Homer, the Phoenicians and the Jews
The Greek lyric poet Homer is among the best-known writers to have ever lived in the world and certainly is an individual who you would still be likely to have heard something about even if you hadn't read a word he had written. Homer's work focuses on the famous Trojan war between the Greeks led by King Agamemnon and the Trojans lead by King Priam.
Now part of Homer's narrative includes many throwaway allusions and anecdotes in relation to other peoples that his audience would have heard of - or had even met a representative - in the course of their lives. What is interesting to us is Homer's several mentions of the Phoenicians in the Iliad and the Odyssey: this is important to us because the Greeks had regular economic and cultural contact with the Phoenicians in Homer's time as in later centuries. (1)
This was particularly so as the Phoenician traders were the original anarcho-capitalists of the ancient world and were interested in selling their wares to Greek kings (who Rhodes rightly styles as more like 'chief aristocrats' than kings in the general historical sense) (2) who paid them in whatever they could get their hands on: gold, silver, wine, food stuffs, manufactured goods and/or slaves. (3)
You might at this point wonder what on earth Homer and the Phoenicians have to do with the jews, (4) but what is important to understand is that the jews as they were became known to the Greeks and Romans did not exist per se, but rather were still immersed in the hodgepodge of tribes and peoples that made up the many kingdoms of what is today the countries of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
This can be easily evinced by pointing to the fact that Herodotus singularly fails to mention so odd a people (i.e., in their supposed monotheism) as the jews as existing in Palestine even though he explicitly says he had been to the country. (5) Indeed, Herodotus clearly associates the whole of what is now Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan together as one general ethnic, cultural and religious entity. (6)
The reason for this had been aptly pointed out by Schaefer when he asserted that Judaism is a religious tradition replete with major theological and intellectual breaks (although with some points of continuity) and that the jewish tradition as we understand it today is completely different to the religious beliefs of the ancestors of the jews with whom we are currently dealing. (7)
This difference has been aptly noted by Goldenberg to consist of religious polytheism as opposed to religious monotheism, (8) which is easily backed up by noting the constant reversion as recorded in both the Torah and the Tanakh of the early Israelites to the worship of gods other than Yahweh. (9) Such a reversion occurred in the famous days of Solomon - who was remember reputed to be wise - and he allowed cults to Canaanite god and goddesses to flourish under his rule. (10)
What is perhaps even more surprising to the modern reader is to learn that Yahweh is actually the Canaanite 'King of Heaven' and the origin of Judaism to a large extent is in a breakaway purist cult based on worshipping Yahweh and his consort Asherah [combined with another goddess Astarte to make 'God's Wife': the Shekhina in Judaism]. (11) Day even goes as far as to call the jewish religious belief system of this time a polytheistic 'sun cult'. (12)
Now once again the reader may wonder what the link is between the jews and Phoenicans via the Canaanites: that connection is very simple in so far as they were the same culture and ethnicity, but which later went in very different directions. In essence the Canaanites of history are more or less identical to the Phoenicians of history. (13) This identification is also more or less made by Josephus when he points out that the jews were to gain all of the Canaanite's (i.e. their religious opponents among their own people) territory and that this had been gifted to them by Yahweh (as chief of all the Canaanite deities). (14)
Now once we understand that when Homer talks about the Phoenicians: he is by extension also talking indirectly about the jews as well. Then we can look at just what Homer says about the Phoenicians and see how it reflects on the jews.
In the Iliad Homer talks about the Phoenicians as being great merchants who barter their goods and the produce of their artisans around the world (15) as well as the 'work of their women' (i.e., cloth) being the most luxuriant of robes. (16) This is all well and good as Homer's comments on the Phoenicians clearly indicate that they are great traders, but also that that this probably does not apply to the jews given that Josephus for example denies the jews had been traders at all historically! (17)
When we turn to Homer's somewhat different epic the Odyssey; we note that the mentions of the Phoenicians are rather different in tone. The eponymous hero Odysseus is making up a story to hide his true identity in a conversation with the goddess Athene and in the basis of this story we find mention of the nefarious nature of the Phoenicians.
