All:
I came across this book review in my reading during the week. I thought
it so interesting that I decided to 'expose' it to you, my literary friends.
The word that attracted me is Tanakh. I found out the following as a
quick search.
The *Tanakh* (/tɑːˈnɑːx/
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English>;^[1]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh#cite_note-1> Hebrew
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language>: תַּנַ"ךְ, pronounced
[taˈnaχ] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Hebrew> or [təˈnax]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Hebrew>; also /Tenakh/,
/Tenak/, /Tanach/) or /*Mikra*/ is the canon
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon> of the Hebrew Bible
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Bible>. The traditional Hebrew
text is known as the Masoretic Text
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masoretic_Text>.
/Tanakh/ is an acronym
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism> of the first
Hebrew letter <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet> of each of
the Masoretic Text's three traditional subdivisions: Torah
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah> ("Teaching", also known as the
Five Books of Moses), Nevi'im <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevi%27im>
("Prophets") and Ketuvim <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketuvim>
("Writings")—hence /*T*a*N*a*Kh*/. The name "/Mikra/" (מקרא), meaning
"that which is read", is another Hebrew word for the /Tanakh/. The books
of the Tanakh were passed on by each generation, and according to
rabbinic tradition were accompanied by an oral tradition, called the
Oral Torah <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_Torah>.
And now to the article.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/thumbing-your-nose-at-zeus-1450925192
Thumbing Your Nose at Zeus
The same god was worshiped differently in each city. Some Greeks
worshiped none at all.
ENLARGE
A Hellenistic relief of a family making a sacrifice, possibly at an
altar dedicated to Zeus. Photo: Print Collector/Getty Images
By
Christopher Carroll
Dec. 23, 2015 9:46 p.m. ET
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/thumbing-your-nose-at-zeus-1450925192#livefyre-comment>*In
ancient Athens* there was a dinner society called the Bad Luck Club.
Determined to mock the gods and the laws of the city, its members were
said to have scheduled their private meals on ill-omened days, when
feasting was forbidden. Having thus piqued the gods, all of them died
miserable deaths, except for one lone survivor, whose life, we are told
in an account from the third century A.D., was more a punishment than
death would have been anyway. Stories like this one, written not by
atheists but by pious contemporaries who often regarded them with
suspicion, make up much of the evidence that attests to atheism in
ancient Greece.
Few texts by ancient disbelievers have survived. And yet, as Tim
Whitmarsh argues in “Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World,”
“atheism has a tradition that is comparable in its antiquity to Judaism
(and considerably older than Christianity or Islam).” Mr. Whitmarsh, a
classicist at the University of Cambridge, has undertaken to tell the
story of Greek atheism over a thousand-year period. Drawing on the close
reading of many texts, he suggests that the tradition of Greek disbelief
is more considerable than previously imagined, that Greek atheists were
“airbrushed out of ancient history, or their significance minimized.”
His book, which ranges from the dark ages of Greece to the imposition of
Christianity as the sole legal religion of the Roman Empire in the fifth
century A.D., is a remarkable survey of the ways in which the Greeks
questioned and rejected notions of the divine, as impressive for its
breadth and erudition as for the concision, clarity and ease with which
it conveys a sometimes forbiddingly complex story.
Battling the Gods
By Tim Whitmarsh
/Knopf, 290 pages, $27.95/
For much of Greek antiquity, Mr. Whitmarsh writes, atheism wasn’t
treated as a heresy but was “seen rather as one of the many possible
stances one could take on the question of the gods (albeit an extreme
one).” This was in large part owing to the pluralistic nature of ancient
Greek society. Classical Greece was a world of squabbling city-states
spread around the Mediterranean, as Plato wrote, like “frogs around a
pond.” Just as they had no one ruler, the Greeks had no one sacred
text—no equivalent of the Tanakh, the Bible or the Quran. The pantheon,
established mainly by the epics of Homer and Hesiod, was roughly the
same for all Greeks, and yet always different. “In Greek polytheism,”
Mr. Whitmarsh explains, “religious ritual is always localized: you pray
not to Athena as an abstract deity but as her specific manifestation in
your local sanctuary.” And in each city, the same god would be worshiped
differently. Consider the example of Artemis, who, Mr. Whitmarsh
writes,at Brauron near Athens presided over a ritual involving young
girls of marriageable age dressing as bears; who near Ephesus on the
Anatolian coast occupied the largest temple in the region and was
depicted in the guise of a pre-Greek deity with a profusion of what have
been variously interpreted as breasts, eggs, or even bull’s testicles;
and who at Patrae was worshipped, as Artemis Laphria, with a huge fire
onto which were thrown wild animals of all kinds.
