by
Damien F. Mackey
“Herder has called [Ezekiel] the AEschylus and Shakespeare of the Hebrews …”.
Ezekiel appropriated by the Greeks?
(i) Plato
One instance of this may be Ezekiel’s Merkabah vision, picked up, perhaps, in Plato’s Phaedrus: https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm
THE Chariot Allegory of Plato, which appears in the Phaedrus, is a very important part of the Western — and World — spiritual and philosophical tradition. It presents a rich metaphor for the soul and its journey. Everyone with a soul should read it!
The soul is portrayed as a compound of three components: a charioteer (Reason), and two winged steeds: one white (spiritedness, the irascible element, boldness) and one black (the appetitive element, concupiscence, desire).
The goal is to ascend to divine heights — but the black horse poses problems.
The chariot image arguably supplies a better tripartite model of the human psyche than Freud's divisions of ego, id and super-ego, However the chariot itself is just the beginning; the story of its journeys is a revealing allegory of the spiritual or philosophical life. ….
[End of quote]
Prophet Ezekiel and Plato’s ‘Myth of Er’
Traces of Ezekiel’s famous ‘merkabah’ vision of the wheels within wheels
may perhaps be found towards the end of Plato’s Republic,
in the mysterious Myth of Er.
IMAGE: WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS (Ezekiel 1 and 3)
The prophet Ezekiel tells of what he saw (1:15-17):
As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels, and their construction: their appearance was like a gleaming of beryl; and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved. ….
Ezekiel would encounter these whirling creatures again at the river Chebar, in captivity, when he said (3:15): “I came to the exiles at Tel-abib, who lived by the river Chebar. And I sat there among them stunned for seven days” (note this is exactly what Job’s three friends had done as well, Job 2:13).
Here is the prophet’s full account of it (Ezekiel 3:12-21):
Then the spirit lifted me up, and as the glory of the Lord rose from its place, I heard behind me the sound of loud rumbling; it was the sound of the wings of the living creatures brushing against one another, and the sound of the wheels beside them, that sounded like a loud rumbling. The spirit lifted me up and bore me away; I went in bitterness in the heat of my spirit, the hand of the Lord being strong upon me. I came to the exiles at Tel-abib, who lived by the river Chebar. And I sat there among them stunned for seven days.
At the end of the seven days, the word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die’, and you give them no warning, or speak to warn the wicked from their wicked way, in order to save their life, those wicked persons shall die for their iniquity; but their blood I will require at your hand.
But if you warn the wicked, and they do not turn from their wickedness, or from their wicked way, they shall die for their iniquity; but you will have saved your life. Again, if the righteous turn from their righteousness and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before them, they shall die; because you haven’t warned them, they shall die for their sin, and their righteous deeds that they have done shall not be remembered; but their blood I will require at your hand. If, however, you warn the righteous not to sin, and they do not sin, they shall surely live, because they took warning; and you will have saved your life.
Myth of Er
Now let us see what (as I think) Plato might have done to this inspired text, in the ‘Myth of Er’, at the end of the Republic, with Ezekiel, replaced by the messenger, Er; Er being the soul of a dead person come to life, whereas Ezekiel had been in spirit lifted out of his body. And Er being set apart as a messenger to the dead as they choose their destiny, whereas Ezekiel, set apart as the prophet-sentinel, is amongst the exiled living, calling them to righteousness over evil (Republic, 614):
[Er] said when his soul left its body it travelled in company with many others till they came to a wonderfully strange place, where there were, close to each other, two gaping chasms in the earth, and opposite and above them two other chasms in the sky.
Between the chasms sat Judges, who, having delivered judgement, ordered the just to take the right-hand road that led up through the sky, and fastened the badge of their judgement in front of them, while they ordered the unjust, who carried the badges of all that they had done behind them, to take the left-hand road that led downwards. When Er came before them, they said that he was to be a messenger to men about the other world, and ordered him to listen to and watch all that went on in that place.
