(JTA) — Even before its release on Friday, buzz over Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film adaptation, “The Odyssey,” is introducing a new generation to Homer’s tale of shipwrecks, monsters, gods and the long road home. But what does an ancient Greek epic have to do with Jewish readers — or with the Hebrew Bible?

Quite a bit, says Jacob Howland, a philosopher and classicist who has spent much of his career exploring what has been called the conversation between Athens and Jerusalem. His 1998 book “Plato and the Talmud” was inspired in part by a Talmud study group at his synagogue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa from 1988 to 2020.

Howland is currently a distinguished visiting professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas, founded in 2023 to put Western civilization and “the American idea” at the center of academia in the Lone Star State. Howland has written extensively on the Greeks, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud for Mosaic, the online magazine of the conservative Jewish think tank and educational philanthropy Tikvah.

In the first of a recent series of essays on the “Odyssey” for Mosaic, Howland asks, “Should Jews Read Homer?” His answer, no surprise, is “yes”: The “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Bible, he writes, “illuminate the enduring questions of human life, including how to bring order and common purpose to the otherwise chaotic relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, familiars and strangers, clans and nations.”

To recap: The “Odyssey” follows the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon in the film) on his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. Delayed by storms, nymphs, temptations and the whims of the gods, he survives encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens and the sorceress Circe before finally returning to Ithaca. There, disguised as a beggar, he reunites with his faithful wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and (spoiler alert) reclaims his kingdom from the suitors who have overrun his household.

As Nolan’s blockbuster brings Odysseus back into the cultural conversation, we spoke with Howland about what Homer and the Bible have in common, how they differ and why both epics are at the center of the conservative discourse around “Western civilization.”

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

As someone who reads the “Odyssey” professionally, are you excited about a new movie production of this?

I am going to see the film. I’ve been encouraged, actually — there’s been an incredible amount of controversy, which is funny, because no one’s seen it yet. But I read that a number of people, including the historian Tom Holland — the “Rest Is History” podcast host, not the actor playing Telemachus — have seen it and given it strong reviews.

I’m fairly confident we won’t get something like “300” — that film about Thermopylae, with its computer-generated monsters, which younger audiences oddly loved but which was, historically, terrible. I think there has to be some attempt, if not at full historical accuracy, then at least a semblance of it in costuming, ships and so on — at a minimum, a gritty reality that transports you into another time and place, even if a hypercritical viewer could point out an anachronistic helmet or two.

I want to talk a little about Athens and Jerusalem, which is how the 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher and conservative icon Leo Strauss described the tension in Western civilization between the Bible and classical Greek philosophy. The “Odyssey” was written down somewhere between 725 and 675 BCE, and the Hebrew Bible was composed primarily between the eighth and second centuries BCE. How aware are these two cultures of each other?

If you’re asking about the time of Homer, it’s all speculation. But I can talk to you about the Talmudic period [roughly the first through fourth centuries CE]. According to Warren Zev Harvey at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis seemed to have known a lot about Greek philosophy. They just didn’t make that clear in the Talmud. They didn’t want to say, “We’ve studied the Greeks.”

I think it’s safer to talk about the Homeric and the biblical as two fundamentally different approaches — different understandings of the world, of human life, of the divine — and then ask how they differ, how they interact and what overlap they have.

In other words, what are the fruitful comparisons for understanding the differences and similarities between these cultures?

Yes. Athens and Jerusalem are the two oldest, greatest roots of Western civilization. I don’t always agree with everything Leo Strauss says, but he regards those two as a coiled spring, a tension from which the West itself grows. These texts, if we look at their fundamental view of the world, pose a question we have to decide for ourselves — and in some sense the future of our civilization depends on how we decide it.

What are some of the major episodes in the “Odyssey” we can expect to see in Nolan’s film that bear these kinds of comparisons to Jewish texts, and what questions and answers can we derive from them?

One thing that will probably show up is the recognition of Odysseus by his nurse Eurycleia when he returns to Ithaca in disguise — that’s where Homer tells the story of how Odysseus got his scar. As a youth — mid-teens, or thereabouts — Odysseus goes out to hunt a boar. The ordinary way the ancient Greeks hunted a boar: You get about five guys with javelins and a bunch of dogs and a net. The dogs locate the boar, drive it into its lair, and keep it at bay, barking. You set up the net, unleash the dogs, and they harass the boar until it runs out and gets caught in the net. Then a group of men comes in and stabs it.

