Cyrus Gordon—the brilliant, maverick scholar—has spent a significant part of his professional life searching for connections between the early Greeks and Hebrews. His most popular effort in this area is a book entitled The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Norton, 1966).

Long a professor at Brandeis University, Gordon now teaches at New York University. Although he is regarded as a leading Ugaritic scholar (he wrote the basic Ugaritic textbook), some of his other work is sometimes seen as tenuous, speculative and often wrong.

In a new book entitled Bronze Age Civilization—The Philistines and the Danites^a, a disciple of Gordon’s—Gordon wrote the foreword—carries on the effort to find connections between the Hebrews and the Greeks.