Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange: Comparative Exegesis in Context 9780812209457

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: On Comparative Biblical Exegesis–Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation
1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105
2. Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?
3. Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law
4. Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers: Exegesis and Cultural Interaction in Late Antique Palestine
5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context
6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture, and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam
7. May Karaites Eat Chicken? Indeterminacy in Sectarian Halakhic Exegesis
8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’anic Wisdom (Hikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet
9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages
10. Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs
11. Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena’s Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis
12. Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Notes
List of Contributors
Index of Persons
Index of Sources

Citation preview

Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange

J E W I S H C U LT U R E A N D C O N T E X T S Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania David B. Ruderman, Series Editor Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Alan Mintz Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert Michael D. Swartz A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange Comparative Exegesis in Context

EDITED BY N ATA L I E B . D O H R M A N N AND D AV I D S T E R N

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Martin D. Gruss Endowment Fund of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Copyright 䉷 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4074-0

Contents

Preface

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Introduction: On Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation 1 David Stern 1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105 Adele Berlin 2. Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan? Israel Knohl

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3. Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law Natalie B. Dohrmann

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4. Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers: Exegesis and Cultural Interaction in Late Antique Palestine 66 Megan Hale Williams 5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context 87 David Stern 6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture, and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam 108 Reuven Firestone 7. May Karaites Eat Chicken? Indeterminacy in Sectarian Halakhic Exegesis 124 Daniel Frank

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8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’anic Wisdom (H 139 . ikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet Joseph E. Lowry 9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages 161 Daniel Sheerin 10. Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs 182 Sara Japhet 11. Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena’s Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis 196 Deeana Copeland Klepper 12. Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy 214 Fabrizio Lelli Notes

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List of Contributors

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Index of Persons

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Index of Sources

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Preface

This rich volume of original essays emerged from a year of learning, conversation, and fellowship for some twenty scholars who worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies during the academic year 2001–2. All experts in the history and literature of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, they shared an interest in the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and worked to explore the diverging and converging lines of scriptural interpretation among the three faith communities. Through the study of commentaries, liturgy, art, and even the material dimensions of the text, they sought to understand how each of the traditions read the Bible from its particular vantage point and how these readings often paralleled, intersected with, borrowed from, or appropriated from each other in fascinating and sometimes unexpected ways. The study of biblical exegesis proved to be a meaningful way of reexamining how these cultures came into contact with each other and how they shared perceptions and beliefs even when confronting and challenging each other’s faith. The formal seminars and informal study groups that structured the fellowship year brilliantly demonstrated the enormous value of reading texts and examining contexts together across cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Both in the seriousness of their scholarly work and in their respectful and supportive interchanges, the members of this group exemplified time and again the magic and excitement that the ambiance of the Center often creates. I wish to thank all the scholars who participated in this fellowship year, both those included in this volume and those who are not included but were still actively engaged in the collective deliberations of the entire year. I offer special thanks to the two editors, Natalie Dohrmann and David Stern, for their hard work in shaping this volume and to Jerry Singerman, the Senior Editor of the Humanities of the University of Pennsylvania Press, for his personal guidance through the entire publication process. I am confident that this volume will contribute significantly to the study of these three religious

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traditions and to the complex interactions that mark their intertwined histories. David Ruderman Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History Ella Darivoff Director Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies University of Pennsylvania

Introduction

On Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation David Stern

Over the last thirty years, the study of ancient and medieval biblical interpretation—Jewish and Christian alike—has undergone a sea change. Forty years ago, if a scholar in Bible studies were asked about premodern biblical exegesis and its value, the answer would almost certainly have been dismissive; at best, it would have acknowledged the historical significance of these texts as putative sources for their authors’ lives or theology. Only rarely would an ancient or medieval commentary have been treated as genuine exegesis, and even more rarely as possessing an enduring value. As late as 1970, the eminent Origen scholar R. P. C. Hanson could write in regard to the Church Fathers (early and late) that ‘‘no admiration of the beauty or skill displayed in their typological and allegorical interpretation should be allowed to disguise the distorting effect which these ideas [about exegesis] have upon [the Church Fathers’] understanding of the Bible.’’1 Today it would be difficult to find such sentiments stated so baldly and categorically. Ancient and medieval biblical commentary alike have undergone a large-scale rehabilitation and are now appreciated both for their value in elucidating the Bible (with obvious qualifications, of course) and as literary documents worth reading in their own right. Several reasons lie behind this decisive change. In the first place, there has been a growing disillusionment with historical criticism of the Bible and its positivistic approaches to the text as self-sufficient guarantors for understanding the meaning of the biblical text. So, too, the increasing sophistication of general hermeneutics and literary studies has worked to undermine the positivism of historical scholarship and to justify on philosophical grounds some of the more outlandish or seemingly dated characteristics of premodern exegesis (which on occasion turn out not

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to be so un- or pre-modern after all). Indeed, as literary theory has increasingly emerged as a field in its own right, some literary theorists have looked back upon the history of exegesis to discover their own past. A prominent theorist once remarked to me personally that he now recognized that modern ‘‘literary criticism’’ was the mere tip of an iceberg whose gigantic foundations lay submerged beneath the surface in the vast shoals of the history of ancient and medieval biblical exegesis.2 The second major change that has occurred in the field of biblical exegesis has been its growing enlargement and inclusiveness. Forty years ago, premodern biblical exegesis (ancient and medieval) meant, essentially, Christian exegesis. Robert M. Grant’s A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (1963) has all of about three paragraphs on ‘‘Jewish’’ interpretation in the time of Jesus and Paul and not a mention of Qumran or any later Jewish exegesis.3 Less than ten years later, in 1970, the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Bible—perhaps the first major project in English to attempt to situate the development of biblical exegesis within the Bible’s larger history—gave a full chapter to Geza Vermes to write on ‘‘Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis,’’ but in the space of some twenty pages, under the rubric of ‘‘midrash,’’ Vermes had to cover all ancient Jewish exegesis from Philo to Qumran, the targumim (or Aramaic translations of the Bible), the various pseudepigraphic and apocryphal texts, and of course all rabbinic literature Now compare those publications with a more recent one like Mikra (1988)—the Hebrew term for Scripture—which has separate chapters by different scholars on Josephus, on Hellenistic Jewish authors, on Samaritan exegesis as well as rabbinic, and chapter-length treatments of Gnosticism and (of course) multiple chapters on early Christian exegesis in its various types and schools. And even more impressive are the massive two first volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (1996/2000), a multivolume series that will eventually cover all the history of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament and whose first two volumes alone (nearly 1,600 pages) treat exegesis until the year 1300.4 These volumes have chapters on everything found in Mikra (and lengthier ones at that) as well as extensive coverage of early medieval Jewish exegesis from the geonim through all the various schools of peshat in both Ashkenaz and Sefarad (with individual chapters devoted to figures like Moshe Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, and the Kimhis).5 Needless to say, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament’s coverage of Christian exegesis is no less comprehensive. The two volumes of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament are an impressive indication of the field’s maturation. Yet they also reflect its growing pains and what remains most problematic about it. For all the excellence of many individual chapters, the two volumes as a whole lack what one

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might call a controlling vision, an idea of what the history of biblical interpretation means beyond all its particular moments. Rather than a continuous history of the development of Jewish and Christian exegesis, the two volumes present fragments of a history. This problematic has not escaped the notice of the volumes’ editor, Magne Sæbø. In an epilogue to the first volume, in attempting to sum up the history covered in the volume, he writes, ‘‘In the end, then, a long double story . . . has been followed . . . These two main roads [of Jewish and Christian exegesis], with several minor deviating paths, have mostly been kept apart by the ancient Synagogue and Church—who have moved forward in relatively great isolation from one another, with only few signs of combining tracks.’’6 On strictly historical grounds, Sæbø is correct that there are not many moments when Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation openly intersect. But is the story of Jewish and Christian exegesis a long ‘‘double story’’? Perhaps it is really two essentially separate stories (which is what the volumes actually seem to present). Or, alternately, is it one story, with both Jewish and Christian scriptural exegesis deriving from a single set of reading practices that first develop in the aftermath of the Bible’s canonization (if not earlier, within the Bible itself, in inner-biblical exegesis) and then diverge on seemingly separate tracks as the two religious traditions also separate and diverge? If such is the case, is it possible to write a single history of biblical exegesis, to look at Jewish and Christian (not to mention Islamic) exegesis in tandem? On the other hand, if their subsequent development has so little to say to each other, what is the point of studying them together? Or to phrase these questions from a different vantage point, namely, that of reading practice as it develops and changes historically and in different cultural centers: How do Jewish and Christian traditions of biblical interpretation and their reading practices resemble the reading practices applied to other books? How does this resemblance (or lack of it) affect the difference between the two interpretive traditions? And finally, how does the history of Bible reading fit into the history of reading practice in Western culture? But in that case, whose story are we telling? The story of biblical interpretation? Of Western reading practices? Of their intersection? The essays in this volume do not offer definitive answers to these questions, but they address them by exploring intersections of the three exegetical traditions and the problems that study of these intersections entails. Before turning to these individual explorations, however, it is worth tracing the background to the field of comparative exegesis as it has emerged in scholarship over the last half-century. Most of the scholarship I will discuss deals with the earlier periods of biblical interpretation in Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity but its relevance can

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easily be extended to the medieval and even early modern periods, about which I will write more at the conclusion. So, too, virtually all the scholarship I will talk about deals with the intersection of Jewish and Christian interpretation but the problematics are largely identical for Islam and its intersection with Jewish (and Christian) exegetical tradition. We can begin with the term ‘‘comparative exegesis’’ itself. To the best of my knowledge, the first person to write about ‘‘comparative exegesis’’ in connection with the scholarly study of ancient scriptural interpretation was the French scholar Renee Bloch in a 1955 article entitled ‘‘Note methodologique pour l’etude de la literature rabbinique.’’7 Bloch’s aim in that article was to demonstrate the importance of rabbinic literature for understanding the Bible and its interpretation in postbiblical tradition and to set forth a method for pursuing such scholarship. According to Bloch, the major challenge a scholar faces in using rabbinic texts visa`-vis the Bible—beyond penetrating their inherent obscurity—is dating its various texts and placing them in sequence so as to be able to trace the development of an exegetical motif or theme. These motifs or themes were the specific focus of her study, and it was specifically to solve the difficulty of situating their different versions in various postbiblical texts that Bloch first conceived of what she called her ‘‘comparative’’ method. In order to illustrate the method, Bloch presented in the article a sample exercise in which she traced the motif of the prophecy of Moses’s birth by Pharaoh’s magicians through various ancient exegetical works. Beginning with the targumim, she proceeded through Josephus, classical rabbinic midrash, and even late medieval midrashic compilations like Yalkut Shimoni and the Chronicle of Moses, situating each version in relation to its predecessors and later successors and setting methodological guidelines for doing so. She concluded her study with the impact of the motif upon the story of Jesus’s birth. To be sure, Bloch was hardly the first to study the history of traditions in ancient Jewish literature. From the inception of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) at the beginning of the nineteenth century such studies were among the favored preoccupations for Jewish scholars. Perhaps the greatest example of the genre is Louis Ginzberg’s monumental Legends of the Jews (1909–38), many of whose footnotes remain to this day the definitive monographs on their subjects. Bloch, however, was (to the best of my knowledge) the first scholar to attempt to study such traditions systematically, and it is here where her importance lies, as well as that of her foremost student, Geza Vermes (who, after Bloch’s premature death in an airplane crash in the fifties, continued her work in numerous studies that applied and developed her methodology).8 Their common work remains to this day the model for what

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is still probably the most widespread type of scholarship on biblical exegesis—namely, the tracing of interpretive motifs and their development through early postbiblical literature (particularly the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) into subsequent Jewish and Christian interpretation in Late Antiquity through the Middles Ages. Bloch herself came out of French biblical studies; she was a student of A. Robert, who was among the first to discuss what we today call ‘‘innerbiblical exegesis.’’9 Bloch herself was a firm believer in the biblical origins of midrash or, more accurately, of ‘‘the midrashic genre,’’ which she defined as ‘‘an edifying and explanatory genre closely tied to Scripture, in which the role of amplification is real but secondary and always remains subordinate to the primary religious end, which is to show the full import of the work of God, the Word of God.’’10 For Bloch, as for Vermes, midrash was very much a fully fledged literary genre with a lengthy career in ancient Jewish literature—that is to say, not just the name for a particular type of scriptural study or exegesis practiced by rabbinic sages in Palestine in the first five or six centuries in the common era. ‘‘Nothing could be more wrong than the idea that midrash is a late creation of rabbinic Judaism,’’ she wrote—the key word here being ‘‘late.’’11 Writing in the wake of the publication by Paul Kahle of the Palestinian targumim from the Cairo Geniza, Bloch (and after her, Vermes) followed Kahle in giving the Palestinian targumim a very early dating that preceded the rise of rabbinic Judaism.12 In Bloch’s eyes, the targumim were indeed the first real flowering of the midrashic genre after the close of the biblical canon. Because she saw midrash as an ‘‘early’’ phenomenon, she also included in her comparative studies much late Second Temple material, placing great emphasis in particular on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament. Indeed, when Bloch wrote about the utility of midrash to illuminate the Bible, she meant the New Testament as much as—perhaps even more than—the Old. This was her Bible. Which is to state, simply, that Bloch and Vermes’s method had a not always explicit agenda that can be seen best in the historiography of ancient exegesis that the two scholars proposed. Not only were the origins of the ‘‘midrashic tendency’’ within ‘‘the inspired Scripture themselves,’’13 Bloch wrote, but they reached their real culmination and full fruition in the New Testament. ‘‘With Paul, especially in the major epistles,’’ she writes, ‘‘we find the most characteristic and authentic form of midrash, what might be called the great midrash: confronted with the immense problem of a change in economy—salvation by faith in Christ, the call of the Gentiles, the rejection by official Judaism—the Apostle, guided by the Spirit, searched ceaselessly in the ancient Scriptures to find divine answers to the questions posed by the new situation.’’14

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Vermes, in his Cambridge History of the Bible essay on midrash, gave a far more nuanced and subtle presentation of what was essentially the same argument. He, too, began with the biblical origins of postbiblical Jewish interpretation and then divided its later history into two periods, those of ‘‘pure exegesis’’ and ‘‘applied exegesis.’’ ‘‘Pure exegesis’’ was ‘‘organically bound to the Bible’’; its purpose was ‘‘to render every word and verse in Scripture intelligible and its message acceptable and meaningful to the interpreters’ contemporaries,’’15 and it was mainly to be found (on the basis of the works Vermes cites) in the targumim, the Septuagint, Qumram texts (like the Genesis Apocryphon), the Apocrypha and Pseuedepigrapha, and, on a few occasions, in rabbinic literature. In contrast, the point of departure for ‘‘applied exegesis’’ ‘‘was no longer the Torah itself but contemporary customs and beliefs, which the interpreter attempted to connect with scripture and to justify.’’16 This type was anticipated in Qumran literature and in the New Testament but it was found most extensively in rabbinic literature. One of the differences between ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘applied’’ exegesis is that where the former is closer to what we call exegesis—which derives meaning out of the biblical text—the latter more closely resembles eisegesis, which reads meaning into the text. The earliest, most authentic practitioners of the ‘‘midrashic genre’’ were exegetes who interpreted meaning out of the Bible. In contrast, the rabbis were eisegetes who used midrash to read whatever meanings they wanted (or needed) into Scripture. The work of Bloch and Vermes remains foundational for all scholarship concerned with comparative exegesis, but there have been several important changes in scholarly conceptions and assumptions about the field since their time. For one thing, scholars today think very differently from Bloch and Vermes about tradition and the way it develops. Bloch and Vermes had a very linear notion of tradition; for example, it was axiomatic to their work that the simpler and shorter version of a motif was always earlier than a more elaborate or lengthier version. We now know that this is not always the case. So too we know that the oral does not always or necessarily precede the written, nor does the written phase always or necessarily follow the oral. A tradition can be transmitted orally, then committed to writing, then pass back into oral transmission. The written and the oral can also coexist. Further, the written stage of tradition can exhibit many of the same features that were once exclusively attributed to the oral.17 What has changed most since Bloch and Vermes, however, is a shift in focus from tradition itself, or a particular motif of tradition (like the birth of Moses), as if it were a kind of objective datum with an independent existence, to the reading practices of ancient interpreters as the producers of tradition and traditional motifs. This shift in particular has

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been the contribution of James Kugel, the most recent practitioner of ‘‘comparative exegesis’’ (even if, to the best of my knowledge, he has never referred to himself that way). In several books, Kugel has eloquently argued that ancient Israel’s greatest contribution to the West was not solely the Bible but equally a way of reading the Bible, namely, the earliest set of reading practices, or what we call ‘‘early Biblical interpretation.’’18 Of all these practices, the most basic is the fact that ‘‘ancient Biblical interpretation is an interpretation of verses, not stories’’—that is to say, the smaller textual units (like a verse, a phrase, even an unusual word) that would be remembered in a culture that was essentially memorial, to use Mary Carruthers’s phrase.19 In addition, Kugel argues, all ancient interpreters of the Bible shared four basic beliefs about the biblical text—first, that it is ‘‘fundamentally a cryptic document’’; second, that Scripture ‘‘constitutes one great Book of Instruction, and as such is a fundamentally relevant text’’; third, that it is ‘‘perfect and perfectly harmonious,’’ that is, without contradictions or inconsistencies or superfluities; and fourth, that it is of ‘‘divine provenance.’’20 These four assumptions or presuppositions were, according to Kugel, brought to the Bible by all its ancient interpreters and were the practices that created most early postbiblical ‘‘traditions.’’ As a result, nearly all ancient biblical interpretations—including all those preserved in the varieties of Second Temple–period literature, not to mention rabbinic and early Christian exegetical tradition—share a profound common ground. In making this case, Kugel has been one of the major proponents of the view that ancient biblical interpretation should be appreciated as a legitimate mode of reading (once, that is, its assumptions are understood) rather than a product of imaginative fancy or a reflex of theological or ideological baggage that ancient readers brought to and read into the text. Hence Kugel’s insistence that every ancient interpretation derives from a ‘‘problem’’ or ‘‘difficulty’’ in the biblical text and that ‘‘the formal starting point’’ of all ancient exegesis ‘‘is always Scripture itself.’’21 Indeed, Kugel’s virtually telepathic ability to transport himself into the minds of ancient readers and to look at the text through their eyes may be the closest that many of us today, Kugel’s own readers, will ever come to witnessing how ancient Jews (and Christians) read the Bible. Even so, Kugel’s almost exclusive concentration upon reading practice comes at the expense of accounting for extratextual motivations and predispositions that ancient interpreters brought to their reading of the Bible—in the case of the rabbis, for example, the axiomatic conviction that the Written Torah and the Oral Torah will always be complementary and never in contradiction; or for Qumranic readers, the belief

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that the Bible is essentially oracular and prognostic and directed to the history of the community itself; or for (at least for some) early Christians, that the meaning of the Old Testament will always be in some way christological. Kugel himself is not unaware of these factors, but his approach, if only because of its emphasis on the exegetical side, never fully accounts for the extratextual motivations. It thus inevitably ends up reducing the very real differences that distinguish ancient interpretations even when they derive from a common exegetical problem. How does one decide whether a given tradition derives from an interpretive urge (i.e., a reading practice) or from an ideological or other extratextual desire that may later take on an exegetical coloration? This problematic, which is actually inherent in all comparative study, becomes only more complicated when the tradition is preserved or recorded in a nonexegetical context (like the narrative contexts so common in Second Temple literature), and still more complicated when there exist multiple versions of a given tradition whose chronological relation is not easily determined (which was, as we have seen, a problem that already bothered Bloch). Further, even a reading practice itself is not necessarily ideology free. Take, for example, the basic hermeneutical axiom of the Bible’s divine origins. Kugel is appropriately cautious about assigning too much weight to this particular assumption (like making it the basis of all the other assumptions, something that is commonly done).22 But the real problem with divine authorship is that it directly depends upon the nature of the divinity imagined to be the divine author. For example, Philo’s Middle-Platonic First Principle produces a certain kind of allegorical exegesis that is consonant with its Middle Platonism, and that is very different from the profound anthropomorphism of the rabbis’ God, which is reflected in the playfulness and intimacy of midrashic exegesis. Similar parallels could be drawn between other notions of divinity and the types of sacred texts and exegesis produced by their divine ‘‘authors.’’ The new attention to reading practice I have outlined is nonetheless the first of several major changes in comparative exegetical scholarship that have taken place since Bloch and Vermes initially defined the field. The second major change since their time is the way scholars now think about the origins and beginnings of ancient biblical exegesis. Bloch was neither alone nor the first to take account of what we today call innerbiblical exegesis, that is, interpretive activity within the Bible itself, as the source for all postbiblical exegesis. Nahum Sarna in America and Isaac Seeligman in Israel as well as others made early important contributions to understanding this phenomenon.23 Bloch, however, was among the first to integrate evidence of inner-biblical exegesis into studies of postbiblical exegesis, drawing her primary examples from Chronicles, which

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she correctly saw as retellings of the books of Samuel and Kings from a particular ideological/theological perspective; she also included texts like Ezekiel 16, with its allegory of the history of Israel. For Bloch, these compositions were so important as early examples of exegesis both because they proved that her view of midrash as a meditation upon the meaning of the Bible existed even within the biblical corpus as an authentically native modality, and because these examples also anticipated the rereading and rewriting of the Old Testament in the New. As we have seen, the latter document marked for Bloch the real fruition of the midrashic genre. In her reconstruction of the early history of biblical interpretation, between Old Testament protomidrash and New Testament midrash lay a virtually uninterrupted line of succession. Scholars today look at inner-biblical exegesis from a completely different perspective. In this field, the most important recent contributions have been made by Michael Fishbane, for whom inner-biblical exegesis is less a ‘‘meditation upon the Bible’s meaning’’ as it was for Bloch than a cluster of dynamic tendencies or habits—for lack of a better term— that underlie the Bible’s own process of composition and that later, after the closing of the Bible and its canonization, resurface in midrash as full-blown exegetical techniques.24 Such tendencies include the harmonization of contradictions and inconsistencies, the systematization of diverse and unconnected sources, the recasting of motifs and imagery in new contexts, the transformation of old imagery into new, the historicizing of ahistorical texts (like the addition of superscriptions to the Psalms), and the rehistoricizing of past historical texts, prophecies in particular, into newly historical or prophetic texts. These habits or tendencies have little to do with a particular text ‘‘meditating’’ upon the meaning of an earlier text. Rather, they are more like ways of thinking (or of reading and writing) that underlie the Bible’s very own process of composition, a kind of deep dynamics behind the very making of the Bible. Later, they reappear in midrash as explicit if not formal techniques of interpretation which are self-consciously applied to the explication and elaboration of the Bible. Fishbane’s view of inner-biblical exegesis is not unproblematic. Whether or not the presence of these tendencies within the Bible actually constitutes exegesis remains open to question. By definition, exegesis seeks to explain something—a difficulty or complexity—in a primary text; Fishbane’s inner-biblical examples rarely elucidate or clarify anything about the passages of old Bible that lie behind the new ones even if they help to compose the latter. Yet even if the tendencies he has identified are more like compositional forces than exegetical ones, Fishbane’s claim that they nonetheless lie behind the explicitly hermeneutical tendencies that emerge in postbiblical midrash is com-

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pelling. In fact, Fishbane’s tendencies explain, in my view, the inner workings of midrash far more cogently than do, say, the middot (or hermeneutical principles) like the kal va-h.omer (the argument a fortiori) or the gezerah shavah (verbal analogy) that have traditionally been invoked as the logic behind midrash and the primary mechanics of its exegesis.25 The connection between inner-biblical exegesis and rabbinic midrash is, for Fishbane, intrinsic—as intrinsic as inner-biblical meditation and midrash in the New Testament was for Bloch. Indeed, for Fishbane, the connection between inner-biblical exegesis and rabbinic midrash is not only indisputable proof of the continuity of rabbinic tradition with its biblical predecessor; it also obviates the need for the intervention of foreign or non-Jewish influence to explain the emergence of rabbinic commentary. ‘‘To say, then,’’ he writes in one of his more recent restatements of ancient Israelite exegetical history, ‘‘that Rabbinic exegesis was fundamentally dependent upon trends in contemporary Greco-Roman rhetoric or among the Alexandrian grammarians is to mistake ecumenical currents of text-study and the occurrence of similar exegetical terms for the inner-Jewish cultivation of preexistent native traditions of interpretation.’’26 Rather, the Hebrew Bible itself is ‘‘the product of an interpretative tradition,’’ and midrash is a direct continuation of that tradition.27 These remarks are polemical in intent, aimed at the work of scholars like David Daube and Saul Lieberman who sought to show that rabbinic interpretation must be seen within the context of contemporary GrecoRoman culture.28 This view, as Lieberman himself indicated, goes back at least to the twelfth century when the Karaite Judah Hadassi first broached the connection in order to disparage and delegitimate midrash as a form of alien wisdom that had contaminated native Israelite biblical tradition.29 In the nineteenth century, however, the link between rabbinic interpretation and Greco-Roman sources was revived as a productive explanation for the peculiarities of rabbinic exegesis, and Lieberman was only among the last of these scholars to study the connection. Characteristically, Lieberman gave the argument a subtle spin of his own. In the first place, unlike earlier scholars, he did not believe the rabbis ‘‘owed’’ their exegetical modes to Greco-Roman culture. Many of the techniques they used, he claimed, were universally practiced in the ancient world, drawn from a fund of interpretive techniques that derived from rudimentary legal and literary hermeneutics as well as from still more ancient traditions of dream interpretation that were common to nearly every culture in the larger Mediterranean area. Yet if there was no evidence for substantive influence of Greco-Roman interpretation upon the rabbis, Lieberman showed that the rabbis borrowed the names for some of their exegetical techniques from Greek technical

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interpretive terminology. This borrowing was not merely nominal. If nothing else, it showed that rabbinic biblical exegesis did not take place in a historical vacuum—that the rabbis were aware of the exegetical activity taking place in the culture around them, and that there must have been some kind of exchange between the rabbis and that culture. Although Lieberman hedged on the question of influence (whether the rabbis actually borrowed anything substantive from the Greeks), he clearly viewed rabbinic exegesis as part of a larger late antique, GrecoRoman phenomenon. Even if the rabbis borrowed only the technical terminology of exegesis, this was because they must have realized that these exegetical forms were unprecedented in their native tradition; as a result, they had to consult Greco-Roman culture for what to call these new things. Historians do not generally deal with counterfactuals, but I strongly suspect that Lieberman, as a scholar of ancient Judaism, would have found the idea of midrash inconceivable outside Greco-Roman culture. Not so Fishbane. Now there is no necessary reason to see a Greco-Roman genealogy for ancient Jewish exegesis and that of inner-biblical exegesis as mutually exclusive. To the contrary: the two genealogies and their respective hermeneutical corollaries seem to be best taken as complementary—the one, the inner-biblical tendencies, explaining the dynamics underlying midrash; the other, the impact of Greco-Roman exegesis, explaining why these tendencies suddenly change from being mainly compositional forces working within the text and become full-fledged, self-consciously used exegetical techniques operating upon Scripture from outside, as it were. After all, why should an authentically Jewish mode of exegesis, like midrash, be only a purely, genetically, Jewish one, untouched by foreign intervention or influence? Here, too, then, in this scholarly debate over the origins of ancient Jewish exegesis, we encounter a polemical subtext about the purity of genealogy. In this case, the polemic is not over the theological rivalry between Judaism and Christianity but rather, it seems, a reenactment of the even more ancient struggle between Hellenism and Hebraism. In fact, the polemic touches upon an even more fundamental debate about the nature of change in Jewish tradition. Are new developments (like the emergence of midrash) impelled by imminent internal forces? Or are they shaped by historical context, namely, the influence of the foreign host cultures in which Jews have lived since the time of the Babylonian exile? As this last debate is constructed, midrash essentially comes to serve as a figure or trope for Judaism itself. This may seem an unlikely figuration, but it is one that has come to play an increasingly prominent role, particularly in recent attempts to connect literary theory and classical Jewish exegesis.

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The impact of theory upon the study of ancient exegesis—Jewish and Christian alike—has been considerable. For one thing, it has given scholars the lens through which to look at exegesis as literature in its own right, not just as a secondary or supplementary text. The blurring of the distinction between the two orders of discourse, between ‘‘literature’’ and commentary, has enabled scholars to see exegetical activity within the biblical narrative, just as it has enabled them to appreciate the imaginative excess of exegesis. So, too, literary theory has contributed valuable categories like intertextuality that have illuminated the workings of ancient exegesis along with the semiotic tools to connect hermeneutics to other forms of cultural practice, like attitudes toward the body and gender, not to mention theological and political stances. At the same time, theory has also contributed its own set of polemical polarities to the history of exegesis. Contemporary (mainly poststructuralist) theory’s ‘‘re-discovery’’ of ancient and medieval exegesis actually began, somewhat paradoxically, with midrash, and this new fascination was legitimated, if not rationalized, by positing midrash (and classical Jewish exegesis generally) as a kind of antecedent or ancestor for a nonlogocentric hermeneutic of the sort sought by poststructuralist theory itself.30 This identification, in turn, quickly extended into the positing of an antinomy between midrash and allegory, with the latter representing the hermeneutic of the reigning so-called Greco-Christian logocentrism that heretofore had dominated Western thought and was now about to be dislodged. The opposition between the two went as following: In allegory, meaning was seen as an abstraction lying ‘‘behind’’ the text, grimly awaiting its purported revelation by theologians obsessed with metaphysical presence. In midrash, in contrast, meaning was ‘‘in front’’ of the text, an endlessly playful game of interpretive jouissance (which, contra Derrida, is not always Jew-issance), less concerned with meaning than with extending the unlimited conversation of textuality. This antinomy, in turn, turned into an even more essentialized opposition with the terms midrash and allegory now becoming virtual code words for the different, even opposed ontologies that presumably produced them, the homologous ‘‘ways of being’’ in the world that include gender constructions and social and political embodiments.31 Happily, this antinomy, with its hyperpolarized oppositions, has now passed from the academic scene, but its specter—the tendency to view the history of Jewish and Christian exegesis as dueling rivals—remains a temptation and a threat. The specter is Janus-like. On the one hand, if Jewish and Christian exegesis can be seen only as opposites, then there is little chance of viewing exegesis as an arena for productive cultural exchange because there is no real connection between them. On the other hand, if their relationship is viewed solely as a battle over the pos-

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session of originality and influence, how can comparative exegesis not be philosophically and hermeneutically a divisive project? Part of the answer to this question may lie in shifting the terms of the argument. If the study of ancient exegesis over the last two decades has taught us anything, it is the lesson that interpretation is inevitably overdetermined. Multiple forces and sources seem always to feed into it—in the case of midrash, for example, inner-biblical compositional tendencies turned into exegetical habits; modes of Greco-Roman literary and legal interpretation; oneirological and esoteric techniques of interpretation; problems and clues in the biblical text demanding explanation and clarification; the rhetorical and ideological needs of ancient interpreters and of their audiences that required authoritative licenses and justifications from the biblical tradition. Nor is this overdetermination unique to midrash. It is even more pronounced in the case of medieval Jewish biblical interpretation where, until now, most scholarship has approached the different commentators and their commentaries in terms of their proximity to or distance from peshat, that code word for the ‘‘plain’’ or ‘‘literal’’ or ‘‘contextual’’ meaning, which is usually treated as a systematic approach to the biblical text. In fact, as Sara Japhet has pointed out in an underappreciated article, this conception of peshat is a Wissenschaft anachronism.32 Most medieval Jewish exegetes, far from being systematic interpreters, are powerfully individualist personalities, each with his own unmistakable voice and identifiable way of reading. But rather than seeing these ways of reading as systematic, it may be far more accurate to view them as ‘‘negotiations’’ in which each exegete struggled on his own to juggle various requirements and needs—the words of the text itself, the imputed meanings of tradition, other contemporary interpretations, polemical intents, ideological desires, and so on. To be sure, each negotiation has its own economy (and, accordingly, a balance of profit or loss), but in either case, ancient or medieval, the task of comparative exegetical scholarship today would seem to be to unpack the multiple determinants and factors that went into making an interpretation rather than to set up different interpretations as rivals or competitors. In this world of exegetical negotiations, every interpretation is also a not-another-intepretation. Although it is not always possible for us to know what the exegetical alternative was, it is safe to assume that, as far back as we can go, every exegesis was an additional interpretation—a davar ah.er, ‘another opinion,’ as the rabbis said—or a refusal of an existing exegesis. This is to say that there will always be an inherently and unavoidable polemical dimension of some sort to exegesis. In most comparative exegetical studies to date, however, there has been a tendency to view the relationship between different traditions of exegeses as being

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either purely polemical or a matter of ascertainable influence with one tradition of exegesis ‘‘subject’’ to another. In the former case, one interpretation wars against another, refutes it, or ‘‘proves’’ from Scripture that the belief-system upon which its ‘‘enemy’’ exegesis is based is wrong. In the latter case, a given exegesis is viewed as a copy or a borrowing from another exegesis, a so-called original interpretation. Where the latter is primary and authoritative, the former—the interpretation underthe-influence—is dependent, secondary, and belated. Inevitably, these characterizations have extended in scholarship to apply to the religious traditions from which the exegeses stem. Thus, Judaism and Christianity have vied for the laurel wreath of originality and struggled to be proclaimed the source of influence upon the other. Islam, in turn, has invariably been viewed (by non-Muslims) as under-the-influence, secondary, derivative. Recent cultural theory has done much to dismantle the privileged status of influence as a critical category.33 As cultural theorists have noted, influence invariably implies an imbalance of power, and as Peter Schaefer has recently reminded us, Western notions of influence are equally determined by categories of cause and effect which go back to antiquity. Citing the pseudo-Aristotleian Liber de causis, Schaefer summarizes its hierarchy as ‘‘the higher a cause, the greater the influence it exerts on its effect.’’34 The implied metaphysics of this formulation helps to explain the power that ‘‘influence’’ has exerted in literary studies, not to mention comparative exegesis scholarship, and it also indicates the degree to which the intertextual relationship is essentially one-sided, with the less powerful party, the one influenced, a passive participant in a cultural exchange whose parameters are determined solely by the active, all-powerful source. If one views the act of interpretation as a negotiation, however, it is possible to flip the perspective, as it were, and to look at the act of exchange called ‘‘influence’’ from the perspective of the recipient of influence rather than from that of the alleged original or source. From the recipient’s perspective, the cultural exchange will appear not as a process of influence but as one of appropriation in which he, the less powerful party, nonetheless exercises what power he has and appropriates—literally ‘‘makes his own’’—what he takes from the more powerful other party. In this case, appropriation is both an act of possession and a re-production of meaning, which may sometimes involve ‘‘killing off ’’ the source; or theft; or friendly borrowing.35 In all instances, though, it is a creative act in which the agent of appropriation, the less powerful party, the one being influenced, chooses to appropriate and, by making it his own, transforms the new possession. It is that transformed exegesis that now appears as a new exegesis. Further, the agent of appro-

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priation is a human agent. Particularly in the case of early Jewish interpretation from its beginnings through the rabbinic period, because it is nearly all an anonymous literature of interpretation, which preserves at best the names of tradents but little more (since the voices behind the names all pretty much sound alike), it is easy to forget that the exegetes were individuals and not religious traditions or literary texts. By restoring human agency to the equation, appropriation allows us to see interpretation as a genuine work of culture that will always be greater than simply being one exegetical tradition or approach. In selecting and editing the essays for this volume, my coeditor, Natalie Dohrmann, and I have intentionally sought to highlight those that have chosen to address the appropriative side of exegesis in the ancient and medieval worlds by using the comparative context to explore the different ways in which exegesis can be understood only by understanding one interpretation and its tradition in the context of others. The essays in the volume all derive from a year-long seminar held at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania whose participants—visiting fellows in the fields of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegesis—constituted a group that was itself a weekly exercise in comparative exegesis. The positive results that such comparative study can produce are, we hope, reflected in the excellence of the essays in this volume and in their implicit dialogues with each other. Because of limitations of space, not all fellows in the seminar are explicitly represented here, but their invisible presence as commentators and critics upon earlier drafts of these essays is acknowledged with gratitude. In organizing this volume, Natalie Dohrmann and I have chosen to order the essays chronologically (as best as we could) rather than by exegetical or religious tradition. It is our hope that, by ‘‘mixing it up’’ in this way, by mingling exegetes and separate traditions, the reader will also be encouraged to see his or her own connections between the individual essays and their subjects—moments of comparative relevance that may have eluded even the authors of the essays themselves (not to mention the editors). The following remarks about the separate essays should therefore be taken less as summaries of their contents or judgments on their significance than as pointers in the direction of avenues of connection that the reader may wish to explore. The first two essays in the volume—by Adele Berlin and Israel Knohl—begin, appropriately enough, with biblical exegesis within the Bible and in early postbiblical literature. The common effect of the essays, if they are taken together, is to blur the line between innerbiblical exegesis and early postbiblical interpretation. In her study of Psalm 105, Berlin shows how the psalmist/exegete appropriated earlier Israelite traditions. Rather than viewing the psalm as historical in genre,

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as constituting a repository of alternative historical traditions to those preserved elsewhere in the Bible, as scholars have previously done, Berlin approaches the text as an act of creative exegesis, a re-interpretation of past traditions that the psalmist has deliberately reshaped in order to connect the past to the exilic present in which he lived. Like Berlin, Knohl also deals with the interpretive dimension of compositional elements within the Bible, as well as with the compositional force of interpretive elements in postbiblical literature. In tracing the lineage of the dual views of Cain as Son of God and as Son of Satan, Knohl offers a speculative reconstruction of the text of the genealogies in Genesis 4 that provides a prehistory for the two traditions that, as he shows, resurface in Second Temple literature and early Christian exegesis only to reemerge a third time (albeit in an even more extreme form) in an early medieval rabbinic text. Rather than proving the antimony of Jewish and Christian exegesis, the history of this motif, in Knohl’s reconstruction, demonstrates how the two religious traditions became parallel conduits in transmitting tradition and simultaneously pushes the innerbiblical exegetical moment back still further, before the Bible, to the traditions that helped compose it. The next three essays in the book follow biblical interpretation into the Roman imperial and late antique period and into the sphere of formal biblical exegesis in both rabbinic Jewish and early Christian tradition. As each essay demonstrates, biblical interpretation can do much more than just exegesis. In her study of rabbinic interpretation of the biblical laws of slavery, Natalie Dohrmann shows how the rabbis not only reinterpret the biblical injunctions but also their larger cultural experience under Roman imperial rule by appropriating Roman views of slavery in order to define, via exegesis, their own place in the empire. Exegesis here becomes cultural work in a literal sense. The next essay, by Megan Williams, a study of Jerome’s relationship to Jewish exegesis, picks up Dohrmann’s argument about exegesis as cultural work and carries it into the early Christian realm. In this case, Williams demonstrates how Jerome exemplifies an early Christian exegete who appropriated Jewish exegesis in order to define his own identity as a Christian in the Empire, both vis-a`-vis other Christians and toward contemporary pagans. As Williams shows, Jerome proudly appropriated Jewish exegesis precisely in order to represent—or misrepresent—it for his own rhetorical ends. Through his translations and commentaries iuxta Hebraeos, he sought ‘‘to take the place of the Jewish teachers from whom he had learned so much’’—an almost perfect example of cultural appropriation that seeks literally to eliminate its source In my own essay, I study ancient Jewish interpretation of the Song of Songs from a double comparative perspective—both within rabbinic

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Judaism by comparing midrashic and esoteric intepretations, and in relation to early Christian exegesis of the Song. In both cases, I try to shift the focus of scholarly attention from hermeneutics to reading practice arguing that, in all three cases, the same allegorical reading is simply used differently; while the different interpretations have different contents, they share the same structure including—in the case of the rabbinic and early Christian interpretations—a conception of the Song itself as a struggle over being God’s true love vis-a`-vis the other tradition. As with both Dohrmann’s study and Williams’, exegesis here does cultural work. The next group of three essays moves to the Near East and the Islamic world. The first of these, Reuven Firstone’s comparative study of the Abrahamic traditions in rabbinic and Islamic exegesis, explicitly interrogates the notion of influence; as Firestone shows, of all the monotheistic faiths, Islam generally has struggled most with the burden of influence because it is the latest of the three. As he demonstrates in his comparative study, however, both rabbinic and Islamic interpretations are impelled by parallel polemical motives, and those motives may in fact reflect inner-biblical ambiguities as well as the mutual competition the two faiths felt toward each other and that produced parallel interpretive approaches. The next essay, Daniel Frank’s study of Karaite halakhic (legal) exegesis, directly confronts what is certainly the most polemically charged exegesis in all medieval Jewish interpretation; even so, as Franks shows, the polemic is restricted to exegesis, not necessarily practice. In tracing Karaite and Rabbanite exegesis of the specific laws regarding permissible fowl (and focusing on the permissibility of chicken), Frank shows in effect how a Karaite ‘‘tradition’’—independent of the Bible yet with legal authority—came into existence through an accommodation with Rabbanite practice yet without compromising Karaite exegetical principles. This tradition, identified by Karaite legislators with consensus, allowed them to eat chicken yet did not diminish the Karaite ability to tolerate indeterminacy in the Bible in a way that their Rabbanite contemporaries could not. The final essay in this group, Joseph Lowry’s study of how traditions attributed to the prophet Muhammad were elevated to the level of Quranic revelation, is also in effect a study in the creation of an Oral Law next to a Written Law. The specific focus of Lowry’s study is the history of interpretation of the word h.ikma and its identification with sunna, which he explores through every conceivable venue, including the possibility of rabbinic influence on the interpretation. While Lowry is properly cautious about the speculative nature of this suggestion, he nonetheless demonstrates a powerful structural parallel in the two tradi-

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tions in respect to their creation of an extrabiblical body of tradition with the authority of Scripture itself. This parallel would not be visible without comparative study, which again yields a profound commonality between the two traditions. The final group of essays in the volume returns to Christian Europe and its exegetical traditions. The first of these, Sara Japhet’s study of Rashbam’s commentary on the Song of Songs, addresses the question: How does this foremost peshat exegete deal with a text whose meaning was understood to be allegorical rather than literal? Japhet answers the question by juxtaposing Rashbam’s approach to those of Rashi and Abraham Ibn Ezra—that is, through comparative study—and thereby defines the uniqueness of his reading, which sees the Song not merely as a love poem (its ‘‘literal’’ meaning) but as a poetic address to contemporary Jews designed to overcome their despair at the endless travails of exile by recalling the love of their youth. The next essay, by Daniel Sheerin, explores a very different aspect of the cultural work of exegesis in the Middle Ages by studying the use of Scripture in the Christian liturgy, specifically in the Mass Proper, where scriptural excerpts were combined montage-like with liturgical passages to create what were essentially new quasi-scriptural compositions. As Sheerin points out, the liturgy was the medium through which Scripture was in fact known by most medieval laypersons; if so, he asks, what does this tell us about knowledge of Scripture and its interpretation? Using the comparative method in an original fashion, Sheerin shows how the methods and procedures of scriptural exegesis were applied to the Mass proper in order to prove its coherence, meaningfulness, and timeliness. In doing this, he shows how comparative exegesis extends beyond even the formal purview of Scripture both as a medium for imparting meaning and for connecting text to the life of its audience. In the following essay, Deeana Copeland Klepper continues to explore the topic of the reception of the Bible and its interpretation in the late Middle Ages by analyzing the work of George of Sienna, a popular Dominican preacher and exegete of the late fourteenth century. As Klepper shows, George sought to provide biblical proofs of Christianity for a Christian audience, and in doing so, he drew upon a venerable tradition of anti-Jewish polemic, but he also insisted that the Christian sense of Scripture lay in the proper understanding of the Bible’s literal sense. By reframing Nicholas of Lyra’s presentation of Rashi’s quasiliteralist commentary in a more polemical vein, George’s corpus is a brilliant example of the inadequacy of purely hermeneutical terms like peshat or the literal meaning to capture the uniqueness and richness of creative exegetes who sought to make their exegesis do more things than merely explain the Bible.

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The final essay in this volume, Fabrizio Lelli’s study of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the figure of Job in fifteenth-century Italy, both brings the comparative study of ancient and medieval Jewish and Christian exegesis to a kind of conclusion and opens the way to the new types of humanistic biblical exegesis that would shortly mark the early modern period. As Lelli shows, both Jewish and Christian theologian/ philosopher exegetes shared a commitment to revealing the universal truths of ‘‘the pristine traditions,’’ thus making possible for the first time a true collaboration between Jews and Christians in interpreting the Bible. The collaboration, however, was not solely philosophical or theological. As Lelli shows, it extended even to the material dimension of the book where both Jews and Christians collaborated in producing and enjoying a common iconography for figures like Job (who, as Lelli illustrates, possessed in fact a double iconography). The material collaboration that Lelli reveals in Jewish-Christian Renaissance circles only intensified in the course of the subsequent century. In the printing houses of Venice as well as other European centers, Jews and Christians continued famously to collaborate in producing the Bible, and that material collaboration inevitably left its impact upon biblical interpretation, as the evidence of the rabbinic Bible, the Mikra’ot gedolot, in both its early sixteenth-century editions, with the increasingly canonical selection of commentaries, manifestly shows. In this new period, the project of comparative exegetical study takes on a somewhat different direction, as both Jewish and Christian exegesis faced the assaults of modernity and more critical approaches to the Bible’s meaning. Even so, the thrust of exegesis remained powerfully at work in culture. But that story, as the saying goes, is the subject for another book. The rest is commentary.

1

Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105 Adele Berlin

This essay is about interpretation: my interpretation of Psalm 105 and the psalm’s interpretation of the Torah traditions from which it is fashioned. The latter brings us into the domain of inner-biblical interpretation, a term designating the many ways in which one segment of the Bible may reappear in another. In the explication of the psalm that follows, I will attend to the ways in which Torah traditions are alluded to, interpreted, or reinterpreted. This approach has a twofold benefit: it sheds light on the meaning of the psalm and it shows something of the early interpretation of authoritative texts. Psalm 105 is one of a group of psalms, most notably 78, 106, 135, and 136, that recount and rework, in poetic form, the prose narrative traditions of Israel’s past preserved in Genesis–Kings, especially the Torah traditions about the creation, the patriarchs, the Exodus, and the coming into the promised land. These psalms exemplify the use of scripture within scripture, or, to be more precise, the use of texts already considered authoritative in liturgical compositions that would, in time, themselves become authoritative. Psalm 105 employs two vehicles of inner-biblical interpretation: allusion and exegesis. While both bring new meaning to old traditions, they do so by different avenues. Allusion recontextualizes an authoritative text, setting an older text alongside, or inside, a newer text. Exegesis affirms the meaning of an older text, be that a longstanding accepted meaning or an innovative meaning promoted by the exegete. In allusion, the new text is primary; the old text is the servant of the new. In exegesis the old text is primary; the new text is the servant of the old. When allusion and exegesis go hand-in-hand, as they do here and elsewhere in the Bible,1 the relationship between the old and new text is fraught with complexity. The goal of all this interpretive activity in our psalm is to reaffirm the authority of the old text and at the same time to create new meaning for the traditions invoked, a new way of seeing

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them. By reenvisioning the Torah traditions, the psalmist contemporizes them so that they address the needs of his own community.

A Brief Sketch of Modern Approaches to Psalm 105 It is a truism, but worth stating nevertheless, that different methodologies yield different results since different questions are posed and different assumptions maintained. Even the label attached to Psalms 78, 105, 106, 135, and 136 says a lot about how one views these psalms and the Torah texts they reference. Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) called them legends, since he saw in Genesis various folklore genres, legends among them.2 Most recent studies label these psalms ‘‘historical psalms,’’ a term that reflects the preoccupation of current biblical scholarship with the history of, and the historicity of, the biblical text.3 The designation ‘‘historical psalm’’ is, from the perspective of inner-biblical interpretation, not especially helpful because it imposes a modern notion of what constitutes history, omitting psalms that, like Psalm 104, do not focus on ‘‘historical events.’’ Yet Psalm 104 is no less dependent on Torah traditions than Psalm 105, albeit a different part of the Torah, the creation story. These days the term ‘‘historical psalm’’ is even more problematic, given that serious questions have been raised about the historicity of much of the Torah’s narrative. I prefer a term like ‘‘psalms invoking traditions about Israel’s past,’’ a more inclusive term that avoids the question of historicity. The point is not whether these events actually occurred but that the story of them had been incorporated into the national memory by the time of the psalmist. The traditions about Israel’s past are evoked selectively in Psalm 105, often diverging from the exact wording and content of the source texts (most noticeably, the number and order of the plagues). How should these divergences be explained? Some historical critics concluded that the psalm preserved ancient alternative traditions of the Exodus, traditions as authentic as those in the book of Exodus.4 In other words, the traditions contained in the psalm were taken as an alternative version of the story of Israel’s past, a different version from that preserved in the Torah. This position excludes the possibility that the psalm is an intentional refashioning of the Torah’s story. Literary approaches to the Bible take a different position, prizing the poets’ literary creativity and acknowledging with approval that poets made individual choices regarding the selection and shaping of their traditional material. Literary approaches move away from the idea that behind every phrase stands one of many authentic traditions of the past, preferring the idea that each individual poet was free to put his own spin on inherited traditions.5 Yet, many literary critics of the Bible, especially

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those in earlier years influenced by New Criticism, tended to focus on the poem as an object in itself and consequently deflected attention from its relationship to other texts in the biblical corpus and from the real-life situation that the poem might be addressing. Poetic creativity was credited to the poet but biblical intertextuality went largely unobserved. That began to change within literary studies as intertexuality became a topic of interest and as reader-response criticism and other postmodern ways of reading gained ground. In biblical studies the discovery of inner-biblical interpretation provided the lens to see more and more references within the Bible to other parts of the Bible and to understand their interpretive potential. In this sense, inner-biblical interpretation is both an ancient activity and a modern hermeneutic approach. The argument that our psalmist engaged in this ancient activity is made more compelling by the now nearly universal dating of the psalm to the exilic or postexilic period and the growing agreement that its wording ‘‘presupposes the Pentateuchal narrative as presently constituted.’’6 As a modern hermeneutic approach, inner-biblical interpretation asks us to take seriously the work of the ancient interpreter, both as an exegete and as a creative literary artist—to understand what he did with his traditional material and what he accomplished by doing it. Which Torah texts did he cite and how did he phrase them? What did he omit, or change, or combine? What is the effect on the audience, who must have been familiar with the Torah traditions? We have not understood the psalm thoroughly until we can answer these questions, and I will offer some answers in the discussion that follows. But first, a brief explanation of my use of the term ‘‘inner-biblical interpretation.’’

What Is Inner-Biblical Interpretation? The project of identifying inner-biblical interpretation runs the risk of putting too much emphasis on exegesis as the goal of the author. Psalm 105 is not an exegetical text per se; it did not set out to analyze or clarify the Torah text or disambiguate its meaning or harmonize its contradictions.7 As a literary composition, the psalm reenvisions Torah traditions in order to promote its own agenda. Does this involve interpretation? Yes. Does that make the psalm exegetical? No. ‘‘Interpretation’’ and ‘‘exegesis’’ are too casually interchanged in most studies, and I would differentiate between them. I take ‘‘interpretation’’ to be a broad term for the many ways in which meaning is created or expressed, while ‘‘exegesis’’ is a more limited and formal process of textual study. I would therefore distinguish between ‘‘inner-biblical interpretation’’ and ‘‘innerbiblical exegesis.’’ Inner-biblical interpretation, broadly defined, is a con-

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geries of acts, all of which may be considered interpretive but not all are necessarily exegetical.8 The term ‘‘inner-biblical interpretation’’ can serve as a general designation for the several types of interpretation of Torah traditions that are present in Psalm 105. They include the literary or rhetorical reenvisioning of these traditions (a creative act by the psalmist), mostly through allusions, and the inclusion of bits of exegesis that the psalmist presumably inherited. (A passage can include exegesis without being itself exegetical.) Allusion is surely to be distinguished from exegesis, but it is just as surely a form of interpretation. So I am content to include allusion under my broad definition of inner-biblical interpretation because allusion inevitably involves the interpretation of the alluded text.9 My own interpretive strategy is to interpret the allusions. First of all, like many others, I assume that the wording of the psalmist’s authoritative traditions was the same, for all practical purposes, as that of the Masoretic Text, and that the psalmist is alluding to a specific phrase or pericope in that tradition.10 Because the phrases I identify as allusions are not common combinations of words, it is not a question of general biblical or biblicizing language. The psalmist is not simply peppering his poem with scriptural-sounding expressions; he is alluding to specific passages and/or to phrases that, by virtue of their context elsewhere, have specific associations.

Interpreting Allusion The allusions to the Torah traditions in Psalm 105 are not formally marked but were presumably recognizable to the ancient audience (otherwise there would have been no point in making them) and are largely evident to modern commentators, who routinely cross-reference the passages alluded to. Even so, the full extent of the psalm’s verbal allusions is not always appreciated, nor is their interpretive force. Take one example, v. 35: µtmda yrp lkayw µxrab bç[ lk lkayw, va-yo’khal kol ‘esev be-’artsam va-yo’khal peri admatam, ‘‘It [the locust plague] consumed all the grass in their land, and it consumed the fruit of their soil.’’ The NJPS translation, replicated in NEB and NIV, reads ‘‘They devoured every green thing in the land; they consumed the produce of the soil.’’ This translation brings out the parallelism of the lines, but by rendering ‘esev and peri as ‘‘green thing // produce’’ instead of ‘‘grass // fruit’’ it obscures the allusion to Ex 10.15: ≈[h yrp lk taw ≈rah bç[ lk ta lkayw, vayo’khal et kol ‘esev ha-’arets ve-’et kol peri ha-‘ets, ‘‘It consumed all the grass of the land and all the fruit of the tree.’’ Ex 10.15 and, following it, Ps 105.35 are using ‘‘grass and fruit,’’ the two species of vegetation that represent the totality of the plant world (Gn 1.12).

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Now, to be sure, while the psalm is alluding to the wording of Ex 10.15, it is also changing it slightly: ‘‘grass of the land’’ (the place where the grass grows) becomes ‘‘grass of their land’’ (the country of Egypt) and similarly ‘‘fruit of the tree’’ becomes ‘‘fruit of their soil.’’ This last is a rather strange phrase, given that fruit does not come from the soil or ground (adamah), but it reinforces the concept of ‘‘their land.’’ The psalm maintains the destruction of the totality of vegetation, grass, and fruit but emphasizes that it occurred to the land of Egypt. This conforms to the psalm’s pattern, when speaking of the plagues, of using ‘‘their’’—as in ‘‘their water,’’ ‘‘their fish,’’ ‘‘their land’’ (several times), ‘‘their rain,’’ ‘‘their vines,’’ and so forth. This subtle and complex deployment of allusions, which both invokes and alters the wording of the original text, changes the message of the alluded text. The psalm’s retelling of the plague story emphasizes how God devastated the land of Egypt, whereas the Exodus account is about the contest of power between God and Pharaoh.11 Since the main point of the psalm is God’s intention and ability to give the promised land to Israel, it uses the plague narrative to say something about God’s control over a land. The land in question here is Egypt, a cypher for Babylonia in much postexilic literature (for the use of the Exodus theme for the return to Judah, see below). So the psalm’s ancient reader could easily deduce that God would do to Babylonia what he had done to Egypt. This type of allusion—allusion with a change in wording—is typical of this psalm and is the primary way the psalm rewrites tradition.

Identifying Exegesis Recognizing bits of ancient exegesis in the psalm is a more difficult matter, for one cannot always tell whether the additions and changes to the Torah traditions represent accepted exegetical explanations, new exegetical explanations being offered by the psalmist, or poetic flourishes that are not exegetical. However, that we can raise the possibility of the presence of exegetical additions is the result of our awareness of innerbiblical interpretation. Before scholars had this hermeneutic at their disposal, they saw all these additions as flourishes by the poet or by an editor (or in the case of historical critics, as evidence of alternate traditions). Ps 105.18 provides an example: ‘‘They tormented his feet with fetters; iron came upon his neck.’’ Nothing in the Joseph story in Genesis suggests treatment like this, so it was explained as ‘‘sentimental . . . and altogether improbable’’;12 or ‘‘it may refer to an earlier stage of imprisonment . . . or it may be tinged with the colouring of poetry’’;13 or ‘‘due to poetic license.’’14 Along the same lines, C. A. Briggs, commenting on v. 38, says that ‘‘Egypt rejoiced when they left for their fear

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fell upon them’’ is ‘‘a glossator’s exultation over the terror of the Egyptians.’’15 These comments, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, view the departures from the Torah traditions as suspect; they are not like those of the later literary critics who celebrated poetic creativity. They see no benefit, exegetical or poetic, in the poet’s additions and are at a loss as to how to explain them. It seems to me that while some of these additions may be poetic flourishes, others are better explained as exegetical traces reflecting the common postexilic understanding of Torah traditions (see below).

The Message of Psalm 105 Psalm 105 takes as its main topic the promise of the land to the forebears of Israel, a promise that is eternal and unconditional and that therefore is still in force, undiminished, in the time of the exiles, to whom the psalm is directed. I use the term ‘‘exiles’’ to refer to the exilic and/or postexilic audience, living either in Babylonia or in the Land of Israel under Persian rule—all these people considered themselves to be in exile in some sense, regardless of their geographic location. To pin down the audience more precisely, I find evidence in the psalm (especially in v. 12, see below) that it is directed to the returnees living in Judah. According to the psalm, these returnees are the direct heir of the patriarchs, the initial promisees, and of their progeny, the Exodus generation, in whose time the promise to the patriarchs was fulfilled and whose vicissitudes en route to possessing the land are summarized. For the exilic audience, the review of the patriarchal and Exodus traditions comes not to lecture about ancient history but to speak to an issue of contemporary concern. The issue is the possession of the land, which the psalm insists belongs to the exiles by divine right. The psalmist calls upon authoritative traditions to prove it, selecting those texts that support his view and presenting them in a manner that strengthens his argument. Although he alludes several times to Deuteronomy, he does not invoke the deuteronomistic idea that the land was held on condition that Israel obey God. His message is much more positive, and for that he relies on the unconditional promise to the patriarchs, a theme more characteristic of the Priestly source (see especially Lev 26.42) and J and E before it.16 To be sure, the patriarchal promise is not altogether absent from Deuteronomy but it is in abeyance, canceled by the exile (Dt 28.62), with the hope that it will be reinstated if the people repent of their sins (Dt 4.31, 30.5). Many commentators have observed that the traditions singled out for mention in the psalm are the patriarchal traditions, the story of Joseph, the Exodus and plague traditions, and the wandering, leading up to the

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possession of the land; but what usually goes unnoticed is that in all of the references cited, Israel is outside of its land.17 Verses 12–14 refer to the travels of Abraham and Isaac in Egypt and Gerar (Gn 12, 20, 26); verses 16–22 tell of Joseph in Egypt; verses 23–24 have Jacob come to Egypt; verses 25–41 give an account of the Exodus from Egypt and the aftermath, reaching the brink of the fulfillment of the promise of the land. The traditions have been selected brilliantly to make ‘‘the national history’’ fit the situation of the current exiles, removed from their land (at least conceptually if not literally) just like their ancestors, awaiting a new exodus that will return them to it. The Exodus from Egypt is a known motif in exilic literature (compare Is 40–55), and it has been recognized in our psalm.18 But the exile in Egypt is not the only exile, for the psalm portrays the patriarchal period as one of multiple exiles. The psalm is a history of exile, the various ‘‘exiles’’ experienced by Israel’s founding fathers, whose experiences prefigure the exilic experience of the contemporary audience.19 And all through these prototypical exiles, the promise of the land comes closer to fulfillment, until at the end of the poem it is achieved. Just as the promise of the land was made to Abraham, confirmed to Abraham’s offspring, and fulfilled to his descendents after many exiles, so, implies the psalm, will that same promise, still in effect, be fulfilled to Abraham’s current descendents after their own exile.

The Exiles Are Like the Patriarchs The theme of the patriarchs had wide currency in the exilic and postexilic periods (e.g., Is 41.8, 51.2, 63.16; Jer 33.26; Ez 33.24; Neh 9.7); it is a major theme in the literature of the exile.20 Our psalm uses it to good advantage, making two complementary equations between the exiles and the patriarchs: the exiles are likened to the patriarchs and the patriarchs are likened to the exiles. This is accomplished through a network of reconfigured Torah allusions that reframe the Genesis stories to suit the psalm’s message. The implied audience is addressed as ‘‘progeny of Abraham His servant, children of Jacob, His chosen ones’’ (v. 6). The wording is artful. ‘‘Progeny’’ (zera‘) occurs in the promise to Abraham (Gn 15.3–6) and immediately evokes that promise; and here now, being addressed by the psalmist, is that very progeny—living proof that the first part of the promise to Abraham is still in force. The parallelism is constructed on a common wordpair, ‘eved // b-h.-r, ‘‘servant // choose,’’ but the terms are applied to different syntactic parts of their respective phrases (compare vv. 42–43 and contrast v. 26). Instead of ‘‘Jacob, his chosen one’’ it is his children, the psalm’s implied audience, who are the chosen ones. The

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effect of the parallelism is to close the distance between the patriarchs and the audience.21 The audience is the realization of the promise of progeny made to Abraham; and the audience is the children of Jacob, the original nucleus of the people of Israel, as well as the descendents of that nucleus. Moreover, they are as chosen as the patriarchs. Having made the point that the current generation is the progeny of Abraham, the psalm now emphasizes that they are the heirs to the land promised to their ancestor. First of all, that promise is in force ‘‘for a thousand generations’’ (v. 8); it is ‘‘an eternal covenant’’ (v. 10)—that is, it is no less binding than it was when first made. Second, the promise is conveyed in direct discourse, as though the present generation can actually hear the words spoken to Abraham. This is a clever literary fiction because these words are a paraphrase of the promise in Genesis. Verse 11 quotes God as having said, ‘‘To you I will give the land of Canaan as your allotted heritage.’’ While this phrase clearly harks back to the promise to Abraham (e.g., Gn 17.8), nowhere does God utter it.22 In fact, the phrase h.evel nah.alah, ‘‘allotted heritage,’’ does not appear in Genesis. The phrase is deuteronomic (Dt 32.9) and it refers to the apportionment of peoples and lands to the gods—Jacob (that is, Israel) is allotted to God as his possession.23 This example of a double allusion, or the juxtaposition of two allusions, is one of many throughout the psalm. Allusion is a powerful technique; it creates meaning by importing some sense of the source text (the alluded text) into the alluding text. An allusion to an authoritative text like the Torah, presumably well known to the audience, is accompanied by the context of the alluded passage and by the commonly accepted understanding of it. A double allusion juxtaposes two texts and their contexts, and the meaning is made through the combination. Our psalmist strengthens the original promise of the land by calling it a h.evel nah.alah, an inalienable land-holding. Moreover, by alluding to Dt 32.9, he joins the deuteronomic context of h.evel nah.alah with the new context he has created for it. The implication is that just as Israel is God’s possession, so is the land Israel’s possession. The audience presumably accepted the first premise since it is found in an authoritative text; it is the second premise that the psalmist labors to prove. The phrase h.evel nah.alah emphasizes the idea of possession, ownership. The idea of the permanence of the promise to Abraham was already stressed in vv. 8–10. Verse 11 adds a new dimension: the status of the promised real estate, which is a h.evel nah.alah. The implication is that even under Persian rule, when Judah was not sovereign in its land and Persia legally owned it, the land belongs to Israel, Israel has a God-given, inalienable right of ownership.24

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The Patriarchs Are Like the Exiles Not only is the exilic audience directly linked to the founding fathers, becoming the patriarchs, as it were, by virtue of being their heirs and of experiencing analogous exiles; but at the same time the patriarchs also become the exiles. The patriarchs are reimagined as having experienced the Babylonian exile. The psalmist does this by applying exilic language and imagery to the patriarchal stories. S. Holm-Nielsen provided a number of examples, to which I will add my own. The verb ‘-q-sh, ‘‘to oppress,’’ used in Ps 105.14, ‘‘he did not let anyone oppress them [the patriarchs],’’ is not found in the Genesis stories but is commonly used to indicate the subjugation of Israel to foreign powers (as in Is 52.4, 54.14; Jer 50.33).25 By applying this verb to the patriarchs, the psalm intimates that they were threatened with the same type of subjugation as the exiles. A more telling hint of exile is in v. 16, where the famine in the time of Joseph is recounted in poetic parallelism as ‘‘He summoned a famine on the land; he broke every staff of bread.’’ The second phrase seems to be a simple parallel to the first. But ‘‘to break the staff of bread’’ is found only in texts referring to the famine that accompanies an enemy siege that God instigates against sinning Israel (Lev 26.26; Ez 4.16, 5.16, 14.13).26 Jacob and his family, in our psalm’s retelling, are thereby made to suffer the same type of deprivation that was suffered during the siege of Jerusalem. The most striking example of the psalm’s fusing of the patriarchs and the exiles is v. 12: ‘‘When they were men of (small) number, few, and sojourning in it.’’ This verse provides the setting for God’s promise and reinforces both parts of it (progeny and land) by showing that at the time it was made the patriarchs lacked both population and landholdings. But again, the wording of the verse is not found in Genesis in connection with the promise to the patriarchs. The idiom, mete mispar (‘‘men of small number’’), occurs in Gn 34.30, the Shechem episode, where Jacob complains to Simeon and Levi that he is small in number and therefore vulnerable to attack by the native residents of Canaan among whom he wanted to settle. This context may be implicated in the psalm’s verse, but I think the allusion is, rather, to Deuteronomy, where the phrase occurs in three telling contexts, echoed also in Jeremiah. Dt 4.27 says: ‘‘you will remain men of (small) number (mete mispar) among the nations.’’ Dt 28.62 warns that ‘‘you will remain few in number (mete me‘at) instead of being like the stars of the sky in multitude.’’ Both passages are warnings about exile; and the second passage views exile as the exact opposite of God’s promise to Abraham. Jer 44.28, also speaking of destruction and exile, says that those who escape the sword will return

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from Egypt to Judah ‘‘small in number’’ (mete mispar). Clearly, for the reader familiar with these passages, the idiom ‘‘small in number’’ has the connotation of being in exile. Notice that the idiom has two forms, mete mispar or mete me‘at, and that Ps 105.12 combines both into mete mispar kim‘at (f[mk rpsm ytm). This combination resembles the same type of fusing of two scriptural verses that we know from other late biblical writings, often done to harmonize apparent contradictions.27 In our psalm, however, it is not a question of harmonizing but of drawing together two similar verses from Deuteronomy (4.27 and 28.62) in an allusion to both of them simultaneously. But there is yet a further allusion to Deuteronomy. A verse more closely echoed in our psalm is Dt 26.5: ‘‘He [Jacob] went down to Egypt and sojourned (gur) there with small number (va-yagar sham bi-mete me‘at).’’ Here again, the idiom mete me‘at indicates a form of exile – this time in Egypt (like Jeremiah) rather than in Babylonia. What’s more, unlike the straightforward allusions we have been noting, in this allusion there is a two-stage move—the psalm is alluding to Deuteronomy’s interpretation of a Genesis tradition. And then the psalm proceeds to skew Deuteronomy’s interpretation by switching the reference to the location. According to Deuteronomy, the place where Jacob sojourned, that is, lived as a resident alien, is Egypt, but the psalm has the patriarchs sojourning in Canaan, the very land promised to them but not yet theirs. While one might say that the patriarchs sojourned in Canaan, the subtext is a statement about the situation of the contemporary audience, who, like the psalm’s portrait of the patriarchs, are sojourning as exiles in the land God promised them. In all these examples we see that the psalm repeatedly inscribes the exile and restoration onto the patriarchal stories in a manner that identifies the patriarchs with the exiles and the exiles with the patriarchs. To put it another way, the allusions to the patriarchs are being read as double-entendres, as references to the Torah traditions and as references to the contemporary moment.

Joseph in Fetters Joseph too, like the patriarchs, is identified with the psalm’s audience. In v. 18 Joseph’s imprisonment is graphically described, far beyond anything in Genesis, as ‘‘they tormented his feet with fetters, iron came upon his neck.’’ Holm-Nielsen identified the imagery as that of prisoners of war, sometimes pictured as being led away in chains (cf. 2 Kgs 25.7)—in other words, the deportation of the exiles.28 Even more to the point is Dt 28.48, which speaks of an iron yoke on the neck in the context of exile. In fact, terms for fetters and imprisonment are part of the

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lexicography of biblical exile literature.29 In this context the words ‘‘sold’’ and ‘‘slave’’ in v. 17, ordinary in themselves and used in the Joseph story, become loaded with the double-entendre of ‘‘sold’’ ⳱ ‘‘delivered into captivity’’ (Is 50.1, 52.3);30 moreover, ‘eved, ‘‘slave, servant,’’ was a common term for being the subject of a ruler of an empire.31 As in the case of the patriarchs, Joseph’s saga reads more and more like the story of the exile and the restoration. He is ‘‘freed’’ by a king, ‘‘a ruler of peoples’’ released him (p-t-h.) (v. 20). Pharaoh was the ruler of the Egyptians and of the Israelites in Egypt; but the title ‘‘ruler of peoples [in the plural]’’ fits Cyrus (the liberator of the Judeans), who indeed ruled over many peoples, much better than it fits Pharaoh. Moreover, if the reference in v. 18 is indeed to a neck-collar (the phrase is difficult), then Psalm 105’s description of Joseph sounds uncannily similar to the imagery (expressed in different words) that Is 52.2 applies to Bat Zion, ‘‘open up (p-t-h.) the bonds of your neck.’’ The changing fortunes of Joseph mirror the changing fortunes of the exiles. The allusion to Gn 45.7 (cf. also Gn 45.5) in verse 17 ties in with Joseph as representative of the exile. Ps 105.17 says: ‘‘He sent ahead of them a man,’’ clearly calling on Gn 45.7: ‘‘God sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance’’ (NJPS translation). If Joseph is identified with the exiles, then they, like Joseph, are the vanguard whom God sent to ensure the future survival of the nation. Moreover, the relocation to Babylonia, like Joseph’s relocation to Egypt, was divinely ordained for the good. If this interpretation is correct, the exile is being promoted not as a punishment for sin but as a means of preservation of the people until their ultimate return. Indeed, the Israelites followed Joseph into Egypt (⳱Babylonia), where they became many and strong (vv. 23–24). Thus far I have been interpreting the psalm’s allusions to and juxtaposition with other biblical expressions. Through the juxtaposition of allusions the psalm recontextualizes the traditions, rereading them in light of the current situation of the audience.32 Besides allusions, there is another type of interpretation at work: exegetical comments.33 Their presence may be detected when they add information lacking in the Torah story and when their wording does not echo other biblical phrases.34 Exegetical traces are present in several places in the psalm’s retelling of the Exodus traditions, and also, I think, in v. 18. While I have accepted Holm-Nielsen’s view that the verse describing Joseph’s fetters is a reference to the deportation of prisoners of war, I note that the wording of this verse is different from the other biblical references to chained prisoners and to Isaiah’s image of released prisoners (Is 52.2). That is, the psalmist is not alluding to another biblical verse. I have the

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feeling, then, that v. 18 is calling on an interpretation of the Joseph story current in the psalmist’s time but not recorded elsewhere in the Bible. Joseph’s fetters have an afterlife in postbiblical literature. Josephus (Antiquities 5.1) mentions that Joseph ‘‘silently underwent the bonds and the distress he was in’’ and that the keeper of the prison ‘‘relaxed his bonds.’’ The Testament of Joseph 1.5–6 reads: ‘‘They sold me into slavery; the Lord of all set me free. I was in bonds and he loosened me.’’ Note the difference in each case as to who did the releasing: the prisonkeeper, God, or the king (in Ps 105). Another example is Agadat Bereshit, a late (tenth century) midrash containing a passage telling how each righteous hero suffered in his youth. Each incident is based on a biblical verse. Of Joseph it says: Joseph, how much did he suffer! His brothers hated him; they put him in a pit, sold him, and he was put in prison. See what is written about him: His feet were hurt with fetters, his neck was put in a collar if iron, until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord kept testing him (Ps 105:18–19), but Joseph kept silent. They ripped off his clothes and Joseph kept silent.35

Since Ps 105 had become authoritative by the time Joseph’s fetters made their way into the later works, it seems likely that Josephus and the author of the Testament of Joseph borrowed the motif from our psalm. Agadat Bereshit did so more obviously, using the psalm to interpret the incident. But it is equally clear that by postbiblical times this exegetical item was widely known and used. Was it just as widely known in the time of our psalmist? Or was the psalmist the originator of this exegesis? I tend to think it was the former, but there is no way to prove it in this case. I can only say that the psalm provides evidence of an early exegetical elaboration on the Joseph story, and that elaboration is in keeping with an exilic mentality.

The Exodus Traditions and Their Exegesis The Exodus served as a model or prototype of the exile and the return during the exilic period (e.g., Is 40–55), so it is not unexpected that our psalm would use it in this way. The psalm’s story of the Exodus stresses its positive aspects for Israel: the Israelites were well provisioned when they left (v. 37) and were well provided for during their wanderings (vv. 39–41); the Exodus was a joyous occasion that fulfilled the promise to Abraham (vv. 42–43). Although Holm-Nielsen finds the same type of exile language in the Exodus section that he found in the patriarch section, mostly in v. 41,36 I do not see in the Exodus section a preponderance of creative rereadings of Torah traditions by means of the juxtaposition of allusions, as I

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did in the patriarch section. Instead, the psalm incorporates pieces of presumably accepted exegesis of the Exodus narrative (similar to ‘‘Joseph in fetters’’). Again, we often cannot know if our psalm originated the exegetical comment, although I tend to think not. Only when other, roughly contemporary, biblical compositions contain a similar comment do we have evidence that the comment was in general circulation at the time of the psalmist. Since the Exodus remained a set piece for writers in late Second Temple times, it is not surprising that many of its exegetical enhancements found in our psalm continued their existence in postbiblical works (as in the case of Joseph’s fetters). I will point out a few illustrations, because, though they do not prove that Psalm 105 drew on known exegetical comments, they are suggestive that such was the case. Verse 30: ‘‘Their land swarmed with frogs in the rooms of their kings.’’ The plurality of kings, rather than a single Pharaoh, is puzzling but is also found in Wisdom of Solomon 10.16b and Ben Sira 45.3.37 Verse 33: ‘‘He smote their vines and fig trees, and wrecked the trees of their territory.’’ The account of the damage caused by the hail in Ex 9.25 reads: ‘‘The hail struck throughout Egypt, everyone in the field from man to beast; and all the grass of the field the hail struck and every tree of the field it wrecked.’’ Our psalm omits the nonvegetable victims and adds ‘‘vine and fig tree’’ (a symbol of peace and prosperity—1 Kgs 5.5; 2 Kgs 18.31, etc.). This elaboration is similar but not identical to the one in Ps 78.47, where the hail destroyed vines and sycamores, as well as animals (78.48). We likely have here a pre–Psalm 105 exegetical trend toward supplying specific details about the plagues, making the picture more graphic; the trend developed further in postbiblical literature. In the same vein, Josephus (Antiquities 14.4) records, ‘‘This hail broke down their boughs laden with fruit.’’ The midrash combines the picture with the idea of measure for measure retribution. Exodus Rabbah says: ‘‘Why did he [God] bring the hail upon them? Because they had made the Israelites planters of their vineyards, gardens, orchards, and trees; on this account did he bring upon them hail which destroyed all these plantations.’’38 Verses 37–38: ‘‘And he took them out with silver and gold, and none of his tribes stumbled. Egypt rejoiced at their going out, for the fear of them had fallen upon them.’’ These verses combine several exegetical remarks. ‘‘None of his tribes stumbled’’ apparently explains Ex 6.26 and 12.51, where God took out the Israelites ‘al tsev’otam, ‘‘troop by troop’’ (NJPS). The view that the Israelites were arranged by tribe for the Exodus is more explicit in Josephus (Antiquities 14.6): ‘‘Accordingly, he having got the Hebrews ready for their departure, and having sorted the people

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into tribes, he kept them together in one place.’’ (See also Rashi on Ex 6.26.) ‘‘Stumble’’ is a separate idea, not hinted at in Exodus. Holm-Nielsen notes its use in Lam 1.14 and 5.13 in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem, and in Is 63.16, ‘‘where it is even more conspicuous in a context about the delivery of the exiled.’’39 In this instance we may have a combination of an accepted interpretation about the tribal arrangement of the Israelites and the psalmist’s own addition of ‘‘stumbled’’ (which has the connotation of being very fatigued), which makes the Israelites of the Exodus sound like the exiles. ‘‘Gold and silver’’ obviously points to Ex 12.33–36 (cf. Ex 11.2). Verse 38 contains both an exegetical expansion and an allusion. Exodus mentions only the haste with which the Egyptians sought to rid themselves of the Israelites and the favor that God caused them to have for the Israelites so that Israel could borrow/despoil Egypt. That Egypt rejoiced seems to be an exegetical addition. Two scholars of early biblical interpretation, Louis Ginzberg and James Kugel, do not hesitate to include our verse in their collection of interpretations on Exodus. Ginzberg, obviously referring to our verse although he does not say so directly, states: ‘‘Great as the joy of the Hebrew was at their deliverance from the Egyptian bondage, it was exceeded by that of Pharaoh’s people at seeing the slaves depart, for with them went the dread of death that had obsessed them.’’40 Kugel’s explanation is fuller; he links our verse to the midrashic justification for the somewhat embarrassing plunder of the Egyptians’ silver and gold (or borrowing it with no intention of returning it). ‘‘If Egypt was glad when they left,’’ says Kugel, ‘‘then it could not have been the case that the Israelites had tricked the Egyptians into lending them their silver and gold, otherwise the Egyptians would have been quite distressed and angry when they found out the Israelites were going.’’41 Midrash ha-gadol includes our verse from Ps 105 in its comment on Ex 6.1, where God tells Moses that ‘‘with a strong hand he [Pharaoh] will send them out and with a strong hand he will chase them from his land.’’ Since the midrash does not recognize parallelism, it must find two different referents for God’s statement. For the second, it refers to Ex 12.33, ≈rah ˜m µjlçl rhml µ[h l[ µyrxm qzjtw, va-teh.ezak mitsrayim ‘al ha‘am le-maher le-shalh.am min ha-’arets, ‘‘Egypt urged the people hard, to hasten to send them from the land.’’ This verse nicely echoes the wording of Ex 6.1 in its use of h.azak, shalah., and erets. To Ex 12.33 the midrash appends Ps 105.38 by way of explanation, adding, ‘‘just as the Egyptians rejoiced at the Exodus of our fathers, so will the nations of the world rejoice in the future at the time of our redemption.’’42 This midrash, one might say, is making similar typological use of the Exodus that Sec-

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ond Isaiah and others make of it, applying it to a future restoration/ redemption. Other than Midrash ha-gadol, which obviously derived its interpretation from our psalm verse, I have found no evidence in ancient literature for Egyptian rejoicing, with one exception. Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagoge, preserved in Eusebius (Praeparatio Evangelica 9, 28–29), rewrites the Exodus story as a Hellenistic tragedy. The events at the Red Sea are told by an Egyptian, who, after describing in expansive detail the plight of the Israelites, adds, ‘‘But we, for our part, were all overjoyed’’ (line 214).43 It is possible that this line reflects the same tradition as Ps 105.38 and that Egyptian rejoicing was associated either with the Exodus itself or with its immediate sequel at the Red Sea. The Egyptian rejoicing is attributed to the fact that the fear of the Israelites had fallen upon the Egyptians. The phrase sounds uncannily like Esther 8.17 and 9.2, where the fear of the Jews fell on the people of Persia. More likely, though, both Esther and our psalm borrowed it from Dt 11.25: ‘‘YHVH your God will put the fear and dread of you over the whole land in which you tread.’’ The phrase caps the promise that if Israel remains faithful to God, he will dispossess greater and more numerous nations and extend Israel’s territory from the wilderness to the Lebanon. Deuteronomy purports to be saying this as the people are about to enter the promised land after forty years of wandering, but, once again, the psalm recontextualized the allusion, placing it before the Exodus. Now, at the moment of the Exodus (read: Return), it provides assurance that Israel will overcome all obstacles to (re)possessing its land. Verse 39: ‘‘He spread a cloud as a cover (masakh), and fire to light at/ the night.’’ Ex 13.21 tells of a pillar of cloud by day to lead the Israelites and a pillar of fire to provide light at night. In Ex 14.19 the pillar of cloud takes on a protective function, moving from in front of the Israelites to behind them, where it stood between them and the Egyptian army. Inherent in the idea of protective covering is that it serves as a shade against the hot sun (compare the use of the same image for Mt. Zion in Is 4.5–6). Judging from what seems to be Isaiah’s borrowing of the cloud image as a protective covering (for shade), this interpretation predates our psalm. In fact, the exodus cloud is easily conflated with the cloud from which God appears or which protects people from direct contact with him (Nm 14.14; Ex 33.9–10; Lev 16.2). Lam 3.44 also reflects the notion of the cloud as a protection but ironically reverses the image to mean that God protects himself with a barrier-cloud from the prayers of Israel.44 The Exodus cloud as protection/shade is found in several postbiblical sources.45 Our psalm shares in the idea of the cloud as a protection, calling it a cover, a protective covering. The verb paras, ‘‘spread,’’

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emphasizes the picture of the cloud-cover being spread over the Israelites, instead of moving in front of them. This verb is not otherwise associated with the cloud; when associated with God it is usually in the context of God spreading his wings over Israel to protect them (Dt 32.11) or the cherubim spreading their wings over the Ark (Ex 25.20; 1 Kgs 8.17; 1 Chr 28.18 and passim). The psalm’s exegetical understanding of the cloud, plus the verb ‘‘spread,’’ add to the aura of numinous protection of Israel during the journey in the wilderness. Verse 40: ‘‘He (Israel) asked and he (God) brought quail, and with bread of heaven he satisfied them.’’ ‘‘Bread of heaven’’ alludes to Ex 16.4: ‘‘I will rain down bread for you from the heaven.’’ See also Ps 78.23–25 for a fuller description of the heaven raining down bread, called ‘‘grain of heaven.’’ Bread from heaven developed into heavenly bread, or bread of angels, as James Kugel charts in the later literature.46 The rest of the phrase alludes to Ex 16.8, 12, which speaks of giving meat to eat and bread to be satiated with, along with Ex 16.13, where the meat is identified as the quail. Noteworthy is the omission of any of the negative aspects of the manna and quail episodes found in Ex 16 and Nm 11. Our psalm views these foods as an immediate divine response to Israel’s need. Throughout its Exodus section, by its selection of referents and its exegetical additions, the psalm stresses God’s care and protection of Israel.

Conclusions This essay has explored inner-biblical interpretation, especially allusion and exegesis. For heuristic purposes I have distinguished between these two phenomena, but in reality they work in tandem and may be considered two sides of the same coin. My examples of double allusions might also be considered a form of explaining one biblical phrase by another, a kind of intertextual exegesis that one also finds in some rabbinic exegesis. While the phenomenon of inner-biblical interpretation is interesting in its own right and sheds light on the development of the Bible and the growth of its interpretation, I have stressed here its usefulness for understanding the meaning and message of Psalm 105. The compositional dynamic of the psalm calls extensively on inner-biblical interpretation—in fact, that is its primary dynamic. This dynamic lets the psalmist speak to the needs of a current religious/political moment. By calling upon the nation’s traditions about its past—traditions already accepted as authoritative—he reinforces the continuity between predestruction and postdestruction Israel and thereby helps the postdestruction audience to see itself as part of the ongoing history of Israel. More particu-

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larly, the psalmist uses the Torah traditions to ‘‘prove’’ the most important ideology of the return: the divine promise to (re)possess the land and the divine commitment to bring it about. In order to confirm and encourage the returnees in their mission, he contemporizes the authoritative traditions so that they take on new meaning specific to the occasion. Such is the power of interpretation.

2

Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan? Israel Knohl

One of the great achievements of recent scholarship on early biblical exegesis has been its discovery of a ‘‘new’’ period in its history—a period that is, in a sense, the missing link between the Bible and early rabbinic and Christian exegesis. I am referring to the exegetical literature of the Second Temple period—works written primarily between the third century b.c.e. and the first century c.e. many of which are better known under the rubric of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—whose richness as a source for early biblical interpretation has only now come to be fully appreciated.1 Even though much of this literature does not explicitly present itself as exegesis, scholars have shown that numerous details in these texts, and particularly in those narratives that expand upon the biblical narrative, can best be appreciated when viewed as interpretations. Indeed, the interpretive element in these texts seems to be one of their most important defining characteristics. Partly on this basis, they are frequently grouped under the generic rubric of the ‘‘Rewritten Bible’’—that is, texts that seem merely to retell the biblical narrative (or selected parts of it) although in doing so they in fact explain the biblical text with innumerable details, additions, and glosses. Typical works of this genre are the Book of Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and sections of Enoch. For students of comparative exegesis, this period is especially important since its traditions appear to represent the soil out of which much subsequent Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis grew. Even so, the discovery of this literature has also raised many new questions for the early history of biblical interpretation. In the first place, the exegesis in this literature often seems to record themes, motifs, and conceptions with overtly mythological features that are sometimes preserved in subsequent Christian traditions of interpretation but more rarely in rabbinic tradition. Why is this? Did the rabbis know of these interpretations, and did they deliberately exclude or suppress them because of their mytho-

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logical content? Or were they unaware of them? Further, what is the relation of these traces of mythological thinking to earlier biblical tradition? Were these themes and conceptions current in prebiblical tradition and later suppressed by the biblical author, only to have them reemerge later in early interpretive literature? And if so, do they attest to a noncanonical tradition that existed alongside the more canonical and authoritative tradition of exegesis? What then can they tell us about the formation of the canon of rabbinic exegesis? As scholars have often noted, the rabbis generally seemed to have avoided the genre of the rewritten Bible. Is this fact connected to the avoidance of these mythological elements preserved in Second Temple literature? This last question is further complicated by the fact that some of these mythological themes as well as the literary form of the rewritten Bible appear to resurface in ‘‘late’’ rabbinic literature, specifically in a work known as Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE). The unexpected reappearance of these hitherto absent elements raises anew the question of the transmission of tradition and the formation of a canonical, authoritative tradition in rabbinic Jewish exegesis. In this essay, I want to explore these questions by looking at one particular motif relating to the story of the birth of Cain as related in Gn 4.1. As we will see, this story raises virtually all the problematic issues I have mentioned: the origins of an exegetical tradition; its transmission, reception, and canonization within rabbinic exegesis; and finally, the reappearance of the noncanonical tradition within Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer. Even if this exploration will not offer any definitive resolution to these problematic issues, it is my hope that it will at the least help to illuminate the problematic itself. The story of the birth of Cain is first related in Gn 4.1: Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain and she said: ‘‘I have created a man with God.’’2 Biblical interpreters have long noted the incongruity and obscurity of Eve’s boast. These words may have some mythical background. We may see here the footprints of the goddess Mother of Life, who is said to have participated with the supreme god in the production of man.3 However, in the context of the story as it is found in Genesis, Eve’s words might be interpreted in a different manner: After the expulsion from Eden there had been no direct communication between mankind and the Divine. God no longer spoke directly to Adam or to Eve. Eve tries to use the event of the naming of her son to renew the contact between herself and God. She describes a partnership between God and herself in creating the newborn baby, Cain. In fact, her words can be seen as a reply to the last words that she had heard from God: I will make most severe // Your pang in childbearing // In pain shall you bear children, // Yet your urge shall be for your husband // And he shall rule over you. (Gn 3.16)

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God stressed the pain of childbearing; Eve replies with a description of the positive aspect of giving birth as a new creation. God had told her that she would be subjected to her husband; but in Eve’s present boast to God, her husband has disappeared from the picture. God and Eve are responsible for the creation of a new human. Adam is not even mentioned! According to the immediate meaning of her words, Cain is the son of God and Eve alone. Eve’s description of Cain as her and God’s child is reflected in early postbiblical traditions that describe the infant Cain’s exceptional appearance and behavior at the time of his birth. As early as the Life of Adam and Eve, a work which was probably written in the first century c.e., there already exists testimony to the tradition that Cain’s birth was out of the ordinary. And she bore a son and he was shining; and at once the babe rose up and ran and bore a blade of grass in his hands and gave it to his mother, and his name was called Cain.4

In this brief passage, Cain is described as (1) having: a shining, illuminated face; and (2) being preternaturally precocious. The two motifs are not necessarily connected. For example, Louis Ginzberg5 proposed that Cain’s shining face derived from a pun between the Hebrew Kayin (Cain) and kiyun, Kaiwan,6 the planet Saturn, which lent the infant its shining face. As for Cain’s ability to run immediately after he was born, James Kugel has suggested that this notion is based on Eve’s designation of her child as ‘‘a man,’’ which might suggest to the reader that Cain was fully grown at the moment he was born.7 I would like to propose a different approach to interpreting the two motifs. We can begin with the shining face of Cain. In 1 Enoch 106,8 the text’s eponymous hero describes the birth of his grandson Noah: And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of the rose . . . And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness. And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. And he said to him: ‘‘I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven. And his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the son, and his countenance is glorious. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels.’’

Like Cain, Noah’s birth is associated with luminosity; in this case, though, the infant’s appearance frightens his father, who interprets the

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baby’s appearance as a sign of semi-divine descent—that he is not his son but an angel’s. Similar traditions concerning the birth of Noah are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a fragment found in Qumran cave 1 we read:9 3. 4. 5. 6.

the] first-born was born, because Glorious Ones [ ] and his father [feared]; and when Lamech saw the [ ] illuminated] the rooms of the house like the rays of the sun [ ]10 to frighten the [ ]

Even though the text is fragmentary we clearly see here some of the same motifs found in the account in 1 Enoch. The newborn baby literally shines and fills the house with light, and his father, Lamech, is frightened at the sight. This last motif, Lamech’s fright and concern about the child’s unusual appearance, is preserved more explicitly in another Qumranic document, the Genesis Apocryphon:11 So that I thought in my mind that the conception was due to the Watchers or that it w[a]s due to the Holy Ones, or to the Nephil[im..] and my mind wavered because of this child. Then I, Lamech, became frightened.

The shining eyes of the newborn baby Noah and his ability to rise and talk at the moment of birth are explicitly interpreted by the frightened Lamech as signs that his wife has conceived the child from intercourse with an angelic or semi-divine figure, the ‘‘Holy Ones,’’ or the ‘‘Nephilim.’’ This last reference is a clear indication of the motif ’s origins in an exegetical moment, namely, the unclear rationale behind the sequencing of the last part of Gn 5, which relates the genealogy of Seth’s line culminating in Lamech and the birth of Noah (5.28), and Gn 6.1–2 and 4: ‘‘When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings [bene ha-elohim, lit. ‘‘the sons of God’’] saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them . . . It was then and later too that the Nephilim appeared on earth—when the divine beings cohabited who with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring.’’ What is this relation between these two sections, the birth of Noah and the account of ‘‘the sons of God’’? While our motif does not offer an explicit rationale for the sequencing, it exploits the juxtaposition of the two narratives to create the narrative of Noah’s birth and Lamech’s concern that his wife has slept with one of the ‘‘sons of God,’’ hence the baby’s supernatural appearance (a suspicion that is, of course, immediately disproved but

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shows that the infant’s luminous appearance may indicate its origins in an illicit union). Similarly, the children born from the union between the sons of God and the daughters of man (Gn 6.1–4) are described in PRE as being able to talk and dance immediately after their birth: ‘‘In that hour (⳱of their birth) they stood on their feet, and spoke the holy language, and danced before them (⳱their mothers) like sheep.’’12 What happens when an angel or son of God cohabits with human females? There are two possibilities: First, the fruits of a union between the angels and the daughters of man might have a demonic character. Thus we read in an incantation against demons in 11Q11, col. 5.6:13 µ[yçw]dqh [rzmw µda[m dwlyh] hta ym Who are you, [oh offspring of] man and of the seed of the ho[ly ones].

As was already argued by J. M. Baumgarten,14 we probably have here a reference to origins of the demons in the union between the angels and the daughters of man,15 and such a child, as Lamech’s fear suggest, will appear extraordinary—shiny and precocious, to say the least. On the other hand, the stories of the births of Cain and Noah also resemble that of Moses, of whom we are told, in the Babylonian Talmud, that ‘‘when he was born, light filled the entire house.’’16 Like Cain, who was able to run at birth, and like Noah, who was born speaking, Moses tells us ‘‘and on the day that I was born, I manifested the gift of speech and walked about on my two feet, conversing with my father and my mother.’’17 Moses, of course, was not a semi-divine child. His luminous appearance and his precocity are merely signs of his extraordinary nature as a heroic and exceptional human being. Thus, the extraordinary appearance and precocious behavior of a newborn baby like Cain is an ambiguous sign of the child’s origins.18 It may signify either that he is a child born from the illicit union of a human mother with a semi-divine—either angel-like or demon-like— father, as Lamech fears is the case with Noah, or that he is a righteous man, a hero, or a savior19 like Noah20 or Moses. Which one was Cain, a heroic, righteous human or a child born from an illicit union with a divine or semi-divine figure? If the latter, was Cain a demonic child from birth? The answer to this question is not simple, and even to approach it we need to explore the different biblical traditions about Cain and the place of his descent in the larger genealogical traditions of Genesis. Genesis 4 begins with the story of Cain and Abel (vv. 1–16). That story is followed by the Cainite genealogy, which ends with an episode about

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Lamech (vv. 17–24). At the end of the chapter, two verses deserve special attention: Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning: ‘‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel,’’ for Cain had killed him. And to Seth, in turn, a son was born, and he named him Enosh, It was then that men began to invoke the Lord by name. (Gn 4.25–26) These verses pose several difficulties: In the first place, this brief, twoverse genealogy is duplicated in far greater length in 5.1–7. What is the reason for the duplication? Further, why does our genealogy stop after the third generation (while the genealogy of the children of Seth in chapter 5 goes on for nine generations)? Some scholars have proposed that Gn 4’s genealogy of Seth belongs to the J tradition, while Gn 5’s is part of P. This solution, however, is problematic. While chapter 5 doubtless belongs to P, it is more difficult to attribute 4.25–26 to J. For one thing, 4.25 uses ‘‘Adam’’ (adam) as a proper name—a usage typical of P,21 not of J who always uses the form ‘‘the man’’ (ha-adam). Furthermore, the divine name used in verse 25 is Elohim. This, too, is typical of P,22 whereas in the J tradition we would expect the use of YHWH.23 The statement at the end of 4.26, ‘‘It was then that men began to invoke the Lord by name,’’ is also problematic. Some scholars interpret this statement to mean that it was at the time of Enosh that people began to invoke the Lord by the name YHWH. This, however, does not fit any of the above-mentioned sources. According to P, the name YHWH was not used before Moses, while in J it was already used even in Adam’s time.24 Because these various solutions seem to me faulty, I would propose that, in their present form and placement, verses 4.25–26 are a product of redaction.25 Before explaining my proposal, however, I would like to point out another problematic verse, this time in chapter 5. As I remarked above, Gn 5 belongs to P, and in accord with that source’s standard procedure, based on the belief that the name YHWH was not yet known in the primordial period, the author uses the name Elohim26 throughout the chapter. Gn 5.29, however, clearly deviates from the P tradition. And he [Lamech] named him Noah, saying: ‘‘This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands out of the very soil which the Lord (YHWH) placed under a curse.’’

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Not only do we have the name YHWH (Lord) here. We also have here a clear reference to the curse, which was laid upon the earth, an idea that belongs to the J tradition.27 How can we explain these discrepancies? I would like to propose that this verse originated in the J tradition,28 and that originally its place was at the end of the Cainite genealogy now preserved in chapter 4. The reconstructed text of the full passage would read as follows:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

˜b dltw 29 wtça ta dw[ ˚ml [dyw .1 rmal jn wmç ta arqyw .2 wnydy ˜wbx[mw wnç[mm wnmjny hz .3 'h hrra rça hmdah ˜m .4 'h µçb arql ljh za .5 Lamech knew his wife again and she bore a son. And he named him Noah, saying: ‘‘This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands out of the very soil which the Lord placed under a curse’’ Then he began to invoke the Lord by name.