Because there was no universally imposed orthodoxy—no canonical idea of
what exactly the gods were like or how one was meant to worship them—it
wasn’t considered blasphemous to question their nature. In one of the
most impressive chapters of his book, Mr. Whitmarsh describes how the
many pre-Socratic philosophers, beginning in the sixth century B.C.,
attempted to explain the world around them not through Homeric or
Hesiodic myth but by the observation of physical reality. Thus for the
philosopher Anaximenes the stars were not supernatural but “pieces of
Earth that had been borne aloft on evaporated moisture and had
subsequently caught fire.” Yet these philosophers were not radical
atheists—they didn’t deny the existence of divinity. They sought instead
to redefine it, often as a sort of omnipotent, animating principle.
By the 420s, Mr. Whitmarsh notes, tragedians and comedians were writing
plays exploring not just the gods’ nature but whether they existed at
all. A number of these plays contain arguments against theism that are
still used today. The “Bellerophon,” for instance, a tragedy by
Euripides that survives only in fragmentary form, contains an early
version of what philosophers now call the Problem of Evil.
Someone says that there really are gods in heaven?
There are not, there are not—if you are willing
Not to subscribe foolishly to the antiquated account.
Consider it for yourselves; do not use my words
As a guide for your opinion. I reckon that tyrants
Kill very many people and deprive them of their property
And break their oaths to sack cities;
And despite this they prosper more
Than those who live piously in peace every day.
Though these plays, as Mr. Whitmarsh notes, ultimately affirmed
prevailing beliefs, they were presented in front of audiences of
thousands of citizens, providing a means of considering ideas about the
gods introduced by pre-Socratics and sophists.
This is not to say that it was entirely a good idea to go about denying
the existence of the gods. Though polytheism was generally tolerant of
disbelief, there were periods of repression, the first of which came in
imperial Athens during the Peloponnesian war in the fifth century, as
Athens’s fortunes began to wane and the citizenry grew skittish about
offending the gods. A number of philosophers, Socrates most prominent
among them, were tried and convicted on highly politicized charges of
atheism and impiety, and it was in this period that the Greek word
/atheos/, which had first meant something more like godforsaken, took on
a second meaning of “atheist.”
This suppression, though it had lasting effects, did not snuff out
ancient disbelief. Mr. Whitmarsh’s account continues through the
conquests of Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic age and Greece’s
absorption into the rising Roman Empire, finally ending in the Christian
era. It was only then, Mr. Whitmarsh writes, that “atheism began to be
constructed in systematically antithetical terms, as the inverse of
proper religion, a threat to the very foundations of human civilization.”
Mr. Whitmarsh’s book is, on the whole, a delight to read, though his
attempts to show that atheism was more prominent than we may have
thought can be excessively speculative. One such example is the story of
Salmoneus, who was said to have been killed by the gods after claiming
to be Zeus and dragging dried hides with bronze kettles behind his
chariot in an attempt to mimic the sound of thunder. Mr. Whitmarsh sees
in the story “a meditation on the metaphysical implications of a culture
that was beginning to manufacture divinity in the human realm, through
sculpture, painting, and theater.” Others may not see this at all.
Still, even if a reader were to disagree with every such suggestion, Mr.
Whitmarsh’s book would be very much worth attention, a sophisticated and
nuanced account of a fascinating and too often overlooked world.
—Mr. Carroll is on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books.
I Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I also learned something.
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.
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