The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Classics: Horace on Gratitude

Epicurus wrote an essay, now lost, on gifts and graces (peri doron kai charitos), and Norman DeWitt calls Horace’s epistle 1.7 to Maecenas a “sermon” on the theme of Epicurus’ essay.  He commends the generosity of Maecenas, contrasting him with a proverbial “Calabrian host” who urged a guest to take as many pears as he pleased.  ”I’m as grateful as if I’d been sent away weighed down,” says the recipient, to which the hose replies, “As you wish: you’re leaving them for the pigs to guzzle.”

Hardly a gift that inspires gratitude. Horace comments that “Lavish fools make gifts of what they despise and dislike,” and observes that the benefactor’s attitude toward his gift can only provoke ingratitude from the recipient: “They yield, and will forever yield, a crop of ingratitude.”  Giving must be generous, but it must also be wise, and wisdom in giving  manifests itself in two ways: The wise and good must be “ready to help the worthy,” and they must also know “how real and false coins differ.”  This latter point is not entirely clear: Horace apparently believes that givers must know the real value of their gifts, neither overestimating nor underestimating their value.  And they must also be careful to give gifts that are desirable – not pears destined for the pig sty.  Presumably too the wise man will be careful to distinguish between true and false worthiness in the recipient.

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Classics: Carpe Diem

This is the doctrine of Epicurus, but in a 1937 article in the American Journal of Philology, Norman DeWitt places this slogan in the context of that slogan in the context of the Epicurean doctrine of gratitude.   He cites Seneca’s summary of the Epicurean view that “The life that lacks wisdom is void of gratitude and filled with apprehension; its outlook is entirely toward the future.” (Stulta vita ingrata est et trpida; tota in futurum fertur.)

DeWitt explains that the positive flip side of this negative statement is the “principle that the wise man is grateful for the gift of each new day and lives in the present,” and adds: “Although the elaboration of this doctrine is not preserved in any of the extant remains of Epicurus, one might venture the conjecture that it found a place in the essay On choice and avoidance in the following shape: ‘Do not try to know the future but make the best possible use of each day as it comes.’  This is the pattern, at any rate, into which Horace throws the advice to the mythical Leuconoe: Tu ne quaesieris . . . carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.”

Seizing the day doesn’t mean ignoring the past.  For Epicurus, it means the opposite.  It means accumulating a store of memories from the past that enable one to live in daily gratitude for benefits received.

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Classics: Archimedes Palimpsest

In the Best-of-2011 edition of the TLS, Mary Beard casts her vote for The Archimedes Palimpsest, which she describes as follows: “This publishes a thirteenth-century prayer book, made up – as has long been recognized – out of earlier manuscripts. An international project has deployed all the most up-to-the-minute, hi-tech imaging devices to decipher the earlier classical texts that lie under the prayers: these include ‘new’ treatises by the third-century bc mathematician Archimedes (including one apparently known as a ‘Stomachion,’ or ‘Bellyache,’ which was the classical Greek word for ‘brain-teaser’); and some unknown speeches by the Greek orator Hyperides. But the amazing images in the book, revealing how the decipherment has been pulled off, are as remarkable as the contents.”

Classics: Zeusophany

A description of war in heaven from The Fall of Troy by Quintus of Smyrna sounds familiar to Bible readers:

“Yet men feared not, for naught they knew of all

That strife, by Heaven’s decree.  Then her high peaks

The Gods’ hands wrenched from Ida’s crest, and hurled

Against each other: but like crumbling sands

Shivered they fell round those invincible limbs,

Shattered to small dust.  But the mind of Zeus,

At the utmost verge of earth, was ware of all:

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Classics: Proto-Homers

Gordon summarizes epics that previewed the Homeric epics in quite direct ways.  The “Ugaritic Legend of Kret is of Cretan derivation as the name of the hero indicates.  Like the Iliad, the story concerns a war waged so that a king might regain his rightful wife who is being withheld from him, in a distant city.  This theme is found nowhere else among known texts in any language prior to our East Mediterranean tablets of the Amarna Age.  It is alien to the older extant literature of  Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

For the Odyssey, he points to the Egyptian story of Wenamon, who “was sent on a mission to Byblos.  Like Odysseus, he traveled by ship on the East Mediterranean.  En route, he had misadventures and escapades at Dor, south of Haifa.  After fulfilling his mission . . . , he wants to go home go Egypt.  Pursued by enemies, he is forced to sail to Cyprus, where he seeks protection from the Island Queen.”  Though the text breaks there, we are left with ‘the clear inference that he at last got home again.”