The first line in this reconstruction is based on the beginning of Gn 4.25 with the modification of Adam to Lamech. Lines 2–4 are taken from Gn 5.29. Line 5 is based on the ending of Gn 4.26: In the Masoretic version of the Bible we read here: ‘‘At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord’’ ('h µçb arql ljwh za). The Samaritan Bible, however, records a different version: ‘‘Then he began to invoke the Lord by name’’ ('h µçb arql ljh za).30 I would like to propose that this reconstructed passage originally followed the text of J that is now contained in Gn 4.1–24, which completed the story of the descendants of Cain. All these generations were under the curse, which was laid upon the earth in the time of Cain (Gn 4.11– 12). No one was able to till the accursed soil, and hence mankind turned to other occupations; no one even asked God to remove the curse from the earth. In fact, after Cain murdered Abel and had to hide himself from the presence of God (Gn 4.14), none of his descendants so much as tried to approach the Lord. In other words, during this whole period, there was no communication between humanity and God: ‘‘No one invokes your name, rouses himself to cling to you, for you have hidden your face from us,’’ as Isaiah remarks (Is 64.6).31 The first human to mention God was Lamech, seven generations after Adam, when he named his son Noah and expressed the hope that the child would bring comfort to the world by removing the curse of God from the earth. It was after this that, as the verse says, Lamech began to invoke the Lord

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by name, probably in prayer for forgiveness and salvation. And indeed, after the flood, Lamech’s request was granted. When Noah offered God a sacrifice, God was appeased and removed the curse from the earth (Gn 8.20–21).32 Noah thus became the first ish ha-’adamah (tiller of the soil) (Gn 9.20). And further, since Noah was a direct descendant of Cain (in the seventh generation), all human beings who are descended from Noah are also the descendants of Cain!33 Such is the upshot of this reconstructed text from the J tradition. P’s description of the first human generations is strikingly different. According to P, Adam was perfectly good, like all the creatures first created by God. Adam’s firstborn, Seth, was begotten in his likeness and after his image (Gn 5.3), and therefore, like Adam, Seth and all later generations begotten from him were until the time of the flood also perfectly good. P makes no mention of the figures of Cain and Abel and their bloody rivalry. It was only in the tenth generation, the generation of Noah, that the suppressed primeval evil penetrated God’s creation and spoiled the earth and its inhabitants. The traditions of J and P regarding the first human generations were incompatible. Even if we were to ignore the sharp difference in their respective depictions of humanity, there is still a factual disagreement between the sources: According to P, Adam’s firstborn was Seth, and Noah was a descendant of Seth. According to our reconstruction of J, however, Cain was Adam’s firstborn, and Noah was a descendant of Cain. The final redactors of the Pentateuch, who had to put together diverse ancient traditions, nonetheless found a way to resolve the disagreement between the two traditions. Since they belonged to a priestly school,34 they adopted the priestly view that Noah was a descendant of Seth. To do this, however, they had to sever the genealogical connection between Cain and Noah, and so they cut the description of Noah’s birth and naming from the original ending of J’s Cainite dynasty and relocated it within P’s Sethite genealogy (Gn 5.28).35 In place of the original conclusion of the Cainite genealogy, the editors inserted the story about the naming of Seth (Gn 4.25). This story presents Seth as the son who was born to Adam after the murder of Abel by Cain, thereby harmonizing36 in this way the two different traditions.37 The final result was the current picture in our Bible: a polarization of the dynasty of Cain and the dynasty of Seth. Seth and his descendants are the ‘‘sons of light’’; Cain and his descendants are the ‘‘sons of darkness.’’38 This dualistic picture is characteristic of the priestly conception of the universe. In the J source, Cain is a tragic hero. After the child Cain grew up, he became the founder of sacrificial worship.39 We are told that he brought

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an offering to the Lord, but Scripture never explains why Cain decides to offer his sacrifice. Presumably he wanted to form a relationship with God, ‘‘his father,’’ by means of an offering; possibly this was because, as a farmer, he had to struggle daily with the curse that God had laid upon the earth as punishment for his father’s sin (Gn 3.17–19).40 Perhaps Cain hoped that an offering would atone for Adam’s sin and remove the curse from the earth. His offering, however, was rejected by God. By rejecting Cain’s sacrifice, God himself played the typical role of a parent in the book of Genesis.41 He preferred the offering of the younger brother, Abel, to that of the firstborn, Cain. Yet in contrast to the other narratives in Genesis about filial rivalry, where the younger brother prevails and carries on the dynasty, in this narrative the rejected older brother kills his younger sibling in a burst of jealousy. What Esau wanted to do to Jacob, Cain actually did to Abel. In this way, the final result of Cain’s offering was exactly the opposite of what he initially intended. Cain wanted to establish a connection with his ‘‘father,’’ God, by means of his offering, but instead he brought another curse upon the earth and had to hide himself from God.42 I fully agree with Harold Bloom’s assessment of Cain43 as ‘‘a tragic rebel and not a villain.’’44 Cain’s story does not end, however, with his murder of his brother and punishment. Cain ‘‘left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden’’ (Gn 4.16). Like his parents after they were expelled from Eden, Cain began to procreate immediately after his expulsion: ‘‘Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch’’ (Gn 4.17). Ultimately, Cain’s terrible sin and his punishment lead to the development of humanity. Cain, who was expelled from the soil that he tilled, instead became the founder of urbanization.45 Among his descendants we find the founders of industry and music.46 In this way, Cain becomes a true forefather of humanity. J’s conception of his tragic character probably has something to say about J’s conception of the tragic existential situation of every human being. In the Torah as it finally took shape, however, Cain came to be represented very differently. His genealogy was recast in such a way as to make him the father of a dynasty of evildoers who were ultimately and completely destroyed in the flood. In this way Cain changed from being a tragic figure, the forefather of humanity, to becoming the forefather of evil. This negative representation of Cain was not without its own problems, though. For one thing, the conception of Cain as the forefather of evil conflicted with, if it did not profoundly contradict, the conception behind Eve’s boast in Gn 4.1 that she created a man ‘‘with God.’’ How could Cain simultaneously have been a child of a divinity and the father of evil?

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A possible solution to this contradiction was the exegetical tradition that we have already seen briefly at the beginning of this chapter. Cain was indeed born from a sexual union with a divinity. That divinity, however, was satanic, or evil. The first stage in the development of this tradition was the belief that Eve had sexual relations with the serpent in the Garden. This view is attested as early as 4 Maccabees (first century), which puts the following words into the mouth of the figure of the mother in the famous story about the martyrdom of the seven sons: I was chaste maiden and did not leave my father’s house; but I kept guard over the rib built into woman’s body. No seducer of the desert nor deceiver in the field corrupted me, nor did the seducing and beguiling serpent defile my maidenly purity.47

The phrase ‘‘the rib built into woman’s body’’ is a clear reference to the story of the creation of Eve in Gn 2, and the mention of the seduction and the defilement by the serpent would seem to refer to the story of Eve and the serpent in Gn 3. By having the mother of the seven sons in 4 Maccabees boast that she was not seduced by the serpent, the author of the book implies strongly that Eve was. More explicit evidence for the tradition that Eve was defiled by the serpent can be found in the Babylonian Talmud; R. Yohanan is attributed with the statement that ‘‘when the serpent came unto Eve, he infused filthy lust into her.’’48 The second stage in the tradition was the development of the view that Cain was the fruit of the illicit union between Eve and the serpent. Thus we read in 1 John: No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another, and not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother.49 Cain is represented here as the archetype of the evildoer who is a child of the devil; he ‘‘was of the evil one.’’ His murder of his brother Abel is not a tragic event, as it is in J, the blind result of God’s rejection of his sacrifice, but rather a direct result of Cain’s evil origins. 1 John’s dualis-

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tic opposition of the two types of human beings—the children of God and the children of the devil—resembles the similar dualism espoused by the final redactors of the Torah, as we have already seen. Similar representations of Cain as the son of Satan or the son of the serpent are to be found in Gnostic writings. Thus we read in the Gospel According to Philip: ‘‘And he (Cain) was born of adultery; for he was the son of the snake.’’50 Similar views are expressed in the writings of the Fathers of the Church.51 However, the idea that Cain was the son of the snake is absent from early rabbinic literature.52 We will return to the question of this absence shortly. The fullest exposition of the tradition—combining virtually all the motifs we have seen so far—can be found in the late midrashic work Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, about which I will say more below, in its recounting of the story of the birth of Cain and Abel: (Samael) came riding on the serpent to [Eve], and she conceived; afterwards, Adam came to her, and she conceived Abel, as it is said And Adam knew Eve his wife (Gn 4.1). What is the meaning of ‘‘knew’’? [He knew] that she had conceived. And she saw his [Cain’s] likeness that it was not of the earthly beings, but of the heavenly beings, and she prophesied and said: I have gotten a man with the Lord.53

As this passage makes clear, Eve was seduced by Samael, the satanic angel,54 who came to her riding upon the serpent. Samael had sexual intercourse with Eve, and Cain was the fruit of their union. When Cain was born, Eve saw that he resembled not a human being but a heavenly being. She immediately understood that the child’s father was Samael, which was the reason she said: ‘I have gotten a man with the Lord.’’ Her words should be interpreted to mean ‘‘I have created a child with Samael, the angel of the Lord.’’ The only motifs not explicitly mentioned here are those of luminosity and precocity associated with Cain’s birth, but they may be implied in Eve’s ‘‘seeing’’ that Cain’s likeness was not of earthly beings. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer is a unique work. Although there is no unanimous agreement among scholars about its dating, PRE probably underwent final redaction during the late rabbinic period, in the seventh or the eighth century c.e., although some traditions in it clearly have far more ancient roots. Most unusual about the composition, however, is its combination of classic midrashic exegesis with a far more continuous mode of retelling the biblical story that resembles the genre of the Rewritten Bible, mentioned at the beginning of this article, and that flourished in the Second Temple period55 but disappeared from subsequent rabbinic literature. PRE seems to attest to a resurgence of this genre in rabbinic culture. Furthermore, this resurgence is not simply

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one of literary form. It is also evident in the sudden reappearance of certain ideas and motifs, many of them mythological, that are also present in Second Temple literature but that had vanished in rabbinic literature, only to reappear centuries later in Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer. For example, in the passage quoted above, we can see motifs found earlier in 4 Maccabees, in the Book of Adam and Eve, and in 1 John. Following 4 Maccabees, PRE describes the sexual relations between Eve and the (rider of the) serpent. As in the Book of Adam and Eve, the newborn Cain is said to have an extraordinary appearance. Yet while the Book of Adam and Eve does not give that appearance a negative meaning, PRE seems to follow 1 John’s tradition in viewing Cain as the son of Satan. What is clear is that PRE shares with 1 John an explicitly dualistic view of humanity. Like 1 John, PRE distinguishes sharply between the ‘‘sons of light’’ and the ‘‘sons of darkness,’’ the latter being the direct descendents of Cain. ‘‘From Cain arose and were descended all the generations of the wicked who rebel and sin.’’56 Such dualism is of course typical of Qumran and it is somewhat ironic that PRE not only preserves many of these motifs found earlier only in Second Temple literature but it is the first text to preserve them all in a single passage. How are we to understand this phenomenon in PRE—the resurgence of a new/old literary style, and along with it, the unanticipated reappearance in classical Jewish literature of motifs from the ancient Jewish past that are missing from nearly all subsequent Jewish literature? In the first place, we should note that the phenomenon is not limited to mythological motifs or narrative contexts. Let me give an example from the first scholarly article I published, which dealt with the question as to whether or not sacrifices contributed by Gentiles were accepted in the Temple.57 As I noted in that article, historical sources58 attest to the fact that, during the Second Temple period, sacrifices were indeed accepted from Gentiles. This is the uncontested position of talmudic law as well.59 On the other hand, certain late midrashic sources, including PRE60 and some versions of midrash Tanh.uma-Yelamdenu,61 express serious objections to the acceptance of such sacrifices. A similar objection is raised by the Karaite Daniel b. Moses al-Kumisi (Kumis and Jerusalem, ninth and tenth centuries) in his commentary to Leviticus.62 At the time that I wrote the article, I did not know of any Second Temple sources that also voiced such objections, but I speculated that these views were part of sectarian law during the Second Temple period and that they had disappeared following the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e. as rabbinic law gradually came to dominate the Jewish landscape. My speculation was confirmed, however, when the Qumran fragment 4QMMT was finally published. While the rule about sacrifices of Gentiles in this scroll is not fully preserved,63 it is clear from the context that

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the Qumranic composition prohibited the acceptance of sacrifices of Gentiles.64 As this example indicates, the author of PRE seems to have had access to some traditions that had ‘‘vanished’’ from ‘‘normative’’ rabbinic literature; these traditions were both aggadic and halakhic in nature. How exactly he had access to these traditions—through channels of oral transmission or through noncanonical literary works that no longer survive—is something we do not know, but it would seem clear that the author of PRE did not simply invent them himself. In light of this fact, however, it is also clear that our original question needs to be reformulated: not how did these traditions survive, but what was it that suddenly enabled the author of PRE to make these long-silent traditions public and audible? One way to answer this question would be to investigate a change in historical conditions that may have made its impact felt upon the author of PRE in particular. Along these lines one might argue that a change in historical conditions created a new context within which hitherto silent exegeses were able to be voiced aloud. For example, one might suggest that once Christianity accepted the belief that the messiah was born of the union between the Holy Spirit and a human woman, it became necessary for the rabbis to evaluate in purely negative terms any motif concerning a child born out of a union between an angel and a woman (even if the angel were evil or Satan) and even to exclude any motif that hinted of such a relationship. And indeed, certain rabbinic statements do condemn the mythical reading of the story in Gn 6:1–4 regarding the union between the sons of God and the daughters of man and the fruits of their union.65 Once, however, Christianity lost its full dominion over Jewish centers of authority, and after Jews found themselves living in Islamic lands, the ‘‘danger’’ posed by mythological beliefs like those discussed above disappeared, thereby allowing for the revival of the motif in the early Islamic period. An alternative explanation might account for the reemergence of these literary forms and motifs in PRE by focusing upon the very nature of PRE itself. As I have already noted, PRE is unique on account of its unusual combination of a literary style and various motifs and traditions characteristic of Second Temple–period Judaism, including its sectarian streams, with classical midrashic techniques and passages from the rabbinic period. Partly by virtue of these rabbinic elements, and due to its pseudepigraphic attribution to R. Eliezer, the great mishnaic scholar of the first century c.e., PRE eventually became part of the canon of rabbinic Judaism, which is to say that it came to be studied and cited by later medieval authors along with the more conventional midrashic and talmudic works of earlier rabbinic Jewish culture. Precisely how PRE

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came to be accepted as part of this canon is something we do not know, but once it did, the different ideas and motifs of the Second Temple period that it contained now found their way into medieval Judaism. By being accepted as part of the canon, PRE became, somewhat paradoxically, the conduit for the transmission of many noncanonical ideas and motifs. What this means, in brief, is that the question of the reemergence of these Second Temple motifs in PRE and their consequent absorption in the rabbinic corpus may have less to do with the motifs themselves than with the reception of PRE within the Jewish canon. Nonetheless, the fact that these once noncanonical conceptions later could become part of the rabbinic canon is instructive for our understanding of the history of biblical exegesis and its transmission. As we have seen, the conception of Cain as the forefather of evil, and the sharp polarity between the sons of Cain and the sons of Seth, is rooted in the final editing of the Pentateuch that was done by the priestly circle of the ‘‘Holiness School,’’ an editing that involved, among other things, the blurring of J’s conception of Cain as a tragic hero, as the Son of God, and as the forefather of all humanity. Yet even as these priestly editors sought to harmonize different biblical traditions about the early history of mankind and Cain’s place in that history, their editing was imperfect and left traces—fault lines, as it were—in the final text of the Bible. These fault lines, in turn, became the exegetical occasion for early interpreters to invent the character of Cain as an outright epitome of evil, as the son of Satan, and the forefather of the Sons of Darkness. These exegetical traditions emerged most clearly in the late Second Temple period and they remained potent notions in Christian exegesis, though few traces of them remain in the exegetical literature of the rabbis. They did not disappear, however, and through the conduit of a late rabbinic work, Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, they again became a part of the canonical Jewish tradition of medieval Judaism. The conception that the early editors of the Bible sought to read out of the tradition ultimately returned, we might say, with a vengeance, in an even more extreme form. Was Cain a tragic hero or a child of Satan? The answer may be that one gave birth to the other.

3

Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law Natalie B. Dohrmann

Introduction In Roman and rabbinic legal and literary sources from the first centuries of the Common Era, the institution of slavery exhibits a double nature. For both Jews and Romans, slavery is a dreaded state of denigrated nonpersonhood, and yet in both legal worlds, slavery can be a site of acculturation, even conversion, to the dominant status and ideals of rabbinic and Roman civilization.1 Initial research into key symbols and ideas on this topic reveal some suggestive similarities—structural and conceptual homologies between Roman and rabbinic constructions of slavery and the modes and cultural valuations of the manumission of slaves. The slave marks the outer boundary of the person and yet, at the same time, provides an exemplum that facilitates a transformation of the slave-self and an opportunity for movement from periphery to center, from thing to citizen, from Gentile to Jew. I will compare a few aspects of Roman and rabbinic legal thinking on slaves in the first centuries c.e. as a way to think more broadly about rabbinic legal/exegetical self-fashioning in the Roman Near East. In this essay I want to map the narratives of integration that are encoded in Roman and rabbinic slave law. The common features of the legal itinerary from slave to free are several. It is important to note from the beginning that the notion of slavery as paideia that leads to enfranchisement is largely a legal and cultural fiction. For most freedmen in both cultures, past slavery seems to have stigmatized them their entire lives.2 However, the fact that a part of each culture imagines that its slaves could become them provokes many questions. What does this ideal transformation tell us about the fact of Jewishness or Romanness; and, how, if at all, is the figural ‘‘enslavement’’ of the Jews under Roman power reflected in the Jewish slave laws (or more pointedly, in the rabbinic interpretation and recasting of biblical slave laws)?

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The legal strain preserved in the Roman and rabbinic legal sources that presumes or supports manumission as gateway to belonging reveals surprisingly similar ideas of the person and the nature of freedom and belonging in the rabbinic/Roman legal imagination. For both legal cultures slavery effaces past history and social connections. Both the rabbinic and Roman legal material uniquely imagine slavery, after it has obliterated family and history, as a site of acculturation and conversion that has the potential to culminate in manumission into membership in the master’s own community—be it as Jew or Roman. And finally, this membership is within a legal community, in a world portrayed as an idealized nomos. My evidence in this particular essay is limited to Roman and rabbinic literary texts, namely, legal texts written in the first three centuries of the Common Era.3 The Roman legal source that presents the closest parallel to the tannaitic texts is the Institutes of Gaius (and its later recapitulation by Justinian).4 This epitome and codification of Roman law was intended to be a textbook for law students. It was the first attempt at such a systematic ordering of Roman law, and was completed during the reign of Antoninus Pius in the late second century, ca. 161 c.e.5 The Roman and tannaitic sources have a great deal in common.6 Neither the Institutes nor the rabbinic material functioned as working legal texts in court situations (at least in the forms in which we inherit them).7 Neither is comprehensive. And while it is famously difficult to extrapolate from the texts to actual legal praxis, each preserves many of the culture’s social and legal ideals, and each quickly accrues iconic status within its respective social and legal context.8 The rabbis, as is becoming increasingly evident, were a diffuse group with limited authority within Jewish society in the tannaitic era. Since their legal decrees had at best minor social impact, they were freer to inhabit a more idealized legal landscape.9 Throughout my work, I aim to set legal texts in social-historical conversation but, more immediately, to show a case in which legal (interpretation and) writing is productive rabbinic discourse that functions beyond its manifest legal content. Law codes are notoriously bad sources for descriptive social history.10 By limiting myself primarily to legal texts, I limit myself to a certain form of cultural presentation, one that organizes data structurally, systematically, and ideologically—and not according to the messy vicissitudes of life. Still, the legal imagination tells us something of a culture’s selfperception that, if not actual, is also not peripheral to any thick description of national identity and aspiration. When reading the Jewish slave laws, I am attempting to hear the cultural ideals obliquely articulated by legal detail. I argue that each of the ideological strands in the legal cor-

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pus must be read as a product of hermeneutical approaches to divergent legal traditions that are simultaneously political and theological discourses arising in the context of and in response to the Roman Empire in which the rabbis lived and worked.11 As I hope has become clear, law seen from this perspective is a mode of commentary on more explicitly stated cultural narratives, and legal discourse a mode of cultural negotiation that reaches far beyond the details of its stated object. Having first summarized the position that assumes or argues that slaves may be converted into Jews upon manumission, I will turn to the biblical tradition. I will show how the language and categories of rabbinic slave law remain closely bound to biblical slave laws, but I will then show how the at times stark innovation in the face of tradition can be best explained not as biblical hermeneutics but more as cultural hermeneutics. I will argue that in the manumission of Gentile slaves, the rabbis are reading themselves through Roman cultural lenses yet still using the language of Scripture. In other words, while rabbinic literature is always a fundamentally insider mode of inquiry (its inward-looking status underscored by its largely exegetical genres), tannaitic slave law imagines rabbinic culture more in relation to Roman trajectories of power than to the interpretive cues of the biblical material. My focus is on this mirroring function of the law: formally the law operates within internal discourses that are largely exegetical, yet the big picture makes sense only when refracted against the larger imperial culture in whose context the law is written. This chapter will take a brief look at the biblical treatment of slavery. I will mark out the categories that become most resonant with the tannaitic reader and ask how porous the boundary is that separates Israelite from slave. I will then turn to the tannaitic texts, asking, in heuristic terms, in what ways they remain in keeping with exegetical concerns and in what ways they respond to historical forces (granting of course the complexities of both poles). This will be a question that underlies the final section of the chapter, in which I turn to the Roman law. I will demonstrate that the aporiae in the rabbinic exegetical etymologies are better filled if rabbinic manumission is seen in a Roman conceptual context. Tannaitic slave law reflects a larger yearning on the part of the rabbis for a Judaism with the sort of magnetism and influence already possessed by Rome, a desire given contour perhaps by the rabbis’ successful and powerful neighbors and masters.

Jewish Manumission Let me begin by sketching a fictional scenario: A rich Jewish businessman buys a Gentile slave, one Plonius, at market. He is one of only a few

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slaves owned by the Jew12 and he becomes a member of his household. If Plonius comes uncircumcised, the master circumcises his new slave (Gn 17.12–13)13 and has him ritually immersed.14 Plonius, now circumcised, joins the family at Passover,15 he rests on the Sabbath (Ex 20.10, 23.12), he keeps Jewish holidays (Dt 16.11–14), he knows the prayers.16 In order to do his job, he must learn to negotiate the stringent and complicated laws of ritual purity.17 One day slave and master arrive at the synagogue for evening services to find the congregation a man short. There are not enough Jewish men to complete the minyan, the quorum of ten required for public prayer. The master turns and, by his word, frees his slave, who becomes a full Jew,18 completing the minyan and permitting the evening prayer to proceed.19 This collage, culled from rabbinic sources and presumptions drawn largely but not exclusively from biblical sources, presents a composite but nonetheless legally viable narrative in rabbinic terms. Plonius enters a ‘‘Canaanite’’ (or Gentile)20 and exits a Jew—a Jew absorbed in prayer no less. Why should a slave become a Jew? (Why should he want to?) Why does rabbinic culture want to incorporate slaves into itself ? To what extent are tannaitic ideals of cultural permeability readable from biblical sources? The authority and model for this transformation are only partially found in the Hebrew Bible itself. Like all rabbinic literature, slave law partakes in an ongoing process of interpreting sacred texts. In this case, the rabbis seem to join an exegetical evolution that has already begun in the Bible.21 Still, the rabbinic construct of slavery/manumission may reveal more about current historical pressures, and about the rabbinic reader and exegete of culture, than the exigencies of biblical exegesis and interpretive tradition. First, it is important to establish what sort of narrative emerges from the biblical sources. Slavery holds a highly symbolic place in biblical narrative and theology. The movement from slavery in Egypt to freedom at Sinai traces the Torah’s core redemptive narrative. Central to this is the notion of freedom embodied in this narrative—freedom is freedom into a law that is understood to be a pinnacle of human endeavor; it is a freedom to most fully obey that law, most completely become a member of that nomos and its community. Servitude at its worst restricts one’s ability to keep God’s commandments. In the epic vision of the Pentateuch, slavery is not merely the state of not being free or of being a thing (though both are true) but is qualified by a long religious tradition in which the term and state ‘‘slavery’’ have deep historical and religious resonances. In Rome, a Roman is precisely not a slave.22 Conversely, ever since the mythic moment when the God of Israel liberated Israel from her bondage in Egypt, slavery has been a vital element of the Jewish sacred narrative and normative religious identity. Although actual enslavement is

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despised, one cannot properly project the slave as other. The slave is always integrated—metaphorically and ritually—into the Jewish self. Therefore the dyad of slave and free is always at its essence a dynamic, a sacred narrative in which every Jew participates.23 ‘‘For to me the people of Israel are servants/slaves (‘avadim), they are my servants/slaves (‘avadai hem) whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God’’ (Lev 25.55). Freedom is not slavery’s opposite but is its preferable form, since Judaism conceives freedom as slavery—to God. The freedom that God grants Israel is the opportunity to don the ‘‘yoke of his commandments.’’24 It is clear then that a movement from slavery to Judaism (or Israelite religion) is central to the biblical and Jewish experience and could thus be transferred easily to legal debates on contemporary slave law. Indeed we find that the redemptive epic seems to have had a determinative influence on the Bible’s legal materials as they are both written and redacted. Legal sources on slavery/manumission appear in Ex 21.2– 11, Lev 25.39–55, and Dt 15.12–18. From Lev 25.39–55 (esp. vv. 42, 55), it is clear that the literary construction of the Egyptian experience has shaped the slave law, as Sara Japhet summarizes, ‘‘for Israel the masterservant relationship holds true in one context only; between each and every Israelite and his God. The relationship is the result of the redemption of Israel from Egypt.’’25 This is also true, mutatis mutandis, of Dt 15.12–18; Dt 15.15 says, ‘‘Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; for this reason I command you this thing [manumission of Hebrew slaves] today.’’26 There is a tension established here between the clear theological taboo against Israelite slavery and the legal allowance for it. In the face of this contradiction the law answers by distinguishing Israelite from alien slaves, thereby making space for the liminal quasi-slave status of the Israelite.27 In both Leviticus and Deuteronomy the Bible explicitly distinguishes Israelite from foreign slaves28 in an attempt to limit Israelite servitude.29 The lessons of divine redemption seem to have been applied only to coreligionists. This strict distinction means that manumitted Hebrew slaves (promoted to sekhir or toshav in Lev 25.40) return to their former status, having in some sense never lost it, while foreign slaves are enslaved for life as ‘‘your property’’ and inheritance (Lev 25.44–46). There is then a perceivable conceptual tension between the theological teleology from manumission to Jewishness, and the more ethnocentric legal distinction between Israelite and foreign slaves (person and property). Foreign slaves are the focus of this essay.30 What was the alien slave’s religious status, if any, and how might a notion of his manumission/conversion have made its way into the tannaitic legal corpus? While there is no obvious rule for the manumission of Gentile slaves in the

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Bible, there is a notion of their acculturation. Saul Olyan, following Orlando Patterson’s comparative work on slavery, says that there must have been some ritual by which the ‘‘natally alienated’’ foreign slave would have been initiated into his new society, albeit in a marginal mode.31 The only such rite clearly recorded was the slave’s mandatory circumcision (Gn 17.10–14; Ex 12.43–49), though boring the ear may well have been part of this process as well, Olyan claims.32 Once initiated into the Israelite household, the foreign male slave shares in many of the most exalted privileges of the Israelite community, including partaking of the Passover sacrifice and even the holiest priestly food (Lev 22.10–13). Yet Olyan argues that in the biblical world this high status is illusory, masking the slave’s true status as mere shadow of his master and ‘‘underscor[ing] the slave’s debasement and his lack of an independent social existence.’’33 As mere agent for his master, even the ritually indoctrinated foreign slave would have been no closer to enfranchisement than he was the day of his enslavement.34 Despite the intricate ideological differences marking the biblical source texts, the rabbinic project sees the divergent biblical legal corpora as part of a single seamless revelation, and so we must see them as such. The Bible is telegraphic. Discrepancies between the sources are opportunities for the rabbis to ‘‘show their cards’’ as it were. They are the blank screen calling for projection. What are the most attractive gaps in the biblical slave law? As I turn to the tannaitic treatment of manumission, I want to highlight a few areas of biblical slave law from which the rabbinic exegetes swerve.35 First is the highly theologized aspect of slavery in the redacted presentation of biblical slave laws. The derivation/ justification of manumission from the redemption of Israel from Egyptian servitude is largely missing from the surface of the rabbinic treatment of slavery and redemption. That is, except in rare instances (see below), the link between slave-holding and historical experience is not made in the rabbinic laws.36 The second obvious point of divergence is the fact that the manumission of Gentile slaves is part of rabbinic law when it had no obvious place in the Bible. Though at times challenged, tannaitic law made space for the legal manumission of Gentile slaves, and moreover, the freed Gentile slave was often presumed to be converted.37 Finally, the distinction between foreign and native slaves so central to biblical slave laws is variously sidelined by the rabbis. Why these changes? Despite the general lack of aggadic or narrative reiteration of this motif in the tannaitic slave laws (or tannaitic law in general, for that matter), on rare occasion the rabbinic midrash does explicitly echo the double notion of the slave/slave to God. In Exodus 21.5–6, the biblical law stipulates that a Hebrew slave who wants to extend his servitude beyond six years must declare that he loves his master, then stand beside a door-

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post and have his ear bored with an awl. A baraita from bKidushin (22b38) asks why he must stand against a doorframe: Why should a door and doorpost be singled out from all the utensils in a house? God said, ‘‘The door and doorpost were my witnesses in Egypt that I passed over the lintel and doorposts [and spared the Israelites who marked their presence by splashing blood on their doorposts]. Moreover, I have said, ‘‘For unto me the children of Israel are slaves’’ (Lev 25.55) and not slaves unto slaves, and I brought them forth from slavery into freedom, yet this man has gone and acquired for himself a human master!39

In giving up his freedom, the slave here chooses to limit his ability to serve God. Since his master controls his time and his movement he cannot, by definition, worship as directed in the proper times and in the sanctioned places.40 As such, slavery inverts the sacred narrative and betrays God. In this passage the free Jew, then, is a product not of nature but of history. One then might expect a highly sympathetic treatment of slaves in rabbinic literature. Indeed such a strain exists and is my focus here. Yet rabbinic texts preserve divergent positions on the manumission of slaves.41 There is a strain in tannaitic slave law, which I will not explore here, in which the rabbis promulgate a restrictive norm concerning Gentile slaves—prohibiting their manumission outright, as does Akiba,42 or maintaining a wide gulf between Gentile and Jew, whether freed or not.43 Manumission laws preserve a live legal debate that was at its essence an ideological divide with a wider horizon. The idea of the slave self in legal terms is categorically different in rabbinic thinking than in the Bible. Three aspects seem to me relevant to this shift away from Scripture: (1) the influence of actual slaveholding in the centuries intervening, including the influences of Greek and Roman practices; (2) the rabbinic notion of the slave self as a being without legal pedigree or past; and (3) the transformation of the biblical notion of ritual inclusion and indoctrination of the household slave in light of the previous two (history and pedigree). Actual slave-holding practices in the centuries between the Bible and the tannaim would certainly have influenced rabbinic categories and concepts, even if their ultimate legal creations were not rooted in social reality. There is evidence suggesting that during the Second Temple era Jews did not honor the biblical distinction between Israelite and Canaanite slaves in practice. Philo tells us that Jewish slaves were treated no differently from other slaves, as evidenced in his discussion of Dt 15 in De Specialibus Legibus 2.79–81,44 where Philo adjures his fellow Jews to conform their slave-holding habits to biblical norms, implying that they do not. He urges them to keep only Hebrew slaves, then admits that

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since his fellow Jews do seem to keep Jews as slaves, they should treat them as laborers on short-term contract, as the Bible instructs, and not as any other slave over whom the Jew would have ‘‘the rights of absolute power.’’45 So while rabbinic legal categories are often derived exegetically, and while tannaitic law is rarely an unmediated reflection of social reality (and this is true in the case of slavery), we cannot yet say that tannaitic law developed in a vacuum. Even the most ideological is historical, but historical in the sense that cultural currents can permeate the rabbinic worldview and exegetical project, even without making pragmatic claims on its outcomes. Another development in the rabbinic notion of the slave self is the making explicit of the slave’s lack of legal pedigree. A Gentile slave would be legal chattel having few if any rights46 or property or history or kin. ‘‘Once someone becomes a bondman, slavery constitutes his defining feature.’’47 bBaba Kama 15a says explicitly of a slave ‘‘he has no legal pedigree.’’ We saw this presumed by Saul Olyan of the biblical material above, but in the case of Gentile slaves (the Israelite was presumed to have maintained his identity as a kinsman). However, in instances where one might expect a clear distinction, the Mishnah sees the legal ramifications and logic of lost pedigree (yih.us) as overshadowing the distinction between Hebrew and Canaanite ethnicity.48 The slave was given a legal status void of history, he became a clean slate and a sort of chattel that possessed limited volition.49 Even if we bracket this possibility and focus on the case of the Canaanite (Gentile) slave, the transformational effect of slavery was not lost on its victims, who are depicted as attempting to manipulate it to their advantage. Several texts express a fear that the slave will use conversion as a pretext to gain freedom.50 In a mishnah in Kidushin (3.13) slavery acts as a cultural detergent powerful enough to wash away the stigma of a Jewish bastard’s status: Rabbi Tarfon said, ‘‘It is possible to purify a mamzer [loosely: ‘‘bastard’’] from his defective ancestry. How so? Take the case of a mamzer who marries a slave woman, their offspring is a slave. If the offspring is freed, the son becomes a freedman.’’

In normal circumstances, the offspring of a mamzer is himself a mamzer. Here, even for Israelites, slavery effaces one’s past and so makes space for the transformation of the mamzer’s social and legal status.51 The fact of slavery, and its ability to purge and reconstitute the slave-self, is determinative of one’s present and future social relations and trumps past relationships and obligations.52 As I will show below, this is in part likely

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reflective of history of slave-holding and the practices of the rabbis’ neighbors. One key area in which biblical ideas are modified for the rabbinic context is that of the slave’s ritual indoctrination. The functional education of a household slave in Jewish religious practice would have made him less of an alien. The ritual conformity demanded of the Gentile slave may well have further complicated his polemical ‘‘othering.’’ The Bible expected that the slave would be integrated into the religious life of the household, and his ritual purity would have been crucial to the religious status of the household. This integration would have blurred the slave’s foreign origins, made it harder to limit him to the outside in the cultural mix. His time of enslavement may have served as a period of integration that transcended mere utility.53 Since by law every slave is imagined to have been circumcised and ritually immersed (not incidentally the two steps required of proselytes54) and to have learned de facto a great deal of law and observed both Sabbath and holy days, it seems it would be easy for him to step into the master’s culture once manumitted.55 In this way recall the story of R. Eliezer, alluded to above (bGit 38b). Eliezer, it seems, brought his slave with him to prayer and, needing a tenth, freed him. The slave steps seamlessly into the liturgy, no further education necessary.56 In this model, the biblical notion that the slave is a member of the household for ritual reasons is here only slightly modified to turn the ritually orthodox slave from ‘‘tool’’ or agent into a functioning coreligionist. Indeed, many laws for slaves functionally assume that the (Gentile) slave is Jewish, a ‘‘brother in the commandments’’ (bBK 88a; bSan 86a)57 from the moment of his circumcision and immersion.58 It is perhaps not an accident that this language echoes the gloss of Israelite slave as ‘‘your brother’’ in the Deuteronomic reworking. Manumission, then, is just the last step to enfranchisement. The notions elaborated above, namely, that a slave has no past and that he is integrated into religious life of the family and community, result in a soft distinction in rabbinic texts between alien and native.59 An implied cultural education is realized in the person of the freedman, which is reflected in the legal and metaphorical matrices that accrete around the slave. Tannaitic law shows an insistent and frequent pairing and comparison of proselyte to freedman.60 (Amoraic sources explicitly encouraged the acquisition of Gentile slaves as a way to bring them ‘‘under the wings of Shekhinah.’’61) Not only are slaves and proselytes legally parallel, virtually identical in all but social status, but the rabbinic texts often forge a metaphorical link between the student and the slave, as has been discussed by Catherine Hezser in regard to slaves of rabbis: ‘‘The roles of slaves and students are often overlapping in rabbinic literature, and the boundaries between the two types of hierarchically infe-

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rior members of a rabbi’s household are sometimes blurred.’’62 In bKet 96a ‘‘R. Joshua b. Levi ruled: All manner of service that a slave must render to his master, a student must render to his teacher.’’ This analogy can be read to reflect backward as well; not only must the student be like a slave—loyal, subservient, diligent, and attentive—but the slave then is like a student, absorbing the ways of his wise, stern, but fair master.63 The idea of slavery as acculturation is laced in other ways throughout tannaitic legislation—there are strict rules, for example: ‘‘One who sells his slave to a Gentile or outside of the land, he goes out a free man’’ (mGit 4.6). The law privileges the slave’s allegiance to the geographies of Judaism over his bondage. In Sifra, Behar 8, the reason for the prohibition against selling a Jewish slave to a Gentile is explicit: ‘‘Do not leave him to be mixed up beyond recognition (among the Gentiles).’’ This terse comment seems simple enough, but its tone and reasoning point less to a fear of Roman brutality or the slave’s being coerced to worship idols; instead we find anxiety that he will assimilate! There is revealed here a strong sense that the experience of being a slave does not reinforce difference; rather it moves inevitably toward integration. Two models alien to the biblical text emerge in rabbinic slave laws: the collective notion of undifferentiated slave, and the fact not only of the manumission of alien slaves but their conversion. Each can, I will argue, be traced to the influence of Roman slave law. I do not argue for a direct legal borrowing and application, for I do not find one. However, I trace a larger appropriation, explicating rabbinic law as text of cultural self-presentation that has digested and interpreted its historical context on a grand scale. The law is exegetical, not only of its own scriptural past but it parlays its own parochial legal concerns to law etched on larger horizons. The shifts in rabbinic slave law not only mirror and co-opt Roman slave-holding praxis but communicate a message that far supersedes its manifest details. But first let me back up: why Roman? Roman laws concerning slaves and manumission were likely well known by Jews in this period.64 Many Jews were enslaved by Romans. Josephus estimates that 97,000 had been sold into Roman slavery following the Jewish War alone!65 Even allowing for his customary inflation, this is a massive number. Some of these who were eventually manumitted would have brought home with them intimate knowledge of the life and prospects of the Roman slave.66 In addition, Jews placed a high premium on the redemption of their brethren who were enslaved to Gentiles, implying that they must have known enough Roman law in any case to know what would secure the release of a fellow Jew.67 Moreover, while explicit terminology from Roman manumission law only appears in amoraic sources,68 Jews were functionally conversant with much Roman civil law in the tannaitic era (even before 212 c.e.) and regularly con-

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sulted Roman courts in civil matters.69 Slavery, in sum, is a natural site of ‘‘international’’ concern—peppered with clashing jurisdictions, with conflict of laws and legal reasoning. For all these reasons, it is a likely place for rabbinic reflection on issues of contact, accommodation, and contagion. In the Roman imagination (on this, more below), legal freedom manifests, reinforces, perfects, and safeguards man’s natural freedom. In the Jewish imagination the Jew is not free but only ever freed.70 Yet Roman and Jewish laws share in common a mythology of elemental or foundational parity between the slave and the master that can and should be restored at manumission.71 While many years and many streams of influence run between the Bible and the tannaim, the big picture of enfranchisement of alien slaves is in the end most plausibly explained by Roman influence.

The Roman Case The enslavement and manumission of Gentile slaves owned by Jews follows a narrative arc very similar to that of the Roman slave.72 Roman freedman were likely originally household slaves who had been bought at market, born into servitude, or perhaps even found exposed as infants and adopted into slavery. Having been acquired by a Roman citizen, the slave73 may well have been given a name easy on Roman ears (Felix, ‘‘happy,’’ was a popular slave name74) and put to work as a domestic slave.75 There he became part of his master’s household, adopting his religious practices,76 imitating the local dress,77 learning Latin and perfecting his Greek.78 His manumission would have been an official, courtcontrolled affair initiated by a grateful or ostentatious79 master, or commonly, in his will.80 Now free, ‘‘Felix’’ is transformed from legal object to legal subject. Significantly, manumission does not bring about repatriation.81 Felix does not revert to his previous status as Syrian or Gallic or Judean provincial (this past has been effectively effaced at the moment of his enslavement). He is now a freedman and Roman citizen, subject to Roman laws,82 and eligible for a citizen’s privileges.83 At the beginning of the first section of Gaius’s Institutes, he introduces the Roman law of persons. There he states, ‘‘The main classification of the law of persons is this: all men are either free or slave.’’84 Roman slaves were property over which their masters had ‘‘absolute power.’’85 Slavery is one half of perhaps the most essential Roman legal category of being, and even a cursory perusal of Roman literature bears out the huge space inhabited by slaves in the social and literary imagination of Roman society.86 This distinguishes it sharply from the Jewish foundation narrative. Keith Bradley writes, ‘‘Slavery for the Romans was not a

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peculiar institution but the standard by which all else in society was measured and judged: it was a way of thinking about society and social categorization.’’87 At his fullest, a Roman was a free man, paterfamilias, citizen, while a slave, according to Justinian’s Institutes, ‘‘has no standing at all.’’88 According to Gaius, enslavement was among the most extreme losses of status, analogous to or even worse perhaps than death or banishment, and was a form of capital punishment, categorized alongside drowning, beheading and other more obvious ‘‘rubbings out.’’89 That being said, enslavement was perceived to be contrary to nature; ‘‘By the law of nature all men were initially born free.’’90 If a slave is a human being, naturally free, how does one justify his enslavement? The Institutes isolate war as the origin of institutional slavery. That is, slavery is not natural, but is a man-made phenomenon; it is ‘‘contrary to the law of nature.’’91 If slavery is unnatural it follows that slaves possess some spark of freedom. Furthermore, every Roman soldier knows that it takes but one bad day in battle to set him too on the auction block.92 This notion of the human nature of the slave underwrites Roman laws and practices of manumission. That a slave ought to be acculturated should not be presumed, however, and different cultures preserve divergent notions of their own permeability. The Roman case ‘‘was unique in the Graeco-Roman world’’93 and is especially striking when contrasted with possible alternative conceptions—especially the neighboring Greeks, epitomized by Aristotle, for whom the slave is inherently servile, by nature unfit for citizenship.94 It is hard to imagine a similarly sanctioned way to become Greek—it sounds as odd as a nineteenth-century American slaveholder imagining that his own slave, even if freed, could ever become like him. Still, Roman slaves of vastly disparate ethnic origins regularly became Romans. Roman slave laws are at once polarizing and permeable. A slave’s life was not his own, and he had ‘‘no natural right [even] to food, drink, or sex.’’95 Beyond his physical enslavement, a slave also lost his past. ‘‘Legally speaking, he could have no relatives.’’96 He had no legal history, no story. Ethnicity, tradition, ancestors, wife, progeny, and heirs were all denied him.97 Each was amputated by his status. Patterson terms slavery ‘‘social death.’’98 From this ‘‘social death,’’ Sohm says that ‘‘manumission is a kind of new birth.’’99 Manumission, especially of urban slaves or those who lived in the household of their owners, was common and easy to effect.100 Gaius writes: ‘‘It is such an everyday matter that manumissions are performed even en route from one place to another, for instance when the Praetor or Proconsul is passing by on his way to the baths or the theatre.’’101 Dupont notes that

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[F]reedmen were children of Roman culture . . . They emerged from a system of reproduction not unlike cultural ‘‘cloning.’’ There was a direct link between the fides of the slave and his future identity as a citizen . . . This identification with the master is recorded in the emancipation itself: having been his double and his shadow, the emancipated slave would bear his master’s name.102

A legal progression through stages from res to persona (thing to person) spans and connects the cultural poles of slave and free. Already within and from these legal realms and categories we can trace an emergent narrative: the marginal foreigner is purged of his past identity through his transformation into slave-thing, and from there the state proffers its beneficent metamorphosis through the law into Roman free person—the culmination of this matriculation. Once manumitted, the Roman slave is granted the chance, or better, the privilege, of bowing to the yoke of Roman freedom, ius civile, as citizen (G. Inst. 11; J. Inst. 5.3). Through manumission, our Felix is transformed from being one of ‘‘all peoples’’ subject to ius gentium to being a particularly Roman freedman—in so doing he has in fact returned to his ‘‘primordial’’ natural state. Yet it is the law of nature refined—improved by the civil glory of Rome.103 Slavery and freedom make a pair that echoes the imperial standard of subjugation and universalism.104 The (triumphal) goal in both cases: Roman Law.105 Three important elements emerge from the Roman material. (1) The polarity slave/free is not only permeable but reveals in fact an evolutionist narrative. (2) The definition of that enfranchisement is membership in a law deemed both elect and normative—striated with universalist assumptions and aspirations.106 (3) Third, there is a strong sense of cultural confidence and a faith that patronage will supplant patriotism and other prior allegiances to blood or country.107 The manumission laws imply that Rome, by the fact of her existence, must, of course, become the preferred world of the freedman.

Conclusion Each of the elements I identified in the Roman material is present in the Jewish material as well; that is, the border dividing Gentile and Jew, slave and free is permeable, and their relationship is dynamic; enfranchisement is inscribed inevitably in the act of historical and genealogical effacement that marks the slave; and, finally, the manumission laws assume that the experience of inhabiting a Jewish life, however restricted, will result in either the slave’s desire to adopt Judaism or in his ontological transformation into a Jew. In either case, the conversion teleology is surprisingly self-confident. I have argued that rabbinic law is being fashioned by larger cultural

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forces at work—Roman law and Roman idealized self-perception—and the rabbis are reshaping their own evolving tradition in a Roman model. The exegetical history of one legal complex shows an evolution of concepts and ideas. Slave laws do not present a static picture but rather a dynamic ongoing development, which in the tannaitic era was neither fixed nor at all times monovocal in its own positions. That being said, we can clearly identify one tradition that treats the slave as nascent convert. This idea grows from multiple roots, many aspects drawn from within Jewish and biblical tradition. But what I hoped to show is that the unique telos of acculturation, given that it is not biblical (nor Greek), reflects in fact a Roman cultural model. Roman culture creates the hermeneutical rubric in which biblical terms are translated. In adopting it, the rabbis have built on their own tradition and added Roman conceptions, folding them into the slave law in such a way as to assert an exegesis of Jewish Scripture cum culture that is not immediately apparent. Roman cultural confidence is donned by the rabbis and it displaces other schemes as a hermeneutical model. In the Roman case, that slaves matriculate to citizenship mirrors Roman imperialism and the so-far successful ‘‘Romanizing’’ of the world. The empire not only forced all non-Romans to kneel and serve her (war, expansion, and slavery make up a tightly bound matrix) but then absorbed region after region into herself, inscribing her ‘‘colonies’’ with theaters, roads, languages, commerce, soldiers, and citizens.108 The ideal of slavery as path to Roman citizenship nicely echoes this imperial narrative. The slave is first subject to Rome, then its child, his old country having been overrun and lost in the process. When the same narrative appears in the Jewish material the disanalogies between Rome and rabbinic Judaism stand out. The tannaim have no empire; their law is not normative among second- and third-century Jews. Therefore, the cultural confidence implicit in this strand of slave law is especially bold, even defiant. The assumed absorption of the slave-convert into the idealized law of Torah runs alongside and counter to the law of Rome that has in fact trumped Jewish jurisdiction. In the light of the relatively small size of the rabbinic movement, the great devastations of population in the wake of the two wars against Rome, and the subsequent enslavement of thousands of Jews, one voice in rabbinic Judaism insists on a law in which not only is the rabbi the master of a Gentile but the slave is his ‘‘cultural clone,’’ aspiring to his God, his law, his piety, and his mercy. Scattered through the slave laws are images of the slave who is a student of Jewish observance and a proselyte in the making. The slave law, like the path through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, channels the slave to the law itself.109 And like the Roman freedman, the Gentile slave of a

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Jew has the chance to be liberated into the culture’s highest most ideal realm—the place of the fully Jewish male, under the law. Torah, like Roman citizenship, opens to these slave-converts with a profound confidence in its superiority and its universal appeal.110 The divine law it proffers defines a world to which all men must aspire.111 The legal literature interprets the biblical institution of slavery through the lens of Roman slavery, to envision a religion that is powerful, desirable, true to its authoritative source narrative, and growing.

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Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers: Exegesis and Cultural Interaction in Late Antique Palestine Megan Hale Williams

Jerome, alone among non-Jewish writers of Late Antiquity whose works survive intact, makes abundant and well-informed reference to Jews, to Jewish custom, and above all to Jewish biblical interpretation. He attributes this knowledge not to Jewish literary sources but to oral instruction from Jewish informants, whom he repeatedly describes as Jews recognized as authorities among their own people. Contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, Jerome’s information about Jewish matters is generally good.1 Many of the interpretations he cites as Jewish are paralleled in Jewish literature from antiquity; others exhibit the distinctive traits of the Jewish exegesis we know from those literary sources.2 We have no reason not to believe Jerome when he claims to have made strenuous efforts to learn as much as he could of Jewish biblical interpretation, nor to doubt his ultimate success.3 Jerome’s voluminous works, therefore, hold out the possibility—tantalizing to many scholars—of recapturing not merely the influence of one ancient tradition of interpretation on the other but a moment of face-to-face contact between Jewish and Christian readers, bent over their Bible together. Jerome was one of a generation of Latin Christian writers who, at the turn of the fifth century, created a new literary legacy for their church, independent of the great tradition of Greek Christian learning. Ambrose of Milan pioneered the new tendency with his voluminous, and avidly read, commentaries and treatises. Jerome and his contemporaries, from Augustine to John Cassian, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus, and numerous others, together took up the challenge that Ambrose had laid down. They produced a massive body of Latin Christian texts able to serve as the basis for the further creativity of the Latin Church through the end of Late Antiquity and beyond. Jerome himself

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began as a product of the best literary and rhetorical education that the Western empire could provide, a student of the great grammarian Donatus at Rome. A Christian from birth, and a convert to asceticism as a young man, he forged over the course of several decades—at Antioch, Constantinople, Rome, and finally Bethlehem—a literary persona founded on the association of coenobitic monasticism, ascetic rigor, and biblical scholarship. At the same time, his many surviving letters and his polemical works show that he had neither abandoned the skills nor eradicated the dispositions inculcated by his education.4 Jerome’s scholarly labors yielded their richest fruits after he settled in Bethlehem in the mid-380s. These were his complete series of translations of the Hebrew Bible and of commentaries on the Prophets. In these works, Jerome distilled for his Latin readership the vast output of two great traditions of biblical study and interpretation: that of the Christians of the East, and that of the Jews of Palestine. Jerome claimed to have learned Greek Christian exegesis from living teachers. He had studied the Antiochene tradition with Apollinaris of Laodicea at Antioch in the 370s, the Alexandrian tradition both with Gregory of Nazianzus at Constantinople in 381 and with Didymus of Alexandria in that city in 386. But it is clear that literary sources played by far the most important role in supplying him with the Greek Christian biblical interpretations that he compiled in his commentaries and other works. For the Jewish materials he used, on the other hand, Jerome can have had access to very few Jewish written sources, aside from the works of Philo and Josephus.5 Instead, he must have obtained most of the material he cites as Jewish directly from living Jewish informants. Thus Jerome must have had lengthy and intimate contact with a Jewish teacher or teachers, probably with several Jews over the course of decades. Their learning came to permeate the vast corpus of work that Jerome bequeathed to eager readers in the West for a millenium to come.6 Yet Jerome’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward his Jewish material has proved a stumbling block to historical reconstruction. The words of a particularly penetrating modern student of his biblical philology may stand in for those of many others. Benjamin Kedar has carried out critically important work on Jewish influence on Jerome’s translation technique in the Vulgate, showing that Jerome deferred again and again to interpretations paralleled in Jewish literature from antiquity, presumably on the authority of his Jewish teachers and informants.7 But as Kedar also documents, Jerome could write of the Jews, and of their biblical exegesis, in virulently hostile terms. Attempting to account for this phenomenon, Kedar writes that Jerome ‘‘seems to have a split personality.’’ He concludes, ‘‘Summing up the evidence and thinking of Jerome’s impact on Western civilization we may feel entitled to say that this man

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built the most important bridge between the classic Jewish culture and Western Europe. Nolens volens he did it; but then, history is full of such ironic twists.’’8 In this formulation, Jerome’s standing as an important channel for the transmission of Jewish biblical learning to the Latin Christian world is so paradoxical that it can be understood only as involuntary. With all due respect, such an explanation is unhelpful. Not only does it fail to account for why Jerome pursued Jewish learning so avidly but it makes it all the more difficult to imagine how he and his teachers interacted. How are we to resolve this apparent impasse? I suggest that the interpretive challenge that Jerome’s dealings with Jewish informants have presented for historians of the relation between Judaism and Christianity in antiquity is symptomatic of a larger problem in that field. With increasing intensity in recent years, scholars have attempted to reimagine how ancient Jews and Christians interacted. This is particularly true for the century from about 325 to 425, the period of the Christianization of the empire. An influential current tendency represents contact between Jews and Christians during that period as much more extensive, intense, and significant than had once been imagined.9 Many scholars now conceive of the categories ‘‘Jew’’ and ‘‘Christian’’ as unstable and ill defined with respect to each other even during Late Antiquity, long after the two groups had once been thought to be recognizably distinct. Going even further, some reject entirely essentialist notions that posit two intrinsically different faiths sprung from a common origin and extend the moment of the ‘‘parting of the ways’’ indefinitely.10 Peter Scha¨fer, in the conclusion to his recent study of the currents of intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in medieval Western Europe, has pursued this analysis in a particularly fruitful and interesting direction. He argues that the mutual influence exerted upon each other by Jewish and Christian traditions should be understood as a process of active appropriation. He writes that ‘‘historical influence is a creative and mutual process that affects both partners, so that neither is simply ‘source’ or ‘recipient’ . . . The recipient actively digests the transmitted tradition, transforms it, and creates something new.’’ He goes on to argue that Judaism and Christianity, given their common investment in the Hebrew Scriptures, never become fully separate discourses. Under Scha¨fer’s conception, the two traditions can hardly even be conceived of as separate in theory, much less in historical fact. Mutual influence is intrinsic to the cultural system of which the two traditions each form a part.11 Scha¨fer’s argument that the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity can never be conceived of as closed has much to recommend it, yet it has its limitations, of which Scha¨fer himself is well aware. As he

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goes on to argue, even within his reformulated conception of influence, there are elements of competition, even hostility. Deliberately echoing Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence, Scha¨fer writes, ‘‘the act of re-creation is tantamount to ‘killing’ the transmitted; thus the inevitable feeling of anxiety towards the ‘source’ that is transformed and recreated, the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion.’’12 Influence, however inevitable, is not neutral. Cultural interaction, for all that it may make essentialist categories useless as tools of historical analysis, does not prevent people from generating such categories and attempting to impose them upon social reality. The categories ‘‘Jew’’ and ‘‘Christian,’’ far from being merely illusory, are cultural constructs generated and imposed by hegemonic power and its representatives—whether official or self-appointed. The process of their construction, and their contestation, demands to be studied in concrete, chronologically specific detail, rather than dismissed as an obstacle to understanding reality ‘‘on the ground.’’13 On another level, the problem of reconstructing Jerome’s relations with Jewish teachers arises simply from the difficulties that his texts present as evidence for social reality. How are we to imagine that a man who reviled Jews, individually and collectively, at so many points in his writings could also work intimately with learned, and presumably loyal, Jewish teachers? For such is the story that Jerome’s biblical scholarship— with its vast dependence on Jewish learning—and his mocking or vituperative descriptions of Jews, including those who taught him, demand that we reconstruct. Here, a more holistic and sophisticated reading of Jerome’s texts may be of help. In the end we will probably never be able to eavesdrop on Jerome’s sessions with his Jewish teachers, but we can nevertheless learn important lessons from them. For Jerome’s depictions of his studies with learned Jews promise to teach us much about how to interpret other evidence for interaction between Jews and Christians in antiquity. This is particularly true for the crucial period when Jerome began his Jewish researches, under the newly militant Christian Roman empire ruled by Theodosius I and guided by bishops like Ambrose of Milan and Theophilus of Antioch.

The End of Ancient Judaism: Theodosian Christianity and the Construction of Jewish Corporate Identity Jerome came to Palestine in late 385, with the intention of settling near the holy places at Jerusalem. Eventually, he and his companions and patronesses, the Roman noblewoman Paula and her daughter Eustochium, founded a double monastery—with sections for both male and female monks—at Bethlehem. Christian conceptions of (Jewish) Pales-

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tine as a ‘‘Holy Land’’ were embedded from the beginning in an ambivalent discourse concerning contemporary Jews and their relation to Christianity. That discourse, like the desire for pilgrimage it both excited and attempted to sate, had deep roots in the pre-Constantinian period. It inspired Constantine’s massive building program at the holy places—an effort to meet the needs of Christian pilgrims, which inevitably succeeded only in producing an ever-increasing flow of them. In texts written during the early years of his life in Bethlehem, Jerome invokes the ‘‘Jewish’’ mystique of the Holy Land in its most formulaic versions.14 Yet his relocation was not merely one in an unbroken series of Christian settlements in Palestine. Rather, it coincided with an important point of inflection in the religious history of the Roman Mediterranean. The specificity of that moment is of such importance that it deserves extended consideration. Nothing less is at stake than our entire understanding of the ways that religious boundaries were drawn, and redrawn, in Late Antiquity. Constantine ended the harsh persecutions of Christians instituted by his predecessors, Diocletian and his fellow Tetrarchs, and, by the latter part of his reign, threw the full weight of imperial sponsorship behind his chosen cult of Nicene Christianity. However, it is misleading to conclude that the Roman Empire ‘‘became Christian’’ under his rule. Such a view presupposes an estimate of Constantine’s religious program that is inaccurate and anachronistic. It also vastly undervalues the vital energies of Greco-Roman religious traditionalism. As Peter Brown wrote already in 1978: Some scholars . . . tend to present the religious changes of the third century as the final breaking through of intrusive elements that had built up in the Roman world over previous centuries. In so doing, they assume a rigidity and a vulnerability in later classical paganism that exists more in their own, idealized image of such a paganism that in the realities of the second century a.d. The Roman world of the age of the Antonines was both more flexible and had been more effectively ‘‘immunized’’ to the emergence of new elements than appears at first sight.15

In his examination of the ‘‘paganism’’ of the third and fourth centuries, too, Brown sees not fossilization but a continuing vitality, which allowed a transformed Greco-Roman traditionalism to remain a potent cultural and religious resource in the very different world of the late empire.16 Since its articulation in the late 1970s, this analysis has become widely accepted. When Brown wrote, Glen Bowersock had already begun to revise views of the traditional culture of Roman elites in the second through fourth centuries, showing that continuity rather than rupture, vitality rather than desuetude, characterized both their literary and their

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religious worlds.17 More recently, Simon Price, in his work on Roman imperial cult, has delineated the vital social and cultural role played by a religious institution once deemed a distinguishing symptom of spiritual decay.18 Garth Fowden, in his work on the Hermetic corpus in its Egyptian context, has revealed the continuing adaptability and persuasiveness of classical Egyptian religion in the fourth century and its ability to find expression in the terms of late Greek philosophy.19 These and many other scholars have uncovered persuasive evidence for a ‘‘pagan’’ religiosity that remained as vital and flexible as Brown portrayed it, however it may have deviated from the ideals of nineteenth- and mid-twentiethcentury classicists. Similarly, instead of focusing on outside intrusions—whether in the form of alien cults or of barbarian hordes—as causes for the structural transformation of the Roman world in the century and a half from the end of the Severan dynasty in 235 to the rise of Theodosius I in 380, scholars have come to see that process as driven primarily by the internal dynamics of the empire itself. To quote Brown again: Of all the developments in the social history of the Roman Empire, the process by which local families from the larger cities of the Greek East in the fourth century were drained upwards and away to the senate and court of Constantinople, leaving behind them a rump of resentful and vociferously impoverished colleagues, is the most predictable. The more clearly this story emerges, as it now does from the dense pages of Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World, the less it is one which requires a dramatic ‘‘crisis’’ to explain it.20

Again, the view Brown outlines here has become virtually canonical. Millar’s detailed examination of epigraphic and other documentary evidence for the nature and evolution of Roman imperial administration persuaded the vast majority of his readers and has shaped the research of a generation of scholars. Just as it can no longer be contended that classical Roman religion decayed from within, a victim of its own spiritual bankruptcy, so it cannot be claimed that it collapsed under the pressure of external attacks, its credibility destroyed by barbarian victory or by the vitality of ‘‘Eastern’’ cults. Revised accounts of the transformation of the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries, therefore, have removed major factors used to explain the Christianization of the empire. If the second and third centuries are no longer, in E. R. Dodds’s famous phrase, an ‘‘age of anxiety,’’ then the notion that Christianity grew in popularity and in power because it provided a salve for the era’s existential angst evaporates.21 An explanatory gap yawns. We are left, on the one hand, with a more modest impression of Christianity’s gradual increase in numbers, so that by the early fourth century perhaps 10 percent of the empire’s inhabitants

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were Christian, and by the year 380 not more than 30 to 50 percent.22 On the other hand, the spiritual needs of a people threatened by social disintegration can no longer be invoked to explain the rise of the hegemonic Catholic Church as an institution. What, then, explains the religious changes of the fourth and early fifth centuries? Part of the explanation for Christianity’s rise is straightforward. From the reign of Theodosius I onward, Nicene Christianity was imposed by force. Such is the lesson we draw from scholarship like that of David Frankfurter, whose work on rural Egypt shows in detail how forcible Christianization was carried out, whether by imperial officials or, far more often, by monastic vigilantes backed by episcopal authority. Frankfurter documents, too, the vigorous resistance put up by adherents of traditional Egyptian religion.23 Similar examples, especially from the Near East, could easily be multiplied. But where did the energy come from that drove the monks and bishops of Egypt, and of so many other regions of the Roman Mediterranean, to attack the temples that had stood so solidly and for so long at the center of their cities and towns? Here, another aspect of Brown’s portrait of the new society of Late Antiquity is of help: as Brown writes, To move from the age of the Antonines to the age of Constantine is not to pass through some moment of catastrophic breakdown, of bankruptcy, depletion, pauperization, and the consequent ‘‘cutting back’’ of expenditure on religious and cultural activity but rather to pass from one dominant lifestyle, and its forms of expression, to another; to pass, in fact, from an age of equipoise to an age of ambition.24

Prominent among the ‘‘ambitious’’ new men of the fourth-century empire were the rising class of Christian bishops. A great deal of the impetus behind Christianization from Constantine’s accession onward can be accounted for in terms of the tremendous exertions of bishops to define, to legitimate, to consolidate, and to extend their authority, in every sphere of Roman civic life. During the early and middle decades of the fourth century, it was the liberated energies of the Christian bishops already to be found in every Mediterranean city and town that drove forward the process of Christianization. From the last decades of the century on, imperial fiat stiffened the bishops’ morale and greatly increased the pressure they were able to exert.25 Neil McLynn’s powerful reinterpretation of the career of bishop Ambrose of Milan compellingly illustrates this process. In McLynn’s account, Ambrose emerges as a constantly threatened—and indefatigably creative—player on a stage of power that included Nicene and ‘‘Arian’’ bishops, emperors and their officials, and Roman aristocrats of varied religious persuasions. His relations with emperors were shaped

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not by preexisting theological conceptions of the ideal relation of church and state, as has so long been believed, but by the political exigencies of survival in this complex milieu. As McLynn persuasively argues, Ambrose had to construct his own authority, in dealing with the people of Milan as with emperors from Gratian to Theodosius, from whatever materials he had at hand. He was not always successful. Only gradually over the course of the reign of Theodosius I, from 380 to the mid-390s, did the bishop of Milan succeed in forging an alliance with an emperor who came to see a particular form of Christian piety, publicly and floridly demonstrated and supported with military force, as a crucial instrument of his own rule. Ambrose, in McLynn’s portrayal, is ultimately as much the creation of the emperors he addressed as they are of his vivid rhetoric and daring interventions.26 This new relationship between ecclesiastical and imperial ambition, on the one hand, and a more hard-edged version of Christianity, on the other, is eloquently summed up by Peter Brown in a passage from his 1998 lectures, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World. Speaking precisely of Ambrose, Brown writes, Bishops, such as Ambrose of Milan, are usually treated as having been the decisive figures in late fourth-century Latin Christianity: they are held to have bullied the laity, from the emperor downwards, into a less tolerant mood. But . . . a new generation of powerful lay Christians . . . could be expected to do more . . . Christianity had become one of the symbolic forms through which they made their power more present to their inferiors . . . We should not underestimate the long-term impact of a new, more drastic definition of monotheism on notions of authority among lay elites . . . in the course of the late fourth and fifth centuries, Christian exhortation presented the elites with a new model of power. It assumed a chain of command drawn as starkly on earth as it was in heaven. An emperor, hailed by Ambrose as militans pro Deo, on active service for the Christian God, was linked to his upper-class subjects, and, through these, to all inhabitants of the empire.27

Ironically, one of the most important cultural by-products of the intensification under Theodosius and his successors of the orthodox Church’s effort to extend its hegemony to every aspect of life was an accentuation of the sense of separateness expressed by Christian writers with respect to their non-Christian contemporaries. Robert Markus has captured this pivotal moment in the cultural history of the Roman Mediterranean with great delicacy. As he describes the situation earlier in the century, ‘‘Around 350 very little separated a Christian from his pagan counterpart in Roman society.’’ He goes on to remark that ‘‘the image of a society neatly divided into ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ is the creation of late fourth-century Christians, and has been too readily taken at its face value by modern historians.’’ But Markus does not leave the matter there: he

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traces the contours of an important shift, taking place in the final decades of the fourth century. Thus he argues that before the late fourth century, ‘‘Paganism’’ . . . [as a religious identity] . . . existed only in the minds, and, increasingly, the speech-habits, of Christians . . . The so-called ‘‘pagan revival’’ of the fourth century is nothing more than the vague sense of apprehension in the minds of pagan aristocrats congealing, suddenly, into the discovery that Christianity was on the way to becoming more than a religious movement which had been favored by a number of recent emperors; that it was becoming a threat to much of what their class had long stood for. A generation after Victorinus’ conversion [in 355] the position had changed. It now made sense to speak of ‘‘paganism’’ and ‘‘Christianity’’ as a division running through at least one section of Roman society.28

Markus, that is, delineates a precise historical moment, in the last two decades of the fourth century, when a transition took place from a world in which ‘‘pagan’’ and ‘‘Christian’’ could often be hard to separate, to one in which the polemical construction of ‘‘paganism’’ on the part of certain Christian intellectuals had begun, in a very short time, to correspond to a concrete social division. As he goes on to argue, that heightened consciousness of separation was short-lived. In the next generation, as Christianization succeeded and paganism receded from the scene, the boundaries of Christian identity again lost their cutting edge. It was Jerome’s own generation, therefore, that was most involved in constructing and successfully imposing a sharpened sense of Christian identity on the social and cultural world of the Roman Mediterranean.29 Scholars of late antique Judaism have not failed to note connections between this new portrayal of the nature and chronology of Christianization and our understanding of the evolution of Judaism in the fourth century. Two major recent descriptions of the transformation of Judaism in Late Antiquity emphasize the impact of imperial Christianity during the fourth century. Daniel Boyarin has already made the connection between Markus’s analysis of the production of ‘‘paganism’’ as cultural other by the Christian intellectuals of the last decades of the fourth and first decades of the fifth centuries, and the rather different case of relations between Christianity and Judaism.30 Seth Schwartz has argued suggestively that, in his words, the Roman state of the later fourth century (by which he means Theodosius and his successors) ‘‘regarded the Jews as a discrete category of humanity,’’ to an extent that earlier emperors had not.31 He goes on to connect this new legal status with the emergence of a radically new form of Jewish communal identity. Neither writer, however, links his portrait of the evolution of late antique Judaism to the carefully differentiated chronology of imperial adoption and imposition of Nicene Christianity outlined above. Rather, each refers

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vaguely to the fourth century as the period of transformation, with little further specification. And while Boyarin gestures in the direction of connecting the Christian production of ‘‘paganism’’ to a corresponding production of ‘‘Judaism,’’32 Schwartz, in his far more detailed and ambitious study, neglects this parallel entirely. Seth Schwartz’s Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 bce to 640 ce, is as its title suggests an immensely ambitious, and largely successful, effort to rethink an entire epoch of Jewish history in terms of the relations of the Jewish people to the imperial powers that ruled their Palestinian homeland in succession for over eight hundred years. The book’s final section treats the situation of the Jews of Palestine under the rule of the Christian Roman empire. There, Schwartz argues that changes in Roman law of the 380s and 390s ‘‘helped redefine the relation between the Jews and the Roman state in a radical way.’’33 With this assertion, he advocates a sweeping reassessment of the consensus view of Roman law and the Jews from the second through the fifth centuries. As Schwartz portrays the previous scholarship, the legislation of Theodosius and his successors regarding the Jews has typically been seen as a conservative attempt to preserve traditional Jewish privileges in the face of the increasingly shrill demands of Christian bishops. Schwartz claims instead that this legislation embodied a significant, even radical, innovation.34 He persuasively argues that the ‘‘disembedding’’ of religion as a category of identity under Christian rule made a crucial difference in the legal status of the Jews. In describing the legislation of Theodosius and his successors, Schwartz traces the ambiguous contours of an imperial policy that seemed to wish at once to penalize, and to protect, its Jewish subjects.35 But Schwartz avoids investigating—indeed, dismisses in a footnote— the emerging Christian theology of Judaism that corresponded precisely to such apparently contradictory imperial enactments.36 Instead, he repeatedly asserts that ‘‘the Christian state regarded Judaism as simply wrong.’’37 This was not the case: the Christian state regarded Judaism as ‘‘wrong,’’ but complexly so. Where heretics and pagans, being ‘‘simply’’ wrong, could be brought to convert by any means necessary, Jews were to be set apart, ‘‘marginalized’’ in Schwartz’s language, but not to be forcibly converted. Where pagan shrines were the objects, from the first Theodosius’s reign on, of imperially sanctioned demolition, synagogues were protected in law, if not always in practice. The conversion of individual Jews was universally welcomed by the Christians of the day. The conversion of the Jewish people, or of entire Jewish communities, was with few exceptions neither anticipated nor encouraged—much less enforced.38 The theology that shaped this complex stance toward Judaism was the

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product of the same class of men whom Markus studied in The End of Ancient Christianity. For these thinkers, the ambiguous status of Judaism was an important theological problem, one with concrete consequences for how they viewed living Jews in the contemporary Roman Empire. In Augustine’s developed theology of Judaism—to take a particularly complex and influential example—the Jews must continue to exist as a corporate entity, preserved, even as they are penalized, by hegemonic Christianity, because their sad fate provides a crucial external testimony to Christian truth. The Jews, by copying and reading their own versions of the Scriptures that Christians also claim, transmit against their will the prophecies that prove Jesus’s status as Christ. Even more importantly, the simple fact of their visible existence as a dispersed, persecuted, yet never eradicated minority is evidence for Christianity’s exclusive claims. If the Jews were to disappear, there would no longer be living evidence for their collective guilt as the heirs of those who rejected and killed Christ.39 The homology between this kind of theology and the novel legislation of Theodosius hardly seems coincidental, however loose the historical connection may have been. Certainly, theologies such as the one I have just sketched were part and parcel of the Christian imperial and cultural hegemony under whose impact late antique Judaism was produced. In the final chapter of his book, Schwartz analyzes the compositions of Yannai and other early payetanim, the virtuosi of the liturgical poetry of the sixth-century Palestinian synagogue. His reading of certain piyyutim—the poetic works of the payetanim—suggests a possible relationship between their thought and late antique Christian anti-Jewish theology. Schwartz emphasizes the rather morbid character of many of the most artistically accomplished piyutim, quoting at length two poems that lament the downfall of Israel. One of them explicitly contrasts the wretched state of the Jews with the dominance of ‘‘Edom,’’ that is, of Christian Rome.40 Schwartz goes so far as to diagnose in the latter a case of Jewish internalization of Christian anti-Judaism: ‘‘Some Jews had unhappily internalized Christian triumphalism and believed, as the payyetan Yannai put it, that the lamps of Edom (Rome, i.e. Byzantium) burned brightly while those of Zion were about to flicker out.’’41 But he never discusses the structure of that ‘‘Christian triumphalism,’’ or the specifics of its view of the Jews. Contemporary Christian theology assigned a specific theological significance to Jewish dispersion and oppression. Similarly, the piyutim Schwartz cites not only depict Jewish suffering but attempt to extract religious meaning from what they so poignantly describe. The relationship was perhaps more than coincidental. Thus, we must recognize that the period covered by Jerome’s career

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as an exegete, from the Council of Constantinople in 381, which canonized the views of the fathers of Nicea fifty years before, to the reign of the pious Theodosius II, which began in 402, represents a crucial watershed in the religious history of the Roman world. Before this period, Christian emperors had largely refrained from cooperating with the more ambitious schemes of bishops eager to impose their own party’s theological views on the Church as a whole. Instead, they had sought compromise. During the period when Jerome produced his mature works, emperors increasingly provided legal and even military sanction for sharp-edged views of Christian communal identity and theological correctness. To these newly hardened understandings of the boundaries of the ‘‘in-group’’ corresponded new constructions of its various others—heretics, pagans, and Jews. This attempt, on the part of a generation of Christian leaders and the emperors who backed them, to define religious identity in terms of closed rather than blurred categories must be understood holistically, as a system made up of multiple terms constructed in relation to each other. The production of the category of ‘‘pagan’’ as a concrete social and religious identity by Christian writers and Christian legislators led rapidly to the decline of pagan religion, and eventually to its total extinction. The redefinition of the category of the Jew in new terms did not lead to Jewish extinction within Roman domains: the theologians who articulated it did not intend it to do so. Instead, as Schwartz documents, the Jews were increasingly marginalized in late Roman society, while their internal institutions and ritual life underwent profound and often highly creative transformation. It is against this background that Jerome’s representation of his Jewish teachers can be best understood, and only in this context that we have any hope of appreciating what they have to teach us today.

Jerome, the Hebraica Veritas, and the Production of the ‘‘Jew’’ in Christian Discourse The cultural field in which Jerome’s contact with Jewish biblical culture took place was, therefore, structured, even defined, by historically specific relations of power. At the same time, the work of power in defining solid, stable, non-overlapping Jewish and Christian groups—or even individual identities—was far from complete. Jerome himself was to play a major role in that cultural project. During the thirty-five years he spent at Bethlehem, until his death as a very old man in 419 or 420, he produced a body of work that contributed greatly to the emergence of a new Christian discourse of the Jew, and to its persistence in the Latin West for at least a millennium. In order to gather the Jewish materials he used, Jerome must have had to infringe the boundaries—intellectual,

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social, and even religious—between the two communities. Paradoxically, the ways that he described Jewish biblical learning and deployed it in his own exegesis served not to blur those boundaries but to define and solidify them. During the years he spent at Rome in the early 380s, as a prote´ge´ of the city’s militantly Nicene bishop, Damasus, and spiritual adviser to several aristocratic female ascetics, Jerome had already begun to articulate a program of Christian biblical scholarship founded on the possibility of access to the Hebrew Bible in its original language, and on the appropriation of Jewish biblical learning. After his relocation to Palestine, he produced a series of scholarly works based on that program. At first, his scholarship was experimental, even incoherent, but eventually his efforts bore fruit in an impressively unified body of work. Chief among the products of Jerome’s mature career were his commentaries on the Prophets, written between 393 and the end of his life, and his translations of the Hebrew Bible from the original, made between 391 and 405. Every page of both the translations and the commentaries makes clear how much Jerome had gained from contemporary Jewish biblical learning. Furthermore, in his exegetical writings and elsewhere, Jerome continually refers to his contacts with learned Jews and to their role as his teachers.42 The commentaries on the Prophets reveal particularly clearly how Jerome constructed the figure of ‘‘the Jew’’ within the interpretive universe of his writings. Unlike much commentary literature from antiquity, Jerome’s treatments of the Hebrew Prophets are self-conscious literary works. Despite an appearance of looseness, their underlying organization is coherent and consistent. Jerome explicitly presents the interpretive material that he collects as second hand, derived either from earlier Christian commentators writing in Greek or from Jewish informants. His major contribution to his own exegesis is precisely the manner in which he deploys the material that he drew from the rich heritage of existing biblical learning. His fundamental organizing principle was the division of his material into two senses, the literal or historical and the allegorical or spiritual. Though his terminology for the two senses is loose, their content, presentation, and especially their relation to each other are remarkably consistent. In principle, for each biblical passage that he cites, Jerome presents two quasi-autonomous interpretations. First, he gives a literal interpretation—for difficult passages, a close paraphrase— and an explanation of the passage’s historical referent. Then, he presents an allegorical interpretation, often quite remote from the first sense. However, the spiritual meaning of the text is not completely independent of its literal meaning and historical reference. Rather, these first interpretations limit the possibilities of allegorical exegesis, so that

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Jerome will reshape or even reject allegorical readings found in his sources that conflict with his literal and historical interpretations.43 Jerome explicitly and consistently identifies his two primary classes of interpretation with two separate traditions of exegesis: one Jewish—the interpretation iuxta Hebraeos—and the other Christian. In Jerome’s rhetorical division of his materials, the Jews possess the domain of the literal and historical senses, while the spiritual truth of the Prophets is the preserve of the Christians. However, this division does not reflect accurately the sources from which he drew his exegesis. Jerome’s allegorical interpretation derives largely from Origen and Didymus of Alexandria but also includes material not found in those Greek writers but paralleled in midrashic literature.44 Conversely, his interpretation iuxta Hebraeos subsumes a disparate array of exegetical materials. These include textcritical comments, interpretations of prophecy in terms of the history of the states of Israel and Judah during the period when the prophets themselves were active, and a startling quantity of apocalyptic speculation, among other things.45 Crucially, Jerome’s textual criticism—the central component of his literal interpretation—seems to have depended, in large part, on the research tools prepared by his great predecessor, Origen. Jerome relied in particular on the Hexapla, Origen’s six-column Bible, which juxtaposed the Hebrew original to its Greek transliteration and a series of Greek translations, including the Septuagint, which had become the authoritative Old Testament of the Greek-speaking Church.46 He also had recourse to Origen’s recension of the Septuagint, which was furnished with critical signs marking places where that Greek version differed from the Hebrew original. Yet Jerome never explicitly attributes the material that he drew from the products of Origen’s vast labors to their true source. Instead, he consistently places textual criticism within the sphere of Jewish learning and is eager, when the occasion presents itself, to draw attention to textual insights he had acquired from his Jewish teachers.47 Jerome’s historical exegesis, similarly, seems to be of mixed origins. It includes many interpretations paralleled in Jewish literature from Late Antiquity, in particular those which connect biblical prophecy with the history of the Jews under Roman rule. Jerome must have learned some of these interpretations from contemporary Jewish sources. Others he probably used at second hand, culling them from what Origen had learned from his own Jewish contacts in third-century Caesarea.48 Many other historical interpretations are essentially intrabiblical, correlating prophetic texts with the biblical histories. This material may well preserve Greek Christian scholarship now lost to us. In fact, it seems likely that much of what Jerome represents as the historical insight of his Jew-

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ish teachers draws upon a koine´ of Syro-Palestinian biblical interpretation, largely orally produced and circulated, that was never the exclusive property of either Jews or Christians, much less of any particular faction within either religion. Whether Jerome came to know any one interpretation from a lost Christian text, from a Jewish informant, from a Jewish convert to Christianity, or simply from observing the variegated religious practices of late antique Palestine, we are unlikely to be able to determine with finality.49 What is clear, however, is that despite the heterogeneity of this body of interpretations, Jerome deliberately chose to impose upon it a single rubric, that of the sense iuxta Hebraeos.50 Alongside these textual and historical materials, Jerome attributes a third major category of interpretive traditions to Jewish sources: millenarian interpretations of prophecy that predict a coming kingdom of God on earth. Unlike the two former bodies of information, however, he regards this strand of exegesis as worthless, even repulsive. Yet despite repeated expressions of distaste, Jerome continually cites these interpretations, which he attributes to Jews, and sometimes also to ‘‘Judaizing’’ Christians. The place of these materials in the schema of his commentaries is hard to explain. First of all, his obsessive interest in exegeses that he considers not merely mistaken but both ludicrous and pernicious is curious. Second, the attribution of this mode of exegesis to Christian ‘‘Judaizers’’ as well as to Jews threatens to disrupt Jerome’s own carefully constructed division of exegetical tradition into two separate and complementary streams. Finally, while there are certainly extensive areas of overlap between the eschatological speculations that Jerome attributes to ‘‘the Jews’’ and materials transmitted in Jewish literature of Late Antiquity, there are also clear connections—which Jerome occasionally emphasizes—between the kinds of millenarian interpretations he decries and major strands of Christian eschatological interpretation.51 A passage from Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel, in which he cites millenarian interpretations of Ez 16.55, provides a particularly interesting example of the phenomenon. The verse under comment reads: ‘‘As for your sisters, Sodom and her daughters shall return to their former state, Samaria and her daughters shall return to their former state, and you and your daughters shall return to your former state.’’52 In context, ‘‘restoration’’ is actually punitive: the prophet is attacking Jerusalem’s idolatry, the cause of her destruction, and threatening her with the future mockery of her ‘‘sisters,’’ the equally fallen Sodom and Samaria. In the first interpretation that Jerome cites, the verse has been taken in isolation, so that it can be read in a positive sense. He writes, The Jews, among the other myths and endless genealogies and ravings which they fabricate, even fantasize about the meaning of this passage: [they believe

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that] when their Christ comes (whom we know to be Antichrist), and at the time of his thousand year reign, Sodom will be restored to her former state, so that it will be like the Paradise of God and like the land of Egypt, and Samaria will receive back her original happiness, so that they will return from Assyria to the land of Judea—for we read that the ten tribes were captured by Phul and Shalmanezer and Tiglathpilezer, the kings of the Assyrians, and unto this day are captives there—at that time, Jerusalem will be built up, and all her daughters, that is the cities and towns and forts that in the future will be under her power, will flower as once they did flower, and Jerusalem herself will be constructed from gold and silver and precious stones.53

Having rejected this interpretation, he gives his own exegesis, which seems more like a refutation of the ‘‘Jewish’’ reading he has just cited than an attempt to understand the verse of Ezekiel: ‘‘We, however, relinquishing their perfect knowledge to the judgment of God, or rather confessing with certainty, that after the second coming of the Lord our Savior there will be nothing that is humble, nothing that is of the earth, rather maintain that the heavenly kingdoms which first were promised in the Gospel, are entirely completed in the existence of the Church, and are fulfilled every day.’’54 Most of the elements that appear in this passage are common to the ‘‘Jewish’’ apocalyptic interpretations that Jerome cites: the reference to the thousand year reign of a (false) Christ, the hope for a physical restoration of Jerusalem, which will be built of ‘‘gold and silver and precious stones,’’ and even the terms of condemnation that open the passage, which Jerome draws from 1 Timothy and Titus. In other, similar passages, he fills in further elements of this eschatological myth. In the messianic kingdom, the Jewish Temple and its sacrificial rites will be restored, the Law will be literally observed, and the just will receive their reward in the form of never-ending feasting and drinking, while marriage, sexuality, and reproduction will continue as before. Elsewhere, Jerome emphasizes far more strongly that these expectations are shared by Jews and some Christians, whom he terms ‘‘Judaizers.’’ Indeed, he attributes similar interpretations to Christian readers of the Gospel of Matthew, whom he accuses of hoping for a ‘‘thousand year kingdom’’ of wine-bibbing and drunkenness, on the basis of their reading of Mt 26.29.55 In certain particularly revealing passages, Jerome attributes the fullblown millenarian program to a list of surprisingly orthodox-sounding Christian writers, including Tertullian, Irenaeus, Victorinus of Poetovio, Lactantius, and Jerome’s own teacher, Apollinaris of Laodicea.56 While Apollinaris was a millenarian of sorts, and some of the other Christian figures whom Jerome lumps together with him had strong eschatological orientations, the identification of these figures with ‘‘Jews’’ and

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‘‘Judaizers’’ is puzzling.57 Finally, and most perplexingly, Jerome articulates as an exegetical principle the avoidance of millenarianism, ‘‘lest we be compelled to Judaize.’’58 His language here alludes to that of Galatians 2, where Paul accuses Peter of ‘‘compelling the Gentiles to Judaize.’’ By invoking this primal crisis of the church of the Apostles, the allusion intensifies, rather than diluting, the potential threat Jerome implies: unless exegetical vigilance is exercised, the Christian reader may involuntarily ‘‘Judaize.’’ In its original setting, Paul’s concern had nothing to do with eschewing eschatological speculation but rather with Peter’s choice of whom to eat with. Jerome has imposed his own sense on the passage without regard to its context. What are we to make of these proliferating accusations of millenarianism? Why is it this material, in particular, that strains at the boundaries of Jerome’s two carefully defined exegetical traditions, mixing Jew and Gentile in an indiscriminate mass, even threatening the Christian scholar himself with creeping Judaization? I suggest that the key to the entire puzzle lies in the emphasis Jerome places on the carnality of his targets’ hopes for the messianic future. Remaining on this earth, they will eat, drink, and be merry; they will marry and be given in marriage. For Jerome, a committed ascetic and zealous polemicist for his chosen way of life, such a view of the eschaton was repellent. It was also, in Jerome’s conception, intrinsically Jewish, no matter who professed it. This feature, I think, explains why Jerome included so much of this material in his commentaries, only to reject and ridicule it. For within the paradigm that Jerome created for his commentaries, the Jews’ expectation of a carnal redemption marked off Jewish interpretation as a whole as itself carnal. Thus the citation and rejection of these interpretations allowed Jerome to establish an appropriate distance between himself and his Jewish sources. Through his treatment of this material, he signaled to his reader that he was no mere dupe of the Jews but rather the master of their arcane biblical science. Furthermore, the label of ‘‘Judaizer’’ allowed him to stigmatize non- or anti-ascetical readings of the biblical texts, whether Jewish or Christian. In the final analysis, the apparent disruption that this material presents within the carefully ordered structure of Jerome’s commentaries lapses back into the basic duality that Jerome has imposed upon his material. Even Christians with whom Jerome disagrees can be ‘‘Jews,’’ and as such, in his schematization of humanity in its relation to Scripture, they have their place. Jerome’s explicit references to learned Jews, and to his own Jewish teachers, bear out the suggestion that his self-fashioning as an exemplary ascetic was at stake in how he represented Jewish biblical learning. Not only was Jewish interpretation carnal: so were its exponents. Some of Jerome’s passing references to learned Jews seem relatively neutral.

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He displays his knowledge of the terminology of the Jewish intellectual world, referring to deuterosis—the Greek translation of mishnah—and remarking, ‘‘They call their learned men sophoi, that is, ‘the wise.’ And when on certain days they expound their traditions, their disciples are accustomed to say, Hoi sophoi deuterousin, that is, ‘the wise teach the traditions.’’’59 Echoes of the language of rabbinic literature in this passage are hard to deny, however we might account for the similarity. Other passages, however, reveal that for Jerome, this technical terminology had strongly negative connotations. Thus, for example, he refers to the deuteroseis of the Jewish sages as ‘‘excrement’’ and interprets the names Hillel and Shammai as ‘‘destroyer’’ and ‘‘impious.’’60 The essential carnality—and thus the repulsiveness—of Jewish learning come across most vividly in a passage from a letter that Jerome wrote to the Gallic lady Algasia, who had sent him a list of eleven exegetical questions. The tenth concerned a passage of the letter to the Colossians, including the verse ‘‘Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch’? All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings’’ (Col 2.20). Apropos of this text, Jerome launches into a vituperative polemic against Jewish observance of tradition. His accusations against the Jews are sensational, even bizarre, and clearly intended to disgust his readers. He opens his diatribe with a florid description of Jewish practices related to menstrual purity: How many are the traditions of the Pharisees, which today they call deuteroseis, and how foolish their stories, I refuse to recount. For . . . many of them are so vile that I would blush to tell them. Yet I will repeat one example, to bring ignominy upon an enemy race. The following foul task is delegated to the wisest leaders of the synagogues: if they cannot discern with their eyes whether the blood of a virgin or a menstruant woman is pure or impure, they taste it to be sure.61

The conjunction of blood, sex, and eating must have been almost too much for Jerome’s ascetic Christian readership, for whom he here purveys a distilled essence of the foulness of Jewish carnality. That these Jews undertake, as if commanded, to touch and taste what would normally be forbidden—rather than, as the apostle wrote, prohibiting ‘‘handling, tasting, and touching’’—merely drives home the artificiality of Jerome’s association of this story with the text he is purportedly explaining. What follows is an anticlimax, though its substance is more theologically relevant. Jerome adds that, for example, the Jews justify their modification of the Sabbath laws to allow travel over distances of up to two thousand feet by invoking the traditions handed down from ‘‘Barachibas and Symeon and Helles, our teachers.’’ In typical Christian fashion, he argues that the Jews’ adherence to human teachings in place of the com-

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mandments of God indicts them, and that the impossibility of observing the commandment as written proves that it was intended to be observed not carnally but spiritually.62 This passage forges a link between Jewish carnality in its most graphic form and Jewish halakhic exegesis of any kind. The account of the synagogue leaders’ willingness to taste menstrual blood justifies the unwillingness of Jerome’s hypothetical Christian interlocutor to accept anything but literal observance of the Law from his Jewish victims. Just as Christians who could be represented as subscribing to earthly millenarian expectations could, finally, be reduced to ‘‘Jews,’’ so the Jews themselves, by virtue of their preoccupation with, indeed their immersion in, the flesh at its foulest, can be constrained from offering interpretations of their scriptures that are anything but ‘‘literal.’’ Furthermore, in its deliberate flaunting of ascetic sensibilities, this passage sets up an implicit opposition between the figure of the learned Jew and that of the monk, as representatives of fundamentally incompatible values. What, then, of Jerome’s own Jewish teachers? His references to them do not invoke the repulsive carnality of the passage just discussed. However, some of them use other means to describe the men to whom they refer as representatives of a value system diametrically opposed to Christian asceticism. In the preface to his translation of Job from the Hebrew, Jerome refers to a Jewish expert from Lydda who assisted him in studying the text for a considerable fee.63 In another passage, from a letter to his supporters Pammachius and Oceanus at Rome, Jerome defends his studies with a Jewish teacher named Baranina: ‘‘At Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with what labor, and at what a price, I had Baranina as my teacher by night! For he feared the Jews and presented himself to me in the guise of another Nicodemus.’’64 The passage presents many oddities: if Baranina was to Jerome ‘‘another Nicodemus,’’ was Jerome to Baranina another Jesus Christ?65 Did Jerome, then, teach Christianity to the Jew who came to him by night, for fear of his coreligionists?66 Whatever the implication of this allusion may be, one thing is clear: as Jerome tells it, the exchange between Jerome and his teacher was not simply one of learning for learning but involved Jerome’s paying his teacher handsomely. In both these passages, Jerome’s imputation of cupidity to his Jewish teachers serves to oppose them categorically to Christian monks, like Jerome himself. One might ask where Jerome got the money that he spent on Jewish instruction—but he himself does not go out of his way to tell us. Jerome’s deployment of Jewish learning, then, and his descriptions of its exponents, construct not a bridge but a wall between ‘‘the classic Jewish culture’’ and Latin Christendom. Even when Jerome seems to blur the boundary between Jewish and Christian readings of the Bible, he

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reinscribes the identification of Jewish interpretation with a ‘‘carnal’’ literalism. Just as he seems to admire the learning of Jewish sages, he presents to his readers’ prurient curiosity a sensationalized version of Jewish customs, precisely engineered to offend ascetic Christian sensibilities. He repeatedly describes his Jewish teachers as offering their learning for a price—and a substantial one at that. Thus his polemical construction of the learned Jew, in its appeal to its objects’ essential carnality— whether expressed through their hope for an earthly redemption, their obsession with bodily purity, or their willingness to sell their wisdom for hard cash—implicitly reflects on its other, the Christian monk. Jerome’s particular version of the Jew, that is, served both to facilitate his appropriation of Jewish learning and, by contrast, to legitimate his entire way of life.

Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers: Reconstructions of Jewish-Christian Relations in Late Antiquity and Their Limits What, then, can we hope to learn from Jerome’s Jewish teachers? A close comparison of Jerome’s works with Jewish texts from antiquity has yielded, and will continue to yield, numerous apparent parallels, worth pursuing on their own terms. But the human tableau of Jerome at work with his Jewish teacher, the two of them bent over their Bible, seems to recede indefinitely behind Jerome’s own rhetoric. This fact in itself, however, has something of great importance to teach us. On the one hand, modern scholars would do well to avoid imposing their own essentialist constructs of Jewish and Christian identity upon their sources. On the other hand, the production of such constructs—by representatives of every group involved—was a virtual industry in the period under consideration here, as it has been throughout most of Western history. More specifically, the last decades of the fourth century and the first decades of the fifth saw a new effort on the part of Christians to define themselves, and their others, in essentialized terms. Jerome’s appropriation of Jewish exegesis was part and parcel of this project. His representation—both implicitly through the structure of his commentaries and explicitly in his descriptions of learned Jews—of Jewish exegesis as confined to the realm of the carnal was just such an essentialism. As such, it was by definition a misrepresentation, as every essentialism misrepresents the unruliness of reality. But it was a powerful misrepresentation: both rhetorically powerful for Jerome’s audience and backed by power in the form of episcopal influence and, potentially, imperial force. Jerome’s career was a checkered one, often marked by the opposition of other articulate and influential Christians. As many scholars have noted, his Jewish studies brought him in for a great deal of suspicion.

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Furthermore, Jerome seems to have inspired no followers who imitated his program of study. No Hebrew scholars emerged from his monastery to carry on his exegetical labors. But this latter failing, if such it was, is probably not to be attributed to Jerome’s personal limitations, or to his failure to persuade his contemporaries. Rather, the very nature of Jerome’s appropriation of Jewish biblical learning seems intended, whether consciously or not, to preclude imitation. Jerome himself, in the form of his own texts—in particular his translations iuxta Hebraeos— took the place of the Jewish teachers from whom he had learned so much. We have before us, in truth, a case of cultural appropriation that threatened to ‘‘kill the transmitted.’’ On a more general level, Jerome’s example warns against a global rejection of ‘‘essentialism’’ that refuses to distinguish between modern scholarly essentialisms—to be avoided—and the past essentialisms that shaped the history we attempt to understand, which are central to our subject matter. Jerome, a monk and scholar, often besieged by accusations of heresy, perhaps wielded little power over the situation ‘‘on the ground’’ in the Palestine of his day. But the contribution that he made to a particular Christian construction of the Jew as other was to have a millennial impact. The very fact that he could learn so much from Jews and still find them so repellent likely served to stand in the way of real intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians living after him. At the same time, we should not take Jerome too seriously. He was, after all, a product of his times. If he could not speak of a learned Jew in terms of respect, that is not to say that a different relationship was not possible for his predecessor, Origen, a century and a half earlier. Nor, certainly, does Jerome’s influence continue to weigh upon us as it did upon generations of his heirs. For categories of identity do not, in the end, refer to essences, perpetuating themselves across the generations by an intrinsic process of reproduction. Instead, if they are to be maintained, it must be by the investment of much labor. Those laborious efforts by which essentialisms are produced, reproduced, and maintained as social realities over time, as well as the ways that they are resisted and ultimately replaced, refashioned, or rejected, ought to be primary objects of scholarship on the history of religion.

