Old Testament Poetry and Homeric Epic

Abstract

RICH AUERBACH'S Mimesis' appears to be generally regarded as one of the finest treatises in comparative literature that we shall ever see, and none of its chapters is perhaps more widely or more justly admired than the first, which contrasts two antique styles of narration-one of them used in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey for telling the story of Odysseus' scar, the other used in the twentysecond chapter of Genesis to record Abraham's offering of Isaac. Auerbach's analysis of the two texts seems to me extremely good, but his following overall assumption that these texts fairly represent Homeric epic and the Old Testament in their entireties certainly cannot be allowed. Though the Homeric style is indeed always the same, half of the Old Testament is in prose and the other half in poetry-two broad categories that are not very much alike at all. In defining the characteristics of the prose, Auerbach never admitted the existence of the poetry, and for this reason his summations are vitiated at the core. My purpose here is to speak against them. The first section of the paper will argue that the true generic analogue of Homeric epic is in fact the poetry, and not the prose; the second and third sections will assert theses about the poetry from the vantage point of current Homeric critical theory; and the conclusion will be that, on the basis of style, the Hebraic mind or world view cannot be distinguished from the intelligence behind the Odyssey or Iliad.