Thus, the detailed parallels between Homer and earlier literature are not accidental but genetic, since “both as whole entities, and, at the same time, in innumerable details, there is demonstrable agreement.”  On the other hand, “No comparable array of parallels can be made between Homeric Epic and the pre-Amarna literatures of Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

Bible Classics: Epic, Nation, Cosmos

In his dense 1967 monograph on Homer and the Bible, Cyrus Gordon argued that the Iliad was written not for the sake of art only but to inspire the imagination of a Greek nation: “it does not divide Greek from Greek.  The Trojans and their allies are treated with as much decorum and honor as the Achaeans and their allies.  Moreover, in the Catalogue of Ships and in scattered descriptions of heroes (on both sides) and their genealogies, satisfaction is given to all the elements of the Hellenic world: in Greece, Asia Minor, and the islands.  Pilgrims from widely scattered areas, attending the festivals where the Iliad was read, could listen with pride to the glories of their own epic hero, no matter whether they were Ionian, Cretan, or Peloponnesian.  The Iliad tells how once the Greek world had participated in the glorious and manly Trojan War; listening to the Iliad could only inspire the entire Greek people with heroic sentiments and the vision of nationhood.”

The Pentateuch and especially the Patriarchal narratives, he suggests, had the same function for Israel, as Ugaritic myth did for Ugarit.  He concludes,  ”Israel, Greece and Ugarit had texts for the great problem in that part of the world: national union.”  Yet, he goes on to indicate how different the Pentateuch is from the other epics: “It is infinitely more many-sided than any other national epic of any age.  But perhaps its most distinctive feature is its universal framework.  Genesis leads up to the Patriarchs with the story of the Creation and the peoples of the world, showing how Israel fits into the broad scheme of things.”  Even in form of its “national epic,” Israel is evidently not merely a nation for itself, but a nation for the life of the world.

Classics: Ancient Model

In the preface to his controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1), Martin Bernal describes how he moved from Chinese studies, through study of Indo-China to a study of Judaism and Hebrew and finally to comparative studies on Semitic and Hellenic language and culture.  He found a large number of remarkable parallels between Hebrew and Greek, and concluded that “this number of parallels is not normal language without contacts with each other.”  He realized too that “Hebrew/Canaanite was not merely the language of a small tribe, isolated inland in the mountains of Palestine, but that it had been spoken all over the Mediterranean, wherever the Phoenicians sailed and settled.”

He estimated that about a quarter of Greek vocabulary could be derived from Semitic sources, and another 40-50% from Indo-European, but that left a large proportion whose source was yet to be discovered.  When he began a study of Ancient Egyptian, the last piece of his puzzle clicked into place: 80-90% of Greek vocabulary could be accounted for from this triple source, Semitic, Indo-European, and Egyptian.

What inspired his study, however, was the question, Why am I the first to notice this?  And the answer is, that he wasn’t.  By a long shot” ”I was staggered to discover what what I began to call the ‘Ancient Model’ had not been overthrown until the early 19th century, and that the version of Greek history which I had been taught – far from being as old as the Greeks themselves – had been developed only in the 1840s and 50s.”  The tendency to overlook Semitic contributions to the development of Greek culture he attributed to the anti-Semitism of 19th-century classics studies, and the marginalization of Egypt he thought was a reflex of “Northern European racism.”

Classics: Greek Mythology

If there was any doubt before, it has become very clear in recent scholarship that Greek mythology is indebted to Ancient Near Eastern predecessors.  The most massively detailed treatment of this point in recent years is ML West’s The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, from which the following points are taken.

We start with the obvious: In Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, Hittite, and Greek mythology, “the gods appear as a society of individuals, some male, some female, similar to human beings in form, speech, psychology, and social arrangements, but far surpassing them in power.”  Each of the gods has a particular function or specialty: “the weather- or storm-god, the sun-god, the god of war, the goddess of love, a goddess . . . who delights in battle, a divine messenger, and a divine smith.”  These gods have a chief, which in Greek is Zeus.

Not only is the general overview the same, but the titles are frequently reused.

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Classics Philosophy: Descent of Poiesis

In his introduction to Plato: Timaeus (Focus Philosophical Library), Peter Kalkavage writes that Timaeus’ “likely story . . . depicts making, poiesis, as an activity that starts with the highest things and proceeds to the lower.” In that is contained all the pathology and pathos of Western philosophy and theology.
If poiesis is a descent, then the move from mind to matter is a descent; the move from conception to execution is not fulfillment but failure; the move from individual to community is a decline; the move from inner to outer is tragic; the move from possession to sharing is a loss; the move from contemplation to action is calamitous. Language is less than thought, poetry than science. If poiesis is a descent, then change is evil, creation is deterioration, and to be a human is to be fallen. If poiesis is a descent, the end can never recover, much less surpass the beginning, and the Last Adam is lower than the First.