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Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context David Stern

No biblical book’s ancient interpretation is more extensively documented than that of the Song of Songs. Nor is there another biblical book that has so clearly been subjected to so many different exegetical approaches. In the case of Jewish exegesis in the late antique period alone, one can count at least three distinctly different exegetical approaches to the book: (1) the explicitly rabbinic midrashic approach— or more accurately, approaches—as represented first in sporadic exegeses recorded in the various tannaitic collections of midrash as well as in other classic rabbinic works, and later in the several amoraic anthologies like Song of Songs Rabbah (Shir ha-Shirim rabbah, hereafter ShirR) devoted specifically to the exegesis of the Song of Songs;1 (2) the far more continuous if not systematic historical allegorization of the Song found in the Aramaic Targum;2 and (3) hints toward an ancient tradition of esoteric interpretation of the Song that once existed though it no longer survives in any particular literary document.3 While the literary documents containing the first two traditions of interpretation are all relatively late—from the sixth through the eighth centuries at the earliest—it is likely that specific interpretation of the Song in these collections may go back as early as the first or second centuries c.e. in Roman Palestine. Not coincidentally, an analogous Christian tradition of interpretation of the Song is explicitly attested for second- to third-century Greek-speaking Palestine.4 To one extent or another, nearly all these traditions assume that the Song is about something other than its plain or obvious meaning as an exchange between two human lovers who express their desire, longing, and praise for each other. The origins of this so-called allegorical interpretation of the poem have been the subject of inquiry virtually since the beginning of modern scholarship on the Song. The similarities and

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differences between the various ‘‘allegorical’’ approaches—both within the Jewish world (for example, between the midrashic and targumic traditions) and between Jewish and Christian allegorical interpretations— have been extensively investigated, with special attention focused upon specific exegeses of the same or very similar verses in the two traditions with an eye to establishing their relationship to each other.5 To date, no consensus, let alone agreement, on this issue has emerged, but all these studies have assumed a basic comparability between the different interpretive approaches. More recently, however, some scholars have questioned this very assumption, arguing that the two exegetical approaches—the midrashic, on the one hand, and the allegorical, on the other—are founded upon entirely different hermeneutics. In the words of Daniel Boyarin, the most prominent exponent of this position, ‘‘reading on the highest level in midrash is intertextual reading, the connecting of texts to the ultimate Text’’—namely, Torah—while in allegoresis it is ‘‘the connecting of texts to abstract ideas.’’6 In this view, the two types of reading are quintessentially different, not even to be compared. For both groups of scholars, more has been at stake than merely the history of interpretation of the Song of Songs. In the first case, debates over the priority of Jewish and Christian exegesis—namely, which interpretation was the first, if not the original, and which one influenced the other—have clearly reflected more ancient rivalries about the originality and belatedness of the respective religious traditions out of which the interpretations emerged. In the second case, the essential difference if not opposition between the two modes of interpretation, Jewish midrash and Christian allegory, has become the fulcrum for distinguishing between the two religious traditions themselves, with hermeneutics becoming a virtual trope, as it were, for ontology—Christian allegory embodying one type of religious being, rabbinic midrash another.7 My aim in this essay is not to resolve the basic contradiction between these two conceptualizations, let alone the truth or utility of their respective methodological stances. Rather, I hope to use this occasion to explore some of the issues involved in trying to ‘‘do’’ comparative exegesis between separate exegetical and religious traditions. In exploring this larger project, I will use the term ‘‘allegory’’ in the broadest sense to include any type of interpretation that assumes the text under analysis to mean something other than what it says, but I will also allow for the possibility that there may be incompatible forms of allegory—for example, philosophical allegory on the one hand and midrashic allegory on the other. I will begin by exploring the history of scholarship on the origins of the so-called allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs and then focus upon two particular areas of controversy, one having to do with the particular nature of the interpretations found in rabbinic midrash and their relationship to other Jewish modes of interpretation, par-

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ticularly esoteric ones, and the other having to do with the relationship between rabbinic interpretation of the Song of Songs and that of Origen, the greatest of all early Christian exegetes of the Song of Songs. As I hope to show, the categories of midrash and allegory, or of the literal and the allegorical (including midrashic allegory), may not be either the most productive or insightful lens through which to view ancient biblical interpretation, and other categories, like the exoteric and the esoteric, which touch upon the practice of reading (e.g., its purpose and function, intended audience, modes of presentation) may be more illuminating than their purely hermeneutic counterparts. Exactly when ancient interpretation of the Song began is not clear. While there are a few scattered possible allusions and references to the Song in Second Temple literature and in early Jewish literature following the destruction, no full-fledged documentation of exegesis of the book survives.8 Nonetheless, it seems likely that by the second century c.e. there had emerged a tradition of interpretation close to what we call the allegorical approach insofar as it assumed the Song to be more than merely a poem expressing the yearnings of love of a young woman and her sometimes absent, sometimes present lover; according to this reading, the true subject of the poem was the mutual expression of love between God and Israel (however the latter is defined, as either Judaism or Christianity). Where, when, and how did this allegorical understanding begin? Essentially, two views have been proposed. The first sees the origins of the allegorical approach as connected somehow to the canonization of the Song within the Hebrew Bible. Although scholars no longer believe that the Hebrew Bible was canonized through a formal decision or at an institutionalized conclave along the lines of the canonization process that took place in the early Church, there are nonetheless scattered rabbinic statements that reflect a certain ambivalence or unease about the place of the Song in the canon—along with one or two other biblical books, Ecclesiastes in particular—and that possibly indicate that there was still discussion about its status as late as the first or second century. 9 According to these views, the allegorical interpretation arose as a response to that ambivalence, presumably one that focused upon the apparently ‘‘sexual’’ (in contrast to spiritual) character of the song as an exchange between two human lovers.10 The passage most often cited as a source for that ambivalence is the discussion of ‘‘books that impurify the hands’’ in mYad 3.5—a text to which I will return shortly—but the most explicit statement of the rabbis’ ambivalence is to be found in a far less frequently cited passage in

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the amoraic collection, Avot de-Rabbi Natan Version A (henceforth ARNA; ed. Schechter, 2): Be deliberate (metunim) in judgement. What is that? This teaches that a person should take time in rendering judgment; for whoever takes time in rendering judgment is unruffled in judgment. As it is said, ‘‘These too are the proverbs of Solomon (mishle shlomoh) that the men of Hezekiah, the king of Judah, copied (he‘etiku)’’ (Prov 25.1). [No!] It is not that they copied them but that they held them in abeyance (himtinu). Abba Shaul said: It does not mean that they held them in abeyance but that they interpreted. Originally, they11 used to say, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes were hidden (genuzim hayu, i.e., removed from public circulation), for since they were held to be stories (meshalot) and not part of the Holy Writings, [the religious authorities] arose and hid them (veganzu, removed them from circulation); [and so they remained] until the men of Hezekiah came and interpreted them.12

The passage then goes on to quote the so-called allegory of the strange woman from Prov 7.6–20; Song 7.11, Eccl 11.9, and Song 7.11. All these passages speak explicitly about either carnal desire or sensual pleasure. At the outset it should be said that the ARNA passage is problematic. The ‘‘men of Hezekiah’’ is that group of sages who lived during the time of Hezekiah, king of Judah, and who are said in Prov 25.1 to have copied (he‘etiku)—according to ARNA, either ‘‘held in abeyance’’ or ‘‘interpreted’’—the meshalim of Solomon; in bBB 14b–15a, this same group is said to have first ‘‘written’’ (katav) the three texts usually attributed to Solomon, with ‘‘writing’’ probably meaning not ‘‘composed’’ but either ‘‘transcribed’’ or ‘‘committed to writing from oral tradition.’’13 Our passage, however, does not fully clarify how the men of Hezekiah interpreted the texts so as to make them more suitable for public circulation. Further, as Leiman has shown, the term ganaz is usually applied to canonical, sacred works that are ‘‘hidden away’’ or removed from public circulation either because there is something theologically or substantively problematic about them or because they are no longer physically or materially fit to circulate publicly. In this case, however, the text seems to suggest that their status as Holy Writings (ketuvim) was in doubt because they were thought be meshalot, a term which here seems to mean stories or fictions, and (as the scriptural passages cited suggest) inappropriately erotic or hedonistic ones at that.14 Their problem, in other words, was one of content and apparent meaning. This is not quite the same anxiety as the one voiced in the oft-quoted denunciation attributed to Akiba, ‘‘The one who trills (hamena‘ne‘a kolo, lit. sings in a tremulous voice) the Song of Songs in the banquet-houses and makes it into a kind of song (zemer) has no place in world-to-come’’ (tSan 12.10).15 Akiba’s statement should be understood as a condemnation not of a literal or carnal reading per se but of a reading practice, or mispractice—

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namely, the inappropriate use of the Song as a drinking song sung in vulgar places like banquet houses.16 Even so, Akiba’s anxiety must have derived from an acknowledgment that there was something about the Song that could lead to its abuse in this fashion. To this extent, both these passages point to an ambivalence about the Song due to its apparently sexual character; there can be no doubt that its ancient readers would have been as fully attuned to the erotic possibilities of the Song as are their modern counterparts. Nonetheless, it is significant that in ancient Jewish tradition there is little evidence—apart from these two references—to support the contention that a literal reading of the Song was considered particularly threatening. (In this, as we will see, there may have been a very important difference between early Jewish and Christian readings.) Further, as the late Gerson Cohen remarked, if the Song of Songs was truly looked upon as an inappropriately sexual poem about human love, how could the rabbis in favor of its canonization have convinced their opponents or themselves ‘‘into regarding a piece of erotica as genuine religious literature?’’17 The wide acceptance of the allegorical reading may have helped secure the Song’s place in the canon, but it does not really explain how that reading itself emerged. A second explanation for the origins of the allegorical interpretation was advanced by Cohen himself.18 In brief, Cohen argued that the understanding of the poem as a love song between God and his chosen nation went back to the very formation of the Song as a composition; in this sense, it might even be called the Song’s ‘‘original’’ (if not literal) meaning, though Cohen never said as much. The motive for this understanding, according to Cohen, was a need to fill an important gap in the biblical corpus itself. Beginning with the Pentateuch and continuing through the Prophets, as Cohen pointed out, various biblical authors had repeatedly represented Israel’s failure to obey God’s law as an act of marital infidelity and sexual betrayal: thus, Israel is said repeatedly to have forsaken her one true husband, God; to have gone awhoring after foreign be‘alim, literally husbands; and thus to have broken the inviolable bonds of her marriage contract, namely, the covenant.19 As Cohen pointed out, this relationship is figured numerous times in the biblical corpus, but almost exclusively in negative terms, and nowhere in its positive, founding sense. It was this absent positive figure, Cohen argued, that the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs provided as a dialogue of the mutual longing and desire that Israel and God express for each other. According to this view, the allegorical interpretation was not a secondary formation, an interpretation that ‘‘followed,’’ as it were, an earlier literal or carnal reading of the poem but a reading that was itself part of

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the poem’s literal, or surface, meaning from the moment that the book became part of the Bible. As Morton Bloomfield pointed out long ago, there are numerous literary works whose ‘‘literal’’ meaning is a figurative one.20 The play between the human and the spiritual was not a hermeneutical move from one level of meaning to another, let alone an apologetic strategy, but the very substance of the poem’s imaginative universe. Cohen’s argument for the original implication of the literal and spiritual readings of the poem is borne out by Harold Fish’s observation that the language of the Song seems to call attention to its symbolizing, selfconsciously referential aspirations.21 Not only the abundance of metaphors and similes in the poem generally but the very presence of verses like Song 6.4—‘‘Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah/ comely as Jerusalem’’—lead the reader into making the small leap from seeing the Shulamite as being as lovely ‘‘as Jerusalem’’ to seeing the Shulamite as Jerusalem. What Fish calls ‘‘the pressure of the text itself ’’ creates ‘‘the allegorical imperative.’’22 This pressure, it should be added, is not unique or limited to the Song of Songs—it is present elsewhere in the Bible—but it is felt especially strongly in this book. This allegorical imperative would seem to be one of the two major determinants of early Jewish interpretation of the Song. The other major determinant is the characteristic rabbinic tendency (to use Michael Fishbane’s terminology) to ‘‘historicize the non-historical’’ sections of the Bible—that is, to connect all ahistorical, abstract, or uncontextualized verses in the Bible to the overall biblical narrative, particularly as found in the Pentateuch, and thus to unify the entirety of Tanakh within this supernarrative.23 Like the allegorical imperative, the rabbis’ tendency to historicize the nonhistorical is not unique or specific to the interpretation of the Song of Songs; it becomes a motive for exegesis wherever the rabbis find gnomic, uncontextualized verses, and especially so in ahistorical books of the Bible like Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, to name only a few. As a corollary to this observation, it should be added that rabbinic interpretations of the Song of Songs are not essentially different from rabbinic interpretations of verses from other books: they tend to be similarly atomistic, ad hoc, and difficult to systematize under any unifying approach or method. Indeed, the unexceptionality of many early rabbinic interpretations of the Song of Songs is perhaps the most striking feature of its early Jewish interpretation.24 I will cite three brief examples: 1. Sifre ba-Midbar (Sifre Numbers) Pinh.as §139): On Nm 27.17, a verse that concludes Moses’s plea to God (after he has been told that he will die before entering the land of Canaan) to appoint a leader in his place ‘‘so that the Lord’s community may not be like sheep that have no

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shepherd,’’ the midrash cites Song 1.7, ‘‘Tell me, you whom I love so well; Where do you pasture your sheep? Where do you rest them at noon? Let me not be as one who wraps himself up (ke‘otyah, ‘‘strays’’ [JPS]) [besides the flocks of your fellows],’’ and interprets the latter verse as an exchange between Moses and God, with Moses serving as the equivalent of the female figure in the Song and God as the male beloved counterpart. This localized allegory is unusual but not entirely exceptional since Moses is, after all, a kind of symbolic representative of the larger community of Israel. The exposition of a series of verses to create a dialogue is a common midrashic procedure. 2. In ARNA, chapter 20, ‘‘Don’t stare at me because I am swarthy, because the sun has gazed upon me. My mother’s sons quarreled with me, they made me guard the vineyards; my own vineyard I did not guard’’ (Song 1.5–6), is interpreted multiple times. The phrase ‘‘my mother’s sons quarreled with me’’ is said to refer to (a) the assemblies of Judah who shook off the yoke of the Holy One, and made a creature of flesh and blood; (b) Datan and Aviram, who informed against Moses when he slew his father-in-law; (c) Moses at the time he fled to Midian; and (d) the spies who spread an evil report of the land and brought death upon Israel. Again, these types of petirot or applications are common in midrash as a typical technique for historicizing the nonhistorical.25 3. Another way of historicizing the nonhistorical is found in a passage in Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Bah.odesh 1 (Lauterbach 2:193–95), which relates an anecdote about R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, who, in the aftermath of the destruction, saw a girl picking barley-corn out of the excrements of a horse and applied to her Song 1.8, ‘‘If you do not know, O fairest of women, go follow the tracks of the sheep and graze your kids by the tents of the shepherds.’’ In what is essentially a form of prognostic interpretation, R. Yohanan reads the verse as a prophecy literally fulfilled in the person of the young woman. Scripture here is invoked literally to lend dignity, and meaning, to the woman’s desperately victimized state, and the hapless woman herself becomes emblematic of the people of Israel more generally.26 Again, such an application—sometimes preceded by the term lekayem, ‘‘to fulfill [followed by the verse],’’ or attributed to a sage who ‘‘calls’’ the verse ‘‘upon’’ (kara ‘alav) a specific occurrence—is a frequent midrashic literary form.27 These examples will suffice to demonstrate how undifferent much early interpretation of the Song is from rabbinic interpretations of other comparable verses. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of interpretations in rabbinic literature are of this type. Nonetheless, early on in rabbinic tradition one also begins to witness the emergence of certain tendencies of interpretation specific to the Song. It is to these interpretations that we now turn.

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The most significant of these exegeses are the different views as to ‘‘where’’ and ‘‘when’’ the Song was first sung.28 The most complete list of the different possibilities is the relatively late version found in Shir haShirim Rabbah 1.2 (henceforth ShirR), a lengthy passage that is both complicated and multilayered, as Tamar Kadari has shown in a recent analysis of its redaction.29 I will simply excerpt the relevant opinions. Where (hekhan) was [the Song] said? R. Hanina bar Papa: ‘‘It was spoken30 at the Sea,’’ as it says (Song 1.9), ‘‘To my mare among the chariots of Pharaoh.’’ R. Yuda in the name of R. Simon said: It was spoken at Sinai . . .’’ R. Yohanan said, ‘‘It was spoken at Sinai . . .’’ R. Meir says, ‘‘It was spoken at the Tent of Meeting . . .’’ The rabbis said, ‘‘In the Eternal Temple.’’

With the exception of R. Meir, the named sages mentioned in this passage are all amoraim, but as Saul Lieberman and more recently Isaac Gottlieb have shown, all the opinions are cited in tannaitic literature where it is possible to identify two separate traditions. The first tradition is found in the Mekilta (both of R. Ishmael and of R. Shimeon ben Yohai) and preserves the opinions citing the splitting of the Red Sea and the revelation of the Torah at Sinai as the occasions on which the Song was composed. The second tradition is found in Sifra (Shemini, Mekilta de-Miluim 15–16) and Seder ‘Olam (7, 15) and locates the origins of the Song at either the dedication of the Tent of Meeting or that of the Temple; these opinions focus upon interpretations of Song 3.9–11 and 4.16– 5.1.31 As Gottlieb has noted, the twin dedications of the Tent and the Temple are a merismus, spanning the first moment God came to dwell among Israel in a temporary sanctuary and the last moment when he descended into his permanent abode.32 Rather than being competing interpretations, they may have been intended as complementary, suggesting a totality of religious experience. For our purposes, however, the more relevant pair of views are those preserved in the Mekilta, attributed respectively to the tannaim Akiba and Eliezer, the first of whom ascribes the Song to the Sinaitic revelation (Mekilta, Bah.odesh 3 [Lauterbach 2:219–20]), the second to the time that the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea (Mekilta, Beshallah. 3 [Lauterbach 1:210–11]).33 As Lieberman already noted, both opinions build upon separate traditions attesting to the belief that the Children of Israel actually saw God at both revelations.34 Lieberman himself seems to have believed that there once existed complete interpretations of the Song according to each of the two positions, but only remnants of these fuller treatments survive, and it remains to be proven that such complete commentaries actually existed.35 In fact, nearly all the surviving exegeses are on discrete sections of the Song, namely, the verses in which the

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maiden praises and describes her lover, his physical beauty in particular: Song 1.12, 2.2, 2.8–9, and 5.2.36 Following a suggestion originally made by Gershom Scholem, Lieberman proposed that, according to both views, the Song was understood to be a song of praise of God sung by Israel at either moment of theophany, and that the real subject of these exegeses was the esoteric doctrine preserved in a work entitled Shiur Komah, literally, the ‘‘The Measurements of the [Divine] Body.’’ As its name indicates, this text records the measurements of every limb in God’s body and especially of the most minute portions of the anatomy of God’s head, as well as the secret names of each limb; according to both Scholem and Lieberman, the text was presented as an exegesis of Song 5.11–16, the famous passage in which the maiden sings the praises of her lover’s body. A small selection of the text is enough to convey the fantastic, even grotesque (if not preposterous) sense of the measurements that Shiur Komah presents: The crown on [God’s] head is 500,000 by 500,000 [parasangs]; Israel is its name. And on the gemstone that is between its (or his) horns is engraved, ‘‘Israel, my people; Israel, my beloved people is mine. My beloved is shining and ruddy, preeminent among the ten thousand. His head is finest gold. His eyes are like doves by watercourses etc.’’ (Song 5.11–12)—namely, 2000 parasangs. It turns out that the entire measurement is 100,000,000,000 parasangs tall and 10,000,000,000 parasangs wide. R. Ishmael said: When I said this thing before R. Akiba, he said to me: Whoever knows this measurement of his Creator and the glory of the Holy One, blessed be he, is secure in this world and in the world to come.37

The point of this knowledge was, as Philip S. Alexander has written, to function ‘‘as a kind of mental mandala, an aid to mystical contemplation that gave the mystic something on which to focus at the climax of his ecstasy, and allowed him to prolong the moment of his mystical contemplation of God.’’38 The act of interpretation, in other words, was not solely exegetical but also performative—the act of explicating the meaning of Song 5.11–12 was for the mystic an occasion for anagogy, ascent to the divine, to borrow a hermeneutical category from a somewhat different but contemporary ancient interpretive tradition. Both Lieberman and Scholem believed that the Shiur Komah text was very ancient, composed as early as the second or third century c.e. This belief, however, has been substantially discarded in recent scholarship, and the editor of the most recent scholarly edition, Martin Cohen, has dated the text’s composition to geonic Babylonia at least six centuries later.39 Further, as Cohen has remarked, there are in fact few references to the Song of Songs in the text we know as Shiur Komah.40 Yet even if that particular text does not contain the ancient tradition of esoteric interpretation of the Song of Songs, the force of Scholem’s and Lieberman’s argument should not be lost, namely, that there existed early eso-

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teric interpretations of at least some passages in the Song, 5.10–16 in particular (as well as, arguably, other passages describing the body and beauty of the male lover). Several additional arguments and other pieces of, albeit circumstantial, evidence are worth reviewing insofar as they may point to the existence of such a tradition. 1. In mYad 3.4, at the conclusion of the famous discussion over ‘‘books that impurify the hands,’’ R. Akiba is said to have stated: ‘‘Heaven forbid!—no man in Israel ever disputed the fact that the Song of Songs does not render the hands unclean, for the entire world is not worthy of the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the Writings (ha-ketuvim) are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies (kodesh kodashim).’’41 This last assertion is usually taken as a rhetorically hyperbolic statement of the Song’s canonicity on account of its super-sacrality.42 But it is equally possible to understand the phrase ‘‘the Holy of Holies’’ as referring to the fact that it is a mysterium, an innermost sanctum in which only an initiate—in the case of the biblical Holy of Holies, solely the High Priest—can enter.43 As such, Akiba’s description of the Song as the Holy of Holies may refer to the fact that it, too, is a mysterium, a sanctum on account of its esoteric character that only the mystical initiate can enter through study.44 2. Several exegeses of Song verses preserved in different collections interpret the verses as referring directly to either esoteric topics or the practice of esoteric transmission. See, for example, the exegeses in ShirR on Song 1.4 (Dunsky, 27–28), ‘‘the king has brought me into his chambers (h.adarav),’’ nearly all of which read his ‘‘chambers’’ as esoteric knowledge which God revealed to Israel (by implication, in the Song of Songs and elsewhere).45 So, too, Song 4.11, ‘‘honey and milk are under your tongue,’’ is interpreted in bH . ag 13a as related to the prohibition against teaching ma‘aseh merkavah: ‘‘Those things that are sweeter than honey and milk should be [kept] under your tongue.’’46 Finally, on 1.11, ‘‘your neck with strings of beads’’ (tsavarekh ba-h.aruzim), ShirR (Dunsky, 41–42) cites, among other interpretations, a series of anecdotes about sages who were h.orez be-divre torah u-mi-divre torah li-nevi’im u-mi-nevi’im li-khetuvim, a practice that (according to the passages) caused fire to flash around them ‘‘and they [the words] rejoiced as on the day when they were delivered from Sinai.’’ The most famous of these stories is the one about the sage Ben Azzai who was sitting and expounding (doresh) in this way when he was visited by Akiba, who, after hearing about the flames dancing around him, asked Ben Azzai, ‘‘Perhaps you are engaged with the chambers of the Chariot (h.adre merkavah)?’’ To which Ben Azzai responded: ‘‘No, I was simply h.orez be-divre torah etc.’’ Exactly what the phrase h.orez be-divre torah etc. means is unclear; most scholars translate it as meaning to ‘‘link’’ or ‘‘string together’’ verses, a

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ubiquitous activity in midrash, and one exemplified in the form of the petih.ta or proem that is constructed out of such links between verses from the different sections of the Bible. But there is no reason to assume that merely ‘‘doing’’ midrash by linking verses normatively resulted in recreating the Sinaitic revelation. The point of the passage seems to be that, whatever Ben Azzai was doing in this instance, it was indistinguishable from engaging in esoteric study.47 In other words, it was not typical or normative midrash-study, and certainly not public or exoteric preaching or instruction.48 3. In a famous passage in Mekilta, Shirta 3, the following passage is attributed to Akiba as a comment on the verse, ‘‘This is my God and I will praise him’’ (Ex 15. 2) (Lauterbach 2:26–27): R. Akiba says: I shall speak of the beauty and praise (nevotav ve-shivh.o)49 of him by whose word the world came into being before all the nations of the world. For all the nations of the world ask Israel, saying: ‘‘What is your beloved more than another beloved, that you do so adjure us’’ (Song 5.9)—that you are so ready to die for him, and so ready to let yourselves be killed for him? . . . But the Israelites say to the nations of the world: ‘‘Do you know him? Let us tell you some of his praise: ‘My beloved is white and ruddy,’ ’’ etc. (Song 5.10). As soon as the nations of the world hear some of his praise, they say to the Israelites, ‘‘We will join you,’’ as it is said, ‘‘Whither is your beloved gone, O you fairest among women? Whither has your beloved turned him, that we may seek him with you?’’ (Song 6.1). The Israelites, however, say to the nations of the world: ‘‘You can have no share in him, but ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’ (Song 2.16), and ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’ ’’ (Song 6.3).

The same passage is cited anonymously in Sifre Deuteronomy (§333, ed. Finkelstein, 399) with the beginnings of all the verses within Song 5.10– 16. Whether or not the attribution to Akiba is accurate is inconsequential for our primary concern here—namely, understanding the history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs. As Lieberman acutely noted, the passage quotes the verses in Song 5.10–16 but does not reveal the actual substance of the interpretations of the verses, namely, the content of the praise that the Israelites speak to the nations (and which, as the passage goes on to relate, so impresses them that they immediately offer to convert!). Lieberman suggested that the passage does not state them explicitly because the interpretations were part of esoteric lore.50 These particular verses were in any case the focus of attention insofar as the Song was interpreted along esoteric lines. 4. In a passage near the beginning of his prologue to his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen refers to the practice of Jews ‘‘to allow no one even to hold this book [of the Song of Songs] in his hands who has not reached a full and ripe age.’’ He also refers to the fact that Jews, while they teach children Scripture, refrain from teaching them the

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Song of the Songs (along with the creation story in Genesis; the first chapters in Ezekiel containing the visions of God’s chariot; and the last chapters in that same prophet containing the description of the Temple) until the end of their studies. The first statement would seem to be a miscomprehension of mYadayim’s reference to ‘‘books that defile the hands,’’ while the last statement probably refers to scriptural texts with an esoteric meaning. Scholem, who first called attention to this passage, used it to confirm his early dating of Shiur Komah (which he saw as an interpretation of Song of Songs), but minimally Origen seems to be referring to some kind of esoteric interpretation of the book.51 5. Two medieval Jewish authors commenting on the Song of Songs spoke about both an esoteric and exoteric tradition of interpretation. The first of these is a twelfth–thirteenth-century Yemenite commentator on the Song, but more important for our purposes is a statement by the fourteenth-century Spanish preacher Joshua ibn Shuaib in a sermon for the last day of the holiday of Passover (when the Song was traditionally read in the synagogue): For the words of this Song are quite obscure and sealed, etc. therefore they judge it the holy of holies, because all its words are mysteries of the Chariot and of the names of the Holy One, blessed be he, etc. And in spite of the fact that its words are obscured and sealed, there is something exoteric in it, etc. And our sages of blessed memory explained in an exoteric manner that the groom is the Holy One, blessed be he, and the bride is the Community of Israel.52

Lieberman cited this passage (as well as that of the Yemenite commentator) as an additional support for his argument that there existed an ancient tradition of esoteric interpretation of the Song. Of course, it is equally possible that Ibn Shuaib was referring to a more contemporary tradition of interpretation that he perhaps believed was ancient (whether it was or was not). For our purposes, however, what is most revealing is his statement that the interpretation of the Song referring to the relationship between God and Israel as groom and bride was the exoteric tradition. By ‘‘exoteric,’’ then, he clearly did not mean the literal meaning of the poem— that it is a love song about and between human figures—but what we call its allegorical interpretation. For Ibn Shuaib, then, what distinguished the esoteric from the exoteric was not whether the reading was allegorical or not but the contents of the allegorical reading and the manner in which it was taught—whether publicly to all students, or privately to select initiates. The esoteric allegory had a different content and could only be taught to certain individuals. 6. The exoteric/esoteric distinction may also bear upon different rabbinic views about the authorship of the Song. The Song itself, of course,

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explicitly attributes its authorship to Solomon in the opening verse, and subsequently Solomon is referred to or addressed several times through the poem as is ‘‘the king’’ (ha-melekh). Within rabbinic literature and in ShirR in particular, the question of authorship is more complicated. As Lieberman first noted, the tannaitic views claiming that the Song was composed either at the Sea or at Sinai both presume that the Song’s author was God himself (or, according to one view expressed a single time, the angels), and this presumption fits the conception of the Song as a text to be understood (probably in esoteric terms) as the immediate expression of love between God and Israel at the moment of God’s theophany (whether at the Sea or at Sinai). Within ShirR itself, virtually all tannaitic opinions cited on verses after Song 1.2 also maintain the claim to divine authorship with virtually every other occurrence or reference to Solomon (Shelomo) or to the king interpreted as referring to ha-melekh she-ha-shalom shelo, ‘‘the king to whom peace belongs.’’53 The Solomonic position is notably absent from the exegetical midrash itself with the striking exception of the five petih.ta’ot or homiletical proems that precede the exegetical midrash and the introductory section of midrash on 1.1 (Dunsky, 5–6), which Kadari has argued is a formally and carefully redacted ‘‘introduction’’ to the exegetical midrash that should be read as a unit on its own terms.54 Whatever the textual relationship between these two sections and the rest of the collection, it is worth noting that all five proems end with a similarly formulaic conclusion whose full form is preserved in the conclusion to the fourth and fifth proems: R. Yudan said: This will teach you that who ever teaches Torah publicly (be-rabim) merits having the Holy Spirit (ruah. ha-kodesh) rest upon him. For this Solomon did and the Holy Spirit rested upon him, and he composed three books— Proverbs, Koheleth, and the Song of Songs.55

What made Solomon worthy of composing his compositions under divine inspiration was the fact that he had proven himself deserving of such inspiration by previously teaching Torah publicly. As Birke Rapp has recently shown, the portrait of Solomon in ShirR generally involves a rabbinizing of his figure, and this tendency is clearly evident here as well.56 The material in all six points I have just listed supports, I would propose, a claim for the existence of an esoteric tradition of interpretation of the Song alongside or simultaneous with an exoteric tradition of interpretation. The contents of the exoteric tradition would appear to resemble the vast number of interpretations preserved in the existing midrashic collections that are preserved to this day. It would seem likely that, according to this tradition, the author of the Song was Solomon, and it is possible that this tradition located the Song’s origins in the

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events cited in the Sifra/Seder ‘Olam tradition, namely, at the dedication of the Tent of Meeting or the Temple. The esoteric tradition, in contrast, is more difficult to describe. Its exact contents are not known; possibly, it was material akin to the later Shiur Komah traditions or other lore connected to early Jewish mystical preoccupations. Unlike the exoteric tradition, which attributed authorship to Solomon, this tradition may have been more closely aligned to the view preserved in the Mekilta assigning the Song’s origins to the theophanies at the Sea or Sinai where the Song’s authors were God himself and Israel, and the Song itself would have been understood as an immediate expression of that revelatory experience.57 The question of content aside, the most important implication of this speculative argument is its claim that there may have simultaneously existed exoteric and esoteric approaches to the interpretation of the Song, and that these two traditions should be appreciated in conjunction with each other. Indeed, this possibility may help explain some of the peculiarities of the exoteric tradition, and specifically the use that some interpretations in ShirR in particular make of the figure of Torah and scholars of Torah as the subjects of their allegorical interpretation. Not surprisingly, Torah is a ubiquitous presence in the midrashim on the Song of Song. It is frequently referenced in interpretations of verses describing the female lover or the daughters of Zion.58 Tamar Kadari has recently discussed an unusual tannaitic midrash (recorded in ShirR) that describes the Torah rather than Israel as the maiden, that is, as God’s bride, and the Song as an allegory of love between God and the Torah.59 To the best of my knowledge, however, scholarship on the Song has not noted a series of midrashim in ShirR that substitute the Torah (and, secondarily, scholars of Torah) for the figure of God himself. It is telling, perhaps, that the largest cluster of such interpretations is found on Song 5.11–16. Let me cite selected portions of the interpretations as found in ShirR 5.11 (Dunsky, 131–34); for purposes of brevity, I will exclude all prooftexts and digressions. ‘‘His head is finest gold, his locks are curled and black as a raven’’ (Song 5.11)— His head (rosho) is the Torah . . . finest gold: this refers to the words of the Torah . . . His locks are curled: this refers to the ruled lines [in the scroll]. And black as a raven: this refers to the letters. His locks are curled: heaps upon heaps [of laws]. Another explanation: R. Azariah says, Even matters which seem to be nothing but [scribal?] strokes in the Torah are thorns upon thorns [that is, they raise many problems] . . . With whom are they preserved? Black as a raven (‘orev): With the person who is at them early and late (ma‘ariv) [i.e., sages] . . . Black as a raven . . . Were all the inhabitants of the world to come together and try to turn one wing of a raven white, they would not succeed. So if all came together and tried to remove a yod, the smallest letter of the Torah, they would not succeed. . . . Locks black as a raven: these are the scholars; they look repulsive and black in this

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world but in the time to come . . . Locks black as a raven: this refers to those texts of the Torah which seem on the surface to be too repulsive and black to be recited in public, but the Holy One, blessed be he, says, They are pleasing (‘arevot) to me . . . His eyes are like doves (Ibid., 5.12). His eyes are the Sanhedrin who are the eyes of the congregation . . . Beside the water-brooks (‘afikim) because they are fortified (‘afikim) by the waters of the Torah . . . Washed with milk: this refers to the halakhot which as it were they wash with their teeth till they make them clear like milk. Set upon silk (milet) on the fullness (mel’eta) of the Torah.60

I have quoted these interpretations at such length to give the reader some sense of how ShirR allegorizes the Song’s physical description of the lover as referring either to the physical features of the Torah itself or to those of its students, namely, the sages. The exegeses are not mere ‘‘figurative’’ applications. Rather, they involve the Torah’s ‘‘material text,’’ as it were—the black words or letters on the page, the ruling lines on the parchment, the small decorative strokes that frequently crown the letters, the tiny size of the letter yod, and so on. The physical description of the lover in the original text has been replaced not by an enumeration of the measurements of God’s body nor by an abstract theologized delineation of divine attributes but by a depiction of the Torah as a material artifact. Given the conventional allegorical interpretation of the male lover in the Song as representing God, how can we explain the substitution of God by the Torah and the sages? And what sense does this substitution make on the allegorical plane? There are two possible answers to these questions. The first is that the Torah itself is being divinized or, at the least, being used as a synechdoche for God. And indeed there is at least one other interpretation in ShirR that lends itself to this understanding—on 1.4, nagilah ve-nismeh.ah bakh, ‘‘let us delight and rejoice in you,’’ ShirR offers a series of interpretations for the word ’’you’’ (bakh): (1) ‘‘the Holy One, blessed be he’’; (2) ‘‘Your salvation’’; (3) ‘‘Your Torah’’; (4) ‘‘Your fear’’; and (5) (in the name of R. Isaac) ‘‘the twenty-two letters with which the Torah is written.’’61 In this case, however, the replacement of God by the Torah or by its letters is less exceptional since in any case it is only something in which the maiden or bride says she will delight. It is not the person—or divinity—himself. While there do exist notions of a divinized Torah in ancient Jewish literature, they are found almost exclusively in the esoteric tradition and do not appear to have found a place in rabbinic Judaism or in its literature where Torah is conceived at best as a synechdoche for God but not as an equivalent.62 The other explanation is that the Torah is used here as a screen for God—that is, as a conscious substitute for interpretations that would have read descriptions of God’s body into these verses. There are several reasons for viewing these interpretations of the groom as Torah in this

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way. First, on the allegorical plane, these interpretations of the male beloved as the Torah or as the sages do not make logical sense; they are what structuralist literary critics once called ungrammaticalities, that is, deviations from the general syntax of the proposition. How could the Torah be the groom or lover of Israel? As Kadari has shown, there is one interpretation that views the Torah as God’s bride, and there are other instances in which the Torah is viewed as Israel’s consort, but almost always, the gender of Torah, both grammatically and conceptually, is female.63 To view the Torah as male, let alone as a male lover, is anomalous in classical Jewish tradition. On the other hand, there are instances in midrash where the Torah is used as a conscious substitute for God. In one famous case, Torah literally replaces God; this is the famous interpretation (via the parable of the ketubah) in Lamentations Rabbah (3.21) of Lam 3.21, ‘‘This (z’ot) I will recall to my heart,’’ where the word z’ot in its scriptural context refers to the preceding series of propositions about God while in the midrash the word is taken to refer to Torah, and specifically Torah-study—that is, midrash.64 As a consciously employed substitute, the Torah does not take God’s place so much as stand in his place, at least for the duration of human history, and until the arrival of the final redemption.65 In suggesting that these interpretations of Song 5.11–16 as Torah are a screen for interpretations of the verses as referring to God’s body, I am not proposing that the editor of ShirR meant to polemicize against the esoteric tradition.66 My point is, rather, that the ungrammatical interpretations in ShirR need to be appreciated alongside the esoteric exegeses in order to be comprehensible; in fact, the two sets of interpretations—the exoteric (Torah) and the esoteric (God’s body)—are not so much opposites as two sides of a single coin; one might even suggest that the esoteric interpretation is the hidden motor that drives the exoteric. In this respect, the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric is entirely different from the distinction between the literal and the allegorical, where the latter not only replaces the former but in effect eliminates it (even when the exegete insists that this is not his intent or the inevitable consequence). The exoteric and the esoteric can be seen, rather, as simply two different steps on a ladder of signification, different in orientation and in function but not necessarily opposed or exclusive of each other.67 In this respect, they are not so different from the allegorical-historical and anagogical interpretations that Origen offers for the Song—the one, an allegory whose protagonists are God and the Church, the other, Christ and the soul. To be sure, in Origen, these two different levels, along with the literal or the carnal, have already been organized within a single system of interpretation, all of them presented by a single exegete. In the case of the Jewish esoteric and exoteric interpretations,

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the two traditions have not been integrated. Nonetheless, if we can assume—as in the case of the exegeses of Song 5.11–16—that they are best appreciated in conjunction with each other, there is a profound commonality in structure between the ancient Jewish and the early Christian readings. This last point may serve as a transition to our final section: the comparative study of Jewish and Christian exegesis of the Song. For nearly the last century, the relationship between ancient Jewish and early Christian exegesis of the Song has been, arguably, the focus of greatest attention and interest in modern scholarship, particularly so in Jewish scholarship. Beginning with a study by A. Marmorstein in 1920, a series of articles by prominent scholars has sought to establish the relationship between the two traditions of interpretation and their dependence upon each other.68 The structural similarity between the overall approaches of the two traditions to the text; their common assumption that its meaning was allegorical, and that its protagonists were God and his true love (the nation of Israel, on the one hand, and the Church or the Christian soul, on the other); and the apparent similarity between specific exegeses of particular verses—all these features seemed so prominent and obvious that scholars assumed on their basis that Jewish and Christian exegetes—Origen in particular—were in active dialogue over the correct interpretation of the Song; from this assumption it was indeed only a small leap to assume that the scriptural text served as the arena for a historically actual polemic between the two religions and their ancient advocates. Where Jewish scholars (not to mention Christians) differed was in their view of that polemic and its historical context and, most of all, in respect to which tradition was the active source of influence—that is, whether it was the Jews or the Christians who had originated the allegorical approach.69 More recent scholarship has questioned the assumptions behind this overly binary view of influence—by proposing, for example, that still earlier native Jewish or Christian exegetical traditions could actually have been the sources of certain exegeses of Songs verses independently of later polemical contexts.70 Most recently, in a lengthy and comprehensive study, Alon GoshenGottstein has exhaustively reviewed the entire history of scholarship on the topic and persuasively challenged its basic assumption that the various exegeses preserved in Jewish and Christian commentaries reflect an actual polemical exchange that took place between Jews and Christians. So, too, he has questioned whether specific exegeses of verses necessarily indicate any mutual dependence or influence of polemical import.71 As Goshen-Gottstein shows, the mere fact that two similar exegeses of the same verse both argue for the superiority of their respective religious

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traditions over the other does not prove that either exegesis was a response to the other; both interpretations might be independently responding to the same (or to different) exegetical spurs in the verse under interpretation. Further, even if the relationship of Christianity to Judaism was one of the main themes of both Origen’s sermons and commentaries on the Song, his view of that relationship is far more complicated than the simplistically binary Jewish-Christian polemical view allows. As Elizabeth Clark has shown, Origen may have polemicized against Judaism (which is also not the same thing as saying that his interpretations polemicize against contemporary Jewish interpretations of the Song), but he simultaneously waged a polemic against Gnosticism and its rejection of the Old Testament, and that polemic effectively worked to defend Judaism.72 Moreover, Goshen-Gottstein correctly points out that there are profound differences between rabbinic/midrashic interpretation and that of a Christian exegete like Origen—differences that are, arguably, even more fundamental than their similarity as allegories. For Origen the Song is primarily a liturgical text: it is a song that the Church or the Christian soul sings to God in order to express its extraordinary love for him and to invoke God’s unsurpassed love for the Church or the soul. For the rabbis, in contrast, the Song details (albeit unsystematically) the relationship between God and Israel as it transpired in the biblical past (for example, either at the Sea or at Sinai); even if the Song was originally a direct expression of an experience of theophany, that experience for the rabbis is part of sacred history. So, too, there is a palpable difference in the way the two traditions treat the sexual/erotic dimension of the Song. As we have seen, there is very little that is explicitly erotic (even on the spiritual plane) about the rabbinic allegorical reading. In contrast, as David Carr has shown, the major thrust of Origen’s reading was to kindle his ‘‘fallen’’ human reader’s spiritually erotic ‘‘God-love’’ and to ‘‘leave cold earth-love behind.’’73 Origen’s exegesis is thoroughly spiritual but it is highly charged erotically. Beyond what Goshen-Gottstein and others like Carr have established, there is little I have to add to the discussion of the putative place of Origen and the rabbis in an ancient Jewish-Christian polemic centering upon the interpretation of the Song. In concluding this essay, however, I would like to call attention to the interpretations by the rabbis and Origen of a single pair of verses. These verses have sometimes been invoked as proof of the polemical background to the Song’s interpretation in Late Antiquity, but they may have more to teach us about the history of the modern polemical interpretation on both the Jewish and Christian sides.74 The verses are 1.5–6,

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I am dark (shehorah, literally ‘‘black’’), but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem— like the tents of Kedar, like the pavilions of Solomon. Do not stare at me because I am swarthy (sheharhoret), because the sun has gazed upon me.

The speaker in these verses is the Shulamite, the female lover, who turns in these verses from her opening plea to the beloved—‘‘Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth’’(1.2)—to address the daughters of Jerusalem in defense of her own beauty. The identity of these daughters of Jerusalem (or of Zion) is never clarified in the text, though they are frequently addressed in the Song (2.7, 3.5, 10, 11, and elsewhere) and effectively function as a kind of personification for the city and its inhabitants, a kind of silent chorus witnessing the Song’s progress.75 Both Origen and the rabbis offer lengthy interpretations of the two verses including strikingly parallel interpretations of ‘‘I am dark but comely’’ (along the lines of ‘‘I have sinned but now repented’’) as well as of the identity of the daughters of Jerusalem. For Origen, the latter are ‘‘the daughters of this earthly Jerusalem’’—namely, the Jews—‘‘who, seeing the Church of the Gentiles, despise and vilify her for her ignoble birth,’’ because she does not have noble descent from the patriarchs; and to whom, she, the Church, responds, ‘‘The bridegroom loves me more and holds me dearer than you, who are the many daughters of Jerusalem; you stand without and watch the bride enter the chamber.’’76 For the rabbis, in contrast, and specifically for R. Yohanan and his disciples, the ‘‘daughters of Jerusalem’’ refer to the outlying, presumably Gentile cities or colonies of Jerusalem, a metropolis (literally ‘‘mother-city’’ with daughters), whom Jerusalem addresses in 1.6 as explained through the following anecdote (ma‘aseh) attributed to R. Isaac, a disciple and frequent tradent of R. Yohanan: It happened once that a provincial lady had a black maidservant (shifh.ah kushit) who went down with a companion to draw water from the spring, and she said to the companion: Tomorrow my master is going to divorce his wife and marry me. Why?, asked the other. She replied: Because he saw her hands covered with soot (mepuh.amot, ‘‘blackened’’). Retorted [her companion]: Foolish woman! Let your ears hear what your mouth speaks. Here is his wife whom he loves exceedingly, and you say he is going to divorce her because once he saw her hands blackened with coal. And you, who are entirely black as coal your entire life from the time you left your mother’s womb—how much the more [will he hate you]! So, too, the nations of the world taunt Israel and say: This nation traded away their glory (hemiru kevodam), as it is said, ‘‘They exchanged (vayamiru) their glory [i.e., God] for an ox [i.e., the golden calf]. Israel replies: If we [who sinned] only once are punished thus, how much the more so will you be?!77

The similarities between Origen’s and the rabbis’ exegeses are clear: both see the two verses not simply as the Shulamite’s spontaneous, seemingly unanticipated defense of herself but as her pointed response to a

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rival for the love of the beloved. These parallels—as well as those between other details of the verses’ lengthy exegeses in both traditions—have been noted in the past, and scholars have (predictably) debated which tradition came first.78 What has not been noted, however, is the sheer novelty of the interpretation, with its importation of the figure of the Kushite or Ethiopean female into the exegetical discourse, and the impact of the insertion of this new figure upon the poem’s narrative and meaning. In its scriptural context, the Song of Songs is a poem about the Shulamite’s love for a now-present, now-absent beloved; the poem swings dialectically between presence and absence. Through the prism of either Origen’s interpretation or R. Isaac’s parable, the binary relationship at the heart of the biblical poem, between the lover and the beloved, has been transformed into a drama with three characters—the Shulamite lover; a male beloved; and a rival female who challenges the Shulamite for the beloved’s true love. In place of a binary, the relationship at the heart of this late antique interpretation is a triad with two rival females vying over the love of a single male. The presence of this triadic relationship is ubiquitous in Origen’s commentaries and homilies that explicitly claim to prove how the Christian Church (or the Christian soul) has displaced and replaced Judaism (and the Jews) as God’s true love. In rabbinic commentaries on the Song, there are fewer texts that explicitly invoke the triadic model but its presence is implicit in a few passages and fully explicit in one other text—the famous passage from Mekilta Shirta 3, cited earlier in this chapter, in which Akiba records the exchange between the Gentile nations and Israel in which the former ask Israel about its God, and after Israel recites his praises to them on the basis of Song 5.10–16, the nations are so impressed that they ask to join Israel in their pursuit of the beloved, only to be rejected by Israel with the verse ‘‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’’ (Song 6.3)—clearly understood here to mean: mine, and not yours.79 In this passage, the triad as found in R. Isaac’s anecdote is virtually reversed. What we have here is almost the ultimate rabbinic fantasy: not only do the Gentile nations beseech Israel to allow them to join in seeking God but Israel is granted its ultimate wish—the opportunity to reject the Gentiles and claim God for themselves alone. The fact that this triadic recasting of the dramatic situation of the Song is attested explicitly in only a few rabbinic texts should not diminish its significance, particularly for the later history of Jewish interpretation of the Song. That history is a succession of recastings and repositioning of the Song’s dramatic situation and its dramatis personae. In the targum, the love poem was reinterpreted as a continuous historical allegory of the relationship between God and Israel culminat-

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ing in the final redemption. For Rashi, the Song became a story of memories and hope, of a woman ‘‘in a living widowhood,’’ longing for her husband and recalling his love while he, too, remembers her youthful grace and assures her that their divorce is not final and she is still his wife.80 For Abraham Ibn Ezra, in contrast, the Song was the story of ‘‘a very little girl, who has as yet no breasts, who was guarding a vineyard and saw a shepherd passing by, love was kindled in each of them.’’81 For R. Samuel ben Meir, the Rashbam, as Sara Japhet shows in her contribution to this volume, the Song is a tale of ‘‘a young woman who mourns her beloved who has left her,’’ and about whose love she composes a poem in order to show her companions and maidens ‘‘what my beloved said to me and this is what I answered him.’’82 In subsequent Jewish mystical traditions, the plot is further recast so as to serve as an allegory of the love of God for the Shekhinah.83 Each of these interpretations involves a different repositioning, as it were, of the Song’s plot and of the relationship of its protagonists, with each instance best seen as a response to its own historical context and its needs. The recasting of the Song as a contest between two rivals for the love of God is surely not proof in any way of the historical existence of a polemic between Jews and Christians over the interpretation of the Song, but it may our earliest evidence for the existence of such an interpretation of the Song’s true meaning among both Jewish and Christian readers of the text. If so, the modern scholarly view that these interpretations reflect historical reality—an actual polemic between Jews and Christians—may be only the latest avatar of these repositionings. R. Isaac’s interpretation of Song 1.6 was among the first of these repositionings and thereby set a model for all subsequent Jewish interpretation.

6

Patriarchy, Primogeniture, and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam Reuven Firestone

Parallels in method, rhetoric, and content between qur’a¯nic exegesis and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation were known to medieval Jewish and Christian scholars and have attracted the attention of modern scholarship since Abraham Geiger’s famous doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Bonn in 1832.1 Questions of origins and influence between the Qur’a¯n and the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity have figured prominently in this discourse and have always been loaded with political and cultural overtones. Issues of influence have always been a part of Islamic conversation with its sister monotheisms as well, and awareness of the issue is clearly evidenced as early as the Qur’a¯n and Hadith themselves.2 The assumption among Jews and Christians in this exchange, clearly voiced in premodern literatures and usually assumed but increasingly unspoken in later studies, has been that earlier meant original and original meant authoritative and superior. In the most general terms, subsequent occurrences represented ‘‘borrowing,’’ meaning less originality, less authenticity, less worth. Surprisingly perhaps, Islam also worked within the world of this shared assumption, possibly because it had no choice but to do so. But Islam made a brilliant end-run around the claims of Jews and Christians by claiming that is own scripture is coeval with that of its sister religions because all divine scriptures derive from a single source.3 While the earliest modern scholarship in comparative scriptures was particularly interested in the question of borrowing and tended to see the lines of influence monolithically as an Islamic ‘‘borrowing’’ from Judaism (Christian scholars tended to observe the same in relation to Christianity), later scholarship has complicated the picture somewhat.4 Diachronic studies that attempt to understand the roots and origins of

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phenomena have yielded, in part, to synchronic studies that seek to learn about the phenomena for themselves in great depth. Indeed, interest in the character of relationship now transcends interest in learning who was first. The older debates over influence on Islam moved in two directions. One was a set of assumptions that centered on chronology and a hierarchy of relationship between Islam and its older monotheistic siblings. The other reflected a competition between Judaism and Christianity over which was more influential on the development of Islam. Such debates over influence reflect deeper ideological disputes between the three families of monotheistic expressions in general, and they parallel more ancient disputes over the preeminence of one religious system over the other that have ensued at least since Late Antiquity. The ancient debates were fueled by and in some ways were analogous to the rhetorical style of the Bible itself, which repeatedly privileges one child or one tribe or one people over all others. Such privileging screams polemic, but the early subtexts of the biblical stories were generally unknown to later interpreters. The stories thus allowed for tremendous creativity, especially for those involved in polemics with other religions or religious sects (and in environments where Jews, Christians, and Muslims interacted, low-level polemics seems to have been a constant background buzz). The narratives of Abraham and his family history not only serve as paradigmatic with regard to the privileging of one child or nation over others; they represent the quintessential privileging story, in relation to which so many subsequent biblical and postbiblical stories are set.5 The Abraham narratives establish the problem of primogeniture, that special right of inheritance afforded to the first-born, that appears as a recurring motif throughout the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Chronicles.6 But its first appearance in the foundation history of monotheism occurs within the context of the Abrahamic family constellation, where conflict over the birthright occurs as an issue of not merely primogeniture but also of polygyny.7 The problem of inheritance can be related to the problem of rank among multiple wives, as the legal prescription of Dt 21.16–17 makes clear: ‘‘[a man] . . . may not treat as first-born the son of the loved one in disregard of the son of the unloved one who is older. Instead, he must accept the first-born, the son of the unloved one, and allot to him a double portion of all he possesses.’’ But the legal question of material inheritance in the Abrahamic triangle takes a second position in the exegetical literature to theological issues associated with the sacred history of Israel, for Abraham’s inheritor continues the line: he bears the seed and the blessing of a nation chosen by God to fulfill the divine will,8

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while the loser represents only another in a long list of similar or related but ordinary peoples. In a world of competing cultures and civilizations, association with a transcendent monotheistic deity carried immense value and meaning, and not only in the biblical world. In Late Antiquity, when emerging Judaism came into competition with emerging Christianity, and again during and after the seventh century, when Islam, too, began to make its claim to represent the most authentic expression of monotheism, authority was claimed and contested using the currency of spiritualgenetic pedigree.9 Sarah and Hagar and their respective progeny became a useful motif in the ongoing polemic between the three great monotheistic traditions, each claiming possession of the most authentic scripture and genuine religious expression of the divine will. For Judaism, Gn 17.18–21 and 21.10–13 demonstrate God’s inscrutable wisdom in the divine assurance that continuity of Abraham’s chosen status will be sustained through his second-born son, the first-born of his favorite wife but not his own firstborn. Christianity would serve as the spiritual clone for this divine subversion of ancient Near Eastern tradition by claiming the status of spiritual if not biological heir to Isaac. Gal 4.21–31 represents Sarah and Isaac as the quintessential symbols for the freedom of Christianity, while Hagar and Ishmael stand for the rejected Jews, enslaved to the Law.10 Although the simplest narrative message of Genesis does indeed single out Isaac as Abraham’s sole heir, the biblical story expresses ambivalence about the issue in a number of ways, the most obvious of which lies in the blessings given to Ishmael.11 Notwithstanding this evident textual ambivalence, the exegetical traditions of both Judaism and Christianity foreground the special status of Isaac while essentially ignoring the blessings associated with Ishmael. By the turn of the eighth century, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity before it, made its own claim for exclusive access to religious truth. While Islam accepted the Jewish and Christian scriptures as legitimate (though flawed) expressions of God’s will, its attitude toward these earlier expressions of the divine will differed from Christianity’s approach to its Old Testament. On the one hand, Islam considers the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels God’s authentic word to the Children of Israel and the early Christians.12 On the other hand, these early revelations are regarded as so hopelessly altered and corrupted that they cannot be relied upon as accurate expressions of divine truth.13 This ambivalence proved beneficial in the world of interreligious polemics because it allowed Muslims to attach importance to those parts of the Bible that agreed with the Qur’a¯n or could be made to support an Islamic position while rejecting as inaccurate those that could not.

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This approach would be called into service when treating the Abrahamic triangle for two reasons. The story is, first of all, a prominent and extended biblical narrative that has no echo whatsoever in the Qur’a¯n, despite the Qur’a¯n’s numerous references to an Ishmael and an Isaac. Second, the narrative has been harnessed by previous monotheists from very early on as a means of authorizing a dominance in the competitive economy of world religions. Despite the absence of Abrahamic genealogical references in the Qur’a¯n, Arab genealogists cite a family tree for the Arab peoples that faithfully reproduces and conflates the genealogical lists of Genesis 10, 11, and 25 and that includes Ishmael as the progenitor of an Arab lineage that would later result in the birth of the great Arabian prophet Muhammad.14 The fact that the story of Hagar and Sarah / Ishmael and Isaac does not occur in the Qur’a¯n did not prevent Muslim scholars from responding to it in mainstream Islamic exegetical literature. In fact, they may have felt compelled to do so because of Jewish and Christian claims to anteriority and, therefore, superiority. The result is Islamic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, although indirect, and this exegesis can be examined in relation to Jewish and Christian exegesis of the same material. According to Jewish exegetical literature, the story plays itself out in four biblical loci. The first mention of Hagar in the Bible occurs in Gn 16.1 as an introduction to the Abrahamic triangle. After having lived together for ten years in the Land of Canaan, Abraham and Sarah15 are still childless. The barren Sarah gives her personal slave, the Egyptian Hagar, to Abraham as a surrogate mother for his child, saying: ‘‘Perhaps I shall be built up [with a son] through her.’’16 They have sexual relations, and in the same sentence (in the following word!) Hagar becomes pregnant and begins to treat her mistress too casually. Sarah, miffed, complains to Abraham, who tells her to treat her personal slave as she wishes. Sarah then treats Hagar cruelly, so Hagar flees into the wilderness where she stops at a well. A messenger of God finds her there and promises her a son who will survive to father a great line of people. His name will be Ishmael, meaning ‘‘God hears,’’ for, says the angel, ‘‘God has paid heed to your suffering.’’ The messenger provides a somewhat obscure foretelling as to Ishmael’s future and then tells Hagar to return to Sarah and suffer whatever treatment she will receive at the hands of her mistress. Hagar returns and gives birth to a son for Abraham. In thanks, Hagar herself provides an etymology for the well at which the angel encountered her. It becomes known as ‘‘The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me’’ (be’er lah.ay ro’i). The next scene in Genesis skips thirteen years to when Abraham is ninety-nine years old, according to the biblical chronology.17 Abraham had despaired of fathering a son through his favored wife Sarah, but

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God suddenly promises that Sarah will indeed bear him a son.18 Abraham finds this so ludicrous that he falls down laughing (va-yipol Avraham ‘al panav va-yitsh.ak), and says: ‘‘Let Ishmael live on by your favor’’ (Gn 17.17). Abraham’s strange behavior here serves as one of three biblical etymologies for his future son’s name, for the Hebrew meaning of Isaac—Yitsh.ak—is laughter. God affirms that Sarah will indeed give birth to a son for Abraham and stresses that the divine covenant will endure through Sarah’s child, Isaac, rather than through Abraham’s first-born son through Hagar. But God maintains the earlier blessing as well: Ishmael will also father a great nation.19 The following year, Sarah gives birth to Isaac as God had promised.20 At the festive occasion celebrating Isaac’s weaning, Sarah sees Ishmael doing something in relation to Isaac or the weaning ceremony that disturbs her greatly but which is not specified clearly in the biblical text. The word describing his action is metsah.ek (Gn 21.9), a word derived from the same root, ts-h.-k, which conveys laughter, frivolity, or play. She immediately demands that Abraham cast out Hagar and her son, ‘‘for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.’’21 Abraham objects, but God commands him to obey Sarah because in fact, it is indeed Isaac who will serve as heir of the Abrahamic line. Abraham then sends them off with meager supplies, which are rapidly depleted in the desert. As Hagar fears the approaching death of her son, a messenger of God again appears and announces the divine promise for a third time that Ishmael will father a great nation. God provides for them in the desert, where they continue to live and where Ishmael grows up as an archer (Gn 21.15–21). This is virtually the end of the story of Hagar and Ishmael in the Hebrew Bible.22 One last passage (Gn 25.8–18) notes that Ishmael returned to the place of his birth upon the death of his father and, along with his brother Isaac, buried Abraham. It also provides the names of Ishmael’s sons, his age at death, and the location of the tribes and ethnic peoples thought to have derived from his line. According to rabbinic readings, however, Hagar’s story does not end here. The early fifth-century collection of midrashic exegesis known as Genesis Rabbah (and other later collections) makes note of Gn 24.62, the odd biblical statement that many years after Isaac had grown to marriageable age and Sarah had died, on the occasion when Isaac met his wife Rebecca for the first time, Isaac happened to be returning from the direction of the well of Lah.ay ro’i,23 the very place where God’s messenger first spoke with Hagar. It notes further that, only six verses later, Abraham again takes a wife, whose name is Keturah. The rabbis combine these and arrive at the surprising conclusion that after Sarah’s

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death, her son went to the desert well of Lah.ay ro’i to retrieve Hagar, aka Keturah, and bring her back home to be remarried to Abraham!24 The early Jewish biblical exegetes who authored or collected the material found in the midrash25 of course knew the conclusion of Isaac’s favored status in the Abrahamic triangle. Living in a period of great turmoil and dislocation for the Jewish people in Late Antiquity, however, they were influenced by their environment to assign special significance to the two sons’ interrelationship. Independent Jewish civilization had taken a pounding under Hellenism and Jewish independence had eroded and eventually ended under the growing strength of Rome. Much of the earliest extant exegetical comments, from which much subsequent exegesis derived, evolved during a turbulent period when neighboring peoples were ascendant and Judaism was fragmenting into various sects or religio-political ‘‘parties,’’ including one that would result in Christianity. Scholars have long recognized the linguistic, cultural, racial, and geographical affinities between the Israelite peoples and their neighbors.26 Because the rabbis subscribed to worldviews strongly influenced by biblical cosmology, they were able to conclude that neighboring Arab peoples of their own day derived from such biblical forebears as Hagar and Ishmael. It was of course clear to those familiar with the Bible that despite his powerful position as the patrilinial firstborn (bekhor), Abraham’s son through Hagar was rejected in favor of his younger halfbrother. But the Genesis narrative provides no clear reason or justification for the switch.27 The rabbis of Late Antiquity sought to provide just such explanatory data and attach them to various motifs they found prominent in the narrative, and they did so in a manner that was influenced by (and could respond to) the particular circumstances in which they found themselves in their own day. While we cannot reconstruct the motivations behind their commentaries, we can delineate trends in their exegetical explanations. Sarah, for example, as the matriarch of the chosen genealogical line of Abraham, serves for the rabbis as a kind of queen mother representing the royalty of Judaism in a fashion that parallels the royal systems of the empires under which the rabbis lived. Rabbinic literature recognizes Sarah as the great princess of Israel and provides a biblical proof for her exalted status in the deep meaning of her name. The rabbis knew that the Hebrew name, Sarah, looks like the Hebrew word for commander or chief, evoking royalty and suggesting the meaning of ‘‘princess.’’28 As early as in the Palestinian Targum, however, Hagar is also granted royal lineage—deemed to be the very daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh!29 But because Hagar becomes Sarah’s personal slave and is ultimately rejected in the lineal competition, it must be asked how the rabbis can

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posit such a lineage for her. The answer may be found in the exegetical reconstruction of Hagar’s entry into the biblical story. The first biblical reference to Hagar, ‘‘an Egyptian slave,’’ is in Gn 16.1 when Sarah gives her to Abraham in order to mother his child. The only pericope associated with Egypt prior to Gn 16 is the narrative of Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt during a famine in Canaan30 where, after a harrowing episode in which Abraham’s life is endangered and Sarah is taken into Pharaoh’s harem, Abraham bests Pharaoh himself with the help of God. As a result, Pharaoh releases Sarah to her husband and sends the patriarch off with, among other material gifts, female slaves received previously from Pharaoh’s hand. Rabbinic exegesis reconstructs Pharaoh’s words as if he gives his own daughter to Sarah as her personal slave: ‘‘Better that my daughter should be a servant in this house than a mistress in another!’’31 This is clearly meant as a compliment to Sarah and Abraham, but it also offers an image of Hagar as a proud and royal personage in her own right. In several places, midrashim describe Sarah as a stunning beauty, a loyal wife, kind and hospitable.32 These traits reflect to a great extent the image of her husband, partly because of the paucity of data on Sarah from the biblical source, and partly because the rabbis, like the Bible itself, clearly emphasize the role of the patriarch and tend to gloss over the matriarchal character. Rabbinic exegesis reflects the biblical ambivalence toward Sarah but also extends the story. On the one hand, Hagar belittles the Jewish matriarch after becoming pregnant (Gn 16.4). On the other, she is privileged to have God speak to her through divine messengers (Gn 21.17). Hagar’s lack of regard for Sarah is amplified in Genesis Rabbah.33 In other places, rabbinic exegetes portray Hagar as an idolater at heart who, when sent out from Abraham and Sarah’s home, ‘‘departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beer Sheba’’ (Gn 21.14). The rabbis interpreted the biblical word ‘‘wandered’’ (va-teta‘) as wandering after idols and reverting back to her father’s idolatry.34 But as noted previously, the rabbis take note of the fact that angels visited Hagar and spoke with her directly, suggesting that she was of a stature to merit God’s personal intervention.35 Ambivalent toward both Sarah and Hagar, these passages suggest that the competition for the matriarchate parallels and stands for the competition for the Abrahamic heir.36 The Bible of course makes clear who the scion must be and provides the basis for the inevitable conclusion. Not only does Genesis affirm that God’s covenant will apply only to Isaac (Gn 17.19, 21), that Abraham gave all he had to Isaac (Gn 25.5), that God blessed Isaac (Gn 25.11), and that Ishmael’s progeny dwelt outside the promised land (Gn 25.18); the biblical text also provides the pretext for

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Ishmael’s downfall—and its significance is so deep and inevitable that it is inexorably tied up with the essence of Ishmael’s and Isaac’s relationship. The pretext for Ishmael’s undoing is that he does something described in Gn 21.9 as metsah.ek, rendered variously in English translations as ‘‘mocking,’’ ‘‘making sport,’’ or ‘‘playing with.’’37 The Hebrew root for Ishmael’s action is identical with that of Isaac’s name. In some definitive way, Ishmael’s act against Isaac is a key for defining the destinies of both sons.38 But because the biblical text never provides an explicit meaning for metsah.ek, it is up to the rabbis to define it. Five suggestions are offered by early exegetes, each destined to discredit Ishmael and demonstrate how he could not merit the role of patriarchal successor. Rabbi Akiba interpreted Ishmael’s act as illegal sexual relations (gilui ‘arayot), citing a parallel biblical use of the word’s root with what was interpreted as an accusation of attempted illegal sexual aggression.39 R. Ishmael associated metsah.ek with idolatry, citing a case of the word being used biblically in an idolatrous context.40 R. Eliezer, son of R. Yosi HaGalili, understood Ishmael’s action to be one of wanton violence (shefikhut damim) by referring to a biblical use of the word in a context of violent killing.41 R. Azaria in the name of R. Levi interpreted the act as one of unbalanced lying and violence, similarly citing a parallel biblical use of the word, metsah.ek.42 These suggestions are followed by that of R.Shimon bar Yohai, who reduces his colleagues’ clever attempts to validate the biblical conclusion through a conflation of biblical texts by providing a surprisingly detached and critical view of the situation.43 R. Shimon bar Yohai observes from the context of the narrative that the problematic word refers to the issue of inheritance (en ha-lashon ha-zeh shel tseh.ok ela’ leshon yerushah). Ishmael commits his act during the weaning celebration of Isaac, when the family celebrates the viability of the child. During the feast, Ishmael laughs or makes fun of the proceedings because he knows that as the firstborn, he should be entitled to the privileged inheritance. This is what ignites Sarah’s fury, and her very response to Ishmael confirms Shimon bar Yohai’s argument (Gn 21.10): ‘‘Cast out that slavewoman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.’’ Many other midrashic comments paint Hagar and Ishmael in negative light. Hagar is described as criticizing God,44 as teaching Ishmael his evil ways,45 and as lacking faith.46 How do the rabbis regard her as lacking in faith given the fact that she returns to a difficult and perhaps even dangerous situation in response to the directions and promise of an angel of God? The reason is found in an obscure act of Hagar when an angel caused a well of water to spring up for her and her son after they were banished into the desert: she began to fill her water skin from the spring

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rather than rely on God’s grace in keeping the spring flowing. More ammunition for negative portrayals of Ishmael is available from the enigmatic prophecy regarding him in Gn 16.12: ‘‘He shall be a wild man (pere’ adam), his hand against everyone and the hand of everyone against him.’’ Most exegetes used this statement as a means of further reducing the character of Ishmael.47 A few comments, however, seem to parallel the less dramatic analysis offered above by Shimon bar Yohai. R. Yohanan understands pere’ adam as simply ‘‘while all people are raised in settlements, he would be raised in the wilderness.’’48 Some exegetes even made God’s positive blessing for Ishmael in Gn 17.20 refer to Isaac. The Masoretic (authoritative) text of the Hebrew Bible produces the following: ‘‘[God says to Abraham:] As for Ishmael, I have heeded you (shema‘tikha). I hereby bless him. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous. He shall be the father of twelve chieftains, and I will make of him a great nation.’’ This verse is built around a play on words with Ishmael’s name: Ishmael (yishma‘-’el) means ‘‘God hears,’’ and the verse notes how God heard Ishmael and then blessed him. But R. Yohanan in the name of R. Yehoshua b. Hanania provides a different reading of the biblical play on words and renders the key word not directed to Abraham as shema‘tikha (‘‘I have heeded/heard you’’) but rather to Ishmael, as shima‘tikha (‘‘I inform you’’).49 The consonantal text of the verse remains exactly the same; the different vocalization of one word provides an entire different meaning. According to this reading (interpretation), then, God is actually informing Ishmael of Isaac’s blessings: ‘‘And to Ishmael [God says]: ‘I am telling you, I hereby bless him. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous.’’ Why did the rabbis go to such great extent to blacken the image of Ishmael when the Bible already seems to have made it unmistakably clear that he is excluded from the covenant, which obtains only with the line of Isaac? Their comments represent more than a scholarly response to a literal reading of the biblical text, for their exegesis sheds light on the influence of historical context on the thinking of the rabbis. In Gn 21.17, for example, a messenger of God responds to Ishmael’s plight after having been sent out into the desert. In a narrative explanation for the reason why God does not allow Ishmael (and Hagar) to die of thirst in the desert, R. Shimon begins a story as follows: ‘‘The heavenly angels jumped up to accuse (God). They said before Him: ‘Master of all the worlds, you cause a well to spring forth for a person who in the future will kill your children through thirst?’50 R. Shimon is referring to what rabbinic tradition viewed as Ishmaelite treachery against Israel during the traumatic period of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, based on an exegetical understanding of the enigmatic prophecy of Is 21.13–17. Rabbinic tradition under-

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stands the Isaiah text as a prophetic utterance describing the downfall of an Arab nation deriving from Ishmael. The opening words of the Isaiah prophecy, ‘‘The burden upon Arav’’ (masa’ ba-‘arav), are regarded as a reference to Arabia, paralleled further on in the prophecy with the names Dedan, Kedar, and Tema which are attested in extrabiblical sources as place names in Arabian geography.51 Two of these three names listed in the ‘‘Arabian prophecy’’ of Isaiah (Kedar and Tema) are the names of Ishmael’s sons given in Gn 25, and the third (Dedan) is a son of Keturah, who, we recall, is conflated by the rabbis to be none other than Hagar. Why, according to the rabbinic reading of the prophecy, will these Arab tribes of the Isaiah prophecy be destroyed? The answer is that they tricked innocent Israelites who had escaped the destructive armies of Nebuchadnezzar, only to be deceived and killed by their erstwhile Arab allies.52 This exegesis of the rabbis is certainly centuries removed from the debacle of the First Temple’s destruction, but the rabbis were, in essence, reliving that nightmare as their own world was disintegrating under the cultural and political-military onslaught of Rome. Some of Rome’s local allies were neighboring Arab peoples such as the Nabateans, who controlled what the Romans called Arabia Petraea in what is mostly today’s southern Jordan, and Tacitus notes that the Roman conquest of Judea included ‘‘a strong contingent of Arabs who hated the Jews with all that hatred that is common among neighbors.’’53 We cannot know the details, but the strong polemic suggests that contemporary threats, whether physical, spiritual or both, clearly played a role in the rabbis’ exegesis of their ancient texts. Another revealing example of rabbinic exegesis, this time on Gn 25.7, is set in the days of Alexander the Great.54 In the days of Alexander the Macedonian, the Ishmaelites came to dispute the issue of the birthright (bekhorah) with Israel. Two evil families came with them: Canaanites and Egyptians. They [the rabbis] said: Who will argue against them? Gevi‘ah b. Kosem55 said: I will go and present the case against them. They said: Take care not to enable the judgment to go on their behalf for the land. . . . He went and presented the case against them. Alexander of Macedon said: Who is making the claim against whom? The Ishmaelites said: We are making a claim against them. From their own Torah we can vanquish them. It is written (Dt 21.17): He must recognize the first born son of the hated [wife] to give him a double portion [of the inheritance]. It was Ishmael who according to the law should receive a double portion. Gevi‘ah b. Kosem said to him: My lord king, does a man not do as he wishes for his sons? He replied: Yes. He continued: Is it not written (Gn 25.5): Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac. Where is the document outlining what he gave to his (other) sons?56 He continued (Gn 25.6): And to the sons of Abraham’s concubines, he gave gifts. (With that), they departed shamefaced.

We lack the data required to reconstruct the exact historical or social circumstance for which this analogy was made, but it again suggests that

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the rabbis’ denigration of Ishmael beyond the parameters of the biblical text was a reaction to the difficulties of their times. Long before the genesis of Islam in the seventh century, rabbinic Judaism had absorbed and extended biblical images of Hagar and Ishmael, and like most of the non-Israelite characters depicted in the Hebrew Bible, those images extended by the rabbis were mostly negative. What of Islamic views of the Abrahamic triangle? Although Abraham occurs in the Qur’a¯n in a hundred verses spanning dozens of chapters, Sarah is never mentioned by name nor is Hagar ever referred to, even indirectly.57 They both appear by name repeatedly, however, in Islamic exegesis. Sarah is often mentioned positively. She is beautiful and obedient;58 ‘‘one of the best of people that could ever be mentioned.’’59 On the other hand, she is portrayed in the same sources as being fickle and terribly jealous of Hagar, even to the point of committing violence against her: Sarah said to Abraham: ‘‘Take Hagar as a concubine, for I give you permission.’’ So he had sexual relations with her and she became pregnant with Ishmael. Then he had relations with Sarah and she became pregnant with Isaac. When she gave birth to him and he grew up, he and Ishmael fought one another.60 Sarah became angry with the mother of Ishmael and became jealous of her. She sent her away. Then she called her back. Then she grew angry again and sent her away. Then she brought her in and swore that she would cut her into pieces. She said: ‘‘I will cut off your nose. I will cut off your ears so it will cause your disfigurement!’’ Then she said: ‘‘No, but I will circumcise her.’’ Then she cut it off from her. With that, Hagar took the bottom of her skirt and wiped off the blood. This is the reason that women are circumcised and that they use the bottoms of their skirts.61 Then she said: ‘‘You will not share quarters with me in this place!’’ God provided a revelation to Abraham that he will go to Mecca, the House62 not yet in existence in Mecca at that time. So he took her and her son to Mecca and left them.63

This narrative, which represents one of many different transitional narratives in Islamic exegetical literature that move Hagar and Ishmael from a biblical to an Arabian context, is invariably connected with qur’a¯nic depictions of Abraham in Mecca.64 As such, it inserts a biblical motif absent from the textus receptus of the Qur’a¯n into the standard qur’a¯nic readings. This insertion of Bible and midrash into the unofficial Qur’a¯n satisfied the need of Muslims to bring the biblical story of Sarah and Hagar into an official Islamic context. The motif is reborn anew, but contrary to the Jewish and Christian exegetical position that the blessing of election rests entirely in Sarah and Isaac’s line, the Islamic renderings emphasize the biblical depiction of Sarah’s shock and fear of Hagar’s status as matriarchal rival. Islamic exegesis extends the story in order to provide greater substance to the biblical blessings of Ishmael.

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In the Islamic environment, Hagar and Ishmael were removed from the biblical context because of specific instruction given to Abraham. Abraham knew that prophethood would shift in the future from the Israelites to the Ishmaelites, through whom the last and greatest prophet of humankind would trace his lineage from father Ishmael. In Qur’a¯n 2.129, Abraham and Ishmael pray the following together: ‘‘Our Lord, send them a messenger from among them who will recite for them your signs and teach them the Book and wisdom and make them pure.’’ Islamic extensions of the narrative, therefore, depict Hagar’s son growing up and joining with his father Abraham in building God’s house, the Ka‘ba, on the site of the future holy city of Mecca.65 Abraham is essential in this endeavor because he is known for establishing sacred sites from where divine communication can be received.66 Not only does he found sacred sites in or near Bethel and Ai, and at Mamre and Be’er Sheva; he offers up his own son at Moriah, a location that is subsequently associated with the location of the Jerusalem Temple.67 Abraham’s authenticity as the original monotheist proves the sacred authenticity of the Holy Ka‘ba, and it is Ishmael—not Isaac—who joins in its building: ‘‘We covenanted with Abraham and Ishmael [saying]: Purify my house (an .tahhira¯ baytı¯) . . .’’ (Qur’a¯n 2.125). The struggle over primacy is particularly evident in the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son (Qur’a¯n 37.99–113). The qur’a¯nic rendering does not provide the identity of the intended victim, and the early exegetical literature is also ambivalent. But by the early ninth century it became virtually axiomatic that it was Ishmael and not Isaac. Ishmael will bring merit to himself, his father, and his Arabian progeny through his willingness to submit himself without reservation to God’s will—the very meaning of the word ‘‘Islam.’’ Like his father, Abraham, therefore, Ishmael epitomizes the meaning of ‘‘Muslim.’’68 In contrast to rabbinic views observed above, then, Hagar personifies the obedient wife in Islamic exegesis. She is, after all, the matriarch of the Arab peoples who will produce the ultimate and final prophet, Muhammad. Hagar, therefore, trusts in her husband and in God. When Abraham leaves Hagar in the desolate desert area of Mecca, she trusts her husband when he assures her that God is responsible for her and her son.69 Hagar is also described as pretty or even beautiful.70 In an interesting and enigmatic parallel to the Jewish criticism of Hagar, however, she is castigated also in Islamic traditions for scooping the water provided by God’s angel into her water skin.71 On the other hand, she epitomizes the traits of hospitality reserved in Jewish tradition for Abraham and, by association, also for Sarah.72 It is of great interest to note that, unlike Jewish exegesis, Islamic exegesis rarely ascribes royal lineage to Hagar.73 Often, no pedigree is

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ascribed to her at all, although she is sometimes described as Egyptian or as a slave of Pharaoh.74 Yet she is referred to repeatedly in the tradition as the matriarch of the Arab peoples through the idiomatic expression that Hagar is the mother of the ‘‘children of the water of heaven (banu¯ ma¯’ al-sama¯’),’’ a reference to Arabs.75 Traditions ascribed even to the Prophet Muhammad state that all Arabs derive from Hagar’s son.76 Islamic narrative exegesis on the Abrahamic triangle invariably includes an episode missing from most Jewish narratives. This is the extension, noted above, of a narrative found in both Jewish and Islamic sources that depicts Abraham visiting Ishmael to check up on his son after Hagar’s death.77 The basic narrative, found in both Islamic and Jewish tradition, begins with Abraham asking permission from Sarah to visit Ishmael or Hagar (depending on the version). Sarah gives him permission, usually on the condition that he will not dismount from his riding animal. In every version, Ishmael is not at home when Abraham arrives, so the patriarch is met by Ishmael’s inhospitable wife, sometimes depicted as rude and uncivilized. Abraham leaves her with a cryptic message that only Ishmael would understand, communicating that she is undeserving of being his wife and that he should divorce her. The dutiful son obeys his father and then remarries. Some time later, Abraham visits Ishmael again. This time, he is greeted properly by a caring and generous woman. Before he returns to Sarah (still without seeing Ishmael), he leaves a second cryptic message confirming and blessing the new marriage. Prior to the third visit, not found in any Jewish version, Abraham is told by God to build a house for him, so Abraham returns to Ishmael, who is living in the vicinity of Mecca. Together they build the House of God (the Ka‘ba) or rebuild it on ancient foundations first established by Adam. This narrative is likewise linked in Islamic exegetical literature with the Qur’a¯n passage describing Abraham and Ishmael’s divinely orchestrated association with the Ka‘ba.78 The Qur’a¯n does not include any mention of Ishmael being abandoned in the desert with his mother to meet their fate. On the contrary, Ishmael is associated with the most sacred site in Islam, where he is established by his father according to the divine will.79 According to the Qur’a¯n, Ishmael is supervised by his father, who also calls God’s blessing upon him and his offspring. When it is time to build God’s Holy House, Abraham builds it with Ishmael’s help. This series of qur’a¯nic exegetical narratives places the biblical motif of Abraham, the founder of sacred sites, fully in an Arabian context. It demonstrates how Abraham, along with his son and patriarch of Arab peoples, built the holiest shrine of Islam, thereby establishing Islam’s authenticity through the very personages of the biblical patriarchs. In

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addition, and equally important, Islamic religious literatures subtly turn the biblical view (and the Christian and Jewish exegetical traditions) on its head in order to demonstrate how the chosen line of Abraham rests in his truly firstborn, the son of Hagar, who, all agree, fathered the Arab peoples.80 This is not explicit in the Qur’a¯n, and it probably was not intended there, but as will be demonstrated below, the reversal is quite clear in the exegetical literature. As the epitome of steadfastness under hardship, as founder of religious shrines, and as unyielding submittor to God’s will, Abraham is clearly established in both Jewish and Islamic literatures as founding patriarch and prophet. Moreover, each religious civilization acknowledges that its neighbor also derives its own sacred history from him. But in the case of Judaism and Islam, common ancestry did not foster brotherly love or reduce competition. Jewish tradition repeatedly made clear that Ishmael is the rejected son and that God’s design rests only in Isaac. In response, Islam could cite evidence discrediting Israel’s claim for sole religious primacy. One particularly interesting Islamic tradition treats the issue in the form of a question as to which of Abraham’s sons was laid on the altar for sacrifice. The qur’a¯nic rendering of the ‘‘intended sacrifice’’ (al-dhabı¯h.), which is the term used in Islamic parlance for what Jews refer to as the ‘‘binding’’ (‘akedah), does not indicate with any clarity which son of Abraham was bound on the altar. The early Muslim exegetes were divided over the issue, with roughly half of the traditions favoring one over the other.81 The arguments supporting each candidate are complex and center mostly on issues of interpretive methodologies applied to the qur’a¯nic text, but also geography and attribution of tradition. AlMas‘u¯dı¯ (d. 956–57), for example wrote, ‘‘If the Sacrifice occurred in the H . ija¯z, it was Ishmael, because Isaac nevered entered the H . ija¯z. If the Sacrifice took place in Syria, then it was Isaac because Ishmael did not enter Syria after he was taken from there.’’82 A well-known tradition, repeated in many sources, makes obvious what the issue is that lies behind so much exegesis. [The caliph, ‘Umar II, d. 720] sent for a man who was . . . a Jew who had converted to Islam and became a good Muslim. It became apparent that he was one of the religious scholars (‘ulama¯’) of the Jews, so ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Azı¯z decided to ask him about it . . . ‘‘Which of Abraham’s two sons was he commanded to sacrifice?’’ He answered, ‘‘Ishmael. And by God, O Caliph, the Jews know that. However, they envy the Arab community because their father was the one commanded [to be sacrificed] and he is the one who is ascribed for merit for his steadfastness. But they deny that and claim that it was Isaac because Isaac was their father.‘‘83

The importance that each of the three great monotheistic traditions attached to Abraham as its founder is brilliantly brought to light in the

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qur’a¯nic claim that, contrary to the claims of Jews and Christians, Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but rather a pre-Israelite monotheist and precursor to authentic Islam.84 The competing claims over the divine blessing fought exegetically between Isaac and Ishmael are echoed in the traditions of Sarah and Hagar, although their struggle is less obvious or clearly delineated in the patriarchal systems of the competing traditions. The Abrahamic family is only one of many motifs that serve as a crucible for the polemic between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and perhaps with other religious ideas and movements, both internal and external, that cannot be identified today). The Qur’a¯n is highly polemical, speaking often and pointedly against Judaism and Christianity as well as to the idolatrous religious systems native to pre-Islamic Arabia. Qur’a¯nic polemic thus reflects Islam’s historical struggle to establish itself against the resistance and pressure exerted by neighboring Jews, Christians, and pagans. The Christian Bible and Hebrew Bible are likewise, highly polemical vis-a`-vis their own religious neighbors and competitors. Scripture is inherently polemical (though not exclusively so). As depicted by the scriptural records, the intrusion of the divine will into the workings of humanity is exceptional. The context of revelation in virtually every case reflects human turmoil and radical change: sudden exit from a life of slavery and entry into a new and uncertain, dangerous world (Sinai); fear and dread of social disintegration or conquest by enemy empires (the classical biblical prophets); imminent collapse of the old institutions of established religion ( Jesus); encroachment by foreign civilizations against a beleaguered and dying tradition (Muhammad). Because Scripture emerges in periods of disorder and confusion, the community (or its leadership or powerful factions) articulates the belief that it is fighting for survival (which it may indeed be doing). Polemic serves to define the self in relation to the other: it identifies the self with the good and the threatening other as malicious and dangerous. Polemic in Scripture is authoritative by virtue of its divine source, but Scripture itself, as has been frequently observed as of late, also interprets itself.85 Scriptural self-interpretation is not polemical, of course, because it does not differentiate between self and other. It seeks, rather, to validate certain kinds of societal changes by investing them with divine authority. Like Scripture, scriptural interpretation also carries on the work of polemic, partly because it is simply responding to the debates already existing in the primary text, and partly because scriptural discord

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becomes a convenient way to play out the tensions in the world of the exegetes. The polemical nature of exegesis is clear in the case of the Abrahamic triangle, and perhaps no more obvious than in the example of the ‘‘binding’’/‘‘intended sacrifice’’ of Abraham’s son. This segment demonstrates how the exegetical enterprise is not simply a process (even if a complex one) of borrowing and embellishment. The Islamic claim that the Qur’a¯n represents ancient wisdom coeval with that of the Bible cannot simply be rejected without deeper consideration. It is possible, according to modern methodologies of intertextual research, for example, that the qur’a¯nic rendering of the ‘‘intended sacrifice’’ emerges from a tradition that predates the biblical rendering.86 More important here, its exegesis among Muslims is not simply derivative and secondary. Polemical energy associated with the identity of the intended sacrifice was not directed only against non-Muslims, however, for the language and symbolism of the story also entered into internal Islamic polemical discourse.87 Even in the very earliest layers, the exegetes were working in a cultural and literary environment that overlapped significantly with that of Jews and Christians,88 so the motifs and symbols reflect a common world. But the art of the Islamic exegetical process here reflects a synthesis of universal inclinations with indigenous talent and culture. The profoundly polemical nature of scriptural exegesis is not always evident when read alone and by one whose worldview is already influenced by or derivative of the world that produced the texts. When such texts are read in relation to a different, even if similar, religious/literary world, it can be far more obvious. Studies in comparative exegesis help to highlight and uncover textual or conceptual nuances that may be unknowable without reading across religious systems. Comparative studies in this case do not attempt to determine the source of influence but, rather, from a unique perspective, flesh out both the text and its exegesis in a novel way.

7

May Karaites Eat Chicken? Indeterminacy in Sectarian Halakhic Exegesis Daniel Frank

Karaite and Rabbanite Sources of Law In his invaluable history of Karaite Jewry in twentieth-century Egypt, Mourad El-Kodsi writes briefly but enthusiastically about the community’s traditional cuisine. Among the fare he describes is a rich dish of chicken stuffed with ground meat, rice, and pine nuts.1 Delicious as it may be, there is nothing extraordinary about the dish per se; similar recipes have long been popular in the Middle East with Jews and non-Jews alike.2 What is remarkable, however, is that at one time, Karaite Jews did not eat chicken on principle, since they could not be sure that the Bible permits its consumption. Rabbanite Jews, on the other hand, have always declared the chicken to be a ‘‘kosher’’ bird, even though there are no scriptural grounds for doing so. Medieval texts document a lively debate between Karaite and Rabbanite Jews concerning the permissibility of various domestic fowl, a debate that illustrates each community’s respective conception of the law and its sources. Rabbinic Judaism is founded equally upon Scripture and tradition, and the latter is indispensable to the former. During the Second Temple period, laws were still derived exegetically from the Bible by a process known as midrash halakhah. By the end of the talmudic age, however, the Torah had lost its direct legislative force. Scripture still constituted the law’s basic principle or norm, but the actual sources of rabbinic halakhah were now tradition, interpretation, legislation, custom, incident, and legal reasoning. Legislation might be scripturally justified, but the codification of the Talmud had eliminated the Bible’s creative legal function. As Menachem Elon has put it: ‘‘In halakhic literature after the completion of the Talmud, and especially after the middle of the geonic period, neither creative nor integrative Biblical exegesis was employed to any significant extent.’’3

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Karaite Judaism stands in stark contrast to the religion of the rabbis.4 If the Karaite movement developed as a rejection of rabbinic Judaism, Karaite law represents a reaction to rabbinic halakhah. When the sect crystallized in the Islamic East during the tenth century, its scripturalism was at its most manifest, with the Bible functioning not only as the basic legal norm but also as the primary legal source, mediated by reason and consensus.5 Consequently, Karaite halakhic works are exegetical, if not in form, then in content. Legal positions are always grounded in Scripture, and dissenting views scrutinized as to their exegetical validity. Conversely, Bible commentaries regularly contain extended discussions of halakhic issues, especially at those loci that may serve as a basis for legislation. Karaite-Rabbanite polemics raged primarily over points of law, which served as emblems that demarcated the two groups. The calendar, the Sabbath regulations, and the liturgy are among the better-known areas of contention.6 But the factions differed substantively as well on almost every other legal subject. Among the problems raised by both sides were questions of ambiguity, nonspecificity, and uncertainty: How detailed must legislation be? Can law be derived from the Bible alone by means of legal reasoning, or is an authoritative, interpretive tradition necessary? And what is to be done when certain legal passages in Scripture defy interpretation? In this chapter, I will show how early Karaites responded to halakhic indeterminacy when confronted with a single problem, the identification of unclean birds. In order to elucidate my primary sources—many of which are in Judeo-Arabic—I will have recourse to various Islamic concepts and technical terms that shaped the Karaite and Rabbanite positions. But first, a definition of terms is in order.

Halakhic Indeterminacy By ‘‘halakhic indeterminacy’’ I mean two things.7 First, there are practical issues that have not been regulated—laws, or aspects of legislation, whose precise implementation has not been fixed. Under these circumstances, custom (minhag) supplements the law in rabbinic Judaism, although ultimately custom too becomes fixed and assumes binding force.8 Second, there are points of law that have become obscure with the passage of time and whose proper implementation can no longer be determined. In rabbinic Judaism, the fulfillment of certain commandments depends upon the exact knowledge of biblical realia, such as the nature of the colored thread in the ritual fringes. Since the identity of the requisite dye has become uncertain, the fringes are worn without the colored thread—a temporary measure until further clarification is forthcoming.9 From the Rabbanite perspective, of course, most of the

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Law would have remained indeterminate, had it not been for the existence of the Sinaitic tradition. Without an authoritative interpretation, biblical law would perplex us with its innumerable ambiguities. In the introduction to his Commentary on Genesis, Saadya Gaon (882–942 c.e.) expresses this forcefully. The Law, he says, contains both rational and revealed commandments: As for the rational commandments (al-‘aqlı¯ya), people would come to know them, even if they were not mentioned in Scripture. For this reason, (even) if ambiguous expressions (alfa¯z. mutasha¯biha min al-lugha) occur in their exposition, they are not incomprehensible to us, for (our) reason engages them, examines them, and verifies them wisely and justly. But as for the revealed commandments (al-sam‘ı¯ya)—if they had not been established in Scripture, we would not come to (know) them. Similarly, if there were any ambiguous expressions in their exposition, we would be perplexed about them, since their numerous (possible) meanings would differ from each other. Therefore, we require the testimony of those who beheld the prophet, so that these ambiguous expressions (al-alfa¯z. al-mutasha¯biha) concerning the revealed commandments will be restored to (their) unambiguous meanings (al-muh.kam).10

As he subsequently elaborates: It is inconceivable that (Moses) commanded them to eat unleavened bread (on Passover) without informing them explicitly of which grain it is (to be made),11 or to stay away from ritual impurities, without explaining to them the measure of emissions,12 and the like. For this reason, traditionally revealed knowledge must have existed for forty years before Scripture was set down in writing.13

Saadya’s classification of the divine commandments, which is developed at greater length in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, distinguishes between laws that coincide with the dictates of human reason and laws grounded in divine decree alone, whose purpose is to increase human reward and happiness.14 Although he was apparently the first Jewish thinker to employ these categories, they derive from Mu‘tazilite theology, which stresses that divine commandments are acts of God’s absolute wisdom (h.ikma), not arbitrary products of his will. Could ambiguity beset such a law? Can divine precepts be imprecise? No, says Saadya: Reason decrees as well, that (God) the All-Wise would not make his commandments and prohibitions known in an ambiguous manner (mutasha¯bihan). Thus he stated: ‘‘Surely, this instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach’’ (Dt 30.11). Indeed he confirmed (their) clarity, as it is stated: ‘‘All are straightforward to the intelligent man, and right to those who have attained knowledge’’ (Prov 8.9).15

Not surprisingly, Saadya’s preoccupation with scriptural ambiguities derives from Islamic discussions of the terms mutasha¯biha¯t and muh.kama¯t in Qur’a¯n 3.7:

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It is he who sent down upon thee the Book, wherein are unambiguous verses (aya¯t muh.kama¯t) that are the Essence of the Book (umm al-kita¯b), and others ambiguous (mutasha¯biha¯t). As for those in whose hearts is swerving, they follow the ambiguous part, desiring dissension, and desiring its interpretation; and none knows its interpretation, save only God. And those firmly rooted in knowledge say, ‘‘We believe in it; all is from our Lord.’’16

As John Wansbrough showed, Muslim exegetes differed widely in their understanding of this verse.17 According to Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n (d. 767), the aya¯t muh.kama¯t are verses containing clear directives, such as the ordinances in Qur’a¯n 6.151–53, while the aya¯t mutasha¯biha¯t are four of the mysterious sets of abbreviations (al-muqat..ta‘a¯t) with which certain su¯ras are headed.18 But according to the Companion Muja¯hid (as reported by al T.abarı¯), the only aya¯t muh.kama¯t are verses that prescribe what is permitted or forbidden; all others are mutasha¯biha¯t.19 Interestingly, both authorities define aya¯t muh.kama¯t as legislative verses, even though the injunctions they contain require elaboration; presumably, the very fact that they contain explicit prescriptions sets these passages apart. The theologian al-Ma¯turı¯dı¯ (d. 944) suggests an epistemological distinction directly relevant to Saadya’s usage: ‘‘the meaning of muh.kama¯t could be rationally apprehended . . . , that of mutasha¯biha¯t only by recourse to authoritative tradition.’’20 Taken together with the view of Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), that the Prophet and his companions must have known the meaning of the ambiguous verses, this comes very close to Saadya’s usage.21 It is the Oral Law that enables us to clarify ambiguous statements in Scripture.22 Since the revealed commandments are largely inaccessible to reason, they may be fully known only via the tradition.23 In support of his argument, Saadya lists seven categories (or ‘‘roots,’’ Ar. us.u¯l) of the Revealed Law, for which we require the Oral Tradition: commandments whose qualities, quantities, essential nature, or very existence are not mentioned in the Bible, such as the form of the booth (sukkah), the length of the ritual fringe (tsitsit), or the amount of the gift-offering (terumah).24 For Karaites, of course, such claims were absurd. Revelation and reason alone, they maintained, are perfectly adequate sources of knowledge. There is nothing ambiguous or unclear about the rituals mentioned by Saadya: the Bible has simply left them undetermined. As Salmon ben Yeruh.im (mid-tenth century) writes in his Wars of the Lord: ‘‘You have written lies, for not all ordinances have a definite measurement, and that is why the length of the fringe is not specified in the Law.’’25 Deftly parrying Saadya’s polemical thrust, Salmon states a fundamental scripturalist position: the details of certain halakhot were never meant to be fixed. The biblical injunction (Nm 15.37–41, Dt 22.12) to

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attach fringes to the corners of one’s cloak does not prescribe their length. On the other hand, Scripture does require that a blue cord (petil tekhelet) be attached to the fringe of each corner, and this regulation afforded the Karaites an instance of Rabbanite uncertainty over the implementation of a law. Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ (ca. 935) argues that the rabbis were ignorant of the subject and held different opinions about it, since they asserted that the tekhelet (i.e. the blue cord ) is a substance in and of itself (jawharan bi-‘aynihi), that they are no longer familiar with it, and that they do not know what it is. Now according to their statement, they ought to require that the tsitsit be abolished for the nation at this time, since that which renders it complete is absent.26

To the Karaites, Rabbanite concern with the numbers, knotting, and length of the threads seemed particularly misplaced, when the one clear halakhic guideline furnished by Scripture—the colored thread—was openly flouted. Indeed, the early Karaites’ approach to tsitsit illustrates their halakhic exegesis in general, and their handling of loosely regulated legislation in particular.27 Here, however, I will focus on the second type of indeterminacy, in which biblical precision gives way to great uncertainty; this can be illustrated by a very different halakhic problem.