Odysseus tells Athene that he was a fugitive from his home island of Crete, because he had killed a man named Orsilochus who had tried to unjustly rob him of the wealth that he acquired from the sacking of Troy. Having slain Orsilochus Odysseus then proceeded to hitch a lift on the first ship he found, which just so happened to be a Phoenician galley heading home to the port city of Sidon. However, the weather turned against Odysseus and the Phoenicians so they had to call into an island port short of Odysseus' destination. Odysseus being much fatigued from the rowing he had done laid down to sleep with the crew on the shore: only for the Phoenicians to steal all Odysseus' accumulated wealth from the Trojan war and sail back to the port of Sidon with it leaving Odysseus stranded. (18)
This however is not always the way of Phoenician hospitality given that Homer also describes Phaedimus - the ruler of the Phoenician city-state of Sidon - following Greek (although not Phoenician) custom gifted King Menelaus - the cuckolded husband of Helen of Sparta/Troy and the brother of King Agamemnon - a bowl for the mixing of wine with water (as wine was then kept neat and needed to be watered down to be drunk) which was made of solid silver and edged in gold. (19)
Now as this happened after Agamemnon and the Greek army had successfully sacked Troy: it is not implausible to suggest that Phaedimus was engaging in a simple bit of realpolitik by seeking to placate the brother of the for the time massive Greek army that had just been victorious against and had wiped out another major local power in the form of the Trojans (who would have undoubtedly had close relations with the Phoenicians as a major trading port). (20)
We can already see that the Phoenicians as Homer depicts them are scheming traders obsessed with material wealth as opposed to the heroic battles and combats of the Greeks and Trojans before the gates of Troy.
Indeed, when Odysseus tells his cover story a-new to the loyal swineherd Eumaeus on his covert return to Ithaca: he adds that he stayed in Egypt for seven years and that in the eighth year he made the acquaintance of a Phoenician who he describes as being a born con-artist. This unnamed Phoenician knew about all the wealth that Odysseus had gathered during his lengthy sojourn in Egypt and promptly inveigled Odysseus into coming back to Phoenicia with him on the suggestion that should he do so then he could garner yet more wealth.
This Phoenician however had other ideas and planned to steal all of Odysseus' wealth after having had Odysseus unload it himself - or paid others to unload it for him - and then promptly enslave him according to Phoenician custom so that he could sell him to make even more profit for himself. (21)
We should note Homer's wording on this point: in that he refers to the Phoenician as already having done much that is evil in the world and deceived many people in the way that he is now deceiving Odysseus. This can argued to suggest that Homer is here using an ethnic archetype aimed at the ways of Phoenicians writ large (in opposition to the heroism and plain-dealing of the Greeks and Trojans) and that the reference to the deception of many Greeks in this way is the means by which the Phoenician make such great profit from their dealing with the Greeks (i.e. by using their trusting and honest nature against them).
Further we should take notice of the part of Homer's story where the Phoenician seeks to enslave and sell Odysseus both to make himself more profit on top of his theft of Odysseus' Egyptian wealth and also get rid of Odysseus as a witness and aggrieved party by removing his freedom from him (i.e., slaves didn't tend to live too long and had little to no rights in Phoenicia). Indeed, we should notice that the Torah and Tanakh made just such explicit legal provision for the jewish ownership of and trade in [non-jewish] slaves as Odysseus would have been. (22)
The last mention Homer makes of the Phoenicians is once again in relation to the cover story he tells the loyal swineherd Eumaeus on his covert return to Ithaca. Odysseus recounts a new element in relation to his cover story that his supposed father Ctesius - the ruler of the island of Syros - had in his household an attractive Phoenician slave woman from Sidon who was one day visited by the crew of a Phoenician mercantile galley during their visit to Syros to hawk their wares to the proverbial gullible yokels.
The Phoenicians aboard this galley struck up a conversation with her and discovered that she was the daughter of a rich Phoenician merchant named Arybas, but that one day she had been abducted by Taphian pirates, transported to Syros and sold as a slave to Ctesius. The Phoenician woman - who was Odysseus' nursemaid in his cover story - on being told by the Phoenician traders that her father Arybas was alive and still extremely wealthy: makes a pact with the Phoenician traders that if they will transport her back to him. She will see to it that he makes them rich for having rescued her.
