Hesiod - Tumblr Posts

Pissed off I had to get an idea and had to write it down. Anyway, something something about Odysseus, the Hesiodic children by Kalypso, and what he might be pushed to contemplate in the direst of straits.

He was content to merely recover, at first.

Seventeen days tossed at sea, starving and thirsting, had been hard, and Kalypso's cave was well-appointed, the goddess-nymph herself welcoming and soft. A respite after such despair. A soothing of both mind and body, in food, in sleep, in her soft arms.

But a year passed, and unlike with Kirke, he didn't need Polites to urge him to ask Kirke to aid them in leaving. Kalypso, however, ignored him. She might well have missed his musing at first, spoken in half-sleep desire against her breast one night; he had been distracted, and so, perhaps, had she. But when he presented the request days later at breakfast, she blinked, staring at him with large, luminous eyes, blue-gray like the storming sea, and then put a cup of wine in his hands.

A full year later many more requests voiced, her stomach was curving under his hand.

He left her cave for the day for the first time, refusing intending to stay away.

But while her island was a gentle respite, and he had seen many bushes and nut-bearing trees, and a fair few rabbits earlier (they were providing the meat she served at meals; there were no other animals aside from birds and fish in the shoals around the shores), when he went looking to make himself a meal near sunset, he could find nothing. The next morning, nothing, either.

The third day, he went back to Kalypso, and she welcomed him like he hadn't been gone.

He left the next morning, but unwilling to suffer an empty stomach and carving away at his strength, he comes back at night. To her table, and, even though he doesn't want to any longer, her bed.

There was a winter storm tearing at the cold, gray sea, not yet into the third year, when Kalypso gave birth.

"Your son, my Odysseus," she proclaimed as she came into the main room of the cave, tired but practically singing, a glow about her as she handed a swaddled bundle over. "Nausinous."

The infant was an infant, small in his arms. He didn't look like Telemachos, Odysseus was sure, but memory was a little fuzzy on the matter. He sat there, staring down at the sleeping boy, until dark lashes fluttered open. Huge, luminous blue-gray eyes meet his with the unfocused wont of babies, and Odysseus was relieved. The boy really didn't look like Telemachos.

That was what he told himself, anyway, as the months passed.

As he saw - though he tried to ignore him and Kalypso, but he had to go back in the evenings after the weather and season turned and he could flee for the day outside once more - the infant grow, past the age he'd last seen Telemachos. Those luminous eyes remained, declaring firmly who the child's mother was, and that made it - easier. But Nausinous had thick, curling dark hair and chubby cheeks and---

"Papa!"

The delighted cry cut through the air, and Odysseus stormed out of the cave to avoid his tottering infant son attempting to walk to him.

He had never gotten to see Telemachos try to walk. He'd just about begun to crawl when the second muster was called.

Hunger and a comfortable place to sleep ever drew him back to Kalypso's cave, no matter his attempts at avoiding the cave's inhabitants. He could not avoid the child in truth, and it was hard to ignore him, to harden his heart against those huge eyes and chubby little fingers whenever they shared a table. Nausinous was quickly put in his own chair in preference of his mother's lap (he'd made it himself, Kalypso seemingly not realizing the boy couldn't sit in a regular chair just yet and growing impatient with the boy), and he was the one to dry off child-sticky chins and cheeks, he was the one to have to put the boy to bed. Odysseus knew Kalypso was partially forcing him into doing this by ignoring the child intentionally - he knew she wanted him to spend time with their son - but she also seemed to have lost interest quite quickly, as Nausinous grew out of his first few months and into his first year.

He could not imagine that happening with Penelope, and after that there would also be Eurykleia. But here there was only he and Kalypso, and Nausinous couldn't take care of himself.

"Hi."

Odysseus choked on a wet, half-groaning sob, dragging a hand down his face. Nausinous plopped himself down on the sand beside him, chubby, not-yet-five year old legs stretched out in front of him. He hadn't expected the boy to come all the way over here, but he was a stubborn child. And maybe he was realizing his mother didn't have much patience for him; those huge eyes seemed to be everywhere, Nausinous more quiet than he talked, watching. Odysseus didn't want to think it, but it reminded him of how both Eurykleia and his mother had described him as a child.

Had Telemachos been like that at Nausinous' age? Was he still so? Was his nature something else entirely?

"You should go back," he managed, sucked in a breath through his nose. It pushed back the tears. Kalypso was pregnant again. She'd told him this very morning. He couldn't deal with this right now.

