24 Ancient Ideals
on diff erent sides in the war between the Greeks and Trojans, and
matters come quickly to the point where Zeus threatens to throttle
his wife there on Olympus, in front of all the gods. The gods are
quarreling, yes, and like the mortals that they si mul ta neously love
and disdain, the gods are quarreling about power.
The gods in Homer value what the mortals do— strength, beauty,
renown, amazing deeds, and power: power most of all. They con-
tend with each other for position much as the Greek and Trojan war-
riors do. Zeus appears to be preeminent, and for the time being he
is, but it’s clear that the gods have rebelled against him at least once
in the past, and it’s likely they could again. (Thetis saved Zeus
during the rebellion and so can beseech him now to help her son in
return.) Achilles is at home in this cosmos, at least until the quarrel
with Agamemnon. The gods he worships worship what he does.
They act as he would if he were as power ful as a god and destined
to live forever.
How diff erent is the relation between the God of the Hebrew
Bible and his worshippers. The God of the Old Testament is radi-
cally removed from his mortal creations; he is of another order of
being entirely. Humans cannot understand his ways. On what seems
a whim, he makes a wager with Satan on whether or not Job, his loyal
servant, will turn against him if his fortunes change. Yahweh visits
every kind of degradation on Job, until the unfortunate man is
sitting alone in a pigsty, his family dead, his wealth gone. He is
covered in sores and scraping himself with a piece of broken
pottery. When he protests his fate, and asks what he has done to de-
serve it, the Lord answers that Job cannot know his ways. Yahweh
is of a diff erent order of being. Where were you when I created the
foundation of the earth? he asks Job. Can you put a hook through
Leviathan’s lip and raise him from the sea? “Can you bind the
chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” ( Job 38.31).