There were Greeks in Anatolia and Greeks in Egypt, where the
famous emporion of Naukratis had been founded by the middle of the sixth
century BCE. Already by the eighth, Greek trade flowed through al-Mina in Syria,
at the mouth of the great Orontes River. And in the other direction sailed the
Phoenicians, Israel’s northern neighbors—a Semitic-speaking people whose gods
and goddesses could play more than bit parts in certain biblical stories. They
glided west as far as Spain, and even to Britain, on great wooden ships that
inspired some of the prophet Ezekiel’s most evocative poetry (Ezek. 27). And
even today, believe it or not, Cyprus, home of Homer’s Aphrodite, where both Greeks
and Phoenicians lived, sits at anchor no more than 150 miles off the Levantine coast,
closer than New York is to Boston.
We may not know quite what role the Israelites and
Judahites played in all this, but they certainly lived among these tanging
webs. And at least some of the authors in the Hebrew Bible knew of the Greeks.
Rather, it is not the Graikoi who appear in the Hebrew Bible but the Ionian
Greeks who lived on and off the west coast of Asia Minor and troubled the
Assyrians with their raiding. In fact, the biblical genealogist who made Iawan
a grandson of Noah, son of Japheth (Gen. 10:2) in the great “Table of Nations,”
knew enough, too, to record that this Iawan was the father of “Kittim,” probably
Cyprus, and very like Rhodes as well. Neither were these empty connections; the
brother of the poet Alcaeus would fight in the armies of Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon, while Sappho’s brother is supposed to have settled in Nauktratis. A
bilingual tombstone (KAI 53) in Piraeus, the port of Athens,
commemorates the life of the Sidonian Abdtanit son of Abdshamash—or, in the
Greek, Artemidoros son of Heliodoros. And Homer, if he lived, was a contemporary
of Isaiah, Solon of King Josiah, Herodotus of Ezra. This is the word
that we, like the intellectual Diadochi, have divided. (Andrew
Toboloswky, Ancient Israel, Judah, and Greece: Laying the Foundation of a
Comparative Approach [Hebrew Bible Monographs 111; Sheffield Center for
Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 9; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2024],
1-2)
To Support this Blog:
Email for Amazon Gift
card: ScripturalMormonism@gmail.com
Email for Logos.com Gift
Card: IrishLDS87@gmail.com
