Cyrus H. Gordon Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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
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 competent archeologist can date pottery much as some of us can date cars or dresses of our own century.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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."

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The Sabbath, perhaps the most important labour legislation next to the abolition of slavery, is a Hebrew institution.

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

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

Cyrus H. Gordon
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)

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

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

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

Cyrus H. Gordon
By examining the pottery on any given site you can tell during which periods it has been occupied.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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."

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Babylonian mathematics and astronomy have left an indelible impression on our exact sciences. We still call some of the planets by their Babylonian names in translation.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The excavators cleared out one of the ancient cisterns, and a few of the winter rains sufficed to fill the cistern with enough water to supply the expedition with water for the whole season. This illustrates the possibilities of almost any country, provided the right kind of people are there. With energetic people, the few, but heavy, winter rains and be stretched a long, long way.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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)

Cyrus H. Gordon