Homer and the Bible

Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age and his Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture , along with ML West’s massive The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth have re-forged the links between the Bible and archaic Greece, much as Cyrus Gordon’s work has done from the Biblical side.

As Stroumsa points out ( A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason ), it’s old news. Comparative studies of Homer and the Bible were critical in the early development of biblical criticism. For most of the early modern writers, though, the comparisons were made in the framework of a biblically-informed account of ancient history.

Early modern chronologists like John Masham concluded that both Greece and ancient Israel were younger than the older civilizations of the ANE and in Egypt (52). In 1658 Zachary Bogan compared common words and phrases in his Homerus Hebraizon (53). For James Duport, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, the parallels were deliberate; Homer was later than Moses and he alluded to, quoted, and parodied earlier biblical texts (53-4).

Along similar lines, Gerard Croese’s Homeros Hebraios claimed that “the authors of the Homeric books were refugees from Palestine who concealed their original traditions within the Greek text. Thus, for instance, the story of the fall of Troy would hide that of Jericho’s conquest, while Ithaca, Ulysses’ fatherland, would stand for Mesopotamia, Abraham’s fatherland. Croese also claimed to identify various allusions to Isaac in the Homeric text” (54). Others suggested a journey in the opposite direction, positing that Homer must have journeyed in the ancient near east and Egypt, picking up Hebraic stories and turns of phrase as he traveled (56).

The Demonstratio Evangelica of 1679, written by Pierre-Daniel Huet, made a broader claim. Stroumsa summarizes: “Huet, an excellent Hebraist, read Hebrew texts for a few hours ever day, according to his own testimony: the Bible, but also the rabbis. For him, the various mythologies in the world represented so many disguised versions of the story of Moses. The Egyptian Thoth, the Greek Hermes, the Roman Mercury, the German Wotan, the Gaul Tautates, Osiris, Bacchus, Adonis in Arabia where Moses sojourned, and many other gods, were all masquerades of Moses” (56).

Same Bochart likewise attempted to place ancient Greek and ANE religions and myths in a biblical story. In Geographia Sacra and Phaleg , he attempted to trace the multiple civilizations of the ancient world back to the division of the world after Babel.

Others used the parallels to help explain the Bible. Thunder accompanying a theophany appeared in the Odyssey as well as in Exodus. From such parallels, one author concluded that “without a significant knowledge of Antiquity, it is not possible to understand correctly various passages of the Holy Writ” (54).