Cyrus Herzl Gordon Quotes

The text of Homer about the Mycenaen Age with its memories of the Trojan War, and the Hebrew text covering from the Conquest through David's reign, cover ground with much in common geographically, chronologically and ethnically.

The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. ...our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans.

Solomon was a 'copper king', and all along that Araba, on both sides, we found many copper mines and smelting stations, all attributable to Solomon and his immediate successors.

That Homeric epic and the earliest Hebrew poetry were the results of long and rich developments should have been apparent to anyone who realizes that artistic perfection is never created ex nihilo.

When a new religion supplants an old religion, the gods of the old often survive as the demons of the new.

Transjordan, or Palestine east of the Jordan Rift is not sufficiently known and has therefore been in need of archeological study. ...these nations in antiquity belonged to a group of people called the Canaanites. Culturally and linguistically they were practically identical with the Judean and Israelite 'Canaanites' west of the Rift.

There is a large corpus of magical texts from Babylonia of the Sassanian Era, designed to exorcise demons. In these texts, which are mostly Jewish and Christian, the Indo-Iranian deities called daiva appear as demons. ...the demons of these texts are constantly appearing to women in the form of their husbands, and impregnating them. As a result, the names of the clients are always matronymic because no one could be sure of his paternity. ...both the Greeks and Iranians had such notions.

The older cultures did not develop the concept of canonical writings. There is no Bible in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Neither country had a collection of sacred writings that excluded other writings from comparable status. ...there was never an official "Book of the Dead" in Egypt.

Archeological discoveries at sites like Ugarit prevent us from regarding Greece as the hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, or Israel as the vacuum-packed miracle from Sinai.

The priestly guilds were highly mobile, with the result that cultic practices crossed ethnic lines over wide areas.

Music was an art fostered by the mightiest of heroes. Achilles is represented as entertaining himself with his lyre. (Iliad 9: 185-6). We compare David, the warrior skilled in poetry, singing and musical instruments.

The [Judaic] Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native lands.

Homeric tradition has its own way of telling us that Minoan/Mycenaean civilisation was intertwined with the culture of the Semitic Phoenicians. Iliad 14: 321-322 makes Phoenix (named after the ancestor of the Phoenicians) the maternal grandfather of Minos. ...Archaeology bears out early cultural connections between the two.

It has been said that the Bedouin Arab is a parasite that lives on the camel, and this to a great extent is true. It is the camel that carries him about; it is the camel's hair that supplies him with both his clothes and his tent; the camel's dung is the fuel of the desert; it is the camel's meat that supplies food for his banquets; the camel's milk is his beverage; and I could go on enumerating the basic gifts of the camel to his Arab master.

The warriors who constituted the aristocracy were awarded land grants to recompense them for their share in conquering the country. Both in Greece and in Israel, the theory of society was basically the same. The conquerors were the fighting and ruling stratum; the conquered natives were degraded to the labouring class. In Sparta the latter were called Helots. In Israel the Canaanites were the "hewers of wood and the drawers of water."