As to the Glory of God and the wheels within wheels, a famous image from Ezekiel, Plato again tells of something very similar. It is what he calls the ‘spindle of Necessity’, and is eschatological like Ezekiel.
And the seven day period is there also, as in Ezekiel (Republic, Bk. 10, 615):
‘After seven days spent in the meadow the souls set out again and came on the fourth day to a place from which they could see a shaft of light running straight through earth and heaven, like a pillar, in colour most nearly resembling a rainbow, only brighter and clearer; after a further day’s journey they entered the light and could then look down its axis and see the ends of it stretching from heaven, to which they were tied; for this light is the tie-rod of heaven which holds its whole circumference together like the braces of a trireme [a Greek boat]. And to these ends is fastened the spindle of Necessity, which causes all the orbits to revolve; its shaft and its hook are of adamant, and its whorl a mixture of adamant and other substances. And the whorl is made in the following way. Its shape is like the ones we know; but from the description Er gave me we must suppose it to consist of a large whorl hollowed out, with a second fitting exactly into it, the second being hollowed out to hold a third, the third a fourth, and so on up to a total of eight, like a nest of bowls. For there were in all eight whorls, fitting one inside the other, with their rims showing as circles from above and forming a continuous surface of a single whorl round the shaft, which was driven straight through the middle of the eighth…’.
Er’s “Forgetful river”, where the souls were all encamped (ibid., 620), has probably taken the place of the river Chebar, where Ezekiel was living amongst the exiles. Whereas Er seems to be amongst the dead, Ezekiel - who does in fact have a vision of dead bones becoming en-fleshed again (Ezekiel 37:1-14) - is a prophet to the living, with the portfolio from God to warn the evildoers.
Ezekiel’s account of the good who turn to evil, and the evil who turn to good, may have been picked up in the Greek version as souls choosing in what form they will come back, whether as tyrants or as virtual saints.
Now, Justin Martyr had given consideration to this famous Platonic myth:
The Myth of Er
Justin is quoting from Plato's The Republic book 10. It is the very last section of the Republic where Socrates is relating to Glaucon a story about the fate of souls after death. The story is known as the myth of Er.
A description is given of a man called Er son of Armenius from Pamphylia and his journey into the realm of the dead. In his journey he was shown how Souls were judged, how they had to pay back 10 fold for all that they did on earth. Halliwell introduces the myth.
The myth of Er belongs to a great 'family' of Platonic eschatological visions, whose other members are the myths found in the Gorgias; Phaedo, and Phaedrus... Few will dispute that the interpretation of all these passages must take as primary frame of reference Plato's own attitudes to myth ...Yet the myth of Er contains an especial number of elements ¬- starting with Er’s name itself - which stimulated inquiries into Plato's sources" (Halliwell 1988,169) "the rewards and punishments experienced during human life cannot compare with those which await us after death. Socrates explains the nature of these by relating the story of Er, a Pamphylian soldier who returned to life and told of what his soul had witnessed in the other world" (Halliwell 1988, 169).