Unclean Birds Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 prescribe the types of creatures that may be eaten. The Bible specifies the physical characteristics by which we may distinguish land animals, water creatures, and insects that are permitted, or ‘‘clean’’ (tahor). It gives no criteria, however, for birds, listing instead some twenty varieties that are forbidden, or ‘‘unclean’’ (tame).28 Noting this apparent omission, the ancient rabbis recorded a set of indicia for birds as well. Thus, we read in the Mishnah, H . ullin 3.6: The criteria (or ‘‘signs,’’ Heb. simanim) for cattle and wild animals are stated in the law, but the criteria for birds are not stated. But the sages have said: Any bird that seizes (food in its claws; Heb. dores) is unclean. (And) any that has an extra toe, and a crop, and whose gizzard can be separated (from the surrounding muscle), is clean. R. Eliezer b. Zadok says: Any bird that divides its feet (i.e. parts its toes evenly) is unclean.29

Elaborating on this passage, the Babylonian Talmud suggests that the vulture (nesher) and turtledove (tor) constitute ideal types: the vulture uniquely lacks every characteristic listed in the Mishnah, while the turtledove possesses them all. By forbidding the vulture and permitting the turtledove, therefore, Scripture is alluding to the crucial set of criteria.

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Abbaye, however, remarks that ‘‘the (characteristics) were not expressly stated in the Torah but were inferred by the scribes.’’30 Much of the section is devoted to determining whether a bird must have all or some of the characteristics and whether one particular characteristic constitutes a sine qua non. There are debates as well concerning the permissibility of various species of birds to which the criteria may or may not apply. Attempts are made to identify some of the birds forbidden in Scripture—by the rabbinic period there was great uncertainty on the subject—but physical criteria, their definition, interpretation, and relevance frame the entire discussion. From the talmudic presentation, it is apparent that distinguishing between permitted and forbidden birds by means of the Mishnah’s criteria was by no means straightforward. Conceding as much, the early fifthcentury Babylonian sage Ameimar states: ‘‘As for the shoknai and botnai [i.e. two species of birds], wherever it is the custom to eat them one may do so, and wherever it is the custom not to eat them one may not do so.’’31 Received information may remain a trustworthy guide, then, where the interpretation of empirical knowledge proves to be inadequate. In this case at least, it is deemed safer to rely upon local custom (minhag) than to decide a bird’s permissibility on the basis of its physical characteristics. Another dictum expresses this approach overtly: ‘‘A clean bird may be eaten on the basis of tradition (‘of tahor ne’ekhal bemasoret)’’—that is to say, a given species may be considered permissible, if there is a tradition to that effect.32 Although the probative value of received knowledge is declared here almost as an afterthought, later authorities would pronounce tradition to be the decisive criterion in determining whether a given type of bird may or may not be consumed. I will return to the place of tradition toward the end of this essay. In the early stages of the Karaite-Rabbanite controversy, however, both sides focused on the legitimacy of the Mishnah’s indicia.33

Anan B. David and Benjamin al-Naha¯wandı¯ For scripturalist sectarians, the rabbinic approach begs three crucial questions: Is it still possible to identify the birds forbidden in the Bible? If not, does the Bible provide distinguishing criteria for permitted and forbidden birds? And if not, which birds are permitted, and on what basis? In his Book of Commandments, Anan b. David links Noah’s burnt offering of ‘‘every clean bird’’ (Gn 8.20) with the burnt offerings decreed in Lev 1.14: ‘‘Now we do not find that any birds were used for burnt offerings save turtledoves and pigeons, as it is written . . . (in Lev 1.14). The juxtaposition of the words ‘of every clean bird’ and ‘he offered burnt offerings’ thus proves that the only clean birds are turtle-

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doves and pigeons.’’34 Anan’s strict interpretation of the two verses would seem to obviate the need for physical criteria: apparently all birds are unclean, except for those sacrificed. At the same time, it is difficult to escape the notion that the lists of prohibited birds are meant to be comprehensive, and that any bird not explicitly forbidden is permitted. Since only fragments of Anan’s work have been preserved, however, we cannot say how he understood Lev 11 and Dt 14.35 According to al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, some of Anan’s followers did establish two characteristics or ‘‘signs’’ (Ar. ‘ala¯matayn), which are typical of pigeons and turtledoves: (1) they feed their young; and (2) when they drink water they spit.36 Since Scripture specifies two signs for permitted land animals, water creatures, and insects, they believed that clean birds— that is, pigeons and turtledoves—must possess two characteristics as well.37 What is striking here is the similarity to the Rabbanite approach: lacking explicit biblical guidelines, they derived physical criteria from their observation of permissible (and forbidden) birds. The only difference is in the number and nature of the criteria. As Haggai BenShammai has emphasized, neither Anan nor the Ananites were true scripturalists. Rather, they championed an alternative interpretation of the Law, comparable to an Islamic legal school (madhhab).38 As we will see, the Karaites rejected the use of physical criteria for birds as a human innovation. Like Anan, they prudently restricted themselves to those species whose permissibility was universally acknowledged—pigeons and turtledoves. But, in principle, they believed many other birds to be permitted as well. One of their earliest authorities, Benjamin al-Naha¯wandı¯ (early ninth century), states: The only clean birds that can be identified are the pigeon and its kind. There are many clean and unclean (varieties), as it said: ‘‘Two living clean birds’’ (Lev 14.4). And it states: ‘‘You may eat all (clean) birds’’ (Dt 14.11). This indicates that there are many clean (varieties), but they cannot be identified by means of physical criteria, since Scripture did not make these explicit. The pigeon and the turtledove are clean, for it is stated: ‘‘Then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves or of young pigeons’’ (Lev 1.14). The pigeon is the (bird) that makes a cooing noise in its throat, as it is stated: We coo like doves (Is 59.11). And the turtledove is (a kind) of pigeon, as it is said: ‘‘And a young pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering’’ (Lev 12.6). Therefore the only clean bird that it mentioned is the pigeon and its kind.39

Since pigeons and turtledoves were brought as sacrifices, they are still permitted. The identification of other clean birds, however, remains uncertain: the Bible provides no physical criteria by which they may be known. Implicit in this passage is the question: Can we identify the biblical pigeon and turtledove with certainty? According to Benjamin, Is 59.11 describes the characteristic cooing (or moaning) of pigeons—

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scriptural confirmation of the identification. Benjamin’s insistence that pigeons and turtledoves constitute a single genus likely relates to the use of min (‘‘kind’’) in Lev 11 and Dt 14. Presumably, if turtledoves are but one kind of pigeon, other kinds of pigeon are clean as well.

Daniel al-Qu¯misı¯ Benjamin’s approach heralds the staunchly scripturalist stance of Daniel al-Qu¯misı¯, who led the Karaite movement of Mourners for Zion at the end of the ninth century. In his Book of Commandments, Daniel clearly distinguishes between the creatures whose cleanness may be known by physical criteria—quadrupeds, fish, grasshoppers—and the birds that are known only by their names. God did this, he says: Because the marks of unclean beasts differ from those of clean beasts, whereas the mark of many a clean bird is like that of an unclean one; that is why he listed the unclean birds by their names, and not by their marks.40

Al-Qu¯misı¯ rejects Rabbanite attempts to find scriptural justification for the physical criteria. Lev 1.16 states that the priest is to remove the bird’s mur’ah with its notsah; according to the Sifra, these words are to be glossed ‘‘gizzard’’ and ‘‘crop,’’ respectively.41 Dismissing this interpretation—albeit with the glosses reversed—al-Qu¯misı¯ explains that the mur’ah is the food stored by a bird in its notsah, a general designation for crop, stomach, or intestines. Thus, only one body part is mentioned, and there is nothing distinguishing about it: ‘‘Does a bird exist which does not possess an organ for the storage of food, be it a notsah or the intestines?’’42 Having dismissed the rabbinic signs, al-Qu¯misı¯ states that unless we can make perfect sense of the lists of forbidden species, we are not permitted to eat any birds, with the exception of the turtledove (Heb. tor, Ar. shafnı¯n) and the pigeon (Heb. yonah, Ar. h.ama¯m), which are well known. But since Hebrew is no longer our vernacular, there is widespread disagreement concerning the significance of many biblical bird names. To be sure, there is a consensus concerning the more common terms, but without sufficient context, it is impossible to establish the meaning of hapax legomena: ‘‘We can explain any word attested (elsewhere) in Scripture, such as crow (‘orev) and vulture (nesher), but we cannot explain a word that is unattested (elsewhere) in Scripture, such as peres, ‘ozniya, tah.mas, and the rest.’’43 Naturally, domesticated fowl pose the real problem. While their physical markings indicate that they are clean and people are accustomed to eating them, there is no scriptural evidence that they are permitted. Attempts to identify the biblical tor with the chicken (Ar. dı¯k, daja¯ja) fail

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to convince al-Qu¯misı¯, who cites Jer 8.7 as proof that the tor is wild, not domestic. Others have cited rabbinic sources, which assert that the cock (tarnegol) is known in some parts as sekhvi—an obscure word appearing in Job 38.36.44 For a Rabbanite, this would have been enough to exclude chickens from the list of forbidden birds. But al-Qu¯misı¯ raises a simple objection: even granting that sekhvi is a fowl, how do we know that it is not a kind (min) of unclean bird? ‘‘Know,’’ he says, ‘‘that not every unclean bird is mentioned by name, but rather that for each kind a single representative type (is listed), as it is written: every crow according to its kind (Lev 11.15); the ayyah according to its kind . . . From this you know that all those listed are representative types of birds. For each of these, there are a number of species whose names were not recorded. And who knows if sekhvi is not the name of (some unclean) bird?’’45 Al-Qu¯misı¯’s arguments were probably directed as much at other sectarians as at Rabbanites. According to al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, a certain minor heresiarch, Malik al-Ramlı¯, ‘‘stood up in Jerusalem (bayt al-muqaddas) and swore that cocks used to be sacrificed on the altar which was in the Temple, i.e. on ‘the altar of God.’’’46 Malik’s position—which differed from Anan’s on the one hand and Benjamin’s on the other—suggests that the identification of clean and unclean birds had become something of a touchstone among the various Jewish sects in the Abbasid East during the mid-ninth century.47 When al-Qu¯misı¯ took his principled stand against eating chicken, therefore, he was very likely contending with another group of dissenters. For God-fearing people, he insisted, the only permitted birds are turtledoves, pigeons, and wild pigeons—at least until the coming of the Teacher of Righteousness. As he explains in his commentary on Joel 2.23, he believes this mysterious figure to be none other than the prophet Elijah, ‘‘whom (God) will assign to Israel to teach them laws.’’48 It is Elijah’s special task, to resolve precisely the kind of exegetical difficulty posed here, for ‘‘every word in the Bible has but one (true) interpretation, not two. Since people do not know (Scripture’s) true meanings, however, some will interpret it in one way and others in another until the coming of the Teacher of Righteousness.’’49 Al-Qu¯misı¯’s exposition of the problem anticipates all later Karaite treatments. Noting that Scripture furnishes no criteria for clean birds, he attacks the Rabbanites for having invented any; the unclean birds must be recognized by name alone. Great uncertainty prevails, however, since Hebrew is no longer spoken. Consequently, pigeons and turtledoves remain the only permitted birds, since their consumption is authorized in the Bible. Resisting attempts to sanction the eating of other species, al-Qu¯misı¯ asserts that the issue’s resolution awaits the advent of the Teacher of Righteousness.

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Saadya Gaon In his commentary on Lev 11, Saadya Gaon reacts to sectarian criticism.50 Saadya’s approach is familiar from his other writings: Scripture, reason, and tradition represent complementary sources of knowledge that together leave no halakhic problem unresolved. As an exegete, he does not shy from glossing strange names or words, but as a legal authority, he upholds traditional rabbinic solutions. Thus, although he translates the bird names into Arabic according to information he has collected, he admits that these renderings can only be conjectural.51 Confronted with an unfamiliar ornithological specimen, he would not be able to provide a firm identification. Moreover, aside from the twenty names listed in the Bible, there are certainly other unclean birds; this is made explicit by the expression ‘‘after its kind (min),’’ which occurs four times in verses 14–16 and 19. Even when we know a bird to be clean— such as the pigeon—it is impossible for us to infer which specific characteristics it might share exclusively with other permitted birds.52 For this reason, it was essential that Moses give the people a set of physical criteria, which the sages subsequently transmitted; these are the four signs recorded in mH . ul and the Sifra.53 Saadya’s statement reflects his general conception of the Oral Law as an independent, authoritative source of divine origin that supplies information lacking in Scripture.54 The criteria for classifying birds constitute but one more proof that God has clarified all biblical ambiguities for us. At this point, the antisectarian polemic becomes explicit. Saadya mentions a heretic (ba‘d. al-muh.dithı¯n) who denies that fowl is permitted, despite its possessing all four characteristics. If this innovator (mubdi‘ ) were asked for his proof, he would say: ‘‘I have seen that pigeons spit water and feed their young, but I do not find this to be the case with chickens.’’55 As we have seen, certain Ananites used these behavioral traits to distinguish between pigeons and all other birds. Saadya rejects these criteria, arguing that the signs indicating whether a creature is permitted or forbidden must not be habitual but physical, so that they are always observable.56 This is the case with fish, insects, and beasts. The latter, for example, must possess cloven hooves and chew their cuds; ruminating, notes Saadya, actually implies a physical attribute, namely, the lack of upper molars.57 In the same way, the rabbinic criteria for permitted birds are all physical, including the provision that they not tear their food. This too involves a bodily feature—claws that cannot bend, for raptors must grip their food with their feet in order to tear it.58 Saadya also criticizes Anan’s citation of Gn 8.20 as proof that pigeons and turtledoves alone are permitted.59 The parallel partitive constructions in that verse—‘‘And he took of all the clean beasts and of all the

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clean birds’’—indicate that Noah sacrificed clean animals only, not that he sacrificed one of every clean species. After all, Saadya believed many—perhaps most—birds to be permitted, a view that the Karaites shared in principle. In practice, of course, the latter restricted themselves to the species sanctioned by Anan, while faulting the logic that led him to his position.

Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ Saadya’s younger contemporary Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ responded directly to the Gaon as did the late tenth-century Karaite exegete Japheth b. Eli.60 Both scholars clearly drew upon al-Qu¯misı¯’s Code, and Japheth was also able to incorporate al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s work into his own. These presentations address three main topics: the identification of certain bird names; the principled rejection of any distinguishing signs adduced by Rabbanites or Ananites; and the refusal to sanction the consumption of any birds save pigeons and turtledoves. When al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ states that five of the twenty-one bird names are still understood, he implies the existence of transmitted linguistic knowledge. Like other early Karaites and Ananites, he had already confirmed the probative value of consensus (ijma¯‘ ) and equated it with tradition (naql). Now, at first blush, it might seem heretical for a strict scripturalist to admit traditional knowledge of any kind, but al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ carefully restricts naql to fundamental principles accepted by all Jewish groups, such as the incidence of the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week or the soundness of the consonantal text of Scripture. This type of common knowledge differs sharply from the rabbinic tradition, which the Karaites reject as the teachings of individual authorities.61 For al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ knowledge founded on naql extends to the meaning of basic Hebrew vocabulary, such as common verbs. By contrast, there is no such agreement concerning most rare words; these can only be translated provisionally on the basis of root-derivation (al-ishtiqa¯q), or context, or the views of individual scholars.62 Since three of the five identifications involve cognates—‘orev/ghura¯b (‘‘crow,’’ ‘‘raven’’); nesher/nasr (‘‘vulture’’); and rah.am/rakham (‘‘Egyptian vulture’’)—it is tempting to ascribe the consensus to the obvious similarities between words. A fourth identification—bat ha-ya‘anah/na‘a¯ma (‘‘ostrich’’)—was likely made in similar fashion via Aramaic na‘amita; translations of this kind, in fact, have clear antecedents in the targumim.63 At the same time, although these equations seem self-evident, they were not completely satisfactory to our exegetes. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s treatment of the fifth name, kos, is instructive: ‘‘the kos is the bu¯m (‘owl’)—for it is stated: I am like an owl (kos) of the ruins (Ps

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102.7), and the owl is typically found among ruins.’’64 Tenth-century Islamic sources provide similar characterizations: Abu¯ H . ayya¯n alTawh.¯ıdı¯ (ca. 932–1023) writes that ‘‘the owl’s shelter and habitat are ruins,’’ and according to the Rasa¯’il Ikhwa¯n al-S.afa¯’, it ‘‘lives in . . . abandoned dwelling places, decayed buildings, and dilapidated castles.’’65 Here the correlation between a biblical allusion and general knowledge has secured an identification. This technique is familiar from the writings of medieval Arab philologists who also sought to determine the meanings of obscure zoological names by matching known behavioral patterns with information found in proverbs, traditions, and verse.66 The early Karaites, of course, restricted their literary corpus to the Bible. Here is Japheth’s comment on the nesher: The nesher is the nasr (vulture)—there is no disagreement about this among the language community (Ar. ahl al-lugha).67 Moreover, there is a clear reference to it in Scripture that strengthens the identification with the nasr, as it is stated: ‘‘like a vulture that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young’’ (Dt 32.11). Observers assert that of all birds, the vulture alone habitually carries its young upon its wings, since it feels safe that no other bird will alight upon them. Other birds, however, bear their young beneath their wings for fear that a predatory bird might harm them or their young.68

By using prooftexts to confirm even the most certain identifications, Japheth and al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ actually undercut the force of tradition—a useful move for staunch scripturalists. The Ananite and Rabbanite methods of identifying clean birds by means of certain behavioral or physical criteria also elicit sharp criticism from al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ and Japheth. Drawing upon al-Qu¯misı¯, they stress that there is no scriptural basis for such signs and dismiss the Rabbanites’ appeal to their oral tradition: Should someone say, ‘‘The people already knew these signs via oral tradition from the prophet, but they only observed the unclean birds and saw that they differed from the clean (species) and spoke about this.’’ He may be answered: ‘‘As to your statement that the people used to know these signs via oral tradition from the prophet—this is (but) a claim. You have no proof of this, either from consensus or from Scripture. At the same time, we have said that God established knowledge of all the permitted and forbidden animals from Scripture; nothing of (this subject) is known via the oral tradition.69

Finally, al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ and Japheth emphasize that pigeons and turtledoves are the only unquestionably permitted birds; all other species should be avoided: Of all the birds, those which are demonstrably permitted are turtledove and pigeon, as we have explained. As for chicken, mountain quail, partridge, duck,

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goose, crane, sparrow, and others—we must suspend judgment concerning them all ‘‘until he comes and teaches righteousness’’ (Hos 10.12).70

Echoing al-Qu¯misı¯’s admonitions, this warning responds to the state of halakhic uncertainty described by al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ in Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, Book I.19: ‘‘One allows chicken, another forbids it, while yet another asserts that he does not know whether it is permitted or forbidden.’’71 A cursory glance at the entire chapter reveals the chaotic condition of Karaite law in general during the first half of the tenth century, with significant differences of praxis in everything from Sabbath regulations to calendration, purity laws, and liturgy, as well as dietary restrictions.72 Having dispensed with any authoritative tradition, individual Karaites or small communities each claimed the license to interpret and legislate for themselves. As al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ concedes, the situation was deteriorating and there were real fears that Rabbanite critics might gain polemical capital from it. If the integrity of the rabbinic tradition could be challenged with the existence of different Rabbanite customs in Iraq and the Land of Israel, why could sectarian scripturalism not be ridiculed as a recipe for anarchy?73 Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ responds that traditional knowledge should produce unanimity—but clearly does not—while rational knowledge inevitably leads to disagreement.74 The purpose of Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r and all subsequent Karaite codes is, of course, to minimize disagreement through rational, persuasive argumentation. As I stated at the outset, however, Karaite legislation derives directly from Scripture as mediated by reason and consensus (or tradition). Thus, when certain Karaites permitted the consumption of chicken and other domestic fowl, could they not have had recourse to a tradition permitting these birds? After all, if all Jews had been eating them from time immemorial—why should they suddenly be forbidden? Implicit in the Arabic sources, this question was raised by Greek-speaking sectarians on Byzantine soil.75

Conclusion: The Karaites of Byzantium During the eleventh century, Byzantium emerged as a new Karaite center. Under the aegis of the Mourners for Zion and their academy, sectarian scholarship was imported from Jerusalem to a Christian, grecophone realm. The process of translation, abridgement, and adaptation was laborious, but as Zvi Ankori has shown, much more was involved than developing a new Hebrew technical vocabulary and glossing difficult terms in Greek.76 Karaite immigrants had to consider an indigenous Rabbanite community, which firmly resisted the incursion of sectarian teachings. In his Bible commentary, Midrash lekah. tov, the Rabbanite

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scholar Tobiah b. Eliezer (fl. ca. 1100) attacks the Karaite leaders for their ignorance and unfounded innovations, while underscoring the soundness of Byzantine practices, which ‘‘are a tradition in Israel, generation after generation,’’ faithfully perpetuating the Oral Law.77 In the same vein, when he comments on Lev 11.13–19, Tobiah augments the talmudic statement ‘‘a clean bird may be eaten on the basis of tradition’’ (‘of tahor ne’ekhal be-masoret) with the words ‘‘generation after generation’’ (dor ’ah.ar dor): certain birds eaten by the Byzantine Rabbanites, such as goose, wild goose, and chicken, have always been permitted. (In fact, he deems this tradition to be a more trustworthy gauge of a bird’s permissibility than the four rabbinic criteria, which cannot always be readily verified.)78 Now since there was a strong local Rabbanite tradition that these birds were permitted, might certain Karaite leaders not regard it as a general, Jewish consensus, and permit their community to eat chicken? In his compendious Eshkol ha-kofer (1148), the Karaite Judah Hadassi suggests that this is precisely how matters were developing: Now some of the (Karaite) teachers approved79 those domestic fowl, which are customarily raised in their homes. (They did so) because this was the choice of the entire nation (beh.irat kelal ha-’umah), not because there are any scriptural allusions that justify or confirm (this practice). Happy is he who guards himself wholeheartedly against uncertainties so that he is stringent in all (matters pertaining) to ritual slaughter! For knowledge80 of the Holy Tongue has disappeared from our midst, and we no longer know the names of (the birds) so as to recognize which is permitted and which is forbidden to us. Therefore we will remain silent until (Elijah) comes and teaches us righteousness. But if we rely upon custom (minhag) and tradition (sevel ha-yoreshim),81 does this tradition not take away from and add to our Torah,82 even contradicting it in part?83

Hadassi may deplore the leniency of his fellow Karaites who permit domestic fowl on the basis of ‘‘custom and tradition,’’ but he also concedes that they are acting in accordance with communal consensus, ‘‘the choice of the entire nation.’’ Hadassi’s negative assessment of tradition here contrasts with his positive evaluation elsewhere.84 While he does not say as much, appealing to local custom in the present context would mean a concession to rabbinic halakhah—something he is anxious to avoid. But the change in Karaite dietary law was clearly becoming established.85 Unfortunately, the patchy literary record of the Byzantine Karaites does not allow us to document with any precision the evolution of a new local tradition. The next major sectarian author from the region, Aaron b. Joseph (fl. ca. 1300), criticizes the Rabbanite and Ananite reliance upon physical criteria for birds, before declaring: ‘‘The proper course for us is to be stringent and to eat only what is known to us with cer-

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tainty.’’86 This vague pronouncement remains obscure: does Aaron sanction pigeons and turtledoves only, or does he accept other birds, deeming received knowledge to be certain?87 Half a century later, however, the theologian, exegete, and jurist Aaron b. Elijah (d. 1369) states definitively: Since (knowledge of ) our language has now become deficient during our exile, we do not know the clean species. All that remains, in fact, is knowledge of several of the names (mentioned) in Scripture and those known via the tradition (sevel ha-yerushah), such as pigeon, turtledove, quail, partridge, swan, chicken, and goose. For it has been transmitted, one person from the next, that these are raised domestically and that they are permitted; but whatever is doubtful is forbidden.88

Aaron’s ruling proved authoritative: succeeding generations of Karaite jurists, including Elijah Bashyachi (d. 1490) and Solomon b. Afeda HaKohen (1836–93), reaffirmed the validity of the Karaite tradition and permitted the consumption of chicken and other fowl.89 Indeed, from what Mourad El-Kodsi reports, poultry dishes were considered something of a specialty within the modern Egyptian community.90 Whatever the identity of those proscribed birds in Lev 11 and Dt 14, chicken most certainly was not among them. The Karaites’ volte-face concerning poultry represents an accommodation with Rabbanite practice without compromising their own principles. They would neither concede that the chicken might be the biblical tor, nor accept that birds could be classified according to non-scriptural criteria. Fundamentally, they rejected the possibility that such signs could have been transmitted as part of an authoritative tradition. And yet in the end, they permitted chicken, because Jews had always eaten it. Their decision, then, was based on consensus, which, as we have seen, they regarded as a valid source of knowledge, quite distinct from the rabbinic tradition whose authority they impugned.

8

Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory: How Qur’a¯nic Wisdom (H . ikma) Became the Sunna of the Prophet Joseph E. Lowry

Qur’a¯nic exegesis appears among the very earliest intellectual tasks undertaken by Muslims, and so one is not surprised to find that commentaries on the Qur’a¯n survive among the oldest preserved Arabic texts. The spread of Islam brought both the need and the opportunity for explication of the Qur’a¯n; many persons genuinely needed to know what it meant and others were only too happy to oblige them. Commentaries that survive from the eighth century—the earliest that we have— take a wide focus, supplying the meanings of unusual words, fleshing out the details and contexts of terse narratives, and providing general background information about the Arabian or Judaic or Christian settings in which personalities appear and events unfold. By the early ninth century an increasing tendency toward specialization can be detected in the exegetes’ activities, and qur’a¯nic exegeses, informed by the achievements of the heroic age of Arabic grammar, increasingly furnish a wide array of linguistic information, both to help with the decoding of Scripture and to confirm the normative status of the language of Scripture.1 Jurists, too, played their part in early qur’a¯nic exegesis, producing studies of the Qur’a¯n focused on its narrowly legal aspects, such as its abrogating and abrogated passages (al-na¯sikh wa’l-mansu¯kh), or its legal rulings (ah.ka¯m al-qur’a¯n), though such works tended to concern themselves with discrete, carefully selected passages rather than provide a running commentary on the text from beginning to end. Because of their narrow focus, these legal texts inhabit—from the point of view of literary genre—the fringes of the tafsı¯r tradition, but for all that they offer a legislative reading of the Qur’a¯n, they are no less concerned with fundamental problems attending the interpretation of Scripture. It would be fair to say that modern scholarly concern with early qur’a¯nic

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exegesis has focused to a very great extent on the interesting questions of the history of the qur’a¯nic text, on the reception of Jewish and Christian lore in early Islam, and also on the preservation by early exegetes of details of the early and pre-Islamic history of Arabia. By contrast, the early jurists’ readings of the Qur’a¯n have, in general, received much less attention,2 though it should be noted that jurists such as Muh.ammad b. Jarı¯r al-T.abarı¯ (d. 311/923) authored some of the most important works belonging to the mainstream tradition of tafsı¯r.3 This essay traces the early history of the juristic exegesis of two terms in the Qur’a¯n, the pair al-kita¯b (‘the book’) and al-h.ikma (‘wisdom’), and in particular how h.ikma came to be glossed as sunna in the sense of the Sunna of the Prophet Muh.ammad.4 This exegesis, which came to underlie a fundamental postulate of Islamic legal hermeneutics, is first attested in the eighth century or slightly later (depending on how one dates sources). The first preserved use of this exegesis as part of a larger argument about legal hermeneutics is found in the Risa¯la (‘Epistle’) of Muh.ammad b. Idrı¯s al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯ (d. 204/820), the first preserved comprehensive work on legal theory in Arabic.5 After examining Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s deployment and elaboration of this idea, this essay will attempt to sketch out the diverse background factors that contributed to the coalescing of this particular exegesis. The analysis will focus on early Muslim texts, especially the earliest Muslim exegetical literature, and also consider a possible rabbinic parallel. The development of this particular exegetical tradition accompanies and mirrors one of the most significant developments in the entire history of Islamic legal hermeneutics: the elevation of traditions from the Prophet Muh.ammad, his legal dicta in effect, to a status equal, or nearly so, to that of the Qur’a¯n, as revelation. This is the process by which Islamic law’s definitive master rule of recognition emerged.6 Today, and ever since the ninth century, the Qur’a¯n and traditions from the Prophet are considered, at least in theory, the two fundamental sources of Islamic law. The person usually held responsible for vindicating the view that such traditions, in the form of h.adı¯ths, should constitute the sole legislative supplement to the Qur’a¯n is the renowned jurist Muh.ammad b. Idrı¯s al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯.7

Sha¯fi‘ı¯ Sha¯fi‘ı¯ was born in southern Palestine into the Prophet’s tribe of Quraysh, probably in the year 150/767.8 An orphan who spent part of his childhood among the bedouin, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ began to study law at a relatively early age in Mekka, where he counted the famed traditionist Sufya¯n b. ‘Uyayna (d. 196/811) and the prominent legal scholar Muslim

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b. Kha¯lid al-Zanjı¯ (d. ca. 179/795) among his teachers. He is said also to have studied the Muwat..ta’ of the Medinan jurist Ma¯lik b. Anas (d. 179/ 795) and then to have traveled to Medina and impressed Ma¯lik with his command of the material in the Muwat..ta’, which he had memorized. Possibly after a brief sojourn to Yemen, Sha¯fi‘ı¯, like so many of the great minds of the ninth century, found himself in Baghdad, where he availed himself of the opportunity to study with one of that city’s leading jurists, Muh.ammad b. al-H . asan al-Shayba¯nı¯ (d. 189/805), a student of Abu¯ H . anı¯fa (d. 150/767) and legal adviser to the caliph Ha¯ru¯n al-Rashı¯d (r. 170–193/786–809). In 814 Sha¯fi‘ı¯ accompanied the son of the newly appointed ‘Abba¯sid governor of Egypt to Cairo, where he spent the last years of his life teaching and writing. He died in Cairo in early 820 and his tomb can still be found there today. Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s fame as a jurist rests primarily on three accomplishments. He is the author of one of the very earliest extant compilations of Islamic law, the voluminous Kita¯b al-Umm. In addition, he authored the first systematic treatise on legal hermeneutics or legal theory in Islamic law, the Risa¯la, inaugurating a discipline that would later be called us.u¯l al-fiqh (‘the sources of jurisprudence’).9 Finally, he is the eponymous head of the Sha¯fi‘ı¯ madhhab or school of law, though its founding really dates to about a century after Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s death.10 In the realm of legal hermeneutics, Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s most conspicuous achievement, and the one that had a lasting impact on Muslim legal thought, was his claim that traditions from the Prophet—collectively referred to as the Sunna—furnished the sole legitimate legislative supplement to the Qur’a¯n. It is the exegetical support that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ mustered in the service of this argument that will concern us in this chapter. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ offers a particular interpretation of several passages from the Qur’a¯n in support of his contention that the Sunna constitutes the natural and necessary complement to the Qur’a¯n. Before turning to those prooftexts, a brief synopsis of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s hermeneutics will be useful.

Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s Legal Hermeneutics and the Qur’a¯n In order to understand Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s concern with the exegesis of the terms under consideration here, it will behoove us to survey the general outlines of his account of the divine law’s structure. In his Risa¯la, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ devised a supremely systematic and elegant account of the law as the function of a defined number of combinations of revealed texts, that is, combinations of the Qur’a¯n and the Sunna. According to Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s system, any given legal rule results from one of four possible combinations of revelatory materials: the Qur’a¯n alone, the Qur’a¯n and Sunna in combination, the Sunna alone, or none of the above, in which case one anal-

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ogizes from a revealed text that is only indirectly on point.11 The great merit of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s system is that it naturalizes all (alleged) contradictions in revealed texts by portraying them as functions of the architecture of the divine law. Thus, for example, when Qur’a¯n and Sunna appear to conflict on a point of law, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ employs various hermeneutic techniques and rubrics to harmonize the two texts and portray them as jointly expressing a coherent rule, or as severally expressing mutually compatible rules. Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s intense interest in harmonizing apparent contradictions in revealed texts, especially instances of inter-source contradiction, can hardly be overemphasized. The theological concern to avoid contradiction in the divinely revealed source texts inspired him to turn all instances of apparent textual conflict to his advantage, by claiming textual interaction as a divinely pre-planned feature of the law. What is important for present purposes, as should be clear from this brief account of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s theory of the law’s architectonics, is Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s heavy investment in the notion of a two-part revelation, one part being Scripture and the other part being the (in theory) orally transmitted legal traditions from Muh.ammad. Now, if these two revealed sources of divine law complement each other as a result of a divinely intended structuring, then they might also be expected also to refer to each other, and it is evidently this assumption that led Sha¯fi‘ı¯ to seek out useful exegeses to buttress his assertion of the mutual complementarity of Qur’a¯n and Sunna. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ wanted very much to show that the Qur’a¯n referred to the Sunna as its natural complement.12 In one sense, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ was in luck, since the Qur’a¯n uses the word sunna and its plural, sunan, some sixteen times.13 Unfortunately for Sha¯fi‘ı¯, however, the word appears in the Qur’a¯n in only two senses, in phrases which contain either a reference to ‘‘God’s sunna’’ (sunnat alla¯h) or a reference to ‘‘the sunna of those who came before’’ (sunnat al-awwalı¯n). Neither sense is helpful to Sha¯fi‘ı¯. ‘‘God’s sunna’’ in these passages generally refers to the divine punishment of a recalcitrant community that refused to believe in him and so means ‘‘his actions,’’ or ‘‘what he did to them.’’14 Frequently paired with the idea of ‘‘what God did to them’’ is the other qur’a¯nic sense of sunna, the idea of ‘‘what they did’’ to incur his wrath, or rather ‘‘what happened to them.’’ Here is a passage that uses sunna in both these senses. When the Warner came to them it only increased their aversion. Haughty on the earth were they, conniving at evil; but evil conniving only overcomes those who practice it. Can they look forward to anything but what happened to those who came before [sunnat al-awwalı¯n]? You will find neither an alternative to, nor any way to change, what God does [sunnat alla¯h]. (Q 35 [Fa¯t.ir].42–43)

In the Qur’a¯n, then, sunna appears in hortatory contexts with strong eschatological overtones, frequently referring to a series of exemplary

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dress rehearsals for the Last Day.15 Qur’a¯nic sunna thus has a somewhat negative and depressing flavor quite at odds with the notion of Sunna invoked by Sha¯fi‘ı¯ as a positive and comforting source of legislation that rescues the juridical plenitude of Scripture. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ needed, therefore, some other passage or passages to support his portrayal of the Prophetic Sunna as the necessary complement to the Qur’a¯n. Being a creative reader, he found another set of passages in the Qur’a¯n that were much more useful to him: passages that refer to the ‘‘the Book’’ (al-kita¯b) and ‘‘wisdom’’ (al-h.ikma) together, which he takes to refer, respectively, to the Qur’a¯n and the Sunna. It is on the exegesis of these passages that I will focus in the remainder of this essay.

Sha¯ fi‘ı¯’s Qur’a¯ nic Prooftexts Sha¯fi‘ı¯ offers seven prooftexts from the Qur’a¯n in support of his argument that the word h.ikma in the Qur’a¯n refers to the Sunna of Muh.ammad. I give them in the order in which Sha¯fi‘ı¯ quotes them (Risa¯la ‫نن‬245–251):16 O our Lord: Send among them [⳱ Abraham’s descendants] a messenger from among them, who will recite your a¯ya¯t17 and teach them your Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma] and purify them. You are, indeed, mighty and wise. (Q 2 [alBaqara].129) Similarly, We have sent a messenger [⳱ Muh.ammad] to you, from among yourselves, who recites for you Our a¯ya¯t, and purifies you, and teaches you the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], and teaches you that which you did not know. (Q 2.151) God has favored the believers inasmuch as he has sent among them a messenger, from among themselves, who recites Our a¯ya¯t for them, purifies them, and teaches them the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], even though they were, ¯ l ‘Imra¯n].164) previously, manifestly astray. (Q 3 [A He [⳱ God] it is who sent among the gentile nations [ummı¯yı¯n] a messenger from among them, who recites for them his a¯ya¯t, purifies them, and teaches them the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], even though they were, previously, manifestly astray. (Q 62 [al-Jum‘a].2) Bear in mind [masc. pl. imp.] God’s favoring of you, and the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma] which he sent down, with which he admonishes you. (Q 2.231) God sent down to you the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], and taught you what you did not know. God’s favoring of you has been immense. (Q 4 [alNisa¯’].113)

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Bear in mind [fem. pl. imp.] God’s a¯ya¯t and the wisdom [a¯ya¯t alla¯h wa’l-h.ikma] which are recited in your houses. God is shrewd18 and well informed. (Q 33 [alAh.za¯b].34)

Now, it is fairly obvious where Sha¯fi‘ı¯ is headed with these passages. In each of them, the word h.ikma follows either ‘‘the Book’’ or some equivalent thereof (I am particularly interested in the ‘‘equivalent thereof ’’ in Q 33.34, as we will see). Sha¯fi‘ı¯ wants to show that what he takes to be the fundamental pair of revealed sources of law, Qur’a¯n and Sunna, is also portrayed as such in the Qur’a¯n itself. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ might have cited a few additional suggestive pairings of h.ikma and it is worth a brief digression to consider these other passages. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ has very carefully culled his seven passages from a wider pool of possibilities. H . ikma appears some twenty times in the Qur’a¯n altogether. It also appears paired with the ‘‘Book’’ in a couple of passages not cited by Sha¯fi‘ı¯: He [⳱ God] teaches him [⳱ Jesus] the Book, wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], the Torah, and the Evangelium. (Q 3.48) We brought Abraham’s clan [a¯l Ibra¯hı¯m] the Book and wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’lh.ikma], and we brought them a great overlordship. (Q 4.54) I [⳱ God] taught you [⳱ Jesus] the Book, wisdom [al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma], the Torah, and the Evangelium. (Q 5.110)

Perhaps Sha¯fi‘ı¯ deemed these unhelpful because they discussed prophets other than Muh.ammad. On the other hand, it could have been worthwhile to point out that previous prophets had both a book and a sunna, as shown by the Qur’a¯n’s claim that adherents of scriptural religions receive both a Scripture and wisdom: God made His covenant with the prophets [as follows]: In regard to what we have brought you [i.e., recipients of revelation generally], namely a book and wisdom [kita¯b wa-h.ikma], a messenger came to you to verify what you had. You should believe in him [⳱ the messenger] and make him successful. (Q 3.81)

H . ikma appears in yet another pairing, which, though again perhaps less helpful, is still addressed to Muh.ammad: Call them [⳱ Jews?]19 to the path of your Lord with wisdom and fair admonishment [bi’l-h.ikma wa’l-maw‘iz.a al-h.asana]. (Q 16 [al-Nah.l].125)

The obviously polemical, proselytizing context may have disqualified this verse for Sha¯fi‘ı¯. God also gives h.ikma once by itself to Muh.ammad (Q 17 [al-Isra¯‘].39).

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H . ikma almost always comes from God and frequently is given to a prophet. The recipients of h.ikma, in addition to Muh.ammad, are figures from the Hebrew Bible, Jesus, and the legendary Arabian figure of Luqma¯n. On nine occasions it is associated with Muh.ammad (six times paired with the Book, once in relation to his wives and paired with a¯ya¯t, once paired with maw‘iz.a, and once alone, all noted above). Three times it is associated with Jesus (twice with the Book, Torah, and Evangelium, as seen above, and once Jesus announces that he has brought it, Q 43 [al-Zukhruf].63). Twice it is given to David, once paired with eloquence (fas.l al-khit.a¯b, Q 38 [S.a¯d].20) and once paired with kingship (mulk, Q 2.251). Once, as seen above, it is given to Abraham’s clan, paired with the Book. It is also given, alone, to Luqma¯n on one occasion (Q 31 [Luqma¯n].12). In several other passages it has no recipient. In one of these it describes the edifying ubi sunt motif in qur’a¯nic narratives (Q 54 [alQamar].5) and in three others it is used in a general way, once, as seen above, paired with the Book, and twice more generally (both in Q 2.262). H . ikma also usually arrives in tandem with one or more other items. It is paired most often with ‘‘the Book’’ (kita¯b) (six times in the case of Muh.ammad, once in regard to Abraham’s clan, once generally, and twice, in the case of Jesus, along with the Torah and Evangelium). Once it appears accompanied by a¯ya¯t, in reference to Muh.ammad’s wives. It also appears paired with al-maw‘iz.a al-h.asana (Muh.ammad), and once each with eloquence and kingship (David). On the remaining seven occasions, it appears without a counterpart. It is clear that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ has chosen his exegetical evidence with great care and skill, and so it will behoove us to scrutinize his prooftexts a little more closely, to gain some idea of what might be called their ‘‘morphology.’’ As can be seen, they fall into three very distinct groups considered in terms of parallelisms in syntax and vocabulary, as Sha¯fi‘ı¯ himself must have perceived, since he cites them in an order which highlights their morphological affinities. a. rasu¯l yu‘allim (‘a messenger who will teach . . .’) 2.129 rasu¯l yu‘allimuhum al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (also yatlu¯ ‘alayhim a¯ya¯tika, yuzakkı¯him) 2.151 rasu¯l yu‘allimukum al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (also yatlu¯ ‘alaykum a¯ya¯tika, yuzakkı¯kum) 3.164 rasu¯l yu‘allimuhum al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (also yatlu¯ ‘alayhim a¯ya¯tihi, yuzakkı¯him) 62.2 rasu¯l minhum yatlu¯ ‘alayhim a¯yatihi wa-yuzakkı¯him wa-yu‘allimuhum al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (with yatlu¯ ‘alayhim a¯ya¯tihi and yuzakkı¯him inserted earlier here)

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b. anzala alla¯h (‘God revealed . . . ’) 2.231 anzala [alla¯h] ‘alayhim . . . al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (near a¯ya¯t and God’s ni‘ma) 4.113 anzala alla¯h ‘alayka al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma (addressed to Muh.ammad, and followed by ‘allama) c. a¯ya¯t Ⳮ h.ikma, 2d person fem. pl. addressees, passive of yatlu¯ 33.34 wa’dhkurna ma¯ yutla¯ . . . min a¯ya¯t alla¯h wa’l-h.ikma Group (a)—the first four—share the Arabic phrase rasu¯l yu‘allim, ‘‘a messenger who will teach,’’ that is, who will teach the Book and wisdom, al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma. They also share additional parallel vocabulary, as can be seen. The next two, group (b), have in common the phrase anzala alla¯h, ‘‘God revealed,’’ that is, he revealed the Book and wisdom, al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma. So far, so good, very good, in fact. The word kita¯b, which can easily be made to refer to the Qur’a¯n, is consistently paired with a very nice word indeed, h.ikma, ‘wisdom.’ H . ikma itself is something taught by messengers and Muh.ammad is just such a messenger, a rasu¯l. Moreover, h.ikma is, just like the kita¯b, something revealed by God, literally ‘‘sent down’’ from Heaven, and that, too, serves Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s theory very well. That leaves one verse, Q 33.34, which stands orphaned. It differs in a couple of very obvious ways from the other six prooftexts cited by Sha¯fi‘ı¯. First, it omits the word kita¯b entirely. Instead, h.ikma is paired in it with a¯ya¯t, ‘‘signs,’’ but—I note in sympathy with Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s project—also the usual word for ‘‘verses’’ of the Qur’a¯n.20 The content of the verse is also odd, however, at least in comparison with the other six prooftexts. The ‘‘signs and wisdom’’ ‘‘are recited,’’ so the terminology departs from that of the verses in groups of (a) and (b), and also the passive verb yutla¯ stands out. Interestingly, the ‘‘signs and wisdom’’ also remain unattributed, whereas in the other verses their direct or indirect divine provenance is emphasized. It should be noted that the verse shares with 2.231 the admonition to ‘‘bear something in mind’’ (dh-k-r), though the object of the verb is not the same in the two verses (God’s favor vs. signs and wisdom). Just what Q 33.34 means remains somewhat elusive. This verse comes at the end of a sustained address by Muh.ammad to his wives. Here it is translated again, together with some preceding verses for context: O Prophet: Say to your wives: ‘‘If you desire this [earthly] life [i.e., as opposed to continued marriage with the Prophet] and its finery, then come here and I will outfit you and send you hence in a good manner [i.e., give you an equitable divorce]. ‘‘But if you desire God and his Messenger, and the Afterlife, then God has prepared a great reward for those of you who are good.’’21 O wives of the Prophet: Whoever among you openly commits a sexual indis-

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cretion, her punishment will be doubled, something which it is easy for God to do. But whoever among you submits to God and his Messenger, and is virtuous, to her we will bring her reward, twice over, and we have prepared a generous bounty for her. O wives of the Prophet: You are not like any other women. If you are Godfearing, then do not be [coquettishly] down-cast in conversation [with other men], so that whoever has a sickness in his heart will become desirous [of you], but rather speak uprightly. Be dignified in your homes and do not display your charms as in the first Period of Ignorance, but rather perform the prayer, give alms, and obey God and his Messenger. God wants only to drive away from you, people of the House [of the Prophet, or perhaps of the Ka‘ba], impurity, and to purify you thoroughly. Bear in mind [fem. pl. imp.] God’s a¯ya¯t and the wisdom which are recited in your houses. God is shrewd and well informed. (Q 33 [al-Ah.za¯b].28–34)

A reasonable paraphrase of the preceding material would be: If you no longer wish to be married to Muh.ammad, then he will grant you an equitable divorce, but if you want to remain married to him, you will receive a heavenly reward; in either event, remain chaste.22 Verse 34 supplies the conclusion to this address: Contemplate the divine message, and remember that God knows what you do. Obviously, the verses concern the behavior of Muh.ammad’s wives, but beyond that, the context does not help much with the specific meaning of a¯ya¯t alla¯h wa’l-h.ikma. A possible reading would be that a¯ya¯t refers specifically to the verses of the Qur’a¯n and h.ikma generally to its content,23 but even that is conjectural. What Sha¯ fi‘ı¯ Says about These Verses After reciting his seven prooftexts, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ gives us his analysis of them. I translate this passage below, inserting numbers in square brackets to divide the constituent elements of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s argument. [1] God mentioned ‘‘the Book,’’ which is the Qur’a¯n, and he mentioned ‘‘wisdom.’’ [2] I have heard someone whom I trust among Qur’a¯n scholars [man ard.a¯ min ahl al-‘ilm bi’l-Qur’a¯n] say that ‘‘wisdom’’ means the Sunna of God’s Messenger. [3] That, in turn, resembles what he said above [in the seven passages from the Qur’a¯n]; but God knows best. [a] [This is] because the Qur’a¯n was mentioned, and then ‘‘wisdom’’ made to follow it. God mentioned his favor which he bestowed on his creation by teaching them ‘‘the Book and wisdom.’’ So it is not permissible—though God knows best—to say that ‘‘wisdom’’ here is anything other than the Sunna of God’s Messenger. [b] This, in turn, is because it [wisdom] is paired with God’s Book, and because God imposed the obligation to obey his Messenger, and decreed upon the people that they follow his commandment. Accordingly, it is not permissible

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to say of a statement [qawl] that it is an obligation [fard.] unless one is saying it of God’s Book, and then of the Sunna of his Messenger. [c] [This, in turn, is] because of what we described, to wit, that God made faith in his Messenger to be paired with faith in him.24 [d] The Sunna of God’s Messenger clarifies, on God’s behalf, what he intended, indicating whether it is restricted or unrestricted. Then [4], He linked ‘‘wisdom’’ with it [⳱ sunna] in his Book, and made the one [⳱ wisdom] to follow the other [⳱ the Book]. That [⳱ his points 3.b, c, and d] is something which he did not do for any one of his creatures save for his Messenger. (Risa¯la ‫نن‬252–57)

Despite the terse style typical of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s Risa¯la, the argument advanced is relatively straightforward: Sha¯fi‘ı¯ first notes that [1] in all the passages ‘‘the Book’’ and ‘‘wisdom’’ are paired. He next [2] appeals to the authority of an unnamed expert on qur’a¯nic exegesis. I will come back to this point below. In the third section of the argument he gives his reasoning: He begins by asserting that [3] the opinion of the unnamed expert corresponds to what is found in the seven prooftexts. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ argues that [3.a] ‘‘Book’’ and ‘‘wisdom’’ are conspicuously paired and that the Qur’a¯n emphasizes that both were bestowed as a favor on the believers (referring in particular to verses 3.164, 2.231, and 4.113).25 Accordingly, ‘‘wisdom’’ must refer to Muh.ammad’s Sunna. This conclusion seems, perhaps, premature, but Sha¯fi‘ı¯ gives further reasons: After noting again [3b] the pairing of the Book and wisdom, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ asserts that God obligated people to obey Muh.ammad,26 and, therefore, that the only sources of legal obligation are God’s Book and Muh.ammad’s Sunna. Moreover, [3c] God also paired faith in himself with faith in Muh.ammad (presumably meaning belief in the truth of Muh.ammad’s mission). Then, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ gives a fundamental principle of his hermeneutics: [3d] The Sunna clarifies what is in the Book. Thus, he concludes, because God singled out the Prophet for obedience, faith, and a special hermeneutical role, the conspicuous pairing of the Book and wisdom must reflect the pairing that follows from these various theological postulates, namely, of God and his Prophet, or rather of God’s Book and his Prophet’s Sunna.27 This argument boils down to two points, one specific and one general: First, because God and Muh.ammad constitute a theologically fundamental pairing, other conspicuous pairings of God and X, where the precise identity of X may be in doubt, allow the inference that X refers to something related to the Prophet.28 Sha¯fi‘ı¯ employs this argument to prove that the variable in this instance, h.ikma, stands for the Sunna of Muh.ammad. More generally, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ suggests that God’s employment of messengers to deliver h.ikma confers a particular authority on those messengers. I now turn to the question of the genesis of this exegesis of the term h.ikma.

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H . ikma in Other Early Sources Theology In general, the term sunna in early theological texts has a looser sense than Sha¯fi‘ı¯ gives it, referring to the hallowed practice of the earliest generations of Muslims, not the narrowly normative content of Muh.ammad’s words and deeds. It is not surprising, then, that theological writings prior to or contemporaneous with Sha¯fi‘ı¯ contain only a scant suggestion of a connection between Arabic sunna and h.ikma.29 Several early authors identify h.ikma as something that comes from God. AlH . asan al-Bas.rı¯ (d. 110/728), for example, in the well-known epistle attributed to him, refers to God’s h.ikma as something that ‘‘the forbears . . . related.’’30 That phrase is at least not incompatible with Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s interpretation of qur’a¯nic h.ikma as the orally transmitted Sunna. Another recension of the same epistle also refers to God’s wisdom, but in a way less compatible with Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s exegesis,31 and that less helpful sense of God’s wisdom is echoed in one of the theological writings attributed to Abu¯ H . anı¯fa, as well.32 Only the anti-Qadarite questions attributed to al-H . asan b. Muh.ammad b. al-H . anafı¯ya (d. before 101/720) suggest a connection between sunna and h.ikma. In the following exchange between the author and his interlocutor, a link between sunna and h.ikma is implied. Tell us about God’s human messengers: Did God give them the means and the ability to omit to communicate revelation? And, further, if they wished, could they alter what they were commanded to do, namely to communicate revelation [wah.y] and to practice [al-‘amal bi-] the sunnas? Or, were they instead compelled [ulzimu¯ ilza¯man] such that they were neither able to omit to do so, nor to add to it, nor to subtract from it? If they say, ‘‘Yes. God gave them the means and the power to omit to communicate revelation [wah.y], and if they wished they could have altered those parts of his Book and his wisdom [h.ikma] which were revealed to them,’’ then they have embarked on something more grievous than what they already dislike.33

The parallelism is not perfect. Wah.y and sunna appear in the question, but in the answer we get wah.y and then a pairing of the ‘‘Book’’ and ‘‘wisdom.’’ It seems unlikely that ‘‘the sunnas’’ are supposed to be parallel to ‘‘his Book and his Wisdom.’’ It is possible, but not certain, that both the author of the questions and his opponent agree that revelation (wah.y) is to sunna as the Book (kita¯b) is to wisdom (h.ikma). Note also that in the question, sunna is distinguished from revelation (wah.y) but in the answer h.ikma is expressly identified as something revealed. This evidence is, then, equivocal at best, and seems anyway not to focus on the narrow exegetical problem that so concerned Sha¯fi‘ı¯.

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Early Exegesis Sha¯fi‘ı¯ tells us that he has this interpretation of the word h.ikma from someone else, though he declines to identify the person in question by name. Instead, he merely says that it is someone of whom he approves among scholars of the Qur’a¯n. We now have such a relatively large number of early exegetical and quasi-exegetical texts that it seems very worthwhile to mine them for clues. In general, and perhaps surprisingly, the earliest Muslim exegetes whose writings are preserved do not care about the meaning of h.ikma in the verses cited by Sha¯fi‘ı¯. In early exegetical or quasi-exegetical works by Muja¯hid b. Jabr (d. 104/722),34 Qata¯da (d. 118/736),35 al-Zuhrı¯ (d. 124/742),36 Sufya¯n al-Thawrı¯ (d. 161/778),37 Ibn Wahb (d. 197/812),38 al-Farra¯’ (d. 207/822),39 Abu¯ ‘Ubayda (d. 209/824),40 al-Akhfash (d. 215/830),41 and Abu¯ ‘Ubayd (d. 222/837)42 there is not a trace of concern with the exegesis of the word h.ikma in any of the seven passages employed by Sha¯fi‘ı¯ as prooftexts—their silence is positively thunderous.43 In fact, if we were to look for glosses of the word h.ikma in any of the twenty places where it appears in the Qur’a¯n, the results would be even more striking: it is hardly ever glossed—at least in the early period—in any context, by any exegete. Still, there are two exegetes who do pay attention to it, Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n and ‘Abd al-Razza¯q al-S.an‘a¯nı¯. Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n (d. 150/ 767, the year Sha¯fi‘ı¯ was born), in two preserved exegetical works, unambigiously connects ‘‘h.ikma’’ in the seven passages in question with law.44 I give his glosses of h.ikma in Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s seven passages below: 2.129: al-mawa¯‘iz. allatı¯ fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n min al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m (qur’a¯nic admonitions concerning what is lawful and unlawful, Tafsı¯r) 2.151: al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m (lawful and unlawful, Tafsı¯r) 2.231: al-mawa¯‘iz. allatı¯ fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n min al-amr wa’l-nahy wa’l-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m (qur’a¯nic admonitions concerning commands and prohibitions and what is lawful and unlawful, Ashba¯h) 2.231: al-mawa¯‘iz. allatı¯ fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n min amrihi wa-nahyihi (qur’a¯nic admonitions concerning His command and prohibition, Tafsı¯r) 3.164: al-mawa¯‘iz. allatı¯ fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n min al-h. ala¯ l wa’l-h. ara¯ m wa’l-sunna (qur’a¯nic admonitions concerning what is lawful and unlawful and the sunna, Tafsı¯r) 4.113: al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m alladhı¯ fı¯ al-Baqara [sic] (what is lawful and unlawful in [Surat] al-Baqara, Ashba¯h) 4.113: al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m (what is lawful and unlawful, Tafsı¯r) 33.34: ya‘nı¯ amrahu wa-nahyahu fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n (that is, his command and prohibition in the Qur’a¯n, Tafsı¯r)

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62.2: mawa¯‘iz. al-Qur’a¯n al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m [sic] (qur’a¯nic admonishments [concerning?] what is lawful and unlawful, Tafsı¯r)

Strikingly, each passage uses one or two pairs of technical terms for qur’a¯nic text types which signal legal matter: al-h.ala¯l wa’l-h.ara¯m, ‘lawful and unlawful,’ and al-amr wa’l-nahy, ‘command and prohibition.’45 It seems, then, that Muqa¯til has qur’a¯nic law in mind, since the more fulsome glosses (e.g., to 2.231 and 3.164) make explicit that these legal prescriptions are found precisely in the Qur’a¯n.46 It is also noteworthy, however, that his gloss to 3.164 (from the Tafsı¯r) includes a reference to ‘‘sunna.’’ Does Muqa¯til mean to refer, in his discussion of Q 3.164, to the Sunna of the Prophet? It is impossible to tell. First, he gives no information beyond the wording reproduced above. Second, it is hard to see how Q 3.164 differs from the other ‘‘rasu¯l yu‘allim’’ verses cited by Sha¯fi‘ı¯ (group (a) above, comprising [in addition to 3.164] 2.129, 2.151, and 62.2), so the verse does not appear to contain a trigger justifying an expanded gloss. While it is not impossible that Muqa¯til intended the sunna of the Prophet, it is equally possible that he intended by Sunna simply ‘‘law’’ or ‘‘past practice’’ or some other general term more or less synomymous with, or in the general spirit of, or as a summation of, what he understood by ‘‘lawful and unlawful’’ and ‘‘command and prohibition.’’ Given the otherwise striking consistency of his understanding of h.ikma as a reference to qur’a¯nic legislation in particular, it seems at least possible that sunna in the one passage could even refer to some aspect of the Qur’a¯n.47 The other early exegete to refer to sunna in his discussion of the verses in question is a contemporary of Sha¯fi‘ı¯, namely, the Yemeni ‘Abd al-Razza¯q al-S.an‘a¯nı¯ (d. 212/827). In his Tafsı¯r,48 ‘Abd al-Razza¯q glosses h.ikma only once as it occurs in these seven passages, namely, in Q 33.34, and then as meaning ‘‘sunna.’’ Recall that Q 33.34 was, in regard to what I called above its morphology, the orphan among Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s seven prooftexts. Like Muqa¯til, ‘Abd al-Razza¯q says nothing about what he means by sunna, so his precise intention remains elusive. One inference which seems relatively safe, however, is that, as in the case of Muqa¯til, if ‘Abd al-Razza¯q had meant that h.ikma should always be glossed as sunna—in whatever sense—then he could have been expected to invoke this particular gloss both earlier (e.g., in regard to the first occurrence of h.ikma, at Q 2.129), and in any event in less difficult passages. ‘Abd al-Razza¯q’s attachment of the gloss sunna to the word h.ikma in this, the oddest of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s prooftexts, suggests, perhaps, that he had something idiosyncratic in mind, and that it was not his general solution to the meaning of h.ikma wherever it occurred in the Qur’a¯n.

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Even though the precise sense (or senses) of sunna that Muqa¯til and ‘Abd al-Razza¯q intended eludes detection, their use of the word sunna to explain qur’a¯nic h.ikma has a reasonably certain geographical origin. Muqa¯til was born in Central Asia (Balkh, in modern Afghanistan), but he settled, was active, and died in the Iraqi city of Bas.ra.49 ‘Abd al-Razza¯q tells us that he has his gloss of 33.34 from his teacher Ma‘mar b. Ra¯shid (d. 153/770?), a Bas.ran who emigrated to Yemen, where ‘Abd al-Razza¯q studied with him. We also know from ‘Abd al-Razza¯q that Ma‘mar got it from one of his teachers, Qata¯da b. Di‘a¯ma (d. 118/736), an early Bas.ran authority on the Qur’a¯n.50 A much later source, the Fata¯wa¯ of Ibn Taymı¯ya (d. 728/1328), ascribes the interpretation of qur’a¯nic h.ikma as sunna to three persons: Sha¯fi‘ı¯, Qata¯da, and another Basran, Yah.ya¯ b. Abı¯ Kathı¯r (d. ca. 746).51 It is reported that Ma‘mar, in addition to transmitting from Qata¯da, also transmitted from Yah.ya¯.52 Thus, the explanation of h.ikma as sunna probably originated in Bas.ra in the mid- to late eighth century. Beyond being able to locate and date—more or less—the otherwise obscure explanation of h.ikma as sunna, however, there is not much more to say about this aspect of the problem, since discussions of the question from that time and place, if indeed there were any, do not survive. So let me propose now a different tack in regard to the history of this particular exegetical wrinkle: it is just conceivable that it reflects a rabbinic discussion.

Rabbinic Currents Could it be that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ adopted his interpretation of the qur’a¯nic term h.ikma as a result of inspiration from, or through appropriation of, a rabbinic idea? The existence of Hebrew and Aramaic cognates of h.ikma and kita¯b in rabbinic discourse, the prominence and significance of those cognates, and the mutually resonant complexes of ideas, when taken together, all give Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s exegesis of these passages a vaguely rabbinic flavor. Writing in the late tenth century, Sharira, Ga‘on of Pumbeditha (d. 1006), offers the following definition of ‘‘Talmud’’: The Talmud is the wisdom [h.okhmah] of the early authorities and of those who analyzed the grounds of the Mishnah. It was taught by our Rabbis that: One’s teacher is not the teacher who teaches Mishnah, and not the teacher who teaches Scripture [mikra’ ], but rather the teacher who teaches one Talmud. And there are those who say [instead of ‘‘Talmud’’], ‘‘who teaches one wisdom [h.okhmah].’’ Both of these [variants] mean the same.53

For Sharira, then, h.okhmh is synonymous with ‘‘Talmud,’’ and to the extent that Talmud represents the oral elaboration of Scripture, this

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equation of h.okhmah and Talmud is very much in the spirit of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s exegetical Gleichsetzung of h.ikma and sunna. But Sharira is late for present purposes—his own appropriation of Muslim ideas is a possibility that cannot be excluded. Earlier sources are required. Judith Wegner has proposed a rabbinic origin for Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s gloss of h.ikma as Sunna.54 After noting the structural similarity between Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s conception of a two-part revelation (the Qur’a¯n as ‘‘the Book’’ and the Sunna as orally transmitted traditions from the Prophet) and the rabbinic notion of the Written and Oral Torahs, she concludes that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ must have been inspired by rabbinic ideas on this point. Unfortunately, the only authority she has for tying Arabic h.-k-m to the rabbinic oral tradition, in this instance to the Mishnah, is a gloss of the medieval French authority Rashi to Deuteronomy 4.6.55 With all respect to Rashi, who died in 1105 in France, it is not possible to rely on his opinion as evidence for Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s possible borrowing of rabbinic concepts or terminology in late eighth- or early ninth-century Iraq (or the H . ija¯z or Egypt, for that matter). The weakness of Wegner’s evidence need not prevent further digging, though. An initial point of interest lies in the etymology of the Arabic word h.ikma itself. The Arabic root h.-k-m concerns primarily rule and governance (e.g., h.ukm, h.uku¯ma, mah.kama). H . ikma, on the other hand, seems to reflect, already in the Qur’a¯n, a different semantic field, one possibly influenced by Northwest Semitic.56 That h.ikma could be a borrowing seems borne out in a couple of places in the Qur’a¯n, where we would expect to find h.ikma but instead find h.ukm, possibly in the sense of ‘‘wisdom.’’57 Thus, the etymological background of qur’a¯nic h.ikma renders it at least potentially receptive to a rabbinic-inspired interpretation. What would be required to clinch the matter is the unambiguous identification of the Oral Torah (torah she be-‘al pe) with ‘‘wisdom,’’ denoted either by the Hebrew or Aramaic cognates of h.ikma—h.okhmah or h.okhmata, respectively—and paired in an obvious way with a reference to the written Torah (torah she bi-ktav). Herein lies the problem, which is one of proof.58 At the conceptual level, rabbinic sources do not lack for passages in which h.okhmah/h.okhmata is identified loosely with rabbinic teachings. Thus, it is not hard to show that h.okhmah, in this sense, is distinguished from Scripture, the teaching of Scripture (mikra’), or even that it is equivalent to the Oral Torah. On the other hand, I have not uncovered any passage in which the distinction between Oral and Written Torah is expressed using permutations of the Semitic roots h.-k-m and k-t-b together. I survey a few representative passages below. It hardly requires noting that the root k-t-b figures prominently in rabbinic terminology: The phrase she bi-ktav, ‘‘that which is written,’’ refers

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to the Written Torah, the books of the Bible revealed to Moses on Sinai. The root k-t-b, as in Hebrew katuv (‘written,’ ‘Scripture’) and Aramaic d’ktiv (‘as it is written [in Scripture]’) also refer, as quasi-technical terms, to the Hebrew Bible, being used to introduce prooftexts.59 Thus, the equation between k-t-b and the Written Torah, Scripture, is clear enough. On the other hand, although Hebrew h.akham (‘sage’) denotes precisely a rabbi, a specific, rigorous, and consistent link between the root h.-k-m and the Oral Torah proves difficult to document. In some instances in talmudic literature, Hebrew h.okhmah refers to the body of learning and lore of which rabbis are in charge, and which they pass on to their students. So, for example, the terms rab (‘teacher,’ ‘rabbi’), limed (‘teach’), and h.okhmah (‘wisdom’) are frequently connected, as, for example, in Semah.ot, where the phrase rabo she-limdo h.okhmah (‘his teacher who taught him h.okhmah’) appears as a legal term of art, meaning the master who teaches his student rabbinic lore, law, and learning and to whom, in contrast to others, special reverence is due.60 The above passages employ h.okhmah in the sense of ‘‘general rabbinic teachings,’’ but it is very difficult to make h.okhmah in them refer specifically to the Oral Torah. Some such passages, potentially connecting h.okhmah and Oral Torah, have been collected by Louis Ginzberg in his commentary on the Palestinian Talmud, but these are problematic. In a passage from the Avot d’Rabbi Nathan, one is exhorted to acquire a teacher of wisdom (li-‘aseh lo rab li-h.okhmah) in order to learn ‘‘midrash hilkhot va-agadot’’ (version B, ch. 39).61 Another passage from this text seems to distinguish between a teacher from whom one learns wisdom (rav li-h.okhmah) and a companion with whom one studies Scripture (h.aver li-mishneh), but only by reading mishneh for mishnah, and the latter, more likely reading shows only that the rabbis equated wisdom with the Torah generally, and not specifically with the Oral Torah.62 Ginzberg also claims that the meaning of h.okhmah differs between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. In the Palestinian Talmud, he claims, it means precisely the Oral Torah, which is to say that it can refer to Mishnah, halakhah, or haggadah. It has this meaning also whenever it is used without a modifier. In the Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, it has a more narrowly legal connotation and refers specifically to halakhah, or to the rationalistic derivation of halakhah.63 In addition, Ginzberg draws attention to rabbinic elaborations of Mishnah BM 2.11,64 which could be read as employing h.okhmah to refer to the Oral Torah: ‘‘[If a man went to seek] lost property of his father and that of his teacher, his teacher’s has first place, for his father did but bring him into this world, but his teacher that taught him wisdom [shelimdo h.okhmah] brings him into the life of the world to come.’’65 The Tosefta’s commentary to this passage explains that the teacher in ques-

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tion is ‘‘his teacher who taught him Torah and not the teacher who taught him a trade [rabo she-limdo torah va-lo . . . umanut].’’66 The Tosefta also provides, however, a tantalizing dictum of R. Meir67 that it is ‘‘his teacher who taught him wisdom [h.okhmah], and not his teacher who taught him Scripture [mikra’].’’68 This appears to be a distinction between recited Scripture and rabbinic teachings using the roots q/k-r-’ (from which come the cognates mikra’ and Qur’a¯n) and h.-k-m, respectively. Parallel passages do not emphasize this precise distinction, however, and even contradict it in places. R. Meir’s dictum does not appear in the Palestinian Talmud at all,69 and in the Babylonian Talmud R. Meir’s dictum reads ‘‘his teacher who taught him wisdom [h.okhmah] and not his teacher who taught him Scripture [mikra’ ] and not rabbinic teachings [mishnah]’’ (bBM 33a). Further parallels collected by Saul Lieberman in his commentary to the Tosefta show that R. Meir’s distinction between mikra’ and h.okhmah is an isolated one.70 To the above passages, one might add the following references from the Babylonian Talmud, where h.okhmah and Torah appear paired in a small number of passages that are equivocal on whether those two terms denote a strict dichotomy between oral and written law. When R. Akiba passed away, the seeds of the Torah dried up [batlu] and the wellsprings of wisdom [h.okhmah] were sealed. (bSot 49b)71 [In answer to the question why Moses is thrice given the appellation ‘‘father’’] He was a father in relation to the Torah, in relation to wisdom [h.okhmah], and in relation to prophesies. (bMeg 13a)72

Such passages are neutral at best on the question whether h.okhmah specifically designates the oral law as opposed to the written law. It could simply mean ‘‘wisdom,’’ and in any event, as noted above, ‘‘Torah’’ can mean both the oral and the written law and h.okhmah is even interpreted to be a general synonym for Torah.73 The best support that I have found for the strict identification of h.okhmah with the Oral Torah in the Babylonian Talmud is the following passage: R. Yoh.anan said: ‘‘I spent eighteen days with R. Osha‘aya Bribbini and I only learned one thing from him which is in our Mishnah: [namely, . . . ].’’ But that cannot be right. Did not R. Yoh.anan say: ‘‘R. Osha‘aya Bribbini had twelve students and I spent eighteen days among them and came to know the mind [lev] of each one, and the wisdom [h.okhmah] of each one.’’ Surely ‘‘the mind of each one, and the wisdom of each one’’ means that he was studying traditional teachings [gamar gemara]—and yet he learned no traditional teachings? (bEruv 53a)74

Here Hebrew h.okhmah appears as a synonym for Aramaic gemara, which denotes rabbinic teachings and later came to designate the Talmud as a

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commentary on the Mishnah.75 This usage of h.okhmah recalls that of Sharira Ga‘on, quoted above. It is possible that a more thorough examination of rabbinic literature will uncover relevant passages. Also, Islamic period midrashim such as the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer76 may yield additional evidence (though in the case of that text, it seems not to contain relevant usages of h.okhmah, and given its somewhat apocalyptic flavor, perhaps it is not surprising that it does not focus on neat halakhic-hermeneutic distinctions). There are two further problems with the proposed rabbinic origin of the interpretation of h.ikma to mean sunna, however. First, the two qur’a¯nic passages that have God teach Jesus the Book, wisdom, Torah, and Evangelium (Q 3.48 and 5.110: al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma wa’l-tawra¯h wa’linjı¯l), clearly distinguish between each of these four entities in a way that would seem to inhibit strict identification of kita¯b and h.ikma with the Written and Oral Torahs, respectively. Second, the more natural pair in Arabic, and which has a potential parallel in rabbinic writing, is Qur’a¯n and Sunna, which strikingly resembles Hebrew koreh va-shoneh (‘‘recited’’ from Scripture and ‘‘taught’’ orally). Qur’a¯n and koreh (qoreh) are cognates, but not Sunna and shoneh. It would not be surprising, however, given the conceptual congruence, if shoneh and sunna had been assimilated, perhaps, through some kind of process of folk-etymologizing—but it must be emphasized that there is no evidence for such a process.77

Conclusions and Epilogue Since the rabbinic aspect must remain—for now—conjectural, the following account at least seems warranted: Sha¯fi‘ı¯ learned the Bas.ran gloss of h.ikma as sunna in Q 33.34.78 Notwithstanding what sunna may originally have meant in this context, which we cannot tell, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ decided to press it into service in his project of making the Prophetic Sunna the sole legislative supplement to the Qur’a¯n—it was, after all, an excellent exegetical idea for his purposes and so he appropriated it. He therefore applied this gloss of h.ikma to the other passages where h.ikma could arguably be understood in the sense of Muh.ammad’s Sunna. That is why Sha¯fi‘ı¯ includes Q 33.34 in his list of prooftexts even though it is so unlike the other, better passages he cites in support of reading h.ikma as Sunna. It was the verse as glossed by ‘Abd al-Razza¯q (or some recipient of this Bas.ran idea—Sha¯fi‘ı¯ need not have had it directly from ‘Abd alRazza¯q himself ) that gave Sha¯fi‘ı¯ the idea in the first place. This proposed course of events could also provide an explanation as to why Sha¯fi‘ı¯ cites an anonymous authority for his reading of h.ikma as the Sunna of the Prophet. He could in that way attribute the gloss to a pre-

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decessor, simultaneously cloaking it with the authority of tradition and signaling its reshaping as his own. Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s approach to these several passages may be described as broadly ‘‘halakhic,’’79 although he is not concerned with discrete norms, as that term implies, and attempts no explanation of the circumstances of revelation (asba¯b al-nuzu¯l) so as to allow a determination of legislative purpose. Neither does Sha¯fi‘ı¯ proceed aggadically (so to speak) and allow exegetical narratio to rule his presentation of Scripture (though one would hardly expect such a procedure in context). Finally, he is not at all interested in the masoretic project of supplying variants or (pseudo-)etymological explanations of words. But it must also be admitted that Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s interest in these texts appears somewhat idiosyncratic when compared with the earliest works on qur’a¯nic exegesis, precisely because he pursues a particular dogmatic agenda. In terms of exegetical technique, Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s reads these passages in a highly focused manner, zeroing in on a relatively tiny scriptural unit in the service of a disputed and major point of theology. His goal emerges as narrowly ideological. His exegesis cannot, therefore, be accounted for in terms of play, a dichotomy between peshat/midrash, or allegory. It is more akin to laser surgery—a very serious business. In tandem with Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s laser-like focus on results in this otherwise relatively simple instance of substitution exegesis, it is worthwhile to note that the success of his interpretation depended in no small part on the underdetermined semantic field of the scriptural variable h.ikma. Moreover, the more general obscurity of Q 33.34, which probably furnished his starting point, further contributed to his ability to mold its interpretation to his needs. The social background to Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s project—and the sources only really allow hypothesizing here—may be the following: The h.adı¯th movement was an anti-elite pietism, but its members had custody of the Prophet’s traditions, the h.adı¯ths that collectively embodied the Sunna.80 As a member of the scholarly elite, Sha¯fi‘ı¯ sought to bring these texts within his own sphere of activity. He therefore ceded to the h.adı¯th movement the custody of these texts but reserved to himself and other jurists the sole right to manipulate them for purposes of articulating the sacred law. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ clearly marks out this division of labor in his Risa¯la.81 The ahl al-h.adı¯th may well have represented competition at some level— authority and patronage suggest themselves as likely sites of contestation—and perhaps that competition provided part of the impulse for Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s development of the notion of the complementarity of the oral and written revelation. This account need not preclude the possibility that a rabbinic echo reverberate at some level in the above-described process. In Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s

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time, direct, and especially acknowledged, borrowing—or appropriation, or reception, or whatever—might have been difficult. In an earlier period, appropriation was recognized, even if it was not always approved.82 Later, too, in the ninth century it was possible even for relatively conservative Muslim writers such as Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889) to make use of the Bible—Christian and Jewish—not only as a legitimate source of historical anecdote and narrative, but also as an authority in arguments about Muslim texts and dogma.83 But during Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s lifetime—a period of self-conscious articulation of norms, structures, dogmas, orthodoxy, and relationships of difference to other communities—rabbinic notions may have been, for polemical reasons, more likely to enter Islamic legal discourse only as loose and general and sorts of principles, transformed, perhaps beyond recognition, in the process of (sometimes unconscious) transplantation to a situation where they would necessarily have to be different. The idea of h.ikma as the orally transmitted, Prophetic law could have been ‘‘in the air’’ in Iraq, it would have made excellent sense to Sha¯fi‘ı¯, and it need not even have been perceived as strictly rabbinic property (which anyway it is not, as we have seen). Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s contemporary Pirkoi b. Baboi, writing in Hebrew, formulated an account of the intense complementarity of the two-part revelation, of the relationship of the Oral to the Written Torah, in terms which resonate strikingly with Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s Risa¯la. He begins an epistle84 as follows: [God] gave them [⳱ Israel] a written Torah and an oral Torah. The written Torah is an allusion [remez] and the oral Torah an explanation [meforash]; the written Torah is general [kelal] and the oral Torah specific [perat]; the written Torah is brief [me‘at] and the oral Torah expansive to no end [reh.abah ‘ad en kets].85

Ben Baboi unmistakably describes what I have called, in relation to Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s own hermeneutics, ‘‘source interaction.’’86 Ben Baboi inhabits a particular polemical context, insisting on the authority of the Babylonian as against the Palestinian tradition,87 but his championing of the Oral Torah may also aim in part at the scripturalism of the Karaites. In this latter regard, his situation is, very roughly, equivalent to that of a Muslim who defends the Sunna against those who insist on the supremacy of the Qur’a¯n.88 However one chooses to characterize the relationship between Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s thought and rabbinic ideas—borrowing, appropriation, influence, parallels, aimless meandering of ideas—one does well to keep in mind that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ began with the same materials as the rabbis (speaking in very general terms): an authoritative body of law, the jurists who developed that body of law, and an authoritative Scripture that remained,

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early on, independent to some meaningful extent from the jurists’ activities.89 Thus, the same three-part puzzle confronted both Sha¯fi‘ı¯ and the rabbis: how to fit together law, Scripture, and the function of jurists. The answer in both cases seems to have been to make the jurists custodians of a two-part revelation, consisting of oral tradition and Scripture, with special responsibility for its oral component. Under those circumstances, the possibility of a parallel development of a theory of source interaction can hardly be excluded. Indeed, one cannot even discount the possibility of Muslim (or even Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s) influence on a writer such as Ben Baboi.90 Epilogue The story of this exegesis has an epilogue. The great scholar alT.abarı¯—who died in 311/923, a century after Sha¯fi‘ı¯, and who authored an extremely important and lengthy exegetical work that preserves a considerable amount of earlier material—knows the gloss of h.ikma as sunna. He, like ‘Abd al-Razza¯q, has it from the Bas.ran Qata¯da. T.abarı¯ trots it out right off the bat, though, in his discussion of Q 2.129, the first of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s prooftexts, and the very first occurrence in the Qur’a¯n of the pair kita¯b and h.ikma. T.abarı¯’s prominent placement of this gloss suggests that, for him, it represents the interpretation of those two terms.91 ‘Abd al-Razza¯q, by contrast, had it only for the most obscure of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s seven prooftexts. Once the force of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s legal-theoretical arguments for the legal authority of Muh.ammad’s Sunna were appreciated and gained currency, his exegesis of all the passages relating to Muh.ammad’s reception of a book and wisdom probably became attached to the Bas.ran reading of Q 33.34, and that reading was then retrojected on to the early Bas.ran authorities for all the relevant passages. Later exegetes such as, for example, al-Zamakhsharı¯ (d. 538/1144),92 al-T.abrisı¯ (d. 548/1154),93 and the two Jala¯ls (al-Mah.allı¯ d. 864/1459 and al-Suyu¯t.¯ı d. 911/1505),94 all know and adopt the equation of h.ikma with the Sunna of the Prophet. T.abarı¯, however, for reasons that remain obscure, does not credit Sha¯fi‘ı¯ with this exegetical strategy that was to have such far-reaching consequences for Islamic legal thought. T.abarı¯ was also a jurist with an abiding interest in legal theory and hermeneutics, so perhaps it is not surprising that the h.ikma:sunna equation appealed to him. It is surprising that he was unaware of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s use of these verses—perhaps he did not consider Sha¯fi‘ı¯ an authority in qur’a¯nic exegesis. The rabbis’ use of the oral/written distinction in regard to the Torah, although probably dating to biblical times, eventually acquired a polemical, post-hoc character and did not necessarily reflect anything about the written or oral

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nature of the texts so designated.95 Sha¯fi‘ı¯, on the other hand, mined the nascent qur’a¯nic exegetical tradition for a suitable prooftext that could support a major premise of his legal thought—the indispensability of Prophetic tradition—and his adoption of an obscure exegetical remark in the service thereof proved a remarkable success, as noted centuries later by the exceptionally well-read Ibn Taymı¯ya.

9

Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy: Exegesis of Mass Propers in the Middle Ages Daniel Sheerin

Before the era of inexpensive printing and widespread literacy, the ordinary person’s encounter with Scripture was vicarious and quite selective—for although personal study of Scripture by cultural and religious elites was encouraged,1 the principal encounter with Scripture was in a liturgical context, where selected excerpts were chanted or read to/for them within a contextualizing ritual. This was true of Jews as well as Christians but it was especially the case with the latter. Ordinary people partook of a vicarious biblical literacy, one made possible by a clergy trained to chant the Scripture interpretatively and explain it to them, and by the congregations’ own complex of liturgico-biblical interpretative skills.2 However, although a variety of biblical texts were read or chanted to the people in liturgical settings, the biblical texts of the eucharistic liturgy (the Mass, Divine Liturgy) could include only a small fraction of the extensive collection (bibliotheca) of sacred books (biblia) that the appropriation of the Septuagint Bible and canonization of what came to be called the New Testament had created for Christians of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.3 Earlier evidence suggests that selection of biblical texts for liturgical reading was in part ad libitum, in part determined by tradition, and, to a limited extent, dictated by programs of continuous reading of particular books (lectio continua) or reading of discontinuous excerpts from particular books in their biblical sequence (lectio occurrens). But I wish to direct our focus to a later stage, the beginning of the ninth century, by which time, as a result of the process James McKinnon called ‘‘properization,’’4 the majority of days of the liturgical year had a full set of propers (propria), that is, chants, readings, and prayers peculiar or ‘‘proper’’ to that day.

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The project of this essay is to show how techniques borrowed from traditional biblical exegesis were employed to solve the problem of finding coherent meaning in these ensembles of biblical excerpts and nonbiblical prayers.5 Why is this interesting and what has it to do with biblical interpretation? The perforce selective transmission and dissemination of Scripture through the chants and readings of the Mass entailed a virtual rewriting of Scripture. The component texts that made up the mass were altered by being given a special prominence, by being decontextualized and by being recontextualized amid other excerpts. This me´lange of excerpts amounted to new parabiblical entity,6 an anthology of biblical passages that were individually and collectively applied to a particular season or feast and presented repeatedly, and so, memorably, to the worshipping community in the annual cycles of the liturgical year. These sets of biblical passages constituted an annually performed epitome of Scripture, a ‘‘liturgical Bible.’’ This ‘‘liturgical Bible’’ required its own exegesis, and this was provided, earlier, in isolation, by homilies that explained and harmonized the propers of individual feasts, and eventually en bloc, in liturgical commentaries that discussed the propers of feasts through the entire liturgical year. The corpus of liturgical exegesis was produced mainly by borrowing from and adapting the methods of traditional biblical exegesis. Of course, the exegesis that elucidated the excerpted texts when in situ could be similarly excerpted and applied to the passages in their new settings. But of greater interest is the adaptation of traditional principles, techniques, and tools of biblical interpretation to explain the excerpted passages in their new venue and combination, namely, their attachment to a particular feast and their harmony with one another and with the prayer texts proper to the day. This little-studied enterprise in parabiblical exegesis deserves attention both because it was a creatively adaptive enterprise and because it was a part of the training of both secular clergy and religious in the Latin West from the ninth century through the twentieth, and thus a significant part of biblical paideia in its broadest sense. This essay’s scope ends with the twelfth century, the intermediate stage of this liturgical-exegetical activity, but the exegesis of liturgical texts continued to generate its own literature, both learned and devotional, through the later Middle Ages and the Reformation, and on into the modern era, and the lectionary reforms of recent decades have themselves evoked a corpus of publications in this same vein. I am going to consider: (1) Why the coherence of the mass propers constituted a problem; (2) Why the problem had to be addressed; (3) What were the resources, mainly from biblical exegesis, that were drawn

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upon to address this problem; and (4) How the liturgical exegetes of the twelfth century constructed the coherence of the mass propers.

The Problem: Coherence of the Mass Propers First, what exactly are the mass propers? The mass was bipartite, consisting of a service of readings called the ‘‘Mass of the Catechumens,’’ now called ‘‘Liturgy of the Word,’’ and the ‘‘Mass of the Faithful [that is, Baptized],’’ the rites of the Eucharist itself, culminating in Communion. The almost invariable structure of the mass alternated components of the ‘‘ordinary,’’ the series of texts that were part of almost every mass, with the ‘‘propers’’ (propria), the texts proper or peculiar to the feast days of the liturgical year. These proper texts of the mass are of three types: texts wholly composed, texts excerpted and recomposed, and simple excerpts.8 The wholly composed texts are the three prayers: the collect, the so-called secret prayer, and the postcommunion prayer. Each of these was composed in a genre-specific, hieratic style9 and collected into the priest’s book, the sacramentary (sacramentarium, liber sacramentorum, etc.). In a solemn (chanted) mass the celebrating priest would intone the prayers, using readily recognizable musical formulae. The remaining proper texts are, in the vast majority of cases, scriptural passages.10 Shorter excerpts, mostly from the Psalms,11 serve as texts for the elaborate chants: the entry chant (‘‘Introit’’), chants between the readings (‘‘Gradual’’ Ⳮ verse followed by Alleluia Ⳮ verse), the offertory chant, and communion chant, which were sung by choir and soloist and collected into a MS called a mass antiphonal (antiphonale). The more extensive excerpts (pericopes) from Scripture are the two readings: the first a nongospel passage, occasionally taken from the Old Testament, but usually from the New Testament epistles (hence the common alternative name for this element, the ‘‘Epistle’’), and the second reading, or ‘‘Gospel,’’ an excerpt from one of the four gospels. These were commonly collected into various types of lectionary, and in a solemn mass the readings were chanted according to simple formulae, the epistle by a subdeacon, the gospel by a deacon. The character of the mass propers as an ensemble, as, in a way, a single text, is more evident in the later type of liturgical book called a missal (missale) that collected and placed before one’s eyes, sometimes on a single page, all the propers of a given feast. Let us take as a specimen of an ensemble of proper texts the set provided in some sources for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (hereafter Pentecost XI).12 I have chosen Pentecost XI because it constituted an interpretative challenge in two respects: it is from a liturgical season that lacked the more obvious

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rememorative functions of other seasons of the temporal cycles, and there was also a controversial divergence in the assignment of proper prayers to the Sundays after Pentecost.. Translations of the biblical texts cited here can be found in the Douay-Rheims-Challoner translation of the Vulgate; references to the Psalms are by the LXX numbering used in the Vulgate Psalter. The Eleventh Sunday [Liturgy of the Word; Mass of the Catechumens] Entrance chant: Composed from Psalm 67.6b–7a, 36b and Ps 67.2 Collect: Almighty, eternal God, who from the abundance of your pity go beyond both the merits of those who entreat you and their prayers, pour out your mercy upon us so as to forgive what conscience fears and to bestow what prayer does not presume to ask. Through. Epistle: 1 Cor 15.1–10a [Between-readings chants] Gradual: Ps 27.7bc Ⳮ Verse Ps 27.1a, Ps 34.22b Alleluia Ⳮ Verse Ps 77.1 Gospel: Luke 18.9–14 [Liturgy of the Eucharist; Mass of the Faithful] Offertory chant: Ps 29.2–3 Secret Prayer: Look kindly, we beg, O Lord, upon our service, that what we offer to you may be an acceptable offering and a support to our weakness. Through. Communion chant: Prov 3.9–10 Postcommunion Prayer: May we realize from the reception of your sacrament, O Lord, a support for mind and body, that, healed in both, we may glory in the fullness of the heavenly cure. Through.13

A casual examination of the scriptural texts for Pentecost XI could leave the modern reader or performer with the impression that this ensemble of texts was put together as set of random choices, as if one were to draw a series of inscribed slips of paper from a set of jars labeled ‘‘readings’’ and ‘‘chants.’’ Here, then, is the problem: Although there are many cases of brilliantly successful combinations of readings and chants selected to suit particular seasons and feast days, some degree of disorder and haphazard, is, in fact, apparent passim in the traditional repertory of mass propers. Liturgical scholars have discerned vestiges of careful selection and systematic arrangements of chants and readings.14 But the psalm antiphons and associated single verses are vestiges of whole psalms that earlier had accompanied parts of the mass, vestiges so slight that in some cases the verse of the psalm relevant to the feast ceased to be chanted.15 And though some series of pericopes of epistles and gospels of successive Sundays suggest an orderly or at least serial arrangement, the series of epistle readings and series of gospel readings for much of the liturgical year developed independently of one another.

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So, due to truncations and abridgements of texts, dislocations of earlier patterns, cross-purposes of redactors, variations in selections of texts, and divergent liturgical usages, the repertory of mass propers came to contain as many riddles and problems as it did brilliantly constructed me´langes of scriptural passages and prayer texts.16

Why the Issue of Coherence Had to Be Addressed Early-modern and modern liturgists, from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, have brought new sets of historical assumptions and their own ideas of the roles of Scripture in liturgy to their critique of the mass propers of the received repertory. Their dissatisfaction with the traditional repertory led to its replacement with more extensive and rationalized programs of biblical readings and chants. Medieval liturgists17 did not have this option. They had developed their own historicizing narrative of the development of the liturgy, and this narrative, as well as other considerations, led them to regard what they had received as authoritative and inviolable. The narrative of liturgical development was based on Isidore of Seville’s De officiis ecclesiasticis, or, as the earlier MSS call it, De origine officiorum, because its point of departure, shared with Isidore’s better-known Etymologiae sive origines, is the determination of the origins or inventors of things, in this case, of the rites of the Church.18 Medieval writers produced a set of what one might call liturgical aetiologies that blended fact, extrapolation, conjecture, and fantasy to affirm and explain liturgical practices and texts by deriving them from authoritative inventores, ordinatores, and compositores.19 In the case of lectionary compilations we have some early historical notices that emphasize the suitability of the lections to the feast days to which they were assigned by their authoritative redactors. Gennadius recorded that his contemporary Musaeus of Marseilles (d. ca. 456–61) had at the instance of his bishop ‘‘excerpted lections from the sacred scriptures suited to the feastdays of the entire year, as well as responsoryverses of the psalms agreeable to the seasons and readings,’’20 and Sidonius Apollinaris listed among literary labors in the epitaph he composed for his friend Claudianus Mamertus (d. ca. 474) that ‘‘he prepared for the yearly feasts [selections] that would be suitable at the time they were read.’’21 So it is no surprise that we find prefixed to some lectionaries pseudepigraphical compositions that exploit the concern with origins and assert the suitability of their lections to the appointed days. For example, in the letter ‘‘Quamquam licenter,’’ forged under the name of Jerome and prefixed to a lectionary,22 its author both claims Jerome’s prestige for the appended lectionary and describes the ideal of liturgical books of this kind when he asserts that this lectionary was put together

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‘‘in such a way that this large me´lange of excerpts may be regarded as having an intellectual principle and systematic basis,’’ his purpose having been ‘‘to excerpt from the great abundance of the divine books what is suited and appropriate to particular feasts and arrange these in a very orderly way.’’23 But, as suggested earlier, historicizing, whether authentic, conjectural, or fictional, only made the received liturgy more canonical by giving support to the assumption that it had been established and redacted by authoritative figures whose work was eventually considered to have been divinely inspired, not unlike the Scriptures.24 This assimilation to the canonical Scriptures contributed to the assumption that the composers and redactors of liturgical texts had imbued the propers of the liturgy with a concordia, a harmony, of their own analogous to the concordia that was assumed to prevail in the Scriptures. Thus, when disputes arose over which of variant liturgical texts or arrangements thereof was the more authentic, whether about universal practice, like the eleventhcentury dispute about the correct assignment of prayers to the Sundays after Pentecost (see below), or about local usage, telling arguments could be based upon the construction of a plausible provenance for the favored texts and the demonstration of a suitable harmony among them. Demonstrating the concordia, the coherent meaning, of mass propers was not only a tool to be employed when adjudicating controversies about liturgical practice but also, as we will see, a component of the liturgical commentaries that were produced as instruments for clerical education and reform.

