Sunday, January 31, 2010

Euripides Reads Torah, Paul Does the Classics

.... Now I’m no scholar of the Christian Scriptures (although I have taught courses on them a time or two), but when obvious parallels exist it is incumbent upon modern readers to pay attention. The parallels of Dionysus and Jesus were evident to early Christians, so what I noticed was nothing new. When the followers of Dionysus, however, strike a rock with their sticks and water flows out, I wondered if Euripides had read his Torah!

3 comments:

Chiron Cane said...

.:.

εὖοἷ
Ῥεῖ δὲ γάλακτι πέδον
ῥεῖ δ᾿ οἴνωι
ῥεῖ δὲ µελισσᾶν νέκταρι

.:.

Euripides in "The Bacchae" may well have been drawing on an oral tradition that was Minoan-Mycenaean in origin and which predated the Torah by several centuries.

It is interesting that although the first references to the miracle of the thyrsus of Moses and the rock refer to the flow of water this seems to be brought much more into line with the Dionysian mythos at a later period and transmutes into the familiar "honey from the rock" imagery present in the book of Psalms.

The triple flow of milk, honey and wine that appears in the verses from Euripides is an Elysian mytheme which lived on in the paradisal visions of even the nature-despising legalistic monotheisms of modern times.

It seems to make an early appearance into orthodoxy via the Sibylline Oracles with speak of the three fountains of milk, honey and wine which are part of the Golden Age vision of times to come.

Over time this mytheme manages to find its way into the visionary portrayals of the Four Rivers of the Garden of Eden.

The milk, honey and wine (familiar as a triple libation from Hellenic sources) remain a constant; the competing monotheistic monopolies merely differ on their choice of a fourth river which becomes olive oil in apocryphal Christian myth, water in the Koran and balm in later Hebrew folk legend.

That khamr, "wine", a word which like yayin, is attested in Ugaritic should appear as a river of paradise in Islamic scripture shows just how compelling such imagery can be.

The Sufis seemed to have understood something of the original significance of the triple flow as it surfaces in the writings of mystical poets such as Rumi.


Chiron Cane said...

I should have included an English translation with my earlier comment.

Sorry

:-(

____________________________

Evoah !


(the land)

Flows with new milk !

Flows with wine !

Flows with the nektar of bees !

.:.



(from "The Bacchae" by Euripides)

____________________________

J. K. Gayle said...

The milk, honey and wine (familiar as a triple libation from Hellenic sources) remain a constant; the competing monotheistic monopolies merely differ on their choice of a fourth river which becomes olive oil in apocryphal Christian myth, water in the Koran and balm in later Hebrew folk legend.

Thank you, Chiron, for your insightful comments here. And your translation!

Observant Jews, Christians, and Muslims might take offense at the notion that the genesis of biblical and/or koranic narratives derive from hellenic sources. And no one is suggesting some sort of Ishmael Reed re-reading of histories; rather the variations on themes that you point us to may get at something profoundly human in our story telling (and translating)!

My point now is that Aristotle was hellene in such a different way. It's an epistemology that most of us can hardly self-reflect on because we want to deny such earlier (poetic, perhaps mythic) ways of knowing and being and be coming.

Back to Bacchae, your translation reminds me of what poet-translator Anne Carson suggests about Euripides: that he may have been steeped in irony, that the "darkness" of the play here might be more light than we, at first glance, see in the women of Thebes and in the themes.

Thank you again Chiron, and welcome here to this blog!