DAJ > DAJ's Quotes

“Fundamentalism, in whatever form, solves no problems but only suppresses them. We must not succumb to the temptation that from time to time emerges from it and its apparently simple and clear solutions. With its intolerance, it can have no future: things must not be reduced to a single, isolated principle, be it ever so noble and elevated. Always and above all, the whole is at stake.”
― Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light

“Inexorably history destroys all 'eternal' and 'absolute' values and demonstrates the relativity of every absolute point of reference which we seek to establish. Hence the fanatical opposition to anything historical—or scorn for it which takes the form of unscrupulous distortion—on the part of those who wish to establish definitive, binding norms.”
― Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many

“Whatever the nature of the gods may or may not be, in whatever system of concepts or network of associations we may place them, all attempts to 'explain' them have been attempts to express the information they convey in a different, less ambiguous language. We sense that they say something valuable about the world and about mankind. But no language has been found whose expressive richness can compare with that of the gods themselves. Again and again they refer us back to themselves, revealing to us the limits of our conceptual universe. If we are to comprehend the world we still need the gods.”
― Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many

“One sometimes notes in the research certain evasive strategies designed to avoid the conclusion that the notion of dying and rising deities might be a pre-Christian phenomenon. Ancient Near Eastern gods are freely granted the privilege of rising or returning—as long as they behave like gentlemen and do not do so before Christ.”
― Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East

“Whoever reduces the destruction of the environment, even in a very limited way, helps promote survival and improves the quality of life; whoever does so increases rather than decreases maat.”
― Erik Hornung, Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought

“Within its own "world view" Egyptian hkꜢ was of far more exalted significance than its Coptic descendant or Western approximation. Amoral and quintessentially effective, a power to which gods, men, and all of nature were subject, it was still the same force whether used by god, king, priest, private individual, rebel, or foreign enemy, whether hostile or beneficent, sanctioned or suppressed. As the pre-eminent force through which the creator engendered and sustained the ordered cosmos, it was necessarily the dynamic "energy" which Egyptian religious ritual sought to channel that it might effect its identical goal, the preservation of the creator's universe. The cultic manipulation of this "energy" by recitation, substance, and ritual thus constituted a sophisticated system of "practical theology," a "theurgy" in which the priest quite literally "performed the works of god.”
― Robert K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice

“The impression that one has now is that the debate has settled down. Although they do not seem to admit it, the minimalists have triumphed in many ways. That is, most scholars reject the historicity of the 'patriarchal period', see the settlement as mostly made up of indigenous inhabitants of Canaan and are cautious about the early monarchy. The exodus is rejected or assumed to be based on an event much different from the biblical account. On the other hand, there is not the widespread rejection of the biblical text as a historical source that one finds among the main minimalists… Most who write on the history of ancient Israel now take a position that accepts some minimalist positions (as just noted) but is also willing to make use of the biblical text as one of the sources in reconstructing the history of Israel and Judah.”
― Lester L. Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?