Biblical Views: Yahweh as Achilles

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Sing “Wrath!” O Goddess; the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son,

and its devastation, which laid anguish a thousandfold upon the Achaians.

So begins Homer’s Iliad. But can one draw parallels between Homer and the Bible? I agree with Susan Niditch who, in War in the Hebrew Bible, notes that in the Bible, “heroic warrior material is part of larger narrative patterns that are typical of a cross-cultural range of epic stories about heroes.”¹ For example, David’s encounter with Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 follows a story pattern similar to Homeric warrior epic. (In fact, given Goliath’s Philistine ethnicity, he probably could claim an ancestor or two among the Greeks at Troy,^a and he might have sung a Philistine variant of the Iliad!) Similarly, the bloody mélée at Gibeon (2 Samuel2) between the soldiers of rival generals Joab and Abner recalls Iliadic skirmishes.

Thanks to some obliging source citations on the part of Biblical writers, we know the names of some lost Israelite documents that apparently contained substantial chunks of Israelite epic poetry.^b The Book of Jashar, for example, supplied the snippet of song about the sun standing still at Gibeon (Joshua 10:13) as well as the “Song of the Bow” (2 Samuel 1:18, “David’s Lament”) a composition remarkably close in style and spirit to Achilles’ outpouring of grief over his slain companion, Patroklos. Compare Achilles in Iliad XVIII:

… my dear companion has perished, Patroklos,

whom I loved beyond all other companions, as well as my own life.

I have lost him …²

with David’s song:

Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.

I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;

greatly beloved were you to me;

your love to me was wonderful,

passing the love of women.

(2 Samuel 1:25–26)

Perhaps most tantalizing of all is the Book of the Wars of Yahweh, mentioned only in Numbers 21:14. This appears to be the source of three archaic poetry fragments, the last of which taunts the defeated people of Chemosh, Moab’s god and Yahweh’s particular foe in the Transjordanian portion of Israel’s conquest. Unlike the Iliad, whose heroes are human—albeit, like Achilles, sometimes of divine parentage—this lost Israelite document points to Yahweh as Israel’s mightiest warrior. As we know from the oldest strata of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh was first and foremost a divine warrior. Exodus 15, which may date as early as the 11th century B.C.E.,^c expresses this simply: “Yahweh is a man of war, Yahweh is his name” (15:3). In Judges 5, another archaic text, Yahweh commands not only the tribes of Israel but the stars and the Kishon River.

Yahweh’s martial persona also undergirds the seventh-century Deuteronomist’s holy war theology. As laid out in Deuteronomy 20, the Israelite army must “not lose heart, or be afraid … for it is Yahweh your God who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to give you victory” (20:3–4). Furthermore, and most notoriously, “as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them” (20:16–17). The “ban” (Hebrew, herem) requiring wholesale slaughter did not originate with the rationale provided in Deuteronomy 20 that stresses the necessity of eliminating any trace of abominated Canaanite religious practice. Rather, as Niditch demonstrates, the wholesale slaughter of the defeated 081enemy constituted a victory thank offering, a sacrifice of the most valuable war spoil, human beings, to God.³

I can express this more colloquially: Yahweh, as the mightiest warrior, is the battle’s MVP (Most Valuable Player) and merits the greatest portion of the spoils. The same “MVP principle” operated in Homer’s warrior society in the form of the geras, the portion of sacrificial meat or war spoils awarded to a warrior as a public expression of his personal honor. Remember that Achilles’ horrific anger is provoked when Agamemnon, the nominal leader of the Greeks, commandeers for himself a captive woman, Briseis, who had already been awarded to Achilles as his geras. Achilles rails at Agamemnon that “always the greater part of the painful fighting is the work of my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty, yours is far the greater reward” (I.165–167). As the “best of the Achaians,” Achilles’ wrath boils over; he cannot acquiesce to Agamemnon’s subversion of the warrior code, and he withdraws to his tent, “minded no longer to stay here dishonored and pile up your wealth and your luxury” (I.171). Without Achilles, the Greeks falter.

As classicist Gregory Nagy points out, Achilles burns with menis, a special word for the terrifying wrath of gods, not mortals.⁴ For precisely the same reason, Yahweh reacts fearsomely to the improper division of the spoils after the fall of Jericho, a victory manifestly won by Yahweh alone (Joshua 6). Because Achan withheld some of the spoils of Jericho, “the anger of the Lord burned against the Israelites” (Joshua 7:1). And then, exactly like Achilles, Yahweh withdraws, abandoning his merely mortal comrades to ignominious defeat at the hands of the men of Ai (Joshua 7:4–5). In the Iliad, Achilles eventually relents, but not before Patroklos is dead and Agamemnon humbled. As for Yahweh, only after the Israelites make suitable amends by stoning Achan with his entire family does the Divine Warrior—the “best of the Israelites”—return to war and inevitable victory. Like Joshua and David, Joab and Abner, Yahweh, too, is an epic hero.

Sing “Wrath!” O Goddess; the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’ son,