Part of this deal was that on the prearranged signal of a Phoenician visit to the household of Ctesius in order to hawk gold jewellery to Ctesius' wife: the Phoenician woman would abscond with them back to Sidon. Now the Phoenician woman in Odysseus' story also brought him - as a child entrusted to her care - along for the voyage back to Sidon in order that she might both profit from his sale as a child slave and also to revenge herself on the Ctesius of having bought her as a slave from Taphian pirates. (23)
Homer naturally doesn't let her survive such evil duplicity and she is struck down by a goddess Artemis six days into the voyage back to Sidon and her erstwhile liberators - fearing for what her powerful father Arybas might do to them for only bringing his daughter's dead body back home - promptly throw her corpse into the sea to be eaten by the 'seals and fish'.
Now this - as with the other descriptions of Phoenicians that Homer brings out in the Odyssey - is clearly meant to be an ethnic archetype of the Phoenicians. In that they are seen to be naturally duplicitous, are only interested in their own personal profit and even have little to no loyalty to their kin (unlike the Greeks and Trojans) only performing superficial altruistic acts if they perceive there to be significant personal profit to be involved (such as the reward from the Phoenician woman's rich father).
Further we should note that Homer's ethnic archetype once again styles the Phoenicians as being unscrupulous slavers and like later Greek depictions of 'Eastern peoples': the Phoenicians - as depicted by Homer - are an effete and emotionally tempestuous people who would do something as malicious as to enslave their former master's son just to get their own back at that master for having bought them as a slave in the first place.
From this then we can conclude that Homer's Phoenicians are - as the ancestors and cousins of the jews that the later Greeks and Romans knew - portrayed as being selfish, materialistic, duplicitous, slave merchants and thoroughly unsavoury towards each other and the rest of the world. If we understand that the Phoenicians of Homer and the jews of Greek and Roman times can be more or less viewed as the same people. Then it is clear that when Homer is describing the many vices and general lack of virtuousness among the Phoenicians that Homer is necessarily also describing the jews in the same was as he is the Phoenicians.
References
(1) Michael Shanks, 1999, 'Art and the Early Greek State: An Interpretative Archaeology', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 201; Catherine Morgan, 2003, 'Early Greek States Beyond the Polis', 1st Edition, Routledge: New York, pp. 2-3
(2) Peter Rhodes, 2006, 'A History of the Classical Greek World 478-323 BC', 1st Edition, Blackwell: Oxford, p. 2
(3) Shanks, Op. Cit., p. 204
(4) I have also touched on this connection in relation to the origin of the ritual murder charge made by the ancient Greeks against the jews in the following article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/reconstructing-the-first-jewish-ritual
(5) Herod. 2:106
(6) Ibid., 3:90-91
(7) Peter Schaefer, 1995, 'The History of the Jews in Antiquity: The Jews of Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest', 1st Edition, Routledge: New York, p. xi
(8) Robert Goldenberg, 2007, 'The Origins of Judaism: From Canaan to the Rise of Islam', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 26-27
(9) Ibid., pp. 28-30
(10) John Day, 2002, 'Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan', 2nd Edition, Sheffield Academic Press: New York, Ibid, pp. 129
(11) See Mark Smith, 2001, 'The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York.
(12) Day, Op. Cit., pp. 151-152
(13) Glenn Markoe, 2000, 'Phoenicians', 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley, p. 108
(14) Joseph. Ant. 1:10.191
(15) Hom. Il. 23:744-746
(16) Ibid., 6:290-296
(17) Joseph. Cont. Ap. 1:12
(18) Hom. Ody. 8:265-293
(19) Ibid., 4:625-630; repeated in Ibid., 15:103-110
(20) Shanks, Op. Cit., p. 204
(21) Hom. Ody. 14:286-298
(22) Goldenberg, Op. Cit., p. 13
(23) Hom. Ody. 15:422-484