Cyrus H. Gordon

"The nomadic Semite... roves as a herdsman, partaking of Allah's hospitality."

"Like Helen, Sarah is wonderously fair and ageless. ...Like Helen, Sarah's name means "princess" in normal Hebrew, and "queen" in Akkadian. It is conceivable that her title came to be used as her name."

"The prevailing attitude may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments... One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the othe…"

"V. Bérard attributed the links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic. ...but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them,…"

"Only two people in East Mediterranean antiquity developed "canonical" Scripture: the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bibl…"

"That Homeric epic and the earliest Hebrew poetry were the results of long and rich developments should have been apparent to anyone who realizes that artistic perfection is never created ex nihilo."

"For every mound excavated in the Near East, a hundred remain untouched. ...most of the excavated mounds have been dug only in small part."

"The Samaritans have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. ...our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans."