Cyrus H. Gordon quotes

The Church tradition that connects the sacrifice of Isaac with the sacrifice of Christ apparently rests on a sound exegesis, for the sacrifice of Isaac would have meant not only the sacrifice of Abraham's son but of God's. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
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. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Like Helen, Sarah's name means "princess" in normal Hebrew, and "queen" in Akkadian. It is conceivable that (like David afterwards, whose name dāvîd means "leader, chief") her title came to be used as her name. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
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. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
It was Yawhism that distinguished the two Hebrew nations from the other Canaanites and it was the great Hebrew prophets who transformed their little 'Canaanite' people into one of the great factors of world history. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The excavators cleared out one of the ancient cisterns, and a few of the winter rains sufficed to fill the cistern with enough water to supply the expedition with water for the whole season. This illustrates the possibilities of almost any country, provided the right kind of people are there. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The thesis of this book is simply that Greek and Hebrew civilisations are parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterranean foundation. ...the evidence is so abundant that our problem is one of selection and arrangement. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bible. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
That both the Gilgamesh Epic and the Odyssey deal with the episodic wanderings of a hero, would not be sufficiently specific to establish a genuine relation between them. But. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
We absorb attitudes as well as subject matter in the learning process. ...the attitudes tend to determine what we see, and what we fail to see, in the subject matter. This is why attitude is just as important as content in the educational process. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Minos has rightly been compared with Moses. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
The ancient inhabitants of Babylonia used the word qaqqadum, 'head', in the sense of 'principal'... our English word 'capital' (via Latin caput. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Manslaughter was requited through blood revenge. Accordingly the offender, to escape the avenger, would be forced to flee, cut off from his land and people, at the mercy of strangers far from home. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
It seems strange that so many generations of Old Testament scholars, trained in Greek as well as Hebrew literature, have managed to keep their Greek and Hebrew studies rigidly compartmentalised. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The parallels that form the core of this book fit into a historical framework in the wake of the Armana Age during the closing centuries of the second millenium. Prior to the Armana Age (i. e., before 1400 B. C.) Egyptian, Canaanite, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean and other influences met around the East Mediterranean to form an international order, by which each was in turn affected. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The central problem of the Greek tragedies is why we suffer so at the hands of God. The movement that evoked Greek tragedy in the fifth century B. C. was spread over the East Mediterranean evoking a parallel response in Israel. ...And as in Greek tragedy, Job deals with the problem of why man suffers so at the had of God. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
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. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The Book [of Judges] as a whole gives a coherent picture of an era and propounds the thesis that the institutions of pre-monarchic Israel were so chaotic... that centralized, hereditary kingship was necessary. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
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. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
For every mound excavated in the Near East, a hundred remain untouched. ...most of the excavated mounds have been dug only in small part. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
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. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The prevailing attitude (which is gradually losing its grip) may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments... One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
We were put up in the police station. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The conquerors were the fighting and ruling stratum; the conquered natives were degraded to the labouring class. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon

Cyrus H. Gordon

Born: June 29, 1908
Died: March 30, 2001
Quotes count: 73