Classics: Aryans and Hellenists

Summarizing the work of Martin Bernal, Assmann says that “the Philhellenic movement in German Romanticism was inextricably combined with Judeophobia and Egyptophobia. This new image of Greece was instrumental in shaping a new image of Germany. The ‘Aryan myth’ had a big share in this retrospective self-modeling, along with Herder’s concepts of national genius and originality.”

Gives one pause.

Classics: Silent reading

It is often said that silent reading was virtually unknown in antiquity.  Not quite true argued Bernard Knox.  According to another scholar’s summary of his argument: “Knox adduced two examples from fifth-century Attic drama in which silent reading actually takes place on stage before the audience. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Theseus notices the letter which is tied to the hand of his now dead wife. He opens it, the chorus proceeds to sing several lines, and then Theseus bursts out in a cry of grief and anger (lines 856-74). As Knox says, ‘Clearly he has read the letter and read it silently—the audience watched him do so.’”

Further: “The other passage comes from the prologue of Aristophanes’ Knights. There, a Demosthenes opens a writing-tablet containing an oracle and while looking at it he continuously expresses his amazement at its contents, asks for more drink but does not tell what he is reading. His partner presses him with demands for information, which Demosthenes finally gives (lines 116-27). Both passages make sense only if we infer that both Theseus and Demosthenes are reading silently.”  Knox himself concluded that “for fifth and fourth century Athens . . . silent reading of letters and oracles (and consequently of any short document) was taken completely for granted.”

Frank Galliard, reviewing the evidence in a 1993 JBL article, concludes:

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Classics: Rome and the stranger

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli notes that a great empire requires people to inhabit it, and goes on to explain the two methods for increasing populations: “This may be effected in two ways, by gentleness or by force. By gentleness, when you offer a safe and open path to all strangers who may wish to come and dwell in your city, so as to encourage them to come there of their own accord; by force, when after destroying neighbouring towns, you transplant their inhabitants to live in yours. Both of these methods were practised by Rome, and with such success, that in the time of her sixth king there dwelt within her walls eighty thousand citizens fit to bear arms. For the Romans loved to follow the methods of the skilful husbandman, who, to insure a plant growing big and yielding and maturing its fruit, cuts off the first shoots it sends out, that the strength remaining in the stem, it may in due season put forth new and more vigorous and more fruitful branches.”

Rome’s “gentleness” enabled the empire to expand beyond anything that Athens or Sparta achieved:

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Classics: Alexander v. Gog

In the thirteenth-century Nestorian work, The Book of the Bee, we find an account of Alexander’s battle with, among others, Gog and Magog.  A nineteenth-century translation by Earnest Budge is available online, and the relevant section reads:

“When Alexander was king and had subdued countries and cities, and had arrived in the East, he saw on the confines of the East those men who are of the children of Japhet. They were more wicked and unclean than all (other) dwellers in the world; filthy peoples of hideous appearance, who ate mice and the creeping things of the earth and snakes and scorpions. They never buried the bodies of their dead, and they ate as dainties the children which women aborted and the after-birth. People ignorant of God, and unacquainted with the power of reason, but who lived in this world without understanding like ravening beasts. When Alexander saw their wickedness, he called God to his aid, and he gathered together and brought them and their wives and children, and made them go in, and shut them up within the confines of the North. This is the gate of the world on the north, and there is no other entrance or exit from the confines of the world from the east to the north. And Alexander prayed to God with tears, and God heard his prayer and commanded those two lofty mountains which are called ‘the children of the north,’ and they drew nigh to one another until there remained between them about twelve cubits. Then he built in front of them a strong building, and be made for it a door of brass, and anointed it within and without with oil of Thesnaktîs, so that if they should bring iron (implements) near it to force it open, they would be unable to move it; and if they wished to melt it with fire, it would quench it; and it feared neither the operations of devils nor of sorcerers, and was not to be overcome (by them). Now there were twenty-two kingdoms imprisoned within the northern gate, and tbeir names are these. . . .

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Classics: Alexander’s Mission

According to Plutarch’s Fortunes of Alexander (329b-d), Alexander wisely rejected the advice of Aristotle, which was “to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and kindred, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals.”  Aristotle’s advice would have been disastrous: “to do so would have been to cumber his leadership with numerous battles and banishments and festering seditions.”