Having seen many Er comes to the place where the souls were permitted to choose their next life on earth. This process was overseen by ones who were called the three daughters of Necessity (Thugateras tees Anagkees), being Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos who can be seen in the writings of Hesiod and Pindar. They were first named by Hesiod (Ferguson, 118). They were singing in tune with a Siren which was making a single sound. Lachesis sung of the past, Clotho of the present and Atropos of the future. Our main interest is in Lachesis as it is her words which Justin quotes. She is called the Disposer of Lots or She who allots. Her name can also be an appellative for lot or destiny as in Herodotus (LS 1978, 466). Lachesis sang of the past and when it was time for souls to choose their next life on earth, they would be lined up by a prophet to appear before Lachesis. They could choose their life in order of the lots they received. They would each choose a daimon to go through their life with them. A daimon is sometimes synonymous with a god as in Homer, but sometimes considered inferior as in Hesiod where it is between God and man. In the myth of Er they are attendant (Ferguson, 120) or guardian spirits. We will let Socrates relate the rest of this event:
From the lap of Lachesis he (the prophet) took numbers for drawing lots and
patterns of lives. Ascending a high platform (beema), he began to speak:
“The word of the maiden Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Souls, creatures of the day, here begins another cycle of mortal life and death it brings. Your guardian spirit will not be given to you by lot. You will choose a guardian spirit for yourselves. Let the one who draws the first lot be the first to choose a life. He will then be joined to it by Necessity. Virtue knows no master. Your respect or contempt for it will give each of you greater or smaller share. The choice makes you responsible God is not responsible" -Aitia elomenou. Theos anaitios ….
It is the last four words spoken by the prophet as the word of Lachesis, which Justin Martyr quotes to indicate Plato took them from Moses and uttered {eipe} them.
These then are the four words under investigation. …. Justin's claim that these four words came from Moses to Plato.
[End of quote]
The discussion after this goes beyond our interest. I inserted a part of it here simply to demonstrate that a Platonic Myth, whose origin I think might lie with the prophet Ezekiel, was discussed by Justin Martyr in terms of a possible Hebrew-biblical connection.
There is also an interesting – but rather difficult and perhaps occasionally far-fetched – article in which comparisons are made of the mathematics of Plato and that attributed to Ezekiel: https://www.scribd.com/document/395416431/The-Forgotten-Harmonical-Science-of-the-Bible
The forgotten harmonical science of the Bible
Ernest G. McClain
Here is a portion of it (# 3):
Both Ezekiel and Plato project their arithmetic into similar concentric circles, “a wheel in a wheel,” functioning as the throne of an idealized heaven.
Plato’s analysis of 5,040 fits many of Ezekiel’s metaphors and thus facilitates decoding the sameness and difference between nascent Greek science and traditional Jewish wisdom. This is the cross-cultural ambiance in which Philo was educated and about which he wrote with equal passion for Greek learning and for his own religion, which shared the same models. The music of the synagogue embodied their union and freed his soul to roam where it would. The two musical modes decoded from Bible numerology have proved to be associated historically with the mode of the Torah (Greek Dorian) and the mode of the Prophets (Greek Phrygian) in ways Philo helps us understand; they are the two modes Plato admitted in model cities.16,17
The importance of the priestly 7-year calendrical cycle is emphasized in Ezekiel 39:10 where God insists that after his destruction of Israel’s enemies the country will have no “need to take wood out of the field or cut down any out of the forests” for a period of seven years, “for they will make their fires of the weapons” of warfare. I analyze the tonal content in 5,040 “days plus nights” as furnishing Jewish “weapons” of spiritual warfare not merely on this circumstantial biblical evidence but because this also follows Jewish philosophical precedent. ….
[End of quote]
The Greeks often absorbed Hebrew and Near Eastern culture and civilization, mythology and folklore, and re-presented it as their own.
Every later generation does this sort of thing, of course.
Perhaps it is more true to say that western scholars have given credit to the Greeks - the civilization with which they especially identify (we find Socrates and his friends holding gentlemanly-like discussions, ‘My dear chap …’) - for culture, ideas, inventions, philosophies, laws, you name it, that actually arose from the more ancient nations of the Fertile Crescent (Egypt, Syro-Palestine, Mesopotamia).
Much has been attributed to the Greeks that did not belong to them. Take architecture, for example.
Egyptologist Sir Henry Breasted made the point that Queen Hatshepsut’s marvellous temple structure, “The Most Splendid of Splendours” at Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes, was a witness to the fact that the Egyptians developed architectural styles for which the later civilization of Greeks would be accredited as the originators (A History of Egypt, 1924, p. 274).
