The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths

Why We Would Be Better Off With Homer's Gods

John Heath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429663741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient My ths explores and compares the most influential sets of divine myths in Western culture: the Homeric pantheon and Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Heath argues that not only does the God of the Old Testament bear a striking resemblance to the Olympians, but also that the Homeric system rejected by the Judeo-Christian tradition offers a better model for the human condition. The universe depicted by Homer and populated by his gods is one that creates a unique and powerful responsibility – almost directly counter to that evoked by the Bible—for humans to discover ethical norms, accept death as a necessary human limit, develop compassion to mitigate a tragic existence, appreciate frankly both the glory and dangers of sex, and embrace and respond courageously to an indifferent universe that was clearly not designed for human dominion.

Heath builds on recent work in biblical and classical studies to examine the contemporary value of mythical deities. Judeo-Christian theologians over the millennia have tried to explain away Yahweh's Olympian nature while dismissing the Homeric deities for the same reason Greek philosophers abandoned them: they don't live up to preconceptions of what a deity should be. In particular, the Homeric gods are disappointingly plural, anthropomorphic, and amoral (at best). But Heath argues that Homer's polytheistic apparatus challenges us to live meaningfully without any help from the divine. In other words, to live well in Homer's tragic world – an insight gleaned by Achilles, the hero of the Iliad – one must live as if there were no gods at all.

The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths should change the conversation academics in classics, biblical studies, theology and philosophy have – especially between disciplines – about the gods of early Greek epic, while reframing on a more popular level the discussion of the role of ancient myth in shaping a thoughtful life.

1
Introduction

If the man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.

– Mark Twain (Following the Equator)

The marble building that serves as home for the United States Supreme Court presents to the attentive visitor numerous artistic representations on the pediments, friezes, doors, and medallions. Most of these symbolize the historical development of the Western legal system, a progressive scheme that apparently culminates in the Supreme Court itself. Scores of individuals are represented, from ethereal abstractions like Wisdom, Justice, and “Liberty Enthroned” to the rather more substantial Chief Justice William Howard Taft. On the north and south friezes, sculptor Adolph A. Weinman created in bas-relief eighteen historically significant lawgivers. Greeks (e.g., Lycurgus, Solon, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes) and Romans (e.g., Cicero, Octavian, Gaius – the jurist, not the psychotic emperor better known as Caligula) predominate, but in the 1930s architect Cass Gilbert commissioned a remarkably multicultural gallery. The Egyptian King Menes appears, as do Hammurabi, Solomon, Confucius, and Napoleon. On the north wall frieze, between Justinian and Charlemagne, stands Muhammad holding the Qur’an.

Let’s give that a moment to sink in.

It’s fun to try to imagine the cataclysm such inclusivity would engender today. First – do Muslims know about this? Well, yes. In 1997, a coalition of Muslim groups petitioned to have the figure sandblasted. The sculpture violated a not-quite-consistent Islamic prohibition of visual representations of their prophet. The carved figure of Muhammad also carries a scimitar in his right hand, thus (according to the complainants) reinforcing “long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors.”

Chief Justice Rehnquist denied the petition, noting that the depiction was “not intended as a form of idol worship.” Besides, he added, there were lots of other swords on the friezes. He did have the official building documents and tourist pamphlets change their previous identification of Muhammad as “Founder of Islam” to “Prophet of Islam,” as the petition had requested. These official publications also added a note of explanation still retained on the official web site of the Supreme Court: “The figure above is a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor, Adolph Weinman, to honor Muhammad and it bears no resemblance to Muhammad.”

And what about Congress, who authorized funding for the building so long ago that this government project actually came in under budget? Picture the present-day scandal should it turn out that tax dollars went to an artist who put the Prophet of Islam on an iconic American building! There aren’t enough travel bans in the world to deal with this threat to our freedom.

