by
Damien F. Mackey
“Both Achilles and David are depicted in
connection with performances of epic poetry; both shown playing the lyre. Both
do so as part of their larger frictions with Agamemnon and Saul”.
Bruce Louden
One will find in Bruce Louden’s terrific
article, “Agamemnon and the Hebrew Bible”, a collection of compelling parallels
between the Old Testament and The Iliad.
Louden’s view of things is different from mine insofar as he would regard the
pagan Greek texts as being the model, or inspiration, for the biblical writings
or the “Near Eastern narratives”.
I would see it as the other way around.
But, as Louden admits in his introduction,
this had not previously been his view on influences:
“I have always been a comparatist. I believe that placing
a narrative in context with other relevant texts is one of the more certain
ways to obtain understanding and meaning. As it became increasingly obvious in
the twentieth century, as unexpected discoveries greatly expanded our vistas,
it dawned on some that Near Eastern narratives provide invaluable contexts for
the study of Homeric epic. However, including the Hebrew Bible among the comparanda has greatly lagged behind,
until fairly recently. When I began studying correspondences between Homeric
epic and the Bible fifteen years ago, I assumed the parallels were best
understood as depending on earlier Near Eastern narratives, with which both
Greek and Israelite culture had come in contact. But now I have changed my
view. When one takes into account how widespread the respective languages were,
Greek and Hebrew, which language has earlier documentation, which people enter
the historical record first, which culture was a significant maritime power for
over a millennium, and which established an empire including the other, if some
form of diffusion, direct or indirect, accounts for the correspondences, the
odds are far greater that the direction is from Greek to Israelite culture. I
count myself, then, among those who regard the Hebrew Bible, in part, as a
response to Greek culture”.
Louden also makes what I would consider to be the rather strange
statement that the Hebrew Bible, unlike the literature of the polytheistic
ancient nations, lacks epic.
My favourite epic is the Book of Judith (it’s in my Bible, at least),
which is, unlike the pagan epics, a true story. See e.g. my:
Ignis de
Caelo, Velikovsky and Sennacherib's 185,000
Moreover, Hollywood of the 1960’s had no trouble in finding
biblical epics.
Anyway, Louden writes:
“Why does the Hebrew Bible lack epic? Epic is inherently
polytheistic; and the Hebrew Bible is largely a prose work, which suggests a
closer affinity with archives, as Van der Toorn notes. …. Though lacking epic,
it nonetheless contains allusions to it, and re-workings [sic] of it. We may
have allusions to lost epics in the mentions of Shamgar (Judges) and Nimrod
(Genesis), as well as references to the Book of Yashar. On the other hand,
commentators have argued that the Hebrew Bible consciously applies epic models
of organization and characterization. Mark Smith, in his study of
correspondences between David and Jonathan, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Achilles
and Patroclus, suggests so, “I would sympathize with Cross’s conviction that
biblical books such as Samuel were ‘interpreting the later history of Israel in
Epic patterns.’” …. But which “epic patterns”? Cross no doubt has in mind
Ugaritic or Canaanite epic, and, we can assume, additional Babylonian or
Assyrian narratives. I am making the case for including ancient Greek epic as
well”.
The famous Ugaritic (Ras
Shamra), or Canaanite, corpus of documents has been grossly mis-dated as was
clearly demonstrated by Dr. I. Velikovsky (and others since). As with the
literature, so with the architecture, the pagan culture is always given the
precedence.
But, as is asked in the following Velikovskian article: “How did
these tombs of Ugarit serve as models for Cypriots, Israelites, Urartians,
Anatolian peoples, and Phoenician colonists, if contemporaneity is denied, and
they went out of use and were thus forgotten 500-600 years earlier?” https://www.varchive.org/schorr/ugarit.htm
“In the published volume of Ages in Chaos, Velikovsky made a
strong case for challenging Ugarit’s conventional dates.1 He pointed out
many 500-year problems in the literary texts uncovered at the site, and shows
the difficulty relating to vaulted Cypriote tombs constructed in the style of
those from Ugarit but set 500 years later. For those who have not read or were
not already convinced by the material presented by Velikovsky for Ras
Shamra-Ugarit, perhaps a couple of additional problems will suffice.
