The full publication of 4Q208 and 4Q209 in 2000 has enabled a renaissance of research on the Enochic Astronomical Book, illumining its deep connections with Babylonian scholasticism and spurring debate about the precise channels by which such “scientific” knowledge came to reach Jewish scribes. This article asks whether attention to Aramaic manuscripts related to the Astronomical Book might also reveal something about Jewish scribal pedagogy and literary production in the early Hellenistic age, particularly prior to the Maccabean Revolt. Engaging recent studies from Classics and the History of Science concerning astronomy, pedagogy, and the place of scribes and books in the cultural politics of the third century bce, it uses the test-case of the Astronomical Book to explore the potential significance of Aramaic sources for charting changes within Jewish literary cultures at the advent of Macedonian rule in the Near East.
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See esp. Raffaela Cribiore, Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
E.g., David Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, tsaj 81 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
E.g., Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); A. Wallace-Hadrill, “To Be Roman, Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42.S71 (1998): 79–91; Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman Staying Greek: Cultural Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994): 116–43; Timothy Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed. Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006)—i.e., also extending earlier efforts to revisit H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), etc., by Peter Brown, e.g., in Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
See already Alan Mendelson, Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1982), and more recently, e.g., Sylvia Honigman, The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2003); Maren Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Niehoff, ed., Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters: Between Literary and Religious Concerns, jsrc 16 (Leiden: Brill 2012).
E.g., David Stern, “The Captive Woman: Hellenization, Greco-Roman Erotic Narrative, and Rabbinic Literature,” Poetics Today 19.1 (1998): 91–127; Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 bce–400 ce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Amram Tropper, Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography: Tractate Avot in the Context of the Graeco-Roman Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Azzan Yadin, “Rabban Gamliel, Aphrodite’s Bath, and the Question of Pagan Monotheism,” jqr 96.2 (2006): 149–79; Daniel Boyarin, “Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud, ed. Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 336–63; Yair Furstenberg, “The Agon with Moses and Homer: Rabbinic Midrash and the Second Sophistic,” in Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters, 299–328.
E.g., Carr, Writing on the Tablet, 253–72; Guy Darshan, “The Twenty-Four Books of the Hebrew Bible and Alexandrian Scribal Methods,” in Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters, 221–44; Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
See, e.g., Moyer, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism, 83–141; Alan Lenzi, “The Uruk List of Kings and Sages and Late Mesopotamian Scholarship,” janer 8.2 (2008): 137–69; Paul Kosmin, “Seeing Double in Seleucid Babylonia: Rereading the Borsippa Cylinder of Antiochus I,” in Patterns of the Past, ed. A. Moreno and R. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 173–98.
Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30.
Devorah Dimant, “Qumran Aramaic Texts and the Qumran Community,” in Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, ed. A. Hilhorst, É. Puech, and E. Tigchelaar, JSJSup 122 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 197–206 at 199. By her count, the Aramaic mss make up roughly 13% of the total mss found in the caves near Qumran; compare, more recently, the survey and reassessment in Daniel Machiela, “Aramaic Writings of the Second Temple Period and the Growth of Apocalyptic Thought: Another Survey of the Texts,” Judaïsme ancient/Ancient Judaism (2014): 113–34. See further Dimant, “Themes and Genres in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran,” in Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, ed. K. Berthelot and D. Stökl Ben Ezra, stdj 94 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 15–45; Eibert Tigchelaar, “Aramaic Texts from Qumran and the Authoritativeness of Hebrew Scriptures: Preliminary Observations,” in Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism, ed. M. Popović, JSJSup 141 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 155–71; Florentino García Martínez, “Scribal Practices in the Aramaic Literary Texts from Qumran,” in Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer, ed. J. H. F. Dijkstra, J. E. A. Kroesen, and Y. B. Kuiper, Numen 127 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 329–41; Andrew Perrin, The Dynamics of Dream-Vision Revelation in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 23–36.
