Not Everything Is a Charging Boar

This essay is the fifth in a six-part series by Jacob Howland on Homer and the Hebrew Bible. Historians of Western intellectual culture sometimes compare “Jerusalem,” or the biblical traditions that erupt into history at Sinai, with “Athens,” the city where Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle sought human wisdom through the exercise of the human mind. In this series, Howland invites a different comparison. Rather than comparing later prophets to philosophers, he looks back at yet earlier cultural cornerstones set at the very foundations of Hebraic and Greek civilizations. The final installment in Howland’s series will arrive next month. —The Editors

The very first part of Genesis is less a history than a prehistory, and its human characters—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his family—are not so much individuals as archetypes, conveying to us the elementary problems of the human soul and human society. By chapter 12, when God first calls on Abraham, other archetypes, now in the form of male and female heroes, enter the Bible. They are no less iron-hearted than are the superhuman warriors of Homer’s Iliad, but theirs is not the awful, tragic strength of an Ajax or an Achilles. Rather, the signal achievement of Genesis is to find heroism not just on the field of battle—where Abraham, too, excels—but on the hardscrabble ground of everyday life.

On that ground, the frequent stumbles and occasional triumphs of the patriarchs and matriarchs reveal the anguished depths and noble heights of human existence in the full richness of its flawed particularity. The Bible’s quotidian realism paradoxically elevates and expands the idea of heroism, even as it brings heroism itself within the reach of ordinary mortals.