"Papa's here," the little boy said, patting the sand into a vague tower, but they were too far up on the beach for it to hold shape. "Why?"

"… I'm missing home."

"Home?" Nausinous looked up, those huge, luminous eyes impossibly piercing for a child not quite yet five, and this was an infant, a child, yet Odysseus' heart quavered under the stare, reminding far too much of his mother.

"I came from elsewhere, before you were born," he said shortly, because he wasn't going to sit here and talk to a little child about what he missed, of Ithaka, Penelope and his son; what he was missing as the years passed - Nausinous' growing an aching reminder of that fact, and Kalypso's not-yet showing second pregnancy.

Kalypso named their second son Nausithous.

Odysseus felt like he was drowning though he was breathing sweet, clear air, ever salty with the sting from the sea. He ended up shouting at Nausinous the once, to leave him alone; to get back home, and then he regretted it as he watched the child grow pale, his eyes even larger, and try to hold back swimming tears. Regretted it even as he resented not knowing if Telemachos had ever looked like that, resented it even as he caught up with the sobbing boy and lifted him up in his arms - he was getting heavy. Regretted it, because it's not Nausinous' fault he was here, that either of them were were. If anything, it was his fault the boy was here, caught between a father weeping on the beach and a divine mother growing ever more distant as she cooed over the babe-in-arms.

And then Kalypso said she was letting him go.

He didn't believe it at first. Made her swear an oath, but she swore it willingly and gave him everything he needed to build a raft and hope sung in his breast for the first time in years.

At least until Nausinous came to watch, standing there quietly for a long while, intently watching, before he spoke up.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going home," Odysseus said, then regretted that too, watching the luminous eyes grow hooded in the edge of his vision. Of course Nausinous would understand what he was saying out of what he wasn't saying. But he couldn't take the boy with him. Kalypso's distant face as she watched Nausinous play with a toy horse he'd carved for their son intruded on his mind. Odysseus closed his eyes. "Do you want to help? I can tell you about Ithaka."

He wasn't sure what he was doing, but distracting Nausinous with tales of home got them through three days without tears, got them through his own indecision. It wasn't a good idea, not knowing what he'd do when - if - they both came to Ithaka unscated, but he couldn't imagine leaving Nausinous here. Kalypso could keep Nausithous - at a couple months, the infant barely knew more than his mother's breast, anyway.

And surely now that she'd had one child she might be more ready to deal with her second. Not that Odysseus had ever considered it possible a woman wouldn't want her own children, whether she had a nurse for them or not. But Kalypso was a goddess-nymph - what did he know of the workings of divine women?

The raft was packed, he was half a breath from stepping onto it, and turned around.

Kalypso caught her breath, her eyes shining, but Odysseus held a hand out to his five year old son.

"Do you want to come with me?"

"Yes!"

The boy flew over, colliding with his legs and Odysseus could only hope this wasn't a mistake. Could only push down the sour resentment over never having had Telemachos do something like this to him, forcing him to try to catch his balance.

"Well," Kalypso said, her voice tight, a storm in her eyes. "If you're taking the one, you can take the other, too."

Odysseus didn't get a chance to say anything as she shoved their baby son at him, and the wind pushed him and Nausinous onto the raft, as well as the raft out into the water.

It went… fine, at first. Despite that he had an armful of baby and a five year old with him.

Then came the storm. Odysseus wasn't sure how he survived that, even less how he still had both children with him, Nausithous against his chest and Nausinous clinging to the mast with him. Especially when he'd had to tear both his and the boy's clothes off to ensure they weren't too heavy and got dragged down.

The problem, in the end, wasn't the storm or the rough sea; there was land so very close by. The problem was that the storm refused to abate, the sea refusing to calm, and he was only a single man with two arms. Nausinous eyes were so very huge, even larger in his tired, pale face. There was no way he'd be able to hold on, and the mast wasn't really large enough to support both of them easily. It kept dipping at the ends, in the middle, with each and every wave. If it sank, they were both lost. And the baby in his arms made it harder to both cling to the mast himself, as well as keep Nausinous from slipping off the mast and into the waters.

Odysseus stared at the distant, yet so very close shore. Stared at his sons, one beside him, one against his chest.

It'd be so much easier if he was alone.

It wouldn't guarantee he would survive, but it would be easier, and neither of these two children were Telemachos.

