Humankind's Relationship To God

The are many differences between the Hebrew conception of the relationship between man and God, and the religious system of the Greek gods. One of the basic differences can be found in the previous statement- for the Hebrews there is but one God, for the Greeks there were many. The most notable difference, however, is the human qualities that the Greek gods seemed to possess compared to an "all-knowing, all-seeing Hebrew God."

To begin, one can take the different versions of the beginning of time, the beginning of the world, and the birth of others (the word man is not used because that is somewhat a different case for the Greeks). For the Greeks it went like this- "First Sky ruled over the entire world. He married Earth and produced Briareus, Gyes, and Cottus, the so-called HundredHanded, who possessed a hundred hands and fifty heads and were unsurpassed in size and strength". This appears to have more to do with the origin of gods than it does with the origin of man. This was important to the Greeks since the worship of many gods was a staple to their belief system.

One can read the beginning of the world as written in and according to The Old Testament, and see a marked difference in the two. Christians believe the following:

• "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earthand God said, Let there be light: and there was light". Here one can clearly see that there is only one God. This is important to the Hebrew views on the relationship that man has to God. For them, there is but one God and that is the only God to be worshiped.
• In the situation of God's son, Christ appearing on the earth - it is considered a holy conception and a virgin birth. God never consummated with the Virgin Mary in our modern sense of what it means to consummate.

For the Greeks however, this was very different.

• Gods frequently mated with humans and the offspring created were half human and half god.
• Even the mighty Zeus who eventually became the superior god of the Greeks had a very unusual event occur in his life.