Hebrew Bible literature is surely as crave-worthy
as classical literature in unecclesiastical Latin and in ancient Greek,
its semitic surfboads still secularly wave-worthy,
when knowledge of the Hebrew Bible’s ancient language is than theirs less weak.
Although translations of the Hebrew Bible, like any text
in ancient Greek and Latin, prevent them from being grave-worthy,
ignorance of the original language of all these texts should make readers just as vexed
as do their heroes for having treated some of their non-heroes as slave-worthy.
In “Ancient Wisdom: For her latest book, the popular British scholar Mary Beard gets personal about how she fell for ancient Greece and Rome,” NYT, 5/19/26, Sarah Ruden, reviewing Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, by Mary Beard, writes:
If classics has a grande dame, it is the actual Dame Mary Beard, the recently retired Cambridge professor. She would likely loathe the characterization noblesse oblige, but there is some sense in it. The female knighthood is one of countless honors that have rewarded her achievements as a popularizer.
In “Talking Classics,” a wide-ranging and entertaining whence-and-whither discussion of her field, she clearly has in mind a potential worldwide classroom, but a justly skeptical one. What appeal does the subject have now? How can new generations enjoy and learn from the classics without joining ancient authorities in their glorification of imperialism and brutally divided societies — as too many acolytes in previous eras have done?
Latin and Greek are hardly going to do what in past centuries they used to: grab you by the scruff of the neck early in primary school and lock you up with them for a decade or more. Now you have to want classics. But Beard’s career, and particularly this latest book, make a case for the classics as crave-worthy — if not up front and immediately, then after the right introduction.
The parallels between the reports of the spies in Numbers 13 and Polyphemus in Homer’s Odyssey are mentioned in thetorah.com, https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-scouts-report-from-rhetoric-to-demagoguery, where Sarah Schwartz discusses to the reference to the Nephilim by the ten scouts who warn the Israelites of the dangers of attacking the Canaanites:
Num. 13:32-33 states:
וַיֹּצִ֜יאוּ דִּבַּ֤ת הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תָּר֣וּ אֹתָ֔הּ אֶל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לֵאמֹ֑ר הָאָ֡רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֩ עָבַ֨רְנוּ בָ֜הּ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֗הּ אֶ֣רֶץ אֹכֶ֤לֶת יוֹשְׁבֶ֙יהָ֙ הִ֔וא וְכׇל־הָעָ֛ם אֲשֶׁר־רָאִ֥ינוּ בְתוֹכָ֖הּ אַנְשֵׁ֥י מִדּֽוֹת׃
Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size;
וְשָׁ֣ם רָאִ֗ינוּ אֶת־הַנְּפִילִ֛ים בְּנֵ֥י עֲנָ֖ק מִן־הַנְּפִלִ֑ים וַנְּהִ֤י בְעֵינֵ֙ינוּ֙ כַּֽחֲגָבִ֔ים וְכֵ֥ן הָיִ֖ינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶֽם׃
and we saw the Nephilim there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”
In place of Anakim (giants), they introduce the Nephilim, demigods, alluding to the account in Gen. 6:4:
בראשית ו:ד הַנְּפִלִים הָיוּ בָאָרֶץ בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם וְגַם אַחֲרֵי כֵן אֲשֶׁר יָבֹאוּ בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים אֶל בְּנוֹת הָאָדָם וְיָלְדוּ לָהֶם הֵמָּה הַגִּבֹּרִים אֲשֶׁר מֵעוֹלָם אַנְשֵׁי הַשֵּׁם. Gen 6:4 It was then that the Nephilim appeared on earth—later too, when the divine beings cohabit with the daughters of men, who bear them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
My thoughts:
By using the term Nephilim, the scouts have moved into the realm of the mythological. They then go further, offering a fantastic—and ludicrous—image of the size difference between these Nephilim and a normal sized human declaring that they felt like grasshoppers and adding that that was how the Nephilim saw them. The reference in the report of the testimony of ten dissident spies to grasshoppers, an insect Leviticus allows the Israelites to consume (Lev 11:22), not only conjures up the image of the Nephilim picking up some tiny Israelite warrior and having him as a snack, but parallels the way that the one-eyed ogre Polyphemus eats Odysseus’ companions in the Odyssey. When Numbers describes the land of Canaan as one that devours its settlers, its suggestion that the land’s inhabitants regarded the Israelites as comparable to grasshoppers, implies that this land not only echoed the area in Sicily adjacent to the volcano of Aetna, the home site of Homer’s ogroid carnivore Polyphemus, but by comparing its invaders to grasshoppers, we hear of insects whose edibility is authorized by laws of Leviticus. The comparison of the territory’s invaders to grasshoppers therefore implies that the dissident scouts thought that the land of Canaan respected the laws of Leviticus.
My son Zachary pointed out that Num. 13:33 contrasts the multiple eyes of the inhabitants of Canaan, a land that allegedly devours its inhabitants in accordance with the laws of Leviticus, with the consumption of Odysseus’ companions by the monocular ogre Polyphemus, who ignored these biblical laws. Num. 13:33 draws our attention to the fact that the settlers of Canaan had more than one eye, in contrast to Polyphemus, when it states, “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” He also pointed out that Num. 22:4 states that the Moabites, facing an invasion by the Israelites, said “Now will this multitude lick up all that is round about us, as the ox licketh up the grass of the field,” implying that they recognized that the Israelite invaders restricted their diet to biblically permissible vegetarian products.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
