Approaching Comparisons with Ancient Greek Traditions

In the corpus of Archaic and Classical Greece written at roughly the same time as the Hebrew Bible’s various compositions, there are a number of similar kinds of stories. In many cases, in fact, they are more similar than either is to Near Eastern compositions.

See also Ancient Israel, Judah, and Greece: Laying the Foundations of a Comparative Approach (Sheffield Phoenix, 2024). 

By Andrew Tobolowsky
William & Mary
January 2025

            The discipline of Hebrew Bible has a long and fruitful history of using comparison to push the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. For at least a century, certainly, scholars have engaged especially deeply in comparisons with the traditions of the Ancient Near East – so much so that, in many places, the training of Hebrew Bible scholars is primarily shaped around producing scholars capable of performing them. And in some ways, this makes a lot of sense. After all, ancient Israel and Judah are Near Eastern, or at least, Levantine places, and biblical authors certainly were influenced by the other cultures of the region. What could be more logical than studying, and training scholars to study, biblical traditions in their historical and geographical context? 
            At the same time, I would argue that the extent to which these specific comparisons have dominated the discipline has crowded out a number of other useful possibilities. And I would also suggest that this dominance is not as justified as it may seem. Certainly, as I say, these are very useful, but they did not take their place at the absolute center of the discipline because of the ways they are useful today. Instead, the early-to-mid twentieth century scholars most responsible for putting them there were at least as interested in the possibility of using them to do something that no longer has much currency in contemporary scholarship: proving the basic accuracy of most of the biblical traditions about Israel’s ancestors, and uncovering the supposed reality behind biblical accounts of their modes of life and practices.
            In other words, scholars such as William Foxwell Albright, whose influence on American biblical studies in particular can hardly be overstated were, in general, far less interested in fleshing out the first millennium world that produced biblical texts than they were in searching for echoes of the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses in the archaeological and epigraphic record of the second millennium BCE.  In fact, this was true to such an extent that the first influential efforts to overturn earlier convictions about the basic accuracy of the stories in question, by the likes of John Van Seters and Thomas L. Thompson in the early 1970s, began by simply pointing out that echoes at least equally as strong also existed at the time the relevant texts were actually being composed.
            I begin with these points because I think making room for more and different comparisons is not as straightforward a business as it may seem. It is, of course, true, that Near Eastern comparisons are far from the only ones that have been employed by biblical scholars either yesterday or today. At the same time, for an argument to have the impact it ought to have, you do not only need someone who can make it, you need people who can fairly evaluate it, who can serve as interlocutors for it, who can build on and refine these arguments once made. And if I am right – if the extent of the focus on Near Eastern comparisons has indeed crowded out other potentially illuminating pathways, and if that extent is poorly justified despite their continued utility, because it is based on an outdated way of thinking about what these comparisons do – then we do need not just new comparisons but a little tsimtsum, the contraction of a deity. Our scholarly sky would then, perhaps, have space for another planet or two.
          In my case, the one that I have been trying to place in the firmament for much of my career is comparisons with the traditions of Ancient Greece. I am, of course, far from the first to attempt these. In fact, in the 19th century, scholarship on the Pentateuch in particular, and on the Homeric poems, often evolved in conversation with each other. Nor am I – also of course! – the only person employing them today. But they are rather neglected nonetheless, and I have already hinted at why that is the cause of more than one kind of problem. It is true that it is hard to get the full benefit this kind of comparison can offer when there are few enough people who can evaluate them and push forward to new ground. But it is also true that it is specifically very easy to use Greek comparisons poorly, for wont of a close enough examination. 
          Certainly, the twentieth century history of ancient Greek comparisons, what there is of it, shows this remarkably well. On the one hand, there was Cyrus Gordon who was convinced that the Israelites and Greeks had had the same ancestors, which explained certain similarities between their traditions. This is simply not the case, and it is not the explanation for the similarities we find. A more important, more insidious, and harder to avoid danger, however, is one that exists any time we engage in comparisons that are not terribly common. In fact, it is the same danger that caused the problem I started with, the early-to-mid twentieth century tendency to see in Ancient Near Eastern evidence dramatic confirmation of the historical background behind biblical traditions.
          We call it “parallelomania,” which – naturally – is the tendency to see parallels, at first blush, that subsequent and closer investigation would dispel. Unfortunately, ancient Greek comparisons, unlike Near Eastern comparisons, have never received the sustained attention that would make them more secure and useful – which is also why, I have argued, the two-best known examples of mid-twentieth century comparisons with ancient Greece are both pronounced expressions of parallelomania (Tobolowsky 2023). These are the German scholar Martin Noth’s attempt to make the case that Israel had taken shape, as an ethnic nation, in the form of an “amphictyony,” an organization of tribes around a central sanctuary known to us only from a handful of Greek texts, and Frank Moore Cross’s efforts to demonstrate that the Pentateuch itself was really based on an oral epic poem, like Homer.  In my view, in both cases, the evidence was extremely slim. So much so that even more than we need to explain how they came to be made, it is their popularity, in their day and age, that needs to be accounted for.