Nausinous cried out, choking on sea water, as a wave slammed over and into them. Odysseus, heart hammeing in his chest - guilt, anger, frustration - shoved his hand under the surface and caught his son by the hair, yanking him up and holding him there until he was clinging to the wet, water-swollen wood again.

It would've been so easy to not snatch him back.

It would have been so much simpler and easier to let Telemachos die to the plough, too; it would've kept him home for these decades, would've kept him away from the sea, away from all of this. That had been unthinkable then, and he still couldn't imagine doing that to Telemachos now. Odysseus glanced down once more, to the baby and the five year old beside him.

He was so tired.

He had done what he had to, with Iphigenia. And he had done what had seemed necessary, when it came to the son of Hektor; they were, after all, killing all the men of Troy, and letting the son of the man who'd been so troublesome, the heir to king Priam himself escape merely because some had sympathy to his wife, who undoubtedly was a worthy, stalwart woman and mother was foolish. Not safe. He would do what he had to, to ensure Troy could never retaliate.

Others' children, that.

And now, if he only had both arms, he could keep himself as well as Nausinous on the mast more easily. If there was only him, he wouldn't have to worry about the weight on the mast being too much. If he---

"Unhappy man!"

Odysseus almost drowned himself in his surprise when a goddess rose from the sea.

He did not need to follow his line of thought to the end, or his growing willingness to do so for his own sake. Not even when Poseidon sent yet more waves at them; the veil Leucothea gave him helped keep the boys safe and his strength sure enough, even when struggling until the nearby river god at his plea stilled the waters close to his outflow. And as he staggered onto the shore, both children still with him, Odysseus ignored the guilty weight in his heart with grim determination, for he needed to see both to himself and the boys, and could not linger on the revelation that in the end, it wasn't just other's children he might have been willing to sacrifice.

The Bible Attributes the Hidden Name of God to Greece

Eli kittim

The Greek New Testament Unlocks the Meaning of God’s Name

The meaning of God’s name (YHVH) was originally incoherent and indecipherable until the appearance of the Greek New Testament. In Isaiah 46:11, God says that he will call the Messiah “from a distant country” (cf. Matt. 28:18; 1 Cor. 15:24-25). Similarly, in Matt. 21:43, Jesus promised that the kingdom of God will be taken away from the Jews and given to another nation. That’s why Isaiah 61:9 says that the Gentiles will be the blessed posterity of God (through the messianic seed). Paul also says categorically and unequivocally, “It is not the children of the flesh [the Jews] … but the children of the promise [who] are regarded as descendants [of Israel]” (Rom. 9:6-8).

These passages demonstrate why the New Testament was not written in Hebrew but in Greek. In fact, most of the New Testament books were composed in Greece. The New Testament was written exclusively in Greek, and most of the epistles address Greek communities. Not to mention that the New Testament authors used the Greek Old Testament as their Inspired text and copied extensively from it. That’s also why Christ attributed the divine I AM to the Greek language (alpha and omega). Now why did all this happen? Was it a mere coincidence or an accident, or is it because God’s name is somehow associated with Greece? Let’s explore this question further.

YHVH (I AM)

Initially, God did not disclose the meaning of his name to Moses (Exod. 3:14), but only the status of his ontological being: “I Am.” The four-letter Hebrew theonym יהוה‎ (transliterated as YHVH) is the name of God in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s pronounced as yahva. In Judaism, this name is forbidden from being vocalized or even pronounced.

Hebrew was a consonantal language. Vowels and cantillation marks were devised much later by the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. Thus, to call the divine name Yahva is a rough approximation. We really don’t know how to properly pronounce the name or what it actually means. But, through linguistic and biblical research, we can propose a scholarly hypothesis.

God Explicitly Identifies Himself with the Language of the Greeks

Since God’s name (the divine “I AM”) was revealed in the New Testament vis-à-vis the first and last letters of the Greek writing system (“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” Rev. 22:13), then it necessarily must reflect a Greek name. The letters Alpha and Omega constitute “the beginning and the end” of the Greek alphabet. Put differently, the creator of the universe (Heb. 1:2) explicitly identifies himself with the language of the Greeks! That explains why the New Testament was written in Greek rather than Hebrew. That’s also why we are told “how God First concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for his name” (Acts 15:14):

“And with this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written, … ‘THE GENTILES WHO ARE CALLED BY MY NAME’ “ (Acts 15:15-17).

