before the Bible (1962)
Lands of the cross and crescent (1948)
Forgotten scripts (1966)
Most used words:
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hebrew
epic
israel
greece
iliad
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people
homer
mediterranean
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