Cyrus H. Gordon Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Mesopotamian merchants spread their commercial institutions far and wide, into Western Asia, Egypt and Europe. The ancient inhabitants of Babylonia used the word qaqqadum, 'head', in the sense of 'principal'... our English word 'capital' (via Latin caput [head]) reflects ancient Mesoptamian usage.... our financial system, that reckons with interest on principal, harks back to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
It has been said that the Bedouin Arab is a parasite that lives on the camel, and this to a great extent is true. It is the camel that carries him about; it is the camel's hair that supplies him with both his clothes and his tent; the camel's dung is the fuel of the desert; it is the camel's meat that supplies food for his banquets; the camel's milk is his beverage; and I could go on enumerating the basic gifts of the camel to his Arab master.

Cyrus H. Gordon
For centuries scholars have been forced to grapple with the problem of accounting for the parallels between Greek literature and the Bible. Did Greece borrow from Israel? Or did Israel borrow from Greece? Can the parallels be accidental, do they obliterate the uniqueness of both Israel and Greece?

Cyrus H. Gordon
I hope that the reader will not regard the contents of this book as an escape from the present world but rather as a key part of it.

Cyrus H. Gordon
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).

Cyrus H. Gordon
Solomon was a 'copper king', and all along that Araba, on both sides, we found many copper mines and smelting stations, all attributable to Solomon and his immediate successors.

Cyrus H. Gordon