Cyrus H. Gordon - People Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Cyrus H. Gordon Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
It was Yawhism that distinguished the two Hebrew nations from the other Canaanites and it was the great Hebrew prophets who transformed their little 'Canaanite' people into one of the great factors of world history.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Just as Mycenaean civilisation is a development of the Minoan, so too the Philistines who came to Palestine from Caphtor were an offshoot of the same general Aegean civilisation.... until David's victories around 1000 B. C., the Philistines dominated the Hebrews, so that, militarily at least, the Davidic monarchy was the Hebrew response to the Philistine stimulus.... the Achaeans, Trojans, Philistines and Hebrews during the closing centuries of the second millennium belonged to the same international complex of peoples, sharing many conventions and institutions, specifically in military matters.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Transjordan, or Palestine east of the Jordan Rift is not sufficiently known and has therefore been in need of archeological study.... these nations in antiquity belonged to a group of people called the Canaanites. Culturally and linguistically they were practically identical with the Judean and Israelite 'Canaanites' west of the Rift.

Cyrus H. Gordon