          Overall, I have argued that in twentieth century scholarship in general, comparisons with ancient Greek traditions played the valuable role of “more malleable other”: a context in which scholars could, quite unconsciously, pursue the kinds of cases they wanted to make, then apply their conclusions to their own body of texts. In other words, in the mid-twentieth century in particular, there were a number of arguments that had been accepted for a long time, mainly about the greater antiquity and historical reliability of pentateuchal traditions, which many scholars cherished, that were on the verge of falling apart. Being less familiar, ancient Greek traditions could seem to provide the necessary evidence to support conclusions about not just the stability of traditions over time, but their basic representativeness where what an entire people believed was concerned, which could then be used as proof that the same would be true of biblical traditions. Closer examination would have, and eventually did, dispel these conclusions too, but it took a surprisingly long time. 
          So this is the question for the twenty-first century would-be comparativist: how do we make ancient Greek comparisons work for us while avoiding pitfalls that are the natural lot of unusual comparisons? How do we reap the benefits without stumbling over the usual stumbling blocks? There may be more than one way. In recent years, for example, a number of scholars have simply acknowledged that Greek activity in the Eastern Mediterranean means that we are justified in breaking down the disciplinary barrier between biblical studies and classics and simply treating Greek evidence as part of the corpus that helps reveal the biblical world (Nissinen 2017; Quick 2021). Others, and I am certainly among these, have pursued “analogical,” rather than “genealogical” comparison, which helps us see our own texts a little better simply by having similar ones to think through, rather than making claims about the nature of the relationship, or the essential similarity, of these bodies of tradition (Knoppers 2003; McEntire and Park 2021; Heth and Kelley 2021).
           At the same time, while analogical comparison can always provide new insights, I am not willing to admit that there is nothing special about ancient Greek comparisons in particular. My conviction here is that if they are not, and cannot become, a “more malleable other,” still they are an other (Tobolowsky 2023, 23). Which is to say that there actually are a great many more similarities between these two corpora than we would find with many other texts we might use for merely analogical investigations. The corpus of Archaic and Classical Greece was written at roughly the same time as the Hebrew Bible’s various compositions, and not so very far away, especially when we recognize that “ancient Greece,” in antiquity, included colonies very close to ancient Israel and Judah. The historical memory these corpora preserve has similar chronological structures, which is to say that many of the traditions that interest us come from the middle of the first millennium BCE but look back to events that the authors of these texts tend to understand as having occurred roughly the same amount of time earlier – they place their legendary eras in approximately the same region of time. More practically, they come from “similarly fragmentary contexts,” meaning that we only have a small proportion of what there once was and usually have to guess about how popular or representative any given story could have been (Tobolowsky 2024, 2). Indeed, these traditions even sometimes developed under the shadow of the same world events – the advent of Persia for example, whose armies met Nabonidus, emperor of Babylon, in battle at Opis in 539 BCE, Themistocles at Marathon in 490, and Leonidas at Thermopylae in 480. 
          In addition, if we must always be careful about assuming that two similar looking texts from two different, not very well-connected places actually share a genre – meaning that their authors, for some reason or another, obeyed the same genre conventions – at the very least, there are a number of similar kinds of stories. In many cases, in fact, they are more similar than either is to Near Eastern compositions. There are, for example, no known Near Eastern attempts to relate the history of the ancient nation in a third person, comprehensive narrative like the ones that are so familiar from both biblical narratives and Greek. And there are no attempts to express the relationship between groups and nations in the form of family genealogies of figures like Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Hellen, and Herakles – of the sort that play such a central role in the book of Genesis and in a great many different Greek texts, including the famous Catalogue of Women. And so, on the one hand, there are significant similarities to take advantage of in some way or another. And there is the great danger – the danger that has, above all, shaped the history of using these comparisons in the discipline of Hebrew Bible in negative ways – of making too much of similarities. What then?
          Here is the solution that I have proposed throughout my scholarly career: that we compare not text to text or tradition to tradition but approach to approach. It is true that no matter how similar two texts or genres might seem, we always have to watch ourselves to make sure we are not seeing things that are not there. I would not say that the two contexts never share genres – I think it is hard to explain just how similar the genealogical traditions in particular are, especially given their absence from other Near Eastern and Levantine literature, without supposing that one influenced the other. Still, caution is always warranted, and it is very much better here to be safe than sorry.
          At the same time, however similar, two texts, or genres of texts, will very often present to the scholar a series of questions and problems that are not similar but actually identical (Tobolowsky 2023, 4). Two stories about an ancient war or the founding of a city might or might not share a genre or genre conventions. But they will both obligate the scholar to ask whether or not the story is based on a real event. This, in turn, will force the scholar to confront the same suite of questions. How should we approach the relationship between archaeology and epigraphy and texts when what we have is more like potential echoes than clear confirmation? How should we imagine that a story about a long ago event was handed down through the generations – through what mechanisms and in what places? In general, how well should we imagine that early traditions were preserved over time, and how? What should we say, generally, about the stability and instability of traditions over time in a predominantly oral age? What should we say people tend to do with the traditions they inherit in the first place – preserve them and pass them on, or use them to make something new?
