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2 results

  • Chapter 12 - Divine Labour

  • from Part III - Difference
  • Edited by Adrian Kelly, University of Oxford, Christopher Metcalf, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology
    Published online:
    27 March 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021, pp 215-228

  • Summary

    This chapter examines a peculiar theme in divine narratives, according to which human beings at one time replaced the gods as workers. The author considers the occurrence of this theme in the Akkadian poem Atrahasīs, the opening of the Biblical book of Genesis and early Greek epic, especially the Iliad. The comparison illustrates that authors and audiences in the ancient world shared not just stories about the gods but also some of the larger questions that made them important. We cannot always tell how the stories travelled but we can certainly understand better how the texts work by considering the narrative resources they share. In particular, the theme of divine labour allows us to appreciate how the Mesopotamian, Israelite and Greek traditions created important, and distinctively different, transitions in the shared history of gods and humans, and how the very concept of the gods at work gave rise, within each tradition, to implicit or explicit criticism and to consequent attempts to rewrite the story, or at least to contain its supposedly undesirable theological implications.

Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology
  • Edited by Adrian Kelly, Christopher Metcalf
  • Published online:
    27 March 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021
  • This volume centres on one of the most important questions in the study of antiquity – the interaction between Greece and the Ancient Near East, from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods. Focusing on the stories that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean told about the gods and their relationships with humankind, the individual treatments draw together specialists from both fields, creating for the first time a truly interdisciplinary synthesis. Old cases are re-examined, new examples discussed, and the whole range of scholarly opinions, past and present, are analysed, critiqued, and contextualised. While direct textual comparisons still have something to show us, the methodologies advanced here turn their attention to deeper structures and wider dynamics of interaction and influence that respect the cultural autonomy and integrity of all the ancient participants.