Visualizing Jews Through the Ages

Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism

Hannah Ewence, Helen Spurling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317630272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorize and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.

Part I

Divinity, Divine Actions and Their Interpretation

The Management of Theological Images

1 The Idea of Creation Out of Nothing

From Qumran to Genesis Rabbah

Markus Bockmuehl

In Antiquity, the idea of creation was far from a Truth Held to Be Self-Evident.¹ The idea that whatever exists was created by a supreme God constituted a great intellectual divide—as perhaps it does once again today: obvious to some, obvious nonsense to others. It separated the Epicureans’ evolutionary materialism from the providential cosmology of the Stoics, and the ordered linear space-time of creation and redemption in the Bible from avowedly timeless Graeco-Roman cosmologies. What made the latter patently different and superior, to one fourth-century pagan apologist writing in happy but wistful memory of the great myths of the past, is that ‘these things never happened—but always are’: narratives of gods and cosmogony are just a symbolic way of sequencing what the mind sees to be eternally the case.² On that reckoning, any entanglement of the gods in the mess of creatureliness was properly relegated to the realms of mythology, methodologically prefaced by Comfortable Words such as those of Heraclitus of Alexandria, that ‘taking Homer literally is to make him blaspheme’.³ Jews, by contrast, and later Christians, were convinced that believers in the God of Israel, and readers of his Scriptures, did not have the luxury of evacuating divinity from contingency, or God from creation. For them, as the church father Tertullian would go on to put it, God was ‘wholly employed and absorbed in [creation]—in his hand, his eye, his labour, his purpose, his wisdom, his providence, and above all, in his love’ (De Resurrectione 6).

In this short study I am interested more narrowly in the question of creatio ex nihilo, which is perhaps the aspect of cosmology that showcases Jewish and Christian thought at its most fiercely anti-Epicurean—not to say ‘countercultural’. For the Greeks, the origin of the world happened not ex nihilo but from material available in a formless or disordered state (α’κοσμíα) to the Demiurge’s fashioning of a state of order.⁴ This question of creation, Frances Young rightly stresses, is ‘an area where early Christianity did develop an understanding of the world which was self-consciously in confrontation with ancient culture’.⁵

The God of Israel, by contrast, did not merely fashion an ordered material world out of disjointed building blocks: far from being formed out of atomic collisions in some primal soup of matter, the world in its entirety was for Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity shaped de novo by God’s providential reason and purpose. This act of creation did indeed entail the primal stuff of chaos (tohu va-bohu) in the sense of Genesis 1, to be sure, but the world’s ‘formless and void’ state comes to be seen as already the product of the act of creation, rather than merely its material cause.

So far, so predictable, perhaps. However, one of the interesting questions here is the difficulty of understanding quite what is meant in Genesis 1. Given the narrative sequence of Genesis 1:1–2, we may read: ‘God created the world; and what he created was at first formless and void’.⁶ Yet the alternative is to see Genesis 1:1 as a kind of title that is then expounded, beginning in 1:2 with a description of the material state of things preceding the act of creation.⁷ Thus: ‘God created the world. Now let me tell you how he did it: when the earth was still formless and void, the Spirit hovered. […] And then God said, etc.’.

Similarly, in Genesis 2 God fashions man out of clay, an image that also brings to mind Jeremiah’s observation of the potter’s wheel, but this could be read quite differently, as ancient readers already appreciated. Is God’s clay the raw material of creation or itself the object of creation? In other words, did God create the chaos itself, and the clay, or did he work with the primeval atomic soup that he found? The Wisdom of Solomon 11:17 takes it to be self-evident that this means God created the world out of pre-existing formless matter (ε’ξ ἀμóρφου ὒλης), a point on which it does not sound very different from Plato, Aristotle or, for that matter, Philo of Alexandria, for whom it also seems to be unproblematically the case that creation is a matter of giving shape and identity to what is shapeless.⁸

And yet at some point in the early Christian centuries, it came to be taken for granted in both Jewish and Christian exegesis that God created all things, including the primeval void and the clay from which man was made. By the third century, in fact, a Christian writer like Origen could show himself exasperated by any view seeming to lend hostages to Epicureanism’s principle that nothing comes from nothing, even if the gods be involved:⁹

I cannot understand how so many distinguished men have been of the opinion that matter […] was uncreated (materiam […] ingenitam). That is, it was not formed by God himself, who is the Creator of all things. Rather, they say that its nature and power were the result of chance, […] thinking that so great a work as the universe could exist without an architect or overseer.

(De Principiis 2.1.4)

Jewish writers were perhaps less immediately challenged and threatened by pagan ideas of uncreated matter, but as and when they did encounter them, at least from the third century onward, they too firmly rejected them. At the same time, it repays close scrutiny to examine why this conclusion was not immediately obvious to Jewish interpreters (or for that matter to Christian ones).