(ii) Aeschylus
Is Aeschylus, the so-called “Father of Tragedy”, yet another of such
Greek appropriations, in his case of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel
with whom he is so frequently compared?
The Pulpit Commentary, considering Ezekiel 18:1-4:
The word of the LORD came to me:
“What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
“‘The parents eat sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?
“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die”.
interestingly likens the prophet Ezekiel to “the Greek poet who was likest to him”, to Aeschylus: http://biblehub.com/commentaries/pulpit/ezekiel/18.htm
….
Ezekiel was led, however, to feel that there was a latent falsehood in the plea. In the depth of his consciousness there was the witness that every man was personally responsible for the things that he did, that the eternal righteousness of God would not ultimately punish the innocent for the guilty, he had to work out, according to the light given him, his vindication of the ways of God to man, to sketch at least the outlines of a theodicy. Did he, in doing this, come forward as a prophet, correcting and setting aside the teaching of the Law? At first, and on a surface view, he might seem to do so. But it was with him as it was afterwards with St. Paul He "established the Law" in the very teaching which seemed to contradict it. He does not deny (it would have been idle to do so) that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, i.e. affect those children for evil.
What he does is to define the limits of that law. And he may have found his starting point in that very book which, for him and his generation, was the great embodiment of the Law as a whole. If men were forbidden, as in Deuteronomy 24:16, to put the children to death for the sins of the fathers; if that was to be the rule of human justice, - the justice of God could not be less equitable than the rule which he prescribed for his creatures. It is not without interest to note the parallelism between Ezekiel and the Greek poet who was likest to him, as in his genius, so also in the courage with which he faced the problems of the universe. Aeschylus also recognizes ('Agam.,' 727-756) that there is a righteous order in the seeming anomalies of history. Men might say, in their proverbs, that prosperity as such provoked the wrath of the gods, and brought on the downfall of a "woe insatiable;" and then he adds –
"But I, apart from all,
Hold this my creed alone."
And that creed is that punishment comes only when the children reproduce the impious recklessness of their fathers. "Justice shines brightly in the dwellings of those who love the right, and rule their life by law." Into the deeper problem raised by the modern thought of inherited tendencies developed by the environment, which itself originates in the past, it was not given to Ezekiel or Aeschylus to enter.
[End of quotes]
Aeschylus is thought to have been born around 525 BC, which was also the approximate era (conventionally speaking) of the prophet Ezekiel.
The name “Aeschyl[us]” I would consider to be simply a Grecised version of the Hebrew name, “Ezekiel” of the same phonetics.
And, as we have already found with certain supposed Greek notables (statesmen, philosophers), such as Thales, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Solon – who, I have argued, were actually ghostly representations of real Hebrew geniuses, Joseph, Moses, Solomon - ‘little is known’ about them. To give some examples:
Thales: “Not much is known about the philosopher’s early life, not even his exact dates of birth and death”.
Heraclitus: “Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom”.
Empedocles: “Very little is known about his life”.
And so we read once again, now regarding Aeschylus (my emphasis)
http://www.ancient-literature.com/greece_aeschylus.html
There are few reliable sources for the life of Aeschylus. He was said to have been born in about 525 or 524 BCE in Eleusis, a small town just northwest of Athens. As a youth, he worked at a vineyard until, according to tradition, the god Dionysus visited him in his sleep and commanded him to turn his attention to the nascent art of tragedy.
[End of quote]
That is hardly encouraging!
It is probably, I think, a late recollection of the call of the Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, who certainly lived through a time of great tragedy for Judah, culminating in that greatest of all catastrophes, the Fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh.
Not surprising, then, that we read of Aeschylus as being “like a Hebrew prophet”. Thus, for instance (Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 8-9):
“Aeschylus the prophet, the soldier of the Great War who found Athens [read Jerusalem] becoming estranged, as a generation grew up that knew neither him nor it, wrestling with the problem of World-governance alone like a Hebrew prophet ...”.