Resources for Addressing the Problem Resources Derived from Biblical Interpretation Centuries of biblical exegesis had provided abundant techniques for dealing with a type of text that was regarded both as absolutely authoritative and as providentially problematic, because it was divinely inspired. So, in order to construct meaning from and for liturgical observances and their me´langes of texts, medieval scholars had recourse to the assumptions and methods of interpretation developed in earlier biblical exegesis, and they brought to bear on the liturgy the same will-to-meaning that they brought to the riddles of the Scriptures, in order to find the kernel within the husk of liturgical times, figures, actions, objects, and texts. The principal interpretative methodologies of patristic biblical exegesis that informed and enabled the work of medieval liturgical exegetes were the following:

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(1) Reading Scripture as a unity with omni-pervasive harmony (concordia): The unity and harmony of the Scriptures had been asserted and defended against Marcionite and Manichean rejection of the Old Testament emphatically, thoroughly, and constantly.25 This dogma of scriptural unity brought with it an assumption of a harmonized or harmonizable connectedness (routinely described with terms like concordia, consonantia, convenientia, etc.) between the Old and New Testaments, indeed, all books of Scripture.26 A precedent for application of this assumption to to mass propers can be seen in some sermons of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) where he extended this assumption of biblical harmony to the excerpts used at mass (for Augustine, 1st reading, psalm, gospel pericope) by pointing out the harmony of these biblical excerpts with one another, whether they had been selected by him or predetermined by tradition.27 In addition, anticipating what will later be carried out in a more systematic way, he occasionally points out and describes the suitability of the texts to the particular feast day being celebrated.28 (2) This assumption of unity/harmony was supported by and contributed to the associated interpretative practice of clarifying one passage of Scripture by reference to another often quite remote from it29 and facilitated the ‘‘bundling’’ of mutually clarifying and supportive passages of Scripture as testimonia in controversies and as epitomes of biblical teaching in treatises on morality, asceticism, and so forth. These inner-connected, inner-responsive bundles of biblical quotations became, I believe, an unacknowledged model to which the me´langes of mass propers were conceptually likened. (3) Constructive approach to obscurities: Ancient Christian exegetes found many details of the Scriptures problematic, and the problems were compounded for interpreters from alien cultures working through the medium of translation. Yet the authority of the biblical text was such that the apparent scandals, contradictions, and muddles that another era might excise, downplay, ignore, or despair of were embraced as challenges whose resolution or understanding might be accessible through more study and more prayer and so become a source of delight to scholar and community.30 This determined, constructive approach to enigmas in the macrocosm of the Scriptures would be carried over into the resolution of problems in the biblical excerpts in the liturgy and of riddles in the liturgy generally (see material quoted in item 噛6). (4) Prosopographical interpretation of Scripture: Prosopographical exegesis is a term for the interpretation of Scripture through identification of the prosopon, or persona, to whom specific utterances should correctly be ascribed,31 as when Origen sorts out the characters speaking in the Song of Solomon, or when Wisdom’s voice in Prov 8–9 and Ben Sira 24

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is said to be Christ’s, or verses of the Psalms are identified as the voices of or allusions to various personae, divine and human, individual and collective.32 (5) Allegorical readings of persons, events, texts: These personae can be historical, that is, figures or communities in salvation history; institutional, for example, Israel and/or the Church; universal, for example, the righteous man or the devout soul; and eschatological, that is, figures from the end-times. When applied to liturgical exegesis, this technique facilitates reading the liturgy as a rememorative allegory of salvation history with assignment of various voices or roles in the liturgy to figures of the Judaeo-Christian past; as a moral allegory with assignment of texts to the voice of the righteous man repenting, progressing, pleading, and so forth; and as anagogical allegory when the texts are ascribed to the citizens of heaven or interpreted as announcing or describing the age to come.33 (6) Sacramental (figurative) reading of details of Scripture: The assumption of unity and harmony was facilitated by and encouraged the proliferation of figurative readings of Scripture whereby surface meaning was regarded as the covering or symbol of a more profound reality. This interpretative temper lent itself readily to liturgical exegesis. Just as Origen (d. ca. 254), after explaining the symbolism of veiling of the objects of the Sanctuary carried by the sons of Caath, went on to apply his construct to rituals of his own religious community,34 so too a medieval expositor of both Scripture and of liturgy, Bruno of Segni (d. 1123), echoing Origen, recalls the genesis of his treatise on the rites for the dedication of a church in a similar perception of the shared figurative character of Mosaic and Christian cults.35 The symbols (sacramenta) of the liturgy came to be regarded as a veil drawn over sacred realities, even as Shem and Japhet drew a veil over their father Noah’s nakedness.36 (7) Typological reading of Scripture: Typological interpretation afforded a view of the rites of the Old Law as types—imitative, predictive antecedents37—of their fulfillments in the New. Typology had been widely employed in patristic mystagogy (explanations of the sacraments of initiation) and was revived in the liturgical exegesis of the Middle Ages. However, typology in medieval liturgical exegesis tends to assign a higher value to the ritual types of the Old Law, since, thanks to Isidore’s De officiis ecclesiasticis, practices that earlier may have been regarded only as Old Testament anticipations of Christian rites had become identified as authoritative precedents or models for Christian ritual. The eleventhcentury canonist Ivo of Chartres produced a treatise On the Harmony of the Old and the New Sacrifice the goal of which was to show ‘‘how the old rites are in harmony with the new, when the Church from its gospel tradition honors these same rites in its sacred ritual with what imitation it

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can, and attests the realization of what the old rites prophesied would come.’’38 Resources Derived from Carolingian Liturgical Exegesis Techniques familiar in biblical exegesis were adapted to liturgical exegesis and permeate it. The liturgists of the twelfth century were not the first to apply these techniques to the liturgy, but were able to draw upon pioneering efforts by Carolingian scholars. The Abbot Smaragdus of St. Mihiel’s Expositio libri comitis (composed ca. 812)39 is a catena40 of patristic exegesis of the biblical excerpts that served as the liturgical readings arranged in the lectionary (liber comitis) for the major feasts of the liturgical year.41 In his preface Smaragdus asserts that the epistle and gospel readings have two relational aspects (earlier identified by Augustine), their aptness (convenientia) to the season and feast and their harmony (concordia) with one another,42 a harmony that can be found in words and/or actions, and he promises to append a concordia, namely, an account of the harmony of the readings, at the end of his florilegium for particular feast days to aid the reader’s perception of ‘‘how the readings are harmoniously responsive to one another and are suited (convenientes) to seasons, feasts, and actions’’ (PL 102:14CD). Smaragdus appends these brief concordiae to his excerpts of patristic commentary for only a limited number of feast days, and this has made them seem incidental,43 but they are not without exegetical method, and, in view of the popularity of the Expositio libri comitis,44 were probably influential. One example, the concordia for the readings of the third mass of Christmas, Heb. 1.1–12 and John 1.1–14, will suffice to show the summary, simple character of Smaragdus’s concordiae: The concordia of these two readings consists of many features. The Gospel says: ‘‘In the beginning was the Word’’ (John 1.1a), and the Apostle: ‘‘You, in the beginning, O Lord, founded the earth’’ (Heb 1.10, quoting Ps 101.26a). The Gospel says: ‘‘All things were made through him’’ and ‘‘the world was made by him’’ (John 1.3a, 10a); the Apostle says: ‘‘Through whom he also made the ages’’ (Heb 1.2b). We should note that both called the Lord Jesus Christ ‘‘God,’’ the Gospel, where it says: ‘‘And the Word was God’’ (John 1.1b), the Apostle, where he says: ‘‘Your throne, O God, is unto age of age.’’ (Heb 1.8, quoting Ps 44.7a; PL 102:35C)

Smaragdus finds the bases for their concordia in the readings themselves and makes no reference to the other propers that had by his time been attached to particular feasts, nor does he address the suitability of these texts to the day to which they were assigned. But we find the suggestion of a broader scope in the work of the greatest Carolingian liturgist, Amalarius of Metz (ca. 775–ca. 850).45 Amalarius approaches the

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liturgy as meaningful and authoritative;46 he regards particular services as the rationalized products of the intentional activity of a redactor, a figure he calls dictator, auctor, praeceptor officii, or compositor; and he is quite confident that, however obscured by time, the intended meaning, namely, ‘‘what was in the minds of the first composers of our liturgy,’’ can be recovered.47 Amalarius harmonizes only a few sets of mass propers48 but goes beyond Smaragdus by considering not just the readings but all the propers of the first part of the mass. Although he is careful to claim support from patristic exegesis, Amalarius’s interpretations relate the propers to his own conception of the symbolism of the feast day and of the period in which it occurs. For example, Amalarius says that the pre-Lenten Sundays symbolically recall the progress of the People of God through three steps, from Septuagesima Sunday with the lamentations of captives under their masters, the vices, to Sexagesima Sunday with the captives’ will to escape and acceptance of their true Master, to Quinquagesima Sunday with its advice about making provision for their protection (Liber officialis I.iii.4; 2:41). In his account of Sexagesima Sunday and the second step, he manages to show how its introit, collect, epistle reading, gradual, tract (a chant substituting for the Alleluia and its verse in penitential seasons), and gospel reading contribute jointly to describing this step. As he does this, he manages also to make retrospective allusion to the propers of the previous Sunday and prospective allusion to the Lenten keynote, the reading (Joel 2.12–19) for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.49 Refinement of the Idea of Coherence (Concordia) in the Eleventh-Century Controversy about Prayer-Sets of the Sundays after Pentecost Concordia of mass propers formed part of the argument of Berno of Reichenau and Bernold of Constance in favor of traditional, Roman liturgical practice. A preliminary word of explanation: The chants and readings appointed for Sundays after Pentecost were, for the most part, firmly established,50 but the prayer sets (collect Ⳮ secret Ⳮ postcommunion prayer) assigned to particular Sundays varied notoriously.51 Roman usage employed the prayer set Deprecationem nostram on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost, one not included in the enumeration of post-Pentecost Sundays52 but other sources, including the influential Supplementum compiled by Benedict of Aniane,53 inserted Deprecationem nostram on Pentecost III thus postponing the succeeding series of prayersets by one Sunday, and this was done without a corresponding adjustment of the chants and readings assigned to these Sundays. So in liturgical communities whose books used the prayer-set Deprecationem nostram

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on Pentecost III, the prayer-set of our specimen mass of Pentecost XI, also assigned to Pentecost XI in the usage which Berno and Bernoldus advocate, was postponed by a week and used with the proper readings and antiphons appointed for Pentecost XII, the prayers assigned in our source to Pentecost XII appear on Pentecost XIII, to be used with its propers, and so on.54 But if there is to be a concordia of the prayers with the chants and readings, one or the other arrangement of prayers for the Sundays after Pentecost has to be wrong to the point of absurdity. Berno of Reichenau (ca. 978–1048), reforming abbot of the monastery for which he is named,55 is best known to musicologists because of his works on music theory and liturgical music, but he contributed several short treatises on liturgical topics, among them On Some Matters Having to Do with the Liturgy of the Mass (PL 142:1055–1080). The portion of this work that concerns us is chapter 5, ‘‘On the Mass Deprecationem nostram and the Concordia of the Sunday Services.’’ In this chapter Berno denounces the deracination of prayer-sets from the rest of the propers that ought to be associated with them that occurs when the prayer-set Deprecationem nostram is inserted on the third Sunday after Pentecost. He asserts that the prayer-set Deprecationem nostram properly belongs on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost, the Dominica vacans, because these prayers and the readings for that day ‘‘harmonize with one another wonderfully’’ (1066D). The consequence of the use of the correct prayers on the Dominica vacans after Pentecost is that the succeeding Sundays ‘‘produce, like a harp, a harmonious chord of sound of differing intervals’’ (1066D–1067A). To demonstrate his point Berno first takes up the mass for the First Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost, that is, Pentecost I, and provides a detailed analysis of the common themes and responsiveness of the several components to one another, concluding: And in this way through twenty-three weeks, if the mass (Deprecationem nostram) mentioned earlier is left out of the third place, either all the components are in harmony (concordant) with all, or some with some, but especially, if one examines carefully, the prayer-sets are in harmony with the gospel readings. (1067CD)

Berno goes on to provide what amounts to the first commentary on the masses of the Sundays after Pentecost through similar analyses of the masses of selected Sundays (V, VII, X, XIII, XVIII–XXII) and refers the reader to his earlier treatment (now lost) of the twenty-third Sunday.56 As Berno describes and demonstrates the coherence of this series of masses, he makes constant use of the verbs congruere and concordare and the nouns concordia and convenientia. Berno’s commentary on our specimen mass of Pentecost XI finds the

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harmony of Gospel, Epistle, and Collect in their shared confession of sin and disinclination to presume: The gospel Two Men and the apostolic reading which is read on that day are quite in harmony (bene concordant), as the Apostle says: ‘‘I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God,’’ and the Publican ‘‘standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’ ’’ The priest, situated between these men prays [the collect]: ‘‘Almighty, eternal God, . . . pour out your mercy upon us so as to forgive what conscience fears and to bestow what prayer does not presume to ask.’’ (1068B)

Berno provides no formal description of his method, but in most instances he begins with the gospel for the day, and it is the concordia of gospel reading with the collect that seems most important to him. Bernoldus of Constance (ca. 1050–1100) also applied the test of the concordia officiorum in the controversy about Deprecationem nostram in his Short Treatise about Church Observances (Micrologus de ecclesiasticis observationibus), composed between 1086 and 1100. Bernold had been better known as a canonist and propagandist for the Gregorian reforms, but the Micrologus (PL 151:973–1022), now confidently ascribed to him, has made a name for him among commentators on the liturgy as well.57 The Micrologus is a miscellany that deals in its sixty-two chapters with a variety of issues arising from the mass and with assorted feasts and features of the liturgical year. Of interest to us is chapter 61, ‘‘About the Concordia and Order of the Services,’’ for while assertions that adherence to the concordia officiorum is the teaching and practice of authoritative figures occur often in the Micrologus (see 1001B, 1001D, 1005C, 1006C, 1008B, 1009D, 1010C), it is in this chapter that Bernold takes issue with the use of the prayer-set Deprecationem nostram on Pentecost III and uses our specimen mass from the Pentecost XI to illustrate and demonstrate his point. Berno’s work is thought to have influenced Bernold on several points, including his treatment of the post-Pentecost Sundays.58 But in contrast to Berno, who bases his assertion of the correctness of the series of postPentecost prayers that he advocates on the internal logic of concordia alone, Bernold opens with an appeal to an authoritative arrangement of propers by Pope Gregory I: It should be known, moreover, that St. Gregory so arranged the church’s services that the first prayer in the mass is always in harmony with the introit, reading [epistle], and gospel, as one can realize in all the feasts. But people who unsuitably employ the prayers of the ‘‘Vacant Sundays’’ [Sundays of quarterly periods of fasting] bring this harmony into disorder, most particularly in the summertime Sundays. For example, although the prayer Deprecationem is rightly appointed for the octave of Pentecost after the Quarterly Fast, it is nevertheless

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quite often found also among the Sundays in the third position . . . those who attach this prayer to the third Sunday service, will throw into confusion the harmony of the services one after the other all the way to Advent. (PL 151:1020D– 1021A)

Bernold complains of the disorder that results from assignment of Deprecationem nostram to Pentecost III and other similar abuses and urges the benefits of adherence to authentic tradition, using the concordia evident in the correct arrangement of propers for Pentecost XI to prove his point: On the basis of these principles, then, let the mass prayers be fitted to the several services in order [reading seriatim, not feriatim] so that the prayer ‘‘Almighty, eternal God, who from the abundance of your pity’’ is associated with the gospel ‘‘Two men.’’ These are so in harmony (adeo concordant) with one another that the devotion of the publican seems to be expressed in the prayer itself. (PL 151:1021A)

Bernold does not explore the notion of concordia in any detail, but his influential and popular work propagated the assumption that an essential concordia existed between the mass propers and that their selection and harmonious arrangement could be traced back to the intention of an authoritative redactor of the services.

Twelfth-Century Liturgical Commentaries For the Instruction of the Clergy The liturgical commentaries of ‘‘Honorius Augustodunensis’’ and Rupert of Deutz, supporters of the reform of the secular and monastic clergy respectively, exhibit the most thorough and imaginative treatment of the concordia of the mass propers. The figure known to his readers as Honorius Augustodunensis (b. ca. 1070–d. shortly after 1139) was, like Bernold, an enthusiastic partisan of the Gregorian reforms. After an earlier career in England, he left his homeland following the death of St. Anselm (1109/1110) and settled as a canon in the collegiate church called alte Kapelle of the imperial city of Regensburg; toward the end of his life he entered monastic life and took the name Honorius. He is thought to have started his principal work on the liturgy, the Gemma animae (Gem of the Soul), consisting of four books of rhyming prose, while still in England and to have completed it at Regensburg.59 Honorius says that he composed this for the instruction of his fellow canons at their request: ‘‘One who does not understand what he is doing is like a blind man who knows not where he is going and perishes from thirst like Tantalus in the midst of waters. And although the simplicity of the

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faithful is pleasing to our God, yet he is more approving of the understanding of the wise, as much as of light over darkness. For this reason, I have produced, as you bade me, a book about the divine services, to which I’ve given the title Gem of the Soul, because, you see, just as gold is adorned by a gem, so is the soul made lovely by the divine liturgy’’ (Preface, PL 172:543–44). Book 4 of Gem of the Soul is entitled On the Harmony of the Services, as is its first chapter, but we look in vain there for a clear statement of the basis of concordia or method for discerning it. Even so, the first chapter is relevant to our subject, for the summary history of the liturgy provided there establishes the authoritative origin for the chants, readings, and prayers of the mass propers and their arrangement and so creates an assumption of coherent meaning. Honorius’s version of the history of the mass propers begins with the command issued by the Emperor Theodosius at the First Council of Constantinople (381)—which he had convened to quash heresy—that the liturgy, thrown into confusion by heresy and schism, be set in order. Pope Damasus commissions St. Jerome to do this work, and Jerome creates the course of psalmody for the liturgy of the hours and the lectionary for mass, arrangements duly promulgated by Pope Damasus. ‘‘Later, Popes Gelasius and Gregory added prayers and chants harmonizing with the readings and gospels, and established the celebration of the divine service as it is chanted today.’’60 However, later in book 4, after explaining the variety and organization of services in Lent, Honorius provides a complementary view of the liturgy as a collaboration of human and divine: ‘‘This is how one should investigate the rest of the things which have been set out in the divine services by learned men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.’’61 Honorius replicates on the grand scale of the entire liturgical year the approach to the coherence of mass propers that Amalarius had modeled in the few instances cited above, since for Honorius too the coherence of the propers becomes evident in their harmonious support of the role he assigns the particular feast day in his larger symbolic interpretations of the liturgical season. Honorius aligns the liturgical year to the course of a salvation history he constructs from biblical typology and the legendary history of the early Church, making an elaborate rememorative allegory that, from Septuagesima (the ninth Sunday before Easter) through the post-Christmas season, interprets the liturgical year as a lived representation of parallel histories of Israel and of the Church. When he takes up the challenging propers of the Sundays after Pentecost, he elaborates his procedure into a twofold treatment for each Sunday by interpreting the propers first ‘‘Under the Law,’’ as reflecting the experience of the people of Israel, and then ‘‘Under grace,’’ as reflect-

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ing the experience of the Church. Honorius fits the several texts into his scheme by assigning them to the voices of particular biblical and historical figures—an application to liturgical exegsis of prosopological interpretation. Early in his commentary on the post-Pentecost Sundays Honorius champions the arrangement of prayer-sets advocated by Berno and Bernold, for when he treats of the third Sunday after Pentecost (in chapters 26–27) he rejects the insertion of the prayer-set Deprecationem nostram on that day because of the concordia of the rest of its propers with the prayerset Protector in te sperantium provided in the Gregorian (Roman) series: ‘‘The prayer Deprecationem nostram which is appointed for the octave [of Pentecost] is not said in place of the Sunday prayer [of Pentecost III]. The Gregorian prayer Protector in te sperantium, however, is in harmony (concordat) with David repenting,’’ David being the ‘‘Under the Law’’ figure to whom all the proper texts are ascribed, and through whose penance is prefigured that the penance in the ‘‘Under grace’’ section, ‘‘of the faithful people, which, after their idolatry, as if after adultery with Bathsheba, and after their murder of the righteous, as if after the killing of Uriah, is turned to penance’’ (706D–707C). By the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost the site on Honorius’s timeline ‘‘Under the Law’’ has advanced from the reign of David well into Solomon’s reign, to the visit of the Queen of Sheba, a type of the Church, and ‘‘Under grace’’ from the penance of the Church for its idolatry to the time of Constantine, to the era of the great Church councils: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost ‘‘God in his holy place.’’ Chapter 65: Under the Law The Queen of Sheba makes haste to Jerusalem, she longs to see Solomon and his temple, she offered up gold and gems, and that is why she earned the privilege of keynoting this Sunday’s liturgy. Indeed, it was upon seeing his temple that she burst forth in praise of God, and that is why the church in her character sings [the introit] ‘‘God in his holy place.’’ Well suited to her (Cui . . . convenit) is the prayer, ‘‘God, who from the abundance of your pity,’’ in which she asks that God grant what prayers do not presume to seek. The epistle is fitted to her (ei congruit), because upon hearing the wisdom of Solomon she despised herself; it says ‘‘by the grace of God, I am what I am.’’ The gradual gives voice to her praise, wherein she says that her ‘‘heart has hoped in the Lord’’ and she would praise him ‘‘with will.’’ In the Alleluia ‘‘O Lord, God of my salvation’’ she sings joyfully in her mind to God whom she names her salvation. The two men who entered the temple [gospel] were Solomon and the Queen. He boasted because of his works; she entreated God humbly, like the Publican. In the offertory ‘‘I will extol thee, O Lord’’ allusion is made to her praisegiving, for in it she rejoices that she has been upheld by the Lord. The communion ‘‘Honor the Lord with thy substance’’ alludes to the Queen’s gifts that she offered to the Lord, and so ‘‘went down into her house justified.’’

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With his gilded temple Solomon had given new beauty to Jerusalem, and the Queen had come from the ends of the earth to see it. Constantine had enhanced the Christian religion with the outstanding city of Constantinople that the Church longs to see as she gathers from all directions. The Queen brought gold and gems; the Church presented people gleaming with wisdom as with gold, and shining with virtues as with gems. Wherefore, to the real Solomon, that is, to Christ she sings, delighted by his temple [the introit]: ‘‘God in his holy place.’’ The prayer is well suited (bene convenit) to the Publican of the gospel who asks that God ‘‘forgive what conscience fears’’ and adds ‘‘what prayer does not presume to ask.’’ In harmony (concordat) with this is the epistle in which she declares that she is the least. In the gradual she declares in advance that she praises ‘‘with’’ her ‘‘will,’’ and not under constraint; in the Alleluia she praises ‘‘the God of her salvation.’’ In the Pharisee of the gospel is understood the arrogant crowd of heretics, in the Publican the humble people of the Catholics. In the offertory the Church gives praise to God who ‘‘has upheld’’ her as she was coming to him. The communion urges her to share her goods with the members of Christ and to return ‘‘justified’’ in this way to her homeland, Paradise. Of course, thanks is given to God in this communion because it is at this time that wheat and wine are being harvested. (714–15)

Honorius connects traditional typological exegesis of the Queen of Sheba as an anticipation of the Church62 to the propers of the mass through a prosopological reading. He retrojects the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican onto the paired figures of Solomon and the Queen from 1 Kgs 10, projects the Pharisee and publican onward to the history of the Church, and concludes with an anagogical reading that looks to the heavenly destination of the church community. He shows that the propers have a concordia with one another, but he derives their true meaning and cohesiveness from the emphasis he places on their shared convenientia or congruentia to the characters of this Sunday’s phase of the historical pageant that he has created. Rupert of Deutz composed his liturgical handbook for monk-priests63 at roughly the same time, ca. 1112, as Honorius was composing his for the cathedral and parochial clergy, and in the same region (Rupert’s work is dedicated to Honorius’s bishop, Archbishop Cuno of Regensburg). The Liber de divinis officiis was Rupert’s first major work and became his most popular. Rupert wrote for the instruction of priests living by the Benedictine Rule, although much of his handbook could be of benefit to secular priests as well. His preface is reminiscent of Honorius’s, for Rupert says, alluding to 1 Cor 14, that ‘‘to celebrate these rites of the Church and not understand the reasons for them is like speaking in a tongue and not knowing its interpretation.’’ This kind of ignorance is tolerable, Rupert allows, in the case of ordinary people, but more is required of the clergy, the eyes of the ecclesial Body of Christ, and so

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he undertakes to provide them access to the sacramentally concealed meanings of the liturgy.64 Rupert devotes more space than any author before him, books 3–12, about 85 percent of his work, to the analysis of the liturgical year and the proper texts of its feasts. His treatment of these is less convoluted and symbolic than that of Honorius, or, at least, more economical, perhaps because they are simple applications of a set of a priori assumptions: (1) the mass propers, their selection and arrangement, are the work of an authoritative although unidentified compositor whose care and presumed intentionality guarantee that the ensembles of mass propers have a coherent meaning; (2) the concordia—the key to the intended meaning of the propers—lies in the relation of the texts to one another, not to an overarching symbolic scheme, although Rupert does provide (see 3.1; 4.3, 9, 11–13) symbolic structures for the liturgical year; (3) the single basis for the concordia of any set of propers is always the gospel reading. Rupert lays down this principle when describing the role of the gospel in his account of the components of the mass in 1.37: The holy gospel is the basis for all the things that are said in the service of the mass. For just as the head is preeminent in the body and the other limbs serve it, so the gospel is preeminent over the entire service, and all things that are read or sung there are in agreement with it in a conceptual scheme. (CCM 7:31)

Rupert alludes to this hermeneutic key passim through the Liber de divinis officiis and applies it consistently.65 Rupert’s privileging the gospel text in this way found acceptance in subsequent liturgical writers, who, although they do not apply his method, at least quote Rupert’s principle, in some cases verbatim.66 In his commentary on the mass of Pentecost XI in 12.11 Rupert does not refer explicitly to his method but employs it implicitly when he begins with the gospel and indicates the harmony of all the other texts with it. Note that he does not mention the collects in his treatment of Sundays after Pentecost, as if avoiding the vexed question of which was the correct series of prayer-sets for the post-Pentecost Sundays. About the Eleventh Sunday [after the octave of Pentecost] On the Eleventh Sunday this gospel ‘‘Two men went up into the Temple to pray’’ is appointed. The epistle reading that precedes, ‘‘I make known unto you the gospel,’’ is obviously in harmony (consonat) with this. For Paul perfectly imitates the model of the publican in the gospel, who accuses himself and says: I am not worthy to ‘‘lift up’’ my ‘‘eyes towards heaven,’’ when he says in this epistle: For I am the least of the apostles, ‘‘who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God,’’ etc. And because it is humility like this that maintains the unity of the household of God, so that one does not become puffed-up against another, quite rightly is this introit used as preface, for in it is said: ‘‘God who maketh men of one mind to dwell in a house.’’

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What is said in the gradual: ‘‘and with my will I will give praise to him’’ and likewise in the offertory: ‘‘O Lord I have cried to thee, and thou has healed me,’’ harmonizes (concordat) with the words of the publican as he stands far off and confesses his sins. And it is to such a one as this, not one boasting pharisaically that he gives tithes of all that he possesses, but one who first offers himself up through humble confession that the command to offer what is one’s own is directed in the communion: ‘‘Honour the Lord with thy substance,’’ etc. (CCM 7:404)

Clearly the concordia of the propers is their common resonance with the gospel, for the other texts are assigned individual and collective meaning in terms of their harmony with the strong voice of the publican’s humble confession. If I may use an unlikely simile, the other proper texts are treated as slices of bland tofu that derive their pronounced flavor from the more savory food with which they are cooked.

Concordia officiorum and Spiritual Formation The liturgical commentaries of Honorius and Rupert are educational works written for the cathedral and monastic clergy and they show how the mass propers were explained in a formally instructional medium and venue. Another set of compositions, from later in the twelfth century, the large collection of homilies from the reformed monastery of Admont,67 provides an example of a more leisured, homiletic presentation of mass propers and their concordia that combines interpretation with technical guidance for the spiritual lives of monks and nuns.68 Authorship of the sermons is uncertain, for claims have been advanced for Godfrey of Admont (d. 1165), his brother Irimbert (d. 1176), and even for editorial activity by female members of the double monastery.69 In the only available edition of the Admont homilies (by Bernhard Pez in 1725, reprinted in PL 174) several cycles of homilies of different types have been intermixed. Some of the festal homilies comment only on the feast day’s gospel or on another scriptural text assigned to the day, but there is a clearly discernible series of homilies that combine extended commentary on the gospel text with treatments of all or most of the propers. One of these is the homily on Pentecost XI (PL 174:549C– 555C), which, after extended commentary on the gospel, harmonizes with it all the other proper texts. The homilist applies the gospel of the Pharisee and the publican to the lives of monastics in a startling reading that portrays the ‘‘two men’’ as embodying the ambivalence of an ‘‘everyman’’ as he enters the ‘‘temple’’ of the spiritual life: In these two men can be understood any man, one and the same man, who, though he is not this way actually, even so seems to me to be not one man, but

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two when he comes into the temple, because at the beginning of conversion the flesh always lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh (Gal 5.17), and these two men, namely, the outer and the inner man, endure countless annoying struggles between them. (550B)

And after development of this theme through a verse-by-verse commentary on the gospel (549C–553B), he shows the harmony of the remaining propers of the mass of the day with his interpretation of the gospel by passing them in review through meditative paraphrase, as follows: Today’s collect has great fittingness (magnam . . . aptitudinem) to this understanding of the Gospel, for, divided into two portions, it is applicable to the two men, the Pharisee and the publican. The first portion: Almighty, eternal God, who from the abundance of your pity go beyond both the merits of those who entreat you and their prayers, applies to the Pharisee who boasts of his merits and considers his prayers pleasing to God; the second portion, pour out your mercy upon us so as to forgive what conscience fears and to bestow what prayer does not presume to ask, applies to the publican, who, unwilling even to raise his eyes to heaven because his sinful conscience gnawed at him, sought only the forgiveness of his sins. (553A–553D) . . . The introit of the mass which is rightly intoned by one who has entered into this temple of the spiritual life has this very fact in view, as he calls upon God fittingly, not with the noise of words, but from the feelings of the heart, and says: God in his holy place: God who maketh men of one mind to dwell in a house . . . , as if to say: I realize and see you, O God, are in this holy place because of the concord and unanimity that are in this your house (553D–554A) . . . Today’s reading [epistle] quite agrees with this, for in it Paul says something about himself that seems applicable to a man who is a sinner, but is quite penitent . . . For I am the least, because I am a worthless and undeserving sinner, but by the grace of God I am what I am, because I have received my abandoning the world and entering the harbor of this repose as his especial gift . . . The [gradual] chant after this adds: In hath my heart confided . . . , which is the voice of a converted sinner speaking as follows: While still situated in the world and in my sins, I had hope in the Lord, and behold I have been helped . . . Alleluia, meaning ‘‘praise,’’ is intoned: O Lord, the God of my salvation: I have cried in the day, and in the night before thee (Ps 87.2) in praise and thanksgiving. This, too, is the voice of the sinner, as if he is saying: You, O God of my salvation . . . The offertory [chant] is also in harmony (congruit) with this, for in it he again breaks forth in praise, saying: I will exalt thee, O Lord, for thou hast upheld me: and hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me, by enemies I mean my spiritual foes whom you’ve given no joy in my destruction. And very effectively, after all of these, at the end of mass, is given in the communion antiphon a sort of exhortation as to how one who is progressing according to this pattern should conduct his life before the Lord: Honour the Lord with thy substance . . . This substance, it seems to me, could mean our body and soul; the first fruits means the custody of the senses.

The homilist uses the propers of Pentecost XI as a didactic prism through which to refract variously the themes of conversion and entry into the spiritual life, so that the texts themselves become both rememorative allegories of the stages in the spiritual lives of the professionally

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religious to whom the homily would have been addressed and moralascetic allegories to guide the ongoing conduct of their lives in religion. The homilies that, like this one, begin with the gospel and harmonize the rest of the propers with it recall the procedure for identifying the concordia advocated by Rupert of Deutz. However, not all the homilies on the mass propers in the Admont collection begin with the gospel, for some build up to the gospel through discussion of other propers. Another procedure we have encountered, interpreting propers of particular Sundays as part of a larger symbolic scheme, is also evident in the Admont homilies on the propers of post-Pentecost Sundays, which the preacher clusters in symbolic numerical series, for example, a series of seven that corresponds to the seven days of creation, and another set of seven corresponding to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in Is 11.2. These twelfth-century liturgists and preachers had successors in their expositions of the propers of Pentecost XI. Sicardus, sometime curial official and bishop of Cremona (ca. 1150–1215), provided in his Mitrale (8.11, PL 213:394–95) an abridged version, with only minor adjustments, of Honorius’s account of Pentecost XI. Another sometime canon lawyer and curial official, Durandus of Mende (ca. 1237–96), provided an account of Pentecost XI in his famous Rationale divinorum officiorum (6.126, CCM 140A:557–58), the largest and most successful of medieval liturgical handbooks.70 Durandus’s treatment, which he borrowed mostly from the unpublished Summa de officiis ecclesiasticis of William of Auxerre, reads the propers of Pentecost XI in the light of the matins readings from the Book of Job that began to be read at the same time of year in the Liturgy of the Hours.71 Durandus identifies the motifs of humility and unanimity, reminiscent of Rupert’s treatment, in each of the propers in their liturgical order and closes with a paraphrase of Honorius’s final words that connect the Communion of Pentecost XI to the harvest season. Commentators of the twelfth century and their medieval successors made the most of the techniques they borrowed from biblical exegesis. Mass propers were a microcosm tuned by the same concordia that harmonized all of Scripture, and so, naturally, the disparate excerpts of Scripture combined as mass propers would clarify and amplify one another. Obscurities of text or ritual were approached with prayerful acceptance, and prosopographical, allegorical, sacramental, and typological interpretation, resources familiar from biblical exegesis, were confidently directed to the explanation of the liturgy. Why? The rhetorical question Anastasius Bibliothecarius posed in the letter dedicating to Charles the Bald his translation (dated 869–70) of selections

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from the Mystagogia of Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) can give an answer for all the liturgical commentators we have encountered: ‘‘But what comes closer to divine wisdom than to know the virtue of the mysteries by which we are introduced to the faith and educated for devotion by constant training?’’72

10

Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs Sara Japhet

Rashi’s grandson Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir) lived and worked in northern France in the twelfth century, the period characterized by modern scholarship as ‘‘the renaissance of the twelfth century.’’1 His exegetical method is marked by the adoption of the peshat—the plainmeaning-of-the-text methodology2 —as the exclusive goal of exegesis, and his success in applying it. Indeed, while in the theoretical commitment to the peshat Rashbam is joined by a few more representatives of the twelfth century, such as Joseph Kara in France and Abraham Ibn Ezra in Spain,3 in the practice of the method, Rashbam is rightly regarded as representing the pinnacle. Neither tension with religious practice nor difficult theological issues would deter him from following the exegetical methodology of peshat.4 Rashbam’s commentary on the Song of Songs5 is not merely an important expression of his exegetical method and spiritual world, but a very interesting commentary in its own right and a unique example of classical biblical interpretation. As is well known, the Song of Songs presents to the students of Scripture a difficult exegetical problem, as it displays, at least apparently, no religious features. The very literary nature of the work—a collection of human love songs—challenged its canonization already in the earliest period, and the debate around this issue was settled only when the understanding of the Song of Songs as an allegory, relating exulted religious events, values, and emotions in the language of human love, was supported and confirmed by the most influential Jewish sages.6 Although this claim is not supported by the explicit phrasing of the book, it was soon universally accepted, leading to the confirmation of the book’s canonical status and forming the basis for all future exegesis. It received its verbal affirmation by R. Akiba’s famous statement: ‘‘All Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.’’7

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As long as biblical exegesis was dominated by the midrashic method, founded, as a matter of fact, on the understanding of the book as allegory, the sages found no difficulty in interpreting it. The literal sense served merely as a springboard for allegory, a fertile soil for the most fervent religious convictions and emotions. The abundance and variety of midrashic allegorical interpretations of key passages in the Song of Songs attest to the book’s productivity and popularity.8 However, with the emergence of the school of peshat exegesis—the change of attitude toward the literal level of the biblical text and its evaluation as having a significant message in and of itself—the question of the Song of Songs presented itself in all its vigor: How should the literal meaning of the Song of Songs be interpreted? What is the relationship between the literal meaning and allegory? It should be stated at this stage that the age-old conviction that the Song of Songs was an allegory was not questioned in medieval Jewish exegesis, including the most fervent advocates of the peshat such as Rashbam and Ibn Ezra.9 This view, however, only highlighted the theoretical/ hermeneutical problem, with its implications for actual interpretation: Does ‘‘plain meaning’’ (peshuto) equal ‘‘literal meaning’’? What is the relationship between ‘‘figurative language’’ (dugma’, dimyon, derekh mashal) and ‘‘literal meaning’’ (mashma‘o)? How should ‘‘figurative language’’ be interpreted within the framework of the peshat?10 And more specifically for the Song of Songs: How should the commentator handle the literal meaning of the Song of Songs? How is it related to the allegorical meaning? And what precisely is the allegory presented in the book? How should this issue be determined? These questions receive different answers—explicit and implicit— from the advocates of peshat exegesis, and three of them actually refer to these questions in their brief introductions to their commentaries on the Song of Songs: Rashi, Rashbam, and Ibn Ezra. Despite their many differences in method and practice, Rashi and Ibn Ezra hold a similar theoretical position, setting into relief Rashbam’s exegetical and conceptual innovations. Rashi presents the essentials of his approach in the short introduction to his commentary on the Song of Songs.11 Concerning his methodology, he says: I saw for this book several works of aggadic midrash [. . .] and 1 decided to capture the literal meaning of the verses, to set their interpretation in order, and to incorporate the midrashic interpretations of our rabbis, each in its place.

According to this introduction, the commentary was intended to achieve three goals: to explain the literal meaning of the text, to interpret the verses in their context, and to integrate the isolated rabbinic midrashic

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interpretations into the commentary. Rashi conceives two levels of meaning in the text: the plain meaning, defined as mashma‘o or peshuto,12 and a midrashic level defined as dugma’.13 In the actual practice of the commentary neither the definitions nor the bi-level structure receive full systematic expression, and in many cases the commentary refers to only one of these levels, most often the allegorical.14 However, in relation to traditional rabbinic exegesis, Rashi’s commentary displays two innovative features: (1) attention to the plain meaning, and (2) an attempt at an orderly, structured arrangement of the midrashic interpretations, regarded as an essential component of the exegetical enterprise.15 As just mentioned, Rashi’s definition of the level of the parable in the Song of Songs is the term mashma‘ (which denotes the literal meaning of the text16) and adds to this aspect of the peshat the element of context. Over against the literal meaning he places traditional midrash and thus asserts the existence of two different spheres of exegesis, each with its own presuppositions and methodology. In his selection from the treasury of midrashic literature, Rashi makes an effort to find as much conformity as possible between the allegorical interpretation and the literal one, but in principle these are two separate exegetical spheres. The literal meaning is determined by linguistic, semantic, and contextual considerations, as well as by a general rational point of view, while the allegorical meaning is determined by the midrashic methodology, its guidelines having been appropriately defined as ‘‘creative philology.’’17 In fact, Rashi’s efforts at conformity between the two spheres seem quite often to work in the opposite direction—from the midrash to the peshat. He proposes a ‘‘literal meaning’’ that would contribute to his preconceived picture of the allegorical meaning, of ‘‘a woman in her living widowhood.’’18 Ibn Ezra introduces his commentary on the Song of Songs19 with a rhymed introduction, followed in the edition of the rabbinic Bible by a prose section. Referring to the structure of his commentary, Ibn Ezra states that he will interpret the work in three parts, which he designates ‘‘instances’’ (pe‘amim): In the first instance I will unveil every hidden word In the second, 1 will announce its rule after the method of peshat And in the third it will be explained after the method of midrash.20 Similar to Rashi, then, Ibn Ezra distinguished between two spheres of meaning, each of which he termed ‘‘method’’ (derekh): the plain mean-

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ing and the midrash. These two spheres are prefaced by a preliminary section dedicated to the interpretation of ‘‘difficult words.’’ In the prose continuation of the rhymed introduction, Ibn Ezra elaborates on these ‘‘instances’’ in a reverse order: ‘‘The truth is what our ancestors, blessed be their memory, explained, that this book is about the people of Israel (Kneset Israel), and this is how I will explain it in the ‘third instance’ [ . . . ]. The ‘second instance’ is the parable, which is a love song [ . . . ] and because there are difficult words in this book I resolved to explain them first, and then I will explain the parable and its tenor.’’ When referring more specifically to the midrashic interpretation he states, ‘‘Nothing is superior to the midrashic interpretation of the Song of Songs which our rabbis offered.’’ However, since he observed that ‘‘the great and the pillars of the world’’ deviated from traditional midrash and created their own midrashic interpretations, he was going to follow in their steps and do the same. Thus, Ibn Ezra commits himself to the peshat methodology only in the second section of his commentary, ‘‘the parable,’’ and does not find any essential connection between the parable and allegory. Rather amazingly, Ibn Ezra completely disconnects the allegory from the literal meaning.21 The links connecting the allegory to the biblical text are quite general and vague, such as often applied in midrashic interpretations: predetermined or standard equivalents, analogies, verbal allusions, and the like.22 The result is that his allegory is a ‘‘midrash’’ in every sense of the term, demonstrating Ibn Ezra’s talents in this field as well.23 Rashbam too, offers a short introduction to the commentary on the Song of Songs, in which he refers, among other things, to his methodology: To study and recount its plain meaning, in its context, and according to its phrasing, as established by its presentation.24 In these brief rhymed phrases Rashbam presents his goal in an unequivocal way: to explain the Song of Songs according to the plain meaning of the text (peshat), in accord with the parameters of this method. The midrash is not mentioned, not even polemically, and in fact the Hebrew root d-r-sh never appears in this work, neither in the introduction nor in the running commentary. According to this introduction, then, not only has Rashbam limited his exegesis to one sphere, the peshat, but his concept of peshat is different from that of Rashi and Ibn Ezra—it is not equivalent to the ‘‘literal’’ meaning and does not exclude allegory. Rather, Rashbam regards allegory as one of the dimensions of the peshat. When a literary text is an allegory, it has by definition two facets—the

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literal and the allegorical—and both meanings are determined by the immanent features of the text, along the same principles. Rashbam’s interpretation of allegory seems to be an extended application of his view of metaphor, where the metaphorical rather than the literal sense is the peshat of the text.25 One may say that for Rashbam, in a very modern sense, ‘‘allegory is an extended metaphor,’’ and one can uncover the full meaning of the metaphor through a thorough analysis of its literal foundation. The three exegetes, then, who undertook to explain the Song of Songs according to its peshat, may, from a methodological point of view, be divided into two groups, Rashi and Ibn Ezra in the one, Rashbam in the other. The goals that Rashbam set in the introduction are achieved in the commentary by means of its structure, methodology, and contents, and to these subjects we now turn. Rashbam’s commentary on the Song of Songs has a distinct literary structure, methodically executed. His first step was to define the literary units from which the Song of Songs is composed and then to build his commentary around these units: to each literary unit of the Song of Songs an interpretative unit is devoted.26 The size of the units varies; some are short, comprising but one verse, while others are quite long. Each of the units, however, is defined as such by the systematic method of interpretation. In each unit the commentary consists of three parts, the order of which is consistent for the first and may interchange for the other two. The first part is a continuous presentation of the unit’s contents and message, mostly in the form of a faithful paraphrase of the text.27 The second part presents the allegorical meaning of the unit, consistently opening with the phrase ‘‘an allegory for’’ (dimyon ‘al/le -; it appears thirty-six times). The last section includes a series of short interpretations, dedicated to the clarification of various details within the unit, mostly, but not exclusively, of words and phrases. The integrity of the unit and its preliminary delimitation are expressed most forcefully by the fact that the exegetical consequences of the details discussed in part 3 are already incorporated into the paraphrase presented in part 1.28 While on the face of it Rashbam’s three-fold structure may seem similar to that of Ibn Ezra, the differences between them elucidate the particular method of each. Ibn Ezra pays only minimal attention to the literary structure of the Song of Songs and presents each, ‘‘instance’’ of his commentary as a running interpretation for the whole book, following the order of the text verse by verse.29 On only three occasions in the entire commentary does he refer to a matter of literary structure.30 Moreover, as already mentioned, each of the ‘‘instances’’ stands on its

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own, with minimal connection between them. For Rashbam, by contrast, each literary unit is indeed a unit. In the paraphrase of the first part he presents the precise scenes, identifies the speakers and the audience, unfolds the literary tropes and the figurative language, and includes the results of the third part, where necessary details are discussed. All these are then applied to the allegorical level, where the religious message of the work is spelled out. What is the literal meaning of the Song of Songs? Each of the three exegetes proposes one unifying theme for the whole book, which serves as its overarching framework. For Rashi, the Song of Songs is the story of ‘‘a woman in a living widowhood (2 Sam 20.3), longing for her husband, clinging to her beloved, recalling her youthful love for him. Her beloved too is sorry for her, and recalls the graces of her youth, her beauty and meritorious deeds to let her know that her divorce is not final, for she is still his wife and he is her husband.’’31 According to this picture, the Song of Songs is the heartfelt expression of memory and hope, the recollection of old love and expectations for its renewal.32 According to Ibn Ezra, the plain meaning of the Song of Songs is the story of ‘‘a very little girl, who has as yet no breasts, who was guarding a vineyard and saw a shepherd passing by; love was kindled in each of them.’’33 It seems quite obvious that the decision of the ‘‘basic theme’’ has been influenced, if not determined, for each of the exegetes by their hermeneutical approach to the Song of Songs. Rashi’s more ‘‘holistic’’ perspective leads him to find a connection between the literal meaning and allegory. Since his point of departure is the work’s theological message, expressed at the allegorical level, this is also the point of departure for the literal level, that is, a woman in her living widowhood. Ibn Ezra, by contrast, who regards the two spheres, literal and allegorical, to be separate, unconnected planes, is better able to separate the two ends, to be more faithful to the literal meaning of the text and explain it as a love song between two young lovers, without undermining his own theory of the text’s allegorical sense. For Ibn Ezra the book’s religious message narrates the fate of Israel from Abraham to the Messiah at the end of days. The comparison between these two exegetes and Rashbam can illuminate Rashbam’s problem in establishing his ‘‘basic theme’’ of the Song of Songs. As mentioned above, Rashbam’s methodology is marked not only by an absolute adherence to the plain meaning but also by the view that allegory is an aspect of the plain meaning. Thus he is obliged to recognize a ‘‘basic theme’’ in harmony with the biblical text, that is, as love poems of young lovers. And yet, the traditional view that the Song of Songs was an allegory, the story of the relationship between God of

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Israel and the people of Israel, was for him an absolute, unquestionable presupposition and therefore had to be borne by the plain meaning. The tension between these presuppositions seems insurmountable. The exposition of the allegorical meaning as an aspect of the peshat is possible and achievable when the genre of the text is indeed an allegory (or parable). However, when the allegory is not immanent to the literary work but imposed from without—as is the case of the Song of Songs— the establishment of a convincing figure that would operate convincingly on both levels would seem to be difficult at best, artificial by definition, certainly forced, and perhaps impossible. This is the problem Rashbam faced, and his ‘‘basic theme’’ is its result, which may be seen as a compromise in the difficult hermeneutical situation. According to him, the Song of Songs is the story of a young woman who longs for and mourns her beloved who left her and went far away. She remembers him, in his eternal love for her, and composes a poem, saying: such strong love my beloved showed me when he stayed with me. She speaks and recounts to her companions and maidens: this is what my beloved said to me and this is what I answered him.34

In the identification of the speaker as a young woman rather than a widowed woman, Rashbam’s view is closer than Rashi’s to the literal meaning of the text, and more similar to the view of Ibn Ezra. Yet, in his understanding, the Song recalls the memory of past love rather than expresses actual passion of young lovers. In this it is akin to Rashi. This compromise enables Rashbam to join together as much as possible the two aspects of the peshat—the close reading of the love poems and the theological message of the allegory. Another peculiar feature of Rashbam’s view is the presentation in the introduction of the overall literary setting of the Song of Songs. The book is conceived as a complex dialogue, unfolded on two levels. The general framework of the story is a primary dialogue between the young woman and her companions: ‘‘She recounts to her companions and maidens.’’ This immediate dialogue serves as a framework for a secondary dialogue, the quotation by the young woman of what her lover said to her and what she answered him. This literary understanding of the Song of Songs is presented again, in greater detail and precision, in Rashbam’s comment on Song 3.5: This is the structure of this song. In all the Song’s parts it is she who sings, and mourns the love of her beloved. After describing some of her love to her companions, saying: this is the love my lover showed me and this is the love I showed him, her friends rebuke her and answer her: remove his love from your heart because he rejected you and will never return to you [ . . . ]. This is proven in that she is telling everything, her own words and her lover’s words, like ‘‘My

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beloved spoke thus to me’’ (Song 2.10), also ‘‘I am asleep but my heart is wakeful’’ (ibid., 5.2). ‘‘Hark! my beloved’’ (ibid., 2.8), and also adjurations which she adjures the young women her friends. Indeed, this is the practice of poets even today. They compose poems that tell the love story of both, love songs which follow the custom of the world.

To be sure, the two types of dialogue are indeed suggested by the Song of Songs. The companions, referred to mainly as ‘‘the daughters of Jerusalem,’’35 are identified as the speakers in some explicit references. Such is the unit Song 5.8–6.3, with its five-stage dialogue: the girl addresses her companions—‘‘I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem! If you meet my beloved, tell him this’’ (Song 5.8); the companions respond with a question—‘‘How is your beloved better than another [ . . . ] that you so adjure us’’ (5.9); the girl responds with a detailed answer: ‘‘My beloved is clear skinned and ruddy [ . . . ] such is my darling, O daughters of Jerusalem’’ (5.10–16); her response is followed by another question— ‘‘Whither has your beloved gone?’’ (6.1), and her final answer—‘‘My beloved has gone down to his garden’’ (6.2–3). The second type of dialogue, between the girl and her beloved, is even more frequent.36 Thus, for example, in Song 1.7–10 the girl opens with: ‘‘Tell me, you whom 1 love so well’’ (1.7), and he answers: ‘‘If you do not know, O fairest of women, go follow the tracks of the sheep (vv. 8–9). In Song 1.15 he addresses her—‘‘Ah, you are fair, my darling [ . . . ],’’ and she responds—‘‘And you my beloved are handsome, Beautiful indeed’’ (v. 16). And so on. In addition to these transparent cases of dialogue, there are quite a few passages in which the beloved is spoken about or quoted, without the speaker or the audience being specified. Rashbam considers all these passages as parts of the primary dialogue between the young woman and her companions. In order to make this setting absolutely clear, he refers to it repeatedly and in several ways, whether or not the speakers are explicitly identified in the biblical text. (1) Song 1.2 ‘‘his mouth. your love37: sometimes the bride sings as if she is speaking with her lover, and sometimes she tells her friends that he is not with her.’’ (2) Song 1.5 ‘‘1 am dark but comely: you my friends, the young women, daughters of Jerusalem, do not despise me [ . . . ].’’ (3) Song 1.6 ‘‘Don’t stare at me: she talks again to her friends, the young women, and tells them: do not look at me to despise me [ . . . ].’’ (4) Song 2.4 ‘‘He brought me to the wine house: Now she speaks to her friends [ . . . ].’’ (5) Song 2.5–6 ‘‘Sustain me with raisin cakes: This is how she com-

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(5) (6)

(7) (8) (9)

(10) (11)

(12)

(13)

(14) (15)

plains to the young women her friends, to provide her with things which she needs in her love sickness.’’ Song 2.7 ‘‘1 adjure you: Her friends answer her to console her: Do not think about him [ . . . ] and she answers them [ . . . ].’’ Song 2.15–17 ‘‘Catch the foxes (Rashbam: They caught the foxes): Now she recounts and says: when I and my beloved were in the orchard [ . . . ] and I told him [ . . . ].’’ Song 3.5 ‘‘I adjure you: This is how she answers the young women her friends, as I explained above.’’ Song 3.7–10 ‘‘There is his couch: She recounts and tells the young women the praise of her beloved.’’ Song 3.11 ‘‘Go forth and gaze upon: my young women and my maidens, the daughters of Zion, [go forth and gaze upon] my friend who is praiseworthy like king Solomon.’’ Song 5.2–7 ‘‘I am asleep but my heart is wakeful: Now she complains about her acts, and that her friend went away from her.’’ Song 5.8–6.3 ‘‘I adjure you, O Daughters of Jerusalem: now she complains and adjures her friends. If you find my friend, tell him [ . . . ]. And they answer her [ . . . ] And she answers them [ . . . ] And they answer her [ . . . ] And she answers them [ . . . ].’’ Song 8.4 (within the larger unit) ‘‘And when she complains to her companions and longs for her friend who went away from her, and they rebuke her and say to her [ . . . ], she answers them: 1 adjure you my friends, you young women, daughters of Jerusalem [ . . . ].’’ Song 8.8–10 ‘‘We have a little sister: Now she tells what her brothers and her household said about her when she was little [ . . . ] and when 1 heard them 1 answered them [ . . . ].’’ Song 8.11–12 ‘‘Solomon had a vineyard in Baal-hamon: This too she complains about her beloved who went away [ . . . ].’’ Song 8.13–14 ‘‘O you, who lingers in the gardens: This she tells about her beloved. This is what my beloved said to me [ . . . ] and she answers him [ . . . ].’’

These examples demonstrate Rashbam’s unique view of the literary setting of the Song of Songs, placing the book’s action in the present, in the interaction between the young woman and her companions. Integrated into this is the secondary dialogue, between the girl and her beloved, placed in its entirety in the past. Both past and present point to the future—the recollection of the past brings with it hope and assurance that the love of old, still burning in her lover and herself, will be renewed in all its force when he returns. For Rashbam, this setting provides a successful unifying framework for the entire work, and for the

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book’s great variety of poems, situations, protagonists, scenes, and moods. It allows for frequent transition between the speakers and their addressees (girl, lover, friends); between the moods (love, remembrance, suffering); between the time-scenes (past, present, future); and between places and scenes in the girl’s memory and hopes. Rashbam does not present the allegorical message in the introduction to the Song of Songs but rather in the commentary on the first words of the book, which may be seen as an extension of the introduction. Here, the protagonists in the allegorical level are spelled out and the focus of the Song in the realities of the Jewish community is made explicit: (Song 1.1) By Solomon: King Solomon composed it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He foresaw how in their exile, the people of Israel would long for the Holy One who went away from them like a bridegroom who departed from his bride, and began to compose his song for the community of Israel, who is like a bride to him.’’38

The three main protagonists, the young woman, her companions, and her lover, are ‘‘deciphered’’ on the allegorical level as ‘‘the community of Israel’’ (kenesset Israel—the feminine form is kept to accord with the metaphor); God, ‘‘The Holy One’’;39 and ‘‘the nations’’ (ha-’umot) or ‘‘the nations of the world’’ (umot ha-‘olam). The first two are the standard representations of these metaphors, while the third is less common but nevertheless not original to Rashbam.40 Rashbam applies these equivalents in totality, everywhere, and to the exclusion of any other. Rashbam’s view of the literary structure of the Song of Songs with its emphasis on the role of the ‘‘companions,’’ and the identification of the companions with ‘‘the nations of the world,’’ focus the Song of Songs on the contemporary interaction between Israel and the peoples among whom they were living.41 The message of the commentary centers on this dialogue, with its specific topic, contents, form, and tone. The first illustration of this dialogue is provided by the comment on Song 2.5–7. In 2.5 the girl asks of unnamed addressees: ‘‘Sustain me with raisin cakes [ . . . ] For I am faint with love,’’ followed in verse 7 by a highly emphatic address to her companions: ‘‘I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem.’’ The unexpected ‘‘adjuring’’ in a context of a love song points to a moment of great tension, left unexplained by the textual sequence. Rashbam understands this adjuring as a rebuke, and since the motivation of this rebuke has not been made explicit, he assumes the existence of a gap in the course of the dialogue. The gap included the answer of the companions to the girl’s first address, and its contents may be learned from the phrasing of the adjuration: ‘‘lest you

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remove, that is, take away the love of my beloved’’ (im ta‘iru ve-tasiru ahavat dodi).42 Rashbam provides the dialogue his paraphrase of this answer: Her friends answer her to console her: do not think about him and do not put your mind to him, because he is not coming back. Join one of our lovers and be loved by him.43

These words are then spelled out on the allegorical level: A metaphor for the nations of the world who say of the community of Israel: leave the love of the Holy One and cling to our religion, because the Holy One is not going to have pity or compassion for you as he had in the beginning. And the community of Israel curses them and adjures them, that they should not be speaking to her about this.

The debate between Israel and the nations is introduced into the commentary at several points, with some variations and different detail. It is greatly elaborated in the long comment on 5.8–6.3: A metaphor for the afflicted community of Israel, oppressed under the yoke of exile. She says to the nations of the world: be my witnesses on the day of judgment, of the troubles and the sorrows that I suffered and endured for the love of the Holy One. And they answer her: What more do you have with your beloved? Take your heart away from him; be like us and join our religion. Why do you suffer the yoke of enemies for his sake? What did you see or find in him? And she answers them: From days of old he showed me his wonders and grace, and therefore I will not forget him. When he took me out of Egypt and appeared to me on the Sea, a warrior and a man of war to fight my war, he was distinguished by the hosts of his armies that came down with him in his honor. Then he brought me to him to be his people and He will be my God. And he gave me his Law [. . .] with the Ten Commandments. In his love and compassion, in joy and happiness he gave me the tables written by his very hands, and he revealed his presence to me when he gave me the Torah [ . . . ]. He is high and lofty, and exalted over all the high ones and the lofty ones [ . . . ]. Because of all this—that he showed me his presence and greatness—I will not betray my integrity to follow and worship other gods. And the nations of the world answer her: since his might had been known among the nations, tell us where he went and we will search for him with you. We also will become his people and seek him like you [ . . . ].

Again, on the unit 6.11–7.11: A metaphor for the Holy One, who sent his prophets to the community of Israel when the temple still existed, in order to rebuke them, that they keep the law [ . . . ]. And the nations approach Israel with soothing words, to convert them to their religion, to worship other gods. And they respond that they should not be approached. But they still soothe them with all these soothing words. And the people of Israel respond and answer them: I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me—I will not turn to or worship the religion of foreign gods. Only to the

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Holy One, Blessed be He, who rewarded me in his compassion and great mercies, from days of old to this day.44

Although some of the details recounted in the dialogue refer to events and situations in the history of Israel, the dialogue at large is a reflection of Rashbam’s reality and his thinking on the interaction between Jews and their neighbors. I have distilled five key observations concerning Rashbam’s vision of this multifaceted reality from his explication of the Song of Songs: (1) The central issue, the burning point, and the great threat to Israel’s future, is the conversion to Christianity.45 This is at the center of the whole polemic. (2) The Christians’ strategy here encountered is not that of coercion but of temptation and inducement. In an open dialogue with the Jews— the circumstance of which are not specified—Christians employ the history of Israel as their point of departure and approach the Jews with theological arguments and ‘‘soothing words.’’ (3) The portrayal of the ‘‘nations of the world’’ is surprisingly mild. The metaphorical figure of ‘‘companions’’ variably termed (na‘aroteha, h.avroteha, re‘oteha) creates an impression of a lateral relationship, even friendship. (4) Nevertheless, there is no feeling of repose in the description of this reality. The existence of the Jews among the nations is referred to throughout as ‘‘exile,’’ and more poignantly, ‘‘this exile’’ (galut ha-zeh; 2.5–6, 9–13; 5.8; 8.12), repeatedly compared to the slavery in Egypt. Song 2.5–6 is deemed ‘‘a metaphor for the community of Israel, in anguish in exile because the Holy One has gone away from her. She complains to the nations to alleviate her oppression, because she suffered enough by the Holy One going away from her.’’ Likewise 5.8 is ‘‘a metaphor for the inflicted community of Israel, oppressed under the yoke of exile. She says to the nations of the world: be my witnesses on the day of judgment, of the troubles and sorrows which 1 suffered and endured for the love of the Holy One.’’ At Song 8.8 Rashbam explains, ‘‘but now she is sentenced to oppression.’’ And 8.12 becomes ‘‘a metaphor for the Holy One who delivered the community of Israel [ . . . ] into the hands of guards, harsh foreign masters in exile, who rule over them and rob all that they have.’’ (5) The companions are summoned also for the ‘‘end of days.’’ At that time they will serve as witnesses to the girl’s sufferings for the sake of her lover (cited above, on 5.8), and they will also compensate the people of Israel for all their suffering. After having paid their due, however, they will be cleared: Rashbam comments on Song 8.12: ‘‘Israel say to them: at the end you will have to stand up to justice, because the

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revenger will revenge our case, as he did to the army, cavalry and chariotry of the Egyptians. And the nations of the world answer: At the end of days, if we are found guilty in court, we will pay the principal and a fifth part, and will be cleared.’’ It seems rather obvious that the true targets of this polemic are not the nations among whom the Jews were scattered but the Jews themselves. These Jews, exposed to Christians’ continuous attempts at conversion, were tired of their oppressive situation and their ears were opened to the Christian claim that ‘‘God has forsaken them.’’46 The purpose of the polemic is to strengthen these Jews in their faith, to buttress their conviction that even in this prolonged suffering they should hold to the religion of their fathers. For that purpose, the Lord’s past graces toward Israel are brought up repeatedly, in almost every passage of the commentary, from the Exodus from Egypt with its miracles and material rewards to the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, the conquest of the land, the building of the tabernacle and the Temple, and to the Presence of the Lord in the midst of his people. The justification of the harsh exile by the sin of idolatry, represented by the conventional paradigm of the golden calf, is also mentioned in the commentary but is of a much lesser significance. Recollections of the glorious historical precedents should assure the Jews that God did not forsake his people, that his departure is only temporary, and that in the end of days he will bring them back to the promised land and restore the relationship with his people in all its glory. This hope for the future is mentioned in four passages, and concludes the commentary as its finale: Song 4.16 ‘‘A metaphor for Israel, who will come together and be brought from exile to Jerusalem the holy city as an offering to the Lord (viz., Is 66.20). There they will sacrifice before him righteous sacrifices, burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings (viz., Ps 51.21).’’ Song 5.1 ‘‘A metaphor for the Holy One, who will again, at the end of days, reside in the midst of Israel, to spread his presence among them as in the days of old.’’ Song 8.5–7 ‘‘A metaphor for the community of Israel, who in the midst of exile brings up the recollection of the love of the giving of Torah that was in Sinai, and the statement we will do and listen (Ex 24.7). She is confident in this love, and she prays before him to hurry the time of her redemption and salvation.’’ Song 8.13–14 ‘‘A metaphor for the Holy One, Blessed be He, who speaks about the community of Israel: angels are waiting, attending your voice. You should let us hear your prayer and offer righteous sacrifices (Dt 33.19). And the community of Israel answers: run my beloved to my holy city, to the place of my temple. Restore my magistrates as of old and my counselors as of yore (viz., Is 1.26), to redeem me from exile. And there my Levites and priests will sing and offer my incense of spices. They will bring righteous sacrifices, burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings, then bulls will be offered on your altar (Ps 51.21).’’

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Rashbam’s commentary on the Song of Songs operates on two different levels, both included in his concept of peshat: on one level it is a sensual love song, where a variety of love scenes are discussed in great detail, through the perspective of memory. On the other level it is a national/ religious poem, employing history as a starting point and means for addressing the contemporary religious crisis. It aims at strengthening the sense of identity, expressed in religious loyalty, and establishing a sense of direction, by applying to and developing historical awareness and perspective. The present is incorporated into the movement of time and becomes a transitory stage between the glories of the past and the even greater glories expected of the future.

11

Literal versus Carnal: George of Siena’s Christian Reading of Jewish Exegesis Deeana Copeland Klepper

In 1388, some decades into a long career teaching and preaching in Tuscany and beyond, a popular Dominican friar, George Naddi of Siena (d. 1398), compiled a treatise detailing one hundred and sixteen Old Testament prophecies of Christ’s advent.1 Opening with a citation of John 5.39, ‘‘Search the Scriptures,’’ said our Lord Jesus Christ to the scribes and pharisees of the Jews, ‘‘in which you think to find eternal life,’’ the Scrutamini scripturas 2 combined longstanding Christian interpretation of Old Testament prophecy with a vigorous insistence that these prophecies could be understood christologically according to the literal sense. George systematically employed both Jewish exegesis and exegetically based antiJewish polemic to achieve his purpose: ‘‘Wherever a prophecy concerning Christ Jesus the Messiah is found, it is my intention to insert it in order here in this book; after that, under the text and its literal meaning, sometimes to note an opinion of modern Jews; and following that, that which the [Christian] doctors have perceived in glosses and other writings.’’ Designed to provide the reader with a coherent approach to literal exegesis of Old Testament prophecy, George also meant for such literal reading to lead the way to a clear vision of Christian truth: ‘‘And finally, we will prove everything most rationally concerning the truth of Christ, principally through four conclusions which modern Jews reject, remaining in their stubbornness.’’3 Though virtually forgotten today, George Naddi was in his time a prominent figure in the Dominican province of Rome and in the city of Siena.4 The necrology of the convent of San Domenico in Camporegio in Siena where he lived for so many years celebrated his character and accomplishments, noting particularly his talent as a ‘‘beautiful and pleasing,’’ as well as prolific, writer.5 His reputation in Siena remained

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sufficiently strong for him to have been included in a seventeenthcentury hagiographical collection by Isidoro Ugurgieri Azzolini called Fasts of Siena, or Lives of the Saints and Blessed of Siena, which recorded the lives of holy men and women venerated in that city.6 Some of the material in the entry was culled from the San Domenico necrology, but most of it has another, presumably non-Dominican, source. More than two centuries after his death, George’s reputation as teacher, preacher, and friend of the civic government survived. According to the San Domenico necrology, George entered the order there as an adolescent.7 No date is given for this, but he appears as ‘‘Brother George Naddi’’ in the 1366 record of his mother’s death and burial in the Dominican Cemetery.8 At the 1372 Dominican chapter general meeting, George was named master of students for the Florence studium generale, the highest-ranking Dominican educational institution in the province of Rome.9 Being named master of students meant that George had already spent years in the study of the liberal arts and theology, that he had continued on to advanced study in theology, that he had served the previous year as bachelor at the Florence studium presenting advanced lectures in Bible, and that he was perceived as someone who would develop a career as a mentor of students in various contexts. Friars chosen for this position were being groomed for a long-term teaching career. As M. Miche`le Mulchahey explains, ‘‘The bachelors in Dominican studia generalia, clearly, were there to cultivate their qualities as shepherds of students as much as they were there to be put through their paces presenting the required texts.’’10 In addition to his active role in the Siena convent, George lectured and preached in many other convents as well.11 After completing his studies in Florence, George returned to San Domenico in Siena, and he appears in numerous archival sources from the 1370s, receiving gifts and conducting business on behalf of the convent and its lay supporters.12 The commune of Siena solicited his help in ‘‘grave affairs,’’ which included sending him as ambassador to Sicily to negotiate for food on their behalf during a shortfall caused by plague. The communities of Trapani and Messina responded to his preaching by sending plentiful supplies back to Siena, earning him the gratitude of the populace.13 In 1378 he served as master of the Sisters of Penitence associated with the Dominican order, a particularly noteworthy undertaking at this time because of Catherine of Siena’s association with the order and her very public reformist career.14 He served at one time as diffinitor, an elected position which required that he monitor the orthodoxy of fellow friars; he was also appointed preacher general for the Dominican order, a rare lifetime privilege which gave him unrestricted license to preach where and when he pleased.15 At the 1380 Chapter

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General Meeting in Bologna, George was named master in theology, apparently by the unusual route of papal fiat.16 Although the Scrutamini scripturas is the only written work thus far identified as his,17 both the necrology of the Dominican convent and Isidoro Azzolini’s seventeenthcentury biography claim that he wrote extensively in addition to his active preaching in Siena and elsewhere. His selection as preacher general confirms that claim and his position as diffinitor suggests that he was considered intellectually capable. Unfamiliar though his name may now be, George clearly was not a marginal figure in his own time. The significance of the Scrutamini scripturas, then, is greater than the limited diffusion of the text might suggest,18 representing as it does the thought of a highly educated, widely respected teacher and preacher, friend of the civic government of Siena, and widely recognized leader within the Dominican order in fourteenth-century Italy. With its Dominican authorship, fairly extensive argumentation against Jewish biblical interpretation, and a prologue characterizing the Jews as traitors to their own faith, the Scrutamini scripturas appears at first glance to be a model of late-medieval anti-rabbinic polemic.19 Indeed, although George seems not to have provided a title for the work, we find in one of the two extant manuscript copies of the text a rubric identifying it as ‘‘a very useful treatise against the Jews.’’20 But an examination of the text in its entirety reveals that George’s polemic bears little resemblance to the eminently useful, aggressive, anti-talmudic, anti-rabbinic polemic that had emerged in Dominican circles of the late thirteenth century and that was still circulating widely a century later. While treatises by Raymond Martini, Theobald de Sezanne, Porchetto de Salvatici, and others aimed to serve as a Muzzle of the Jews, a Dagger of Faith against the Jews, a Quiver of Faith against the Jews, or to provide Victory against the Jews and provided material for friars preaching to or disputing with Jews,21 George’s treatise aimed rather to provide biblical proofs of Christianity for a Christian audience. Borrowing from the Church Fathers, the Glossa ordinaria, and especially from Nicholas of Lyra’s 1309 Quaestio de adventu Christi (Question on the Advent of Christ) the whole of which he rearranged and incorporated into his text, George utilized an older style of polemic to define for his readers a proper Christian understanding of the literal sense of Scripture.22 As had many Christian exegetes before him, George charged that the Jews’ inability to read their own sacred text had led to a plethora of errors. But where earlier Christian polemic tended to view the Jews’ hermeneutical error as one of remaining stuck in the literal sense rather than moving on to the spiritual, George attributed Jewish error specifically to a failure to understand the literal sense itself. By setting Christian interpretations alongside Jewish ‘‘errors,’’

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George taught his readers to distinguish between the truly literal and what he deemed the merely carnal.23 George framed his entire treatise around John 5.39, beginning and ending with Jesus’ admonition to the scribes and pharisees to ‘‘search the Scriptures’’ in which they thought ‘‘to have eternal life.’’ Moving book by book through the Old Testament, George led his readers through such a search. George insisted that the truth of Christianity could be found in Hebrew Scripture, and further that it could be discerned by literal rather than allegorical exegesis.24 While at one level the treatise seems to be about the truth of Christianity against the error of the Jews, the nature of literal exegesis and its use as proof of Christian doctrine emerges as the more important focus of the text. George contrasted his notion of the Christian literal sense—one that incorporated future significance as well as historical and present—with Jewish reading, which he repeatedly described as ‘‘carnal’’ rather than truly literal. George’s literal sense was one that could bear the weight of a wide range of traditional Christian teachings, including interpretations understood by previous generations as spiritual. Although the notion of a fourfold sense to Scripture was widely accepted in the Middle Ages, the various layers of meaning were not always equally valued.25 Christian exegetes who pursued the literal sense too enthusiastically at the expense of what was considered the richer spiritual sense, especially those who turned to rabbinic interpretation in their quest, could find themselves charged with judaizing.26 Here George insisted that holding too firmly to the letter of the text represented not merely abandonment of the spiritual but abandonment of the literal sense as well. For George, a literal sense of the Old Testament that failed to take into account the revelation of the New Testament was no literal sense at all.27 In order to teach the fullness of the literal sense as he understood it, George separated Jewish exegesis from it. Jewish exegesis would, however, maintain an important supporting role in Christian interpretation: George stressed that the carnal sense could coexist with or precede the true literal sense. But for George and his readers, the Jews would no longer be the arbiters of literal interpretation.28 George’s interest in clarifying the scope of the literal sense is understandable in the broader context of late medieval Christian exegesis. While literal exegesis in the twelfth century had been pursued by a small (if enthusiastic) minority, by the fourteenth century, the value of the literal/historical sense of Scripture had achieved wide recognition: the Dominican order decreed in 1308–9 that every province provide training for friars in literal exegesis; the most widely read commentary after the Glossa ordinaria, the Postilla litteralis super bibliam composed by the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra, rigorously emphasized the literal sense

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above all others, leaning heavily on Rashi to determine that sense; and literal commentaries by the twelfth-century Victorines were enjoying a surge in popularity. The appeal to the literal sense that was strikingly new in the twelfth century had been thoroughly embraced by Christian scholars by the fourteenth.29 Yet while fourteenth-century exegetes remained loyal to the traditional rubrics of the fourfold sense of Scripture when discussing hermeneutics, in actual practice the definition of and relationship between the four senses had changed dramatically. More and more, commentators began introducing material into literal exegesis that would have been understood a generation earlier as clearly spiritual or allegorical. According to recent work by Christopher Ocker, the ‘‘fading distinction between the literal and spiritual in the late Middle Ages’’30 reflected changing theories of verbal signification in the realm of sacred text. ‘‘The external world, and the literal text with it, was seamlessly joined to internal and divine truths in a late medieval reader’s experience . . . The late medieval biblical poetic located divine truth in the text and in the world.’’31 When medieval exegetes appear to violate the literal sense as the fourfold sense defined it by introducing substantial metaphorical and allegorical material into their literal commentaries, Ocker suggests that they did so because the meaning of the letter had been opened to include a host of theological presuppositions and dialogue with the whole of Christian tradition.32 George of Siena’s attention to Jewish error in his presentation of this new hermeneutical understanding demonstrates that not only was his thinking firmly in line with this trend but also in addition to the primary factors already noted by Ocker, complicated and contradictory Christian approaches to rabbinic exegesis may have played an important role in redefining literal exegesis during this period. Since the days of the Church Fathers, the literal sense of Scripture, understood as the historical meaning of the text, had been identified with Jewish interpretation. Early Latin Christians overwhelmingly preferred the allegorical readings of St. Augustine to the literal readings of Jerome.33 The letter was important insofar as it held the spiritual sense but was little valued for its own sake. When new interest in narrative structures contributed to developing interest in literal exegesis at the school of St. Victor in northern France some six centuries after Jerome’s death, once again its pursuit was linked with Hebrew study and rabbinic exegesis.34 When their own Hebrew skills were inadequate for the task, figures like Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor turned to contemporary rabbis for help in establishing the letter of the Bible. In the thirteenth century, a small but important group of Franciscan friars picked up the thread, utilizing Hebrew and Aramaic in their efforts to correct problems in the transmission of the Latin Old Testament or devising new

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literal-historical readings of Scripture. The movement reached its apex in the early fourteenth century with Nicholas of Lyra, whose literal commentary on the entire Christian Bible made extensive use of the Hebrew Bible, Rashi’s commentaries, and other rabbinic texts.35 Nicholas was convinced that Christian truth could be found in the letter of the Hebrew Bible and that rabbinic learning was an indispensable tool for drawing it out. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Nicholas tried to uphold a fairly narrow definition of the literal sense, turning to what he called a ‘‘double literal’’ explanation only when his literal reading (or Rashi’s peshat, which he typically presented as the literal reading) was completely irreconcilable with an essential christological reading.36 Where Bonaventure or Thomas Aquinas allowed for metaphorical layers of meaning (christological or soteriological) routinely embedded within the literal sense itself,37 Nicholas of Lyra’s predilection for Jewish interpretation led him toward a much more restrictive literal/historical reading. Like scholars of an earlier generation, he avoided recourse to future significations in the literal sense whenever possible. When the difficulties of the letter forced him beyond a straightforward historical interpretation, he maintained his approach to the literal sense by arguing for two temporally distinct but equally valid historical readings, arguing, for example, that at the same time the Bible refers literally to David, it may also refer literally (rather than allegorically) to Christ, and specifically to Jesus of Nazareth.38 Although Nicholas’s preference for a more restrictive approach to the literal sense may have left him outside the trend toward increasingly ‘‘spiritual’’ literal readings,39 his embrace of the double literal demonstrates his ability to employ such a method when called upon to do so. Further, the tremendous appeal of Nicholas’s exegesis, evident in the rapid and wide diffusion of his Postilla litteralis super bibliam and other related treatises into university, school, and monastic libraries, indicates that interest in the more narrowly defined literal sense characterized by recourse to Jewish traditions was still strong, or at least, as Christopher Ocker argues, it was still seen to be a useful tool or resource for application in a more broadly constructed approach.40 Nevertheless, it is also clear that Nicholas’s approach could be problematic for readers in its loyalty to Jewish interpretations over Christian ones and in its failure to commit fully to the implications of the double literal sense.41 As we will see, the hermeneutical challenges implicit in Nicholas’s appropriation of Jewish tradition within his literal exegesis, especially in light of changing assumptions about the literal sense, may well have provided the motivation for George of Siena to embark on his project. Paradoxically, the literal sense achieved its greatest success just at the time when Jews and rabbinic texts were coming under increasing attack

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in Western Christendom. More polemic deriding Jewish understanding of Scripture was circulating in the fourteenth century than ever before, yet a greater number of Christians were incorporating postbiblical rabbinic exegesis into their Christian study of Scripture than ever before.42 While the literal exegetes of the twelfth century had freely consulted with rabbis, invoking their teachings as if synonymous with the letter of the text itself, fourteenth-century exegetes tread more carefully. Nicholas of Lyra’s apologetic Quaestio de adventu Christi43 sometimes circulated alongside the Postilla as if a corrective to the friar’s regular appeal to Jewish rabbis for scriptural understanding.44 George of Siena’s Scrutamini scripturas, in essence a refashioning of Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio, likewise addressed the difficulties that attended Lyra’s dependence upon Jewish teaching and his fairly strict usage of the literal sense. Just as Nicholas of Lyra’s interest in the literal sense of Scripture (along a Victorine model) led him to wrestle with Jewish exegesis in the Quaestio de adventu Christi, so George of Siena’s interest in a more broadly defined literal sense led him to wrestle with Nicholas and his use of Jewish exegesis.45 Polemic served as an important tool in George’s writing, but he was concerned with Jews as a hermeneutical construct; the Jews served as a symbol for incorrect reading of Scripture within the Christian community. George intentionally reframed the familiar words of Nicholas, a well-known Hebraist and master of rabbinic tradition, in order to help students to distinguish between proper (Christian) literal readings and improper (judaizing) carnal ones. Given that George lived and worked and conducted business for his convent in an Italian city with a vibrant, active Jewish community,46 it is interesting that there is no trace of interaction with that community in the treatise. Beyond bemoaning the Jews’ belief that they can achieve salvation without Christ, and the refusal of ‘‘modern Jews’’ to concede Christian truth, George had little to say about contemporary Jews. When engaging with Jewish ‘‘error,’’ he made no attempt to provide arguments against Jewish interpretation that would be convincing to Jews themselves. In spite of his Dominican affiliation and the likelihood of ongoing contact of some sort with Siena’s Jewish community, George shows no interest in the missionizing stance taken by some other late medieval friars.47 In this, George reflects the attitude of his most important source, Nicholas of Lyra, whose interest lay primarily in exploiting the exegetical insight of the rabbis and secondarily in accounting for the error adhering to that useful material. In fact, almost all of the passages dealing with Jewish traditions in the Scrutamini scripturas were taken verbatim from Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de adventu Christi. When George presented examples of the fantastic, imaginative renderings to which he

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claimed Jews turned to make up for the limitations of their carnal reading, he used Nicholas’s material, as, for example, in his discussion of Is 48.16, ‘‘Come near to me, and hear this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning: from the time before it was done, I was there, and now the Lord God has sent me, and his spirit.’’ George wanted his students to understand the literal sense of the passage as a reference to Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of the letter found in the incarnation of God. Obviously, a Jewish literal interpretation of this passage could not support George’s Christian one. George charged that, bereft of the New Testament spirit that he, following Augustine, believed made sense of the Old, the Jews, mired in the realm of the carnal, turn to ‘‘absurd’’ explanations to interpret the letter. George turned to Nicholas’s words to describe Rashi’s understanding of Isaiah as the subject of the sentence, a reference to his presence along with all Israel at Sinai and his acceptance of his prophetic role at that time. Nicholas had complained that Rashi obscured the christological implications of Is 48 and after a long, labored attack on Rashi’s position he concluded that ‘‘it is evident that the saying of Rabbi Solomon runs counter not only to all of prophecy, which says that the spirit does not precede the body, but also counter to the entire Scripture of the Old Testament, as is evident from the above said things.’’48 George copied this entire passage into his text with only the smallest change, writing at the end that ‘‘it is evident that the saying of Rabbi Solomon runs counter not only to all of prophecy, which says that the spirit does not precede the body, but also counter to the entire Holy Scripture of the Old Testament, as is evident from the above said things.’’49 This close use of Nicholas’s text as a source for Jewish interpretation is found throughout George’s treatise, not only in brief passages like this one but also in extremely long passages. George found a place for almost every word of Nicholas’s Quaestio somewhere in his own treatise, but George’s rearrangement of those words served not to prove that Jewish Scripture contained evidence for Christ’s advent but to support George’s position that Jewish exegesis by definition could not represent the literal sense. Now and then George framed Nicholas’s words with his own comments, and though they tended not to be particularly substantive, they do often give us small insights into his thought. For example, at the end of a long passage from Nicholas that concluded with ‘‘and so we have proved the proposition that the time of Christ’s incarnation is past,’’ George added ‘‘and I do not know, therefore, what more the Jews could wish to see or how much longer to wait.’’50 Whether this comment indicated antagonism or exasperation or merely puzzlement at the Jews’ failure to recognize that the messiah had already arrived, we see in it both a recognition of living Jewish communities remaining in their resistance

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and a disinclination to take an active role in bringing those Jews to Christianity. Rather, he reminded his readers on more than one occasion of the important biblical prophecy that ‘‘at the end of time, God’s beneficence will call the Jews and all other peoples back to full salvation.’’51 George’s anti-Judaism remained in the realm of exegesis and was directed more at Christians who might be tempted by judaizing interpretation than it was directed at the Jews themselves. Though George’s prologue suggested that an organized assault on Jewish error would follow in the treatise, in the event he addressed such questions primarily where the incorporation of Nicholas of Lyra’s text led him to do so. Of the four specific errors of the Jews introduced in the prologue—(1) they say that Christ will come as pure man and not God; (2) they say that Christ has not come but is coming in the future; (3) they say that all Jews even without the advent of Christ have been and will be led to eternal life and happiness; and (4) they will not admit the trinity of persons in divinity52 —all but the third were taken right out of Nicholas’s Quaestio de adventu Christi. George’s own knowledge of Jewish exegesis was clearly very limited, and when not utilizing Nicholas of Lyra’s material, he turned rather to traditional Christian messianic prooftexts, along with frequent recourse to New Testament evidence whenever convenient.53 As long as the evidence he invoked was effective according to his own definition of the literal sense, it did not matter to George whether it came from Jewish or Christian Scripture. But if the objective was not to provide arguments that might be useful against living Jews, neither was the objective to preserve the value of Jewish exegetical insight as Nicholas of Lyra had done.54 Although he absorbed the entirety of Lyra’s Quaestio de adventu Christi into his work, George compiled a very different sort of project in the end. George’s sources—Nicholas of Lyra, the Glossa ordinaria, Augustine’s City of God—were ones readily available to any theology student. We know that George spent much of his career engaged in teaching theology (including Bible) to Dominican friars in convent and provincial schools. The material assembled in Scrutamini scripturas appears to have emerged out of those classrooms. The wide diffusion of Nicholas’s writing makes it more than likely that many of George’s students would also have had some familiarity with Nicholas’s literal exegesis or his scholastic treatises, most of which reiterate material from his exegesis. When George’s treatise is read with the assumption that medieval readers would have recognized the major text from which he borrowed, it suggests that the treatise was meant to serve not only as a commentary on scriptural prophecy but also as a commentary on and a corrective to Nicholas of Lyra’s literal reading of that same prophecy. The centrality of Nicholas’s Quaestio de adventu Christi to George’s trea-

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tise along with the reshaping of that work in his treatise suggests George’s own struggle with Jewish exegesis and Jewish error in Nicholas of Lyra’s writing, or from his perception that Christian Bible scholars ought to have guidance in working through this ubiquitous material. As a teacher in the Dominican schools, George must have known Nicholas’s Postilla and, as demonstrated above, he clearly sat down to write the Scrutamini scripturas with Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio close at hand. Even the framework for his treatise suggests a response to Nicholas’s work. One of the incipit variants of Nicholas’s Quaestio in circulation during George’s lifetime turned to John 5.39 as the first argument in favor of the proposition that one could prove the advent of Christ from Scripture received by the Jews. Although Nicholas’s text did nothing more than invoke the passage, George’s treatise seems designed to carry out John’s program systematically with a particular emphasis on his own reading of the literal sense.55 One has the impression when reading Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de adventu Christi that he was stretching to construct viable explanations for a problem that plagued him personally: leaning so heavily on rabbinic exegesis in his own study of the Bible, Nicholas seems to have been concerned with how to reconcile Jewish insight into the meaning of Scripture with Jewish unbelief. His argument against the proposition that the advent of Christ could be proved by Jewish Scripture observes that ‘‘since among the Jews there are and have been many clever men, well studied in the Scriptures of the law and the prophets, then if the abovesaid could be effectively known by the Scriptures received by them, it is not likely that they would have stood so long in error.’’56 To account for the error of those he deemed ‘‘clever’’ and ‘‘well-studied,’’ Nicholas turned to an unusually thoughtful set of possibilities: Many have been turned against the faith of Christ on account of three reasons. One is on account of fear of temporal poverty, because they have always been covetous, and in their law an abundance of worldly goods is frequently promised. Therefore in the above manner they shrink from the contrary. Another reason is because from the cradle they are nourished in hatred of Christ and Christian law, and Christians are cursed in synagogues every day. Moreover, those things to which men are accustomed from childhood become as in nature, and in consequence they turn judgment away from perception of truth to the contrary. The third reason is on account of the difficulty and depth of those things that are held in the Catholic faith, such as believing there is a trinity of persons in the divine nature and two natures in the one person of Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist which cannot be conceived in any way, and therefore they consider us to worship and revere three gods, and in that same Holy Eucharist they consider us to worship idols most evilly.57

George had much less than Nicholas to say about the reasons for Jewish error, and he did not incorporate the speculative passage cited above

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in his treatise, a notable lapse since he did incorporate almost everything else. George offered only one observation on the subject: that the error of the Jews has its source in their failure to properly comprehend the literal sense of their own Scripture. George claimed that this misreading of Scripture—and the intention of the early rabbis as well—led to the four central errors outlined above, which in turn led to myriad others, causing Jews to resist Christianity. George differentiated between ‘‘proper’’ readings of the literal sense and false literal readings by addressing Jewish exegetical errors. Comparing Christian and Jewish interpretation, George wrote: The Jews understand and explain the sayings of the prophets and all of Scripture carnally but we Catholics draw back to the spirit . . . and therefore in all of the prophecies which may be understood literally about Christ, they see in those same passages only a carnal sense.58

Quoting Saint Paul, George argued that an incomplete literal explication—one that did not take into account a spiritual component or one that did not read the Old Testament through the lens of the New—was no literal explication at all. George consistently referred to Jewish readings of Scripture as ‘‘carnal’’ rather than literal; when Catholic and Jewish interpretations of Old Testament texts differ it is because ‘‘the Jews understand and explain the sayings of the Prophets and the entirety of Sacred Scripture carnally.’’59 So important was this distinction for George that he began the treatise with ‘‘a few preliminary observations useful in reading many prophecies’’ articulating the nature of the literal sense: In the sayings of the prophets it is very often the case that on the face of it, the prophet appears to have prophesied as pertaining to a specific historical event according to the letter. Nevertheless, from these things that actually happened, it is intended also that another thing will come to pass after that historical event, which the prophet brings to light through the spirit of prophecy according to the spiritual sense. And this also is the true sense of the letter hidden in that same prophecy. And it is to this premise that the Apostle [Paul] addresses himself saying that ‘‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life.’’60 And out of that the Jews and their followers may be seen as very frequently explaining that which the letter signifies according to that sense, because many prophecies fulfilled according to the letter were not fulfilled or brought to pass according to the exposition of the Jews. Therefore [the Jews] are bound up with blindness and ignorance to dream and invent, on account of which they understand such prophecies to be about their messiah who they believe is yet to come, when everything has already been discovered and fulfilled in our messiah. Yet many agree that God wishing to suggest something spiritually first shows us carnally.61

Though carnal readings are not necessarily erroneous, George argued that they are limited. George’s structural framework was built upon this

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distinction between literal and carnal. In response to his opening citation of John 5.39, ‘‘Search the Scriptures, for in them you think to find eternal life,’’ George continued, ‘‘and truly, so it is that sacred Scripture is called ‘The Book of Life’ because in its contemplation may be found a recognition of truth, and those things which provide proof for the generation of our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ Though the carnal sense might be clear on the surface, the true literal sense as he defined it for a Christian readership required contemplation—receptivity to the Spirit—to complete the literal understanding, and the truth of the New Testament was a necessary component in understanding the Old. The treatise as a whole worked to provide a connection between the two covenants, and immediately after introducing the imperative from John, George announced his intention to draw them together: ‘‘I will begin in Genesis from Adam, the first man named in sacred Scripture, up until the twelfth prophet Malachi, and there I will end. And through Malachi the Scripture of the Old Testament will be connected with the Scripture of the New Testament.’’62 George moved from a theological connection between the old and the new covenants to an explicit textual and exegetical one. The emphasis on this textual link underscores the exegetical core of the treatise. George insisted not only that Christian doctrine is based upon the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy but also that the truth of these prophecies is accessible by literal readings of the older text in light of the newer one. George’s understanding of the literal sense drew from the same well as Aquinas’ parabolic or Nicholas’s double literal but was more consistent (and insistent) in its application of the spiritual within the literal: Now the rules governing sacred Scripture are such that when a prophecy manifestly was composed concerning the future through an ambiguous allegory, it is not to be limited by those things that are written. On account of which, there are sayings by the prophets about Christ which I intend to insert here not according to the allegorical sense, but only according to the literal sense; the meaning of the Holy Spirit and the words of the prophets may be learned from the doctors.63

George employed this broad understanding of the literal sense throughout his text, particularly in passages where he did not depend upon Nicholas of Lyra’s words and could range more readily through New Testament–based interpretations. For example, George explained the literal sense of Jonah 2—‘‘Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights . . . and the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land’’—as a prophecy of Christ’s ministry of action and his descent into the heart of the earth for three days before reemerging. George wrote that according to the letter, Jonah foretold the future Christ by service more than the

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word. Therefore, Christ in Matthew 12 did not say, ‘‘Jonah said . . .’’ but he said, ‘‘Jonah was inside the fish for three days and so the son of man will be even in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.’’64 Concerning Jonah, moreover, the Lord said to the fish, ‘‘vomit him, and the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land. And truly it is said about Christ that he existed inside hell for three days . . .’’ Just as Jonah was liberated by divine mandate from the fish after three days, Jesus emerged from hell at the end of three days.65 George’s voice as found in this passage is unquestionably different from his Lyra voice. He regularly interwove the two voices for effect, contrasting Christian and Jewish readings to teach the difference between carnal and literal interpretation. In a long discussion of Amos 9, ‘‘In that day I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen,’’ for example, he moved seamlessly back and forth between Nicholas of Lyra’s literal interpretation and his own, finally concluding that the letter of the prophecy was fulfilled in the building of the spiritual temple of the Church, ‘‘so that which the Jews hope to receive carnally in the end of days, we Christians have already received in the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.’’66 When George moved in and out of Nicholas’s text, he edited carefully to maintain a sense of coherence in the work. In addition to the challenges inherent in adapting a formally structured quodlibetal question to the format of a scripted progression through biblical exegesis, Nicholas of Lyra’s habit of frequent self-references required constant maneuvering on George’s part. Generally, George retained Nicholas’s selfreferences, adapting them to maintain the fiction of his own voice. Occasionally Nicholas’s text demanded that George modify a date or a particular construction.67 In two places, Nicholas made mention of the year 1309 as that ‘‘in which this work was written.’’ In both passages, George simply changed the date to 1388. In several other places, Nicholas cited the number of years that had passed since a particular historical event, and George always revised those calculations, more or less accurately. These adaptations of a familiar work must have contributed to a sense that George ‘‘owned’’ the words he was writing; they helped him imbue Nicholas’s work with new meaning and purpose. In addition to contemporizing the text, George also made changes whenever Nicholas alluded to previous writings that George could not own. For example, in the midst of a long discussion of the plurality of persons in divinity, Nicholas wrote, ‘‘But this same plurality [of persons in divinity] is clearly explained in many places of prophecy, for example, in Psalm 44, which cannot be explained according to the letter except about Christ, as I have discussed extensively in the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter one.’’68 George, who could not lay claim to a commentary on Hebrews, simply wrote: ‘‘But the same plurality [of persons in

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divinity] is clearly explained in many places of prophecy, for example, in Psalm 44, which cannot be explained according to the letter except about Christ.’’ George did try to avoid making overt claims to knowledge he did not actually possess, as in his sixty-sixth prophecy, when he incorporated Nicholas’s discussion of Jewish corruption of biblical texts. The discussion centered on the difference between the Hebrew and Latin versions of Jer 33.16, with Nicholas explaining that the Hebrew text contains the verb ‘‘call’’ in the singular future tense, thus holding out the promised messiah as testimony of God’s righteousness, while the Latin Bible contains the future plural form of the verb, shifting the subject in the phrase and identifying the promised messiah (Jesus Christ) as the righteous God himself. Noting that the Aramaic Targum supports the Christian reading, Nicholas defended Jerome’s Latin translation and, turning to a longstanding Christian suspicion, alleged that the Jews intentionally corrupted that passage of text in order to deny the messiah.69 ‘‘Against this solution,’’ he wrote, ‘‘it is not possible to argue except by showing that the Jews have corrupted the text in order to deny the divinity of Christ. This could best be done by obtaining ancient Bibles that have not been corrupted in this passage and in which the divinity of Christ may still be mentioned . . . Now while I myself have not seen such Hebrew Bibles which are not corrupted in this passage, nevertheless I have heard from men who are worthy by reason of knowledge and life who faithfully declare by oath that they have seen such ancient Bibles which have the passage as in Jerome’s translation.’’70 In copying this passage, George followed all of Nicholas’s words faithfully until Nicholas’s reference to himself in the first person, at which point George simply wrote, ‘‘and there are men of good faith who truly affirm that they have seen ancient books which have the passage as in Jerome’s translation,’’ followed by his own additional commentary that ‘‘it is in no way believable that Jerome would have done otherwise than to translate the Hebrew Truth as it truly existed.’’71 Here, even though George retains the notion that alternative readings exist in ‘‘ancient Bibles,’’ he shifts attention away from their purported existence to a much more central point: he argues that it is simply not plausible that Jerome would have deviated from the Hebrew text at hand when he executed his translation, and so the existence of these ‘‘ancient Bibles’’ is essentially irrelevant. Nicholas had far too sophisticated an understanding of the difficulties of translation to make such an argument;72 George makes Nicholas more deferential toward the Church Fathers than he ever was. Through such judicious editing, George maintained the fiction that he was writing in the first person, appropriating and refashioning Nicholas’s text in his own voice. He was able to take advantage of Nicholas’s knowledge of Jewish exegesis, a knowledge that he did not share, and

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utilize it in a systematic exploration of the literal sense of prophecy as he understood it. Bearing in mind George’s important roles (as master of students and diffinitor) in defining and maintaining orthodoxy, we can see an attempt here to make Nicholas’s work build toward an approach to literal exegesis which Nicholas himself had not embraced. By coopting Nicholas’s material and reissuing it in new form, George brought Nicholas of Lyra from the brink of judaizing and back toward what George seems to have considered a safer Christian hermeneutics. Many, if not most, in George’s readership would have recognized the refashioning of Nicholas of Lyra’s text. That George intended to create a more critical use of Nicholas’s exegetical work is evident in George’s condemnation of ‘‘the Jews and their followers’’ for reading prophecies carnally rather than with the fullness of a Christian literal sense. Followers of the Jews who were not themselves Jews can only mean judaizing Christians, possibly including Nicholas of Lyra himself. If there was a danger in Nicholas’s approach to Scripture, it was not only that his writings depended so heavily on Jewish interpretations but also that his widely admired Hebraism had led to the use of his commentary as an authoritative voice on Scripture, as George demonstrates in the single passage where he mentions the Franciscan friar by name. While there are numerous brief citations of ‘‘Jerome in the Gloss’’ or ‘‘Isidore in the Gloss’’ or ‘‘Bede in the Gloss,’’ George took over Nicholas’s entire treatise without any attribution at all. This is not surprising, since medieval Christians did not feel the need to cite the contemporary sources they quoted as they did Church Fathers. But what is interesting is George’s single reference to Nicholas, in the midst of a long passage copied from the Quaestio de adventu Christi. George wanted to include Nicholas’s charge that Bede misinterpreted the meaning of a particular passage, but he was apparently uncomfortable disagreeing with him in his own voice, and so he invoked the name of Nicholas as a more authoritative voice in such circumstances. Nicholas charged that the Venerable Bede misread the seventy weeks of Dn 9.24, ‘‘Seventy weeks are shortened upon your people.’’ George began presenting Nicholas’s argument on Daniel as he usually did, writing Nicholas’s words as his own until he reached the point where Nicholas argued against the interpretation of the Venerable Bede. At that moment George, far more deferential to the Church Fathers than Nicholas of Lyra ever was, suddenly stepped out of his long quotation, turned to the man whose words he was employing, and wrote that ‘‘there is another explanation, such as that of Nicholas of Lyra who says that Bede has not explained the passage properly.’’ The problem was that Bede understood the weeks to refer to a set of lunar years rather than solar, and ‘‘according to that which Nicholas of Lyra says, this is not valid.’’ After this brief distancing

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maneuver, George returned to a word-for-word quotation of Nicholas’s text as if it were his own.73 George’s thoroughgoing transformation of Nicholas’s material allowed him to respond publicly to the ‘‘wrong’’ kind of literal exegesis along the Victorine model. Insofar as George engaged in anti-Jewish polemic in this treatise, it was primarily a hermeneutical one; George argued through the double literal sense that the Old Testament literally meant what the Christians said it meant; it wasn’t enough for Christian truth to lie in the spiritual/allegorical sense. The problem, as he saw it, with Jewish tradition wasn’t that it couldn’t get past the letter, the literal sense, to the spirit, it was that the Jews failed to see the myriad of meanings even within the letter. For George (and many other Christians), tying Christian literal exegesis of Scripture to Jewish (as Andrew of St. Victor and Nicholas of Lyra did, for example) was problematic. While earlier schoolmen embraced the teaching of neighboring rabbis precisely for what they could learn about the literal sense, it was important for George to ensure that his students knew that the ‘‘sensus litteralis,’’ was not necessarily ‘‘what the Jews say’’—the Jews did not have exclusive rights to the letter. George of Siena was clearly an important figure in a number of different, overlapping communities: the Dominican convents in Siena and Florence; the Dominican Province of Rome; and in the city of Siena itself. He was an active preacher and teacher working in a city with an active Jewish community. Yet, in an apparently polemical text, George specifically did not provide his students with the tools they would need to engage with Jews over the meaning of Scripture. Further, George’s understanding of the literal sense was fundamentally at odds with the missionizing effort to prove Christian truth to the Jews through Scriptures accepted as authoritative by them. George seems rather to have sided with those like the Franciscan Raymond Rigauld, who determined in 1287 that only with a preexisting faith—from the vantage point of the New Testament—could one achieve a true reading of the Old Testament. ‘‘The New Testament is contained within the Old like a wheel in the midst of a wheel . . . just as now from the New are things proved fulfilled, so from the Old truly are things proved predicted.’’74 According to this understanding of Bible text, proving Christianity to unbelievers through scriptural prophecy was impossible. Obviously, mendicant engagement in active disputation with Jews was an important part of the late medieval landscape; George’s text does not call into question the existence of Dominican missionizing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But it would seem to ask us to rethink the extent of this transformation and to remember that there were a variety of approaches to both textual and living Jews in the later Middle

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Ages. There is no question but that there are polemical elements in George’s treatise. But they did not serve to instill doubt in the hearts of Jews, to provide arrows, darts, quivers, or muzzles against them.75 Rather, the polemic here was primarily an internal one, building fences around Christian reading of Scripture. In George’s systematic attempt to distinguish between the Jews reading ‘‘carnaliter’’ and the Christians reading ‘‘litteraliter,’’ we see a teacher’s concern with his Christian students’ reading of Scripture. In Scrutamini scripturas, George of Siena found he could use the encounter with Jewish exegesis and Jewish error as a way of inculcating in his readers an understanding of a multivalent literal sense while warning them away from the dangerous waters navigated by the Victorines and, more importantly, by Nicholas of Lyra, whose literal Postilla they could scarcely avoid. While Nicholas’s Quaestio de adventu Christi adhered to the Franciscan’s own restrictive standards of literal exegesis, George interwove this material with his own presentation of proofs for Christ’s advent according to a very broadly understood literal sense: the kind of literal sense advocated by Thomas Aquinas in which virtually the whole of the spiritual could be read within it. The Scrutamini scripturas thus served as a guide for those friars who might judaize unintentionally by turning too eagerly toward the Jewish-inspired exegesis of Nicholas of Lyra. Scholars have long noted the parallel developments in Jewish and Christian Bible exegesis in late eleventh- and early twelfth-century northern France, with a new emphasis on peshat in Jewish commentary, on the literal sense in Christian commentary, and on an increasingly strong undercurrent of polemic in both.76 But just as interest in new forms of narrative seems to have driven the pursuit of peshat and literal interpretation in the Jewish and Christian worlds at roughly the same moment in time, so the shared social and cultural reality called forth continued to change. George of Siena’s presentation of Nicholas of Lyra’s presentation of Rashi’s commentary reminds us that innovation brought with it new challenges calling for resolution. Rashi’s incorporation of peshat was reevaluated and transformed by his followers, and the Christian literal sense, too, was reevaluated and transformed in the decades after the Victorine innovation. The element of polemic seems to have entered both schools gradually, intensifying as each became more knowledgeable about the other.77 Besides the Scrutamini scripturas’ obvious contribution to our understanding of late medieval Christian biblical hermeneutics, George’s work also points out in yet another way the ability of biblical exegesis to adapt to multiple purposes in diverse religious contexts. Nicholas of Lyra saw in Rashi’s peshat the most reliable reading of the literal sense of Scripture, and he employed Rashi’s commentary to fix the literal sense

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for Christian readers, challenging him only in those places where his reading absolutely could not be reconciled with a Christian understanding of the text. George employed Rashi’s commentary as a foil in a systematic presentation of Christian readings of Hebrew prophecy but also to engage with other Christian approaches to Scripture and to establish new boundaries for Christian literal exegesis. Nicholas and George had very different notions of what constituted valid literal hermeneutics, but both found in Jewish exegesis—both peshat and derash—an invaluable tool for refining their Christian understanding of contested sacred text.