Let us again look at the vaulted tombs of Cyprus. Velikovsky has
already mentioned some of these, especially the 7th-century example from
Trachonas. The island of Cyprus has an “astonishing” number of these tombs2
which divide neatly into two series: those assigned to 1550-1200 B.C., and
those beginning in 950 B.C. And continuing for some time.3 The first group
of vaulted tombs (at Enkomi) corresponds closely in date and style to the
Ugaritic tombs, and the type is thought to have come from Syria to Cyprus.4
The second group of Cypriote tombs corresponds to both the Ugaritic and earlier
Cypriote examples, but a 250-year gap separates the inception of the second
group from the end of the Bronze Age tombs. More important than the 250-year
period when no tombs were built in Syria or Cyprus to connect the later tombs
to the earlier ones, is the fact that the earliest tombs of each group (i.e.,
those of 1550 and 950 B.C.), separated by 600 years, are most similar.5
The Cypriote vaulted tombs from 950-600 B.C. seem to undergo the
same development as the Enkomi and Ugaritic tombs with 600 years separating the
corresponding phases. It has been postulated that the later tombs somehow
copied the earlier Cypriote or Syrian ones, but the tombs presumably copied
must have been buried and invisible for some 600 years.6
Similar tombs are found in Jerusalem, Asia Minor, and Urartu of the
9th-7th centuries, and again it is thought that they originated in
9th-7th-century Syro-Phoenicia.7 But the only
tombs of this type in that region, notably the ones from Ugarit, are placed
centuries earlier.
Leaving behind the regions bordering Syro-Phoenicia, we shall travel
briefly to an actual Punic colony. In the 9th or 8th century B.C.,8
a group of Phoenicians sailed to North Africa and founded Carthage. One of the
oldest archaeological discoveries from the site is a late 8th-century B.C. built
tomb “closely related” to the Ugaritic tombs in architectural plan. 9
It is a “faithful miniature rendering” of the Syrian tombs both in design and,
apparently, in arrangements for religious rites.10 It would
hardly be surprising for 8th-century Phoenician colonists to bring over a current
tomb type and burial customs from their motherland. The only similar tomb type
and burial customs that their motherland can produce, however, are put 500
years earlier. By the accepted scheme, the colonists’ ancestors would have been
very familiar with these matters, but by the 8th century B.C., the Ugaritic
tombs must have been buried over, invisible, and forgotten. 11
How did
these tombs of Ugarit serve as models for Cypriots, Israelites, Urartians,
Anatolian peoples, and Phoenician colonists, if contemporaneity is denied, and
they went out of use and were thus forgotten 500-600 years earlier?”
Bruce
Louden has detected some significant parallels between King Saul and King Agamemnon
(op. cit., p. 16-18):
….
“Agamemnon and Saul
We turn, then to Saul. Like Agamemnon in so
many ways, Saul is also a foil. The most powerful man in Israel, he spends much
of his time nervously observing David’s increasing popularity and rise, as
Agamemnon does Achilles. Samuel is not only his almost constant antagonist,
but, behind the scenes, exercises greater influence and authority. We thus have
a set of three analogous characters, Saul and Agamemnon, David and Achilles,
and Samuel and Calchas. The entire saga plays out against confrontation with
the Philistines (1 Sam 14:52), indirect affirmation of its links with Homeric
epic, if we accept that the scribal tradition is aware of the identity of
Philistine and Greek culture (though modern audiences are not).
Both Saul and Agamemnon are qualified
warriors, capable of epic achievements on the battlefield. Agamemnon has his aristeia [greatest
moment] in Iliad 11; 1 Samuel 11:6 presents us with an
equivalent scenario for Saul, “the Spirit of God suddenly seized him.” However,
while the motif normally initiates epic acts, as with Jephthah and Samson, here
Saul proceeds to cut two oxen in pieces (perhaps borrowed from Judges 19, the
last pre-king narrative), which recapitulates Agamemnon summoning the Greeks to
reclaim Helen (recounted in Apollodorus E.3.6). After defeating the Amalekites,
Saul erects a memorial to himself (1 Sam 15:12), like an Iliadic hero, and his
overriding concern with kleos, fame.
