PALLADION MŰHELY

At the very opening of Genesis (6: 1-4), before the Flood, before Abraham, before Israel itself, we encounter a strange myth of divine beings, mortal women, and a race of heroes. Why does a monotheistic text preserve such a myth—and why does it sound so familiar to students of Greek epic? The presence of this episode near the beginning of an ostensibly monotheistic text is striking. It tells of the “sons of God” mating with mortal women and of the birth of a generation of the Nephilim and gibborim possibly giants and certainly heroes. Who might those be? Who was their mother? Why does the text preserve what appears to be a polytheistic scene? And why does this hybrid, potentially immortal generation, immediately provoke divine limitation of one’s span of life and judgment?Biblical scholars have long noted the comparanda with Greek—and particularly Hesiodic—traditions about unions between gods and mortals and the rise of heroic races. Such parallels are often explained through models of “influence” and cultural transmission: was the flow from East to West, as Walter Burkert and Martin West argued? Or might it sometimes have moved in the opposite direction, as Margalit Finkelberg suggests?Yet “influence” is not itself an explanation but a question. Even where borrowing is clear, cultures transform what they receive. Archaic Greek kouroi were inspired by Egyptian models, but the Greeks reimagined them as fully free-standing statues—an innovation that changed everything.

Contact does not necessarily produce imitation; it produces transformation.Modern discourse sometimes frames such processes as “cultural appropriation,” implying ownership and even guilt. But culture has never been pure or self-contained. All cultures are composites, shaped through constant borrowing, adaptation, and reinvention. In that sense, culture itself is already appropriation.Perhaps, then, we need not seek direct influence at all. Similar myths may arise independently as comparable responses to similar material and social conditions. Both Greeks and Hebrews told stories of movement: migrations, conquests, foundations. In both traditions, divine agency provides a framework for legitimizing settlement and possession of land.Across the ancient Mediterranean, peoples explained their origins through journeys rather than roots. Greeks and Hebrews alike imagined themselves not as autochthons, but as migrants whose gods sanctioned movement, settlement, and foundation. One might expect claims of autochthony—of having “always been there”—to serve as the strongest form of legitimacy. Surprisingly, this is rarely central in either Greek or Hebrew traditions. Instead, both peoples remember themselves as newcomers: migrants who must justify their presence.Here the contrast with the ancient Near East is telling. Egyptian and especially Mesopotamian cities such as Eridu were imagined as coeval with creation itself; their inhabitants had always belonged to the land. By contrast, Greeks and Hebrews appear as historically “young” societies whose identities are shaped through narratives of departure, journeys, migrations and foundation.This talk explores these parallel mythic structures and asks how we should understand their similarities: as influence, as shared Mediterranean mentalities, or as recurrent narrative solutions to the problem of belonging. By placing Greek and Hebrew traditions side by side, it seeks to illuminate how myths of movement create claims to place.