Cyrus H. Gordon - Israel Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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 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
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...

Cyrus H. Gordon