In his interactions with Samuel, and
subsequent loss of Yahweh’s favor, Saul moves into even closer correspondence
with Agamemnon. After anointing Saul as king, Samuel places the destruction of
the Amalekites under the ban. When Saul fails to carry this out completely, his
relation with Samuel immediately disintegrates. Saul violates the ban not only
by sparing King Agag, but by keeping some of the Amalekites’ choicest possessions
for himself. In so doing he instantiates one of the Iliad’s central concerns, one of Agamemnon’s central
characteristics, and the main cause for Agamemnon’s quarrel with Achilles: he
distributes war winnings in a selfish, arbitrary manner. When Saul proceeds to
set up a monument to himself, he furthers our impression of excessive
self-involvement. The biggest difference with the Iliad in these relations
is Samuel’s more dominant role than Agamemnon’s prophets.
A whole book, I suggest, could be written on
David and Achilles. …. When, for instance, he defeats the Philistine Goliath,
the Philistine’s preliminary arming scene has long been recognized as
conforming in almost every respect to the Iliad’s arming scenes … and should be understood as
referencing all three of its heroic duels, two of which, like that between
David and Goliath, are to determine the entire battle between the opposing
armies. The Iliad’s first duel between Paris and Menelaus
employs a parodic arming scene. In 1 Samuel 17, the about-to-be-defeated
Goliath’s arming scene is also parodic: for all his armor and weaponry he is
easily slain. Of the three duels, that between Hector and Aias in Iliad 7 is far
the closest to the preliminaries in 1 Samuel 17. The climax of the poem, however,
is Achilles’ duel with Hector, which implicitly seals the Fall of Troy.
Additional tensions between Achilles and
Agamemnon suggest they serve as a rubric for Saul and David’s interactions.
After Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon erupts at the beginning of Book 1, Zeus
supports him, not Agamemnon, for the remainder of the epic. In 1 Samuel, the
audience knows David has already been anointed as king, and has Yahweh’s favor,
near the beginning of his saga. After the quarrel, for the next three fourths of
the epic, Achilles does not fight for the Greek army, and in so doing,
indirectly renders significant aid to the Trojan cause.
David, after Saul threatens him repeatedly, goes over to the Philistines, twice
entering into relationships with King Achish, the Achaian (1 Sam 21:10–15).
During the second occasion (1 Sam 27:1–6), having earned the Philistine king’s
trust, David is ordered by Achish to take the field against the Israelites (1
Sam 28). Robert Alter sees the unusual circumstance, an Israelite king working
with the enemy, as supporting the episode’s historicity—why else include such
an ambivalent sequence? …. This may be, yet I suggest it can be understood as
Israelite scribes fashioning David’s character to
… conform to a motif prominent in Achilles’
interactions with Agamemnon, the harm he causes his fellow Greeks, which Zeus
supports, and which is even more prominent in the Iliad.
Both Achilles and David are depicted in
connection with performances of epic poetry; both shown playing the lyre. Both
do so as part of their larger frictions with Agamemnon and Saul. Midway through
Agamemnon’s quarrel with Achilles, he sends an embassy to him, attempting reconciliation.
When they reach Achilles’ tent, the embassy finds him (Iliad 9.186–189)
playing the lyre, singing epic songs, an instance of Homeric epic’s well-known
self-referentiality, or meta-poetics: the subject of his own epic is singing
about other epic heroes. David is also referenced as the subject of something
like epics in the recurring refrain, “Saul struck down thousands, but David
tens of thousands” (1 Sam 18:6–8; 29:5). As Achilles plays to Agamemnon’s
embassy, while the deluded leader attempts reconciliation with him, so David in
his lyre-playing performs before a troubled, anxious Saul. This motif is much
more at home in Homeric epic: both Homeric protagonists, Achilles and Odysseus,
are so depicted.
While Agamemnon and Saul share several other
corresponding motifs, we conclude with how they are both depicted as visited by
an Evil
Spirit. In
Agamemnon’s case the Evil Spirit is more metaphorical. When he makes his public
apology to Achilles for having begun their quarrel, he says it happened because
Zeus sent the goddess, Ate, to delude him (below we also discuss the
deceptive Dream Zeus sends him). When Saul loses his support, Yahweh repeatedly
sends an evil spirit (16:23; 18:10). 1 Samuel combines this motif with the
motif of David playing lyre (1 Sam 16:23), “And whenever an evil spirit from
God came upon Saul, David would take his lyre and play it, so that relief would
come to Saul.” Again, a tricky immortal figure seems more at home in the fully
polytheistic Iliad than in
the monotheistic Bible”.
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