Dimant, “Qumran Aramaic Texts,” 200; italics mine. By the three, she there means Tobit, 1 Enoch, and Aramaic Levi Document. This is, of course, a rough count: 1 Enoch is more properly multiple texts, as noted above, and Aramaic Levi Document is only indirectly related to a known text, i.e., the Testament of Levi in the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs. Her point, however, remains.
For the fragments, see Jozef T. Milik, Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 273–97 and plates xxv–xxx; E. Tigchelaar and F. García Martínez in djd 36:95–171; Henryk Drawnel, The Aramaic Astronomical Book from Qumran: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Seth L. Sanders, “ ‘I Was Shown Another Calculation:’ The Language of Knowledge in Aramaic Enoch and Priestly Hebrew,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature, ed. Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 69–101 at 75. To be sure, Sanders himself also notes how “not only ‘science’ but also ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Babylonian’ are in important ways reified and anachronistic terms that only somewhat awkwardly fit our data” (p. 75).
See above as well as Matthias Albani, Astronomie und Schöpfungsglaube: Untersuchungen zum astronomischen Henochbuch (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1994); Eshbal Ratzon, “The Gates Cosmology of the Astronomical Book of Enoch,” dsd 22 (2015): 93–111; Ben-Dov and Sanders, ed., Ancient Jewish Sciences; Seth L. Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon, tsaj (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
Henryk Drawnel, The Aramaic Astronomical Book of Enoch from Qumran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–49.
Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh, “Ordering Knowledge,” in Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, ed. König and Whitmarsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–39 at 3.
Emma Gee, Aratus and the Astronomical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Katharina Volk, Manilius and His Intellectual Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Mladen Popović, “The Emergence of Aramaic and Hebrew Scholarly Texts: Transmission and Translation of Alien Wisdom,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and Production of Texts, ed. S. Metso, H. Najman, and E. Schuller, stdj 92 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 81–114.
Eibert Tigchelaar, “Some Remarks on the Book of Watchers, the Priests, Enoch and Genesis, and 4Q208,” Henoch 24 (2002): 143–45 at 145.
Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 69–118; Drawnel, Aramaic Astronomical Book, 260–310.
Drawnel, Aramaic Astronomical Book, 72–73. Contrast the approach of VanderKam (“Book of Luminaries,” 342), who argues—especially against Tigchelaar—for the possibility that 4Q208 “was an Enochic astronomical work that contained more than the synchronistic calendar.” By his reading, the lunar material therein already presupposes the system of celestial gates described in 1 Enoch 72 (p. 357).
Drawnel, Aramaic Astronomical Book, 33. By his reading, the Astronomical Book and Aramaic Levi have the “same literary style: short sentences with tabular numerical notations that find their origin in Babylonian scribal literature” (p. 58). This insight buttresses his broader argument for “a didactic context for the transmission of the whole compendium” of the Astronomical Book as well—at least in its early Aramaic forms (p. 35).
Translations here follow Tigchelaar, “Eden and Paradise: The Garden Motif in Some Early Jewish Texts (1 Enoch and Other Texts Found at Qumran),” in Paradise Interpreted: Representations of Biblical Paradise in Judaism and Christianity, ed. G. P. Luttikhuizen, Themes in Biblical Narrative 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 62–81 at 62; Kelly Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen,” JSJSup 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 200–201; VanderKam, “Book of Luminaries,” 482; cf. Milik, Books of Enoch, 290. Note that in the Ethiopic, this split is depicted as a three-fold division of the northern quadrant of the earth, while the Aramaic fragments describe a three-fold division of the entire world (VanderKam, “1 Enoch 77, 3 and a Babylonian Map of the World,” RevQ 42 [1983]: 271–78 at 274–75).
Drawnel, Aramaic Astronomical Book, 36–37. Here the verb is חוי in paʿel, whereas it occurs in haphʿel in ald 84.
James VanderKam, “Enoch’s Science,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences, 60–61.
Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria,” Greece & Rome 42 (1995): 38–48.
Tim Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
S. Johnstone, “A New History of Libraries and Books in the Hellenistic Period,” Classical Antiquity 33.2 (2014): 347–93 at 349.
