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PARTISAN REVIEW
to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier,
at the first mention of the word "scar," where the themes "Odysseus"
and "recollection" were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic–
perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background,
resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is en–
tirely foreign to the Homeric style; and so the excursus does not
begin until two lines later, when Eurycleia has discovered the scar–
the possibility for a perspectivistic connection no longer exists, and the
story of the wound becomes an independent and exclusive present.
This particularity of the Homeric style becomes even more ap–
parent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally
epic style from a different world of forms. I shall attempt this com–
parison with the account of the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous
narrative produced by the so-called Elohist. The King James version
translates the opening as follows: "And it came to pass after these
things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham!
and he said, Behold, here I am." Coming to it from Homer, this
opening startles us. Where are the two speakers? Weare not told.
The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found
together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to
speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly
realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come,
from whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not
come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has
been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his
reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus,
discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council;
nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us;
unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown
height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that
this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the
Jews held and which was so entirely different from that of the
Greeks. True enough-but this constitutes no objection. For how is
the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God
of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his
lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the
end not only maintained but developed even further in competition
