Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>]

> Subject: Genesis and Greek Parallels
> From: "Walter Mattfeld" <mattfeld AT mail.pjsnet.com>
> Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 23:51:45 +0100

>> Peter Kirk:

>> Why do you find a closer model for Genesis in Greece rather than in
>> Mesopotamia?  Is Genesis really so much closer to Herodotus than to
>> Gilgamesh?  Of course it is different from both.

> Genesis' Greek parallels:

> Hesiod claims the gods made man first and later a woman (Pandora),
> just like Adam is made first and then a woman (this is not a
> Mesopotamian motif).  [...both] a contrast to the Mesopotamian
> notions that man was made as an afterthought to relieve the god's of
> toil.  Greek myths have men enjoying a bountiful nature without toil
> until hubris rears it ugly head and man becomes alienated from Zeus,
> a similar notion of hubris exists for Adam.  The first woman,
> Pandora is blamed for mankind's woes because she disobeyed and her
> womanly curiousity opened the forbidden jug releasing evil.  If I am
> correct in dating Genesis to the 5th century BCE, then these motifs
> may have been picked up by Jews at the Persian court, being exposed
> to Greek advisors, mercenaries, spies, physicians, and businessman.

I think the chronology here is somewhat dicey in terms of the
development of Hebrew religion; the Jews did retain aspects of their
own somewhat long-established semi-unrefined mythology, but at this
late date I doubt that Jews returned from exile to Jerusalem would
have been very open to incorporating other nations' semi-unrefined
myths as basic beliefs in the by then increasingly exclusivistic and
monotheistic Jewish religion.  It just doesn't seem like this allows
enough time for foreign mythology to become embedded in the
"archaic"-appearing parts of the Hebrew scriptures.  I think it would
probably be more profitable to look at 2nd. millennium B.C.E. (or
early 1st. millennium B.C.E.) contacts than to posit a specific
literary dependence on Hesiod.


> Subject: Re: Gilgamesh and Genesis
> From: "Jan-Wim Wesselius" <jww AT xs4all.nl>
> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 19:50:43 +0100

> Well, I would say that I solved this old problem (date of the
> Pentateuch) (at least for the final form of the text) in my recent
> article =91Discontinuity, Congruence and the Making of the Hebrew
> Bible=92, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13 (1999) 24-77:
> certainly after the composition of Herodotus=92 Histories (i.e.
> about 440 BCE), from which the general structure of Primary History
> (Gen =96 2 Kings) has clearly been derived (nine books divided in
> three groups: 1, 2-6 and 7-9 with a Great Campaign as main action,
> congruence of the genealogy of the main family and their contacts
> with the starting point of the Great Campaign, and much more)

On the face of it this seems to be a rather grotesque hypothesis.  Why
would a third century B.C. Jerusalem temple scribe (for example) have
even remotely cared about the vast majority of what Herodotus had to
say, much less taken him as as a literary model (but only with respect
to a few abstruse and abstract subtle schematic details of overarching
structure, and _not_ with respect to most aspects of literary style)??
Does this mean that if Herodotus had chosen to digress about Egypt in
the eighth book, the Exodus would have come between the reigns of
David and Solomon????!!!!!  (In fact, probably neither the existing
book divisions of Herodotus' histories, nor the idea of a nine-part
division, are even Herodotus' own...)

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/