Instead, Odysseus jumps out in front and rushes the boar himself, to stab it on his own, and that’s when the boar gashes him and gives him his scar.

In my view, this charging, wounding boar is a Homeric image of reality, at least from Odysseus’ perspective. Reality will wound you, and how do you confront it? You go out, and you fight. That’s a premise that explains Odysseus’s behavior through much of the “Odyssey.”

What’s the Hebrew counterpart? 

Fundamentally, trust in God — trust that there is an Almighty Creator who has fashioned a world habitable and suitable for human beings, and who will support them if they trust in Him. It’s not that the Hebrews didn’t know reality is wounding — it’s that there’s something above that wounding reality. The boar is an animal; the highest thing for Homer is essentially nature. There are the gods, but what exactly are they?

It’s not that the Jewish tradition doesn’t understand realpolitik. Abraham is a great warrior as well as a man of God. They understand it. But the starting point is trust. Odysseus does not trust. Odysseus is a man of disguises, cunning, cleverness — leveraging every trick.

Along with the charging-boar business, there’s a famous essay by a scholar named George Dimock called “The Name of Odysseus.” Dimock’s essential point: There’s a Greek verb, odusasthai, that means to cause pain to oneself and others, and to be willing to do so. Dimock points out that Odysseus does this in many ways — the Cyclops, whose eye he takes; the suitors, whom he kills; all of it.

By the end of the story, hasn’t he basically sacrificed his entire entourage?

This is incredible, if you look at it. Odysseus leaves Troy with 12 ships, which means around a thousand men. One way or another, they all die. So he takes a generation of young men to Troy and comes back with zero.

Twenty years later, you have the next generation — the noble cream of the crop, 108 suitors from Ithaca and the outlying islands. He kills all of them. So: Another generation of young people gone. Then the fathers of those suitors want revenge, so they make war against him. He would have killed them all too, except that Zeus had Athena intervene, essentially averting a civil war, with a pact of peace afterward.

Now, this begins to get at the real difference between the “Odyssey” and the Bible. After the universal history of Genesis 1 through 11, we get to the patriarchs. God is, in effect, saying: All right, I’m going with this guy Abraham — and remarkably, astonishingly, He says, “Come with me, leave your ways and customs behind, leave your gods, leave your family — we’re just going to go.” At that point, you’re dealing with God’s desire to form community, starting with a family, and it builds from there. Odysseus, by contrast, wants to get back home, but he’s a loner, a man of pain who must endure the world’s harsh reality to find fulfillment.

Let’s talk about the Cyclops, an episode that reveals a lot about the character of Odysseus. A one-eyed giant imprisons Odysseus’s men in a cave and rolls a stone against the entrance so they can’t get out — even if they kill him, they’d still be trapped inside.

Odysseus comes away from the war with Troy into a postwar world, a political crisis, He’s now a grizzled veteran of a bloody, horrible 10-year war. And the first thing he does is sack the city of the Cicones — an actual historical people — killing all the men and enslaving the women. He’s in a nasty mood. Very shortly after, they spot the Cyclops’s island — smoke rising — and decide to go see. They realize a monster must live there: Everything is enormous, racks of cheese stacked way up high. Odysseus says, “Let’s wait and meet this guy.” His men say, “No — let’s just take the stuff and go.” He insists on sitting inside the cave, waiting. It’s insane — he wants to measure himself.

The Cyclops episode is really the antithesis of what’s happening with Abraham and the patriarchs, who are building a family, a tribe, a nation, looking forward. Odysseus just wants to test himself. When the Cyclops returns, Odysseus uses his cleverness, blinds him, and they sneak out under the rams. Then he shouts his own name — which is what gets all his men killed, because the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son, and Poseidon is furious. He identifies himself completely: “I’m Odysseus, I live in Ithaca, here’s my address.” That episode is clearly one in which Odysseus is giving birth to himself — an act of absolute hubris.

So Odysseus has two competing desires. One is to make his name — to achieve glory and fame through his exploits. The other becomes: I have to get home.

Is there a biblical character who’s a useful compare-and-contrast for this notion of what it means to be a man, or a hero?