Volk, Manilius, 27. As much as Hipparchus is celebrated now for his contribution to scientific “progress,” for instance, it is telling that the only work of his to survive is a commentary on Aratus’ Phaenomena—a work that is clearly inferior in terms of its scientific value, and even filled with errors, but was nevertheless far more popular in its own time and into the Middle Ages; Volk, Manilius, 28.
E.g., Aratus, Phaen. 783–787; J.-M. Jacques, “Sur un acrostiche d’Aratos,” Revue des études anciennes 62 (1960): 48–61.
Kidd, Aratus, 8–10; Gee, Aratus, 24–29, 185–88; Richard L. Hunter, “Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in Aratus’ Phaenomena,” Arachnion 2 (1995): 1–34.
Acts 17:28; Clement, Strom. 5.14.101.4; Eusebius, Praep.ev. 13.12.6–7; Annewies van de Bunt-van den Hoek, “Aristobulos, Acts, Theophilus, Clement—Making Use of Aratus’ Phainomena: A Peregrination,” Bijdragen 41 (1980): 290–99; Erich S. Gruen, “Jews and Greeks as Philosophers: A Challenge to Otherness,” in The “Other” in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins, ed. D. C. Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 402–22 at 414–15; Mark J. Edwards, “Quoting Aratus: Acts 17, 28,” znw 83 (1992): 266–69. The possibility that ben Sira was aware of this work is explored in Núria Calduch-Benages, “Hymn to the Creation (Sir 42:15–43:33): A Polemic Text?” in The Wisdom of Ben Sira: Studies on Tradition, Redaction, and Theology, ed. A. Passaro and G. Bellia, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 119–38.
This was the judgment of Otto Neugebauer, “The Survival of Babylonian Methods in the Exact Sciences of Antiquity and Middle Ages,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 528–35 at 529.
John M. Steele, “The ‘Astronomical Fragments’ of Berossos in Context,” in The World of Berossus, ed. J. Haubold, et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 107–22 at 109. Berossus predates Aratus, and the two also have in common the specification of the days of the moon’s phases (p. 108).
Greg Woolf, “Afterword: The Local and the Global in the Graeco-Roman East,” in Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, ed. T. Whitmarsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 189–200 at 190.
Greg Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Malden: Blackwell, 2010), 73.
Susan E. Alcock, “The Heroic Past in a Hellenistic Present,” in Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography, ed. P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, and E. S. Gruen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 20–34 at 32–33.
Morgan, Literate Education, 35–38. Morgan, notably, notes that the references to the scope of such education found in literature are borne out by papyrological evidence for Greek education in Hellenistic Egypt as well: “Parallel with these ‘literate’ exercises were the reading and writing of lists and tables of numbers, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and astronomy” (p. 43). Cribiore (Gymnastics of the Mind, 3) similarly notes that astronomy and mathematics formed part of enkyklios paideia, although her study does not focus on these elements. Cribiore there reminds us that Greek philosophy was not part of this initial education—an important caveat, for our purposes, inasmuch as studies of “Hellenism” and “Judaism” often privilege philosophy when searching for hints of “Hellenization,” consistent with the prominent place of Plato, et al., in modern Classics curricula.
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The full publication of 4Q208 and 4Q209 in 2000 has enabled a renaissance of research on the Enochic Astronomical Book, illumining its deep connections with Babylonian scholasticism and spurring debate about the precise channels by which such “scientific” knowledge came to reach Jewish scribes. This article asks whether attention to Aramaic manuscripts related to the Astronomical Book might also reveal something about Jewish scribal pedagogy and literary production in the early Hellenistic age, particularly prior to the Maccabean Revolt. Engaging recent studies from Classics and the History of Science concerning astronomy, pedagogy, and the place of scribes and books in the cultural politics of the third century bce, it uses the test-case of the Astronomical Book to explore the potential significance of Aramaic sources for charting changes within Jewish literary cultures at the advent of Macedonian rule in the Near East.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 490 | 123 | 3 |
Full Text Views | 416 | 6 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 228 | 14 | 0 |