JTA — Even before its release on Friday, buzz over Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film adaptation of “The Odyssey” is introducing a new generation to Homer’s tale of shipwrecks, monsters, gods and the long road home. But what does an ancient Greek epic have to do with Jewish readers — or with the Hebrew Bible?

Quite a bit, says Jacob Howland, a philosopher and classicist who has spent much of his career exploring what has been called the conversation between Athens and Jerusalem. His 1998 book “Plato and the Talmud” was inspired in part by a Talmud study group at his synagogue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa from 1988 to 2020.

Howland is currently a distinguished visiting professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas, founded in 2023 to put Western civilization and “the American idea” at the center of academia in the Lone Star State. Howland has written extensively on the Greeks, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud for Mosaic, the online magazine of the conservative Jewish think tank and educational philanthropy Tikvah.

In the first of a recent series of essays on “The Odyssey” for Mosaic, Howland asks, “Should Jews Read Homer?” His answer, no surprise, is yes.

“The Odyssey” and the Hebrew Bible, he writes, “illuminate the enduring questions of human life, including how to bring order and common purpose to the otherwise chaotic relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, familiars and strangers, clans and nations.”

To recap: “The Odyssey” follows the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon in the film) on his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. Delayed by storms, nymphs, temptations and the whims of the gods, he survives encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens and the sorceress Circe before finally returning to Ithaca. There, disguised as a beggar, he reunites with his faithful wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and (spoiler alert) reclaims his kingdom from the suitors who have overrun his household.

As Nolan’s blockbuster brings Odysseus back into the cultural conversation, we spoke with Howland about what Homer and the Bible have in common, how they differ and why both epics are at the center of the conservative discourse around “Western civilization.”

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

As someone who reads “The Odyssey” professionally, are you excited about a new movie production of this?

I am going to see the film. I’ve been encouraged, actually — there’s been an incredible amount of controversy, which is funny, because no one’s seen it yet. But I read that a number of people, including the historian Tom Holland — the “Rest Is History” podcast host, not the actor playing Telemachus — have seen it and given it strong reviews.

I’m fairly confident we won’t get something like “300” — that film about Thermopylae, with its computer-generated monsters, which younger audiences oddly loved but which was, historically, terrible. I think there has to be some attempt, if not at full historical accuracy, then at least a semblance of it in costuming, ships and so on — at a minimum, a gritty reality that transports you into another time and place, even if a hypercritical viewer could point out an anachronistic helmet or two.

I want to talk a little about Athens and Jerusalem, which is how the 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher and conservative icon Leo Strauss described the tension in Western civilization between the Bible and classical Greek philosophy. “The Odyssey” was written down somewhere between 725 and 675 BCE, and the Hebrew Bible was composed primarily between the eighth and second centuries BCE. How aware are these two cultures of each other?

If you’re asking about the time of Homer, it’s all speculation. But I can talk to you about the Talmudic period [roughly the first through fourth centuries CE]. According to Warren Zev Harvey at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis seemed to have known a lot about Greek philosophy. They just didn’t make that clear in the Talmud. They didn’t want to say, “We’ve studied the Greeks.”

I think it’s safer to talk about the Homeric and the biblical as two fundamentally different approaches — different understandings of the world, of human life, of the divine — and then ask how they differ, how they interact and what overlap they have.

In other words, what are the fruitful comparisons for understanding the differences and similarities between these cultures?

Yes. Athens and Jerusalem are the two oldest, greatest roots of Western civilization. I don’t always agree with everything Leo Strauss says, but he regards those two as a coiled spring, a tension from which the West itself grows. These texts, if we look at their fundamental view of the world, pose a question we have to decide for ourselves — and in some sense the future of our civilization depends on how we decide it.

What are some of the major episodes in “The Odyssey” we can expect to see in Nolan’s film that bear these kinds of comparisons to Jewish texts, and what questions and answers can we derive from them?

One thing that will probably show up is the recognition of Odysseus by his nurse Eurycleia when he returns to Ithaca in disguise — that’s where Homer tells the story of how Odysseus got his scar. As a youth — mid-teens, or thereabouts — Odysseus goes out to hunt a boar. The ordinary way the ancient Greeks hunted a boar: You get about five guys with javelins and a bunch of dogs and a net. The dogs locate the boar, drive it into its lair, and keep it at bay, barking. You set up the net, unleash the dogs, and they harass the boar until it runs out and gets caught in the net. Then a group of men comes in and stabs it.

Instead, Odysseus jumps out in front and rushes the boar himself to stab it on his own, and that’s when the........

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