| dc.description.abstract | The author of the article examines two mythological duels: Hector and Achilles’ and David
and Goliath’s . They serve completely different literary and ideological goals. In the first duel,
two godly heroes stand to fight: Achilles for his fame and revenge for Patrocles, and Hector
for his motherland. In the other, the fight is chiefly of religious character; David’s hands are
the instruments of the Hebrew God’s victory, and the fight is set in the beginning by the
narrator: it is obvious that David is going to win, because God is on his side. Setting small
David against big Goliath is a rhetorical device, to a large extent; the smaller the knight, the
greater the victory of his God. This duel is a fragment of the Book of Samuel, which, in its
whole text, expresses the monarchist and monotheist (Jehovic) ideology, which determines
the propaganda character of the duel.
In the article, both stories are treated as mythological and fictitious (literary), and all the
notions important for their analysis, such as justice, values, sacrum, or God, are treated as
belonging to the presented world of the narration and only as such, without being related to
the actual religious life.
All the above makes the article provide a new, different, and thus polemical presentation of
the two mythological duels: the Greek one and the Hebrew one. | en_EN |
