Does a Hercules sculpture point to ancient Jewish paganism?

[okamido]

Hercules

[Klingan]

I can't read the source article in the Biblical Archaeology Society, but the head line is really not what the article is about, unless the source is very different from the one linked to here.

 

Thanks for the post though!

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

This articles remembers me of a blog post I read yesterday on a spectacles which religious extremists claim "defile Christ" because supposedly excrements are thrown to an image of said Jesus. As the article well pointed, the value of the image of Christ is that of an image, and only an image : the image is not the Christ himself. In the ancient world thing evolved : at first the image was considered as equal to the god, as his shown in the story of the statue of Juno Moneta that was taken from a captured city to the Capitol and which aproved of it's transfer by noding to it's transporters. But in the Hellenistic period, when art was sought for private enjoiment, this vision was no more true.

 

Hercules, through his numerous travels, was associated with almost every places in the ancient world, from the west to the far east, and could be described as the link between all hellenized places in the world. Having his portrait was thus no necessarily a proof of worship but could simply be a proof of hellenism.

 

And it turns out when you look at the history of the site that it was an hellenistic foundation of around 200 B.C. named Antiochia-Hippos (site on Hippos), part of a larger seleucid attempt to hellenize the area, and part during the roman period of the so-called Decapolis, an ensemble known to have been the hellenized anchor in a jewish sea and a defense against eastern powers up to the roman perdiod.

 

Look also at the place it was found : a bath. A place where men showed their virility and where the arch-virilous Hercules could be seen as an ideal body.

 

So all those elements make me think that the presence of an Hercules is nothing exceptional and that only the pitch of the magazine, "Biblical archeology" tries unnecessarily to spin it in a religious way.

[okamido]

Sorry that I couldn't provide the entire article from the magazine.

 

Located at a site along the shore of the Galilee in Israel, could this classically themed sculpture be an indicator of Jewish paganism among the ancient population? This is one of the questions Segal and Eisenberg address in their article

Edited October 29, 2011 by okamido

[Klingan]

Sorry that I couldn't provide the entire article from the magazine.

 

Located at a site along the shore of the Galilee in Israel, could this classically themed sculpture be an indicator of Jewish paganism among the ancient population? This is one of the questions Segal and Eisenberg address in their article