12

Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy Fabrizio Lelli

Throughout the Renaissance, the book of Job played a significant role in the intellectual exchanges between Italian Jewish and Christian scholars. Several commentaries1 on this biblical text were composed between the second half of the fifteenth and the end of the sixteenth century; at the same time, this book and its chief characters also exercised a crucial influence on literary2 and artistic production. The story of the biblical hero who faithfully endures terrible trials and tribulations sent to him by God had long played a major role in Christian and Jewish exegesis in antiquity and during the Middle Ages.3 Until the fifteenth century, however, scholarly relations between the two faiths pertaining to biblical interpretation were rare, the almost unique interlocutors of Jewish exegetes being the ecclesiastical elites.4 In contrast, from the second half of the fifteenth century a new attitude to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible became manifest: Christians—both secular and clerical—and Jews adopted common humanist themes of reflection only partly grounded in earlier exegesis, while new approaches to the Scripture were borrowed by Christian intellectuals from Jewish scholars.5 Beside a new humanist attitude to the exegesis of the Scripture according to the Hebraica Veritas (the Hebrew truth preserved by the original text of the Bible), new biblical interpretations were inspired by the widespread theory of the prisca theologia.6 According to this belief, which originated in Late Antiquity but reached its apex in the Renaissance, scholars assumed that different cultures ultimately derived from the same religious truths. The intellectual’s goal was to determine the correspondences between the ‘‘pristine traditions’’ preserved in divergent literary corpora and contemporary systems of thought. This hermeneutic allowed scholars to identify hidden messages of their own religious beliefs according to specific exegeses of ancient or

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allegedly ancient material—including Scripture, the texts attributed, inter alia, to Plato or Aristotle, to Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus or Zoroaster, and also the kabbalistic literature: seeing that Jewish sources were understood to have developed common truths, Christian interpreters of Scripture could make use of ancient and medieval Hebrew commentaries. In such an intellectual context, like the Greek and Roman authorities reappraised by the humanists, ancient authors of biblical writings were turned into living fonts of timeless truths.7 Job, the alleged author of the biblical book, could be depicted as a priscus philosophus whose life had taken place in a certain historical period. This attempt to create a concord between different truths and to attribute historical and humanist traits to legendary figures was carried out in Italy (and especially in the Florentine intellectual environment of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico8) also thanks to a profound cooperation between Christian and Jewish scholars9 and had its impact especially on Renaissance art.10 In this study I will attempt to demonstrate, on the basis of visual testimonies pertaining to the book of Job, the extent to which Italian art of the late fifteenth century reread traditional Jewish and Christian iconographies of the biblical text according to the major intellectual concerns that were shared simultaneously by members of both faith communities. Renaissance art testifies to a new, fluid exchange of themes of speculation and exegesis shared by both Jews and Christians, who discussed similar issues in the context of the humanist environment. Renaissance art inherited most of its iconographic themes from the past. In the case of Job, the iconographic patterns used in late medieval art to portray the biblical figure11 were grounded on two major theological understandings: the first one stressed the man’s sufferings, Job being thus the paradigm of the righteous man who has been smitten with affliction without being able to rationally comprehend God’s reasons for it. The second understanding focused on the final redemption of Job, whose faith and endurance are ultimately rewarded. Each perspective gave rise to its own iconography. According to what I will call the first pattern, which was especially common in Western Europe, Job was depicted as a suffering old man, who was featured either lying naked, scar-covered, on a heap of ashes, on piles of straw or on a dunghill—alone, with his three friends or only with Elihu, or being urged by his wife to rebel against God’s will.12 According to the second pattern, which was more popular in Byzantine milieus, Job was portrayed as a saint, a king, or a wealthy man, his redemption of greater importance than his suffering.13 As I will demonstrate in the following pages, artists of Italian Quattrocento inherited these traditional iconographies and reinterpreted them

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according to the major intellectual motifs cherished by the humanists. We find these images decorating works commissioned by both Christians and Jews. From this perspective, the artistic production executed during the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century is especially worthy of study as a touchstone for the extraordinary combination of hermeneutic approaches to the Scripture. Through it we witness the ongoing exchange of intellectual information between Jewish and Christian scholarly milieus. By carefully analyzing the Hebrew text of Job and by taking Hebrew medieval exegesis into account, fifteenth-century scholars felt that they could better understand the biblical book as one replete with philosophical and theological meanings, its chief character to them being the best paradigm of the humanist intellectual. The traditional pattern of the ‘‘suffering Job’’ was transformed exegetically into that of a philosopher striving to attain the ultimate knowledge of both the human and the divine world on the basis of rational investigation. The result of such intellectual quest, which stressed Job’s humanity, allowed the biblical figure to be depicted as a man drawn from contemporary reality (according to the common Italian early Renaissance standards used for representing Christian saints14). At the same time, Job was a priscus philosophus, an ancient wise man who, after attaining universal knowledge, transcended human reason in order to reach the ultimate happiness of the religious philosopher who finds in God all responses to his intellectual curiosity.15 A further shift characterized this God-inspired perfect intellectual, this h.akham kolel 16 as the saintly man able to foretell future events, for example, Moses in the redemption of the Jews or Jesus in the redemption of the Christians. By gradually turning the ‘‘suffering Job’’ into a ‘‘universal sage,’’ then into a ‘‘saintly or prophetically inspired Job,’’ Renaissance artists, working both for Jewish and Christian audiences, were not only adopting some of the crucial themes of contemporary Jewish and Christians thought and biblical exegesis but also merging the two medieval Joban patterns into one only, in which rational and nonrational interpretations of the biblical text were reread according to pagan intellectual traditions revived in the Renaissance.

Turning ‘‘Suffering Job’’ into a Universal Wise Man (h.akham kolel) The illuminations of two superb Hebrew manuscripts (MS New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke Collection, 409, and MS Jerusalem, Israel Museum, 180/55) are of particular interest for our study. Although their similarly luxurious decoration had already been com-

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pared in the Beinecke Catalogue,17 no one had suspected that they shared an even closer affinity until both codices were attributed to the pen of the copyist Isaac ben ‘Ovadya of Forlı`.18 Apart from the special interest in the biography of this scribe, who worked mainly in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century and reputedly converted to Christianity during the 1460s (precisely when the two manuscripts were executed19), we may also observe in his work the traces of a close cultural relationship between Jewish and Christian elites. Two manuscripts, copied by the same scribe, containing the same texts—the Hebrew books of Psalms, Job, and Proverbs (the Sifre emet)20 —and decorated with the same patterns by non-Jewish workshops, were produced in the same years, one for a Jewish, the other for a Christian patron. Each patron was interested in the same books of Scripture, which at the time were the object of rich intellectual discussion. A Hebrew Manuscript Copied for Jacob ben Benjamin of Montalcino At the end of the Yale University Library manuscript the scribe, whose name was erased, lets us know that ‘‘as a donkey, I wrote these Psalms, Job and Proverbs to Signor Ya‘akov, may he see progeny and may his days be lengthened, the son of the distinguished rabbi Benjamin, may the Rock and Redeemer protect him, from Montalcino, and I received payment for my work in several installments up to the present day July 5 5227 [1467].’’21 The colophon informs us that this elegant parchment codex, the decoration of which was most probably carried out in the workshop of the non-Jewish Florentine painter Mariano del Buono,22 had been executed at the request of a member of the Montalcino family, one of the most illustrious Jewish banking families in Tuscany.23 The beautiful full-page miniature on fol. 110v of the Yale manuscript, the opening page of the book of Job, shows the protagonist lying on a dunghill, while conversing with his three friends; on the same folio, a marginal medallion represents the destruction of Job’s flock (Figure 1). The illuminator was inspired by traditional iconographic models related to what I have defined as the first pattern, especially common in Tuscany.24 However, the subjects of the pictures may also be understood on the basis of the philosophical exegesis of Job, that is, according to the Scholastic conception of divine providence extended to the suffering man, as articulated by the thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher and exegete Gersonides (Levi ben Gershon). A brief overview of Jacob ben Benjamin of Montalcino’s intellectual environment will serve to demonstrate the double nature of the image—that is, its interweaving of humanist meanings through traditional motifs.

Figure 1. Mariano del Buono and his workshop (?), Job and His Three Friends. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the Yale University, New Haven, MS 409, fol. 110v. Florence, 1467.

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Jacob’s father was Benjamin ben Joab of Montalcino, renowned all over Italy for his talmudic and kabbalistic knowledge, as well as for his activity as a teacher in his Tuscan yeshivah.25 The cultural role played by Benjamin of Montalcino must have been very significant, and not only on a local level. Suffice it to recall that Montalcino took upon himself the responsibility of responding to the open letters addressed in 1454 by Judah Messer Leon, probably the most authoritative Italian Jewish scholar of that time, to the community of Florence. Among the issues debated by the two rabbis, one was related to the circulation of Gersonidean commentaries in the Florentine environment.26 One of Jacob’s brothers, David ben Benjamin of Montalcino, was a good friend of Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano, among the most outstanding Tuscan fifteenth-century kabbalists: David and Elijah Hayyim had studied together at Benjamin’s yeshivah.27 A Tuscan Jewish intellectual, Genazzano, despite his being knowledgeable about the philosophical concerns of contemporaneous Florentine humanists, condemned Neoplatonic trends of thought (as did Messer Leon), above all, for bringing Jewish scholars into close contact with non-Jews. Genazzano was especially hostile to those Jewish philosophers who agreed with the humanist notion of prisca theologia.28 As we have already observed, according to this theory, Plato and Aristotle would have drawn some of their major philosophical assumptions from such outstanding ancient authorities as the biblical patriarchs and prophets, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus. Whereas humanists were entitled to draw parallels between biblical and nonbiblical sources,29 according to Genazzano, Jewish scholars should only emphasize the prior antiquity and sanctity of the biblical authorities, since they had been closely attached to the true God.30 In those same years in Florence, Marsilio Ficino was the most important proponent of the prisca theologia tradition, and we should not be surprised to read in Ficino’s Letter VIII, 7 to Braccio Martelli (On the Harmony between Moses and Plato) that Job and Plato reveal the same truths.31 Starting from Numenius’s famous assertion that Plato is a second Moses speaking in the Athenian tongue,32 Ficino outlines the substance of a series of Platonic dialogues deserving study because of their total alignment with basic principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In order to establish sources for the parallels he draws, Ficino couples two verses of Job with Plato’s Laws.33 Against such an intellectual approach to the interpretation of the Hebrew Scripture, which mainly relied on the prisca theologia view, in the last decade of the fifteenth century Genazzano wrote his philosophical and kabbalistic treatise, entitled Igeret h.amudot (Delightful Epistle), which was written as a response to David of Montalcino.34 In it the author reproached all uses of Gersonides’ commentaries that aimed to explain

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the Scripture on philosophical grounds: the most significant example of such an ‘‘obnoxious’’ exegesis, according to Genazzano, was the philosopher’s Commentary on Job, which widely circulated among Jews and Christians alike.35 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola worked in the same Tuscan environment and in the same years as Genazzano, who was aware of some of the humanist’s works.36 Following the philological trends of Florentine humanism, Pico intended to revise the Latin standard version of the Old Testament on the basis of the Hebrew original of Scripture, as well as Jewish commentaries, ancient and medieval. Pico’s philological concerns with the Hebrew Bible went hand in hand with his peculiar interest in both philosophical and kabbalistic hermeneutics.37 A Latin codex, which once belonged to Pico and is now housed at the Vatican Library (MS Citta` del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottobonianus Lat. 607), offers a clear testimony of the methods followed by this humanist in approaching the Bible. The Vatican manuscript38 contains two different Latin versions of the book of Job: verses 1.1–11.5 are a mere copy of the Vulgate, transcribed by Pico himself with his own marginal notes added, in which the scholar attempted different renderings on the basis of the Hebrew original. From Job 11.5 until the end of the book a different translation is offered (with several corrections added by Pico in the text and in the margins), copied by another scribe. A different hand replaced the verse 42.6, wrote the last verses of the book (Job 42.7–16) and added the final word ‘‘Mitridate.’’ This annotation allows us to gain insight into the composition of this codex in the context of Pico’s association with the convert Jew Flavius Mithridates, who would compose a new Latin version of Job, as Hayyim Wirszubski has convincingly demonstrated.39 In the Vatican manuscript, the Latin interpretations of peculiar Hebrew words or verses are of crucial interest, as well as the marginal glosses and commentaries added by Pico. As the latter remarks in one of his marginalia, the interpretation of the Hebrew Scripture should not be limited to the investigation of the peshat, the literal or plain sense. The scholar’s philosophical exegesis heavily relies on Gersonides’ Commentary on Job.40 There too a series of glosses on specific points of the littera is followed by a continuous interpretative paraphrase of the main philosophical issues dealt with in the biblical text. From Gersonides’ commentary Pico intended to find evidence of a major question of medieval and contemporary theology: ‘‘That is why Levi [⳱ Gersonides] affirms that Moses41 wrote this book [of Job] in order to solve doubts arising from the question of divine providence, which would not be extended to the individuals.’’42

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According to Pico, the book of Job demonstrates that divine providence extends to individuals. In this he followed Gersonides—both in his Commentary on Job and in his treatise Milh.amot ha-Shem (The Wars of the Lord)—who believed that the human genus, as belonging to the sublunar world, was not capable of receiving God’s providential efflux. According to the Provenc¸al author, the higher a man rises in intellectual endeavors, the more numerous rational concepts one acquires, the closer he is to the Active Intellect and to God, thus befitting a more direct influence of divine providence upon him. Gersonides thus managed to reintroduce the Maimonidean notion43 of a special providence bestowed only on the wise.44 If Maimonides’ and Gersonides’ conceptions on providence, not too different from ideas held by Scholastic thinkers and by Thomas Aquinas,45 could be appreciated by a Christian philosopher like Pico della Mirandola, Genazzano, on the contrary, warned his coreligionists from following any philosophical interpretation of the Bible supported by Maimonides and Gersonides and cherished by those humanists who attempted to read Jewish authors according to their own Scholastic sources. By omitting significant passages of Gersonides’ Commentary on Job in his Igeret h.amudot, Genazzano proved that the Provenc¸al philosopher would have totally refuted the existence of a divine providence extended only to individuals, and what is even worse, he would have demonstrated that those erroneous assertions were based on the faulty Aristotelian exegesis of the book of Job.46 Genazzano warned his friend David of Montalcino against any philosophical exegesis of the Scripture (and particularly of Job) grounded in the Scholastic and Gersonidean conception of divine providence, such as that discussed in Florence both in the Montalcino’s Jewish environment and in Pico’s humanist milieu.47 In the final analysis both Jewish and Christian scholars thus resorted to a similar intellectual exegesis of Job, which could be represented by a common iconography in which the image of the biblical character was that of a ‘‘suffering philosopher,’’ a very wise man who, after enduring all sorts of pains caused by his thirst for intellectual knowledge, understands the necessity of God’s help to rationally cleave to the active intellect; by so doing, Job eventually overcomes his suffering, thus becoming a paradigm of the classical virtue of endurance, as well as an ancient priscus philosophus who, following Ficino’s and Pico’s views, but also Gersonides’ and the Hebrew ancient midrashic tradition, was a contemporary of Moses and one who shared with him a similar rank in the genealogical chain of the ancient wise men.48 Genazzano condemned these perspectives for their intellectual elitism.

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A Hebrew Manuscript Copied for Lorenzo de’ Medici (?) As stated above, the Israel Museum MS 180/55 contains the same three books of the Hebrew Scripture as the previously described codex of the Yale University Library and is illuminated in very similar Florentine stylistic patterns.49 The copy of the Israeli manuscript was commissioned to Isaac ben ‘Ovadya of Forlı` by a member of the Medici family, probably by Lorenzo il Magnifico.50 On fol. 134v, in a full-page illumination, the work of a non-Jewish Florentine workshop, we see Job naked, scar-covered, and sitting on ashes in front of his three friends, a pattern which closely resembles the similar illumination of the Yale manuscript51 (Figure 2). As Gabrielle Se´d-Rajna has observed, the intent of one of Job’s interlocutors to begin his discourse is depicted with the emphatic gesture typical of the ancient orator or of the medieval preacher.52 The friend who is about to open his speech is Elihu. In the fourth book of his treatise The Wars of the Lord, Gersonides assumed that ‘‘the Book of Job is to be read as a philosophical dialogue among Job (Aristotle) and his friends (representing various versions of the general view of the religious masses), which is resolved by the character Elihu, who represents the true view advanced by Maimonides and Gersonides that individual providence is evidenced among individual men who deserve it.’’53 In the context of the Gersonidean reference, the iconography of Elihu as an ancient orator can be compared with a passage written by Yohanan Alemanno, one of the most outstanding fifteenth-century Jewish scholars working in Florence in close connection with Marsilio Ficino54 and Giovanni Pico.55 When dealing with man’s wisdom in his encyclopedic treatise H . ay ha-‘olamim (The Immortal),56 Alemanno argued on the basis of the book of Job that the human capacity to apprehend God and nature depends on the degree of man’s proximity and adhesion to the Active Intellect.57 On this particular issue Alemanno relies especially on the Islamic medieval tradition, particularly on Ibn Tufayl’s treatise H . ayy ibn Yaqz.an,58 (which was well known to Pico, who had it translated from Hebrew and may have discussed it with Alemanno),59 and on Averroes, whose work and thought were particularly appreciated in Florentine circles.60 Here is Alemanno’s explanation: As a matter of fact, in one single sentence the prophet has revealed many things through Elihu’s speech. He said that ‘‘if God decides within his heart (lev) to gather unto himself his breath (ruah.) and his spirit (neshamah), all flesh shall perish together and man will return to dust.’’61 This means that the existence of all created things62 depends on God’s will to set out to create and this is alluded to by the word lev [heart], here meaning ‘‘will.’’ However, if God decides within his will not to set out to create out of him, and [if he gathers] his ruah., which is the emanation deriving from him when he creates, and [if he gathers] his nesha-

Figure 2. Mariano del Buono and his workshop (?), Job and His Three Friends. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, MS 180/55, fol. 134v. Florence, after 1460.

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mah, which is the unifying link of his creation whose aim is that of preserving all created things, when he gathers all unto himself and does not set out to create anymore, behold, at that same moment every name will be corrupted and everything will perish, not only the material forms, but also the spiritual ones present in man. Thus man will return unto dust, as he was originally.63

For Elihu, the concept of divine providence extends to individuals and God is the First Cause who controls the destiny of man. This notion, as we have seen, is already found in Gersonidean exegesis, although Alemanno stresses the Neoplatonic aspects of this interpretation, which might be relevant to contemporary Florentine humanists.64 In the illumination of the Israel Museum manuscript Elihu seems to be about to begin his speech on providence, and in the illumination of the Yale Library codex the concept of the perishable destiny of man is well expressed by the image of Elihu addressing the ‘‘suffering Job,’’ as well as by the medallion depicting the destruction of Job’s flock in the same folio.65 Alemanno’s text may thus contribute to better explain the rhetoric gesture of Elihu in the illumination of the Israeli codex. The first sentence of Alemanno’s passage is especially significant: ‘‘In one single sentence the prophet has revealed many things through Elihu’s speech.’’ According to Alemanno, thanks to the art of rhetoric revived in fifteenth-century Florence,66 God reveals, through his human prophet, Elihu, the hidden meanings of philosophy, as well as of nature. As a matter of fact, in his H . ay ha-‘olamim, the author overtly declares his intention to reconstitute and disclose to his students the original wisdom of Israel, the result of God’s revelations to the ancient patriarchs and prophets, by resorting to Aristotelian rhetoric associated with prophecy.67 Alemanno’s interpretation of the book of Job, like Pico’s and Montalcino’s, clearly depends on Maimonidean and Gersonidean exegesis68 adapted to the major humanist concern with the prisca theologia. This position can now be better understood by comparing it with the iconographic pattern of the Israel Museum manuscript. The traditional understanding of the book of Job as the basic authority for those scholars who desire to study the natural sciences was adopted by the Jewish encyclopedists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They, like Alemanno himself, aimed to demonstrate, in Maimonidean terms, the necessity of being familiar with the natural sciences for attaining the supernal goal of human perfection—namely, the intellectual adhesion to God or the Active Intellect.69 It is not by chance, then, that, probably in Alemanno’s generation or shortly after, Joseph Israel of Forlı` wrote (possibly in Tuscany) a huge encyclopedic treatise entitled Sefer toledot Adam (The Book of Man’s Generations or of Man’s History)70 in which he merges traditional Maimonidean and Gersonidean views with Neoplatonic conceptions current in fifteenth-

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century Florence in order to explain religious and mystical issues. Joseph Israel, the son of Abraham, a member of the wealthy banking family from Perugia who operated in Florence and had business relationships with the Montalcino,71 introduces the section of his treatise related to the necessity of the study of physics with an extensive quotation of the last chapters of the book of Job.72 Likewise, in his Oration on Man’s Dignity Pico della Mirandola speaks of the ‘‘righteous Job,’’ a significant figure of the pagan world, sensitive to the truth of the Jewish faith thanks to his knowledge of nature, and identifies Job’s and Empedocles’ theology of the opposites. Pico’s interpretation of a Job who solves all conflicts between the lower and the upper world by means of natural philosophy can be understood against the background of the humanist conception of man who is placed by God at the center of His creation and is given the freedom to raise to the supernal realms or to regress to a degenerate state.73 This humanist Job of the Oration parallels a kabbalistic Job in Pico’s twenty-fourth Thesis ‘‘According to the Secret Doctrine of the Jewish Kabbalists’’: ‘‘Where Job affirms ‘He makes peace in his high places’ [ Job 25.2], the meaning is: Southern Water and Northern Fire, as well as their authorities, about whom nothing more can be said.’’ In his Oration, composed after the Thesis, Pico refers to the same biblical verse from the book of Job; however, Pico’s original view based on a passage from Sefer ha-bahir quoted by Recanati,74 was later reread according to a more Hermetic interpretation that saw man as the center of God’s creation and Job as a priscus philosophus. The Scholastic, Maimonidean, Gersonidean conception of a specific providence bestowed by God only on those individuals capable of studying natural sciences and philosophy could evidently apply to a scholarly elite, influenced by Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, represented by the members of the Montalcino and the Medici family, by Alemanno, Forlı`, and the early Pico.75 In contrast, under the impact of late fifteenthcentury Jewish anti-philosophical kabbalistic trends and of Savonarola’s messianic prophetic preaching, Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano, like the late Pico, dismissed their earlier views in order to demonstrate that every member of the religious community (not solely the wise or the philosophical) is the object of an individual divine plan of salvation.

The Shift to the ‘‘Saintly Job’’ The artistic interest in the narrative of Job incidentally appears in yet another late fifteenth-century Florentine masterpiece. A series of five panels, now in the Gema¨ldegalerie in Berlin, offers a full representation of the narrative parts of the book of Job. The exact function of these

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paintings cannot be established. They seem to have been executed by a Florentine master active at the end of the Quattrocento who has been recently identified either as Jacopo del Sellaio or as a disciple of Domenico Ghirlandaio.76 The five panels represent: the death of Job’s children (n. 1347); the messengers of evil news (n. 1346); Job, lying in his bed, visited by friends and physicians and scorned by his wife (n. 1349); Job and his three friends (in the background, God pleading for Job in the presence of his friends, n. 1348); and the repentance of Job and the blessing of God (n. 1350). In each of the five panels Job is represented wearing or having beside him a king’s crown. This detail hints at the identification of Job with a king of Egypt or with Jobab, a king of Edom, mentioned in Gn 36.33.77 Indeed, iconographic patterns very similar to those found in the two above mentioned Florentine Hebrew manuscripts and in the five panels appeared in Tuscan fourteenth-century frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi78 and Bartolo di Fredi,79 who might have resorted to Greek Christian sources and to the Testament of Job,80 a widely known apocryphal treatise, probably composed in Palestine or Egypt in the first century b.c.e., which had been circulating in Europe since Late Antiquity.81 Like the two Hebrew manuscripts, the five painted panels should be considered in the more general context of a common fifteenth-century trend: that which endowed biblical characters with the most significant moral virtues, exemplified through the representation of the classic exempla virtutis (paradigms of virtue). In the fifteenth century, the reappraisal of Greco-Roman literature turned mythical and biblical heroes and heroines into very common decorative motifs for domestic furniture.82 It is worth observing that the fusion of moral exempla drawn from pagan antiquity and biblical characters appears also in Hebrew midrashic production circulating in early Renaissance Italy. For instance, the Sefer ha-yashar (Book of the Righteous) is a miscellany of various midrashic materials dating to different periods, and possibly collected in Southern Italy, in the second half of the Quattrocento.83 There, biblical figures in humanized garb, appear along with Roman mythical heroes whose lives are closely connected to the ancient Jewish figures. Such juxtapositions created a correspondence between different Eastern and Western traditions, according to the prisca theologia view, and aimed to establish more direct connections between present and ancient times. Fifteenth-century painters who read biblical characters according to moral paradigms suitable for their contemporary audience were therefore adopting hermeneutical techniques similar to those used in Hebrew midrashic narrative.84 The same attitude appears, for instance, in the representation of Job in the Picture-Chronicle, generally

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attributed to the fifteenth-century Florentine goldsmith and engraver Maso Finiguerra, but more recently assigned to Baccio Baldini. This series of ninety-nine drawings ‘‘representing scenes and personages of ancient history sacred and profane’’ can be viewed as the best and most complete paradigm in art of the conceptions of the prisca theologia animating Florentine cultural life throughout the fifteenth century.85 The drawings illustrate the history of mankind from Adam to the foundation of Florence by Julius Caesar and follow the patristic and medieval tradition of comparing chronologies located in Greek, Latin, and biblical legends.86 Drawings numbered 22 and 23 of the Picture-Chronicle portray a crowned, scar-covered Job, lying on a heap of straw, according to the first pattern. Drawings nos. 20–21 depict Moses receiving the tables of the law on Mount Sinai: the decorator’s source established therefore that Moses and Job lived in the same period, as stated also by ancient midrashic sources, as well as by Sefer ha-yashar.87 Sefer ha-yashar deals extensively with the different opinions of the three counselors of Pharaoh—Balaam, Job, and Jethro—concerning the massacre of the male children of Israel ordered by the monarch himself.88 From Sefer ha-yashar we are also informed that as a child Moses dared to take Pharaoh’s crown off the king and to place it over his own head. When Balaam was asked to interpret the meaning of this outrageous act, he induced Pharaoh to call upon all the wise men of Egypt, to know whether the child should be executed. Among those men was the angel Gabriel, who suggested placing an onyx stone and a coal of fire before the child as a test. Had the child Moses grasped the precious stone, he would have been killed.89 The main source for medieval Christian representations of the socalled trial of Moses was the twelfth-century compilation of Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica,90 where the legend was drawn from Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities.91 However, Giorgione’s Trial of Moses, now in the Uffizi Gallery, differs strikingly from the previous representations of the subject (Figure 3). Giorgione seems to emphasize details that, for example, do not appear in Benozzo Gozzoli’s version. Gozzoli’s fifteenth-century fresco depicting the trial is clearly based on Comestor’s Historia. Interestingly, Giorgione’s painting, executed around 1500, cannot be explained without resorting to the midrash.92 Unidentified figures depicted near Pharaoh’s throne may represent Pharaoh’s three counselors, Balaam, Jethro, and Job.93 I have mentioned the possibility that Sefer ha-yashar may have been composed in Southern Italy, at the time of the Aragonese rule.94 Through Southern Italy ancient Eastern traditions, brought to Italy via the Byzantine Empire, would have thus reached early sixteenthcentury Jewish and Christian Italian scholars.95 We can also assume that

Figure 3. Giorgione, Trial of Moses. Uffizi, Florence. Early sixteenth century.

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Southern Italian Jewish exiles who chose to move northward after the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples and migrated in great number to the Venetian area could have been the mediators of those literary traditions to Giorgione’s cultured patrons. From this perspective, Giorgione’s painting should be read in the context of the Italian Renaissance reappraisal of different corpora of knowledge, as part of the prisca theologia. Such a tradition, in Venice as in Ferrara or Florence, allowed humanists to link classical and Byzantine traditions with Jewish biblical and postbiblical ones. The trend of giving biblical figures the status of a priscus philosophus came to an end at the turn of the fifteenth century when Tuscan and Venetian artists began to endow their works with profound religious connotations, more frequently stressing episodes particularly associated with the theme of the ‘‘suffering prophet.’’ In Florence, this shift was due largely to the influence of Girolamo Savonarola’s prophetic preaching and eschatological interpretation of the Scripture.96 In this atmosphere of messianic expectation, in great part provoked by the tragic events that befell late fifteenth-century Europe after the fall of Constantinople, it is understandable that the book of Job became an important source for painters. If in prosperous times Job could be considered a universal paradigm for human endurance, the embodiment of the classical temperantia, it was also easily transformed into an augur and allusion to the passion of Christ, whose suffering and final victory had been often read as anticipated in the biblical figure. From this perspective we should then consider three Renaissance Venetian paintings, Giovanni Bellini’s Sacred Allegory (now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence), Carpaccio’s The Preparation for the Burial of Christ (now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin), and The Meditation on the Passion (now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). In the three paintings Job is situated within a metaphysical landscape, a symbol of the perennial cycle of natural life, which dies so it might once more revive, as the tree of the Cross and resurrection (lignum crucis) in the middle of Bellini’s painting and the half-bare half-green tree in Carpaccio’s Preparation would suggest. The two first masterpieces rely on the exegesis of Job 14.7: ‘‘Since even trees may hope: if they are cut down they blossom and their sprouts never cease growing,’’97 whereas in the Metropolitan Museum painting the reference verse is ‘‘carved’’ in Hebrew letters on the block of stone upon which Job sits: ‘‘My Redeemer liveth’’ (Job 19.25) (Figure 4). These examples illustrate quite well a new hermeneutic of the Bible through art. A biblical verse is now explained through an image: the careful philological study of the Hebrew Scripture carried out by the humanists eventually resulted in the artistic representation of a specific

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Figure 4. Vittore Carpaccio, The Meditation on the Passion. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Mid-1490s.

text instead of an entire episode. In lieu of the traditional reproduction of very important accounts of the Bible, addressed to an ordinary audience who could but resort to the painted surfaces of the churches to better understand the history of salvation, late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century patrons started requesting forms of pictorial exegesis based on their concern with the Hebraica Veritas. The literal meaning of the biblical text was now the basis for the allegoric and anagogic message conveyed by visual arts. The close intellectual relationships between Jewish and Christian scholars were partly responsible for this artistic shift, as it is evident, especially in the Ferrara and Venetian environments, in the numerous Christian paintings that reproduce Hebrew verses copied by the skilled hand of a Jewish scribe.98 In this context, Job turns from the active intellectual dear to humanists to the prophet who meditates on the passion of the Christ, according

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to a Savonarolian vision. By transforming into images this allegorical reading of an individual verse of the Scripture, Renaissance artists were also reviving another traditional category of iconography, according to which Job, like John the Baptist, should be seen as a forerunner of Christ.99 Still in the context of the prisca theologia view, which may embrace also the just mentioned tradition, Marsilio Ficino stressed the role played by Job at the beginning of his Letter VIII, 8 to Paolo Ferobanti (Confirmatio Christianorum per Socratica), where we have a direct mention of Job as a forerunner of Christ: ‘‘If I did not fear, excellent Paolo, that there would be some who, through the perversity of their nature or through narrowmindedness, would contrive to take everything in a sense other than the one we intend, I would show that Socrates was, so to speak, a forerunner of Christ, the author of salvation, not in the manner of Job and John the Baptist, yet perhaps in a way he foreshadowed Christ.’’100 Ficino’s quotation may remind us of a mid-fourteenth-century Byzantine mosaic in the Baptistry of San Marco Basilica, Venice, where John the Baptist is portrayed as Job.101 This apparently unusual iconography is grounded in the exegetical tradition of both Greek and Latin Church Fathers, who viewed Job ‘‘as the prophet of a new life.’’102 Ficino’s textual reference and the above-mentioned Venetian paintings may thus be related to the fifteenth-century revival of Byzantine traditions both in Florence, where Greek scholars had introduced new intellectual material since at least the third decade of the Quattrocento, and in Venice, who saw herself as the heir of Byzantium, especially after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. The iconography of Job appearing in Venetian paintings is also associated with an another peculiarity which can be found in Northern Italian territories influenced by Byzantium: the trend to worship patriarchs and other heroes of the Old Testament who were venerated as saints by the Eastern Church.103 In Venice as well as in other Northern Italian cities,104 since the end of the fourteenth century the worship of Job had given birth to both religious and secular brotherhoods dedicated to the biblical figure.105 The function of those brotherhoods was generally aimed at charity, but they could also serve as gathering places for musicians’ guilds, which had elected Job as their patron saint.106 This is perhaps based on the apocryphal Testament of Job in which musicians are said to accompany Job’s own worship.107 Indeed, if we turn our attention to Giovanni Bellini’s very first altarpiece, entitled Enthroned Virgin with Saints, we observe that Job is depicted nude and stands beside the Madonna, while angels in the lower part of the painting play musical instruments108 (Figure 5). We should remark that, although in the Venetian paintings the bibli-

Figure 5. Giovanni Bellini, Enthroned Virgin with Saints (St. Job’s Altarpiece). Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Ca. 1487.

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cal character appears also as the patron of lepers,109 he is always portrayed as free from blemish, like Saint Job in the Byzantine area.110 The presence of an iconographic pattern related to Byzantine Saint Job in the decoration of a very rich Mah.zor should be associated with the interest in fifteenth-century art shared by wealthy Italian Jewish and nonJewish families. In the very famous Rothschild Miscellany (MS Jerusalem, Israel Museum 180/51), which was probably copied and illuminated in Ferrara (ca. 1454–79),111 two miniatures depict episodes from the book of Job, referring to the two prose sections of the biblical script. Fol. 64v illustrates the final chapter and fol. 65v the beginning of the book, the former illustration being based on Job 42.12, the latter on Job 1.3.112 The full-page miniature on fol. 65v depicts Job’s initial wealth. Workers within an idyllic rural setting are shown in Job’s fertile fields, while in the foreground shepherds are tending Job’s flocks.113 In representing a typical Italian countryside, the illuminator also hints at the ‘‘exotic’’ setting of the book of Job: in the lower right part of the scene dromedaries appear along with sheep, oxen, and donkeys, thus faithfully following the introductory section of the biblical book. On fol. 64v, Job is represented in the garb of a Renaissance signore, seated in the niche of a portico. An Oriental rug is spread under his feet, according to a very common iconographic cliche´ used in Renaissance paintings to depict Madonnas and saints. Job points out his seven sons, standing to the right. On his left are his three daughters.114 This unique scene emphasizes115 the fact that the Renaissance patron of the manuscript intentionally chose to identify with Job, thus stressing his wealthy status, rather than the afflictions Job had to endure (Figure 6). As stated, the iconographic tradition expressed in the Rothschild Miscellany depends on decorative schemes rather common in Byzantine area where the dynamic vitality of the Job story was more relevant than his affliction. However, while in the Byzantine tradition Job triumphs because of his status of Christian saint who has already attained the supernal happiness,116 in the Rothschild miscellany the human characteristics of Job are more stressed, according to humanist standards and in order to better fit to the religious concerns of the Jewish patron. In conclusion, the study of the iconography of Job in Renaissance Italy reveals the extent and range of cultural contact and exchange between Jews and Christians. Christian humanists were eager to investigate the Hebrew Scripture by resorting also to traditional Jewish hermeneutics. At the same time, the Jewish social and intellectual elite who provided their non-Jewish colleagues with new sources of wisdom showed their willingness to fully participate in the social and intellectual dynamics of the Italian Renaissance by seizing inspiration from Christian art for the

Figure 6. Anonymous, Job. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, MS 180/51, fol. 64v. Ferrara (?), ca. 1454–79.

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decoration of their own manuscripts. Through the adoption of both Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the Bible, Renaissance Christian art developed a new sort of biblical exegesis, in which traditional iconographies were reread by means of the humanist conception of a hidden wisdom coming from the East, the prisca theologia. Job, the righteous Gentile who believed in the God of Israel and anticipated the passion of Christ, manifestly represents the humanist attempt to merge Greek, Latin, and Oriental lores in order to create a universal system of common intellectual and religious values.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1:422. 2. For some enlargement on these issues, see the introduction to my Midrash and Theory: Ancient Biblical Interpretation and Contemporary Literary Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 1–12. 3. Robert M. Grant with David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984 [1963]). 4. Martin Jan Mulder, ed., Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Assen/Mastricht: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); and Magne Sæbø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300), Part 1: Antiquity; Part 2: The Middle Ages. These two works are also not the only multivolume histories of biblical interpretation in production: see as well William Yarchin, A History of Biblical Interpretation: A Reader (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004); and Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, eds., A History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003). 5. To be sure, there are still omissions. While there is an excellent treatment of Karaite exegesis, there is hardly any mention of Islamic interpretation (of either the Bible or of the Qur’an), but I daresay that it is only time before Islamic exegesis will also be brought into the fold. 6. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, vol. 1, part 1, 745. 7. The article was published in Recherches de Science Religieuse 58 (1955): 194– 227. An English translation, ‘‘Methodological Note for the Study of Rabbinic Literature,’’ appears in Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice, ed. W. S. Green (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978), 51–76. See also her article ‘‘Midrash,’’ first in published in Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible 5 (Paris, 1957), cols. 1263–81, and translated in the same volume of Approaches, 29–50. 8. ‘‘Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis,’’ in The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1:199–231. See also Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1973), which includes many of his early studies of comparative exegesis. 9. See her references in ‘‘Midrash,’’ 30, to A. Robert, ‘‘Le sens du mot Loi dans le ps. CXIX,’’ Revue Biblique (1937): 205–6. The term ‘‘inner-Biblical exegesis’’ was coined by Nahum Sarna, ‘‘Psalm 89: A Study in Inner Biblical Exegesis,’’ in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 29–46, reprinted in Nahum Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), 377–94.

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10. Bloch, ‘‘Midrash,’’ 29. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. Paul Kahle, The Cairo Genizah (The Schweich Lectures 1941) (London: British Academy, 1947). 13. Bloch, ‘‘Midrash,’’ 31. 14. Ibid., 48. Within this historiography, the Palestinian targumim occupied a pivotal position; see Bloch’s remarks on p. 47. Targum is not merely a ‘‘version’’ like the Septuagint. Rather, it ‘‘includes already the entire structure and all the motifs of midrash.’’ 15. Vermes, ‘‘Midrash and Bible,’’ 220. 16. Ibid., 221 17. The field of recent scholarly literature on orality and literature is vast. For a recent sampling of trends specifically in relation to ancient Jewish literature, see the special issue of Oral Tradition 14 (1999) devoted to the topic. The most recent monograph of importance is Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE–400 CE (New York: Oxford, 2001). 18. Kugel’s magnum opus is Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), which is an expanded version of the earlier The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990); and his book co-authored with Rowan Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). 19. The quote from Kugel is from Traditions of the Bible, 24. Kugel first spelled out the point in his ‘‘Two Introductions to Midrash,’’ Prooftexts 3 (1983), repr. in G. Hartman and S. Budick, Midrash and Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 77–103. For ‘‘memorial’’ culture, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 20. Kugel, Traditions, 14–19. 21. Ibid., 20. 22. Ibid., 18. 23. For Sarna, see n. 9 above; I. Seeligman, ‘‘Voraussetzungen der MidraschExegese,’’ Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 1 (1953): 150–81. Cf. the works of Joseph Heinemann, Agadot ve-toldotehen (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), and articles by various scholars like Avigdor Shinan, Yair Zakovitch, and Jordan Penkower; the comparative tracing of motifs has become a kind of growth industry, particularly in Israel. It is worth noting, however, that most of the major theoretical and substantive developments in the field have taken place in America or Europe. 24. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), and The Garments of Torah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), but see as well Fishbane’s earliest article on the subject, ‘‘Torah and Tradition,’’ in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 275–300. 25. On the middot and their background, including recent bibliography on their background, see H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. M. Bockmeuhl, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 15–30. 26. Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 4. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. David Daube, ‘‘Rabbinic Methods of Interpretation,’’ Hebrew Union College

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Annual 22 (1949): 239–64; and his later semi-retraction, ‘‘Alexandrian Methods of Interpretation and the Rabbis,’’ Festschrift Hans Lewald (Basel: Helbing and Lichtenhahn, 1953), 27–44, reprinted in Essays in Greco-Roman and Related Talmudic Literature, ed. H. Fischel (New York: Ktav, 1977). Daube’s retraction was occasioned by Saul Lieberman’s definitive treatment in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950), 47–82. See Lieberman for additional bibliography on scholars before him who dealt with the topic. 29. Judah Hadassi, Sefer Eshkol ha-kofer (1836; repr. Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), 124b. As cited and discussed by Lieberman in Hellenism, 55–56. 30. The discussion in this paragraph and the following ones draws on my Midrash and Theory, 1–13. 31. The most powerful statement of this antinomy was first proposed by Susan A. Handelman in The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), followed by, among others, Jose Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), and Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 32. Sara Japhet, ‘‘Major Trends in the Study of Medieval Jewish Exegesis,’’ Terumah 9 (2000): 43–61. 33. The literature on influence and on its current re-appraisal is vast. A helpful place to begin, at least in reference to literary studies, is Louis A. Renza, ‘‘Influence,’’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Lettricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 186–202. See as well the special issue of the Journal of Medieval Modern Studies 32.1 (2002) devoted to the topic of ‘‘Appropriation,’’ especially the introduction, ‘‘The Cultural Processes of ‘Appropriation,’ ’’ by Kathleen Ashley and Veronique Plesch, 1–15. I want to thank Deeana Klepper for referring me to the latter text. 34. Peter Schaefer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 229–32. 35. On appropriation that ‘‘kills’’ its sources, see Schaefer, Mirror of His Beauty, 232, who explicitly draws on Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence. For other modalities of appropriation, see the helpful discussion in Ashley and Plesch, ‘‘The Cultural Processes of ‘Appropriation’,’’ 4–6, with the references to Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘‘colonial mimicry’’ (‘‘at once resemblance and menace,’’ Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture [New York: Routledge, 1994], 86) and Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘‘transculturation’’ (Under Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [New York: Routledge, 1992]). The precise relevance of these postcolonial categories to ancient and medieval texts remains to be worked out. Pro temp, see Claire Sponsler, ‘‘In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe,’’ Journal of Medieval Modern Studies 32.1 (2002): 17–39.

1. Interpreting Torah Traditions in Psalm 105 This chapter was written while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania (2001–2). I thank the Center and also the General Research Board and the College of Arts and Humanities of the University of Maryland for their support of this project.

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1. See Judith Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 104–5, 203. 2. Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, completed by Joachim Begrich, trans. J. D. Nogalski (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1998), 247–49. 3. A good discussion of the historical psalms is A. A. Anderson, ‘‘Psalms,’’ in It Is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture, Essays in Honour of Barnabas Lindars, ed. D. A. Carson and H. G. M. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988), 56–66, esp. 59–62. 4. This position is epitomized by Samuel E. Loewenstamm, The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition, trans. B. J. Schwartz (Hebrew original, 1965; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992). See also Loewenstamm, ‘‘The Number of Plagues in Psalm 105,’’ Biblica 52 (1971): 38, where he finds that Pss 78 and 105 preserve a plague tradition older than the Pentateuch. These two psalms ‘‘reflect two separate, original and simultaneously existing traditions’’ (The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition, 97). Archie C. C. Lee, ‘‘Genesis I and the Plagues Tradition in Psalm CV,’’ Vetus Testamentum 40 (1990): 258, modifies this position slightly, suggesting that the plagues tradition remained fluid in the Second Temple period despite the authority of the Pentateuch. 5. See S. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions in Psalm 105,’’ Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute 11 (1977/78): 25. On occasion one finds a combination of the historical-critical and the rhetorical-critical approaches, resulting in a logical contradiction. For example, ‘‘The number and order of the plagues differ in Ps 105 from both Ex 7.14–12.32 and Ps 78.44–51, perhaps reflecting a different tradition and illustrating that the poet’s purpose was not historical accuracy’’ (J. Clinton McCann, Jr. ‘‘Psalms,’’ New Interpreter’s Bible IV [Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1996], 1105). McCann wants to have his cake (multiple traditions) and eat it too (the poet takes liberties). 6. B. Margulis, ‘‘The Plagues Tradition in Ps 105,’’ Biblica 50 (1969): 496. Margulis, already in 1969, writes that ‘‘we are in a position to understand the absence of ‘boils’ in the Psalm as a problem of inner-biblical exegesis rather than as a highly problematical witness for an independent plague tradition.’’ 7. Compare Newman, Praying by the Book, 13: ‘‘Scripturalization differs from the process of ‘inner biblical interpretation’ . . . because the reuse of scripture does not necessarily entail the presumed author’s conscious interpretation of scripture.’’ Likewise, B. Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17: ‘‘By ‘exegesis’ I mean an attempt to analyze, explain, or give meaning to (or uncover meaning in) a text.’’ 8. See Kugel, ‘‘The Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,’’ Prooftexts 7 (1987): 280. For a different critique of the category of inner-biblical exegesis, see L. Eslinger, ‘‘Inner-Biblical Exegesis and Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Question of Category,’’ Vetus Testamentum 42 (1992): 45–58. 9. Sommer, A Prophet, 23, correctly differentiates allusion from exegesis. He finds ‘‘inner biblical exegesis,’’ as it is generally used, to be too broad and hence inaccurate and would rename it ‘‘inner biblical allusion and exegesis.’’ I overcome the same problem by using the term ‘‘inner-biblical interpretation’’ instead of ‘‘inner-biblical exegesis.’’ 10. This is the assumption of Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), and others who study inner-biblical interpretation (how else could one find references in the Bible to earlier biblical texts?). But even earlier scholars, writing before the study of inner-biblical inter-

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pretation, were struck by the similarity of the language of the psalm and the language of the traditions to which it refers. See note 6. 11. Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60–150: A Commentary, trans. H. C. Oswald (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1989), 311, notes the emphasis on the sovereign rule of God. 12. C. A. Briggs, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1907), 2:345. 13. J. J. Stewart Perowne, The Book of Psalms (London: George Bell and Sons, 1879), 2:253. 14. Leslie C. Allen, Psalms 101–150 (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1983), 41. In his revised edition (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2002), Allen is much more accepting of the inner-biblical interpretations at work in this psalm. 15. Briggs, A Critical, 347. Briggs finds the hand of a glossator at numerous points in the psalm. 16. See Peter R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), 90, 93. 17. S. Weitzman made a similar observation about the pentateuchal allusions in Tobit, in ‘‘Allusion, Artifice, and Exile in the Hymn of Tobit,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 60. 18. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 27, explains: ‘‘Ps. 105 is based on the exile. . . . The exile and the delivery is a repetition of the exodus.’’ In fact, the idea is an old one; Perowne ascribes it to E. W. Hengstenberg (Commentar u¨ber die Psalmen, 1849–52) but then rejects it (The Book of Psalms, 248–49). Leslie C. Allen approaches the idea when he finds Joseph’s suffering analogous to, although not identical with, exile. He notes: ‘‘Joseph’s experience was that of Israel in miniature. The path to glory lay through suffering—and had not Israel suffered in exile?’’ (Psalms 101–150, 43; rev. ed., 58). 19. For the use of typology in the Hebrew Bible, see Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 350–79, esp. 375–79 for Abraham and Jacob as types in the postexilic period. 20. For discussions of the Abrahams theme, see Newman, Praying by the Book, 53; Bernard Gosse, ‘‘L’Alliance avec Abraham et les relectures de l’histoire d’Israe¨l en Ne 9, Ps 105–106, 135–136 et 1 Ch 16,’’ Transeuphrate`ne 15 (1998): 123–35; C. J. S. Lombaard, ‘‘Some Remarks on the Patriarchs in the Psalms,’’ Old Testament Essays 11.1 (1998): 59–70. 21. Compare Is 41.8–9, which also closes the gap between the patriarchs and the prophet’s exilic audience, who, like Abraham, were taken from the ends of the earth. See Sara Japhet, ‘‘People and Land in the Restoration Period,’’ in Das Land Israel in biblischer Zeit, ed. G. Strecker (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983), 108. 22. The psalmist puts words in God’s mouth again in v. 15. Cf. Ps 50.16, 68.23, and 78.19 (in the last, words are put into the mouth of other characters). See Newman, Praying by the Book, 111. For more on God’s quotations in Psalms, see now Rolf A. Jacobson, ‘‘Many Are Saying’’: The Function of Direct Discourse in the Hebrew Psalter (London and New York: T and T Clark, 2004), 82–130. 23. While h.evel and nah.alah are associated wordpairs, the only other time they occur together in one expression is in Ps 78.55. This verse is difficult to construe; it may mean either that the tribes of Israel were God’s possession or that the tribes were given the land of the nations as their possession. 24. C. Stuhlmueller, ‘‘The Psalms,’’ in Harper’s Bible Commentary (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 481, seemed to be moving toward the same con-

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clusion but he thinks rather that ‘‘the land is affirmed as the allotted portion for all Israel in language reminiscent of Levites for whom the Lord was their allotted portion and cup.’’ He cites Dt 32.9 and Ps 16.5; the latter is not verbally identical. 25. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 24. 26. Noted by Brooke, ‘‘Psalms 105 and 106 at Qumran,’’ Revue de Qumran 14 (1989): 276. 27. A classic example is 2 Chr 35.13, where the instructions for preparing the paschal animal in Ex 12.9 (roasted in fire) and in Dt 16.7 (boiled) are combined by the Chronicler into ‘‘boiled . . . in fire.’’ 28. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 24–25. 29. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2002), 71–72. 30. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 25. 31. See H. van Grol, ‘‘ ‘Indeed, Servants We Are’: Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9 and 2 Chronicles 12 Compared,’’ in The Crisis of Israelite Religion, ed. B. Becking and M. C. A. Korpel (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 209–27. 32. I found this same technique in Qumran texts (or perhaps I should say that I used the same hermeneutic move to interpret Qumran texts). See my ‘‘Qumran Laments and the Study of Lament Literature,’’ in Fifth Orion International Symposium, Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. E. G. Chazon (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–17. 33. Newman, Praying by the Book, 104, notes that this type of interpretation may be ‘‘subtle or slight enough better to be termed ‘spin.’ These extra interpretive elements have worked their way into the warp and woof of the prayer.’’ 34. This is not the only form in which exegetical comments may occur in the Bible, but it is the case in Psalm 105. 35. Lieve M. Teugels, Agadat Bereshit (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 183. 36. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 26. He notes that the verb z-w-b in connection with water and the noun tsiyyah do not occur in Exodus but are found in Isaiah’s descriptions of the end of the exile (Is 48.21, 41.18). 37. See Peter Enns, Exodus Retold. Ancient Exegesis of the Departure from Egypt in Wis 15–21 and 19.1–9 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 46–52. 38. Midrash Rabbah: Exodus, trans. S. M. Lehrman (London: Soncino, 1939), 146. Other postbiblical literature stresses the destructive nature of the hail against humans, for instance, Artapanus 3.27:33: ‘‘Moses brought about hail and earthquakes through the night so that those who fled the earthquakes were killed by the hail and those who avoided the hail were destroyed by the earthquakes’’ (Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983], 2:902). 39. Holm-Nielsen, ‘‘The Exodus Traditions,’’ 26. 40. L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961), 2:373–74. Ginzberg references Midrash Tehillim Shoher Tov on our verse and on Ps 114.1, but that midrashic source does not reference the Exodus passage. 41. James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 324. 42. Midrash Haggadol on the Pentateuch: Exodus, ed. from various manuscripts by M. Margulies (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1956), 88. I thank Yaakov Elbaum for help in locating this source. 43. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2:817.

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44. See my Lamentations, a Commentary (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 96. 45. See Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 334–35; Enns, Exodus Retold, 56–59. 46. The Bible as It Was, 358 and 464. 2. Cain 1. For inner-biblical interpretation, see M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). For early postbiblical interpretations, see J. L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 85–86; Kugel, Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2. For ytynq as ‘‘I have created,’’ see Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the book of Genesis, trans. I. Abrahams, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1961), 1:201; C. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1994), 290. For the meaning of ’et YHWH (with YHWH), see Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 290–92; G. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 (Waco, Tx.: Word Books, 1987), 101–2. 3. See J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary of Genesis, The International Critical Commentary (New York: Scribner, 1910), 102–3; E. Lipinski, hnq, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapid, Mich.: Eerdmans 2004 ), 13:58–65. 4. The Life of Adam and Eve 21.3, trans. L. S. A. Wells, in R. H. Charles et al., eds., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (henceforth APOT; Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 2:138. The tradition about the shining face of Cain probably gave rise to the name ‘‘Adiaphotos,’’ given to him in the Apocalypse of Moses (APOT), 1.3. Cf. the different interpretations brought by M. D. Johnson, in his introduction to his translation of the Life of Adam and Eve (The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. J. H. Charlesworth [New York: Doubleday, 1985], 2:267, n. 1), and J. Tromp, ‘‘Cain and Abel in the Greek and Armenian/Georgian Recesions of the ’Life of Adam and Eve,’ ’’ in Literature on Adam and Eve, ed. G. Anderson, M. Stone and J. Tromp (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 277–96. It is possible that the identification of Cain with the sun in ‘‘The Secret Book according to John’’ 10.34 (B. Layton, ed. and trans., The Gnostic Scriptures [New York: Doubleday, 1987], 36) is based on a similar tradition. The motif of the shining Cain appears in a negative form in Genesis Rabbah 4, 15, ed. Theodor (Berlin, 1903–28), 219. Here, however, it is within the the description of Cain after his sin. 5. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. H. Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967–69), 5:135. 6. See Amos 5.26 and the comment of Shalom M. Paul, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1991), 196. 7. See Kugel, The Bible as It Was, 85–86; idem, Traditions of the Bible, 146. 8. 1 Enoch 106, APOT, 2:278. 9. D. Barthelemy and J. T. Milik, 1Q19, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 1 (henceforth DJD; Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 85; The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1, trans. J. A. Fitzmyer, 2nd rev. ed. (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1971), 187. 10. Cf. the description of David in the Qumranic Psalms Scroll, 48:3–4, The Psalms Scroll of Qumraˆn Cave 11 (11QPs a), J. A. Sanders, DJD 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 92–93, and the discussion of M. Kister, ‘‘Levi⳱Light’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 45 (1976): 329. 11. Genesis Apocryphon 2, 1–3, The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1, p. 51.

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12. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer § 22, ed. J. Friedlander (New York: Hermon Press, 1965), 161. Cf. 4 Ezra 6.21. 13. See F. Garcia Martı´nez, E. J. C. Tigchelaar, and A. S. van der Woude, eds., Manuscripts from Qumran Cave 11, DJD 23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 198–201. 14. ‘‘The Qumran Songs against Demons’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 55 (1986): 443. 15. On the demonic character of the fruits of the union of angels and human mothers, see 1 Enoch 10.15, 15.8–9, 11–12. Cf. Dimant, ‘‘’The Fallen Angels’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic Books Related to Them‘‘ (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1974), 62, n. 221a; B. Nitzan, ‘‘Hymns from Qumran 'lhblw djpl' Evil Ghosts’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 55 (1986): 24–27. 16. bSotah 12a; cf. the description of the birth of Abraham in A. Jellinek, Bet ha-midrasch, 1:26, and the parallel stories discussed by R. Mach, Der Zaddik in Talmud und Midrash (Leiden: Brill, 1957), 69–70, 74. 17. Deuteronomy Rabbah §11 end. Cf. Mach, Der Zaddik, 70–73. 18. See A. Caquot, ‘‘Les enfants aux cheveux blancs,’’ Me´lange d’histoire des religions offerts a` Henri-Charles Puech, ed. S. Lassier (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1974), 170; John C. Reeves, ‘‘Utnapishtim in the book of Giants?’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 112 (1993): 111–12. For a critique of Reeves’s theory regarding the divine origin of Noah, see R. V. Huggins, ‘‘Noah and the Giants: A Response to John C. Reeves,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 114 (1995): 103–10. 19. On the illuminating quality of the Messiah, see I. Gruenwald, ‘‘From Sunrise to Sunset,’’ in The Messianic Idea in Jewish Thought: A Study Conference in Honour of the Eightieth Birthday of Gershom Scholem (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1982), 21–23. 20. On Noah as Messiah, see Dimant, ‘‘ ‘The Fallen Angels,’‘‘ 110–17. For the scholarly debate whether to identify the person described in 4Q534 1.10 as ’’the chosen of God‘‘ with Noah, see the recent survey of James R. Davila, ‘‘4QMESS AR (4Q534) and Merkavah Mysticism,’’ Dead Sea Discoveries 5.3 (1998): 367–68. 21. See Gn 5.3–5. 22. See throughout Gn 1, Gn 2.2–3. 23. As in Gn 4.1, 3–4, 6, 9, 13, 15–16. 24. For a review of the different scholarly interpretations of this verse, see S. Sandmel, ‘‘Genesis 4.26b,’’ HUCA 32 (1961): 19–29. 25. The notion that we have here an editorial addition has been suggested by several scholars. See J. M. Miller, ‘‘The Descendants of Cain: Notes on Gn 4,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r die Altestamentliche Wissenschaft 86 (1974): 165, n. 6. However, my reconstruction of the original text and my understanding of the editorial process are new. The discussion here is based on my study ‘‘Cain: The Forefather of Humanity,’’ in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume, ed. C. Cohen, A. Hurvitz, and S. M. Paul (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 63–68. Similar views were expressed simultaneously and independently by R. L. Kohn, ‘‘Whom Did Cain Raise?’’ in Le-David Maskil: A Birthday Tribute for David Noel Freedman, ed. R. E. Freedman and W. H. C. Propp (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 39–46. 26. See Gn 5.1, 24. 27. See Gn 3.17–18, 4.11–12. 28. This has been suggested by several scholars; see Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 359–60; Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 80.

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29. It is possible that the name of the wife, Adah or Zillah, was also mentioned here. 30. It is true that the Samaritan version, ljh, can be vocalized like the Masoretic text. However, later Samaritan literature attests the reading hehel. See Steven D. Fraade, Enosh and his Generation (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984), 29–38. The reading ljh (⳱ ‘he began’) is reflected also in the Vulgate and in the Syriac version and in the book of Jubilees 4.12. It seems that the Septuagint reflects a Hebrew text that read ljwh but was interpreted as lyjwh, ‘‘he hoped.’’ See Fraade, Enosh, 5–11; also Fraade, ‘‘Enosh and His Generation Revisited,’’ in Biblical Figures outside the Bible, ed. M. E. Stone and T. A. Bergen (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), 62. The Septuagint, Jubilees, and the Vulgate probably reflect a version in which zeh stood instead of ’az. As for the reason for the change from ’az to zeh, see n. 37 below. 31. The association of this verse has been suggested by Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, 247. 32. See Otto Proksch, Die Genesis u¨bersetzt und erkla¨rt (Leipzig: Erlangen, 1924), 58. 33. This has been already suggested by I. Lewy, ‘‘The Beginning of the Worship of YAHWEH: Conflicting Biblical Views,’’ Vetus Testamentum 6 (1956): 429– 35. However, I cannot accept his theory that Gn 4.26b stood originally after verse 16. 34. On the redaction of the Pentateuch by the Holiness School, see Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1995), 101–3; J. Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1337–34. 35. Another minor change was needed here: the replacement of the regular formula ˚ml ta dlwyw to the irregular ˜b dlwyw at the ending of verse 28. 36. Cf. M. Noth, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. B. W. Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 12, n. 26. 37. According to our reconstruction, the words 'h µçb awrql ljh za referred originally to Lamech. In their original set they ended the story about Lamech and were connected to the rest of the chapter. As a result of the editorial process, these words were left disconnected. This led to the various emendations attested in the different ancient versions. In the Masoretic text, ljh was changed to ljwh, thus creating a passive form, so that it is an anonymous body of people who started to invoke the Lord by name. In another tradition (reflected in the Septuagint, Jubilees, and the Vulgate), these words were interpreted as if they referred to Enosh. However, the word ’az which looked awkward in its new setting, was changed to zeh. 38. On this polarization in early postbiblical sources, see Fraade, Enosh, 25–27 and n. 77. 39. See Skinner, Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 105. 40. See Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 188. 41. See Levenson, Death and Resurrection, 69–81. 42. Gn 4.14; see also Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 310. 43. See Bloom and Rosenberg, Book of J, 188. 44. Cf. M. I. Gruber, ‘‘The Tragedy of Cain and Abel: A Case of Depression,’’ Jewish Quarterly Review 69 (1978–79): 89–97. 45. I agree with W. Hallo, ‘‘Antediluvian Cities,’’ Journal of Cuneiform Studies 23 (1970): 64; Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 327; and N. Sarna, Genesis: The JPS

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Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 36, who maintain that J sees the founding of the first city as an achievement of human civilization. For a different view, see G. Wallis, ‘‘Die Stadt in den Uberlieferungen der Genesis,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r die Altestamentliche Wissenschaft 78 (1966): 133–48; F. S. Frick, The City in Ancient Israel (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977), 205–7; Bloom and Rosenberg, The Book of J, 188. Cf. T. Hiebert, The Yahwist Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 42–43. On the motif of development of humanity through sin in the J source, see Knohl, The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 37–45. 46. For a discussion of parallel traditions in the ancient Near East, about the seven sages who lived before the flood, see R. R. Wilson, Genealogy and History in the Biblical World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 149–54. 47. 4 Macc 18.7–8, ed. H. Anderson, in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2:563. 48. b‘Avodah Zarah 22b; for other references and discussion of the talmudic materials, see J. Goldberg, ‘‘Kain: Sohn des Menschen oder Sohn der Schlange?’’ Judaica 25 (1969): 203–21. For general discussion of Cain in rabbinic literature, see V. Aptowitzer, Kain und Abel in der Agada, den Apokryphen, der hellenistischen, christlichen und muhammedanischen Literatur (Vienna: R. Lo¨wit, 1922). 49. See 1 John 3.9–11. Cf. R. Brown, The Epistles of John (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 405, 441–42; T. C. Kuif, ‘‘Nicht wie Kain (der) vom Bo¨sen war. . . . (1 John 3,13),’’ Bijdrage 41 (1980): 47–63. On the possibility that the text of John 8.44 reflects similar tradition, see the discussion of G. Reim, ‘‘Joh. 8:44Gotteskinder—Teufelskinder,’’ New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 619–24. 50. The Gospel According to Philip 61.5–10 (Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 336). Cain was the child of the serpent. There is a Gnostic tradition according to which Cain was begotten by the rulers; see The Reality of the Rulers 91.11 (Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 72). According to the Gnostic tradition mentioned by St. Epiphanius, Against Heresies 40.5.3 (Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 197), both Cain and Abel were begotten by the devil. Cf. G. A. G. Stroumsa, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 38–49. 51. Tertullian, On Patience 5.15; cf. N. A. Dahl, ‘‘Die erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels,’’ in Apophoreta: Festschrift Ernst Ha¨nchen zu seinem 70. Geburtstag am 10. Dezember 1964, ed. W. Eltester (Berlin: To¨pelmann, 1964), 70–84. 52. See Goldberg, Kain, 213, 219. 53. PRE § 21, ed. J. Friedlander (New York, 1970), 150–51. Cf. PRE § 22, p. 158; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Gn 4.1 says similarly: ‘‘Adam knew his wife Eve who had conceived from Samael, the angel of the Lord.’’ See M. Maher, trans. and ed., Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Genesis (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), and the discussions of E. Cashdan, ‘‘Names and Interpretations of Names in the Pseudo-Jonathan Targum to the Book of Genesis,’’ in Essays Presented to the Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, 2 vols., ed. H. J. Zimmels and J. Rabbinowitz (London: Soncino, 1967); A. Shinan, The Embroidered Targum (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992), 130–31; C. T. R. Hayward, ‘‘Pirqey deRabbi Eliezer and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan,’’ Journal of Jewish Studies 42 (1991): 223; F. Garcia Martı´nez, ‘‘Samma’el in Pseudo-Jonathan and the Origin on Evil,’’ Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 30 (2004): 19–41. 54. The name of Samael is not mentioned explicitly in PRE, only in the parallel tradition in PJ; however, as was noted by Friedlander, it is clear that he is the

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figure who rides the serpent in PRE. On Samael, see the bibliography listed by J. Dan, ‘‘Armilus: The Jewish Antichrist and the Origins and Dating of the SEFER ZERBBAVEL,’’ in Toward the Millennium, ed. P. Shaefer and M. R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 104, n. 71. According to the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch 9.7–8, Samael took the serpent as a garment at the time of Adam’s sin. 55. The Book of Jubilees, the book of Enoch, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and others. 56. PRE § 22, ed. Friedlander, pp. 158–59. 57. ‘‘The Acceptance of Sacrifices from Gentiles’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 48 (1979): 341–45. 58. See D. R. Schwartz, Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 108–14. 59. See Knohl, ‘‘Acceptance of Sacrifice,’’ 342; Y. Gilat, ‘‘A Comment to ’The Acceptance of Sacrifices of Gentiles’ ’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 49 (1980): 422–23, and the comment of E. E. Urbach, ibid., 423, n. 3. 60. At the end of the story about Jonah in PRE §10 it is said about the sailors: ‘‘Did they offer a sacrifice? Is it not that we do not accept sacrifices from the Gentiles?’’ The second question ‘‘Is it not that we do not accept sacrifices from the Gentiles?’’ is represented only in part of the textual witnesses of PRE but it seems to be part of the original version; see Knohl, ‘‘Acceptance of Sacrifice,’’ 344. 61. Knohl, Divine Symphony, 342–43. 62. See the references at ibid., 343, nn. 16–17. 63. See E. Qimron and J. Strugnell, Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Tora, DJD 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 46, ll. 8–9. 64. Ibid., 150; Israel Knohl, ‘‘Re-Considering the Dating and Recipient of Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Tora,’’ Hebrew Studies 37 (1996): 119–25. 65. ‘‘R. Simeon b. Yohai called them (i.e., the bne-’elohim) the sons of the nobles; R. Simeon b. Yohai cursed all who called them sons of God.’’ Genesis Rabbah 26.5, 2, ed. Theodor (Berlin, 1903–28), 247. P. S. Alexander notes that the verses in Gn 6.1–4 were not a key-text for the early Christians in the debate on the divine sonship of Jesus and hence he concludes that the curse of R. Simeon reflects an anti-Christian polemic. He prefers to see R. Simeon’s curse as a condemnation of the possibility that angels will sin (P. S. Alexander, ‘‘The Targumim and Early Exegises of ’Sons of God’ in Genesis 6,’’ Journal of Jewish Studies 23 [1972]: 62). However, there are two problems with Alexander’s explanation: (1) As noted by Alexander himself, the sin of the angels is mentioned in a tannaitic saying in bYoma 67b; (2) Alexander himself notes (p. 68) that the problems with the possibility of sinning angels or a possibility of angels’ procreation ‘‘are in a sense obvious; neither involves anything especially new, so we would still require a reason why they should have been advanced so strongly at that precise time.’’ Alexander’s effort (pp. 69–70) to connect the saying of R. Simeon to the growing of Gnostic trends resulting from the failure of the rebellion of 132–35 c.e. is not convincing. In my view it is better to see R. Simeon’s curse as an anti-Christian polemic. While it is true that the verses in Gn 6.1–4 were not a key-text for the early Christians in the debate on the divine sonship of Jesus, still this is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where there is clear evidence for the possibility of sexual relationship between divine beings and human females. Thus, in Jewish eyes these verses could serve as an argument for the possibility of the divine sonship of Jesus.

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3. Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law 1. For comparative purposes I am focusing throughout on male slaves of urban householders, not only because they permit the most equitable comparison (field slaves were likely rare in Jewish culture), but they were the most likely to be manumitted and, further, only males were eligible for full enfranchisement as Jew or Roman, and it is this trajectory that I am tracing. 2. A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 326–27; S. Treggiari, Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 68–81. Also Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 160–61; Catherine Hezser, ‘‘The Social Status of Slaves in the Talmud Yerushalmi and in Graeco-Roman Society,’’ in The Talmud Yerushalmi in Graeco-Roman Culture III, ed. Peter Scha¨fer (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 137; idem, ‘‘Slaves and Slavery in Rabbinic and Roman Law,’’ in Rabbinic and Roman Law in Its Roman and Near Eastern Context, ed. C. Hezser (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 175. 3. That is, whether Gaius read the rabbis, or vice versa (highly improbable), is not my question; nor is it my purpose here to determine to what extent these laws were applied. For work on the question of influence, see B. S. Jackson, ‘‘On the Problem of Roman Influence on the Halakhah and Normative SelfDefinition in Judaism,’’ in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P. Sanders (London: SCM Press, 1981), 2:157–203, which delineates the methodological problems; B. Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, especially useful for his survey of the history of the field; S. Lieberman, ‘‘Roman Legal Institutions in Early Rabbinics and the Acts Martyrum,’’ JQR 35 (1944–45): 1–57. 4. One key dissimilarity is the nature of the source and authority of the legal texts themselves: Jewish law, or Torah, is revealed religious law. In contrast, Roman slave law is properly ‘‘secular’’ (it is ius, as opposed to fas). B. Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, 28–30. 5. Much of Gaius’s work was borrowed and revised a few centuries later in Justinian’s Institutes. This reformulation of the Institutes is in large part lifted verbatim from Gaius. I have cited both where applicable, since occasionally Justinian’s Institutes will clarify a vague formulation from Gaius. Of course, the later work is also updating the Institutes for its own time (the Corpus Iuris Civilis was begun the in the early sixth century during Justinian’s reign, 527–565 c.e.) and at times deviates from Gaius to fit its own agenda. 6. Dating Jewish texts requires a bit more wiggle room because of questions of redaction and attribution. For obvious reasons I limit my sources, to preChristian Rome wherever possible. 7. This is not to say that they do not reflect actual legal practice. However, by the time that Justinian publishes the Institutes (533 c.e.) they carry statutory force. Sohm, The Institutes: History and System of Roman Private Law, trans. J. C. Ledlie (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), 16. For rabbinic authority, see Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age, trans. G. Levi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 308–9; Aharon Oppenheimer, ‘‘Jewish Penal Authority in Roman Judea,’’ in Jews in a Greco-Roman World, ed. M. Goodman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 189; S. Safrai, ‘‘Jewish Self-Government,’’ in The Jewish People in the First Century, ed. S. Safrai and S. Stern (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), 1:410. Also instructive here is Shaye J. D. Cohen’s ‘‘The Place of the Rabbi in Jewish Society of the Second Century,’’, in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992) 160–64,

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where Cohen has collected the evidence of the takanot of the tannaim, which describe a sharply limited sphere of legal influence for these rabbis. 8. Note Justinian’s sixth-century reformulation of the Institutes, and the talmudic edifice built around the Mishnah as well as the reverence of later rabbis (amoraim) for the tannaitic sources. Halivni, in Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), acknowledges the relatively speedy ‘‘canonization’’ (if not emulation) of the Mishnah, despite its manifest deviation from culturally sanctioned norms of legal authority and formal expression, and despite apparent resistance to it from prominent quarters (59–65). The quasi-canonical authority of the tannaitic material, especially the Mishnah, means it is the text to which the tradition refers and defers again and again. See Catherine Hezser, ‘‘The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Late Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalimi and the Roman Law Codes,’’ in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, ed. P. Scha¨fer (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 1:581– 641. 9. See the work of Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 151–54, 383–94, 450– 66, and passim; and Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1989), 98–105. Martin Goodman notes that Jews bowed to the authority of the Patriarch only voluntarily in his ‘‘The Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch in the Third Century,’’ in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. L. I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 138. 10. This point has been made repeatedly about the slave laws in antiquity. See, for example, J. Albert Harrill, The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 14–17. 11. In brief, without going too far into this material, I have been unearthing hints that perhaps the slave-as-eternal-property model (as opposed to slavery-asacculturation model) may gain cultural resonance in response to the growing hegemony of Rome, especially post 212 c.e., where freed slaves might easily assume the dominant community identity, Roman citizenship, instead of embracing membership in the more beset Jewish minority. See Urbach, The Laws Regarding Slavery as a Source for Social History of the Period of the Second Temple, the Mishnah, and Talmud (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 58–62, where he goes through various rabbinic responses to manumission procedures adopted from Roman practice (cap, rod/manumissio vindicta) and likely executed in Roman venues before Roman officials. Urbach blames the venue of this manumission, i.e., before a Roman official, as the source of rabbinic resistance to the rod, but likely too reflects some resistance to the enfranchisment of yet another Roman free man. (After 212 c.e., Roman citizenship was granted to those freed using this method.) Further, those not freed this way did not become Roman citizens, so a slave’s incentive was surely to obtain the fullest manumission possible, i.e., according to Roman and Jewish laws. Urbach says that amoraic sources permit the rod, so long as the Jewish document was also properly transmitted (though his sources are not clear), and if this is the case, it brings the slave to a freedom in which he is full Jew and full Roman—putting him in legal parity with his exmaster, but also in a position to choose not to become a Jew. 12. Dale Martin, ‘‘Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family,’’ in The Jewish Family in Antiquity, ed. S. J. D. Cohen (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 127; G. Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70–640 c.e.), 160; M. Avi-Yonah, The Jews

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under Roman and Byzantine Rule: A Political History of Palestine from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 21; Urbach, The Laws, 31–32; Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: American Philological Society, 1955), 120–28. 13. Cf., also Mekilta, Pish.a 15. 14. mPes 8.8; Urbach, The Laws, 42, n. 112. 15. Ex 12.24, Mekilta, Pish.a 16. 16. mBer 3.3. 17. Urbach, The Laws, 45; i.e., bYeb 47b (concerning the menstrual ablutions required of a slave) and passim. 18. See Z. W. Falk, ‘‘[H]e had to be converted to Judaism in the form of a free-born proselyte, and thereby became part of the master’s family,’’ in ‘‘Jewish Private Law,’’ in The Jewish People in the First Century, ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1971), 1:509. Joshua Kulp shows that in the tannaitic era, conversion was self-initiated and completed. It does not seem to have been a formal proceeding requiring a court until the amoraic period. JQR 94.3 (2004): 437–70. 19. Borrowed from the same scenario narrated in bGit 38b about R. Eliezer, a fourth-generation tanna. 20. Legally and anachronistically referred to as a Canaanite slave following Noah’s curse on the house of Ham. The curse on Canaan in Gn 9.25–26 reads: ‘‘He [Noah] said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.’ He also said, ‘Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.’ ’’ 21. See the Bible’s own exegetical trajectory as traced by Sara Japhet, ‘‘The Relationship between the Legal Corpora in the Pentateuch in Light of Manumission Laws,’’ in Studies in Bible, ed. S. Japhet, Scripta Heirosolymitana 31 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), 64–89. 22. When a Roman citizen is enslaved he is banished from his home, and it is illegal for another Roman to own him (Urbach, The Laws, 4, n. 127). The citizen who becomes a slave is considered to have lost status in the first degree— forfeiting all three elements constitutive of his freedom (J.Inst. 1.16.1). Indeed, enslavement was considered a form of capital punishment! (B. Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, 166–67, as was exile, which was a part of such servi poeni). 23. Ritually the reenactment of the salvation from slavery is celebrated not only at Passover but throughout the ritual year, especially as marked by the three pilgrimage festivals, beginning with Passover and culminating with Succot. 24. The semantic valences of the root ‘ayin-beth-dalet—slave and worshipper— undergird the integrity of this narrative. The abstract noun (‘avodah) signifies both harsh labor (Gn 29.27; Ex 1.14) and cultic service in the temple (Nm 3.31; 1 Chr 23.24), and when the root ‘eved appears in many proper names (‘Obadaiah; ‘Avdiel; ‘Avdi; even ‘Eved) it means servant as in worshipper of God. 25. Japhet, ‘‘The Relationship between the Legal Corpora,’’ 85. 26. Ibid., 87–88. 27. In Leviticus this polarization is explicit; in Deuteronomy, equally so, with the difference that Deuteronomy denies the existence of the alien slave, in the Israelite orbit, and so never legislates his enslavement (Japhet, ‘‘The Relationship between the Legal Corpora’’). 28. Exodus is more ambiguous in this regard. See E. Leigh Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 63, n. 18

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29. Only the Covenant Code (Ex 21.2–11) is somewhat unclear on the insider/outsider distinction. That being said, its location at the head of the civil law and immediately following the revelation of the Decalogue makes an implicit comment on the importance of slave law in the context of freedom from Egypt. 30. But as will soon become clear, the distinction is of dubious use in the legal material. 31. Saul Olyan, Rites and Rank (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 94. 32. Ibid., 95 and nn. 132–33. 33. Ibid., 96–97. Cf. Flesher, Oxen, Women or Citizens? Slaves in the System of the Mishnah (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 22–24, where he concludes that the foreign slave’s ritual privileges align him with the category of dependent, a more liminal spot than property. 34. For foreign slave women eligible for marriage the case was different. See Dt 21.10–14 and Olyan’s treatment, Rites and Rank, 97–98. 35. Before I get to the literary evidence of the rabbis, it is important to note from the outset that we know that slave holding was a common social practice in the tannaitic era, but the rabbinic laws for slavery and manumission seem to have had only minimal bearing on the reality of slave holding in this period. Based on his survey of nonliterary evidence of Jewish slave keeping in the GrecoRoman era, Dale Martin argues bluntly that ‘‘Jewishness’’ (and by this he seems to mean rabbinic-ness) ‘‘itself had little if any relevance for the structures of slavery among Jews.’’ Martin, ‘‘Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family,’’ 113. 36. In this I depart from Hezser. 37. S. J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness. 155. 38. Parallels in Mekilta, Nezikin 2; tBK 7.5. 39. In a parallel from jKid 1.1.59d: ‘‘R. Eliezer b. Jacob says, why to the door? Because through the instrumentality of the door they went forth from slavery to freedom.’’ 40. Urbach, The Laws, 43. 41. For a helpful if preliminary digest of sources, see Urbach, The Laws, 39, also tBK 9.4; bGit 38b. 42. A baraita in bGitt.38b. See also Urbach, The Laws, 54–55. That being said, Akiba also bans the Gentile from studying the Torah; see Marc Hirshman, ‘‘Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries,’’ HTR 93.2 (2000): 115. 43. jHor 3.9. R. Yohanan says not to trust a slave, even though he is circumcised, until sixteen generations of his genealogy are known to you. This goes against the idea that slaves have no history. Indeed it is the mistrust of this effacement which may underwrite the hesitancy to manumit. 44. Translation from F. H. Colson, in Philo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 7:357. 45. Hezser adds that the intermarriage of slaves of different origins may have also led to their ‘‘denationalization’’ (‘‘The Social Status of Slaves,’’ 135–36). 46. The slave’s body and life are protected by law. A master who maims a slave must free him, and one who kills his slave has committed a capital offense. Flesher gives nuance to the category ‘‘thing,’’ describing the slave as tool, enacting the will of his master and unable to join into volitional relationships with the social world beyond his master (with a few exceptions) (Oxen, Women or Citizens? 102). 47. Ibid., 40.

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48. ‘‘[T]he Mishnah provides no indication of his previous identity’’ (ibid.). 49. See Hezser, ‘‘The Impact of Household Slaves on the Jewish Family in Roman Palestine,’’ Journal for the Study of Judaism 34.4 (2003): esp. 416–17. This is reiterated in the Yerushalmi, as argued by Hezser, ‘‘The Social Status of Slaves,’’ 109–10. Hezser also argues that in the Yerushalmi, the theological transgression involved in a Jew’s being enslaved to a human and not his rightful divine master determined the erasure of any special privileges he might have had in being Jewish. I do not find this supported in any consistent manner in the earlier material. 50. In the Mekilta, Pish.a 15, the slave who ritually immerses in his master’s presence receives his tacit consent to full conversion. (A second immersion was often required before the slave-convert became a full convert.) It once happened to Valoria that some of her female slaves took a ritual bath before her, and some took it behind her. The case then came before the sages who declared that those who submerged themselves before her were free.

The slave needed a second ritual immersion to complete the movement into proselyte status (Bamberger, Proselytism, 104, 127). See Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions, 87, on the various treatments of this passage by scholars. 51. R. Eliezer is uncomfortable with this loophole (R. Eliezer said, ‘‘No, the offspring is a slave-mamzer’’), though later exegetes allow it. 52. Flesher, Oxen, Women or Citizens? 40, 156. The same is true of proselytes. The power of conversion over history is so strong that if a son and mother convert, they are then legally able to marry one another (David Daube, ‘‘Conversion to Judaism and Early Christianity,’’ Ancient Jewish Law [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981], 14). 53. While such conversion appears to be automatic in the first century, it demands an additional step in the third century (bYeb 47b; Urbach, The Laws, 57). This may reflect a certain anxiety about the loyalty of foreigners in this period. More on this below. 54. Beyond the fact of immersion, its details and efficacy are difficult to determine from the material (Bernard J. Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period [Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1939]; Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions, 87). In bYeb 48b R. Jose says ‘‘One who has become a proselyte is like a newborn child. Why then are proselytes oppressed? Because they are not so well acquainted with the details of the commandments.’’ This opinion preserves the sense of the loss of the individual’s past—which links the experience of slave and proselyte—and the opportunity to fulfill the law. Until it can be fully fulfilled, the person is not legally free from oppression. The slave and the proselyte are commonly linked. 55. Urbach reflects this idealized narrative when he says, ‘‘Manumitted slaves were easily assimilated into Jewish society by virtue of their being used to fulfill the commandments and familiar with Jewish customs’’ (The Laws, 48). 56. Again, the facts on the ground argue against any wide adherance to these laws, especially the biblical categories dividing Gentile from Jewish slave, as well as the modes and conditions for manumission. See Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions, 92–94. 57. bYeb 47b–48a; mBK 8.1; mBer 3.3. Flesher, Oxen, Women, or Citizens?, 171. In mBer 3.3 we read, ‘‘Women, slaves, and minors are exempt from reading the Shema‘ and from wearing phylacteries, but they are NOT exempt from saying

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the Tefillah, from the law of the mezzuzah, or from saying the benediction after meals.’’ 58. Consent to circumcision is immaterial in the most early sources, but this does not seem to compromise its effect on the slave (that is, once physically circumcised, he is ritually fit to perform a number of tasks from which he would otherwise be excluded). This is debated in later amoraic sources (bYeb 48b), likely in response to the bans on the conversion or circumcision of Gentile slaves enacted under Antoninus Pius and enforced by the Christian Empire, which later became more explicitly a ban on proselytism (see Bamberger, Proselytism). See also B. Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, 149–50, on the ritual requirements incumbent upon all Jews, including freedmen. On immersion and early sources, see Urbach, The Laws, 42, n. 112; Mekilta, Pish.a 15. 59. See Hezser, ‘‘The Social Status of Slaves.’’ 60. Cf. mHor 3.8 (a proselyte and a freedman are right next to one another on the ladder of prestige), and tHor 2.10 (debate who has preeminence, the slave who grew up in a sacred environment, or the proselyte who does not carry slave ‘‘curse’’ stigma) on the comparative status of proselyte and freedman. The fine points adduced in these debates reveal the legal and cultural similarity connecting the two, and the practice of their categorical elision. Also see B. Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, 146. For a nice collection of source texts, see Bernard J. Bamberger, ‘‘The Halakah Regarding Slaves and Freedmen,’’ Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (New York: Ktav, 1968), 124–32, where he says, ‘‘The status of the freedman in Jewish law is precisely the same as that of any convert.’’ Note that a difference seems to adhere between them in terms of social status. In bBK 88a, neither a slave nor a proselyte has any legal relationship to his ancestors; cf. bYeb 62a. See also S. J. D. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 158–62. (For a contrasting view, read Hezser, ‘‘The Social Status of Slaves,’’ 137.) 61. Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period, 127; GenR 47 end; jAZ 1.1.39b 1.4.39c. 62. Hezser, ‘‘The Impact of Household Slaves,’’ 409, and n. 141. 63. Following her in ‘‘The Impact of Household Slaves’’ where she adds to this picture the inner rabbinic dynamic of the master-student relationship as the crucible for the exegetical treatment of slaves; perhaps another model from which slave transformation derives is one of personal, scholarly abasement, discipline, and transformation—as the disciple becomes a rabbi so the slave becomes a Jew. Cf. Jonathan Schofer’s argument that subordination is central to rabbinic ideology, ethics, and practice (The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005], 170 and passim). Hezser also allows that the casting of students as slaves may reflect rabbinic desire to be like Roman muckety-mucks, a (metaphorical) slave entourage being a clear sign of status. 64. Traveling Roman magistrates/governors would have done a lot of manumitting as part of their rounds through the provinces (a power not granted to most local officials)—and so would have been part of the familiar public legal landscape. 65. Jewish War 6.9.2–3; 3.10.10; Westerman finds these numbers plausible (The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 85), while Alon deems them inflated (The Jews in their Land in the Talmudic Age, 56). 66. Roman concern on this account, which was largely a circumcision issue, becomes especially acute when the empire is Christianized. The fifth-century Theodocian Code amply illustrates that Jews holding Christians as slaves was anathema. Circumcision of slaves was expressly forbidden under the edict of

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Antoninus Pius (138 c.e.) (Digest 48,8,11). The Codex Theodosianus (CTh) says that a slave who is forcible circumcised may claim his freedom (CTh 16,9,1). Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Empire Romain: Leur condition juridique, e´conomique et sociale (Paris: Geunther, 1914), 268–69, notes that this law predated Christian Empire (Urbach, The Laws, 52). 67. Targum Ps. Jonathan to Lev 25.47–49; Sifra Behar 9. Rabbinic law is also cautious to protect Jews from unscrupulous fellow Jews who might take advantage of redemption laws. Philo mentions a synagogue of freedmen in Rome in Embassy to Gaius, 155. K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (Oxford, 1987), 101 n. 82. See Harrill The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity, 172–78. 68. Urbach, The Laws, 59–63. 69. Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 112–23; Hannah Cotton, ‘‘The Rabbis and the Documents,’’ in Jews in a Greco-Roman World, ed. M. Goodman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 167–80; and many others. 70. The law is a gift from God and must preserve man’s freedom to choose servitude to Torah and God. Flesher summarizes the Mishnah’s idea of ‘‘humanity’’ as ‘‘the capacity to cause legal effects through personal power,’’ 37. 71. Sherwin-White points out the relevant tension in Roman law between legislation that is ‘‘restrictive towards newly enfranchised persons, yet generous to the idea of liberation’’ (The Roman Citizenship, 331). We see in this dichotomy the working of the imaginal against the more quotidian anxieties of life in a slave society. 72. A significant asymmetry in this comparison between Roman and rabbinic slave laws is the traditional bifurcation of the category ‘‘slave’’ in Jewish law between the Hebrew slave and the Gentile slave. Such a distinction does not exist in Roman law—indeed the enslavement of a Roman was illegal in Rome and, moreover, the very concept is inherently oxymoronic. For this reason, in this essay I have limited my comparison to the Gentile slave so as to maintain more comparable categories. That being said, Urbach, Flesher, Gibson, and many others have noted the difficulty of distinguishing which rabbinic and biblical slave laws are meant to apply to which sort of slave (Hebrew or Gentile) and which to both. Flesher’s arguments are convincing: he notes the paucity of mishnaic references to this distinction in passages dealing with slavery and summarizes that the division between native and foreigner is a ‘‘secondary scheme’’ (Oxen, Women, or Citizens? 36). 73. I use the masculine here consciously, as the enslavement of women never rings with the mimetic anxieties of male slavery. Similarly, I will restrict my comparison to urban domestic slaves, as they are the ones about whom we know the most and, more importantly, they align better with the status of slaves kept by Jews. Finally, since I am interested in the process of full cultural enfranchisement, the male is the character who is eligible. 74. A. M. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 55; Mary L. Gordon, ‘‘The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire,’’ in Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies, ed M. I. Finley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 171; Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 96. 75. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 31–34, 88–89. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, 6–11. 76. Though, in contrast to the Jewish slave, this was not required.

