Cyrus H. Gordon - Greek Quotes

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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.

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

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 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
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
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.

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