Besides, Alexander was convinced that he had a universal mission: “as he believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor to all, and as a mediator for the whole world, those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered by force of arms, and he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men’s lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them all consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth, as their stronghold and protection his camp, as akin to them all good men, and as foreigners only the wicked; they should not distinguish between Grecian and foreigner by Grecian cloak and targe, or scimitar and jacket; but the distinguishing mark of the Grecian should be seen in virtue, and that of the foreigner in iniquity; clothing and food, marriage and manner of life they should regard as common to all, being blended into one by ties of blood and children.”

Where did Alexander get that vision of a cosmopolitan future?

Classics History: Origins of Charity

In 1943, Hendrik Bolkestein published his dissertation in a German translation, Wohltatigkat und Armenflege im  vor-christlichen Alterlsum: Ein Beitrag zum Problem “Moral und Gesellschaft.  According to the reviewer in The Classical Journal, Bolkestein’s thesis was that Greek and Latin terms thought to refer to “charity” have a very different meaning in their original settings.

Of philanthropia, he argued that “during classical times meant decent respect for one’s fellows, an attitude of willingness to perform the reciprocal favors people in a society of equals perform for each other as occasion requires. It was not used to denote a relationship between the rich and the poor at all in the period of classical Greece.”  Likewise “pity” (eleemosune) ”meant insight or consideration  for one’s peers as misfortune overtook them, such as illness, loss of friends, defeat in battle. It had no usage corresponding  to our employment of  the word eleemosynary, giving alms to the poor. In  fact, Bolkestein raises the question of whether there is any word in classical Greek corresponding  to our word alms.”

The notion of charity as we think of it comes, somewhat paradoxically, from autocratic polities to the east.

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Classics: Greek Holocausts

Greeks sacrificed to share a meal with the gods, but Jane Harrison (in her classic Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge Library Collection – Classics)) found another sort of sacrifice lurking in the dark corners of Greek religion.  According to Harrison, “un-eaten sacrifices are characteristic of angry ghosts demanding placation and of a whole class of underworld divinities in general.”

This is significant in itself.   Greek sacrificial procedures included what Harrison calls “rites of riddance” for the chthonic gods.  Sacrifice  warded off dangerous threats, the underworld gods and ghosts.   More importantly, Harrison’s argument is that the Olympian rites were intertwined with and overlaid by the rites of riddance, rites that placated and pacified the dead.  Summarizing her conclusions about the festival of Diasia, she writes, “The cult of the Olympian Zeus has overlaid the cult of a being called Meilichios, a being who was figured as a snake, who was a sort of Poutos, but who had also some of the characteristics of the Erinys; he was an avenger of kindred blood, his sacrifice was a holocaust offered by night, his festival a time of ‘hilly gloom’ . . . The cult of Meilichios is unlike that of the Olympian Zeus as described in Homer, and the methods of purification characteristic of him are wholly alien.  The name of the festival means ‘the ceremonies of imprecation.’”

Paul said the Gentiles sacrifice to demons.  The Greeks might well have agreed.

Classics: Greek Sacrifice

Vernant (The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks) writes of Greek sacrifice, “Because it is directed towards the gods and claims to include them with the group of guests in the solemnity and joy of the celebration, it evokes the memory of the ancient commensality when, seated together, men and gods made merry day after day at shared meals.  However, if in its intent sacrifice hearkens back to these far-off times of the golden age when, sharing the same food, men still lived ‘like gods,’ far from all evils, work, disease, old age, and women, it is no less true that sacrifice is a reminder that these blessed times when men and gods sat down together to feast are forever ended.  The ritual sets the incorruptible bones aside for the gods and sends them, consumed by the flames, on high in the form of fragrant smoke and gives men the meat of an already lifeless animal, a piece of dead flesh, so that they may satisfy for a moment their constantly awakening hunger. . . . The alimentary rite that brings men into contact with the divine underscores the distance that separates them.  Communication is established by a religious procedure that in reminding men of the Promethean fault emphasizes the insurmountable distance between men and gods.”

Not unlike Israel, whose repeated sacrifices are a constant reminder that the blood of bulls and goats does not take away sin, a constant reminder that only animals transformed into smoke are capable of crossing the barriers into the presence of Yahweh.  Yahweh did not leave the Greeks without a witness.