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77. Appian, Roman Civil Wars, 2.17; Gordon, ‘‘The Nationality of Slaves,’’ 174; Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 103. For particular instances of slaves who were marked by their dress, see K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 87–89. 78. Gordon, ‘‘The Nationality of Slaves,’’ 105. 79. Wiedemann argues that in most cases self-interest motivated manumission, in stark contrast to various rhetorics of generosity and altruism: ‘‘The real world was ruled by self interest’’ (‘‘The Regularity of Manumission at Rome,’’ Classical Quarterly 35 [1985]: 175). See also Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship, 328. A similar argument is made by Gibson regarding the gulf between rabbinic and biblical ideals and probable praxis; see The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions, 89–94. 80. G. Inst. 1.138. On manumissio testamento, see R. Sohm, The Institutes: History and System of Roman Private Law, 167; Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, 25, who notes that ‘‘manumissio testamento was at all times the most popular form [of manumission].’’ Also see Treggiari, Roman Freedmen, 27–29. 81. ‘‘The slave had no patria, but emancipation gave him not only a city but a home: as a freed man he could contract a legal marriage, his children were citizens, and he could found a Romanized and respectable family. How eagerly this privilege was accepted!’’ (Gordon, ‘‘The Nationality of Slaves,’’ 189). 82. He falls under the ius civitatis, as opposed to ius gentium, the law of all peoples. 83. This privilege is not to be assumed in the ancient world, and even such close cultural neighbors as the Greeks had no such institution. (See Wiedemann, ‘‘The Regularity of Manumission at Rome,’’ 3 and sources). A freedman, libertus, is ‘‘a Roman citizen with curtailed rights’’ (Sohm, The Institutes: History and System of Roman Private Law, 169–71) but is a citizen nonetheless. For extensive treatment of the rights and status of the libertini, see Treggiari, Roman Freedmen, and earlier Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire. The limitations on the rights of freedmen vary over time, though often the social stigma of enslavement is not adequately reflected in their legal status. Nonetheless, their status was far better than that of an alien, and moreover their children were ingenui (free born) (Sohm, The Institutes, 170. Despite stigma, there were many avenues open for advancement in Roman society—education, rhetoric, business, government (Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, 30–31, and passim; Bradley, Slave and Masters, 174–76; Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship, 324–29). 84. G. Inst. 1.8; J. Inst. 1.3.pr. 85. G. Inst. 1.52; J. Inst. 1.8.1. ‘‘Owners’ authority over slaves rests on the law of all peoples. We can observe the same thing everywhere: owners hold the power of life and death over slaves, and owners get whatever slaves acquire.’’ Both aspects of this power were largely mitigated in actual practice (G. Inst. 1.53/ J. Inst. 1.8; emphasis mine). The law had, of course, to make some provision for the agency of human will, however curtailed, of this chattel-person. (Sohm, The Institutes: 165–66). For a fuller overview, see Hezser, ‘‘Slaves and Slavery,’’ 161–66. Compare Gaius, who assumes the potestas of slave owners in all places to include the power of life and death over his slaves. This right is denied the Jewish slaveowner. Like the free man, Plonius and his comrades are created in the inviolable image of God. Therefore if his master kills him it is considered murder and is a capital offense (Ex 21.20; mMak 8.2; mBK 8.1,3; Mekilta, Nezikin 6; Urbach, The Laws, 38–40). See also Richard Saller, ‘‘Symbols of Gender and Status Hierarchies in the Roman Household,’’ in Women and Slaves in Greco-

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Roman Culture: Differential Equations, ed. S. Murnaghan and S. R. Joshel (London: Routledge, 1998), 86–87 and 90; and Saller, Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), where he nuances the sometimes flat perception of patria potestas in the Roman household in which the slave lived and worked. 86. See Bradley, Slavery and Society, for a discussion of the pervasiveness of slaves in all levels of Roman life, and Rome as a ‘‘slave society,’’ chap. 2, 10–30. 87. Ibid., 181. Emphasis mine. 88. Three things distinguish a free man, libertatis, civitatis, and familiae— whether he be free or slave, Roman or alien, and paterfamilias or filiusfamilias (cf. Justinian’s Digest 5.4,11). J. Inst. 1.16.4. 89. On servi poeni, or enslavement due to criminal condemnation, see W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908, repr. 1970), 403–7; William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 81. 90. J. Inst. 1.2.2. On natural law (ius naturale), see the references in Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law, 27, n. 95. A similar idea, though not explicit, can be inferred from Gaius’s discussion of the ease of both manumission and the many ways one can become a Roman citizen. Any essentialist ethnic or racial model of human servitude would preclude such permeable socio-legal boundaries. 91. J. Inst. 1.3.2; Dig. 1.5. See also Hezser, ‘‘Slaves and Slavery,’’ 135. 92. As is noted in the J. Inst. 1.3.3, the very word for slave derives from the battlefield where the captive is not executed but is sold and thus saved (servare) from death to become a slave or servi, ‘‘preserved one.’’ Cf. the ‘‘mort-vivant’’ of Pierre Docke`s, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 93. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship, 322. 94. Aristotle, Politics 1252b1–9. Compare this to the possible legal avenues both imaginable and available. Rome might easily have relegated her ex-slaves to the legal and social margins. One might become an alien as did freed slaves under Greek and Hellenistic law (metic or resident alien), which is roughly analogous to the category dedictii in Roman law. However, this was not the norm. Even the status of Latin, a rank below that of citizen (granted to slaves who were not manumitted according to proper legal process—manumission iusta of censu, testamento or vindicta), was a stepping-stone to full citizenship (G. Inst. 1.14–17). As Gaius says, ‘‘Latins achieve Roman citizenship in many ways [multis modis],’’ G. Inst. 1.28–35. W. D. Phillips Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 7; J. Albert Harrill, ‘‘The Apostle Paul on the Slave Self: An Interpretation of Romans 7,’’ in Religion and the Self in Antiquity, ed. D. Brakke, M. Satlow, and S. Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 95. Holt Parker, ‘‘Loyal Slaves and Loyal Wives: The Crisis of the OutsiderWithin and Roman Exemplum Literature,’’ in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, ed. Murnaghan and Joshel, 155. 96. O. F. Robinson, referencing J. Inst. 1.3.5; 1.8.1–2, in ‘‘Persons,’’ in A Companion to Justinian’s Institutes, ed. E. Metzger (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 19. 97. On minimal importance of the ethnicity of Roman slaves to Romans, see Gordon, ‘‘The Nationality of Slaves,’’ 173–75, 178–79. 98. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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99. Sohm, The Institutes, 170. 100. Common enough that at various points measures were taken to restrict the practice. Gaius makes reference in particular to the Lex Aelia Sentia and the Lex Fufia Caninia (2 b.c.e.). Inst. 1.36–47; J. Inst. 1.1.4–7; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman History 4.24.6 (late first century b.c.e.); Sohm, The Institutes, 171; Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, 89–90; Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, 30–35. 101. G. Inst. 1.20. Ultimately only the freedman’s children are ingenui— freeborn persons, no strings attached—and through his children the slave is finally fully Roman (G. Inst. 1.11). This status can also be granted a freedman by imperial decree (Sohm, The Institutes, 170). In the sixth century, Justinian decreed all freedmen fully free (by ius aureorum anulorum and natalium restituio). K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (Oxford, 1987), 101–2, writes, ‘‘Formal manumissions were part of the regular round of business of the provincial governor’’ in the Imperial period. 102. F. Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, trans. C. Woodall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 64–65. 103. Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, ‘‘Slavery as Progress: Pagan and Christian Views of Slavery as Moral Training,’’ International Sociology 10.2 (1995): 219–34. 104. This is—ironically, perhaps—underscored by the many examples of slaves freed in order to support military or political support to the empire and her representatives, as documented by K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 84–85. 105. The empire radically changed the legal model in place in the late republic, as it gave the emperor and his chosen delegates the power to enact law, imperial ius extraordinarium, which reached beyond and transformed the existing ius civile and ius honorarium. Set forth in the provinces by the governor, these imperial laws became themselves interpretable law (Sohm, The Institutes, 109). A major imperial impact was the expansion of the law and of the constituency of Roman law. From the time of Caesar, the ius latini/roman civitas was granted to select individuals and areas outside of Rome proper. When in 212 c.e. Caracalla grants Roman citizenship (civitas) to all free inhabitants of the empire, the journey of the slave becomes the story of all peoples in the empire. ‘‘Roman law, which had continued to be, in theory, merely the law of one particular citycommunity, was thus converted into the law of an Empire, and the community of Roman citizens became a community co-extensive with the civilized world. By thus extending the Roman civitas Caracalla had laid the axe unto the root of every other law in the Empire, including, amongst others, Greek law, which still continued to flourish in full vigor in the Hellenistic East’’ (110; emphasis mine). 106. ‘‘It was citizenship,’’ argues Dupont, ‘‘that shaped Roman notions of space, time, human nature and the human body’’ (Daily Life in Ancient Rome, ix). 107. This metanarrative should not of course be seen as the proximate cause of discrete manumissions. Treggiari and others have done extensive studies of the evidence and have categorized the many motivations behind Roman manumissions. It has also been shown by many scholars that the very promise of freedom lorded over the slave by his master was a myth, which, like the Horatio Alger/American Dream, was a coercive force that worked in the master’s favor to keep slaves submissive. 108. See Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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109. bKet 96a likens a slave to a student/disciple who learns the law at the foot of a sage: ‘‘R. Joshua B. Levi ruled: All manner of service that a slave must render to his master, a student must render to his teacher.’’ As the gemara instructs the student in his profound obligation to his teacher, we also see slavery as the metaphor and model for learning. See Hezser, ‘‘The Impact of Household Slaves,’’ 409. 110. This is not to say such claims are made explicitly in the manumission material (Flesher, Oxen, Women or Citzens? 156). On universalism, see M. Hirshman, who notices a similar universalism in conversion narratives in the Mekilta and elsewhere—noting that they are universalist without being messianic or eschatological. ‘‘Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries,’’ 112. On Jewish identification with Rome, and the idea of election, see Gerson Cohen, ‘‘Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,’’ in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 20. 111. How often this narrative was actually lived is impossible to determine, and seamless manumission-conversions were likely extremely rare (Flesher, Oxen, Women or Citzens? 40, 156). Martin, ‘‘Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family,’’ 118, says, ‘‘[W]e must be wary of using rabbinic sources for the reconstruction of Jewish social institutions in the Roman period. It is equally problematic to use rabbinic materials to argue that Jewish slavery did not exist in this period.’’ Scholars differ widely on this question. Linder, on the basis of the legal energy spent by the Roman/Christian establishment in the fifth century to block this avenue to conversion, says that such conversions were likely both real and common (Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987], 82, 144–49, and elsewhere), while others find little extra-rabbinic evidence to suggest that manumission followed rabbinic models. 4. Lessons from Jerome’s Jewish Teachers 1. Gustave Bardy, ‘‘Je´rome et ses maıˆtres he´breux,’’ Re´vue be´ne´dictine 46 (1934), is the proximate modern source of the contention that Jerome did not have direct access to Jewish interpretation. Pierre Nautin, Orige`ne: sa vie et son oeuvre, ed. Pierre Nautin, Christianisme antique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), took up Bardy’s findings and extended them greatly. The arguments of Bardy, Nautin, and their followers have been refuted by Pierre Jay, L’exe´ge`se de saint Je´roˆme: D’apre`s son ‘‘Commentaire sur Isaı¨e’’ (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1985); Stefan Rebenich, ‘‘Jerome: The ‘Vir Trilinguis’ and the ‘Hebraica Veritas,’ ’’ Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1993): 50–77; and Hillel I. Newman, ‘‘Jerome and the Jews’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997). 2. The most methodologically robust study of Jerome’s use of Jewish material in an exegetical work is Adam Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). For further studies of parallels between Jerome’s exegetical works and Jewish literary sources from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Moritz Rahmer, Die hebra¨ischen traditionen in den werken des Hieronymus: Durch eine vergleichung mit den ju¨dischen quellen, vol. 1. th. (Breslau: Schletter, 1861); Louis Ginzberg, Die Haggada bei den Kirchenva¨tern: Der Kommentar des Hieronymus zu Koheleth (Vienna: s.n., 1933); idem, ‘‘Die Haggada bei den Kirchenva¨tern: Der Kommentar des Hieronymus zu Jesaja,’’ in Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut, ed. Salo W. Baron and Alexander Marx (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation,

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1935); and most recently, Jay Braverman, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel: A Study of Comparative Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1978). For the influence of Jewish exegetical traditions on Jerome’s translation of the Bible, see Benjamin Kedar, ‘‘The Vulgate as a Translation: Some Semantic and Syntactical Aspects of Jerome’s Version of the Hebrew Bible’’ (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1968), and (in summary form) Benjamin Kedar, ‘‘The Latin Translations,’’ in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. M. J. Mulder and H. Sysling, Compendia rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, Section 2, Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud (Assen: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990). 3. For a more detailed treatment of these controversial issues, see Megan Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism and the Making of Christian Scholarship’’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2001), chaps. 2 and 4. 4. On Jerome’s education and its significance, see his modern biographers, Ferdinand Cavallera, Saint Je´roˆme, sa vie et son oeuvre (Louvain: ‘‘Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense’’ Bureaux, 1922), J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London: Duckworth, 1975). For further interpretation, see the critically important articles of Mark Vessey, ‘‘Jerome’s Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona,’’ Studia Patristica 28 (1993): 135–45; ‘‘Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine’s Apologia contra Hieronymum,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.2 (1993): 175–213; and ‘‘The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.4 (1996) 495–513. On the influence of Donatus in particular, see Friedrich Lammert, De Hieronymo Donati discipulo (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912). For Jerome’s continued use of classical literary materials in his later writings, see Harald Hagendahl, Latin Fathers and the Classics: A Study on the Apologists, Jerome and Other Christian Writers (Go¨teborg: Elanders, 1958). Further discussion of the issue of Jerome’s classical culture as it related to his self-presentation as a Christian ascetic appears in Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 5. For Jerome’s use of Philo and Josephus, see Pierre Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and their Greek Sources, trans. H. E. Wedeck (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). 6. For the argument that Jerome’s knowledge of Jewish interpretation cannot be fully accounted for in terms of his use of Christian sources, see Kedar, ‘‘Vulgate’’; Newman, ‘‘Jerome and the Jews’’; and Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism,’’ chap. 3, with notes. 7. Kedar, ‘‘Vulgate,’’ summarized in Kedar, ‘‘Latin Translations.’’ 8. Benjamin Kedar, ‘‘Jewish Traditions in the Writings of Jerome,’’ in The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context, ed. D. R. G. Beattie and M. J. McNamara, JSOT Supplement (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 430. 9. For an early move in this direction, see John G. Gager, The Origins of AntiSemitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10. See for example the articles included in Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 11. Peter Scha¨fer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah, Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 231–32.

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12. Scha¨fer, Mirror, 232. 13. For this phrase, see Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9. 14. E.g., the preface to his translation of the De situ et nominibus Hebraicorum locorum of Eusebius of Caesarea, his letter 46 written in the names of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella at Rome in 386, and his letter 53 to Paulinus of Nola written in 394, urging Paulinus to join him in Bethlehem. 15. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 7. 16. Thus Brown writes, ‘‘So much emphasis has been placed on the withering away of the traditional means by which classical paganism had been expressed, that the new means by which paganism—or, at least, non-Christianity— continued to be rendered visible in public, but in a new idiom, have received far less attention. By assuming that paganism withered away, and that it was immediately replaced by Christianity, we ignore a large, and fascinating, tract of Late Antique religious life: paganism was transformed by being linked to a new ceremonial of power.’’ Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, 49–50, echoed in Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–15. 17. See in particular G. W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), and Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 18. S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 19. Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). Contrast the analysis of Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), who imagines Christianity as filling a vaccum left by the decline of Egyptian religion already in the second century. 20. Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, 32–33, with reference to Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 21. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 22. On the issue of Christian demography, see Keith Hopkins, ‘‘Christian Number and Its Implications,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 185– 226. 23. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt. 24. Brown, Making of Late Antiquity, 34. 25. This analysis, of course, is in no way independent of Brown’s work: see, in particular, his Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 26. Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital, vol. 22, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 27. Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18–19.

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28. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 27–29; emphasis added. 29. Ibid., 30–31, cited by Brown, Authority, 16. 30. Boyarin, Dying, 16–17. 31. Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187. 32. Boyarin, Dying, 16–17, citing Markus, End of Ancient Christianity. Boyarin’s book-length treatment of the topic under discussion, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), was not available at the time of writing. 33. Schwartz, Imperialism, 192. 34. Ibid., 186–95. 35. In this context, it seems worth noting that Schwartz’s skepticism about the possibility of religious policy under the late empire (however ineffectual it may have been in practice), in particular as he articulates it at Imperialism, 186– 87, seems at odds with the current scholarly consensus that the late empire, as opposed to its second- and early third-century predecessor, did begin to act—or at least, to attempt to act—in a more coordinated, centralized manner, with the emergence of religious policy as one of the crucial symptoms of that change; see on this Millar, Emperor. 36. Schwartz, Imperialism, 186, n. 19. 37. Ibid., 183, n. 13, and p. 16, where he refers to the long-standing view that, in his words, the late emperors held a ‘‘growing, theological conviction that those Jews who persisted in their religion were living a lie.’’ 38. The forced conversion of the Jewish community of Minorca in the early fifth century must be regarded as an anomaly, as the dismayed reaction of Christian bishops from other locales to this violent episode shows. 39. This description of Augustine’s theology of the Jews is merely schematic. For fuller discussion with references to the extensive literature, see Paula Fredriksen, ‘‘Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995): 299–324; idem, ‘‘Secundum Carnem: History and Israel in the Theology of St Augustine,’’ in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. W. E. Klingshirn and M. Vessey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 26–41; and idem, ‘‘Augustine and Israel: Interpretatio ad litteram, Jews, and Judaism in Augustine’s Theology of History,’’ in Studia Patristica 38, St. Augustine and His Opponents: Other Latin Writers (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 119–35. 40. Schwartz, Imperialism, 263–74, especially the long quotations on pp. 268–71. 41. Ibid., 181. 42. Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 43. On Jerome’s two senses of scripture, see Jay, L’exe´ge`se, and Dennis Brown, Vir Trilinguis: A Study in the Biblical Exegesis of Saint Jerome (Kampen, Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1992). For this analysis of their relation to each other, see Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 44. For examples, see Rahmer, Hebraı¨schen traditionen. 45. Jay, L’exe´ge`se; Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 46. Jerome’s use of the Hexapla is a controversial point. For a complete discussion with references and argumentation supporting the current claim, see Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism,’’ and Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), chap. 2.

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47. For Jerome’s attribution of the sources of his textual criticism to Jewish teachers instead of Origen, see Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 48. Bardy, ‘‘Maıˆtres he´breux’’; Newman, ‘‘Jerome and the Jews.’’ On Origen’s possible contacts with Jews in Caesarea, see Marc G. Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity, trans. B. Stein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 67–94 and passim. 49. I owe the suggestion that Jerome may have learned of Jewish interpretations by observing Jewish public festivals, such as the fast of the Ninth of Av, to Yaron Eliav. 50. For the artificiality of Jerome’s construction of the sense iuxta Hebraeos, see Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism.’’ 51. Indeed, Wolfram Kinzig has suggested, in an unpublished paper presented at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 2000, that Jerome in fact derived all of his so-called Jewish millenarian interpretations from Christian sources, primarily Apollinaris of Laodicea. I thank Professor Kinzig for sharing a copy of this paper with me. Nevertheless, given the close parallels between some of Jerome’s material and rabbinic literature, it seems unlikely that none of the millenarian material Jerome attributes to Jews in fact derived from Jewish sources, given that he must have had access to them for other materials (for this argument, see Newman, ‘‘Jerome and the Jews,’’ and Williams, ‘‘Jerome’s Biblical Criticism’’). Instead, the notion of a cultural koine´ shared by Jews and Christians, especially in Syria and Palestine, must be borne in mind as a possibility to account for potential overlap between Jerome’s various written and oral sources, all of which are largely or entirely lost to us. 52. Ez 16.53–56a, NRSV translation. 53. Commentarii in Hieziechielem, 5, 16, 55. All translations from Jerome’s commentaries are my own, following the Latin texts of the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina editions. 54. Ibid. 55. Jerome, Letter 120, 2. 56. E.g., Commentarii in Isaiam book 18, preface, l.16. For other passages of this type, see Hillel I. Newman, ‘‘Jerome’s Judaizers,’’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 9.4 (2001): 421–52. 57. Much of what I have to say in this paragraph replicates the findings of Newman, ‘‘Jerome’s Judaizers.’’ However, I take a rather different approach to the material. Newman’s dissection of Jerome’s polemical tactics is acute. But his concern is primarily to expose social realities lying behind the language of Jerome’s commentaries. Thus he limits himself to a consideration of Jerome’s references to Judaizers, almost all of which come in the context of references to millenarian speculations. My interest, on the other hand, is in those speculations themselves as Jerome reports them, whether he attributes them—as he variously does—to Jews, to ‘‘Judaizers,’’ to unnamed Christians, or to known Christian writers. 58. Commentarii in Isaiam book 4, 11, l. 43. 59. Seemingly neutral reference to deuterosis: Ep. 121, 10, 17. For Jerome’s letters, translations are my own, sometimes influenced by those of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series; for the Latin, I follow the edition of Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. 60. Deuterosis as excrement: In Abacuc 1, 2. On the names Hillel and Shammai: Commentarii in Isaiam 3, 8, 11. 61. Ep. 121, 10, 10.

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62. Ibid. 63. Praef. in Iob. 64. ‘‘rursum Hierosolymae et Bethleem quo labore, quo pretio Baraninam nocturnum habui praeceptorem! timebat enim Iudaeos et mihi alterum exhibebat Nicodemum.’’ The allusion is to the character of Nicodemus in John 3.1–10, who comes to Jesus by night to ask him questions. 65. I am indebted for this suggestion to Peter Brown. 66. Boyarin, Dying. 5. Ancient Jewish Interpretation of the Song of Songs in a Comparative Context I want to express my appreciation to Natalie Dohrmann, Marc Hirshman, Tamar Kadari, and Peter Scha¨fer for reading earlier drafts of this essay and for making valuable comments, corrections, and suggestions that helped me improve it substantially. 1. There are three midrashic collections devoted to exegesis of Song of Songs. The main collection, Song of Songs Rabbah—first published in Constantinople in 1514 as Shir ha-Shirim rabbati and Midrash Shir ha-Shirim and also known as Agadat hazita (see M. B. Lerner, ‘‘The First Printing of the Five Megillot: Studies in the Work Methods of the Hebrew Printers in Constantinople and Pisaro,’’ in Yad Leheman: A Collection of Articles in Memory of A. M. Haberman, ed. Z. Malachi [Lod: Mekhon Haberman, 1983], 289–311)—is available in a noncritical edition edited by S. Dunsky, Midrash Rabbah: Shir Hashirim, Midrash Hazita (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1980; henceforth referred to as Dunsky). This work, which borrows many passages from earlier midrashim, has been dated by some scholars to the middle of the sixth century (M. D. Herr, Encyclopaedia Judaica [New York: Macmillan, 1971], vol. 15, cols. 152–54) and by others to the late eighth century (Samuel Lachs, ‘‘Prologomenon to Canticles Rabba,’’ JQR, n.s. 55 [1964–65]: 235–55). For an overview of these datings, see G. Stemberger, Introduction to Talmud and Midrash, trans. M. Bockmuehl, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1996), 315–16; H. E. Steller, ‘‘Preliminary Remarks to a New Edition of Shir Hashirim Rabbah,’’ in Rashi, 1040–1990: Homage a Ephraim E. Urbach, ed. G. Sed-Rajna (Paris: Editions Du Cerf, 1993), 301–11; and most recently, Tamar Kadari, ‘‘On the Redaction of Midrash Shir Hashirim Rabbah’’ (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2004; henceforth referred to as Kadari). In addition, there is a second midrashic compilation, known both as Midrash Zuta to Shir Hashirim (Midrasch Suta: Hagadische Abhandlungen ueber Schir ha-Schirim, Ruth, Echah und Koheleth [Berlin: M’kitse Nirdamim, 1894]) and Agadath Schir Hashirim, Edited from a Parma Manuscript (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1896); cf. the genizah fragments published by Zvi M. Rabinowitz in Ginze Midrash (Tel Aviv: Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, 1976), 250–95. Schechter proposed a date no later than the middle of the tenth century (101), but more recently Marc Hirshman has picked up on a suggestion first made by Rabinowitz that the work may largely be tannaitic; see Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity, trans. B. Stein (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1995), 148, n. 13. Finally, there is a third midrashic collection entitled Midrash Shir Hashirim, ed. E. Gruenhut (1897; reissued with an introduction and notes by J. C. Werthheimer, Jerusalem: Ketav yad vesefer, 1971), probably dating from the eleventh century. In addition, genizah fragments have been published by Jacob Mann, Z. M. Rabinovitz, and others; see Mann, ‘‘Some Midrashic Genizah Fragments,’’ HUCA 14 (1939): 333–37, and

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his Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1972), 1:322, n. 47a; Z. M. Rabinovitz, Ginze midrash, 83–100, 101–7, 108–10, and 250–95. For a complete list of all recent publications from MSS, see Kadari, 4–5. 2. The Western tradition of the Targum on the Song was printed already in the first rabbinic Bible/Mikraot Gedolot (Venice: Bomberg, 1517) and in somewhat different form in all subsequent editions. The Yemenite tradition was presented in a modern critical edition by R. H. Melamed, The Targum to Canticles According to Six Yemen MSS, compared with the ‘‘Textual Receptus,’’ ed. De Lagarde (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1921). There is still no critical edition of the Aramaic text, but see now the excellent and comprehensive scholarly English translation by Philip S. Alexander, The Targum of Canticles (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003), esp. 2–7. The Targum, of course, is not the earliest or only Jewish translation of the Song. The Septuagint precedes it by several centuries, on which see my comments below, note 8. In this essay I have limited my discussion to texts either in Hebrew or Aramaic. 3. On the esoteric tradition, see my extensive discussion later in this article. The two main secondary sources dealing with the question are Gershom G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1965), 36–43; and Saul Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,’’ in the same volume, 118–126. See as well Lieberman’s discussion in Midreshe teman (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1970), 12–17. For a helpful overview, see Arthur Green, ‘‘The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism,’’ Orim 2 (1987): 141–53; and idem, ‘‘Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context,’’ AJS Review 26 (2002): 1–52, particularly 1–12, for his survey of the place of early esoteric/mystical interpretation in the general history of the Song’s interpretation. 4. For a helpful overview, see Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), esp. 3–48. 5. Among others, E. E. Urbach, ‘‘Rabbinic Exegesis and Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and Jewish-Christian Polemics’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 30 (1960/61): 148–70, and in English ‘‘The Homiletical Interpretations of the Sages and the Expositions of Origen on Canticles, and the Jewish-Christian Disputation,’’ Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971): 247–75; R. Kimelman, ‘‘Rabbi Yohanan and Origen on the Song of Songs: A Third-Century Jewish-Christian Disputation,’’ Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 567–95; Hirshman, Rivalry of Genius, 83–94; Raphael Loewe, ‘‘Apologetic Motifs in the Targum to the Song of Songs,’’ in Biblical Motifs: Origins and Transformations, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 159–96. 6. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 116. For a similar argument, see as well Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1982), and Jose Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999). For the continuing impact of Boyarin’s opposition between the two in regard to interpretation of the Song, see Alon GoshenGotshtein, ‘‘Polemomania—Methodological Reflection on the Study of the Judeo-Christian Controversy between the Talmudic Sages and Origin [sic] over the interpretations of the Song of Songs’’ (Hebrew), Jewish Studies 42 (2003/04): 119–90, 153–161 in particular. 7. This was the primary argument of Handelman’s book, but the subtext

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emerges even in Boyarin’s argument—see Intertextuality, 108–9—despite his demurrals on the very same pages and desire to avoid such ‘‘homologies.’’ Cf. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in the Talmud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 31–60, and most recently, ‘‘De/Re/Constructing Midrash,’’ in Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. C. Bakhos (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 299– 321, in which Boyarin revisits the allegory-midrash opposition so as to make it less between Judaism and Christianity tout court (as Boyarin is wont to say) as between Logos and non-Logos theologies, be they Jewish or Christian; even so, the essential terms of the homologies remain untouched. 8. The most extensive discussion of the early history of its exegesis is in Marvin Pope, The Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Bible) (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 90–91. Pope does not see any allegorical interpretive tendencies in the LXX, and he dismisses the attempts even to see references to the Song in works like Wisdom of Solomon. 4 Ezra 5.23–28 may contain a series of allusions to the allegorical understanding of the poem, and Josephus, Contra Apion 1.40, describes the poem as a ‘‘hymn to God,’’ again implying an allegorical understanding. Alexander (Targum of Canticles, 35) notes the possible echo of Song 5.2 in Revelations 3.20, which would suggest that already in the first century the Church had begun to appropriate an allegorical understanding. See as well Jay Treat, ‘‘Aquila, Field, and the Song of Songs,’’ in Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments: Papers Presented at the Rich Seminar on the Hexapla, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 25th July–3rd August 1994, ed. A. Salveson (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 136–76, where he argues that Aquila’s translation does not exhibit any clear tendencies that could be called allegorical or figurative, but compare Treat’s ‘‘A Fiery Dove: The Song of Songs in Codex Venetus 1,’’ in A Multiform Heritage: Studies on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Robert A. Kraft, ed. B. G. Wright (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 275–301, where he suggests that the rubrics in the manuscript already promote a certain layer of interpretation, albeit a nonallegorical one, as do some of its unique readings. In contrast, in the preface to the codex, its author seems to assume that the bride is Christ’s bride, but his allegorical interpretation does not seem to go very far beyond this; Treat dates the MS to the ninth century, and its author does not seem to have been familiar with Origen. 9. Pope, Song of Songs, 18–19. Cf. what are now considered the definitive critiques of the Yavneh theory, J. P. Lewis, ‘‘What Do We Mean by Jabneh?’’ Journal of Bible and Religion 32 (1964): 125–32, and S. Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976), esp. 120–24. 10. With the terms ‘‘sexual’’ and ‘‘spiritual’’ as opposites, I am using the terminology of David Carr, The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5–11 and passim; for Carr, ‘‘sexuality’’ in this sense connotes ‘‘earthly’’ (or in the terms of an early Christian writer like Origen, ‘‘earth-bound’’) love in contrast to spiritual eroticism, which could be categorized as ‘‘heaven-bound.’’ See below in the second section of this essay for some elaboration on this. 11. Probably the Men of the Great Assembly but the subject is slightly unclear in context. 12. The translation follows the emendations of Judah Goldin, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 5 and notes ad locum. The Hebrew text in the conclusion reads ‘‘The Men of the Great Assembly.’’ On the use of the term ganaz in this passage, see Leiman, Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, 72–86, esp. 80.

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13. See Kadari, 49–50, and Jed Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature, 2004), 51–58. 14. On the term mashal and its semantic history, see my book Parables in Midrash: Exegesis and Narrative in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 9–10. While in medieval Hebrew the term mashal is typically used as a term for allegory (which would make its use here somewhat paradoxical), and in rabbinic literature it is often used for the literary form of the parable, its use in this passage appears to be identical to the way it is used in the famous statement at the conclusion of the fourth petih.ta or proem in ShirR, ‘‘Do not treat this mashal lightly (al yehi ha-mashal ha-zeh kal be-’enekha), for it is through this mashal that a person is able to arrive at (la‘amod ‘alav) the words of Torah’’ (Dunsky, 6). Readers should be aware that the first pages of Dunsky’s edition are in incorrect order because of a printer’s error. 15. Also cited in ARNA, chapter 36, though only the first half of the statement appears there, and it is attributed to R. Yohanan ben Nuri. 16. In this sense, the statement should be read in light of Akiba’s famous statement in mYad 3.5 about the Song’s holiness, about which see below. See as well Yohanan Muff ’s comments about Saul Lieberman’s views on this passage in Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 135, n. 32. On the other hand, see Michael Fox, Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 249, who argues that the original setting for recitation of the Song was the festive banquet; cf. the comments of Carr, The Erotic Word, 110–11. For the one other instance in rabbinic literature where the Song is said to have been recited in a decidedly nonreligious, eroticized context, see mTa‘an 4.8, where verses of the Song are said to have been sung by young maidens on Yom Kippur afternoon and on the fifteenth of Av as they sought young men to woo them. 17. Gerson D. Cohen, ‘‘The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality,’’ Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Culture (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 3–17, esp. 4. 18. Ibid. 19. See, for example, Ex 34.14–15; Jgs 2.17; Ez 16. 20. Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘‘Allegory as Interpretation,’’ New Literary History 3 (1972): 301–17. 21. Harold Fish, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 90–95. 22. Ibid., 98, 96. 23. Michael Fishbane, ‘‘Torah and Tradition,’’ in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. A. Knight (London: SPSK/Fortress, 1977), 275–300, esp. 294–95. 24. On this point, see D. M. Carr, ‘‘The Song of Songs as a Microcosm of the Canonization and Decanonization Process,’’ Canonization and Decanonization, ed. A. Van Der Kooij and K. Van Der Toorn (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 173–89, esp. 175–77. 25. On the petirah, see Kadari, 169–217; Y. Fraenkel, The Ways of Midrash and Aggadah (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Yad Letalmud, 1991), 1:156–60. For examples, see Genesis Rabbah (GenR) 33.1; Leviticus Rabbah (LevR) 10.1–3; 21.1–4. 26. See the fuller version in Sifre Devarim (§305), which makes the application even clearer. On the history of this story, see Ofra Meir, ‘‘The Story as Hermeneutical Device,’’ AJS Review 7–8 (1982–83): 231–62.

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27. See, for example, Lamentations Rabbah (LamR) 2.12 (ed. Buber, 117); or 5.18 (ed. Buber, 159–60), and my discussion in Parables, 245–46. 28. The most recent comprehensive survey of these opinions is Isaac B. Gottlieb, ‘‘The Jewish Allegory of Love: Change and Continuity,’’ Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1992): 1–17, who builds upon Saul Lieberman’s seminal treatment of the Exodus traditions of Sinai and Sea in ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim.’’ 29. Kadari, 114–20. 30. Thus Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim.’’ Daniel Boyarin, ‘‘Two Introductions to Midrash Shir Hashirim’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 56 (1987): 479–500, correctly points out that the question with which the passage begins (hekhan ne’emrah) is a later gloss (496) and translates the subsequent phrases be-yam [or be-sinai] ne’emrah as ‘‘it was said in respect’’ or ‘‘relation to’’ the Sea or Sinai, but that is clearly not the gist of the interpretations that follow which dramatize the moment in which the verses were actually first spoken. 31. Gottlieb (‘‘Jewish Allegory of Love’’) presents an exhaustive analysis of the history of this tradition; for other occurrences, see mTa‘an 4.8 and Pesikta de-Rab Kahana 1. I have not concentrated upon the Tent/Temple traditions because it is not entirely clear that these traditions originally claimed to be the original locale of the Song or were simply referents to the verses in the Song for which they are cited. Only in ShirR 1.12 (Dunsky, 12, again out of sequence) is the claim actually made that these were the original sites of the Song’s composition. 32. Gottlieb, ‘‘Jewish Allegory of Love,’’ 10. 33. See Mekilta de-Rashbi (ed. Epstein, Melamed), 143, for a tradition that places the two views together, and see Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,’’ 120–21 for an exhaustive list of all parallels and related passages. 34. Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,’’ 121–22. 35. Ibid., 122. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the surviving exegeses are all on verses in which the maiden praises and describes her lover: Song 1.12, 2.2, 2.8–9, 5.2. See further my comments below. 36. As usual, there are exceptions—see, for example, Mekilta de-Rashbi (ed. Epstein, Melamed, 143) on Song 2.14. 37. For the text and translation, see Martin Samuel Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah: Texts and Recensions (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1985), 149–53; for background and the very complicated history of its transmission, see Cohen’s excellent introduction, 1–26; and at greater length, The Shi’ur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in PreKabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983). For a very helpful survey of the contents of Shiur Qomah and a different interpretation of its significance, see Peter Scha¨fer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, trans. A. Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 99–103. 38. Alexander, Targum of Canticles, 37. 39. Cohen, Texts and Recensions, 2. 40. Cohen, Liturgy and Theurgy, 110–12; and Texts and Recensions, 15–16, where he further argues that where the verses do appear, they are integral to the text but serve as a liturgical frame for recitation of the measurements. See, however, the texts in the manuscripts of Hekhalot rabbati found in Dropsie MS 436 and Budapest MS 238 that quote Song 5.10–16, in Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur, ed. P. Scha¨fer (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1981), 75, par. 167; these texts are cited by Alexander, Targum of Canticles, 37, n. 13, as they are found in Bate midrashot, ed. S. A. Wertheimer (new edition by A. Y. Wertheimer) (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1951–54), 1:87.

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41. Thus all witnesses to the Mishnah’s tradition, including the Kaufmann and Parma MSS. The exact reference of the term ha-ketuvim—translated as the Writings—is ambiguous: it could be either Scriptures (that is, the entirety of the Hebrew Bible) or the Hagiographa alone. Lieberman (‘‘Mishnat Shir haShirim,’’ 118 and n. 1 there) cites a Palestinian version that reads ‘‘for all the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.’’ According to Lieberman, ‘‘the songs’’ are the Songs of Moses, namely, the Pentateuch, thereby proving as well that the Song originated at Sinai. However, Boyarin, ‘‘Two Introductions,’’ 494–96, convincingly argues against using this reading as a primary one. For a comprehensive review of all the tannaitic positions in the Mishnah about the status of the Song and the other books that do or do not impurify the hands, and of the modern scholarly interpretations of those statements, see Kadari, 68–78. Kadari herself offers an interesting interpretation of the parable attributed to R. Eliezer ben Azariah, which she sees as denying the Song’s sacrality; in this view, Eliezer rebuts Akiba’s assertion about the Song’s status. 42. With, perhaps, an echo of the gradations of holiness (ma’a lot kedushah) found in mKelim 1.5–9, though, tellingly, the phrase kodesh kodashim is not used there. 43. See as well mKelim 1.9. 44. This interpretation of the mishnaic phrase was actually first offered by Joshua Ibn Shu’aib in his sermon for the last day of Passover, cited by Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,’’ 125: ‘‘for all its words are the secrets of the Merkavah and the names of the Holy One, blessed be he.’’ 45. See as well Midrash Shir Hashirim (ed. Greenhut), 26 on 1.4: ‘‘The things were hidden from mankind since the six days of Creation, the Holy One, blessed be he, revealed to Israel.’’ 46. Cf. tH . ag 2.4; jH . ag 2.1; 47. See Urbach, ‘‘Homiletical Interpretations,’’ 250. On the imagery of fire, see E. E. Urbach, ‘‘The Traditions about Esoteric Lore in the Tannaitic Period’’ (Hebrew), in Me-‘olamam shel h.akhamim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988), 486–513, esp. 491–95; and David J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1980), 129–30, which also notes the use of the motif in the story of Pentecost in Acts 2.1–4. As both Urbach and Halperin argue, the Sinaitic imagery is used to endow either the esoteric study or verse-linking with the sanctity of the original revelatory moment. Boyarin, in both Intertexuality (109–10) and ‘‘Two Introductions’’ (498–99), takes the story about Ben Azzai to be the paradigm for exoteric midrashic hermeneutics— ‘‘stringing together’’ verses from the Writings to those in the Pentateuch in order to have them ‘‘interpret,’’ as it were, each other. 48. For some additional exegeses pointing to esoteric teaching, see Hirshman, Rivalry of Genius, 85 and 148, n. 14. 49. I am following the reading first proposed by Z. M. Rabinovitz in Ginze midrash, 13; and later reedited by Menahem Kahana, The Geniza Fragments of the Halakhic Midrashim (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005), 1:63. 50. Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,’’ 123. 51. See Urbach, ‘‘Homiletical Interpretations,’’ 252, n. 14, where he cites a parallel text from Gregorious Nanzianzenus (b. 326/329; also a resident of Caesarea) that describes Jewish exoteric and esoteric texts. 52. This passage quoted in Lieberman, ‘‘Mishnat Shir Ha-shirim,’’ 125; the translation is from an unpublished version by Jay Treat.

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53. The one major exception is on Song 3.9, in regard to the palanquin (apiryon) that King Solomon made himself; in the third petirah or application that interprets the palanquin as the Temple, King Solomon is emphatically identified as the historical King Solomon (ha-melekh shelomoh vaday). See Kadari, 109, for some other exceptional cases. On 1.12 (Dunsky, 37), the phrase sheha-melekh bimesibo is interpreted as referring to God four times, and to Moses once. 54. Kadari, 21–155. Earlier scholarship (see in particular Samuel T. Lachs, ‘‘The Poems of Canticles Rabba,’’ JQR 56 [1965/66]: 225–39) believed that the proems were an integral part of the collection, but Kadari (157–68) persuasively argues that they are a later addition; exactly how late is unclear; see her forthcoming article in Tarbiz. 55. The first, second, and third petih.ta all conclude, with slight variations, with the statement (again attributed in the first petih.ta to R. Yudan), ‘‘And what’s more, the Holy Spirit rested upon . . .’’ Note too that in the fourth petih.ta the mashal—whose invention is attributed to Solomon—is explicitly described as a means of making Torah accessible to all. While the argument in that petih.ta is made through a series of literary forms that we would call meshalim, it is likely from the conclusion that the term is used in the petih.ta to refer to the meshalim of Solomon in the book of Proverbs. 56. Birke Rapp-de Lange, ‘‘The Love of Torah: Solomon Projected into the World of R. Aqiba in the Song of Songs Rabbah,’’ in Recycling Biblical Figures, ed. A. Brenner and J. Willem Van Henten (Leiden: Deo, 1999), 272–91. See also Rapp’s Ph.D. diss. at the Katholieke Theologische Universiteit in Utrecht, privately published as a book, Rabbinische Liebe (2003) (which I received only after completing this essay). The emphasis on public teaching of Torah may also bear on connections between the Song and martyrdom, a theme that is invoked several times in ShirR and one that has not been satisfactorily explored to date. At least in some rabbinic traditions, martyrdom is portrayed specifically in connection with the figure of Akiba as punishment for public teaching of Torah. 57. For purposes of clarification, I should add that my association of Solomon as author with the exoteric tradition and of God with the esoteric tradition is a distinction pertaining to the early interpretive history of the Song, not a descriptive statement of the existing literary documents, like ShirR, in which these interpretations have been preserved. ShirR is an ‘‘exoteric’’ document insofar as its readership or circulation was never limited to esoteric circles; however, like most midrashic anthologies, its contents include diverse materials including, it would seem, traditions reflecting esoteric traditions. I wish to thank Tamar Kadari for pushing me to this clarification. 58. See, for example, the exegeses of the different parts of Song 1.5 in ShirR 1.36–38 (Dunsky, Midrash Rabbah: Shir Hashirim, 30–31); on Song 1.11 (ShirR 1.54, Dunsky, 43); Song 4.11 (ShirR 4.23, Dunsky, 119); Song 6.8 (ShirR 6.14, Dunsky, 146). For discussion of the figure of the sage in ShirR, see Birke Rappde Lange, ‘‘Partnership between Heaven and Earth: The Sage as Religious Role Model in Canticles Rabbah,’’ in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity, ed. M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 139–62. 59. Tamar Kadari, ‘‘ ‘Within It Was Decked with Love’: On the Torah as a Bride in the Homilies of the Tannaim to the Song of Songs’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 71 (2002): 391–404. As the title of her article indicates, Kadari believes that these interpretations composed an interpretive approach as early as the tannaitic period. 60. The translation here is based on The Song of Songs, trans. M. Simon, in

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Midrash rabbah, ed. H. Freedman and M. Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1985): 239–45. The beginning of this passage is already found in LevR 19.1 on Leviticus. For an extensive discussion of the text and its parallels, see Nahman Danzig, ‘‘The Ruling of Sacred Books: The Origins of the Halakhah and Its Repercussions,’’ in Atara L’Haim: Studies in the Talmud and Medieval Rabbinic Literature in Honor of Professor Haim Zalman Dimitrovsky, ed. D. Boyarin, S. Friedman, et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 283–359, 312–13 in particular. 61. Twenty-two is the numerical equivalent of the two letters in the word bakh—bet (2) and khaf (20). The use of the apparently feminine gender of bakh in respect to the male lover allows for the dual interpretation of the adverbial pronoun as both masculine (God) and feminine (Torah). 62. For some discussion, see Moshe Idel, ‘‘The Concept of Torah in the Heikhalot and the Kabbalah’’ (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 1 (1981): 42–46, and idem, ‘‘Infinities of Torah in the Kabbalah,’’ in Midrash and Literature, ed. G. H. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 141–57. 63. On the female gender of Torah, see Elliot Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 1–28. 64. LamR 3.21 (ed. Buber, 132), and see Stern, Parables in Midrash, 56–62, and idem, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 44–54. 65. For a later instance of a very similar use of Torah as a screen/substitute for God, see Seder Eliyahu rabah 14 (ed. M. Ish-Shalom, 68) and the enlightening discussion of the passage by Adiel Kadari, ‘‘Torah Study, Mysticism and Eschatology: ‘God’s Study Hall’ in the Later Midrash’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 73 (2004): 189–90. 66. This point of clarification distinguishes my argument from that of Raphael Loewe in his article on the Targum to Shir Hashirim (note 5 above); for a critique of Loewe’s position, see Alexander, Targum of Canticles, 37–39. 67. For additional remarks in this direction, see Kadari, 96. 68. A. Marmorstein, ‘‘Deux Rensigments d’Origene Concernant les Juifs,’’ Revue des Etudes Juifs 71 (1920): 195–99. The other major studies are Yitzhak Baer, ‘‘Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire from the Days of Septimius Severus to the ‘Edict of Toleration’ of 313 C.E.’’ (Hebrew), Zion 21 (1957): 1–49; and the studies of Urbach (1971) and Kimelman (1980) cited in note 5 above. 69. Both Baer and Urbach assumed that Origen borrowed the allegorical approach from early Jewish interpretation, and that many of Origen’s exegeses were either borrowed from or simply copied rabbinic midrashim, reworking them in a Christian mode; however, even Urbach admitted that there were cases where rabbis may also have reacted to and responded to Christian exegeses. While Urbach concentrated his remarks about Christian exegesis upon Origen, he was far less focused in his selection of rabbinic parallels, which ranged from the early tannaitic through the middle of the Palestinian amoraic period. Kimelman, in contrast, focused his study on the mid-third century and concentrated exclusively on Origen and R. Yohanan, both of whom lived for lengthy periods in Caesarea; according to Kimelman’s analysis, R. Yohanan ‘‘led the exegetical battle against Origen’s christologization of the Song’s allegory’’ (‘‘Rabbi Yohanan and Origen,’’ 569), and many of his exegeses are accordingly to be seen as responses to Origen. While Loewe (‘‘Apologetic Motifs in the Targum to the

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Song of Songs’’) concentrates upon the later Targum on Songs, he too tends to see the direction of influence going from Jewish tradition to Christianity. 70. See in particular Hirshman, Rivalry of Genius, and Nicholas de Lange, Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 71. Goshen-Gottstein, ‘‘Polemomania.’’ 72. Elizabeth A. Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 386–408, 396–400 in particular. 73. Carr, The Erotic Word, 141–43. The centrality of the erotic element to Origen’s understanding of the Song is especially evident in the Prologue to the Commentary: in R. P. Lawson’s English translation, Origen: The Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies (New York: Newman Press, 1956), 21–39. 74. The original inspiration for this last section came from a joint seminar David Carr and I taught at a special conference on Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Song held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2001. I wish to thank Carr for his inspired participation, and Michael Fox for organizing the conference, at which the earliest draft of this paper was first presented. 75. See Pope, Song of Songs, 318–19, for various traditional and scholarly views about their identity. Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch in their translation and commentary (The Song of Songs [New York: Random House, 1985]) raise the possibility that the daughters may be ‘‘a purely rhetorical audience’’ (140). 76. For purposes of concision, I have conflated comments by Origen from both his commentary and his homilies: the first part on the ‘‘daughters of Jerusalem’’ is from the Commentary, bk. 2, 1 (Lawson, Origen: The Song of Songs, 92); the second part, from the First Homily (ibid., 277). 77. ShirR 1.41 (Dunsky, 33). Israel then goes on to illustrate its case by telling a parable (mashal) about a king’s son who gets sunburned/blackened by being in the sun in the desert too long but regains his natural pale beauty once he returns home simply by being bathed and washed. 78. The positions are the predictable ones. Baer (‘‘Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,’’ 32) sees Origen as responding to the rabbinic (R. Isaac’s) defense of Israel. Urbach (‘‘Rabbinic Exegesis and Origen’s Commentary,’’ 262–65) accepts Baer’s reconstruction but sees R. Isaac’s interpretation itself as a ‘‘polemical riposte’’ to the Christian claim to be true heir of biblical Israel, particularly as that claim is formulated in Paul’s famous revisionist and ‘‘allegorical’’ interpretation of Hagar and Sarah and the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems in Gal 4.21–28. Urbach’s observation that Gal 4 stands behind both interpretations is important: R. Isaac’s parable clearly reinverts the mistress/maidservant paradigm as applied to the two figures, while Origen identifies the blackness of the Shulamite with the Kushite/Ethiopean woman Moses is said to have taken as wife in Nm 12.1 as well as with the Queen of Sheba whom Solomon weds. Kimelman (‘‘Rabbi Yohanan and Origen,’’ 592–93), in contrast, sees R. Isaac as responding to Origen but he also connects R. Isaac’s position with a number of statements and interpretations attributed to Yohanan or his disciples. On the Kushite and blackness in this anecdote and others in rabbinic literature, see David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 79–82, and n. 4 there. 79. The Mekilta passage is preserved as well in ShirR in a truncated version as a comment on 5.1 (Dunsky, 140–41). The triadic model is implicit as well in the following passages: ShirR 2.1 (Dunsky, 51) as a comment on ‘‘I am the lily

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of the valley . . . I—whom the Holy One, blessed be he, treasures more than the seventy nations’’; ShirR 6.18 (ad Song 6.12; Dunsky, 140), in a parable where the Gentile nations again challenge Israel regarding its identity; and in ShirR 7.8 (ad Song 7.4, Dunsky, 156), in a Streitfabel about Israel and the nations. Finally, note the late parable preserved in the Yemenite commentary translated and discussed in Lieberman, Midreshe teman, 13, in which an evil maidservant kills her mistress, the queen, dresses up in her clothes, and pretends to be the queen; this parable would appear to be the realization of the fantasy fantasized by the Ethiopean maidservant in R. Isaac’s anecdote! 80. Rashi, introduction to his commentary. See as well Ivan G. Marcus, ‘‘The Song of Songs in German H . asidism and the School of Rashi: A Preliminary Comparison,’’ in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, ed. B. Walfish (Waltham, Mass: University Press of New England [for] Haifa University Press, 1993), 1:181–89. 81. Abraham Ibn Ezra, introduction to his commentary as found in the standard rabbinic Bible (Mikra’ot gedolot), ‘‘the second instance.’’ The translation is copied from Sara Japhet’s article in this volume, ‘‘Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs,’’ 184. 82. Rashbam, introduction to his commentary, as cited and translated in Japhet, ‘‘Exegesis and Polemic,’’ 185. 83. See Arthur Green, ‘‘The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism’’; and Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘‘Ascetism and Eroticism in Medieval Jewish Philosophical and Mystical Exegesis of the Song of Songs,’’ in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. J. Dammen McAuliffe, B. D. Walfish, and J. W. Goering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 92– 118. 6. Patriarchy, Primogeniture, and Polemic in the Exegetical Traditions of Judaism and Islam 1. A. Geiger, Inquiratur in fonts Alcorani seu legis Mohammedicae eas qui ex Judaismo derivandi sunt, translated into German and published in 1833 as Was had Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? and much later into English and published in Madras in 1896 as Judaism and Islam. 2. Qur’a¯n 2.79, 2.101, 4.46, 5.43, 5.59–68, 7.162, 10.94, 45.16–17, 62.5, etc. Hadith: Abu¯ Da¯wud, ‘ilm 2 riwa¯yat h.adı¯th ahl al-kita¯b (H . asan 3:1035 噛3637–8, Ar. 3:317 噛3644–5); Bukha¯rı¯ tawh.¯ıd 42 (Kazi 9:460–61 噛613, 噛614), Bukha¯rı¯, anbiya¯‘ 50 (Kazi 4:442 噛667), Abu¯ Da¯wud, jana¯’iz 11, etc. 3. This source is the uncreated ‘‘Preserved Tablet’’ (al-lawh. al-mah.fu¯z., Q 85.2 2) located popularly under the heavenly divine throne and from which derive all divine revelations. Jewish and Christian revelations, therefore, since they derive from the same source as the Qur’a¯n, cannot claim originality (Wensinck and Bosworth, ‘‘Lawh.,’’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Leiden: [Brill, 1960], 5:698). 4. See Firestone, ‘‘ The Qur’a¯n and the Bible: Some Modern Studies of their Relationship,’’ in Bible and Qur’a¯n: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality, ed. J. C. Reeves (Atlanta, Ga.: SBL; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1–22. 5. But not the first representation of the expectation that the firstborn is preeminent. That is already evident in the story of Cain and Abel in Gn 4. 6. For a survey of the issue of primogeniture and inheritance in the ancient Near East, see Eryl W. Davies, ‘‘The Inheritance of the First-Born in Israel and the Ancient Near East,’’ Journal of Semitic Studies 38.2 (1993): 175–91; Frederick

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Greenspahn, When Brothers Dwell Together: The Preeminence of Younger Siblings in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 7. Or perhaps more accurately in the situation of Sarah and Hagar, polycoity, which is the addition of women of lesser status than the primary wife. Savina Teubal reads this not as an issue of birthright but rather as one of an ascendant patriarchal system supplanting an older matrifocal system represented in Mesopotamia (Sarah the Priestess [Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1984], and ‘‘Sarah and Hagar: Matriarchs and Visionaries,’’ in A Feminist Companion to Genesis, ed. A. Brenner [Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1993], 235– 350). 8. The biblical text, on the other hand, is equally concerned with keeping the inheritance (and divine promises) of land within certain kinship boundaries. Naomi Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993). 9. The issue continued among competing movements within Islam as well, particularly among those Shi’ites who considered the progeny of Muhammad to have been invested with a divine spark. 10. See also Rom 4.13–21; 9.6ff and Gal 3.7–9 (cf. Rom 4). 11. For Isaac: Gn 17.19; 19.12; 22.16–18. For Ishmael: Gn 16.10–12; 17.20; 19.13, 18. 12. Q 3.3; 5.44–47, 66–69, etc. 13. Q 2.79, 4.46; 5.12–15, etc. 14. Al-Sı¯ra al-Nabawiyya (Beirut: al-Da¯r al-thiqa¯fiyya al-‘arabiyya, n.d.): 1:1–3 (translated by A. Guillaume in The Life of Muhammad [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955], 3–4); Werner Caskel, Ghamarat an-nasab (‘‘The Abundance of Kinship’’): The Genealogical Work of Hisham b. Muhammad al-Kalbi (Leiden: Brill, 1966; C. Brockelmann, ‘‘Arabia,’’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., (Leiden: Brill, 1913), 1:372–74. 15. ‘‘Abram’’ and ‘‘Sarai’’ until their names are changed in chapter 17. 16. Gn 16.2. This is a play on words based on the similar sounds between ben (‘‘son’’) and banah (‘‘build up’’). 17. Gn 16.16; 17.1. 18. Gn 17. 19. Gn 17.20–21. 20. Gn 21.1–2, 21. 21. Gn 21.10. 22. There are a number of other references to ‘‘Ishmaelites’’ (Gn 37.25, 27; 39.1; Jgs 8.24; Ps 83.7; 1 Chr 2.17; 27.30) and ‘‘Hagarites’’ (Ps 83.7; 1 Chr 5.10, 19, 20; 11.38), clearly demonstrating a consciousness throughout the biblical period of a group of desert peoples assumed to derive from the line of Ishmael. 23. Gn 24.62. 24. Gn 24.62. Bereshit (Genesis) Rabbah (henceforth GenR) 60.14, 61.4, 6. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (henceforth PRE), ed. David Luria (Warsaw), chap. 30, Rashi s.v. Gn 24.62, 25.1, etc. Islamic exegesis does not reflect this view. Ibn alAthir writes, ‘‘When Sarah died, after her, [Abraham] married Qatu¯ra the daughter of Yaqta¯n, a Canaanite woman. She gave him six boys . . . It is said: After Qatu¯ra he married another woman whose name was Haju¯n bt. Uhayr’’ (‘Izz al-Dı¯n Alı¯ Ibn al-Athı¯r, Al-Ka¯mil fı¯ al-Ta’rı¯kh, 5 vols. [Beirut: Da¯r S.a¯dir liltiba¯‘ati wal-nashir, 1385/1965], which is a copy of Ibn-el-Athiri Chronocon quod Perfectissimum Inscribitur, ed. Tornberg [Leiden: Brill, 1867–77], 1:123–24). 25. Midrash, which originated and flourished in Late Antiquity, is, along with

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the targums, the earliest and most influential genre of extrabiblical Jewish Bible exegesis. As collections of oral literature, midrash reflects earlier periods. For the purposes of this study, ‘‘midrash’’ and ‘‘midrashic’’ refer not only to the literary corpus known officially as midrash but also to similar or parallel interpretation in found elsewhere in ancient rabbinic literature. The Jewish exegetical comments to follow are drawn from this literature. 26. Gn 10; 11; 19.30–38; 25.1–18, etc. For older studies of this, see D. S. Margoliouth, The Relations between Arabs and Israelites prior to the Rise of Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1924); James Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible (1934; New York: Ktav, 1969). 27. Only the obscure reference to Ishmael as metsah.ek, which will be treated below. 28. ‘‘At first she was ‘my princess,’ (meaning) to her own people, but later she became princess to the entire world.’’ See tBer 1.13, tBer 13a, GenR 47.1. 29. Palestinian Targum 16.1; GenR 45.1; PRE § 26 (61b), Sefer ha-yashar (Tel Aviv: Alter Bergman, 1980), 42. 30. Gn 12.10–13.2. 31. GenR 45.1. Hagar is sometimes depicted as the daughter of Pharaoh’s concubine, so she is not necessarily of the royal blood that would inherit the throne (PRE 61b, Sefer ha-yashar, 42). 32. Palestinian Targum 12.11; GenR 60.16; Tanhuma (Jerusalem: Eshkol, with the commentaries of the ‘Ets Yosef and the ‘Anaf Yosef ) Lekh-lekha 5 (p. 55); Sefer ha-yashar, 40. These traits arc included or suggested, of course, also by the biblical narrative, though with far less detail (Gn 12.11–15; 18.1–10). 33. See, e.g., GenR 45.4, 6; GenR 60.16. 34. GenR 45.4, repeated in Yalkut Shim‘oni (Jerusalem, with the commentary, Zayit Ra‘anan) Lekh-lekha 79 (p. 44, 22b). 35. GenR 45.7. 36. For a prior study of this issue through the motif of the binding (‘akedah) or attempted sacrifice (dhabı¯h.) of Abraham’s son, see Firestone, ‘‘Abraham’s Son as the Intended Sacrifice (al-Dhabı¯h., Qur’a¯n 37.99–113): Issues in Qur’a¯nic Exegesis,’’ Journal of Semitic Studies 34.1 (1989): 95–131. 37. For an enumeration of a wide range of meanings applied to the term in recent scholarship, see Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage, 79–80. 38. This, as noted previously, is not the only biblical etymology for Isaac’s name. See also Gn 17.17; Gn 18.12; and Gn 21.6. 39. GenR 53.11. The reference is to Gn 39.7. 40. GenR 53.11. The reference is to Ex 32.6. 41. GenR 53.11. The reference is to 2 Sam 2.14. 42. GenR 53.11. The reference is to Prov 22.18–19. 43. Ibid. Cf., for example, Sifre Dt 31.5, ExR 1.1; Pesikta Rabbati, addition to Piska 47 (p. 193b). 44. GenR 53.13d. 45. GenR 53.15b (davar ah.er). 46. GenR 53.14b. 47. See, for example, ExR 1.1. 48. GenR 45.9a. 49. Tense and time are fluid in these forms and irrelevant for this discussion. 50. GenR 53.14. 51. Dedan is today’s al-‘Ula¯’ in the northern Hijaz region of Arabia; Qedar may be associated with the Assyrian name Kidri, referring to Palmyra, southeast

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of Damascus; and Tema is the Arabic Tayma¯’, a caravan stop in western Arabia on the way north from Medina (James Montgomery, Arabia and the Bible [New York: Ktav, 1969], 16–17, 30, 45–47). 52. yTa‘an 4.5 (22a); Lamentations rabbati on Lam 2.2. 53. Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1952), 2:92, 369, n. 4. 54. GenR 61.7. Cf. bSan 91a, Megillat Ta‘anit, chap. 3, Yalkut Shim‘oni, 噛110. 55. Some suggest that this rabbi, who is known as Gevivah b. Pesisa in the Sanhedrin version, might have been an Arab (Ibn Qassem). 56. That is, where is it enumerated what Abraham gave to his other sons? 57. The Qur’a¯n does, however, contain a number of versions and references to the divine messengers’ visit to Abraham and his unnamed wife along with the annunciation of the birth of Isaac (Q 11.69–74; 51.24–30; 15.51–59; 29.3 1), all of which parallel Gn 18. 58. Ibn al-Athir 1:101. 59. Muh.ammad b. Jarı¯r al-T.abarı¯, Ta’rı¯kh al-Rusul wa’l-Mulu¯k (henceforth referred to as Tabari, History), ed. M. J. De Goeje as Annales (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 1:267. Al-Suddı¯ is the authority for this tradition. 60. The Arabic commentaries do not treat the issue of Isaac’s name (Ish.a¯q in Arabic) The Arabic cognate to the Hebrew ts-h.-k is d.-h.-k (to laugh, grin, to mock), which is audially too far removed to find an easy parallel. Although an old Arabic parallel name may be found in the name Al-d.ah.h.a¯k, meaning joker, jester, or one who laughs frequently, it is not remarked upon by the commentators. 61. Unlike male circumcision, female circumcision is not required among the Islamic schools of law, although some recommend it. It is nevertheless not uncommon in traditional cultures in parts of North Africa and the Middle East (A. J. Wensinck, ‘‘Khita¯n,’’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, [2nd ed.], 5:20–22). 62. That is, the Ka‘ba. 63. Tabari, History, 277–78. The tradition is repeated with slight variation in Ibn al-Athir 1:102–3 and Ah.mad b. Abı¯ Ya‘qu¯b al-Ya‘qu¯bı¯, Ta’rı¯kh (ed. M. T. Houtsma as Historiae [Leiden: Brill, 1969]), 23. It is not clear from this narrative whether Sarah is described here in a disparaging manner or whether she is simply acting out what in this context would be the expected behavior of women. Some rabbinic sources note that Sarah gave Ishmael the evil eye, which caused him to become sick and drink up all the water in the water skin (GenR 53.13b, Yalkut Shim‘oni, Vayera’ 94 [p. 55]). In the rabbinic context this cannot be considered a disparaging portrayal of Sarah. 64. Q 22.26: ‘‘And [remember] when we prepared for Abraham the place of the House, [saying]: do not ascribe anything as a partner with me, and purify my House for those who circumambulate [it], and to those who stand and bow and make prostrations.’’ Q 14.35–37: ‘‘And [remember that] Abraham said: my Lord, make this land safe and preserve me and my sons from serving idols . . . our Lord, I have settled some of my offspring in an uncultivated valley near your sacred house, our Lord, so they may worship; so incline the best people toward them, and provide them with sustenance so that they may give thanks.’’ 65. Firestone, ‘‘Abraham’s Journey to Mecca in Islamic Exegesis: A FormCritical Study of a Tradition,’’ Studia Islamica 76 (1992): 5–24. 66. Gn 12.7–8; 13.3–4, 18; 18.1. 67. This association is made late in biblical literature (compare Gn 22.2 with 2 Chr 3.1).

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68. Q 37.102, 108–10. ¯ y al-Qur’a¯n, 30 69. Tabari, History, 280, 282; Tabari, Ja¯mi‘ al-Baya¯n ‘an Ta’wı¯l A vols. in 15 (henceforth referred to as Tabari, Commentary; Beirut: Da¯r al-Fikr, 1405/1985), 1:551; 13:229, 230; Ibn al-Athir 1:103. 70. Ibn al-Athir 1:102, Muh.ammad b. ‘Abdalla¯h al-Kisa¯’ı¯, Qis.as. al-Anbiya¯’, ed. Isaac Eisenberg as Vita Prophetarum (Leiden: Brill, 1922), 142. 71. Tabari, History, 279, 281, 283; Tabari, Commentary, 1:551, 13:230, 231; Ibn al-Athir 1:103. It is not clear to me what the function of this exegesis might be in an Islamic context. 72. Tabari, Commentary, 13:232. 73. The exception is al-Kisa’i, 142. 74. Occasionally even as a Copt (Ibn Sa‘d 1:47–49)! 75. Ibn Sa‘d 1:49–50, Ibn al-Athir 1:101. Arabs are ‘‘children of the water of heaven’’ perhaps because they live in the desert, an area devoid of rivers or lakes and dependent only upon rain. The Lakhmid kings were known also as the banu¯ ma¯’ al-sama¯’, and the waters of the sacred Zamzam spring in Mecca are known as ma¯’ al sama¯’. 76. Muh.ammad b. Manı¯‘ Ibn Sa‘d, Kita¯b al-Tabaqa¯t al-Kabı¯r, 9 vols. (Beirut: Da¯r S.a¯dir lil-tiba¯‘a wal-nashir, 1380/1970), 1:51. This is countered by other traditions that Ishmael was the first of the ‘‘Arabized Arabs’’ (al-‘arab al-muta‘arraba or al-musta‘riba), as opposed to the ‘‘Original Arabs.’’ Other traditions ascribe Hagar as the matriarch of the Egyptian Copts (Ibn al-Athir 1:102, and see Ibn Sa‘d 1:50). 77. For a full treatment of this scene, including a listing of its sources in Jewish and Islamic tradition, see Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands, 76–79, and Aviva Schusman, ‘‘Abraham’s Visits to Ishmael—The Jewish Origin and Orientation ’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 49 (1980): 325–45. 78. Q 2.125–127: ‘‘And We covenanted with Abraham and Ishmael to purify my House for those making the circumambulations . . . and when Abraham and Ishmael raised up the foundations of the House, [they prayed]: our Lord accept [this]from us, for it is you who are the Hearer, the Knower.’’ 79. Q 22.26; 13.35–37. 80. But the issue of importance for Islam is not that of the firstborn per se— rather, it is Ishmael as well as (not instead of ) Isaac. 81. For a tally of the exegetes, see Firestone, ‘‘Abraham’s Son as the Intended Sacrifice,’’ in Journeys in Holy Lands. 82. ‘Alı¯ b. Al-H . usayn a-Mas‘u¯dı¯, Muru¯j al-dhahab wa-Ma‘a¯din al-Jawa¯hir, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Andalus, 1385/1965), 58. The H . ija¯z is the region in which Mecca and Medina are located. Syria in medieval Arabic sources often refers to a Greater Syria that includes Jerusalem and its vicinity. 83. Tabari, Commentary, 23:84–85; Tabari, History 1:299, Ah.mad b. Muh.ammad al-Tha‘labı¯, ‘Ara¯’is al-Maja¯lis (Cairo: Mus.t.afa¯ al-Ba¯bı¯ al-H . alabı¯, 1374/1954), 92; ‘Ima¯d al-Dı¯n Isma¯‘ı¯l b. ‘Umar Ibn Kathı¯r, Tafsı¯r al-Qur’a¯n al-‘Az.¯ım, 4 vols. (Cairo: ‘Isa al-Ba¯bı¯ al-H . alabı¯, n.d.), 4:18; Ibn Kathı¯r, Qis.as. al-Anbiya¯’, 2 vols. (Beirut, 1402/1982), 1:235–36; Mujı¯r al-Dı¯n ‘Abd al-Rah.ma¯n b. Muh.ammad al-H . anbalı¯, An-Uns al-Jalı¯l bi-ta’rı¯kh al-Quds wa’l-Khalı¯l, 2 vols. (Amman: Maktabat alMuh.tasab, 1973), 1:40–41; etc. 84. Q 3.67: ‘‘Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but was a monotheist, one who submits to gods will (h.anı¯fan musliman).’’ Cf. Q 2.140; 22.78. 85. Robert Alter brought this to the attention of a wide audience with The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

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277

86. See Firestone, ‘‘Comparative Studies in Bible and Qur’a¯n: A Fresh Look at Genesis 22 in Light of Surah 37,’’ in Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Communication and Interaction: Essays in Honor of William M. Brinner, ed. B. Hary, J. Hayes, and F. Astren (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 169–84. 87. Firestone, ‘‘Merit, Mimesis, and Martyrdom: Aspects of Shi‘ite Meta-Historical Exegesis on Abraham’s Sacrifice in Light of Jewish, Christian, and Sunni Tradition,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66.1 (1998): 93–116, translated into Hebrew as ‘‘Zekhut, Hikui, Umot Kedoshim,’’ in The Faith of Abraham in the Light of Interpretation throughout the Ages, ed. M. Halamish, H. Kasher, and Y. Silman (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002), 93–112. 88. Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands. 7. May Karaites Eat Chicken? I would like to thank Natalie Dohrmann, Daniel J. Lasker, David Stern, and Adena Tanenbaum for their valuable comments and suggestions. A slightly different version of this chapter appears in my book, Search Scripture Well: Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), chapter 2; my thanks to Brill for permitting me to republish it here. 1. M. El-Kodsi, The Karaite Jews of Egypt, 1882–1986 (Lyons, N.Y.: Wilprint, 1987), 186. 2. See, e.g., C. Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 356–57. 3. M. Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles (Ha-mishpat ha-‘Ivri), 4 vols. (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 1:228–39, 283– 90, 391. For the citation, see 399. 4. For basic orientation, see Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 10:761–85, s.v. ‘‘Karaites’’ (J. E. Heller and L. Nemoy); L. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952); and M. Polliack, ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For an overview of Karaite biblical interpretation, see D. Frank, ‘‘Karaite Exegesis,’’ in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 1/2, ed. M. Saebø (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000), 110–28, and D. Frank, ‘‘Search Scripture Well’’: Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (Leiden: Brill, 2004), chap. 1. 5. For a detailed analysis of the tenth-century Karaites’ theories of knowledge, see H. Ben-Shammai, ‘‘The Doctrines of Religious Thought of Abu¯ Yu¯suf Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ and Yefet ben ‘Elı¯,’’ 2 vols. (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1977), 1:8–111. 6. See, e.g., Saadya Gaon’s description of an anti-Rabbanite work with ten chapters covering Sabbath laws, calendration, forbidden marriages, and laws of purity, among others, in A. Harkavy, ‘‘Fragments of Anti-Karaite Writings of Saadiah in the Imperial Public Library at St. Petersburg,’’ JQR, o.s. 13 (1901): 663, 666. On early Karaite-Rabbanite polemics in general, see S. Poznanski, ‘‘The Karaite Literary Opponents of Saadiah Gaon in the Tenth Century,’’ JQR, o.s. 18 (1906): 209–50 , and idem, ‘‘The Anti-Karaite Writings of Saadiah Gaon,’’ JQR, o.s. 10 (1897–98): 238–76. On the calendar, see ibid., 246–48; Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis, ed. M. Zucker (Arabic and Hebrew; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1984), 227–28, 436; and D. E. Sklare, Samuel ben H . ofni Gaon and His Cultural World (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 283–84. For the polemics concerning Sabbath lights, see, e.g., H. Hirschfeld, ‘‘The Arabic Por-

278

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tion of the Cairo Genizah at Cambridge (Thirteenth Article),’’ JQR, o.s. 18 (1906): 600–620, and B. Klar, Meh.karim ve-‘iyunim be-lashon be-shirah uve-sifrut (Tel Aviv: Mah.barot Lesifrut, 1954), 242–58. On liturgical conflicts, see U. Simon, Four Approaches to the Book of Psalms (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), chaps. 1–2; D. Frank, ‘‘Karaite Prayer and Liturgy,’’ in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 559–62. The halakhic aspect of the schism comes through clearly in S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1952–83), 5:205–85; D. J. Lasker, ‘‘Rabbanism and Karaism: The Contest for Supremacy,’’ in Great Schisms in Jewish History, ed. R. Jospe and S. M. Wagner (Denver, Colo.: University of Denver Center for Judaic Studies, 1981), 47–72; and R. Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 6, esp. pp. 93–99. 7. So far as I am aware, the term is my own. On the question of polysemy versus indeterminacy in aggadic midrash, see David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), chap. 1. 8. On the ramifications of maintaining that certain halakhic details are not divinely determined, see M. Berger, Rabbinic Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86–88, where the problem of scriptural ambiguity and the question of divine intention are directly addressed. On custom, see Elon, Jewish Law, 2:880–944, esp. 901–3 (‘‘Custom as Supplementing the Law’’). 9. See Nm 15.38 for the injunction and bMen 42b–43a for a discussion of the dye. Interestingly, there have been modern attempts at discovering the identity of the snail from which—according to rabbinic sources—the dye was produced; see C. E. Twerski, ‘‘Identifying the Chilazon,’’ Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society 34 (1997): 77–102. 10. See Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis, 13 (Arabic), 180–81 (Hebrew), and Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r wa’l-Mara¯qib, ed. L. Nemoy, 5 vols. (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1939–43), II.14.1, vol. 1, p. 124, lines 1–7, citing Saadya in extenso. Cf. G. Vajda, ‘‘E´tudes sur Qirqisa¯nı¯, II,’’ REJ 107 (1946–47): 89 where lafz.a mutasha¯biha is rendered ‘‘un mot e´quivoque’’ and al-alfa¯z. al-mutasha¯biha ‘‘ces mots de sens amphibologique.’’ 11. See Ex 12.14–15, 39. 12. See Lev 15. 13. Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis, 15 (Arabic), 186 (Hebrew), and alQirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r II.14.4, vol. 1, p. 126, lines 5–8. 14. Saadya discusses the rational and revealed laws in several works, notably Kita¯b al-Mukhta¯r Fı¯ al-Ama¯na¯t wa’l-I‘tiqa¯da¯t (Sefer ha-nivh.ar ba-’emunot uva-de‘ot), ed. Y. Qafih. (Jerusalem: Sura, 1970), 3:1–3, pp. 116–24, trans. S. Rosenblatt, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), 137–47; see A. Altmann, ‘‘Saadya’s Conception of the Law,’’ Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 28 (1944): 320–39, and H. Ben-Shammai, ‘‘The Classification of the Commandments and the Concept of Wisdom in Rav Saadia’s Thought’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 41 (1972): 170–82. He also devoted a special work to the revealed commandments, Kita¯b Tah.s.¯ıl al-Shara¯’i‘ al-Sam‘ı¯ya, portions of which were published by M. Zucker, ‘‘Fragments of the Kita¯b Tah. s.¯ıl al-Shara¯’i‘ alSama¯‘ı¯yah [!]’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 41 (1972): 373–410. 15. Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis, 13 (Arabic), 181 (Hebrew), and alQirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r II.14.1, vol. 1, p. 124, lines 7–10. 16. A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 45 (modified).

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17. J. E. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 149–57. See also M. M. Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 2:20–46, for a convenient summary of traditional interpretations. On al-T.abarı¯’s comment, see J. D. McAuliffe, ‘‘Quranic Hermeneutics: The Views of al-T.abarı¯ and Ibn Kathı¯r,’’ in Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’a¯n, ed. A. Rippin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 42–62. 18. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 149. According to al-T.abarı¯, Ibn ‘Abba¯s identified 6:141–53 as ‘‘clear and decisive verses’’; see Ayyoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, 2:22. 19. Ayyoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, 2:22. 20. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 150. Cf. al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s statement: ‘‘The scholar must interpret the ambiguous passages of the Koran according to the sunna of the Prophet, and if he does not find a sunna, according to the consensus of the Muslims, and if there is no consensus, according to the qiya¯s’’; see J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 134 citing the Risa¯la. 21. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 152; for the text, see Ibn Qutayba, Ta’wı¯l Mushkil al-Qur’a¯n (Cairo: Markaz al-Ahra¯m lil-Tarjama wa’l-Nashr, 1989), 91–95. 22. On Saadya’s usage of muh.kama¯t and mutasha¯biha¯t, see Zucker’s discussion in Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis, xxxviii–xlii, and Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 305–7. 23. But cf. Kita¯b al-Ama¯na¯t 3:1–2, pp. 118–22 (trans. Rosenblatt, 140–45), where Saadya notes ‘‘that they have some partial uses as well as a certain slight justification from the point of view of reason’’ (Arabic, 119; English, 141). 24. He also includes two nonlegal categories: knowledge of postbiblical Jewish history; and knowledge of the End of Days. For Saadya’s seven us.u¯l, see Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis,13–15 (Arabic), 181–84 (Hebrew). For summaries and discussion, see Vajda, ‘‘E´tudes sur Qirqisa¯ni, II,’’ 89–90; Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 92–93; and J. M. Harris, How Do We Know This? (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 75–81. The same argument can be found in Saadya’s polemical poem ’Essa meshali; see B. M. Lewin, ‘‘’Essa meshali lerasag,’’ in Rav se‘adyah ga’on: Kovets torani-madda‘i, ed. Y. L. Fishman (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1943), 525–27. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ reproduces Saadya’s words (Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, II.14.2–3, vol. 1, pp. 124–25) and then refutes them (ibid., II.15.2–7, vol. 1, pp. 128–32). Salmon b. Yeruh.¯ım also responds directly to the seven ‘‘demonstrations’’ (re’ayot) in Saadya’s ‘‘Pitron bereshit’’; see Sefer milh.amot ha-shem (The Book of the Wars of the Lord), ed. I. Davidson (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1934), 47–50, trans. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 80–82. 25. See Salmon ben Yeruh.im, The Book of the Wars of the Lord, 47–48; trans. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 80. Cf. the baraita cited in bMen 41b–42a: ‘‘The word tsitsit only signifies something that hangs over; tsitsit, in fact, signifies any length whatsoever. And [this was established] long ago when the elders of Beth Shammai and of Beth Hillel went up into the upper chamber of Johanan b. Bathyra and decided that there was no prescribed length for the tsitsit; and so, too, that there was no prescribed length for the lulav’’ (The Babylonian Talmud . . . Translated into English, ed. I. Epstein [London: Soncino Press, 1935–52], Seder Kodashim: Menah.ot, 251 [modified]). Only in the explication of the baraita are we told that ‘‘no prescribed length’’ means ‘‘no prescribed maximum length’’; there is, of course a prescribed minimum length: three fingerbreadths, according to Beth Hillel, and four according to Beth Shammai. It should be noted that Anan declared the length of the tassel to be a handbreadth (tefah.); see A. Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, mah.beret sheminit (Studien und Mittheilungen, VIII)

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(Hebrew; St. Petersburg, 1903), 10. As we will see, there were also serious halakhic disagreements between the different sectarian groups. 26. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r II.2, p. 129, lines 2–5. The Rabbanites insist that only one particular blue dye may be used, and that in its absence, the tsitsit should be entirely white. For the Karaites, it is essential that blue cord be attached to the tsitsit, but the source of the color is immaterial. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ differentiates here between the tekhelet of the tsitsit, which is simply a color, i.e., an accident, and the tekhelet, which is part of the sky’s essence. On the color of the sky, see Ben-Shammai, ‘‘Doctrines,’’ 1:157. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s last statement flatly contradicts mMen 4:1: ‘‘The (absence of the) blue (in the fringes) does not invalidate the white, neither does the (absence of the) white invalidate the blue.’’ 27. For the Karaite treatment of tsitsit, see D. Frank, ‘‘Search Scripture Well,’’ 61–77. 28. Lev 11.13–19 and Dt 14.11–18. On the permitted and forbidden birds in the Bible, see J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (Anchor Bible) (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 661–64, 701–2, 718–36; B. Levine, Leviticus (The JPS Torah Commentary) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 67–68, 243–48; J. Tigay, Deuteronomy (The JPS Torah Commentary) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 139–40; M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 41–57; R. Bulmer, ‘‘The Uncleanness of the Birds of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,’’ Man, n.s. 24 (1989): 304–20; and A. D. H. Mayes, ‘‘Deuteronomy 14 and the Deuteronomic World View,’’ Studies in Deuteronomy (Vetus Testamentum Supplement, 53), ed. F. Garcı´a Martı´nez et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 165–81. Note that Dt 14.13 mentions both the ra’ah and the dayyah, bringing the total to twenty-one. 29. H. Danby, trans., The Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 518 (modified; cf. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 661–62). See also Sifra Leviticus, Shemini 5:6 (on Lev 11.13). 30. See bH . ul 60b–61a, trans. Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Kodashim: H . ullin, 1:334. The talmudic discussion extends to fol. 66a; for a comprehensive analysis, see Menahem b. Solomon ha-Me’iri (d. 1306), Beit ha-beh.irah ‘al massekhet h.ullin, ed. A. Lis (Jerusalem: Makhon ha-talmud ha-yisre’eli ha-shalem, 1970), 212–35. 31. bH . ul 63a: makom she-nahagu le’ekhol ’okhelin, makom she-nahagu she-lo le’ekhol ’ein ’okhelin. The identity of the shoknai (shakenai?) and botnai (batenai?) remains uncertain. 32. bH . ul 63b. The sequel reinforces the precedence of expert, practical knowledge in this area over book learning: ‘‘A hunter is believed when he says, ‘My master transmitted to me that this bird is clean.’ Rabbi Johanan added: provided he was familiar with birds and their nomenclature. Rabbi Zera enquired: Does ‘master’ mean a master in learning or in hunting?—Come and hear, for Rabbi Johanan added: provided he was familiar with birds and their nomenclature. Now if it means a master in hunting it is well, but if it means a master in learning, I grant you that he would have learnt their nomenclature, but would he actually know them [so as to recognize them]? You must therefore say it means a master in hunting; this is proved.’’ 33. Interestingly, despite the Talmud’s enumeration of these criteria, most later authorities permit only those birds that have traditionally been consumed. The turkey—a New World bird—posed obvious problems and was, in fact, forbidden by some scholars, notably Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579–1654); for a

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convenient overview with abundant references to later rabbinic sources, see A. Z. Zivotofsky, ‘‘Is Turkey Kosher?’’ Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society 35 (1998): 79–110. 34. See S. Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2:24, line 5; Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 67–68 (trans. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 16–17); and H. Ben-Shammai, ‘‘Between Ananites and Karaites: Observations on Early Medieval Jewish Sectarianism,’’ in Studies in Muslim-Jewish Relations, ed. R. L. Nettler (Chur: Harwood, 1993), 1:22 and 27, nn. 27–29. The passage published by Harkavy and translated by Nemoy is a citation of Anan’s work found in an eleventh-century text; I have cited Nemoy’s translation. 35. See Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 67, n. 10. 36. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r XII.3, vol. 5, pp. 1183–84. Cf. Ben-Shammai, ‘‘Between Ananites and Karaites,’’ 22: ‘‘that it feed its young directly into their mouths and that it give them drink by spitting into their mouths’’ (apparently reading yushribu); so also Aaron b. Joseph (12th–13th c.), Sefer ha-mivh.ar (Go¨zlo¨w, 1835), vol. 3, fol. 16a last line, and Aaron b. Elijah (d. 1369), Gan ‘Eden (Go¨zlo¨w, 1864), fol. 101a. The reading yashribu (‘‘drink’’) would accord, however, with bH . ul 62b: zeh motsets u-meki ve-zeh motsets ve-’eno meki (‘‘the former drinks and spits, the latter drinks but does not spit’’). As Ben-Shammai notes (ibid., 22), these criteria may well represent a later innovation. 37. Some Ananites even added a third criterion, the extra toe; see al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r XII.3, vol. 5, p. 1183, line 17. 38. H. Ben-Shammai, ‘‘The Karaite Controversy: Scripture and Tradition in Early Karaism,’’ in Religionsgespra¨che im Mittelalter, ed. B. Lewis and F. Niewo¨hner (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 24, and idem, ‘‘Return to the Scriptures in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Sectarianism and in Early Islam,’’ in Les Retours aux e´critures: Fondamentalismes pre´sents et passe´s, ed. E´. Patlagean and A. Le Boulluec (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 319–39. On the legal schools in Islam, see N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), chap. 7. 39. Benjamin’s view is recorded in the Commentary of Yeshu‘ah b. Judah (11th c.) on Leviticus (St. Petersburg, Russian National Library, Yevr-Arab. I:1989); see Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 179. On this manuscript, see J. Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1935), 2:38. 40. Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 187–89 (trans. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 32). 41. See Sifra Leviticus, ed. L. Finkelstein (New York and Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1983–91), ‘‘Dibbura dindava,’’ parashah 7.9, vol. 2, p. 63, lines 40–42; for discussion, see Sifra Leviticus, 3.55–57, nn. 40–42. This translation is reflected in Saadya’s Tafsı¯r: Wa-yanza‘u h.aws.alatahu ma‘a qa¯nisatihi; see Version arabe du Pentateuque de R. Saadia ben Iosef al-Fayyou¯mı¯, ed. J. Derenbourg (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1893), ad loc. 42. See Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 187: ki hem h.oshevim ki mur’ah ve-notsah hi qa¯nis.a wa-h.aws.ala; for al-Qu¯misı¯’s explanation, see p. 188 (trans. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 32). Modern translations differ as well; RSV has ‘‘its crop with the feathers,’’ and NJPS ‘‘its crop with the contents.’’ But Milgrom renders: ‘‘He shall remove its crissum by its feathers’’; see Leviticus 1–16, 134 and the discussion on 169–71. 43. Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 188 (my translation; cf. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 33): ve-khol davar ’asher yesh lo domeh ba-mikra nukhal liftor oto kemo ‘orev

282

Notes to Pages 131–133

ve-nesher; va-’asher en lo domeh ba-mikra lo nukhal liftor ’oto kemo ha-peres veha-‘ozniyah veha-tah.mas veha-’ah.erim. 44. See bRosh 26a; yBer 9.1, 63b; and Midrash Leviticus Rabbah 25.5. 45. Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 188 (my translation; cf. Nemoy, Karaite Anthology, 33). 46. See al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r I.16, vol. 1, p. 57, lines 9–11, trans. Lockwood in B. Chiesa and W. Lockwood, Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ on Jewish Sects and Christianity (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984), 150. The Arabic bayt al-muqaddas probably refers to Jerusalem, not the Temple Mount per se. By the twelfth century, the anecdote had become badly garbled; see Judah Hadassi, ’Eshkol ha-kofer (Go¨zlo¨w, 1836), fol. 41d, Alphabet 98, ‘ayin, and Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim, 145. Cf. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 5:195, who senses the polemical nature of Malik’s proclamation. 47. Malik seems to have been a contemporary of Benjamin al-Naha¯wandı¯’s; his followers (the ‘‘Ramlı¯ya’’ or ‘‘Malikı¯ya’’) were still active in al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s day. See al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, I.2.18, vol. 1, p. 14, lines 4–5, trans. Lockwood, 104; cf. 71–72. 48. Daniel al-Qu¯misı¯, Pitron sheneim ‘asar, ed. I. D. Markon (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1957), 29. 49. Daniel al-Qu¯misı¯, Comment on Ps 74.6; see A. Marmorstein, ‘‘Seridim mipitrone ha-kara’i daniel al-qumisi,’’ Hatsofeh: Quartalis Hebraica (Budapest) 8 (1924): 336, lines 16–17 ⳱ idem, ‘‘Fragments du commentaire de Daniel alKumisi sur les Psaumes,’’ Journal Asiatique, IIe`me se´rie 7 (1916): 196. See D. Frank, ‘‘Karaite Exegesis,’’ 114. See also Japheth b. Eli’s comment on Ps 43.3: ‘‘Elijah will eliminate uncertainty and dissension (al-shibh wa’l-khulf ) among the nation, i.e., Israel, concerning (questions of ) impurity and purity as well as the other matters in which they differ’’; see Y. Erder, ‘‘The Attitude of the Karaite, Yefet ben Eli, to Islam in Light of his Interpretation of Psalms 14 and 53’’ (Hebrew), Michael 14 (1997): 29–30, n. 4. On the Teacher of Righteousness in early Karaite thought, see idem, The Karaite Mourners of Zion and the Qumran Scrolls (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004), 366–68, and see index, s.v. ‘‘moreh ha-tsedek.’’ 50. The text was published from a Genizah fragment, T-S Ar. 52.194 (formerly T-S. 10. Ca. 1); see H. Hirschfeld, ‘‘The Arabic Portion of the Cairo Genizah at Cambridge (Fourteenth Article),’’ JQR, o.s. 19 (1907): 136–61. 51. See Hirschfeld, ‘‘The Arabic Portion (Fourteenth Article),’’ 145, lines 1–5 (Ar.), p. 156 (Eng.). Cf. Saadya, Tafsı¯r ad loc. Of the bird names in Lev 11 and Dt 14, only the ’ayah is mentioned in his dictionary, where it is simply glossed ‘of; see Se‘adya Ga’on, Ha-’Egron: Kita¯b ’Us.u¯l al-Shi‘r al-‘Ibra¯nı¯, ed. N. Allony (Jerusalem: Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1969), 190. In his Tafsı¯r, however, he renders the word as s.adan (‘‘screech owl’’; Lev 11.14, Dt 14.13), and h.id’a (‘‘kite’’; Job 28.7). Clearly, he considered these translations to be provisional. On the problem Rabbanites faced in identifying one such bird, see Z. ‘Amar, ‘‘Hapulmus ‘al kashrut ha-h.asidah (Ciconia) bi-yeme ha-benayim’’ (The Debate Concerning the Permissibility of the Stork in the Middle Ages), Sinai 128 (2001): 135–46. 52. See Hirschfeld, ‘‘The Arabic Portion (Fourteenth Article),’’ 145, line 16: wa-’idha¯ fah.as.na¯ ‘an dha¯lika lam najid al-ra’y yu’addı¯na¯ ila¯ ‘ala¯mat al-battati (‘‘Upon investigation, we have not found that reasoning could lead us (to discover) any definite sign’’). 53. Ibid., 145, lines 9–21 (Ar.), p. 156 (Eng.). 54. See Harris, ‘‘How Do We Know This?’’ 76–81. Cf. M. Halbertal’s

Notes to Pages 133–134

283

‘‘retrieval model’’ of midrash halakhah as a means of reconstructing the Oral Law in People of the Book (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 54–59. 55. Hirschfeld, ‘‘The Arabic Portion (Fourteenth Article),’’ 147, lines 14–19 (Ar.), pp. 157–58 (Eng.). 56. Ibid., 147, lines 23–24: wa-dha¯lika an al-‘ala¯ma al-da¯lla ‘ala¯ al-h.ala¯l wa’lh.ara¯m innama¯ hiya fı¯ ’l-jism la¯ fı¯’l-af‘a¯l. 57. Ibid., 148, line 2: al-ijtira¯r al-mud.d.amin bihi ‘adm al-ad.ra¯s al-‘a¯lı¯ya. 58. Ibid., 146, lines 3–4. 59. Ibid., 146, lines 12ff. 60. See al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r XII.2, vol. 5, pp. 1183–85. For translations and analyses of Japheth b. Eli’s comments on Lev 11.13–19 and Dt 14.11–20, see D. Frank, ‘‘Search Scripture Well,’’ 47–61, 80–88. On the exegesis of these two authors in general, see ibid., chap. 1, and Frank, ‘‘Karaite Exegesis,’’ 116–23. 61. On ijma¯‘ and naql, see esp. al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, II.18, pp. 141–49, trans. Vajda, ‘‘E´tudes sur Qirqisa¯nı¯, II,’’ 93–97. For discussions, see Ben-Shammai, ‘‘Doctrines,’’ 1:89–100; G. Khan, ‘‘Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s Opinions Concerning the Text of the Bible and Parallel Muslim Attitudes Towards the Text of the Qur’a¯n,’’ JQR 81 (1990): 59–73; N. Wieder, ‘‘Three Terms for Tradition,’’ JQR 49 (1958–59): 108–13; and Z. Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 228–29 and n. 48. On the interrelationships between custom, tradition, and consensus in geonic writings, see G. Libson, ‘‘Halakhah and Reality in the Gaonic Period: Taqqanah, Minhag, Tradition and Consensus: Some Observations,’’ in The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity, ed. D. Frank (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 92–98. For a late tenth-century Rabbanite perspective on consensus, see Sklare, Samuel ben H . ofni Gaon, 253–59 (the first of Samuel’s Ten Questions). 62. As examples of rare vocabulary, al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ cites fragments of two verses, Nah 2.11 and Joel 1.17, as well as ‘‘the names of many birds and gemstones’’; see al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, II.18.10–11, pp. 145–46, and see also Polliack, The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation, 70–71. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s remarks relate to a Karaite-Rabbanite dispute over the meanings of biblical hapax legomena. The central work is Saadya’s Kita¯b al-sab‘ı¯n lafz.a (‘‘Book of Seventy Words’’); see N. Allony, ‘‘Kita¯b al-sab‘ı¯n lafz.a le-rav Se‘adyah Ga’on,’’ in Studies in Medieval Philology and Literature, vol. 1, ed. Y. Tobi and R. Attal (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1986), 27–74. There is also an anonymous anti-Karaite polemic dedicated to the subject—possibly from the tenth century; see M. El-Hawary, The Differences between the Karaites and the Rabbanites in the Light of Genizah Mss.: MS. Heb. f.18 (fols. 1–33a), Bodleian-Oxford (Arabic) (Cairo: Dar El-Zahraa, 1994). On the treatment of hapax legomena in medieval Jewish exegesis in general, see Frederick E. Greenspahn, ‘‘The Meaning of ’Ein Lo Domeh and Similar Phrases in Medieval Biblical Exegesis,’’ AJS Review 4 (1979): 59–70. 63. On the practice of translating Hebrew words with Arabic cognates (or similar-sounding words), see the discussion of ‘‘imitation’’ in M. Polliack, The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 171–74. For a detailed analysis of the phenomenon, see A. Maman, ‘‘The Comparison of the Hebrew Lexicon with Arabic and Aramaic in the Linguistic Literature of the Jews from Rav Saadia Gaon (Tenth C.) to Ibn Barun (Twelfth C.)’’ (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1984), esp. 99–103 on Saadya’s Tafsı¯r; selected examples can be found in Y. Ratzaby, A Dictionary of Judaeo-Arabic in R. Saadya’s ‘‘Tafsir’’ (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1985), 146–49. Other Karaites clearly accepted the identification of bat ha-ya‘anah with the ostrich;

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thus, Salmon b. Yeruh.im translates ka-ye‘enim (Lam 4.3) as mithl bana¯t al-na‘a¯m; see British Library MS Or. 2516 (Cat. 252), fol. 173a. 64. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, XII.2.2, p. 1183, lines 13–14. See also David b. Abraham al-Fa¯sı¯, The Hebrew-Arabic Dictionary of the Bible Known as Kita¯b Ja¯mi‘ al-Alfa¯z. (Agroˆn), ed. S. L. Skoss (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1936– 45), 2:91, lines 21–23. 65. For al-Tawh.¯ıdı¯, see L. Kopf, ‘‘The Zoological Chapter of the Kita¯b al-Imta¯‘ wal-Mu’a¯nasa of Abu¯ H . ayya¯n al-Tauh.¯ıdı¯ (tenth c.), Translated from the Arabic and Annotated,’’ Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Lexicography (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1976), p. 103, par. 148; for the Rasa¯’il Ikhwa¯n al-S.afa¯’, see L. E. Goodman, The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 100. A similar process could also have been applied to the ostrich, which inhabits the desert (Lam 4.3); see Kopf,’’ The Zoological Chapter,’’ 115 and Goodman, The Case of the Animals versus Man, 91. While al-Tawh.¯ıdı¯ and the Ikhwa¯n al-S.afa¯’ had access to Aristotle’s zoological works or information deriving from them, it is not clear how much the tenth-century Karaites knew about Greek science. On the reception of Aristotle in Arabic zoology, see R. Kruk, ‘‘Hedgehogs and Their ‘Chicks’: A Case History of the Aristotelian Reception in Arabic Zoology,’’ in Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, vol. 2, ed. F. Sezgin (Frankfurt am Main: Institut fu¨r Geschichte der ArabischIslamischen Wissenschaften, 1985), 205–34. 66. For a telling example involving an ornithological name, see L. Kopf, ‘‘The Bird ’Anu¯q (A Lexicographical Study Concerning Arabic Zoology),’’ Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Lexicography, 125–32. Some lexicographers connected the name with the ‘uqa¯b (eagle) and others with the rakhama (vulture), but Kopf suggests that the medievals misunderstood an old proverb that does not refer to birds at all. 67. The phrase ahl al-lugha designates the community of people who use a particular language, not philologists; it may be rendered ‘‘language community’’ or ‘‘linguistic community.’’ On ahl al-lugha, see Ben-Shammai, ‘‘Between Literal Interpretation and Exegetical Freedom: Comparative Observations on Saadya’s Method,’’ in With Reverence for the Word, ed. J. D. McAuliffe et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37 and 46, n. 38. In his comment on Dt 14.11–20, Japheth uses the term repeatedly; see Frank, ‘‘Search Scripture Well,’’ chap. 2, appendix. 68. Comment on Dt 14.11–20, St. Petersburg, Inst. Or. Stds., MS C41 (unfoliated) ⳱ RNL, MS Yevr-Arab. I:0095, fol. 57a–b. Cf. David al-Fa¯sı¯, Kita¯b Ja¯mi‘ alAlfa¯z., 2:294, lines 36–42, for very similar wording. 69. Japheth b. Eli, Comment on Dt 14.11–20, St. Petersburg, Inst. Or. Stds., MS C41 (unfoliated) ⳱ RNL, MS Yevr-Arab. I:0019, fol. 86b, 88a ⳱ RNL, MS Yevr-Arab. I:0095, fol. 58a–b. Cf. al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, XII.2.3–6, pp. 1183–84. 70. Japheth b. Eli, Comment on Dt 14.11–20, St. Petersburg, Inst. Or. Stds., MS C41 (unfoliated) ⳱ RNL, MS Yevr-Arab. I:0019, fol. 88b ⳱ RNL, MS YevrArab. I:0095, fol. 58b–59a. Cf. al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, XII.2.8, p. 1185. 71. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, I.19.3, vol. 1, p. 61, lines 19–20, trans. Lockwood, Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ on Jewish Sects, 154 (modified). 72. Ibid., I.19.3, vol. 1, pp. 59–64, trans. Lockwood, Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ on Jewish Sects, 152–56. 73. On the differences between the respective minhagim of Iraq (Babylonia) and Syria (i.e., the Land of Israel), see ibid., I.10, vol. 1, pp. 48–51, trans. Lock-

Notes to Pages 136–137

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wood, Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ on Jewish Sects, 140–44. The passage draws upon an older Rabbanite composition; see Z. Elkin, ‘‘The Karaite Version of ‘Sefer HaHilluqim Bein Benei Erez-Yisrael Le-Benei Bavel’ ’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 66 (1996): 101–11. 74. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r, I.19.6, vol. 1, pp. 63–64, trans. Lockwood, Ya‘qu¯b al-Qirqisa¯nı¯ on Jewish Sects, 156. 75. Al-Qirqisa¯nı¯’s discussion of permitted and forbidden birds may be supplemented by the code of Levi b. Japheth (first quarter of the 11th c.), son of the exegete Japheth b. Eli; see Sefer ha-mis.vot le-Rabbi Levi ben . . . Yefet Halevi, ed. Yosef Algamil, 4 vols. (Ashdod, Israel: Makhon Tif ’eret Yosef, 2002), 3:629–35. Originally composed in Arabic, the work was translated into Hebrew for the Byzantine Karaite community. Levi devotes a short section (633–35) to chicken and other fowl, such as ‘‘goose, duck , and all the birds eaten by some of the Karaites and the Rabbanites.’’ Like al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, he resists all attempts to identify the chicken with the biblical tor (i.e., the turtledove) and advocates a general policy of caution and dietary restraint. 76. On this phenomenon, see Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, esp. his summation on 451–52. For overviews of Byzantine Karaite literature, see D. Frank, ‘‘Karaite Exegetical and Halakhic Literature in Byzantium and Turkey,’’ and D. J. Lasker, ‘‘Byzantine Karaite Thought, 12th–16th Centuries,’’ in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack. 77. See Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, 360–61 on the Karaites’ ‘‘arbitrary innovations,’’ and 356, citing Tobiah b. Eliezer, Midrash leqah. tov (Vilna, 1880), Leviticus, fol. 63b. 78. See Tobiah b. Eliezer, Midrash leqah. tov (Vilna, 1880), Leviticus, fol. 31a (cf. Deuteronomy, fol. 22b), citing bH . ul 63b. 79. ‘‘Approved’’: Heb. tsiddeku. Cf. the Arabic cognate, s.addaqa, ‘‘approve, confirm, license.’’ The Byzantine Karaites often expanded the semantic range of Hebrew words through recourse to their Arabic cognates; on the character of this Hebrew, see S. Hopkins, ‘‘Arabic Elements in the Hebrew of the Byzantine Karaites,’’ in Genizah Research after Ninety Years: The Case of Judaeo-Arabic, ed. J. Blau and S. C. Reif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93–99; and Aharon Maman, ‘‘Karaite Hebrew,’’ in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack, 485–503. 80. Lit. ‘‘reading.’’ 81. More commonly, sevel ha-yerushah , which Wieder renders ‘‘the inherited tradition’’; see ‘‘Three Terms for Tradition,’’ 108–13. Ankori believes the words sevel and yerushah to be synonymous; Karaites in Byzantium, 231–32, n. 50, 237. 82. Cf. Dt 13.1. 83. Judah b. Elijah Hadassi, Eshkol ha-kofer, Alphabet 234, resh–shin, fol. 89c, lines 42–50. 84. Ibid., Alphabet 169, fol. 64d, cited by Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, 230, n. 50. 85. Interestingly, a similar process may have taken place among the sectarians in the Iberian peninsula during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In his Kuzari, Judah Halevi has the Khazar king state: ‘‘I wish the Karaites would give me a satisfactory answer to questions of this kind . . . I desire an explanation of the lawful and unlawful birds, excepting the common ones, such as the pigeon and turtle dove. How do they know that the hen, goose, duck, and partridge are not unclean birds?’’; see Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, trans. H. Hirschfeld (London, 1905; repr. New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 3:35, p. 167 ⳱ Judah Ha-Levi,

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Kita¯b al-radd wa-’l-dalı¯l fı¯ ’l-dı¯n al-dhalı¯l, ed. D. H. Baneth and H. Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977), 118. This passage suggests that by the 1120s or 1130s, Karaites in Spain permitted the consumption of the same domestic fowl consumed by the Rabbanites. Unfortunately, since no Karaite texts of Iberian provenance survive, this supposition cannot be confirmed. My thanks to Professor Daniel J. Lasker for bringing this passage to my attention. On the Karaites in Spain, see D. J. Lasker, ‘‘Karaism in Twelfth-Century Spain,’’ Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1992): 179–95, and idem, ‘‘Judah Halevi and Karaism,’’ in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism . . . Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox, ed. J. Neusner, et al. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 3:111–26. 86. Aaron b. Joseph, Sefer ha-mivh.ar (Go¨zlo¨w, 1835), 3:16a–b, (Lev 11.13). 87. He can hardly be using barur in its technical sense of ‘‘immediate perception.’’ On the epistemological terminology of the Byzantine Karaites, see D. Frank, ‘‘The Religious Philosophy of the Karaite Aaron b. Elijah’’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1991), 18–21. 88. Aaron b. Elijah, Gan ‘eden, ‘‘ ‘Inyan sheh.itah,’’ chap. 2, fol. 82d, lines 16– 24. Apparently, Gan ‘eden was composed in 1354; see fol. 58a–b. In his Torah commentary, Keter Torah (Gozlow, 1866), 3:25a ad Lev 11, Aaron writes, ‘‘We are uncertain concerning (the meanings of the bird-) names; most species that we find raised domestically are permitted to us by virtue of the inherited tradition (hem be-heter etslenu mi-sevel he-yerushah).’’ 89. See Elijah Bashyachi, Aderet eliyahu (Odessa, 1870), ‘‘ ‘Inyan sheh. itah,’’ chap. 7, fol. 104d, lines 3–11; Solomon b. Afeda Ha-Kohen, Sefer gefen ha-’aderet, ‘‘ ‘Inyan sheh.itah,’’ chap. 7, p. 69. On the latter, see A. Danon, ‘‘The Karaites in European Turkey,’’ JQR, n.s. 15 (1924–25): 354–59. Interestingly, the Egyptian scholar Samuel al-Maghribı¯ (mid-fifteenth c.) discusses the unclean birds but remains silent on the question of poultry; see his code, al-Murshid, treatise 7, chap. 4, ed. M. Lorge, Die Speisegesetze der Kara¨er von Samuel el-Magrebi (Berlin: H. Itzkowski, 1907), 3–4 (Arabic), 34–35 (German). By the nineteenth century—if not much earlier—Samuel’s code had been completely eclipsed by Gan ‘eden and Aderet eliyahu. 90. El-Kodsi, The Karaite Jews of Egypt, 1882–1986, 185–87; note the references to turkey recipes, a further indication that the modern Egyptian Karaites were following the Rabbanite lead in various areas of practice. On the halakhic problem of consuming a New World bird for which no tradition could possibly exist, see Zivotofsky, ‘‘Is Turkey Kosher?’’