Creatio ex nihilo is often said to be absent from the New Testament, as a later distinctively Christian development in reaction to second-century Hellenistic challenges. Thus Frances Young writes:

It is often supposed that Hebraic understanding lost out in the assimilation of the Bible to Greek philosophy, but increasingly this seems to be a false estimate of what was going on. […] Creatio ex nihilo was affirmed in the face of Greek assumptions: ‘nothing comes from nothing’ was a Greek commonplace, and implied that anything coming from nothing is a sham!¹⁰

Young is encouraged in this assessment by the concomitant view that the doctrine has no substantial foothold in Judaism prior to the Middle Ages—a position that follows the influential work of Gerhard May. May argues that it was the second century’s inner-Christian debates, occasioned by the Gnostic challenge, which enhanced the need for a free and sovereign Creator against those who, like the Valentinians, divided matter as the corrupt emanation of the Creator-Demiurge from the purely spiritual supreme deity. Like David Winston, May holds that the doctrine is not articulated in what he calls ‘Hellenistic Judaism’ (by which he means mainly Philo, who seems happier to affirm that God created the world of pre-existing matter).¹¹ In May’s view, quite possibly Basilides was the first to posit that God created matter itself—a suggestion that serious students of that Alexandrian theologian have since come to regard as highly unlikely.¹² May, like Young and other exegetes, believes that Judaism remained remarkably uninterested in this doctrine and that the biblical text of neither Testament requires a doctrine of creation out of nothing.¹³ The most that Frances Young will allow for the Jewish texts is that the doctrine emerged as a distinctively Christian, second-century ‘implicate’ of the affirmation of a sovereign Creator.¹⁴

It is certainly true that frequently cited Septuagintal and New Testament passages that assert God’s creation of ‘what is seen’ from ‘what is not seen’, or ‘things that are’ out of ‘things that are not’, should not be short-circuited into statements about creatio ex nihilo. Exegetes are today in widespread agreement on this point.¹⁵ 2 Maccabees 7:28, for example, affirms not that God made the heavens and the earth out of ‘nothing’, merely that he made them ‘not out of existing things’ (οὐκ ἐξ ὂντων). The writer applies this principle to human conception in the womb, which is clearly a case of God making human beings out of what is not a human being. Other examples could be multiplied. If God makes ‘out of nothing the things that are’, this need not be ex nihilo but merely his making out of shapelessness the things that have shape.

Romans 4:17, likewise, links God’s calling into existence things that do not exist to Abraham and Sarah’s preternatural biological conception, also comparing it to resurrection from the dead. Other New Testament passages that are less explicit than is often assumed include John 1:3, Colossians 1:16 and Hebrews 11:3. Whereas we may all agree that such statements are compatible with God’s sovereign creation out of nothing, what they actually affirm seems to be rather less than this.

My purpose here is not so much to question the suggestion of May and others that the explicit doctrine emerged in Christian circles in the second century. I wish instead to illustrate the extent to which, in positive substance if not in terminology, the same convictions about creation were in fact already intrinsic to Palestinian Judaism in both the Second Temple and rabbinic periods. I will refer in passing to the New Testament and patristic literature as well; but specifically here I wish to focus more narrowly on the question of what pedigree, if any, the idea of God’s creation of matter itself can be shown to have produced in ancient Jewish sources composed or extant in Hebrew or Aramaic.¹⁶ Given the ambiguity of the biblical narratives, how and when did Jews (and Christians) move so decisively to the affirmation that God created matter itself? After a brief observation on Genesis 1 in the ancient versions we will turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls and proceed from here to the rabbinic literature. Aside from accommodating the exigencies of time and space, this very brief sketch will allow us to focus on material that Gerhard May and Frances Young entirely ignore, thereby potentially constituting a useful external point of reference.¹⁷

The Influence of the Ancient Versions

It would not be possible to debate creatio ex nihilo if the biblical creation account had been unequivocal on this point. As it is, the ambiguities of Genesis 1:1 were widely appreciated in post-biblical times and attracted a good deal of semantic, cosmological and mystical speculation.¹⁸ These culminated during the rabbinic period in a creation mysticism focused on the first chapter of Genesis (the so-called ma’aseh bereshit), present already in the Mishnah (for example, at M H·agigah 2:1) and eventually in the Sefer Yetzirah and mediaeval kabbalah, but with many intervening midrashic manifestations.¹⁹ The fundamental argument derives from the Bible’s intriguing first word bereshit, which could be (and sometimes was) understood to mean ‘by/with/in a reshit’—a chief or principle (Aquila’s Greek version famously has ἐν κεφαλαíẉ.).²⁰

Quite what that reshit might be was open to interpretation that drew at times on Proverbs 8:2 in order to identify it with Wisdom (God’s reshit darko, the beginning of his way) or, in the case of Philo’s more Hellenised reading, the Logos. Palestinian Hebrew and Aramaic sources sometimes made that connection explicit, but it is striking to trace two quite different variants in Palestinian Targums to Genesis 1:1. Some manuscripts side with the Septuagint tradition’s seemingly unanimous and poignant rendition ‘in the beginning’ (ἐν ἀρἦ: מלקדמין or מן אוולא), which in a sense firmly c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Visualizing Jews: An Introduction to Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism Through the Ages
• Part I: Divinity, Divine Actions and Their Interpretation: The Management of Theological Images
• Part II: Contested Images of Judaism and Jewishness: Jewish Perspectives on Identity and Image Management
• Part III: Interaction and Conflict with the ‘Other’: The Management of Images in Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations
• Part IV: Communication and Representation: The Management of Jewish Images in Cultural Media
• Contributors
• Index