There’s Jacob, but let me start with David. The David and Goliath scene is fantastic, because Goliath is a Philistine, and the Philistines came from the Aegean — probably Greek speakers, though some think Crete. So Goliath, in effect, is a Greek. He’s described as enormous, fantastic — and he’s bested by David. David killing Goliath is a version of what scholars of myth call the “wily lad” story — another version is Odysseus with the Cyclops, another big, bad opponent. Interestingly, David hits Goliath right in the middle of the forehead, which is where, on Greek vases, the Cyclops’ eye is depicted.

So Goliath is big and bad, and then there’s Saul, a doofus who says, “You have to wear my armor.” David says, no, I’m not going to do that. David trusts in the Lord. When Odysseus defeats the Cyclops, he says, in effect, “I did this — I am Odysseus.” David says, “No — I trust in the Lord; the Lord protects me.”

And Jacob?

Odysseus is a wrestler, and Jacob is very Odyssean — fighting with Esau, leveraging Esau’s hunger to steal his birthright, scheming with his mother Rebecca, who is also an Odyssean figure, telling him to dress in skins to deceive Isaac. Then Esau wants to kill him, and we get the scene where Jacob wrestles at the Jabbok [River], the night before he has to confront Esau. He’s worried, he’s wounded, he fights this “ish” — this figure, angel, whatever it is — and he’s vulnerable. He’s feeling fear, feeling guilt. He’s holding on and fighting because only if Esau blesses him — which happens the next day — can Jacob let go. In other words: “I have to make it right with my brother.” Then he’s told his name will be Israel — because he strives with God.

So to sum this up: The Jewish hero is vulnerable and trusts in God; the Greek hero can show no vulnerability and can only trust in himself. And yes, there’s Athena and the other gods, but the Greek gods are fickle.

Are there similar comparisons between a female heroine in the “Odyssey” and a biblical character — perhaps Penelope and what she represents versus one of the matriarchs?

Penelope and Rebecca are two strong but very different women. Both are capable, like Odysseus, of enduring deep and lasting pain. Penelope seems more passive, but she has a kind of Odyssean cunning and steely determination. She holds the suitors at bay for three years by delaying marriage until she’s finished weaving the funeral shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. Besides her trick of weaving by day and unraveling by night, the shroud is not just for Laertes. It is for the suitors, and it signifies the burial of an entire epoch — a past slain by the violent passions of the younger generation, no longer constrained by ancestral ways.

While Penelope patiently awaits Odysseus’s return and prepares to bury a dying epoch, Rebecca looks forward, toward the great nation that God had promised to make of Abraham’s offspring. Isaac, doubtless traumatized by his near sacrifice, is the passive partner in their marriage; he stays put when Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for him, while Rebecca jumps at the chance to leave her home. She is physically vigorous (she endures a breach birth of twins, and carries water for all the servant’s camels) and strong in will, and it is she who is endowed with Odyssean cunning. She perceives that it is Jacob, not Esau, who has the toughness and ambition needed to be the bearer of the covenant. It is she who instructs Jacob how to disguise himself as Esau so that Isaac’s blessing will go to him; who takes on herself whatever curse Isaac may put on Jacob; and who instructs Jacob to flee to Beersheba, knowing that she will probably never see him again.

Those are really useful comparisons. But it raises a question, which maybe a rabbi would answer differently than a scholar: Is there a temptation, reading the “Odyssey” and the Bible, to conclude that one worldview, not the quality of the literature but the worldview, is simply better than the other? Does Homer have something to teach Jews about how to be a hero, or a lover, or how to be clever?

I was just teaching Exodus, and we got to the scene where Moses punishes the Israelites for the sin of the Golden Calf — a very Homeric episode, morally messy. Were any of the Levites who did the killing themselves involved in making the calf? Are they only killing people who deserve it, or will innocent people die too? My students find it extreme — 3,000 men killed. My response is: Read Machiavelli, where he says armed prophets succeed and unarmed prophets fail — and that 3,000 is about half a percent of the roughly two million Israelites there. If Moses doesn’t get this under control, they’re all going to die. That’s Greek — that’s realpolitik. But it’s already there in the Jewish tradition too, going back to Abraham.