          The answers, in these two different contexts, do not have to be the same. Maybe there is a reason, for example, that Greek authors tended to dynamically reinvent inherited traditions over and over while ancient Israelite and Judahite authors did not. Even so, scholarship in one discipline can be a source of ideas about what might have happened, and what evidence to look for. It can illustrate the realm of the possible in a way that provides a valuable source of new possibilities, new approaches, new theoretical interventions. And then we can investigate for ourselves whether new possibilities mesh with our own evidence or not and presumably gain understanding either way.
          Thus, my first book, The Sons of Jacob and the Sons of Herakles, began with the simple recognition that contemporary scholars of ancient Greek traditions tend to understand the genealogical literature described above very differently than scholars of the Hebrew Bible do. In the 20th century, it was common for scholars in both disciplines to employ what I would later call a “preservative paradigm,” which is to say, they thought the details of the relationships between groups preserved kernels of truth about early realities (Tobolowsky 2022, 22–45). If Jacob had six sons with his first wife Leah, Martin Noth would argue, then there had clearly been a six-tribe organization that pre-dated the twelve tribes in Canaan. If Ion and Achaeus were brothers, and grandsons of Hellen, then the Ionians and the Achaeans were closely related in earlier periods and regarded by all as part of the main stock of Greeks.
          In the twenty-first century, however, while Hebrew Bible scholars tend, broadly, to see early tribal realities reflected in biblical genealogies, many classicists have realized that, in genealogical traditions, “the contemporary world remains the object of description, for the world of myth is a mirror and projection of the present world; through one, the Greeks explored and gave meaning to the other” (Fowler 1999, 17). In other words, rather than simply handing down early traditions generation to generation, thereby preserving kernels of truth, ancient Greek authors instead used genealogical representations of society as an ongoing medium through which identity was constantly being redescribed in order to pursue various contemporary goals. If this is true in the Hebrew Bible’s case as well, then representations of the twelve tribes of Israel would also reflect early realities less well than they would a series of ideological projects that reshaped this tradition over time. Using this possibility as a starting point, I went about showing why I think it is the right one, and what the ramifications of that conclusion would be.
          More recently, I attempted to produce a systematic presentation of the method I have evolved, and the benefits I see in it, in a book called Ancient Israel, Judah, and Greece: Laying the Foundations of a Comparative Approach, with Sheffield Phoenix Press. I chose, as case studies around which to build chapters, scholarly approaches to ethnicity, to the use of extraliterary evidence, to – of course – genealogical traditions, and to foundation traditions. In each, my objective was to begin by showing how and why scholars in each discipline came to investigate similar kinds of traditions differently, what different assumptions these investigations were based on, and what, as a result, we could possibly learn from each other today. And, as the subtitle suggests, I thought of this approach as laying the groundwork for future cooperative efforts, by doing the work to put the two disciplines in conversation with each other.
          Whether, in the long run, I will have helped achieve this goal remains to be seen. One thing I learned along the way, regardless, is that the value for Hebrew Bible scholars in particular, where using ancient Greek comparisons is concerned, comes especially from the fact that – simply put – scholars of ancient Greece tend to be advantaged over biblical scholars in terms of their evidence. In our discipline, our biggest asset is also our biggest problem. We do have a lot of different texts, by different authors, from different periods – but all of them survive today in only one book, almost all of them are anonymous, and almost all of them require us to make educated guesses about when they might date from and the relationship between them. In the ancient Greek corpus, by contrast, we have quite a number of different, independent compositions, many by named authors, and from fairly clear historical contexts. What we guess at in one place is, often enough, what we know in the other – that Homer was early and pseudo-Apollodorus late. What we believe to be true in one is, often enough, what we can demonstrate – or fail to demonstrate! – in the other: did pseudo-Apollodorus, or Herodotus, or Plato feel the need, as John Van Seters put it, “to stick very close to the ‘facts’ as presented by Homer and Hesiod” (Van Seters 1997, 22)? We do not have to guess, we can look and see that the answer is no. 
          Thus, as a source of suggestions to be investigated, and of evidence-based approaches, comparisons drawn from the study of ancient Greek traditions can indeed be very, very valuable for the scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Employing them, we can evade the problem of parallelomania because they do not require us to assume that the traditions in question are identical in order to be useful. They reduce the structural problem of inadequate training – that we are not, and will not become, as expert in Homeric Greek as a Homerist, for example – because they ask us to do close readings of scholarship, not Homer. That doesn’t mean they are easy or straightforward to use. One of the most common problems I have noticed along the way is that there is a tendency to think that, for some reason, big ideas last longer undisturbed in other disciplines than our own. In other words, for example, I have frequently enough seen biblical scholars uncritically citing oral-formulaic theory, just as it was formulated in the 1920s and ‘30s by Milman Parry, without investigating what anyone has said about it since, which – I think! – no one would do with our own Alts and Noths and Albrights. And I have seen, from time to time, the phenomenon repeated in scholarship on ancient Greece, where the 1930s work of some past visionary like Otto Eissfeldt could be used by M.L. West to explain how biblical genealogies work in studies from much later on (West 1985, 13), and West’s encapsulation repeated in still later work, like that of Jonathan M. Hall (Hall 2002, 34). We do, at the very least, have to approach familiarizing ourselves with scholarly debates in other fields, as seriously as we do our own.

