The Bible and Hellenism

Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature

Thomas L. Thompson, Philippe Wajdenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317544258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Did the Bible only take its definitive form after Alexander conquered the Near East, after the Hellenisation of the Samaritans and Jews, and after the founding of the great library of Alexandria? The Bible and Hellenism takes up one of the most pressing and controversial questions of Bible Studies today: the influence of classical literature on the writing and formation of the Bible.

Bringing together a wide range of international scholars, The Bible and Hellenism explores the striking parallels between biblical and earlier Greek literature and examines the methodological issues raised by such comparative study. The book argues that the oral traditions of historical memory are not the key factor in the creation of biblical narrative. It demonstrates that Greek texts – from such authors as Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and Plato – must be considered amongst the most important sources for the Bible.

I

A Mediterranean or ancient Near Eastern context?

1

Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism

Emanuel Pfoh

A prelude on the cultural and intellectual contexts of reading the Bible

It is a self-evident fact from the history of ideas that the Old Testament is an important and influential component of Western civilization. However, to perceive the cultural and intellectual processes (in other words, the historicity which produced such a condition) seems not so evident – in spite of the results of Rezeptionsgeschichte in current biblical scholarship – when analysing the influence of Western biblical memory over modern historiographical efforts to understand ancient Israelite – or, should we say, ancient Palestinian history. This diagnosis is verified by the manners and the strategies through which traditional biblical studies, both textual and archaeological, have used the biblical narrative for reconstructing the history of ancient Israel until the 1970s, in what could be deemed a realist – if not an almost naïve – interpretation of ancient stories, directly depicting ancient historical facts with which the archaeologist or the historian can innocently work. But, as noted above, the key point is that, from the point of view of intellectual history, such a historicist interpretation of biblical images, stories and events has its own historicity as well! It must be understood within the intellectual developments in western Europe since the Renaissance, but especially since the Enlightenment and its crowning of History (with a capital ‘H’, as expressing a single, universal historical experience) as the ultimate referent of Reality and Truth.¹ This process has one logical outcome for the interpretation of Scripture: it contends that for something to be real and evoke truth, it must be inscribed in history; therefore, the theological truth of the biblical narrative had to be inscribed in history as well: biblical events must be historical events. It is thus that biblical archaeology, as a modernist historical enterprise, finds its intellectual legitimation.²

From a theological perspective – and especially from within a confessional community – the Bible ‘speaks to us’ now, in the present, and such a transhistorical code of communication seems to have been expanded to the same extent into our contemporary understanding of ancient evocations of the past: the Bible evokes the past historically, as we do in modern times. This situation, of course, started being criticized and challenged with a new emphasis, particularly in biblical studies, some forty years ago.³ Yet still, the cultural disposition of understanding the Bible as history, as generally depicting actual historical events to some degree, lingers nowadays; and it is widespread in the general public and, not least, among many biblical scholars.

This deconstructive awareness forces us to go beyond the simple historicization of biblical events, enabling a spectrum of sounder interpretative alternatives for the historian. We need, for instance, to approach the interpretation of biblical stories from a critical cultural and historical epistemology. By this, I mean to foster a socio-anthropological or ethnographic sensitivity in our interpretation of ancient texts in order to understand biblical evocations according to the most probable cultural, intellectual and historical contexts in which they originally appeared or were produced. As impossible to reach as this principle would seem to be, I believe the historian can expect and aim at no less from a critical methodological point of view.⁴ Once we have acknowledged the cultural otherness of biblical epistemology regarding its use of the past, we may be able to overcome the problematic situation of blending historical reconstruction and biblical evocation by, first, setting the context for the creation of biblical texts and finding the purpose of its production; and then, attempting to understand how the Bible evokes the past and to what extent all this is of direct or indirect, primary or secondary, use for the historian interested in writing historically about Israel and ancient Palestine.