This is a groundbreaking statement because it demonstrates that God’s name is not derived from Hebraic but rather Gentile sources. The Hebrew Bible asserts the exact same thing:

“All the Gentiles… are called by My name” (Amos 9:12).

The New Testament clearly tells us that God identifies himself with the language of the Greeks: “ ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God” (Rev. 1:8). In the following verse, John is “on the [Greek] island called Patmos BECAUSE of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9 italics mine). We thus begin to realize why the New Testament was written exclusively in Greek, namely, to reflect the Greek God: τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ⸂Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ⸃ (Titus 2:13)! Incidentally, God is never once called Yahva in the Greek New Testament. Rather, he is called Lord (kurios). Similarly, Jesus is never once called Yeshua. He is called Ἰησοῦς, a name which both Cyril of Jerusalem (catechetical lectures 10.13) and Clement of Alexandria (Paedagogus, Book 3) considered to be derived from Greek sources.

Yahva: Semantic and Phonetic Implications

If my hypothesis is accurate, we must find evidence of a Greek linguistic element within the Hebrew name of God (i.e. Yahva) as it was originally revealed to Moses in Exod. 3:14. Indeed, we do! In the Hebrew language, the term “Yahvan” represents the Greeks (Josephus Antiquities I, 6). Therefore, it is not difficult to see how the phonetic and grammatical mystery of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH, commonly pronounced as Yahva) is related to the Hebrew term Yahvan, which refers to the Greeks. In fact, the Hebrew names for both God and Greece (Yahva/Yahvan) are virtually indistinguishable from one another, both grammatically and phonetically! The only difference is in the Nun Sophit (Final Nun), which stands for "Son of" (Hebrew ben). Thus, the Tetragrammaton plus the Final Nun (Yahva + n) can be interpreted as “Son of God.” This would explain why strict injunctions were given that the theonym must remain untranslatable under the consonantal name of God (YV). The Divine Name can only be deciphered with the addition of vowels, which not only point to “YahVan,” the Hebrew name for Greece, but also anticipate the arrival of the Greek New Testament!

There’s further evidence for a connection between the Greek and Hebrew names of God in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a few Septuagint manuscripts, the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) is actually translated in Greek as ΙΑΩ “IAO” (aka Greek Trigrammaton). In other words, the theonym Yahva is translated into Koine Greek as Ιαω (see Lev. 4:27 LXX manuscript 4Q120). This fragment is dated to the 1st century BC. Astoundingly, the name ΙΑΩΝ is the name of Greece (aka Ἰάων/Ionians/IAONIANS), the earliest literary records of whom can be found in the works of Homer (Gk. Ἰάονες; iāones) and also in the writings of the Greek poet Hesiod (Gk. Ἰάων; iāōn). Bible scholars concur that the Hebrew name Yahvan represents the Iaonians; that is to say, Yahvan is Ion (aka Ionia, meaning “Greece”).

We find further evidence that the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) is translated as ΙΑΩ (IAO) in the writings of the church fathers. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) and B.D. Eerdmans, Diodorus Siculus refers to the name of God by writing Ἰαῶ (Iao). Irenaeus reports that the Valentinians use Ἰαῶ (Iao). Origen of Alexandria also employs Ἰαώ (Iao). Theodoret of Cyrus writes Ἰαώ (Iao) as well to refer to the name of God.

Summary

Therefore, the hidden name of God in the Septuagint, the New Testament, and the Hebrew Bible seemingly represents Greece! The ultimate revelation of God’s name is disclosed in the Greek New Testament by Jesus Christ who identifies himself with the language of the Greeks: Ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ (Rev. 1:8). In retrospect, we can trace this Greek name back to the Divine “I am” in Exodus 3:14!

Reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with someone on this topic. For more context, I said that I do not personally consider Medusa a victim and showed to him a list with all the characters who were raped in Greek Mythology (some of them going through worse than her) who deserve to be made symbols of SA/Rape Survivors as well.

I’m kinda tired of Medusa fans defending how Ovid depicts her and saying it’s just as valid as Ancient Greek sources that say she was born a monster, it’s one thing to say that you like an idea or story beat from a Roman or even medieval source and even use it in your interpretation (I do that with Kronos and Hera), it’s another thing entirely to say it’s equally valid as Ancient Greek sources, when all these stories come from different cultures and time periods. I’d probably be more forgiving of this kind of thing if “Medusa was pretty then turned into a monster” was at least implied in ancient sources but it’s not.