There exists such close family relationship amongst Homer's gods, extended as it is also to most of his chieftains, that taking into account the conspicuous reverence displayed towards the hearth and the respect for seniority in age, it may perhaps be justifiable to suppose that domestic religious observances, other than those directed to the Olympic gods, were thought by the poet to be as much beneath his notice as the swarms of common tribesmen who shrink and shudder in the background of the poems.
(M11) Ancestor-worship would be as much out of place in the Old Testament; and yet there are references in the Bible to offerings to the dead which, unless they are held to refer only to importations from outside religions and not to relapses in the Israelites themselves to former superstitions of their own people, imply that the great tribal religion of the Israelites had superseded pre-existing ceremonies of ancestor-worship.
Deut. xxvi. 13. "And thou shalt say before the Lord thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite and the stranger, to the fatherless and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them: I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor _given ought thereof for the dead_."
The transgressions of the Israelites in the wilderness are described in the Psalms:--"They joined themselves also unto Baalpeor and _ate the sacrifices of the dead_."(16)
It was not necessary for an ancestor to become a god to be worthy of worship, or to need the attentions of the living. If he was thought to haunt tomb or hearth, and to keep his connection thus with his family in the upper world, he required nourishment on his visits. He was also considered to keep a jealous watch on the continuance of his fair fame among the living.
(M12) A close resemblance in this point lies between the Homeric poems and the Old Testament. Though actual food and drink is not provided for the dead, yet the stress laid on the permanence of the family, _lest the name of the dead be cut off from his place_, is quite in keeping with the request of Elpenor to Odysseus to insure the continuance of his name in the memory of living men.