            Even so, as I put it in the book,

I think that what is fraught about this kind of comparison is more easily dispelled by effort and intellectual humility than when comparing traditions to traditions; where similarity and difference can rest so heavily on the subjectivity of the eye of the beholder. And I think what is useful about it – as a source of suggestions that may not prove applicable, as a way of building a larger scholarly community to work with, and a larger data set than we would otherwise have – is very much worth having, even with the attendant risks (Tobolowsky 2024, 205).

We have a closely related field, with many similar stories, which presents scholars with many of the same problems, which they have also spent the better part of a century wrestling with. We can take advantage of what they have seen that we have not seen and perhaps offer something similar in reverse. We can talk to each other, learn from each other, even work together. We simply have to leave room in our sky in order to make it possible. 

Works Cited

Fowler, Robert L. 1999. “Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue and the Creation of the Hellenes.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 44:1–19. 

Hall, Jonathan M. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heth, Raleigh, and T.E. Kelley. 2021. “Isaac and Iphigenia: Portrayals of Child Sacrifice in Israelite and Greek Literature.” Biblica 102 (4): 481–502.

Knoppers, Gary N. 2003. “Greek Historiography and the Chronicler’s History: A Reexamination.” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (4): 627–50.

McEntire, Mark, and Wongi Park. 2021. “Ethnic Fission and Fusion in Biblical Genealogies.” Journal of Biblical Literature 140 (1): 31–47.

Nissinen, Martti. 2017. Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives. 1st ed. Oxford: University Press.

Quick, Laura. 2021. Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tobolowsky, Andrew. 2022. The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities Across Time and Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2023. “On Comparisons with Ancient Greek Traditions: Lessons from the Mid-Century.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 23:1–30.

———. 2024. Ancient Israel, Judah, and Greece: Laying the Foundations of a Comparative Approach. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix.

Van Seters, John. 1997. In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History. 2nd ed. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

West, M.L. 1985. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure and Origin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.