Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Walter Mattfeld" <mattfeld AT mail.pjsnet.com>]

Jonathan D. Safren:

I don't know what the author/s of Genesis borrowed/did not borrow from
the Greeks. I do know that the Greeks borrowed from the cultures of the
East Mediterranean.
There's the myth of Venus and Adonis (<'adon, "lord"), for one; Kadmos
(<qdm, "East", for another. And then there's the Ugaritic sea-monster
"Shlyt of the 7 heads" >Scylla of the Odyssey.
Borrowing went both ways.
So one can't make a blanket statement that the structure of Gen-Kings is
taken from Herodotus, Perhaps the opposite is true? He does write about
Gilgamos and about that lazy tribe in Palestine that doesn't work one
day a week.

Dear Jonathan,

I don't deny that ANE motifs were borrowed by the Greeks and appear in their
literature in a different format, as we both know, many fine scholarly
papers and books have been done proving that subject.

My concern is that there are certain motifs that appear only in Genesis and
the works of Homer and Hesiod and not in other ANE works, and I attempt to
create a scenario to account for this anomaly. For me, the Persian period
seems most probable.

As regards your comments about Herodotus- I am not arguing that Herodotus'
work was influencing the Hebrew Bible, that is the position of other
scholars (cf. Wesselius' post on this line of inquiry). I know Noel David
Freedman has also sought to explain parallels between Herodotus and the
Hebrew Bible as well as Van Seters. Personnally, I'm not so convinced that
Herodotus had any direct influence, and am impressed by the arguments
adavanced by the Conservative scholar  (a Baptist)Duane Garrett (cf.
pp.57-64, "Greek Historians and the Pentateuch," in  Rethinking Genesis, The
Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch, Baker Book
House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991, ISBN 0-8010-3837-5).

I do believe, however, that the Jews in the Post-exilic were aware of the
Greeks, and some of their traditions, via the Persian royal court, and
probably developed them in Genesis' motifs.

All the best,

Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld
Walldorf by Heidelberg
Baden-Wurttemburg
Germany