The Old Testament in its (most probable) ancient historical context

Regarding our main topic of inquiry – that is, the relationship between ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism – we should ask in the first place: where does the motivation for the production of biblical literature lie?⁵ Following recent developments in biblical scholarship, the return from the exile in Babylon at the end of the sixth century BCE might stand as a probable terminus a quo in the Persian period, even if its importance is much more ideological than historical, as we have in fact few archaeological traces – if any – of such an event of return.⁶ Indeed, and accepting the exilic condition as an ideological element in the Old Testament, the ‘return’ to the land would need an explanation for the ‘returnees’, something which offered answers to question of identity and self-perception. In other words, we should understand the biblical image of ‘exile and return’ as a founding myth for the construction of a certain identity closely related to biblical stories and the traditions about the land. As observed by N. P. Lemche:

The exile in this way has two roles to play. It at one and the same time disconnects and unites the present and the past. It is also the instrument that guarantees that the transgressors are punished because of their sins and never allowed to return, and that their country is cleansed of their sins. The generation that returns to the land of their fathers will at the same time understand that it is their land. It belonged to their fathers and was left without inhabitants as long as the exile lasted, which says that nobody except the generation that returned should be allowed to stay in the land. As the true heirs of their fathers, the sons will take up and fulfill their obligation to Yahweh and the land in the place where their fathers failed. The exile is in this way clearly seen as a foundation myth of the Jewish people that arose sometime in the latter part of the first millennium BCE. Without the idea of an exile there could be nothing like the purified remnant of Isaiah, residing on Mount Zion under the palladium of their God.⁷

This explanation provides us with an ideological cause for triggering the process of creation, perhaps in the Persian period, of what will come to be identified as the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. But, going beyond this, a probable sociohistorical context for the proper development of this creation – now with more firm circumstantial evidence – can be assumed after the analysis made by P. R. Davies, who argues that the process of Hellenization in ancient Palestine since the late fourth century BCE:

brought Judah under the control of the Ptolemies in Egypt, and with that increasing bureaucracy, increased contact with Judeans in Egypt, and a broader use of Greek as a lingua franca alongside Aramaic. In the economy of Judah, bureaucracy extended to the lowest levels, with governmental officers operating even within the villages, while the introduction of Greek-speaking officials increased. Judah was no longer a small province in a large empire but had become again part of what Egypt had always regarded as its own backyard, while at the same time, a new wave of colonization brought Judah face to face directly with the political forms of Hellenization rather than with Greek culture: the Greek language, trade, and of course, education.⁸

We could think, then, of the Hellenistic period as a very probable historical, social and material context for the beginning of what is referred to as ‘biblical historiography’. In sum, this involves imagining a scribal process that was perhaps ignited by a Persian exilic condition – or better, its ideology⁹ – had then its peak and resolution during the Hellenistic period, and that may well have lasted, in its final arrangements, until Roman times. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that the biblical stories were created out of nothing in the Hellenistic period. It is clear that many traditions and motifs in them are older, dating from the Assyrian and Persian periods,¹⁰ and also from much earlier times and related to different locations in the Near East: at least as early as the Sumerian period, if we link Genesis 6–9 with the Gilgamesh epic; New Kingdom Egypt, if we note the resemblances between the Hymn to the Sun God of Akhenaton and Psalm 104; Late Bronze Age Syria, if we consider the story of Idrimi of Alalakh and David’s ascension to the throne; etc. What I propose here is that both the motivation and the necessary material resources for beginning the writing of what later would become the Old Testament find a more appropriate context during the Hellenistic period; yet the mythic kernel contained in biblical traditions, memories and stories come from centuries, even millennia, of intellectual development in the Near East.¹¹ The first part of this proposition is further illustrated if we compare the variant modes of evoking the past in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean during the second half of the first millennium BCE.

Biblical, Greek and Roman uses of the past

The comparison of biblical stories with Greco-Roman historiography has some relevant antecedents in recent scholarship as a means of exposing influences, parallelisms and borrowings, but also dating the composition and production of biblical literature.¹² This goes along with the opportunity of readdressing our understanding of how ancient Eastern Mediterranean elites constructed and evoked the past. (Elites are not the whole of the population; since the textual remnants of ancient stories and traditions are the products of a scribal class – an important component of ruling elites in antiquity – we hardly have access to what mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Copenhagen International Seminar
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: making room for Japheth
• Part I: A Mediterranean or Ancient Near Eastern Context?
• Part II: Greek-Jew or Jew-Greek?
• Part III: Fleets from Kittim (Numbers 24:24) – Roman-Era Texts
• Index of sources
• Index of authors