Jerusalem and Athens

What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple?

Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out
to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to other
ancient Near Eastern cults. And it was these similarities that might
have drawn the attention of the priestly writers. The word for altar in
Greek (bamos) is virtually identical to the Hebrew (bamah).” Here Biale stretches the evidence, since bamah means no “altar” (Heb. mizbeach) but “high place.” But the verbal connection is still there, and still relevant.

Further: “Biblical
and Greek sacrifices involved both burning and eating, as opposed to
Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Minoan-Mycenaean offerings, which do
not appear to have been burned at all. . . . blood played
only a minor role in Near Eastern sacrifices, but, like the Israelites, the
Greeks required the splashing of blood on the altar and its proper disposal.
As Walter Burkert summarizes: ‘The blood fl owing out [of a
sacrificial animal] is treated with special care. It may not spill on the
ground; rather, it must hit the altar, the hearth, or the sacrifi cial pit.
If the animal is small it is raised over the altar; otherwise the blood is
caught in a bowl and sprinkled on the altar-stone. This object alone
may, and must again and again, drip blood.’”

He cites a vase painting of a Greek sacrifice that “shows a
Dionysian rite in which a satyr wields a knife with a maenad assisting
as the blood pours down into the sphageion or bowl for catching sacrificial blood, perhaps similar to the bowls (aganot – see Ex. 24:6) used
in biblical sacrifice.”

The purpose of blood was similar in both: “As in Israel, blood was used by the Greeks as an agent of purification
(apomattein, to wipe clean). Indeed, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus
made fun of this practice: ‘They vainly purify themselves of bloodguilt
[haimati mianomenoi] by defiling themselves with blood, as though
one who had stepped into mud were to wash with mud; he would seem
to be mad, if any of men noticed him doing this. Further, they pray to
these statues, as if one were to carry on a conversation with houses, not
recognizing the true nature of gods or demi-gods.’”

Biale observes that “the first part
of his statement could just as well describe the use of blood in Leviticus
17 as the agent that purifies or atones for bloodguilt, the second part, attacking
idol worship, sounds as if it comes from a biblical prophet.”

Not all philosophers were so skeptical of Greek blood philosophy: “Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Critias regarded blood as
the soul and the principle of life, quite reminiscent of the biblical ‘the
blood is the life’ and ‘the blood is in the soul’ . . . . For the Greeks, only mortal beings have blood;
the gods, being immortal, do not, possessing instead the mysterious
ichor” (27).