And, according to James Orr (The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia): “Herder, with his undeniable and undenied fine appreciation of the poetry of many nations, calls Ezekiel “the Aeschylus and the Shakespeare of the Hebrews” (compare Lange's Commentary on Ezk, 519).
Hebrew Influence Upon Aeschylus?
“Aeschylus seems to have had an intimate knowledge of Hebrew theology,
for instance, he wrote “Prometheus Bound” Wherein he seems to be familiar with the Exodus wanderings, the Law Covenant, and the idea of the Messiah”.
John R. Salverda.
Damien Mackey to John R. Salverda
Dear John
….
The name Aeschylus (“Father of Tragedy”) has struck me as a Greek version of Ezechiel (Eschyl = Ezchil) [i.e., without the Greek ending -us, -os].
And apparently a writer named Herder has actually referred to Ezechiel as an 'Aeschylus':
.... Whedon - Commentary on Ezekiel-Daniel
www.westbrookewesleyan.org/wesleyan-docs/.../WHD_CO08.PDFYou ....
.... by DD Whedon - 2002 .... "Herder has called him the AEschylus and Shakespeare of the Hebrews, while Schiller wished to study Hebrew chiefly because he longed to read Ezekiel in his [language]".
Any ideas there?
….
Dear Damien,
I too hope to loosen up your audience to the idea of a discussion, they think that they have nothing to add, but they could be wrong about that. Sometimes even what a person believes is a trifling remark can spark a significant idea in another. The process of “discussion” can be a very important one.
Now, as to the equation of the names “Ezekiel” and “Aeschylus.” In my opinion they are almost certainly transliterations of the same name. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel lived only about one hundred years before the Greek playwright Aeschylus (conventionally speaking); and the Greek culture and people were heavily influenced and populated by Israelites, in my view.
As to the idea that they might be one and the same person; I would still need to be convinced of that. …. Never-the-less I do have some ideas that do tend to support the notion. Aeschylus seems to have had an intimate knowledge of Hebrew theology, for instance, he wrote “Prometheus Bound” wherein he seems to be familiar with the Exodus wanderings, the Law Covenant, and the idea of the Messiah. With only but a small fraction of what he wrote available to us today, (he wrote about an hundred plays but only less than ten have survived,) it is a bit difficult to tell what he may have been preaching to those ancient Greeks.
So far as I know he was the first Greek mythographer to link “the wanderings of Io” (the Jew), with Prometheus, the creator of man who was “bound” to his mountain (God bound by contract/ covenant to Sinai). Aeschylus has Io, driven by a divinely ordained plague (gadfly) wander to the mountain of Prometheus, where he tells her that he will be freed from his “bindings” (covenant) by a descendant (the Messiah, by whom he means Heracles) of hers, thirteen generations hence.
Re-read my article on Io (at
http://westerncivilisationamaic.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-on-moses-as-hermes.html ) surely Aeschylus was relating traditions that he was fully familiar with.
I hope that this is of some help to you in your researches, but I must say, that Ezekiel seems to be more focused upon the future return of the tribes of Israel to join with Judah (Eze. 37:15).
He does speak of the Exodus (Chapter 20) but not in the terms of God being “bound” to the covenant, to him the people were bound, but broke the covenant. He mentions David (thirteen generations from Abraham) in Messianic terms four times, but usually as a future Messiah who rules over the “re-gathered” Israel. He speaks of a future "peace covenant" without mentioning the dissolution of the old covenant at Sinai. ....
[End of quote]
For Luke the Evangelist’s potential personal involvement with what he describes here:
‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
It is hard for you kicking against the goad’.