So — is the Jewish tradition superior? I think so, and especially for today, because of our circumstances. The United States was at its height after World War II, and now our institutions are collapsing. What do we need? Trust. We need to rebuild. So if you ask which tradition is better, here’s one criterion: What’s the advantage of trust? It’s a kind of youthfulness, a kind of fertility, a kind of generativity — the capacity of the Jews to rebuild what’s been broken, to regrow, to reestablish themselves at every civilizational crisis, is unparalleled in history. The Greeks have a parallel of sorts — there’s a capacity to find a new way forward there too. But it seems to me what we need today is trust — because people are withdrawing their energy from the task of mending the world, because they don’t want to invest their time, energy and hope in something they believe might fail.

If we’re going to save Western civilization, which I do think is in crisis, we need to renew ourselves by looking to the Jewish tradition in particular.

Many people today, especially on the political right, argue that Western civilization is under siege, and the key to its revival is reclaiming its roots in the Ancient Greeks and Christian traditions. I think some Jewish thinkers and think tanks — including Tikvah, where some of your work has appeared — have a lot invested in including Judaism and Jewish ideas among the cornerstones of Western civilization. Is that a natural fit, or was Judaism more of a counterculture that was constantly challenging classical and Christian ideas?

I was a senior fellow at Tikvah, and they brought me on to design Greek and Jewish courses. When I got to the University of Austin [the pro-free inquiry, “anti-woke” liberal arts college whose founders include the Jewish journalist Bari Weiss] I designed their intellectual foundations program — their liberal-education core — and set it up with Genesis, Exodus and so on. I think what Tikvah is trying to do — and what UT Austin is doing too, in the School of Civic Leadership, where I’ll be teaching Genesis and Exodus this fall — and what other universities are trying to do, is give the Jewish tradition its rightful place.

From the founding fathers onward, there’s this notion that America is a chosen land — that we are, in some sense, a chosen people, engaged in a moral, spiritual, political mission. Lincoln, I think, brings this to a kind of perfection — he turns it into a civil religion, speaking to a people who’ve read the Bible, without pushing any particular sectarian version of it. We don’t know which side God is on, but the project isn’t going to work unless we understand ourselves to be on a kind of collective mission, knowing we’ll make mistakes and need to be forgiven.

You’ve written that the Hebrew Bible, like Homer, is one of the “taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization.” Do you worry about the Christian nationalists who insist Western civilization is intrinsically tied to the Christian faith, and denotes a specifically Christian civilization?

For sure, I think it’s a huge problem. As with anything involving the Jews, I’m horrified by the antisemitism I’ve seen building on the left, now mirrored on the right. Young people in particular are being memed into antisemitism.

It does seem to me that the only way forward is to keep having these conversations — to say, here’s what we’ve inherited, here’s how these texts have shaped who we are as Americans, how we understand things, even if you’re a staunch atheist, the Bible has shaped your thinking about all of this. Only then can we get to a point where more people than just the Jews might say, “Your Christian nationalism, which imagines Christianity came out of nowhere with no real relationship to the Jews except rejection, is fundamentally ill-informed and destructive.”

To return to Nolan’s version of the “Odyssey”: What do you hope it gets right — or, if you’d rather answer the other way, what do you dread it might do to a story of such antiquity and power?

Odysseus, as I’ve indicated, has some questionable qualities as a leader, but he’s a much more complicated, flexible person, better suited to a new reality. I think that’s part of why Homer centered him. He’s a character who can hold two things together at once — maybe more than two: “I want to be an outstanding individual, but my duty is to the community; I want to protect my family and make a name for myself, but I’m willing to do what’s necessary.”

That’s true of the Hebraic heroes too — Abraham surely didn’t think it was a great idea to say his wife Sarah was his sister [when threatened by Pharaoh and King Abimelech] not once but twice, but he had to; otherwise they weren’t getting out of there. You have to hold the necessary and the good together. That requires a complicated person who can juggle both.

And I think it’s such a primal story, from the point of view of the human soul and human history. On the individual level, it’s the shape of a life — leaving home and coming back. And it’s the shape of a community too. Biblically, we’re all exiles, all trying to get back to Eden, if you like. The story of human life is trying to make, or recover, or return to a home — on both the individual and the communal level — and it’s a never-ending task. I think Homer knew what he was doing: Read the last page of the “Odyssey”, and you sense there’s a lot of work still to be done. Because it doesn’t end. This is what life is about — and then going forward too, having children, being concerned with their home, helping them make one.

I hope the film shows that.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post As Christopher Nolan revives ‘The Odyssey,’ a scholar finds links between Homer and the Hebrew Bible appeared first on The Forward.