Slipping by completely unnoticed, however, has been the actual affront to the U.S. Constitution. Although Moses with the Ten Commandments appears several times on and in the building, the architect was careful to place him in a secular context with other international lawgivers. The tablets themselves do not display the first four distinctively religious commandments, but portray either the essentially temporal injunctions (e.g., “You shall not steal”) in Hebrew, which of course very few visitors can read, or merely the Roman numerals I-X (which some have argued refers to the Bill of Rights!), or nothing at all (Coogan 2014: 128–9). Yahweh is not shown on Mt. Sinai handing over the two tablets to Moses – the Jewish leader is the star, not God. I doubt God’s absence from this 1930s building has anything to do with congressional concern for Jewish sensitivities to the artistic depiction of God. Rather, Yahweh is missing because of course no divinities could possibly be displayed on a building designed for a judiciary sworn to uphold the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

But wait – what are we to make of the deities depicted on the ornamental metopes in the Great Hall? These gods – each appearing eight times – are classical deities: Minerva (“Goddess of Wisdom,” the architect’s notes inform us); Juno (“Genius of Womanhood and Guardian of Female Sex”); Mercury (“Herald and Messenger of the Gods”); and Zeus (“Father of Gods and Men; God of Heavens and Fertility”). Sure, a classicist might quibble with a few things. For example, Juno does oversee certain aspects of a woman’s social role, but anyone familiar with her vicious treatment of her husband’s rape victims will be a bit uncomfortable with the label of “guardian of female sex.” And then there’s always the pedantic grumble about mixing Greek and Roman gods. But still, inside the Supreme Court lives Zeus, “God of Heavens,” bearing his Homeric epithet, “Father of Gods and Men.” A god! Of heavens! Publicly funded and governmentally approved. Where’s the ACLU when you need it? Doesn’t anyone care about this breach of the wall separating Church and State?

It turns out that no one does care. The Hellenic gods are not considered real gods, the true God, the honest-to-god God. We are assured that they were and are not authentic deities, even if the Greeks mistakenly built a successful civilization around their worship for two millennia. Zeus, Hera, and the gang are obvious mythological figures, completely, historically, ontologically different from the Judeo-Christian God. Even theologians of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and the “New Atheists” can agree on this one thing: The Greek gods cannot be actual gods. Atheists refer to the unlikelihood that any gods exist, impishly suggesting that the difference between atheists and theists is that the latter – hardened un believers when it comes to the Greek gods and all other deities except their own – merely believe in one more god than atheists do.¹ Theologians over the millennia have dismissed the Homeric deities for the same reason Greek philosophers abandoned them: They don’t live up to preconceptions of what a deity should be. In particular, the Greek gods are disappointingly manifold, anthropomorphic (that is, they look and act like humans), and amoral (at best).

But the rejection of the Homeric gods in favor of the Abrahamic deity has been a serious mistake for Western culture. The polytheistic, humanized, and amoral (at best) gods of Homeric epic provide the basis for a more realistic and useful approach to life than has been offered by Yahweh and his interpreters. The Olympians (the major Greek gods in Homer’s epics) are, I will argue, a vast improvement on the God that most contemporary believers are taught to worship, a chimerical deity based extremely loosely – and often not at all – on the God that is presented in the biblical texts.²

This book makes two connected arguments. First, we must also look closely at Yahweh the way many biblical scholars and literary critics, not theologians, do. Upon close inspection, the God of the Hebrew Bible often turns out to be very much like the deities found in the Iliad and Odyssey. Even after a brutal makeover by the sixth- and fifth-century BCE composers and redactors of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh remains remarkably Olympian throughout the Tanakh (Old Testament). This deity feels quite familiar to a classicist who studies the Homeric gods. The late biblical compilers and the subsequent exegetical traditions (Jewish and especially Christian) have tried to turn Yahweh into something he generally is not. By focusing on a remarkably small part of his biblical persona and applying the wobbly standards of theological argumentation, they have invented a transcendent, nonanthropomorphic, monotheistic deity possessing divine perfections.

But the biblical Yahweh is rarely any of these things. He’s solidly Homeric, and as such he is simply not up to the Herculean task he has been assigned in the Judeo-Christian tradition. A significant reason for the failure of the Abrahamic religions to provide a candid and healthy vision of life in the modern world is that Yahweh, the Ur-deity of all three major Western religions, has been forced into a role for which he was not designed and was poorly equipped. Yahweh has needed 2500 years of theological reconstructive surgery to attempt to turn him into the ideal of his surgeons. He has undergone so many interpretative procedures that what his believers now say about him bears only a tiny resemblance to the character in his officially authorized stories. He is the Michael Jackson of the gods. This composite deity has been at best an impediment to, and not infrequently a disaster for, human flourishing. The first part of this book demonstrates the Olympian nature of Yahweh by comparing him to Homer’s gods. To that end, we will look closely at the important deities in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Hebrew Bible.

