Joshuan Miracle of the Sun absorbed into Homer’s Iliad

by Damien F. Mackey The fictitious Greek king, Agamemnon, appears in Homer’s The Iliad, in at least one notable instance, like Joshua, praying for the Sun not to set so that Agamemnon might be victorious. “Zeus, most glorious, most great, the one of the dark clouds, that dwellest in the heaven, grant that the sun set not, neither darkness come upon us, until I have cast down in headlong ruin the hall of Priam … burned with consuming fire”. (Illiad II:412-415) This is not the only instance in which The Iliad has borrowed from colourful biblical events. See e.g. my article: Judith the Jewess and “Helen” the Hellene https://www.academia.edu/24417162/Judith_the_Jewess_and_Helen_the_Hellene The Greeks may have inadvertently replaced the most beautiful Jewish heroine, Judith of Bethulia, with their own legendary Helen, whose ‘face launched a thousand ships’, given, for instance, these striking similarities (Judith and The Iliad): The beautiful woman praised by the elders at the city gates: "When [the elders of Bethulia] saw [Judith] transformed in appearance and dressed differently, they were very greatly astounded at her beauty" (Judith 10:7). "Now the elders of the people were sitting by the Skaian gates…. When they saw Helen coming … they spoke softly to each other with winged words: 'No shame that the Trojans and the well-greaved Achaians should suffer agonies for long years over a woman like this - she is fearfully like the immortal goddesses to look at'" [The Iliad., pp. 44-45]. This theme of incredible beauty - plus the related view that “no shame” should be attached to the enemy on account of it - is picked up again a few verses later in the Book of Judith (v.19) when the Assyrian soldiers who accompany Judith and her maid to Holofernes "marvelled at [Judith's] beauty and admired the Israelites, judging them by her … 'Who can despise these people, who have women like this among them?'" Nevertheless: 'It is not wise to leave one of their men alive, for if we let them go they will be able to beguile the whole world!' (Judith 10:19). 'But even so, for all her beauty, let her go back in the ships, and not be left here a curse to us and our children'. And, in Virgil’s Aeneid, the encounter between Achior and Holofernes re-emerges with Sinon before Priam: Trojans ought not have ‘signed on’ with Sinon (4) Trojans ought not have 'signed on' with Sinon | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu There I wrote: I, in my article showing that parts of The Odyssey were drawn from the Books of Job and Tobit, was at pains to point out that the history of Tobias (= Job), fixed in the C8th BC neo-Assyrian era (conventional dating), was the basis for some major parts of Homer’s fictitious The Odyssey. And, elsewhere, I have asked the question regarding the Book of Judith and Homer (The Iliad, this time) - and now introducing Sinon: If the very main theme of The Iliad may have been lifted by the Greeks from the Book of Judith, then might not even the Homeric idea of the Trojan Horse ruse to capture Troy have been inspired by Judith’s own ruse to take the Assyrian camp? Before going on to add this note: [According to R. Graves, The Greek Myths (Penguin Books, combined ed., 1992), p. 697 (1, 2): “Classical commentators on Homer were dissatisfied with the story of the wooden horse. They suggested, variously, that the Greeks used a horse-like engine for breaking down the walls (Pausanias: i. 23. 10) … that Antenor admitted the Greeks into Troy by a postern which had a horse painted on it…. Troy is quite likely to have been stormed by means of a wheeled wooden tower, faced with wet horse hides as a protection against incendiary darts…”. …. (Pausanius 2nd century AD: Wrote `Description of Greece’.)]. And then I proceeded to make this radical re-assessment of Virgil’s character, Sinon: What may greatly serve to strengthen this suggestion is the uncannily ‘Judith-like’ trickery of a certain Sinon, a wily Greek, as narrated in the detailed description of the Trojan Horse in Book Two of Virgil’s Aeneid. Sinon, whilst claiming to have become estranged from his own people, because of their treachery and sins, was in fact bent upon deceiving the Trojans about the purpose of the wooden horse, in order “to open Troy to the Greeks”. I shall set out here the main parallels that I find on this score between the Aeneid and the Book of Judith. Firstly, the name Sinon may recall Judith’s ancestor Simeon, son of Israel (Judith 8:1; 9:2). Whilst Sinon, when apprehended by the enemy, is “dishevelled” and “defenceless”, Judith, also defenseless, is greatly admired for her appearance by the members of the Assyrian patrol who apprehend her (Judith 10:14). As Sinon is asked sympathetically by the Trojans ‘what he had come to tell …’ and ‘why he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner’, so does the Assyrian commander-in-chief, Holofernes, ‘kindly’ ask Judith: ‘… tell me why you have fled from [the Israelites] and have come over to us?’ Just as Sinon, when brought before the Trojan king Priam, promises that he ‘will confess the whole truth’ – though having no intention of doing that – so does Judith lie to Holofernes: ‘I will say nothing false to my lord this night’ (Judith 11:5). Sinon then gives his own treacherous account of events, including the supposed sacrileges of the Greeks due to their tearing of the Palladium, image of the goddess Athene, from her own sacred Temple in Troy; slaying the guards on the heights of the citadel and then daring to touch the sacred bands on the head of the virgin goddess with blood on their hands. For these ‘sacrileges’ the Greeks were doomed. Likewise Judith assures Holofernes of victory because of the supposed sacrilegious conduct that the Israelites have planned (e.g. to eat forbidden and consecrated food), even in Jerusalem (11:11-15). Sinon concludes – in relation to the Trojan options regarding what to do with the enigmatic wooden horse – with an Achior-like statement: ‘For if your hands violate this offering to Minerva, then total destruction shall fall upon the empire of Priam and the Trojans…. But if your hands raise it up into your city, Asia shall come unbidden in a mighty war to the walls of Pelops, and that is the fate in store for our descendants’. Whilst Sinon’s words were full of cunning, Achior had been sincere when he had warned Holofernes – in words to which Judith will later allude deceitfully (11:9-10): ‘So now, my master and my lord, if there is any oversight in this people [the Israelites] and they sin against their God and we find out their offense, then we can go up against them and defeat them. But if they are not a guilty nation, then let my lord pass them by; for their Lord and God will defend them, and we shall become the laughing-stock of the whole world’ (Judith 5:20-21). [Similarly, Achilles fears to become ‘a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth’ (Plato’s Apologia, Scene I, D. 5)]. These, Achior’s words, were the very ones that had so enraged Holofernes and his soldiers (vv.22-24). And they would give the Greeks the theme for their greatest epic, The Iliad. Johan Weststeijn is of the opinion - and it is a typical one - that the Book of Judith (as well as the Arabic Zenobia) was based on an earlier work, or “Vorlage”, with Achior of the Book of Judith being an ‘adaptation’ of Sinon at Troy. Thus: https://www.academia.edu/3639903/Zenobia_of_Palmyra_and_the_Book_of_Judith_Common_Motifs_in_Greek_Jewish_and_Arabic_Historiography Abstract: This article points to the many parallels between the book of Judith and the Arabic account of the life and death of Zenobia of Palmyra. By comparing these two stories with the episode about Zopyros in Herodotus’ Histories and the episode about Sinon in accounts of the fall of Troy, it argues that these similarities can only be explained if we assume that the book of Judith and the Arabic Zenobia Legend are adaptations of the same Vorlage, an earlier story that contained a Holofernes motif (heroine kills enemy) and a Sinon motif (enemy deceives heroine). When this Vorlage was adapted to create the book of Judith, the part of the deceiving Sinon was adapted to create the role of the sincere Achior, whereby he lost his function in the story and became a blind motif. Sinon tells the Trojans that the Greeks have built the wooden horse as an offering to the goddess Athena, and that they built it this big to prevent the Trojans from bringing it inside their walls, for if the Trojans would succeed in doing so, Athena would make Troy invincible. The trouble is that the goddess Athena (Athene) can be, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, a paganised version of a lofty biblical character (such as the angel Raphael). Moreover, the famous standoff between Agamemnon and Achilles, also in The Iliad, reminds me of the hostile encounter in the Book of Judith (chapter 5) between the bombastic “Holofernes” and his subordinate, “Achior” (a name not unlike Achilles). And I have previously provided abundant evidence for the use of the books of Tobit and Job in Homer’s The Odyssey. Yet we constantly read statements such as: “Western civilization begins with the two greatest books of the ancient world, the Iliad and the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer”. https://www.memoriapress.com/curriculum/classical-studies/iliad-odyssey-complete-set/ The crucial Hebrew inspiration behind all of this usually goes completely unacknowledged.