Acts 26:14
see my series:
Luke may be Paul’s healer, Ananias of Damascus
(6) Luke may be Paul’s healer, Ananias of Damascus
Luke may be Paul's healer, Ananias of Damascus. Part Two: St. Luke kept returning to Damascus incident
(6) Luke's Repeated References to Damascus
Luke may be Paul's healer, Ananias of Damascus. Part Three: Benedictus "… redacted in a Semitic language"
(6) Luke may be Paul's healer, Ananias of Damascus. Part Three: Benedictus "… redacted in a Semitic language"
Was Luke quoting here from Aeschylus, or perhaps from one or other of the Greco-Roman poets, tragedians or comedians who supposedly used this very phrase, kicking against the goad[s]? Greek: sklhron soi proV kentra laktizein
According to Carsten Peter Thiede (The Jesus Papyrus: The Most Sensational Evidence on the Origins of the Gospels Since the Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2000) on this very point, Luke’s use of the phrase:
This is an unmistakable allusion to one of the most popular cycles of Greek tragedy, the Oresteian trilogy by Aeschylus which is still frequently performed today. In the first of three tragedies, Agamemnon, Aegisthus says to the Chorus (vv. 1623-4): ‘Does not this sight bind you reflect? Then do not kick / Against the goad, lest you should strike out, and be hurt’.
The central point of this passage, the kicking against the goad (pròs kéntra me láktize), occurs in a less recognizable context elsewhere in Aeschylus’ writing, in his tragedy Prometheus (v. 235). It was also used in a similar form … by Euripides in Bacchae (v. 795). Even a Latin comedian, Terentius, employs it in his play Phormio (vv. 77-8): ‘The word came to my mind: For what stupidity it is for you to kick against the goad’ (Nam quae inscitia est? Advorsum stimulum calces).
We can also add the Greek lyric poet, Pindar, to this list of apparent users of this phrase.
We do know that St. Paul himself had quoted from Greek poetry, for example Acts 17:28:
here addressed to the men of Athens.
And it has been suggested that Jesus Christ himself may have been familiar with Greco-Roman theatre from having lived in close proximity to Sepphoris: https://itsgila.com/highlightssepphoris.htm
Seventeen times the word "hypocrites" appears in the Gospels, and three times in the Sermon on the Mount. Where would Jesus, growing up in the small village of Nazareth, have come into contact with “hypocrites,” a Greek word for actors who wore masks, (thus having two faces)? Perhaps five miles away in Sepphoris.
Perched like a bird (tzippor in Hebrew) on a Galilee hilltop, Sepphoris (Hebrew: Tzippori) is an hour’s walk from Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown. During Jesus’ childhood, Sepphoris was the provincial capital of Galilee and the city where the villagers took care of their official business. It had a theater which seated about 3,000 spectators.
Bible scholar and archeologist Jerome Murphy O’Connor believes that after returning from Egypt, Joseph and Mary settled in Nazareth precisely because of its proximity to Sepphoris. After 3 BC, Sepphoris was the center of a building boom, providing work opportunities for artisans such as Joseph.
Did Jesus have a hand building the theater of Sepphoris, just reconstructed for us? Perhaps.
Could he have been a spectator here to a tragedy, comedy or farce? Jesus was an observant Jew and followed the precepts of the rabbis for whom the theater represented a way of life that was external, hedonistic and above all, pagan. Yet undoubtedly Jesus knew what went on at a theater. ….
[End of quote]
But see also my article:
New identification argued for Nazareth
https://www.academia.edu/44103122/New_identification_argued_for_Nazareth
It would seem more likely to me that Jesus, a Hebrew-speaking Jew:
Jesus would have spoken Hebrew with a Galilean accent
https://www.academia.edu/33200844/Jesus_would_have_spoken_Hebrew_with_a_Galilean_accent
would here have been - consistent with his normal practice - referring to teachings from the Hebrew Old Testament, from King Solomon perhaps.
For example:
(Ecclesiastes 12:11): “The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd”.
(Proverbs 13:15): “The way of the unfaithful is hard”.
(Proverbs 15:10): “Stern discipline awaits him who leaves the path”.