The second and more consequential section of the book builds on the first part to demonstrate why we would be much better off with Homer’s fictional Olympians than with the fabricated God that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been championing for so many centuries. While Yahweh may be surprisingly similar to Zeus & Company in general, in those areas where the Hebrew and Greek deities differ the Olympians emerge as a superior concept. We would, in fact, lead more honest and fulfilling lives with Homer’s gods. The world that results from the epic poet’s divine “apparatus” demands that the gods’ human counterparts – and that includes us – live fully, ethically, and meaningfully. The universe depicted by Homer and populated by his gods is one that creates a unique and powerful responsibility for humans to discover ethical norms, accept death as a human limit that creates meaning, develop compassion to mitigate a tragic existence, appreciate frankly both the glory and danger of sex, and courageously respond to an indifferent universe whose nature was clearly not designed for human dominion.

Not that Homer’s mortal characters respond in a better manner to life’s challenges any more often than we do in the modern West. The poet paints a portrait of pious mortals mistakenly turning to the gods for assistance in their search for justice and meaning, thus foreshadowing 3000 years of similarly failed efforts. But unlike the theologies that derive from the biblical traditions, Homer’s gods account perfectly for the vicissitudes of our lives in a universe that remains unim-pressed by our efforts and unresponsive to our demands. Plus, the Olympians can laugh. We could use a good deal more of these gods in today’s world.

Wait, let me explain…

Okay, not really. I didn’t mean that. Three issues need to be clarified right up front. First, I am, of course, not arguing for the actual existence of Homer’s gods any more than for the reality of the biblical Yahweh. This is not a new-age cry for the rekindled worship of the Hellenic pantheon. (Yes, there is such a thing, called the Hellenismos movement. Oy.) I take it as a given (that is, scholars have convincingly demonstrated) that what we have received from antiquity for all the Western religious traditions are heavily edited selections of self-contradictory, elliptical, and ambiguous man-made stories – what scholars call myths – about the divine and its relation to humanity. That some people choose to believe in the Truth of one of these masterful anthologies instead of another is an accident of birth (family, culture, century) and history (the political ambitions of Constantine or the military success of early Islam, for example), as well as a function of personal psychology and inclination. That’s a matter of chance and faith, with which this book is not directly concerned.

Here we will look at stories about gods, especially those in Homer’s epics and the Hebrew Bible, with an occasional dip into the New Testament. My purpose is to demonstrate that the nature of the anthropomorphic gods depicted by Homer – their powers, personalities, relationships, conflicts, values, actions – not only successfully accounts for the world we live in, but creates a demand on us to live self-critical, fully human lives in a far more powerful way than that offered by the world created by Yahweh and currently dominated, in the United States at least, by Jesus. The Homeric poems are inspired works of fiction that have the potential to help us think, reflect, and, yes, even improve. If the Olympians would force us to adjust our lives to a more genuine and honest (if difficult) vision of human existence, we should reconsider just how we are to go about organizing our lives. And we should certainly reconsider the less helpful depictions of Yahweh, the divine Jesus, and Allah.

My second disclaimer: You will find here neither a defense of polytheism as a “tolerant” religion nor an effort to promote current polytheistic “pagan” practices as models of nonviolence. Monotheism has long been attacked for the mayhem its particularism has evoked – the New Atheists are merely its latest and most acerbic detractors. Christianity has especially been targeted, from enlightenment historians (e.g., Gibbon) and philosophers (e.g., Hume, Voltaire) to contemporary scholars of religion, literary critics, philosophers, journalists, and even clergymen. While I share their dismay at the legacy of human destruction that has regularly accompanied the spread and maintenance of the Abrahamic religions, I don’t see monotheism itself as the culprit so much as the human heart. With perhaps a very few exceptions (Jainism comes to mind), all religion is prone to violence, even supposedly pacific Buddhism. As I write this, the Buddhist majority in Myanmar is in the process of killing, raping, or expelling close to a million Muslim Rohingya, who some Buddhist monks say are reincarnated from snakes and insects (not a good thing, apparently). Religion scholar Michael Jerryson observes that since “the third century BCE, Buddhists have clashed with opponents of different faiths, Buddhists from different countries, and even Buddhists of different origination lineages within the same country” (2013: 42; cf. Hitchens 2007: 195–204; Parenti 2010: 196–214). Violence has been associated with religions as varied as Zoroastrianism (Choksy 2012) and Hinduism (Patton 2012).

