Yes, there are some similarities in these epic battles however, one cannot overlook the obvious difference in the leadership of the pagan gods of Troy and Joshua’s YAHWEH! I have also supposed, myself, that the Apostle Paul saw the statue of the “Winged Victory of Samothrace”, which today is proudly displayed in the Musee du Louvre, while on a Missionary Journey! (I offered this supposition a few years ago to a Docent who was giving me a tour at the Louvre, but she didn’t buy it!)īut to return to Homer: Croese’s second assertion is that the Trojan war with the Greek army is only a replica of the contest between the Israelites under Joshua (the Achaians) and the Canaanites (Trojans). I am neither a Jewish scholar nor a Biblical scholar but have spent many years as a laic believer in Christ studying the Bible and this seems perfectly plausible to me. This hypothetical claim also included that “Lycurgus, Pythagoras, Solon and Plato learned of the Jewish wisdom” in the same way (172). The family of Esau settled in Thrace and thus the Greeks there had learned Hebrew, according to Croese. The Canaanites wandered to Thrace and Asia Minor and, in Smyrna, Croese asserts that Homer must have learned to know some of these descendants and therefore learned of Bible from them. We do know that during this time, the Israelites had taken possession of the Holy Land and had expelled the Canaanites who had already become acquainted with the Bible from their Jewish conquerors. and was a contemporary with King Omri of Israel. How can Croese prove this? First, Croese states that Homer lived around the year 927 B.C.
Croese asserts that Homer was fully acquainted with the Bible and with the Hebrew languages. This theory first came about in the beginning of the eighteenth century when it was discovered (or supposed) that “the mythologies, the sacred writings, and the monuments of ancient nations of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Chinese were a reference to the Bible”(“Was Homer Acquainted with the Bible?”, 171).Īdler based his article from a Latin work by a Dutch Quaker, Gerard Croese, written in 1704 stating that “’…the works of Homer were nothing more than an adaptation into Greek verse of the narratives of the Bible, with sundry additions by the poet’s own hand’”(171). While doing research on the Iliad and Odyssey for a World Lit course I’m teaching this summer, I found an intriguing Journal article written in 1892 by Michael Adler citing striking parallels in language and ideas between Homer’s Greek epic of The Iliad and Odyssey and the Bible.
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