Classics: Heroes and Ancestors

Greeks also seem to have practiced some form of ancestor cult and, perhaps related, a cult of heroes.  In a detailed discussion of the archeology of the cult of the dead in early Greece in the American Journal of Archeology, Carla Antonaccio summarizes the evidence that she wishes to test by archeological evidence:

“Although the Greeks did speak of ancestors using a variety of terms, there is less written evidence for a cult of ancestors than for hero cult. In the historical period, the Greeks practiced what Humphreys calls ‘memorialism’ rather than ancestor worship; they were motivated (at least when they write down their thoughts on the subject in the Archaic period and after) by a desire to be remembered by family and passersby. The Greeks of historical periods, however, did not routinely immortalize or divinize their family dead. Moreover, for most Greeks genealogies did not articulate the generations of the dead or structure the relations of the living. Yet, as discussed already, several scholars have proposed that ancestors were local and familial, the founders of a clan, for example, and that their descendants maintained a cult at their graves. Famous figures could receive worship as both ancestors (family) and heroes (community), either in the same or different places. Ancestor cult was suggested as the original model; when some ancestors became heroes, the practice became more general, or some originally unheroic ancestors were elevated to heroic status after the cult of heroes had taken hold. Heroes, then, could be considered as ancestors, especially when claimed by members of an elite; Nagy, too, observed that heroes could be the completely unhistorical ancestors of a kinship group, like a genos, and he proposed that hero cult grew from worship of ancestors; hero cult was a ‘revival of a continuous heritage.’ For Farnell, the earliest clear-cut evidence for ancestor cult was only sixth century in date, and he denied that the Greeks generally worshipped the dead. Since the early work of Rohde, Farnell, and others, ancestors all but dropped out of the discussion until the last 10 years. For this the extension of hero cult to Mycenaean tombs with the increase of archaeological evidence is largely responsible.”

Classics: Cult of the dead

In a 1973 article in the journal Iraq, Miranda Bayliss reviews the evidence for a cult of the dead in ancient Assyrian and Babylon

Little evidence survives a general “cult of deceased kin” except among royal families.  For others, most of the evidence involves dealing with ghosts that torment their kin and others.  “Just as the Mesopotamian cult of the gods entailed the provision of their ‘physical’ needs, particularly the provision of regular meals placed as offerings in front of their images, so also the ghosts of the dead required provision of their needs.”  Ghosts were believed to have superhuman powers like those of demons, and ghosts and demons are sometimes compared in the incantation texts.  Given their powers, ghosts were capable of affecting the living.  Propitiatory rituals were needed to keep ghosts under control and to protect the living from their attacks.  There were also, apparently, funerary cults, but these did not extend any further back than grandparents.

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Classics: Greek idols

Though the Greeks built temples for a variety of reasons, housing and serving the cult image of a god was one of the motivations for building a temple in the first place.  John Pedley (Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World) writes that some temples “seem to have been purpose-built as houses for ancient venerable images with special powers, or for sheltering new cult images; both temples and images were costly offerings from the city to the deity concerned,” a kind of corporate sacrifice to the god.

Among the celebrated images were the Athena Parthenos that was in the fifth-century Parthenon, and the Zeus of Olympia, both by the sculptor Pheidias.  Pedley writes, “These were gigantic statues, gigantic in scale and in cost – the Athena was about ten meters tall and used about a ton of gold – intended to strike awe into the visitor, and sending messages about skill and power and wealth.  The materials, the ivory and gold, of which these statues were made spoke of the height of luxury, and of the great investment of wealth that had gone into them.”  Earlier status had been made of wood, and even later some temples made wood figures: “Pausanias saw several, including an over-life-size Hermes in Arkadia, made of juniper.”  In a temple on Crete, a “local community built a small one-room temple with an interior hearth and a low stone bench against the back wall.  On this bench they placed a trio of bronze and wood figures that have been interpreted as cult statuettes.”

He offers a number of other specific examples of civic dedications of cult figures to the gods: “In the sixth century the Naxians dedicated a marble sphinx atop a tall marble column in the sanctuary at Delphi, and the Argives two kouroi; in the fifth the Messenians dedicated the marble Nike, the work of the sculptor Paionios, in the Sancutary of Zeus at Olympia.  In the fourth, the Knidians dedicated the stunning Aphrodite . . . , a work of Praxiteles.  This statue presented a fullscale female nude for the first time . . . She stands naked, caught in an apparently defense pose, and it is her commanding sexuality open stated, her nakedness, that caused such a stir.  The original stood in an open shrine visible from every side.  Now for the first time her beauty became accessible and tangible, a far cry from the austerity of classical Heras or Demeters.”

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