It is true that political violence has rarely been sanctioned by religious beliefs in polytheistic communities. Scholar of ancient religion Robert Parker concludes that he knows of “no instance in the ancient Near East or classical worlds of intercommunal violence between polytheist groups based on religious difference” (2017: 76). These societies, however, easily found numerous other reasons to kill themselves and their neighbors. The exuberantly polytheistic ancient Greeks were at war constantly, both with others and themselves, and the Romans were spectacularly efficient at organized genocide and innovations in public displays of savagery. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar nearly wiped out entire cultures. The Aztecs may have killed over a million sacrificial victims in less than a century (White 2012: 156–60).

Humans find meaning in identity formation, and the unfortunate companion of that process seems to be our tendency to turn others into The Other – it’s a “function of power and capacity to wield it” (Smith 2008: 24–8). A fanatical commitment to any ideology that claims access to the Truth usually leads to mass murder. Genghis Kahn enforced religious tolerance while killing perhaps as many as 40 million people. Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot were not monotheists. Neither was Hitler, although he was certainly no atheist either, as some defenders of Christianity have suggested.³ Enforced secularism such as the “scientific atheism” – not the least scientific, as Michael Shermer reminds us (2015: 137) – of the Soviet communists is likely to be as barbarous as any religion. The common denominator in mass murder is as often totalitarianism as belief in one supreme god. A recent study of religious violence concludes that obedience to authority – of any kind – is the single greatest contributor to violence (Eller 2010: 328).

This is not to deny that monotheism has been a particularly hypocritical and extremely efficient mechanism for channeling our hatred of difference. As Will Durant noted, “Certainty is murderous” (1992: 784, cited in Harris 2005: 86). Religious violence is not a “myth” constructed by the modern secular nation-state, as at least one postmodern theologian has suggested (Cavanaugh 2009). In one of the best of the recent studies of the connections between religion and violence, Jack David Eller (2010) concludes that as social and ideological systems, such religions have had the tendency to lay the foundations for violence by creating a reality in which violence is accepted as necessary, even desirable; attributing the authority for violence to the greatest good; setting leadership, at the human and superhuman level, that cannot be questioned or opposed; totalizing identities in exclusive ways, an absolute “us” against an absolute “them”; raising the stakes, with ultimate rewards and punishments; and establishing an ultimate goal that cannot and must not fail and that can and must be pursued by any means possible. This drawing a boundary around the group is the “tragic flaw in religious moral psychology” (Teehan 2010: 206; cf. Schwartz 1997).

But the muddy moral record of monotheism does not mean that we should turn to other kinds of religion as a panacea for the perverse psyche that is our human inheritance. Jan Assmann, for example, supports what he calls Egyptian “cosmotheism,” a “religion of an immanent god and a veiled truth that shows and conceals itself in a thousand images” (2010: 43; cf. 1997). Page DuBois’ fine book (2014) on the history of prejudice against polytheism, while not intending to defend polytheism, holds up contemporary nonmonotheistic religions as counterpoints to the dominance of Judeo-Christian traditions and ultimately aims for tolerance of all religions. To my mind, to replace one set of myths with another in the pursuit of Truth is missing the point. The contemporary movement of “pagan polytheism” errantly sees in ancient polytheism a reflection of its own jubilant spirituality, turning it into “an appreciation of the vitality and sacredness of the universe, pluralist and tolerant, enthusiastic and festive, welcoming and in no way fanatical, non-violent and respectful of differences” (Queiruga 2009: 68). Newage polytheistic theology avoids addressing the central and inherent conflicts and ambiguities that an active engagement with life elicits, and ultimately attempts to co-opt an ancient polytheism that never existed.

On the other hand, these defenses of polytheism have been part of an important examination of the history of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE Brothers (and sisters) from a different mother
• PART TWO Diverging deities: Where Homer got it right
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index