Classics and the Bible by Taylor John;

Author:Taylor, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2007-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Aeneid and the Old Testament

Virgil’s epic and the Old Testament share the grand theme of national destiny linked to cosmic purposes. Both describe the formation of a people under the superintending hand of Providence. The theme is so familiar from the Bible that we may fail to appreciate how striking and unusual it is in classical literature. But it is striking too that the story of national origins, although central to the Old Testament, does not have the parallels in the literature of the ancient Near East which can be cited for almost any other biblical genre, perhaps because the cultures that produced it were autochthonous and had no clear sense of a beginning.38 Virgil’s epic and the Old Testament here seem closer in spirit to each other than either does to its nearer neighbours.

The Aeneid is framed not only by the action of the reigning Olympians but implicitly by the even larger perspective of clashing gods and Giants. Philip Hardie in Cosmos and Imperium shows how the poet draws a far-reaching parallel between the functioning of the Roman empire and the organisation of the universe, in both cases with a sense not only of their current operation but also of the struggles through which this precious and precarious ordering was achieved.39 Likewise the vast cosmic perspective of heaven and earth in the first eleven chapters of Genesis provides the context for the national and quotidian theme which occupies the rest of the Pentateuch.

The Aeneid resembles the stories both of Abraham and of the Exodus. Moshe Weinfeld in The Promise of the Land shows the many parallels between Abraham and Aeneas, each story using the powerful theme of a man in the distant past with a glimmering of future glory.40 Aeneas gains successive clues about his destination and destiny, and similarly the promise to Abraham is gradually fulfilled. From the viewpoint of a later age we look back in each case to an account of ancestors setting out to travel to a land divinely promised. For both of these chosen peoples, wanderings are followed by war, and dangers in a new homeland have to be met and overcome in Canaan and Italy alike. But in both cases the ultimate achievement is of more than national importance. The mission of Aeneas is to found (not in person but proleptically) a city that will rule the world. In Genesis it is already made clear that the seed of Abraham will become a great nation with a universal mission, and by the time we reach Isaiah it can be foretold of the city of Jerusalem (in the words of the Authorised Version which Kipling imagined Shakespeare to have had a hand in framing):41 ‘the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising’ (Isa. 60:3).

Abraham (at first called Abram) sets out initially from Ur of the Chaldaeans (Gen. 11:31). Those rulers belong to a later period than his notional date, but the Sumerian city (if correctly identified

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