Pagan and Jewish Heroes: Defining the Human Ideal

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

The hero whose mighty works we tell and retell are telling us about our wildest dreams, our deepest fantasies, and our fervent if not frustrated hopes. Some Feminists argue that the Biblical God is couched in male imagery, indicated that the Biblical God is no more than a projection of a man's dream of power and majesty. By examining four heroes, two pagan and two Israelite, we can appreciate the different ways societies work, or do not work.

The first hero is Bilgamesh, or as he is better known, Gilgamesh. Two parts god and one part human, he is powerful, petty, heroic, steadfast, loyal, and to his despair, mortal. Gilgamesh first appears as a noble king, going to war and enjoying the sexual rights of the first night. His people petition the gods to keep this predator tyrant from ruining their lives. An alter ego human beast, Enkidu, a son of the forest, is created to fight, be conquered by, and ultimately become Gilgamesh's best friend. Gilgamesh is distracted from his oppressive rule of his city by his friend, with whom they enjoy heroic exploits. When Gilgamesh rejects the advances of Ishtar, the events turn and his friend, Enkidu, sickens and dies. With the loss of his friend, Gilgamesh is consumed with the loss of a friend and with his own mortality. When finally finding Ute Napishtim, who was given the gift of immortality, and acquiring the plant that holds the gift of immortality, a snake eats the plant and Gilgamesh becomes resigned to his fated death and realizes that the measure of immortality of being renown is all that is his lot to acquire.

Odysseus is a soldier returning home from the 13th Century Trojan War. A good soldier and a great strategist, Odysseus, like the winning king in a chess game, loses navy and all of his his sailors on his odyssey home. While Ute Napishtim searches for immortality and possesses a childlike desire to be a super adult,or god, whose lust for life and women has no bounds, Odysseus, like Gilgamesh, is approached seductively by a goddesss. Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar not out of a sense of loyalty, but because he realizes that Ishtar abuses and destroys her many consorts. And Ishtar does not offer Gilgamesh immortality. The nymth Calypso would possess Odysseus and give him both immortality and an unending life of constant pleasure. Odysseus rejects Calypso's call and its accompanying immortality, desiring instead to return to his faithful wife, Penelope. Calypso releases Odysseus only at the command of Zeus, because Odysseus is fated to come home. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus enjoys exploits, takes a pilgrimage in life that is transformative, and rejects the advances of the seductress goddess. But unlike Gilgamesh, who mourns his mortality while alive and for whom spousal fidelity obliges his wife but not him, Odysseus prefers spousal fidelity to godly immortality and unending pleasure. In both epic narratives, the gods are really super humans with super but not supreme powers and with human, moral frailties.

Biblical heroes are not known for their exploits, but for their character. Abraham is proactively good. He takes a journey not for the pagan quest for noble renown, but because God commands him to do so to make himself into a better person, covenanted with an all-powerful and faithfully moral God Who brooks no evil. Like God, Abraham is a moral agent who will rush to be hospitable to strangers, who will take financial loss in order to keep peace in the family, who will go to war to save his nephew Lot from captivity, and who will argue with God in order to save the strangers of Sodom. For the pagan, be he [females can be goddesses, who are objects of men's fantasies, but they are rarely human heroines in antiquity] Greek or Sumerian, being a hero is expressed in securing the city, being brave in the face of danger, and being clever enough to keep the capricious gods happily at bay. Immortality is found in renown. In pagan thought, where idols reflect the image of the god that is seen, humans are supposed to look good. Abraham,whose God is unseen, pleases God by being good.

The quintessential Biblical hero is Moses. Although the rabbis portray Moses as rabbeinu, the teacher, projecting on ancient Israel its own religious preferences, Scripture's portrait of Moses as a young man is not as a rabbi or prophet, but as a human being with nobility of conscience. After Pharaoh makes three assaults on the emerging Israelite nation in exile, by enslaving them, ordering the midwives to kill the male offspring, and by asking the nation of Egypt to cast the male Israelite offspring into the sea, Moses first kills an Egyptian who beats an Israelite, mimicking the midwives. Since the midwives' names, Shifra [Aramaic] and Pu'ah [Ugaritic] they were likely not Egyptians but from Semitic and possibly Hebrew stock. Their defiance of Pharaoh's oppression became Moses' first model. One need not have power to protest evil, and silence in the face of moral wrong is a wrong of cowardice. Moses left the aristocracy of the oppressor in order to cast his lot with the fate of the oppressed, not for gain or fame but for the spiritual might that resides in the ethical right. The way of the world is that humans seek greatness and immortality and fame; one rises on the hierarchy of power. The way of Abraham and Moses was to ennoble oneself by bettering the world.

While in the first Mosaic episode, Moses decides that he is an Israelite and not an Egyptian, rejecting the hierarchy of power that is Pharaoh's, the second episode reveals how an Israelite can assimilate the power theology of the pagan. When stopping the Israelite from assaulting a fellow Israelite, the biblical Narrator passes moral judgment on the assaulting culprit by couching Moses question, "why are you assaulting/about to assault your fellow," as an address to the wicked one, the one who assaults his fellow. For Rashi and the Sages, the biblical imperfect tense is taken to be a future tense. And the assaulter, be he one who strikes, or even one who cocks the fist to strike, is wicked. He is acting like an Egyptian. And the wicked assaulter's response to Moses, like the confessional mode in American poetry, reveals more about the mind of the assaulter than is contained in the lexical sense of his rhetorical question's words: "who appointed you, [Mr. Moses] to be king [sar, sharrum] or chieftain [shapitum] over us. Do you intend to kill me as you have killed the Egyptian?" The idiom "who appointed you" is an assertion of authority. But the Hebrew idiom really reads "who placed you over us," to be hierarchically superior to us that you have a moral right to tell us what to do. This rhetorical question is part of the pagan repertoire of asserting control over others. For Moses, the moral conscience is the ultimate source of authority. When Moses susquently assists female shepherds who are oppressed by moral powerful males, Moses reveals a character that, like Abraham's character, was pleasing. Moses possessed the moral conscience to defy oppressive convention, and his sense of right was sufficient for him to deny the piety of Egyptian paganism because it was oppressive.

Like Sargon I of Akkad, Moses is "saved" by being hidden in the bulrushes of the River. Sargon's name means "the king is legitimate," belying his lowly origins. Moses nobility is found not only in his ancestry, but in his character. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and later Christian nobles are warriors who ought but rarely act ethically. Moses and Abraham are exquisitely ethical who, in order to advance their ethical agendas, are constrained to become warriors. In Israel, nobility is found in character, for paganism, nobility is in prowess. Being the conqueror, dancer, caterer, and insurer of stability is the job of the pagan noble. Order is a value because it insures stability. The shape of the order is almost irrelevant. For Gilgamesh and Odysseus, the moral conscience is either barely present or it is primitive. For Abraham and Moses, the moral conscience makes them appropriate messengers of the God Who is not constrained by fate, who demands of Israel that Israel become Godly by becoming holy, and by affirming that moral right is infinitely more powerful than the might of finite human power.

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