8. Early Islamic Exegesis as Legal Theory This essay draws on some of the data and conclusions from chapter 3 of my ‘‘The Legal-Theoretical Content of the Risa¯la of Muh.ammad b. Idrı¯s al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999). Additional research was funded by a fellowship (spring 2002) from the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The kernel of this article was presented at a conference sponsored by the Center, ‘‘Jewish Biblical Interpretation in Comparative Context,’’ held April 29–May 1, 2002. Thanks are due the Center and its director, David Ruderman, for funding my research, and also the other fellows, the conference participants, and the Center’s erudite staff for their assistance, comments, and suggestions. The very learned Robert Brody kindly reviewed a draft of this article and tried valiantly to rescue me from erroneous vowelings and

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misinterpretations of rabbinic texts. All errors are, of course, my own responsibility. 1. For general discussions of the origins and development of qur’a¯nic exegesis, see A. Rippin, ‘‘Tafsı¯r,’’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edition, 12 vols., ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004, hereinafter EI2), 10:83–88; C. H. M. Versteegh, Arabic Grammar and Qur’a¯nic Exegesis (Leiden: Brill, 1993); J. Burton, ‘‘Quranic Exegesis,’’ in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 40–54; and the introduction to Helmut Ga¨tje, Koran und Kornexegese (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1971), English trans. A. T. Welch, The Qur’a¯n and its Exegesis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). 2. A major exception to this trend is John Burton. See, e.g., his The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic Theories of Abrogation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). Burton’s major insight is that early jurists came to scrutinize the Qur’a¯n only after the initial wave of doctrinal formation was complete, and that it therefore represented an intrusive element in early Islamic legal thought that required a creative hermeneutic response. Joseph Schacht also recognized that attention to qur’a¯nic norms occurred at a secondary stage of doctrinal development. See his An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 18. 3. On T.abarı¯’s massive exegetical work, see Claude Gilliot, Exe´ge`se, langue et theologie en Islam: L’exe´ge`se Coranique de Tabari, Etudes Musulmanes 32 (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1990). 4. The word sunna has several meanings, but the most common, and the one under discussion, is the normative practice of the Prophet Muh.ammad. The Sunna (capitalized in this sense) is embodied in short narratives called h.adı¯ths. 5. It has been noticed by N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), 56; Judith R. Wegner, in an article discussed more fully below; and Daniel A. Madigan, The Qur’aˆn’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 92–96. 6. The master rule of recognition, a notion developed by H. L. A. Hart, involves ‘‘the acknowledgment of reference to [a particular] writing . . . as authoritative, i.e., as the proper way of disposing of doubts as to the existence of a rule.’’ In the Islamic legal system, the master rule points to the Qur’a¯n and the Sunna as authoritative in this sense. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), especially 94–110 (quotation from 95). 7. On the process by which (especially legal) traditions embedded in h.adı¯ths were eventually attributed to the Prophet and then made the sole supplement to the Qur’a¯n, see in general J. Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950). Schacht may have overstated Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s role in this development. See W. Hallaq, ‘‘Was al-Shafi‘i the Master Architect of Islamic Jurisprudence?’’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993): 587–605 (Hallaq’s title is a response to a phrase coined by Coulson in his History). Doubts about Schacht’s conclusions and methodology have been expressed by H. Motzki, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools, trans. M. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 8. On Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s life, see E. Chaumont, ‘‘al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯,’’ EI2, 9:181–85; see also my article ‘‘al-Shafi‘i’’ in Arabic Literary Culture, 500–925, Dictionary of Literary Biography 311 (Detroit: Thomas Gale, 2005), 309–17. 9. Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s authorship of these various works has recently been questioned by

288

Notes to Pages 141–147

Norman Calder in his Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) (the Umm and the Risa¯la). On the Umm, see also Z. Muba¯rak, Is.la¯h. ashna‘ khat.a’ fı¯ ta¯rı¯kh al-Tashrı¯‘ al-Isla¯mı¯: Kita¯b al-Umm (1934; repr. Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, 1991). The formation of the corpus of works attributed to Sha¯fi‘ı¯ remains a topic of investigation. See my response to Calder, ‘‘The Legal Hermeneutics of alSha¯fi‘ı¯ and Ibn Qutayba: A Reconsideration,’’ Islamic Law and Society 11.1 (2004): 1–41, and, most recently, C. Melchert, ‘‘The Meaning of qa¯la ’l-Sha¯fi‘ı¯ in NinthCentury Sources,’’ and my ‘‘Ibn Qutayba: The Earliest Witnes to al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯ and His Legal Doctrines,’’ both in Occasional Papers of the School of ‘Abbasid Studies: Cambridge: 6–10 July, 2002, ed. J. E. Montgomery (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). 10. On the institution of the madhhab in general, see G. Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); on their pre- and early history, see C. Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 11. On Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s legal hermeneutics, see my Early Islamic Legal Theory: The ‘‘Risa¯la of Muh.ammad ibn Idrı¯s al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯ (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 12. Numerous h.adı¯ths expressly and implicitly refer to the Qur’a¯n, so that side of the equation needed no special demonstration. 13. Z. I. Ansari, ‘‘Juristic Terminology before Sha¯fi‘ı¯: A Semantic Analysis with Special Reference to Kufa,’’ Arabica 19 (1972): 255–300, 261; G. H. A. Juynboll, ‘‘Some New Ideas on the Development of Sunna as a Technical Term in Early Islam,’’ Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 97–118, 101; see also M. F. ‘Abd al-Ba¯qı¯, al-Mu‘jam al-Mufahras li-Alfa¯z. al-Qur’a¯n al-Karı¯m (Cairo: Da¯r al-H . adı¯th, 1986), s.v. sunna and sunan. 14. See R. Paret, Der Koran: Kommentar und Konkordanz (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1977), ad Q 8:38. See also A. J. Wensinck, ‘‘Sunna,’’ Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1913–34), 7:555–57. 15. J. Wansbrough identifies this motif, as it was interpreted by the medieval qur’a¯nic exegetes, with that found in the Wisdom literature of Late Antiquity: ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere (Qur’a¯nic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 3). Cf. Q 33 (alAh.za¯b).60–62: ‘‘So too was God’s behavior [sunnat alla¯h] towards those who came before. You will find no alternative to what God does [sunnat alla¯h].’’ 16. I cite A.M. Sha¯kir’s edition of the Risa¯la (Cairo: al-H . alabı¯, 1940), by paragraph number. 17. Signs, or verses of the Qur’a¯n. I leave the term untranslated because it figures prominently in one of these verses translated below. 18. ‘‘Lat.¯ıf.’’ See Paret, Kommentar, ad Q 33:34, 12:100 (beschlagen, findig, raffiniert). ¨ bersetzung von Rudi Paret (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 19. R. Paret, Der Koran: U 1983), 195, thinks that this is directed to mankind at large (‘‘die Menschen’’), but the immediately foregoing verse, 16.124, specifically discounts the importance of adhering to the Sabbath and uses a plural pronoun to refer to those who observe it. 20. Arabic a¯ya is probably from the Syriac ata¯, which is related to Hebrew ’ot, in the sense of sign or mark. In biblical Aramaic, at means ‘‘a sign wrought by God.’’ See A. Jefferey, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’a¯n (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1938), 72–73. 21. It seems that after this point God addresses Muh.ammad’s wives directly, rather than suggesting words for Muh.ammad to use with them. 22. On the alleged marital dispute, see T. No¨ldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 3

Notes to Pages 147–150

289

vols., ed. F. Schwally (Leipzig, 1909; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), 1:207; R. Bell, ‘‘Muhammad and Divorce in the Qur’a¯n,’’ The Moslem World 29 (1939): 55–62. 23. Compare Q 54 (al-Qamar).5, which suggests that the narratives (anba¯‘) brought by Muh.ammad to his audience contain h.ikma. 24. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ alludes here to his discussion of Q 4 (al-Nisa¯‘).171 and 24 (alNur).62 at Risa¯la 236–44. Both verses refer to faith, ¯ıma¯n, in God and Muh.ammad. 25. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ uses the verbal noun mann (bestowal, grant). Risa¯la ‫ن‬254. Q 3.164 uses the corresponding verb manna, but 2.231 refers to ni‘mat alla¯h and 4.113 to fad.l alla¯h. 26. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ offers this argument, with ample prooftexts, at Risa¯la ‫ن‬258–71. 27. It has been suggested that the phrase ‘‘and His Prophet’’ was inserted after ‘‘God’’ once in Q 48 (al-Fath.).9 and twice in Q 9 (al-Tawba).3 after the fact, as it were (Burton, ‘‘Quranic Exegesis,’’ 41). Although such an interpolation in the qur’a¯nic text itself (if Burton’s suggestion is correct) would presumably have to belong to a period earlier than Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s lifetime, the impulse to pair God and ‘‘His Prophet’’ resembles Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s attempt to pair ‘‘God’s Book’’ and the Sunna of the Prophet. 28. An abbreviated form of this argument appears in another of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s works, the Jima¯‘ al-‘ilm, ed. A. M. Sha¯kir (Cairo: Mat.ba‘at al-Ma‘a¯rif, 1940), at ‫نن‬19–39, interspersed with some tangentially related material. Sha¯fi‘ı¯ simply asserts that in Q 62 (al-Jum‘a).2 h.ikma means sunna and then makes a point not found in the Risa¯la, namely, that the two are ontologically distinct, which claim he supports with a citation to Q 33 (al-Ah.za¯b).34. The argument as a whole is supposed to demonstrate that God’s book and the rulings therein indicate, for those who know Arabic, that one must accept reports (akhba¯r) from the Prophet (Jima¯‘ ‫ن‬12). In other words, the exclusive authority of the Sunna of Muh.ammad is established with reference to the Qur’a¯n, just as in the Risa¯la. 29. On the very problematic dating and ascription of early theological writings generally (including all those cited herein), see M. Cook, Early Muslim Dogma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 30. Al-salaf alladhı¯na . . . rawu¯ h.ikmat [alla¯h]. Risa¯la fı¯ al-qadar, ed. Ritter, ‘‘Studien zur Geschichte der Islamischen Fro¨mmigkeit I: H . asan al-Bas.rı¯,’’ Der Islam 21 (1933): 1–82, 68, ll. 3–4. 31. H . ikmat [alla¯h]. The sentence in which this phrase occurs is obscure, but the idea seems to be that God, in his wisdom, required certain acts to be performed. In al-Mu’tamar al-duwalı¯ li-ta¯rı¯kh bila¯d al-sha¯m, ed. Dixon (‘Amma¯n: University of Jordan Press, 1974), 63, ll. 6–8. 32. Atqana [al-khalq] bi-h.ikmatih, ‘‘He perfected [creation] with his wisdom.’’ Kita¯b al-‘a¯lim wa’l-muta‘allim, ed. al-Qal‘abjı¯ and al-Nadawı¯ (Aleppo: Maktabat alHuda¯, 1972), 27, l. 5. 33. In J. van Ess, Anfa¨nge muslimischer Theologie: Zwei antiqadaritische Traktate aus dem ersten Jahrhundert der Higra (Beirut: Franz Steiner, 1977), Ar. text 2, p. 11, l. 9 (emphasis added). The author of the questions believes that he has trapped his opponent into arguing that prophets may disobey or fail to worship God. 34. Tafsı¯r Muja¯hid, 2 vols., ed. ‘Abd al-Rah.ma¯n al-T.a¯hir b. Muh.ammad alSu¯ratı¯ (Islamabad: Majmu¯’ al-Buh.u¯th al-Isla¯mı¯ya, n.d.). 35. Kita¯b al-Na¯sikh wa’l-Mansu¯kh, ed. H . a¯tim S.a¯lih. al-D.a¯min (Beirut: Mu‘assasat al-Risa¯la, 1984). 36. Al-Na¯sikh wa’l-Mansu¯kh, ed. H . a¯tim S.a¯lih. al-D.a¯min (Beirut: Mu‘assasat alRisa¯la, 1988).

290

Notes to Pages 150–151

37. Tafsı¯r Sufya¯n al-Thawrı¯, ed. Imtiya¯z ‘Alı¯ ‘Arshı¯ (Beirut: Da¯r al-Kutub al‘Ilmı¯ya, 1983). ˇ a¯mi‘: Die Koranwissenschaften, ed. M. Muranyi (Wiesbaden: Harrassow38. Al-G itz, 1992). 39. Ma‘a¯nı¯ al-Qur’a¯n, 3 vols., ed. A. Y. Naja¯tı¯, M. ‘A. al-Najja¯r (Cairo: al-Hay’a ¯ mma lil-Kita¯b, 1980). al-Mis.rı¯ya al-‘A 40. Maja¯z al-Qur’a¯n, 2 vols., ed. F. Sezgin (Cairo: al-Kha¯njı¯, 1954). 41. Kita¯b Ma‘a¯nı¯ al-Qur’a¯n, 2 vols., ed. Huda¯ Mah.mu¯d Qara¯‘a (Cairo: alKha¯njı¯, 1990). 42. Kita¯b al-Na¯sikh wa’l-Mansu¯kh, ed. J. Burton (Suffolk: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1987); ed. Muh.ammad b. S.a¯lih. al-Murayfi‘ (Riyadh: Maktabat alRushd, 1990). Both editions use the same manuscript; I have consulted Burton’s edition. 43. This claim is subject to the following qualifications: First, some of these very early tafsı¯rs are fragmentary (e.g., that of Sufya¯n al-Thawrı¯) and others are not designed to cover the whole of the Qur’a¯n (e.g., those on abrogation, alna¯sikh wa’l-mansu¯kh, which concern instances of abrogation only) and so might not necessarily preserve opinions on Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s passages. Second, other texts are lost which may have glossed the verses in question. Third, the dating and attribution of a number (or all) of these early texts remains a controversial subject. Still, it is striking that all these sources are consistent—subject to the above qualifications—in their utter disinterest in the verses in question. Perhaps that fact constitutes circumstantial evidence of their substantial authenticity, or at least of their relatively early date. On early tafsı¯r in general, see Versteegh, Arabic Grammar and Qur’a¯nic Exegesis, and Rippin, ‘‘Tafsı¯r.’’ For a questionable but nonetheless stimulating typology of early tafsı¯r, see generally Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, especially chap. 4, ‘‘Principles of Exegesis.’’ 44. Three works attributed to Muqa¯til concern the Qur’a¯n: al-Ashba¯h wa’lNaz.a¯’ir fı¯ al-Qur’a¯nal-Karı¯m, ed. ‘A. M. Shih.a¯ta (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Mis.rı¯ya al¯ mma lil-Kita¯b, 1975); Tafsı¯r Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n, 5 vols., ed. ‘A. M. Shih.a¯ta ‘A ¯ mma lil-Kita¯b, 1979–89); and Tafsı¯r khams mi’at (Cairo: al-Hay‘a al-Mis.rı¯ya al-‘A a¯ya min al-Qur’a¯n, ed. Isaiah Goldfeld (Shfaram: Da¯r al-Mashriq, 1980). It seems clear that the third of these is considerably later than Muqa¯til, as noted by the editor (English introduction, p. 8, dating it to ca. 900), even though it accurately summarizes and condenses materials found in the other works attributed to Muqa¯til. For the record, of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s seven prooftexts, it glosses only Q 2.231, explaining al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma as ‘‘al-qur’a¯n’’ and ‘‘al-mawa¯‘iz. fı¯ al-Qur’a¯n min amrihi wa-nahyihi’’ (p. 184, MS 61a). All references to tafsı¯rs in what follows are according to the verse of the Qur’a¯n under discussion. 45. On the former phrase, see my entry ‘‘Lawful and Unlawful’’ in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’a¯n, ed. J. D. MacAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–6), vol. 3 (J-O), 172–76. On amr and nahy in early Islamic legal hermeneutics, see my ‘‘The Reception of Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s Concept of amr and nahy in the Thought of his Student al-Muzanı¯,’’ Law and Legal Education in Islam: Studies in Memory of George Makdisi (Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004). On the phrase al-amr bi’lma‘ruf wa’l-nahy ‘an al-munkar, which is related to the pair amr and nahy, see Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On these phrases as labels for qur’a¯nic text types in early exegesis, see Versteegh, Arabic Grammar & Qur’a¯nic Exegesis, 64, 104–7. It is possible that Muqa¯til’s use of the word mawa¯‘iz., ‘‘admonishments,’’ consciously echoes the phrase al-h.ikma wa’l-maw‘iz.a al-h.asana of Q 16 (al-Nah.l).125, noted above.

Notes to Pages 151–153

291

46. For an overview of the problem of qur’a¯nic law, and a survey of the secondary literature, see P. Crone, ‘‘Two Legal Problems Bearing on the Early History of the Qur’a¯n,’’ Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 18 (1994): 1–37. Presumably Muqa¯til’s reference in the Ashba¯h to law in Surat al-Baqara (the second Sura of the Qur’a¯n) in his gloss of Q 4.113 evidences some kind of problem with the text. Perhaps ‘‘al-qur’a¯n’’ should be read instead. 47. Interpolation is always a possibility, too, but then the question arises as to why sunna would appear in the explanation of h.ikma in 3.164 and not elsewhere. 48. Tafsı¯r ‘Abd al-Razza¯q, 3 vols., ed. Mah.mu¯d Muh.ammad ‘Abduh (Beirut: Da¯r al-Kutub al-‘Ilmı¯ya, 1999); also 3 vols., ed. Mus.t.afa¯ Muslim Muh.ammad (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1989). I have used ‘Abduh’s edition. 49. But for difficulties posed by the sources in regard to Muqa¯til, see P. Crone, ‘‘A Note on Muqa¯til b. H . ayya¯n and Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n,’’ Der Islam 74 (1997): 238–49. 50. It does not appear, however, in the work of Qata¯da, cited above. 51. Majmu¯‘ Fata¯wa¯ Shaykh al-Isla¯m Ah.mad ibn Taymı¯ya, 37 vols., ed. ‘A. M. Qa¯sim, M. ‘A. Qa¯sim (Raba¯t.: Maktabat al-Ma‘a¯rif, 1961), vol. 2, Tawh.¯ıd al-rubu¯bı¯ya, 6–7. Ibn Taymı¯ya reports this gloss after quoting most of the Qur’a¯n verses at issue here, which verses he cites in support of his assertion that ‘‘God . . . sent Muh.ammad with ‘‘the Book and the Sunna.’’ I am indebted to Dr. Hana Kilani for this reference. 52. Yah.ya¯ b. Abı¯ Kathı¯r was originally from Bas.ra but moved to Yama¯ma. It is said that he and al-Awza¯‘ı¯ related material from each other. Ibn Sa‘d, al-T.abaqa¯t al-kubra¯, 9 vols. (Beirut: Da¯r S.a¯dir, 1957–60), 5:555, 7:488; Ibn H . ajar al-‘Asqala¯nı¯, Tahdhı¯b al-tahdhı¯b (Hyderabad [Deccan]: Da¯‘irat al-Ma‘a¯rif al-Niz.a¯mı¯ya, 1907–9), vol. 11, 268–70. 53. Igeret Rab Sharira Ga’on, ed. B. Lewin (Haifa, 1921), 51, left-hand column (the right-hand column has only minor differences in formulation). Passage cited in Strack/Stemberger, 165. I am greatly indebted to Mordechai Cohen of Yeshiva University for assistance with the Hebrew in this passage and in the passages from Ginzberg’s commentary on the Palestinian Talmud, discussed below. 54. ‘‘Islamic and Talmudic Jurisprudence: The Four Roots of Islamic Law and Their Talmudic Counterparts,’’ American Journal of Legal History 26 (1982): 25– 71, 52–53. 55. Ibid., 53, n. 127 (appears on p. 54). The passage in question reads: ‘‘Observe them faithfully [⳱ God’s ‘‘laws and rules,’’ h.ukim, mishpatim, Dt 4.1], for that will be proof of your wisdom [h.okhmatkhem] and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, ‘Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people [‘am h.akham].’ ’’ According to Wegner, Rashi glosses the object of the verb ‘‘observe’’ as the Mishnah, which is implicitly connected in the following phrase with h.okhmah. This is slender evidence. Translation from Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). 56. Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary, 111. 57. If h.ukm can mean ‘‘wisdom,’’ then perhaps h.ikma is a loanword in Arabic, though this is not at all certain. In addition to Jeffery (cited above), see also the discussion in Josef Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1926), 71–73. Horovitz notes the pairings of kita¯b and h.ikma and assigns them to Muhammad’s period of activity in Medina (after 622), when he is said by Muslim tradition to have been in direct contact with Jewish communities. (On his relationship with the Jews of Medina, see, e.g., W. M. Watt, Muham-

292

Notes to Pages 153–154

mad: Prophet and Statesman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961].) Horovitz identifies a number of passages in which h.ukm could conceivably be read as meaning ‘‘wisdom,’’ and in which it is something granted to biblical figures (Lot in Q 21 [al-Anbiya¯’]:74; Joseph in 12 [Yusuf].22; Moses in 28 [al-Qas.as.].14 and 26 [al-Shu‘ara¯’].21, both of which parallel exactly 12.22; and Abraham 26.83). In addition, Horovitz notes that h.ukm appears listed together with kita¯b and ¯ l ‘Imra¯n].79, 6 [al-An‘a¯m].89, and 45 [al-Ja¯thiya].16, and also nubuwa in Q 3 [A appears in close proximity to kita¯b in 19 [Maryam].12. Horovitz concludes that both h.ikma and h.akı¯m (‘wise’) are originally Aramaic. Horovitz also suggests that God’s vouchsafing of al-kita¯b and al-h.ikma to Jesus, Muh.ammad, and the clan of Abraham (a¯l Ibra¯hı¯m) alike makes the pair kita¯b/h.ikma identical with the ‘‘vormosaische Offenbarung,’’ which in turn is identical ‘‘mit der Lehre des Islam’’ (Koranische Untersuchungen, 71–72). In support of Horovitz’s contention that h.ukm is equivalent to h.ikma in these passages is Muqa¯til’s occasional discussion of h.ukm as though it were equivalent to h.ikma, e.g., Ashba¯h, 111–13. It would not be too far-fetched to think that Sha¯fi‘ı¯ might also have had the term h.ukm (‘rule, ruling’) in mind when equating h.ikma with sunna. 58. There is no question that the rabbis came to identify h.okhmah as used in the biblical tradition with the Torah generally. See, e.g., P. Scha¨fer, The Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 8, 79–81. Thanks to Robert Brody for drawing this point to my attention and to my colleague David Stern for the reference. 59. This usage of katuv is a commonplace, but it is at least helpful that it is attested in the writings of Pirkoi b. Baboi, a contemporary of Sha¯fi‘ı¯. B. Baboi employs the Hebrew phrase she bi-katuv, ‘‘that which is written,’’ in an epistle edited by B. M. Levin in ‘‘Misharide ha-genizah,’’ Tarbiz 2 (1931): 383–414 , 394. I discuss ben Baboi’s text further below. 60. E.g., Semah.ot 9.1, 9.19 12.12, ed. D. Zlotnick, The Tractate Mourning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). This phrase also appears in the Babylonian Talmud in three places, bMK 25b and 26a and bBM 53a. Amusingly, the Soncino translation has these passages listed in the general index under ‘‘Wisdom—as synonym for Torah’’ and in the general index to the Soncino Talmud, under ‘‘wisdom,’’ there appear the two subheadings ‘‘as synonym for Torah’’ and ‘‘synonymous with Torah’’ (The Babylonian Talmud, 18 vols., ed. I. Epstein [London: Soncino Press, 1961], index volume, general index, entry ‘‘Wisdom,’’ 459–60). On the likely early (third-century) dating of Semah.ot, see H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. M. Bockmuehl (London: T and T Clark, 1991), 228–29. See also Zlotnick’s introduction to the text, 1–9. A number of additional instances of this phrase, or variants, have been adduced by Louis Ginzberg in his commentary on the Palestinian Talmud, in the course of an argument that h.okhmah designates precisely the Oral Torah, she be-‘al pe. I will cite some of the other passages considered by Ginzberg below (A Commentary on the Palestinian Talmud, ed. D. Halivni [Hebrew; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1961], 4:19–37). I am very grateful to Rabbi Dr. Solomon Cohen of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for bringing Ginzberg’s detailed and very relevant discussion to my attention. 61. Cited by Ginzberg, Commentary, 20. Ginzberg identifies these three disciplines as ‘‘the tripartite oral Torah,’’ ‘‘ha-torah ha-meshuleshet she be-‘al pe,’’ Commentary, 21. On the extracanonical tractate of the Talmud Abot d’Rabbi Nathan,

Notes to Pages 154–156

293

see Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, 225–27, where the possibility that its final redaction took place in early Islamic times is noted. 62. Version B, chap. 39. Cited by Ginzberg, Commentary, 20. I am informed by Robert Brody (personal communication), that Ginzberg’s reading of mishneh is unlikely, and that mishnah would be the better reading. 63. Sevara, or, as Ginzberg puts it, higyon ha-halakhah. See Ginzberg, Commentary, 24–26. In this sense (‘‘legal deduction of new teachings,’’ Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 165), it is more remote from Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s equation of its Arabic cognate with oral traditions from the Prophet Muh.ammad. Ginzberg also notes that h.okhmah is used in the sense of h.okhmat ha-‘olam in late sources, and especially to refer to rationalist modes of argument (sevara) (Commentary, 29). H . ikma in post-Qur’a¯nic Arabic can denote Hellenistic sciences, especially philosophy. 64. Commentary, 20. 65. Six Orders of the Mishnah, 6 vols., ed. Ch. Albeck (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Dvir, 1952–58), 4:73. Translation adapted from H. Danby, The Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 350. Ginzberg, Commentary, 22, argues that ‘‘the life of the world to come’’ depends on study of the Torah, and so h.okhmah in this instance must mean Torah. The elaborations on this passage in rabbinic literature are clearly the starting point of Sherira Ga’on’s discussion quoted above. Such clarity as the following discussion possesses I owe entirely to the comments of Robert Brody. 66. Tosefta, 5 vols., ed. S. Lieberman (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1955–88), 5:72, BM 2.30. On the exegetical connection between wisdom and the root ’-m-n, see Scha¨fer, Mirror of His Beauty, 80. 67. He belonged to the third generation of tannaim and was a student of Akiba. See Strack and Stemberger, 76. 68. Tosefta, 5:72, tBM 2.30. 69. Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi, 4 vols., ed. P. Scha¨fer, H.-J. Becker (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991–95), 4:74, 8d, BM 2,13/1. 70. Tosefta ki-fshutah, 10 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1955– 88), 9: 168–69, ad BM 2:30. 71. Ginzberg adduces some passages that resemble this one, for example, from Mekilta: ‘‘When R. Nathan died, his wisdom perished with him (abdah h.okhmato ‘imo).’’ Commentary, 27. 72. Perhaps this is a reference to the Torah, the Writings, and the Prophets (TaNaKh), in which case h.okhma would be parallel to the Writings (the h.-kh parallel would be purely phonetic, not exact). 73. Perhaps foreshadowing Muqa¯til’s gloss, noted above, of h.ikma as synonym for the Qur’a¯n itself. Muqa¯til was criticized for relying on Jewish and Christian sources in his exegeses. F. Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, 9 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1984), 1:36–37; A. Rippin [M. Plessner], ‘‘Muqa¯til b. Sulayma¯n,’’ EI2, 7:508–9. 74. I identified the passages cited above using C. J. and B. Kasovsky, Thesaurus Talmudis: Concordantiae Verborum quae in Talmude Babilonico Repreiuntur, 42 vols. (Jerusalem: Misrad ha-hinukh veha-tarbut shel Memshelet Yisrael u-vet hamidrash le-rabanim ba-Amerikah, 1954–89), 19:695–99. 75. Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 165. 76. Trans. G. Friedlander (London, 1916, repr. New York: Hermon Press, 1970). I am grateful to Jacob Elbaum and Haggai Ben-Shammai for suggesting that I consult this source.

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Notes to Pages 156–159

77. Wegner suggests a distant etymological connection between sunna and Mishnah (which is related to shoneh) in ‘‘Islamic and Talmudic Jurisprudence,’’ 34–39. The Arabic cognate of Northwest Semitic sh-n-y is (as Wegner was undoubtedly aware) th-n-y, not s-n-n. Although a distant etymological connection between a geminate and weak la¯m/lamed root is not impossible, even if there were such a connection, it is doubtful that eighth- or ninth-century Muslim jurists would have perceived it. 78. There are at least three documentable routes by which this particular exegesis could have got to Sha¯fi‘ı¯: Sha¯fi‘ı¯ traveled to Yemen, where ‘Abd al-Razza¯q taught. Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s teacher Sufya¯n b. ‘Uyayna traveled to Yemen to study with ‘Abd al-Razza¯q’s teacher Ma‘mar b. Ra¯shid. Finally, ‘Abd al-Razza¯q visited the H . ija¯z for business and for the pilgrimage from time to time, and Sha¯fi‘ı¯ could have learned it from him there. H. Motzki, ‘‘al-S.an‘a¯nı¯, ‘Abd al-Razza¯q,’’ EI2, 9:7–8. I am not aware, however, of any source that mentions a meeting between Sha¯fi‘ı¯ and ‘Abd al-Razza¯q. None of these possibilities precludes a role for rabbinic conceptions of h.okhmah in Sha¯fi‘ı¯’s exegesis of the passages in question. 79. John Wansbrough has, controversially, proposed a judaizing typology of early Muslim exegetical activity that posits a progression from explanatory narrative (‘‘haggadic’’ exegesis), to extraction of norms (‘‘halakhic’’ exegesis), to concern with the establishment of a ne varietur recension (‘‘masoretic’’ exegesis). J. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See especially chap. 4, ‘‘Principles of Exegesis.’’ 80. For the particular style of piety exhibited by the adherents of the h.adı¯th movement (the ahl al-h.adı¯th), see C. Melchert, ‘‘The Piety of the Hadith Folk,’’ IJMES 34 (2002): 425–39, and the description of their leader, Ah.mad b. H . anbal (d. 241/855), in M. Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107–53. 81. See my ‘‘Legal-Theoretical Content,’’ 373–81, and Risa¯la ‫نن‬1001, 1045– 46, 1104. 82. As noted above, Muqa¯til was criticized by some for using Jewish materials in his exegesis. On this point, see also Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 136. 83. The two fundamental discussions of Ibn Qutayba’s use of biblical materials are G. Lecomte, ‘‘Les Citations de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament dans l’oeuvre d’Ibn Qutayba,’’ Arabica 5 (1958): 34–46, and Georges Vajda, ‘‘JudaeoArabica. 1. Observations sur quelques citations bibliques chez Ibn Qotayba,’’ Revue des Etudes Juives 99 (1935): 68–80. The most recent discussion, with a review of further secondary literature, is by Julia Bray, ‘‘Lists and Memory: Ibn Qutayba and Muhammad b. Habib,’’ in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam, ed. F. Daftary and J. W. Meri (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). 84. Written ca. 800 to the congregation of Kairouan, urging them to adopt the Babylonian Talmud. Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 215. 85. Ed. B. M. Lewin, in Tarbiz 2 (1931): 394. 86. See chap. 1 of my ‘‘Legal-Theoretical Content.’’ 87. See R. Brody, Pirqoy Ben Baboy and the History of Internal Polemics in Judaism (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Graphit Press, 2003). 88. The general parallel—but not the specific textual one I cite here—has been recognized by Crone and Cook, Hagarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 38 89. Compare Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 128: the Mishnah ‘‘has comparatively few biblical quotations, and even these are in part later addi-

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tions. Arguments from Scripture . . . are, moreover, relatively rare. In general, the Mishnah creates the impression of a deliberate effort to be independent of the Bible.’’ J. Neusner has characterized the intent of the hermeneutics of the two Talmuds as designed ‘‘to prove that the Mishnah depends upon Scripture and that it is flawless . . . So the hermeneutics that forms the commentaryprogram finds its generative problematic in the myth of the dual Torah.’’ See ‘‘Rabbinic Judaism: Its History and Hermeneutics,’’ Judaism in Late Antiquity, ed. J. Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2:161–225, 187. 90. Crone and Cook have suggested the possibility that Muslim scripturalism influenced Jewish scripturalism (Hagarism, 38). A careful analysis of this possibility has been offered by Cook, ‘‘ ‘Anan and Islam,’’ Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987): 161–82. 91. In fact, he glosses it specifically in the sense of the Sunna of Muh.ammad, exactly in the sense proposed by Sha¯fi‘ı¯ (Ja¯mi’ al-baya¯n ‘an ta’wı¯l a¯y al-qur’a¯n, ed. M. A. and A. M. Sha¯kir, 15 vols. (Cairo: Daral-Ma’arif, 1954–69), 3:86–88, ad Q 2.129). In subsequent occurrences of the term, he refers back to his explanation of it at 2.129. T.abarı¯ also glosses h.ikma as the Sunna of Muh.ammad at Q 33.34 (Tafsı¯r al-T.abarı¯: Ja¯mi‘ al-baya¯n ‘an ta’wı¯l a¯y al-qur’a¯n, ed. B. ‘A. Ma‘ruf, ‘I. F. alH . arasta¯nı¯ [Beirut: Mu‘assasat al-Risa¯la, 1994], 6:178–79 [ad Q 33.34]). He also gives a competing interpretation from Ma¯lik b. Anas, as transmitted by Ibn Wahb, and then another report from Ibn Wahb, probably originating with the son of Zayd b. Aslam, ‘Abd al-Rah.ma¯n b. Zayd (d. 798), which states that h.ikma is that part of the dı¯n known solely through Muh.ammad. There is no hint of such an interpretation in the fragment of Ibn Wahb’s tafsı¯r published by M. Muranyi (though he does not gloss any of the passages that contain the word h.ikma). T.abarı¯ himself accepts the gloss of h.ikma as Sunna and defines sunna in that sense as ‘‘that, knowledge of which may only be acquired by a statement [baya¯n] of the Messenger’’ ( Ja¯mi‘ al-baya¯n, ed. Sha¯kir, 3:86–88). The question of the exegesis of h.ikma as sunna prior to Sha¯fi‘ı¯ has also been examined by Juynboll, but without the benefit of ‘Abd al-Razza¯q’s tafsı¯r. (‘‘New Ideas,’’ 106–7.) Juynboll relies on T.abarı¯’s report of Qata¯da’s opinions and concludes that Qata¯da did not necessarily mean sunnat al-nabı¯y. 92. Al-Kashsha¯f, 4 vols. (Beirut: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al-‘Arabı¯, n.d.), ad 2.231 and 3.164. At 2.129 he gives, for al-kita¯b wa’l-h.ikma: al-Qur’a¯n wa’l-sharı¯‘a wa-baya¯n alah.ka¯m. 93. Majma‘ al-Baya¯n, 30 vols. in 6 (Beirut: Da¯r Maktabat al-H . aya¯t, 1961), ad 2.129, citing Qata¯da. 94. Tafsı¯r al-Jala¯layn (Beirut: Maktabat Lubna¯n, n.d.), ad 3.164 and 33.34. In his discussion of 2.129 he gives for h.ikma: ay ma¯ fı¯hi [⳱ al-qur’a¯n] min al-ah.ka¯m. 95. Strack and Stemberger, Talmud and Midrash, 31–44. 9. Interpreting Scripture in and through Liturgy 1. See indications provided by Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 232–35. 2. Augustine of Hippo told his congregation: ‘‘When you assemble for church, put away your idle talk. Pay attention to the Scripture. We are your books’’ (Sermo 227 [Sources chre´tiennes [⳱ SC] 116:238]); I have attempted to analyze certain aspects of the liturgical mediation of Scripture in ‘‘Sonus et Verba: Varieties of Meaning in the Liturgical Proclamation of the Gospel in the

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Middle Ages,’’ in Ad litteram: Authoritative Texts and their Medieval Readers, ed. M. D. Jordan and K. Emery Jr. (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press 1992), 29–69. 3. Christian antiquity conceived of the sacred Scriptures as a single book, and this concept is evident the Middle Ages, see, e.g., Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129/30), De glorificatione Trinitatis et processione sancti Spiritus 1.5: ‘‘Indeed, the entirety of sacred Scripture, the canonical Scripture, is one book’’ (Patrologia latina [⳱ PL] 169:18B); and Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142), De arca Noe morali 2.8: ‘‘All of divine Scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ, because all of divine Scripture is about Christ’’ (PL 176:642CD). But for reasons both technical and traditional, it was particular books or, more often, sets of books from within the biblical canon that were copied and bound together, studied, and commented upon. See Monique Duchet-Suchaux and Yves Lefe`vre, ‘‘Les noms de la Bible,’’ in Le moyen age et la Bible, ed. P. Riche´ and G. Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 13–23. 4. In his ‘‘Properization: The Roman Mass,’’ no. XIII, in his Variorum volume, The Temple, the Church Fathers and Early Western Chant (Ashgate: Variorum, 1998), XIII.15. McKinnon coined this term to ‘‘refer to the process by which a body of proper liturgical chants comes into being,’’ but it can usefully be extended to all the propers of a feast. In the Middle Ages both the first words of introits or entrance chants and summary titles of gospel readings were used to identify particular Sundays; see tabular presentation in Hermann Grotefend, Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Hannover: Hahn, 1891–98), 1:98–99 (Sunday introits), 52–53 (Sunday gospels). 5. This project has been anticipated on a limited scale by Timothy B. Thibodeau, see n. 70 below. 6. See the account in ‘‘Lectionary Poetics’’ by Elsie R. Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation: Exegesis and Theology in the Liturgical Anthology of the Ninth of Av Season (Providence, R.I.: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 24–28. 7. One should add that this process of scripturalization of nonscriptural text was not unique to Christianity. One finds equivalent processes at work in Judaism beginning with the canonization of the Oral Torah in Late Antiquity, and in the Middle Ages the process is applied to still other genres of Jewish literary creativity and in particular to the liturgy. Indeed, the process of scripturalization of the liturgy was especially prominent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries among Rhineland Pietists living in Ashkenaz (Northern France and Germany), the period focused upon in this essay as well. (See most recently Talya Fishman, ‘‘The Rhineland Pietists’ Sacralization of Oral Torah,’’ JQR 96.1 [2006]: 9–16.) The Christian case is instructive because it is an extreme example of this process. Eds. 8. I am omitting from consideration among mass propers other variable elements proper to a feast that might occur: the preface, insertions in the Canon, seasonal and restricted prayers and benedictions, as well as the chanted accretions, that is, tropes and sequences, which themselves often served to interpret and harmonize the propers. 9. See Hans Rheinfelder, ‘‘Zum Stil der lateinischen Orationen,’’ Jahrbuch fu¨r Liturgiewissenschaft 11 (1931): 20–45. 10. These passages were sometimes excerpted verbatim, sometimes in varying degrees recomposed. James McKinnon called this reworking of scriptural passages for liturgical chant ‘‘textual adjustment’’ and estimated that about half of the biblical passages that made up the chant repertory for mass had been slightly

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adjusted; see James W. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 216 and his discussions of this phenomenon passim (see index, 465 s.v. ‘‘Textual Adjustment’’). 11. The chant texts not derived from the Psalms are catalogued by Petrus Pietschmann, ‘‘Die nicht dem Psalter entnommenen Messgesangstu¨cke auf ihre Textgestalt untersucht,’’ Jahrbuch fu¨r Liturgiewissenschaft 12 (1932): 87–144. 12. Missale Aquileyensis Ecclesie (Venice: G. de Gregoriis, 1519), ff. 170r2 –171v1, from the facsimile reprint by Culture et Civilisation, Bruxelles, 1963. 13. Note typical features of texts of mass propers observable in this specimen: (1) slight modifications in the chant texts, in the modest centonizing of Ps 67 in the Introit, in the combining of Ps 27.1 and 34.22 in the verse of the Gradual, the replacement in Ps 27.7, ‘‘in ipso speravit cor meum . . .’’ of ‘‘ipso’’ by ‘‘Deo’’; and the abridgement and truncation of Ps 80.3 in the Alleluia verse; (2) variant biblical texts: this version of the Introit has the non-Vulgate reading ‘‘men of one mind,’’ the reading of Ps 67.7a in the old Roman Psalter, as do quotations of this Introit by the eleventh- and twelfth-century writers; contrast the Gallican Psalter’s reading ‘‘men of one manner’’ (unius moris) in the Introit as quoted by Sicardus and Durandus in the thirteenth century. This variant is remarked upon in a work attributed to Berno of Reichenau, De varia psalmorum atque cantuum modulatione, where he lists the differences between the Roman Psalter and the Gallican Psalter he uses (PL 142:1137D); both ‘‘unius moris’’ and ‘‘unanimes’’ are translations of monotropous of Ps 67.7a in the LXX; (3) limited variability in the texts selected: one finds in other sources an alternative Gradual verse, Ps 27.1a: ‘‘Verse. Unto thee have I cry, O Lord: O my God, be not thou silent to me, do not at any time keep silent from me,’’ and there is great variability in the choice of the Alleluia verse, since assignment of Alleluia verses to a the Sundays after Pentecost varied according to local practice; see comments of Honorius Augustudonensis, Gemma animae 4.98 (PL 172:727C–728A), and Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale 8.2 (PL 213:390B), and modern studies by R. Le Roux, ‘‘Les graduels des dimanches apre`s la Pentecoˆte,’’ E´tudes gre´goriennes 5 (1962): 119–30, and James W. McKinnon, ‘‘The Roman Post-Pentecostal Communion Series,’’ in Cantus Planus: Papers Read at the Fourth Meeting, Pe´cs, Hungary, 19–24 September 1988, ed. La´szlo´ Dobszay (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1992), 175–86. 14. See especially McKinnon, Advent Project, and discussions in Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. F. A. Brunner (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1951–55), 1:330–31, 398–403; also W. H. Frere, Studies in Early Roman Liturgy II: The Roman Gospel-Lectionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 87; Mario Righetti, Manuale di storia liturgica, 3rd ed. (Milano: Ancora, 1966), 3:254–60; Pierre-Marie Gy, ‘‘La Bible dans la liturgie de la messe,’’ 537–42 in his ‘‘La Bible dans la liturgie au moyen age,’’ in Le moyen age et la Bible, 537–52. 15. See instances of this phenomenon cited by Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, 1:327–28, and see Robert F. Taft, ‘‘Christian Liturgical Psalmody: Origins, Development, Decomposition, Collapse,’’ in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. H. W. Attridge and M. E. Fassler (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 7–32. 16. These ensembles of propers can be likened to a perhaps more familiar entity if we consider that as collections of excerpts they would fall into the category of ‘‘extract collections,’’ which Martin Albl contrasts to the ‘‘testimonia collections’’ in his study of the latter type of document, ‘‘And Scripture cannot be

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broken’’: The Form and Function of the Early Christian Testimonia Collections (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 65–67. Collections of testimonia are, to a degree, self-interpreting, as are florilegia of biblical and other passages collected for an announced purpose (see Henry Chadwick, ‘‘Florilegium,’’ Reallexikon fu¨r Antike und Christentum 7:1131–60, esp. 1148–52). But the coherence of a mosaic of extracts from different parts of Scripture whose connection must be deduced either from internal indicators or their contextualizing frame is often more difficult to discern, and this is the kind of challenge presented by the medieval mass propers. Comparanda might include the abbreviated psalters of the Middle Ages whose different emphases and purposes have to be discerned on the basis of the psalm verses selected for inclusion (see account by Pierre Salmon in CCM [⳱ Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis] 47:35–53) and the collocation of biblical verses accumulated at the beginnings of the midrashic proem (petih.ta) in the lectionary texts, described by David Stern, ‘‘Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash,’’ in The Anthology in Jewish Literature, ed. D. Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115. 17. Surveys of these authors have been provided by Roger Reynolds in his article ‘‘Liturgy, Treatises on,’’ in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 7, ed. J. R. Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1986), 624–633; Mary M. Schaefer, ‘‘Latin Mass Commentaries from the Ninth through Twelfth Centuries: Chronology and Theology,’’ in Fountain of Life, ed. G. Austin (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1991), 35–49; Gary Macy, ‘‘Commentaries on the Mass during the Early Scholastic Period,’’ in Medieval Liturgy: A Book of Essays, ed. Lizette Larson-Miller (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 25–59. 18. See Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique, 2nd ed. (Paris: E´tudes Augustiniennes, 1983), 1:43–44; 2:771–72, 871–73; 3:1152. 19. See, e.g., the accounts of the evolution of the mass given by Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum 1.32–33 in Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum: Studien und Edition, ed. Detlev Zimpel (Frankfurt M.: Peter Lang, 1996), 337–43; by Walafrid Strabo, Walahfrid Strabo’s Libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum, trans. Alice L. Harting-Correa (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Berno of Reichenau, De quibusdam rebus ad missae celebrationem pertinentibus 1 (PL 142:1055D-1058C); Bernoldus of Constance, Micrologus 5, 12, 19, 21, 31 (PL 151:980C–981A, 984C–985A, 989C–990B, 990D–992A, 1003D); Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma animae 1.87–90, 4.1 (PL 172:572C– 574A, 689CD); Rupert of Deutz, De officiis ecclesiasticis 2.21 (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis ⳱ CCM 7:50–52); Ioannes Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis 19, 57, and passim (CCM 41A:41–42, 103–4), Robertus Paululus, De ceremoniis, sacramentis, officiis et observationibus ecclesiasticis 11 (PL 171:416C–417D); Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale 4. prol. (PL 213:1489–90); Durandus of Mende, Rationale divinorum officiorum 4.1 (CCM 140:240–58); and the Cliff Notes–like summary in the edition of the Missale Romanum published in Paris by Franc¸ois Regnault in 1530, reprinted in Missale Romanum Mediolani, 1474: A Collation with Other Editions Printed before 1570, 2 vols. ed. R. Lippe (London: Henry Bradshaw Society 1899, 1907), 2:381–83. 20. ‘‘excerpsit ex sacris scripturis lectiones totius anni festivis diebus aptas, responsoria etiam psalmorum capitula tempori et lectionibus congruentia.’’ Gennadius, De viris illustribus 80, in W. Herding, ed., Hieronymi de viris illustribus liber: Accedit Gennadius Catalogus virorum illustrium (Leipzig: Teubner, 1924), 103. 21. ‘‘his sollemnibus annuis paravit, / quae quo tempore lecta conveniret.’’

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Sidonius Apollinaris, Ep. 4.11.6, Andre´ Loyen, ed., Sidoine Apollinaire, Lettres (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1060–1970), 2.137. 22. Pseudo-Hieronymus, Prologus libri Comitis (‘‘Quamquam licenter . . .’’) in Clavis patristica pseudepigraphorum Medii Aevi 2, no. 918, of Italian origin, from the second half of the eighth century. 23. From W. H. Frere, Studies in Early Roman Liturgy III: The Roman EpistleLectionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 75. 24. See Rupert of Deutz’s prayer for inspiration quoted below (n. 64), and the assimilation of liturgical phenomena to the Scriptures implied in Innocent III’s meditation in the prologue of his De sacro altaris mysterio libri VI (PL 217:774BC, later imitated by Durandus of Mende, CCM 140:3): ‘‘All of these things are filled with divine mysteries, each of them overflowing with heavenly sweetness, if, that is, they have someone to examine them carefully, one who knows how to suck honey from the rock and oil from the hardest stone (Dt 32.13b). But who knows the order of the heavens and sets down its patterns on earth (Job 38.37)? The well is deep and I have not a way to draw water (John 4.11), unless He provide one who gives to all abundantly and does not reproach (Jas 1.5b), so that crossing the midst of the mountains (Ps 103.10b) I may draw water with joy from the springs of the Savior (Is 12.3). So, knocking will I knock, if perchance the Key of David will deign to open (Rev 3.7b), so that the King will bring me into His winecellar (Ct 1.3a).’’ The work of Gregory the Great on the mass antiphonal was considered to have been divinely inspired; see images of the Holy Spirit descending on Gregory as he works on the antiphonale (W. Braufels, ed., Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie 6:433–34) and the tropes prefixed to the Introit for the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the liturgical year and so the first feast day in the antiphonale, that assert the divine inspiration of Gregory’s work (Analecta Hymnica Medii Aev 49:19–24). 25. See the abundant citations in Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture I, trans. M. Sebanc (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), chap. 5, ‘‘The Unity of the Two Testaments,’’ 225–67, 423–57. 26. See De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis , chap. 5, sec. 3. ‘‘The Harmony of the Two Testaments,’’ 241–51/437–45; J. Kevin Coyle, ‘‘Concordia: The Holy Spirit as Bond of the Two Testaments in Augustine,’’ Augustinianum 22 (1982): 427– 56, with review of earlier patristic literature; and Stephan Ch. Kessler, ‘‘Die christologische Concordantia Testamentorum,’’ in his Gregor der Grosse als Exeget: Eine theologische Interpretation der Ezechielhomilien (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1995), 225–34. 27. The liturgical settings and subjects of Augustine’s preaching are described, with citation of relevant earlier work, by Anton Zwinggi, ‘‘Der Wortgottesdienst bei Augustinus,’’ Liturgische Jahrbuch 20 (1970): 92–113, and by Martijn Schrama, ‘‘ ‘Prima lectio quae recitata est’: The Liturgical Pericope in Light of Saint Augustine’s Sermons,’’ Augustiniana 45 (1995): 141–75. See also Michael Fiedrowicz’s abundantly documented sketch of the liturgical setting of the Enarrationes in psalmos in Psalmus vox totius Christi: Studien zu Augustins ‘‘Enarrationes in Psalmos’’ (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1997), 29–32. Geoffrey Willis has undertaken to reconstruct St. Augustine’s Lectionary, Alcuin Club Collections 44 (London: S. P. C. K., 1962). 28. See, e.g., in Sermo 302.1, for the feast of St. Laurence, in C. Lambot, ed., S. Aurelii Augustini . . . sermones selecti duodeviginta (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1950), 100; in Sermo 296.1, for the feast of Peter and Paul (PL 38:1352–1353); in Sermo Morin 2.1, for the feast of St. Eulalia, in G. Morin, ed., Sancti Augustini sermones

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post Maurinos reperti, Miscellanea Agostiniana 1 (Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1930), 594; and in Sermo Lambot 7, also for a feast of martyrs, in Patrologiae latinae supplementum (⳱ PLS) 2:782, 784. 29. See the section V.16, ‘‘OMHRON. EX OMHPOY. SAΦHNIZEIN’’ of Bernhard Neuscha¨fer, Origenes als Philologe (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, 1987), 276–85/481–87, an account of the borrowing from literary scholarship of a practice which was to continue through the Middle Ages, and C. Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exe´ge`se latine au moyen aˆge (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 223–26 and passim. ¨ sthetik und die Exercitatio-Eloquenz der Bible,’’ in 30. See ‘‘Die Obscuritas-A Karla Pollmann, Doctrina christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfa¨ngen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina Christiana (Freiburg, Schweiz: Universita¨tsverlag, 1996), 217–24, and ‘‘Obscuritas der Schrift und Ideal der lectio divina,’’ in Kessler, Gregor der Grosse als Exeget, 246–52. 31. This technique, first specifically discussed in modern scholarship by Carl Andresen, ‘‘Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des trinitarischen Personbegriffes,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 52 (1961): 1–39, was borrowed from classical literary scholarship. See Neuscha¨fer, Origenes als Philologe, 263–77, 475–81. 32. See Marie-Jose`phe Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques du psautier (IIIe–Ve sie`cles), II: Exe´ge`se prosopologique et the´ologie ⳱ Orientalia Christiana Analecta 220 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1985), and Fiedrowicz, Psalmus vox totius Christi, 234–378. One can cite as analogous to this approach features of the midrashim on the Psalms (William G. Braude, trans., The Midrash on the Psalms, 2 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959]), namely, views reported passim like ‘‘All that David says in the Book of Psalms is said of himself or of the congregation of Israel’’ (1:60), or, e.g., the treatments of Ps 45 (1:448–54) whose several verses are said to allude to past (vv. 4–8 to Moses, vv. 8–9 to Aaron, vv. 9–10 to Solomon), to present (v. 10, to the Torah), while ‘‘The verses beginning Hearken, O daughter, and consider, to the end of the psalm are spoken to the congregation of Israel’’ and to a future time in v. 17 ‘‘when every man in Israel will beget as many children as the number of Israel who went out of Egypt.’’ 33. See summary in Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite, 1:87–91, 109–18, and Reinhard Meßner, ‘‘Zur Hermeneutik allegorischer Liturgieerkla¨rung in Ost und West,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r katholische Theologie 115 (1993): 284–319, 415–34. 34. ‘‘But there are many things like this also in the practices of the church . . . [examples] When we do all these and things like them, and yet do not attain an explanation for them, we are lifting upon our shoulders and bearing the divine mysteries shrouded and covered up, unless there be among us an Aaron or the sons of Aaron who have been granted the privilege of looking at these things bare and uncovered.’’ Homily 5 on Numbers 1.4 (SC 145:122/124); these comments of Origen were incorporated into the marginal gloss on Numbers 4 in the Glossa Ordinaria. 35. De sacramentis ecclesiae, mysteriis atque ecclesiasticis ritibus, prol.: ‘‘many things are done in the dedications of churches, many in other rites of the Church as well, which seem no less than those to be done under shadow and figure. So you asked me that just as I had explained those things [namely, in his commentary on Exodus], I would undertake to explain these as well’’ (PL 165:1090B–1091A). 36. See Raphael Schulte, Die Messe als Opfer der Kirche: Die Lehre fru¨hmittelalter-

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licher Autoren u¨ber das eucharistische Opfer (Mu¨nster/W.: Aschendorff, 1959), 24– 25, on sacramentum and velamentum in Isidore of Seville, and note Rupert of Deutz’s borrowing of Augustinian exegesis of Gn 9 (Contra Faustum 12.23–25) to explain how ‘‘the catholic and apostolic fathers’’ like Shem and Japhet ‘‘adorn and show reverence for the weakness taken up for our sakes with the seemly cloak of the rites (honesto sacramentorum pallio)’’ (De officiis ecclesiasticis, prol. [CCM 7:5]). 37. See the description of typology by Jean-Noe¨l Guinot, ‘‘La typologie comme technique herme´neutique,’’ Figures de l’Ancien Testament chez les Pe`res (Strasbourg: Centre d’analyse et de documentation patristiques, 1989), 1–34. 38. Opusculum de conuenientia ueteris et noui sacrificii (PL 162:536A) 39. PL 102:13–552; A. Souter, ‘‘Contributions to the Criticism of Zmaragdus’ Expositio libri comitis,’’ Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1908): 584–97. The precise dates of Smaragdus’s lifespan are not known, but the chronology of Smaragdus’s writings has been established by Fidel Ra¨dle, Studien zu Smaragd von Saint-Mihiel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1974), 21. The best account of the Expositio libri comitis is Ra¨dle’s in Studien, 144–233, where he covers multiple aspects of the work and provides on 144–48 a list of the pericopes around which Smaragdus assembled his catena. 40. This is the characterization of Smaragdus’s work by Henri Barre´, Les home´liaires carolingiens de l’e´cole d’Auxerre (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1962), 12–13; Smaragdus describes himself in the preface as ‘‘excerpter and abridger alike’’ (‘‘pariter derivator, pariterque . . . breviator,’’ PL 102:13C). 41. Ra¨dle, Studien, 132–33, notes that Smaragdus was the first of those who assembled homiletic and exegetical materials concerning the lectionary readings to deal with the ‘‘epistle’’ and the gospel readings in combination. 42. One must distinguish, with Ra¨dle (Studien, 133), Smaragdus’s concordia from efforts to harmonize apparently contradictory biblical passages, as in the Antikeimena (CPL 1261) of Julian of Toledo (d. 690) and the Concordia (CPL 1717) attributed to Gregory the Great, a procedure that pointed the way to Abelard’s Sic et Non and Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Benedict of Aniane’s Concordia regularum (composed 818X820, CCM 168A) that shows the harmony of monastic rules is a closer analogue to Smaragdus’s work. 43. Smaragdus provides concordiae for only twenty-seven of the ninety sets of readings covered by his work. In the first section they occur through the Christmas and post-Christmas seasons and into the pre-Lenten Sundays and Early Lent; they cease during Lent, to resume in the post-Easter season, and cease altogether on the Saturday before Pentecost. Ra¨dle (Studien, 133) says that the concordiae are nonessential, but Barre´ (Les home´liaires, 13) sees in them an attempt by Smaragdus to give more unity to his compilation. 44. See Ra¨dle’s (Studien, 115–27) list of entries of the Expositio libri comitis in medieval library catalogues and his catalogue of extant manuscripts, including fragments. The presence or influence of Smaragdus’s Expositio has been detected in collections of exegesis for preaching. See Raymond E´taix, ‘‘Le ‘Smaragde’ de Cordoue et autres manuscrits,’’ 401–15 in his Home´liaires patristiques latins: Recueil d’e´tudes de manuscrits me´die´vaux (Paris: Institut d’E´tudes Augustiniennes, 1994); and Hildegund Mu¨ller, Das ‘‘Luculentius’’-Homiliar: quel¨ sterreichischen lenkritische Untersuchungen mit Teiledition (Vienna: Verlag der O Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), 60–61. 45. Wolfgang Steck, Der Liturgiker Amalarius—Eine quellenkritische Untersuchungung zu Leben und Werk eines Theologien der Karolingerzeit (Erzabtei St. Ottlilien:

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Eos Verlag, 2000), 197–200, provides a chronology of Amalarius’s life and works, but the precise parameters of his life are unknown. The dates ca. 775–ca. 850 were suggested by J. M. Hanssens in his edition Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948–50), 1:59; citations of Amalarius’s Liber officialis will be to this edition. 46. See his Letter to Abbot Hilduin 36: ‘‘I firmly believe that nothing accidental has been established by the holy fathers, but everything is wholly reasonable and nothing is observed in the church that is not a path trodden out by their footsteps’’ (1:348). 47. Liber officialis, preface, 2:26 48. Those of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima Sundays, the First Sunday of Lent, two Wednesdays of Lent, Wednesday of Holy Week, and the masses of the Easter Vigil and of Easter Day. 49. Liber officialis I.ii.7–4; 2:36–38; note that there are unmistakable traces of Amalarius’s treatment of Sexagesima Sunday in Robertus Paululus’s De ceremoniis 11 (PL 177:444A–444C) and in Sicard of Cremona’s Mitrale 7.2 (PL 213:250A– 251C). 50. See, e.g., the conspectus of chant texts for Pentecost XI from ninth-century sources provided by R. J. Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex (Brussels: Vromant, 1935) 184–85. 51. Genesis of variation in the assignment of prayer texts is described and explained by L. Brou, ‘‘E´tude historique sur les oraisons des dimanches apre`s la Pentecoˆte dans la tradition romain,’’ Sacris Erudiri 2 (1949): 123–224. The confusion continued; note the observation on Pentecost I of the redactor of the fourteenth-century missal from Santa Maria Maggiore (MS BB.ii.15, dated 1350X1375 by S. J. P. Van Dijk and J. Hazelden Walker, The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy [Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1960], 162–63): ‘‘On this first Sunday after Pentecost, because in the books there is great variety of introits, collects, epistles, and gospels, I am at pains to note how they are said in the Roman curia’’ (133n1). 52. This Sunday, called a Dominica vacans, was not usually counted in the enumeration of Sundays after Pentectost, so our Pentecost XI is actually the Eleventh Sunday after the Sunday following Pentecost. This Dominica vacans eventually became Trinity Sunday. The Roman series of prayers for Sundays after Pentecost is found in the Gregorian Sacramentary of Trent that reflects Roman usage of ca. 680 (see Jean Deshusses, Le Sacramentaire gre´gorien: Ses principales formes d’apres les plus anciens manuscrits 3 vols. ⳱ Spicilegium Friburgense 16, 24, 28 [Fribourg: E´ditions universitaires, 1979–82], 3:83–91). Klaus Gamber provides an edition of this series found in a thirteenth-century sacramentary from Thuringia and cites sacramentaries from other dates and venues that contain this series in Das Sakramentar von Jena ⳱ Texte und Arbeiten 52 (Beuron: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1962), 81–82, 84–96. 53. A description of the contents of Benedict of Aniane’s influential Supplementum (compiled ca. 810–20) to the sacramentary sent to Charlemagne by Pope Hadrian can be found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. W. G. Storey and N. K. Rasmussen, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1986), 85–92. 54. See, to cite only one readily accessible example, the prayers of our Pentecost XI with the other propers of Pentecost XII in D. H. Turner, ed., The Missal of the New Minster, Winchester (Le Havre, Bibliothe`que municipale MS 330), Henry Bradshaw Society Publications 93 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1962), 34–36.

Notes to Pages 171–178

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55. Overview provided by K. Ruh, art. ‘‘Bern (Berno) von Reichenau,’’ Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters:Verfasserlexikon, ed. K. Langosch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977–), vol. 1 (1978), 737–44; Berno’s liturgical writings are discussed by Hans Oesch, Berno und Hermann von Reichenau als Musiktheoretiker (Bern: P. Haupt, 1961), 50–51. 56. 1067D–1072B; Oesch (Berno und Hermann, 50, n. 2) reports a twelfth-century MS that contains Berno’s account of these masses of the post-Pentecost season under the title B.⬍ernonis⬎ abbatis de officiorum concordia. 57. Until Daniel S. Taylor’s new edition of the Micrologus appears in CCM, we must rely on the edition reprinted in the PL, supplemented by materials cited and assembled in Taylor’s ‘‘Capitula extranea of the Micrologus de ecclesiasticis observationibus of Bernold of Constance,’’ Revue be´ne´dictine 108 (1998): 243–81; Bernold’s work as liturgist and reformer is mentioned by H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘‘Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) and the Liturgy,’’ Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 55 (2004): 55–83, on 62, 68–70, 74–77, 82. 58. See Taylor, ‘‘Capitula extranea,’’ 279, esp. n. 131; Taylor (‘‘Capitula extranea of the Micrologue,’’ 277–78) also reports that Berno’s chapters 5 and 6 were in some MSS appended to the Micrologus and so circulated with it. 59. These are the hypotheses of the leading scholar of Honorius, V. I. J. Flint, in her Honorius Augustodunensis of Regensburg (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 3–34. 60. PL 172:689CD; cf. Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale, prol. to book 4 (PL 213:147D–149A). 61. ‘‘Sic consideranda sunt caetera, quae a doctis viris Spiritu sancto inspirante in divinis officiis sunt edita’’ (693D–694A). 62. The Queen is portrayed as a type of the Church in point-by-point comparisons passim; see, e.g., in Isidore of Seville, Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum, In Regum III.5 (PL 83:417B), and Rupert of Deutz, De sancta Trinitate et operibus eius, 24.30 (CCM 22:1334). 63. The relationship of Rupert’s work to other liturgical commentaries, its general character, and date are discussed by John H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 58–67. 64. ‘‘igitur sacramentorum omnium opificem inuoco Spiritum sanctum, ut qua per sanctos patres haec ordinauit, eadem mihi secundum sensum et auctoritatem Scripturarum aperire dignetur gratia,’’ CCM 7:6. Rupert’s editor, Rhaban Haacke, aptly cites in connection with part of Rupert’s prayer ‘‘to condescend to open these to me / eadem mihi . . . aperire dignetur’’ the account of Jesus’ opening up the meaning of the Scripture for the disciples on the road to Emaus in Luke 24.45, ‘‘Tunc aperuit illis sensum ut intellegerent scripturas.’’ 65. Rupert applies his method with stark economy in the case of the weekday masses of Lent, for he says that for these, to save time, he will explain only the concordia of the epistles and gospels, because ‘‘once these have been examined, those other elements can of themselves become apparent to those who want to know’’ (4.13, CCM 7:123). 66. John Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis 39 (CCM 41:31.51–64); Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale 5.1 (PL 213:202A); Innocent III, De sacro altaris mysterio, 2.47 (PL 217:826); Durandus, Rationale, 4.24.3 (CCM 140:341). Note also the emphasis in the Lutheran lectionary of 1978 on the Konsonanz of Sunday scriptural passages and the function of the gospel as the rector of the rest, in Karl-Heinrich Bieritz, Das Kirchen Jahr: Feste, Gedenk- und Feiertage in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck 1988), 68. 67. Fritz Peter Knapp, Die Literatur des Fru¨h- und Hochmittelalters in den Bistu¨m-

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ern Passau, Salzburg, Brixen und Trient von den Anfa¨ngen bis zum Jahre 1273 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1994), 74–79. 68. The preface to a collection of homilies for the Summer Sundays declares, ‘‘For ‘comparing things spiritual to spiritual’ (1 Cor 2.13), we mean to expend our studious toil for those especially who put to death the deeds of the flesh by the spirit so as to live (Rom 8.13) to God in monasteries’’ (PL 174:385). 69. Stephan Borgehammar, ‘‘Who Wrote the Admont Sermon Corpus— Gottfried the Abbot, his brother Irimbert, or the Nuns?’’ in De l’home´lie au sermon: Histoire de la pre´dication me´die´vale, ed. J. Hamesse and X. Hermand (Louvainla-Neuve: Universite´ Catholique de Louvain, 1993), 47–51. 70. See Timothy M. Thibodeau, ‘‘Enigmata figurarum: Biblical Exegesis and Liturgical Exposition in Durandus’ Rationale,’’ Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 65–79, on Durandus’s use of the ‘‘four senses’’ of Scripture in his exposition of the liturgy. 71. The great Franciscan preacher Anthony of Padua in his Opus evangeliorum, a set of model Sunday sermons composed to guide the younger friars in Padua in 1227–28, routinely undertakes to develop the concordia of four texts of the Sunday services: the gospel, read both at vespers and at mass; the readings from the Old Testament read at matins; and the introit and epistle of the mass: ‘‘These I have harmonized with one another,’’ he says, ‘‘according as divine grace provided and the thin vein of my small knowledge proved answerable.‘‘ In S. Antonii Patavini, O. Min., Sermones dominicales et festivales, ed. B. Costa, L. Frasson, G. Luisetto, P. Maragon, 3 vols. (Padua: Edizioni Messagero, 1979), 1:3; see Francesco Costa, ‘‘Liturgia,’’ in Dizionario Antoniano, ed. E. Caroli (Padua: Edizioni Messagero, 2002), cc 393–430, esp. 394–400. 72. S. Petrides, ‘‘Traite´s liturgiques de saint Maxime et de saint Germain traduits par Anastase le bibliothe´caire,’’ Revue de l’Orient chre´tien 10 (1905): 289– 313, 350–64; here 296.

10. Exegesis and Polemic in Rashbam’s Commentary on the Song of Songs 1. See C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the XIIth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), who was followed by many, including inter al. R. L. Benson and G. Constable, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); P. Wolff, L’Eveil intellectuel de l’Europe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971). On Rashbam’s life and works, see in particular, D. Rosin, R. Samuel ben Meir als Schrifterkla¨rer (Breslau: Verlag von Wilhelm Koebner, 1880); S. Poznanski, Kommentar zu Ezechiel und den XII Kleinen Propheten von Eliezer aus Beaugency (Hebrew; Warsaw: Druck von H. Eppelberg, 1913), xxxix–xlix; E. Z. Melammed, Bible Commentators (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), 1:449–513. Also S. Japhet and R. B. Salters, The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on Qoheleth (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 11–18. 2. The term peshat has no one precise equivalent in English; the common terms ‘‘literal meaning’’ or ‘‘contextual meaning’’ reflect only partial aspects of it. I therefore prefer to translate peshat as ‘‘plain meaning’’ or ‘‘plain sense,’’ with the understanding that ‘‘plain’’ does not mean ‘‘simple.’’ See also S. Japhet, The Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on the Book of Job (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 54–56. 3. For a concise description of this movement, see M. Greenberg, ed., Jewish Bible Exegesis: An Introduction (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1992). See also

Notes to Pages 182–183

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A. Grossman, ‘‘The School of Literal Jewish Exegesis in Northern France,’’ in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 1/2, ed. M. Saebø (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000), 321–27; U. Simon et al., ‘‘Jewish Exegesis in Spain and Provence, and in the East, in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,’’ Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 1/2, 327–432. 4. See, recently, S. Japhet, ‘‘The Tension between Rabbinic Midrash and the ‘Plain Meaning’ (Peshat) of the Biblical Text—An Unresolved Problem? In the Wake of Rashbam’s Commentary on the Pentateuch,’’ in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume, ed. C. Cohen, A. Hurvitz, and Sh. M. Paul (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 403–25. 5. The commentary was published in 1855 by A. Jellinek from MS Hamburg 32 (See A. Jellinek, Commentar zu Koheleth und dem Hohen Liede von R. Samuel ben Meir [Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von Leopold Schnauss, 1855]). Jellinik’s edition was reviewed and supplemented by S. Salfeld, who testified to the existence of another manuscript of the same work. See S. Salfeld, Das Hohelied Salomo’s bei den ju¨dischen Erkla¨rer des Millelalters (Berlin: Verlag Julius Benzian, 1879), 40–49, 167–72. At present, three complete manuscripts of this work are known: MS Hamburg 32, MS St. Petersburg l.21, and MS Budapest A384, as well as the beginning of the commentary in two manuscripts, where it replaces the beginning of Rashi’s commentary on the Song of Songs: chapter 1.1–6 in MS Parma 3136, and 1.1–3 in MS Cincinnati. For full references of these manuscripts, see Barry D. Walfish, ‘‘An Annotated Bibliography of Medieval Jewish Commentaries on the Song of Songs,’’ in The Bible in the Light of its Interpreters: Sarah Kamin Memorial Volume, ed. S. Japhet (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), 540–41. I am now preparing a new critical edition of the commentary. For a discussion of the work’s authenticity, see now S. Japhet, ‘‘R. Samuel b. Meir’s (Rashbam’s) Commentary on the Song of Songs’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 75 (2005–6): 239–75. 6. As powerfully expressed by the words of R. Akiba, in Mishnah, Yadayim 3.5: ‘‘The whole world is not as worthy as the day in which the Song of Songs was given to Israel.’’ For the debate around the canonization of the Song of Songs, see, e.g., Marvin Pope, A Commentary on the Song of Songs (Anchor Bible) (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 18–19; S. Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (New Haven, Conn.: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, 1991), 102–24. 7. Ibid. See also R. Akiba’s statement in tSan 12.10, and the statement in the name of ‘‘the rabbis’’ in bSan 101a. For a powerful affirmation in modern times of the essential allegorical nature of the Song of Songs, see Gerson D. Cohen, ‘‘The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality,’’ in The Samuel Friedland Lectures (1960–1966), ed. L. Finkelstein (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1966), 1–21. For an important attempt to delineate the relationship between interpretation and allegory and describe the function of allegory in the history and theory of interpretation, see Jon Whitman, ed., Interpretation and Allegory, Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 8. See among others the major collections of Song of Songs Rabbah, Song of Songs Zuta, and the Aramaic Targum. Shorter compilations appear already in the Mekilta, Talmuds, and more. The Song of Songs was also a major focus of interest for Christian biblical exegetes. See E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), with extensive sources and bibliographical references.

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9. An extraordinary phenomenon, however, in medieval Jewish exegesis is the existence of two anonymous commentaries—both of the same provenance in northern France and both from around the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth—that interpret the Song of Songs exclusively on the level of the peshat, with no hint at allegory. The one published by Adolf Hu¨bsch, Die fu¨nf Megilloth (Prague: Druck von Senders und Brandeis, 1866), folios 10–20, is sometimes, wrongly, attributed to Joseph Kara. The other was published by H. J. Mathews, ‘‘Anonymous Commentary on the Song of Songs,’’ Festscrift zum achtsigsten Geburtstage Moritz Steinschneider (Leipzig: Otto Harassowitz, 1896), 238–40, Hebrew section 164–85. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see S. Japhet, ‘‘Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs: The Revolution of the Peshat and Its Aftermath,’’ in Mein Haus wird ein Bethaus fu¨r alle Vo¨lker genannt werden. Festschrift fu¨r Thomas Wille zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. J. Ma¨nnchen and T. Reiprich (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2007), 199–219. 10. For a discussion of these issues in the Spanish school of biblical exegesis, see recently M. Z. Cohen, Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor: From Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides to David Kimhi (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Also M. Cohen, ‘‘Radak vs. Ibn Ezra: A New Approach to ‘Derekh Mashal’ in the Bible’’ (Hebrew), Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1999), sec. 1, 27–41. 11. The best edition of Rashi’s commentary is the one published by Rosenthal from MS Lutzki 778. See J. Rosenthal, ‘‘Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs (from Mss. Edited and Annotated), in Samuel K. Mirsky Jubilee Volume, ed. S. Bernstein and G. A. Churgin (Hebrew; New York: Jubilee Committee, 1958), 130–88. This edition was adopted also by S. Kamin and A. Saltman, eds., in Secundum Salomonem: A Thirteenth Century Latin Commentary on the Song of Songs (Hebrew, Latin, and English; Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1989), 35– 37. For a discussion of the introduction, see Sarah Kamin, Rashi’s Exegetical Categorization with Respect to the Distinction between Peshat and Derash (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), 77–86; S. Kamin, ‘‘Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and Jewish Christian Polemic,’’ in Shnaton—An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 7–8, ed. M. Weinfeld (1983/84): 219–21 (⳱idem, Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible [Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991], 32–34). 12. The definitions of this level of interpretation are quite rare and varied: mashma‘ ha-mikra’ot, mashma‘o (in the introduction); ze be’ur mashma‘o (to 1.2); peshuto lefi ‘inyano (1.4); lefi ha-dibbur (1.3); peshat (7.5); kol ha-‘inyan ha-zeh lefi peshuto (2.13) peshuto (5.10, in the rabbinic Bible, not in MS 778). 13. In the introduction, and in the comments on Song 1.2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 14, 15; 2.3, 6; 4.1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 16; 5.2, 6, 16; 6.5; 7.3. For a broad discussion of this term, see Sarah Kamin, ‘‘Dugma’ in Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 52 (1992): 41–58 (⳱Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible [Hebrew], 13–30). 14. See also Kamin, Rashi’s Exegetical Categorization, 80, n. 69; 120–21. 15. This is the view that Rashi propounds in the famous methodological statement on Gn 3.8. For a broader discussion of this statement, see Kamin, Rashi’s Exegetical Categorization, 62–77, 81–82. 16. This is the version of the introduction in MS Lutzki 778, following rabbinic terminology. The version of Rashi’s introduction in the rabbinic Bible reads mashma‘ut. 17. See Isaac Heineman, Darkhe ha-’agadah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970),

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307

96–164; Y. Frankel, Darkhe ha-’agadah veha-midrash (Gibeataim: Massadah Press, 1991), 1:45–65. 18. See below, p. 187. 19. The Song of Songs is among the biblical books for which Ibn Ezra wrote two commentaries, one printed in the rabbinic Bible and the other published by Henri Mathews from two MSS (with remarks from a third), and translated. See H. J. Mathews, Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Canticles, After the First Recension (London: Tru¨bner and Co., 1874). Mathews suggests that the commentary he published was one of Ibn Ezra’s first exegetical works, written in Rome after 1140 (above, pp. vii–viii). For a description of this commentary and bibliographical references, see S. Reif, ‘‘Abraham Ibn Ezra on Canticles,’’ in Abraham Ibn Ezra y su tiempo, ed. F. Diaz Esteban (Madrid: Asociacio´n Espan ˜ ola de Orientalistas 1990), 241–49. 20. This is the version in Mathew’s edition (Hebrew section 3): Ba-pa‘am ha-rishonah / agaleh kol milah tsefunah // Uva-shenit odia‘ mishpato / ‘al derekh peshuto // Uva-shelishit yihiyeh meforash / ‘al derekh ha-midrash

For Mathew’s translation see ibid., the English section, p. 1. The version in the rabbinic Bible is very similar in contents and terminology but differs in a few details of style. 21. According to Mordechai Cohen, the essential disconnectedness between the literal meaning and the tenor of the figurative language stems from the adoption of a certain literary theory that was prevalent in Muslim Spain at the time (followed also by Maimonides) and defined by Cohen as ‘‘substitution.’’ It is characteristic of Ibn Ezra’s poetic stand in all his works, the Song of Songs being no special case. See M. Cohen, ‘‘Radak against Ibn Ezra,’’ 28–36. 22. For instance: ‘‘May he kiss me. He began with Abraham because he is essential, and the kisses of the mouth are the Torah and the commandments’’ (on Song 1.2, third instance); ‘‘Draw me after you: For he was drawn after God and left his homeland’’ (on 1.4); ‘‘I am dark. He began with the oppression in Egypt . . . The sun is the exile in Egypt’’ (on 1.5); etc. The commentary on the Song of Songs is thus unique among Ibn Ezra’s works, whose rejection of aggadic midrash was in general so professed and uncompromised. See Cohen, ‘‘Radak against Ibn Ezra,’’ 38–39, n. 40. 23. Scholars have posited for a long time that Ibn Ezra’s true interest lay in the peshat of the Song of Songs and have viewed his midrashic interpretations as a kind of lip service, a play at ‘‘hide and seek,’’ the result of his lack of independence, and ‘‘not sufficient boldness.’’ As stated by Graetz and quoted by Mathews, ‘‘Ibn Ezra [ . . . ] was only serious with the First Exposition [ . . . ] in which he conceived the canticles as a song of the love that existed between a young girl and a shepherd.’’ (Mathews, x; see H. Gra¨tz, Schir ha-Schirim oder das Salomonische Hohelied, u¨bersetzed und kritisch erlau¨tert [Wien: W. Braumu¨ller, 1871], 19; quoted also by Pope, Song of Songs, 104). The label ‘‘truth’’ for the allegorical meaning, the extensive treatment of this ‘‘instant’’ in the commentary, and its creative nature all speak against this view. Thus already Melammed: ‘‘Here comes to the fore Ibn Ezra’s great power as an outstanding homiletic preacher’’ (Bible Commentators, 2:530). 24. le-lamed u-le-saper et peshuto / be-shitato / u-milato // ka-’asher yitakhen ‘al mekhono / bi-leshono. This short passage is built entirely from Rahsbam’s favorite terms, peshuto, shitah, milah, yitakhen, lashon. On the terms milah and lashon in his

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language, see Japhet and Salters, Qohelet, 21–27. Rosin includes peshuto and shitah in Rashbam’s characteristic terminology (see Rosin, Schrifterkla¨ rer, 157–58), and on peshuto see also Melammed, Bible Commentators, 458; Japhet and Salters, Qohelet, 60. Rashbam’s commentary on the Song of Songs was translated into English by Yaakov Thompson, ‘‘The Commentary of Samuel ben Meir on the Song of Songs’’ (DHL thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988), 224–304; the translations throughout this article are my own. 25. The most famous example of this rule is the interpretation of Ex 13.9. Here Rashbam explains the well-known words and it shall be like a sign on your hand etc. as a metaphor, contrary to all traditional biblical exegesis, which interprets it literally, as a commandment to put on phylacteries. Rashbam prefaces this metaphorical explanation by the emphatic statement: ‘‘According to the profound plain meaning’’ (lefi ‘omek peshuto). For this issue, see Japhet, ‘‘The Tension,’’ 413–18. 26. This procedure is indicated by the nature of the Song of Songs and is commonly followed in modern exegesis, although scholars differ in the delimitation of these units. See Y. Zakovitch, The Song of Songs (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 4–5 and throughout the commentary; Marcia Falk, Love Lyrics from the Bible: A Translation and Literary Study of the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1976), 62–79. The procedure is not followed by traditional Jewish exegesis, which commonly follows the text verse by verse. See also below. 27. On ‘‘paraphrase’’ as a major tool in Rashbam’s exegesis and its specific techniques, see Japhet, Rashbam on Job, 111–19. 28. The interpretation of the biblical text along predetermined literary units rather than as a running glossary to the individual verses characterizes all of Rashbam’s commentaries, but its most systematic illustration is the commentary on the Song of Songs. For a description of this method and its broader implications for Rashbam as an exegete, see S. Japhet, ‘‘The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir to Qohelet’’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 44 (1974/74): 79–84; Japhet and Salters, The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on Qoheleth, 36–41; Japhet, Rashbam on Job, 101–8. This method was employed also in Rashbam’s commentary on the Pentateuch but was eventually obscured by Rosin’s method of editing. I alluded to it in the above mentioned article (ibid., 89, n. 109), and the subject was further elaborated by E. Touitou, Exegesis in Perpetual Motion: Studies in the Pentateuchal Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003), 85–92. Jellinek recognized some of these units in his edition but tried to present the commentary as much as possible in adherence to the order of the verses. The disregard of these units is one of the greatest shortcomings of Thompson’s edition. 29. See the edition of Mathews and the manuscripts. The apparent division into units in the rabbinic Bible was introduced by the printers for technical reasons; it is wrongly seen by Melammed as original (Bible Commentators, 2:530). 30. In his comments on Song 2.7 and 13 in the ‘‘second instance’’ he remarks that ‘‘the/this section in completed.’’ In his comment on 2.10 he notes, ‘‘My beloved answered. The whole section.’’ 31. Introduction to the commentary. 32. For a detailed analysis of this image, see Kamin, ‘‘Rashi on the Song of Songs,’’ 220–22 (⳱Jews and Christians, 33–35). 33. Introduction, the rabbinic Bible, ‘‘the second instance.’’ 34. Introduction to the commentary. 35. Seven times: ‘‘Daughters of Jerusalem’’ in 1.5; 3.10; 5.16; and the formula I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, in 2.7; 3.5; 5.8; 8.4; Daughters of Zion in 3.11 (the JPS translates the Hebrew banot as ‘‘maidens’’).

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36. 1.7–11, 15–16; 2.10–14; 4.1–6, 7–11, 12–15; 5.1, 2–3; 6.4–10; 6.11–7.11; 7.12–8.4; 8.5–7. 37. The biblical quotations generally follow the JPS, unless a deviation from it seems necessary. 38. This view is very similar to Rashi’s position, as expressed in his introduction: ‘‘Solomon saw by the Holy Spirit that they will be exiled once and again, destruction after destruction, that they will mourn in this exile (be-galut zo) their original honor [ . . . ] and he composed this book under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 39. God’s title is either ‘‘the Holy One,’’ written in an abbreviated form as 'qh on ‘‘The Holy One blessed be he,’’ abbreviated as h''bqh. The first form is used consistently in MS Budapest, and almost so in MS Hamburg; with the exception of the other found at 8.2, the second is used consistently in MS St. Petersburg. In Rashbam’s commentary on Kohelet in MS Hamburg, the form 'qh is written once in full, ha-kadosh (at Eccl 7.26), thus clarifying the meaning of the abbreviated form. 40. So also Rashi. The basis of this figure may be found in the words of Rabbi Yohanan, cited in Song of Songs Rabbah 1.37 (also Exodus Rabbah 23:11): Daughters of Jerusalem. Rabbi Jonathan said: Jerusalem is to become the metropolis for all the provinces [ . . . ], as you say ‘‘Ashdod, its daughters and its villages, Azah, its daughters and it villages’’ (Josh 15.47) [ . . . ]. For R. Johanan said, it is written, ‘‘and I will give them to you as daughters. . . .’’ What is ‘daughters’? Villages.’’ For other possibilities see, for example, Song of Songs Rabbah 1.22, or Ibn Ezra, Introduction to the ‘‘third instance’’ and his comment on Song 1.3. 41. The core of this idea may be found in the midrash attributed to Rabbi Akiba on Song 5.9, in Mekilta, Shirta 3 (and its parallel in Sifre 343), and is expressed—although differently—in the midrash to Lam 3.19 in Lamentations Rabbah 3.21, where the nations are represented as ‘‘the neighbors.’’ However, nowhere in the midrash has this idea received the thorough and systematic elaboration and the specific direction that characterize Rashbam’s commentary, nor was it related to literary considerations. I wish to thank Professor David Stern for calling my attention to the passages in the Mekilta and Lamentations Rabbah, and to his discussion in Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 48 (also: D. Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991], 56). 42. This is Rashbam’s interpretation of the Song’s Hebrew im ta-‘iru ve’im-te‘oreru et ha-’ahavah ‘ad she-teh.pats (as at Song 2.7), often translated or interpreted as ‘‘do not wake or rouse love until it please (JPS). The focal point is the interpretation of the verbs ta-‘iru and te‘oreru (seen as parallel) as ‘‘remove,’’ presented in the paraphrase with vav inerpretative (see Japhet and Salters, The Commentary of R. Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) on Qoheleth, 47–48, and nn. 121–22, and Japhet, Rashbam on Job, 112–14) with no further discussion. This understanding of the phrase is close to that of Rashi: ‘‘lest you evoke the love between me and my beloved to change and replace it.’’ 43. While the assumption of a gap in the poetic text may be considered as falling within the boundaries of peshat interpretation, in the course of ‘‘filling’’ this gap Rashbam seems to come very close to midrashic procedures, which allow for additions of outside information to the wording of the text. The possible deviation from his normally ironclad peshat methodology attests forcefully to the significance of this matter in his view of the book.

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44. Also on 3.5; 7.12–8.4. 45. One of the responsa of Rabbi Jacob Tam (Rashbam’s younger brother) provides an illustration of the prevalence of this phenomenon at that time: ‘‘More than twenty letters of divorce from apostates have been written in Paris and France [ . . . ] also in Lorraine [ . . . ]. I have also seen myself the letter of divorce given by the son-in-law of the late noble R. Jacob the Parnas who has apostatized’’ (Sefer ha-yashar, ed. S. Rosenthal [1898], 45, quoted by H. H. Ben Sasson, ‘‘Apostasy,’’ Encyclopaedia Judaica [New York: Macmillan, 1971], 3:203– 4). The common terms ‘‘apostasy’’ (shemad), ‘‘convert’’ (mumar), and ‘‘duress’’ (ones) are not used in the commentary. 46. See H. H. Ben Sasson, ‘‘Apostasy,’’ 3:203–4. 11. Literal versus Carnal Generous support from the American Academy in Rome, Williams College, Boston University, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania facilitated the research and writing of this essay. Earlier versions of this material were presented at the 35th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and at the 2002 Colloquium of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. I am especially grateful to Mark Zier, Steven McMichael, O.F.M. Conv., Christopher Ocker, Ruth Nisse, Kevin Madigan, Peter Hawkins, and the Boston University Medieval Conversations group for helpful comments and suggestions on various drafts. 1. The text is extant in two manuscript copies, Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 2725 and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Chigi A.V. 150 (hereafter referred to as Bologna and Vat. Chigi respectively). The two extant copies of George’s work both date from the early fifteenth century and appear to have been copied from the same original source (the text is virtually identical). Both are single text quarto volumes, written with care, extensively rubricated; both identify George as a Dominican master associated with the city of Siena. Bologna also bears an elaborately illuminated initial author portrait. The respect with which this apparently treasured book was created is recorded in a colophon that informs us that a friar Iohannes Alzanus, O.P., ‘‘caused the manuscript to be made in Florence at a cost of 2 gold ducats’’ (fol. 128v). The payment in Venetian ducats (rather than in the gold florins of Florence) may (but does not necessarily) indicate a Venetian connection, especially since the Dominican order was establishing a strong presence in Venice during this period. If so, this would demonstrate a diffusion of George’s work outside the Tuscan orbit. Passages within the text identify the date of composition as 1388 (Vat. Chigi fol. 9r and 13v). Except for Gianfranco Fioravanti’s very cursory treatment of George as a source for later fifteenth-century anti-Jewish polemic in ‘‘Aspetti della polemica anti-giudaica nell’italia del quattrocento,’’ Atti del secondo convegno tenuto a Idice, Bologna, nei giorni 4 e 5 Novembre 1981 (Rome: Fausto Parente e Daniela Piattelli, 1983), 35–57, no modern studies of George or his work have been done. 2. I will refer to the text by its Latin incipit, Scrutamini scripturas. 3. Vat. Chigi, 1r. 4. In the fourteenth century, the Dominican Province of Rome incorporated the lands of Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, and the Marches of Ancona. This preliminary picture of George’s career has been reconstructed from a variety of primary sources; further archival work will undoubtedly turn up still more information on George’s activities.

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5. M. Hyacinth Laurent, O.P., ed., I Necrologi de San Domenico in Camporegio, Fontes Vitae S. Catharinae Senensis Historici XX (Milan: Bocca, 1937), 17–18. 6. Isidoro Ugurgieri Azzolini, Fasti senesi, ossia vite di santi e beati senesi, Biblioteca communale di Siena MS A.IV.22, fols. 351v–353v. 7. Laurent, I Necrologi , 17–18. 8. Ibid., 102. 9. T. Kaeppeli, O.P., ‘‘Fragmentum Actorum capitulum generalem anno 1372,’’ Archivum Fratrum Praedictorum 6 (1936): 385. On the establishment of the Dominican studium generale at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, see M. Miche`le Mulchahey, ‘‘First the Bow is Bent in Study . . .’’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000), 384–89. 10. Mulchahey, ‘‘First the Bow is Bent in Study,’’ 282–83. 11. Laurent, I Necrologi , 17–18. 12. George appears on a list of friars attending a chapter meeting back in Siena in 1373, Archivio di Stato Siena, Diplomatico Patrimonio Resti Ecclesiastici S. Domenico 7 dicembre 1373. His work on behalf of the convent brought him into close regular contact with the Sienese elite, as he served as confessor, mediator, and witness to wills and other property exchanges. A rapid search found George’s signature attached to numerous documents including Archivio di Stato Siena, Diplomatico Patrimonio Resti Ecclesiastici S. Domenico 12 giugno 1374; 17 ottobre 1378; 1390 Aprile 22. 13. Bibl. Comm. di Siena MS A.IV.22, fol. 353r. 14. After a long list of women’s names, George writes, ‘‘all of the above named Sisters of Penitence [vestitas], ninety two in number, I, Brother George Naddi, their master, found during a visit that I made in the month of April in the year 1378’’ (M. Hyacinth Laurent, Documenti, Fontes Vitae S. Catharinae Senensis Historici I [Siena: Rivista Universita` di Siena, Cattedra Cateriniana, 1936], 47– 48). In an article on Dominican penitential communities in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner argues that until the fifteenth century, most women’s penitential communities were unregulated, functioning more like beguinages than like contemporary Franciscan communities of penitents (M. Lehmijoki-Gardner, ‘‘Writing Religious Rules as Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making of Their Regula,’’ Speculum 79 [2004]: 660–87). Issues raised by Catherine’s unique religious status in Siena may have led to the appointment of someone with George’s advanced theological training to monitor the women. 15. On the roles of diffinitor and preacher general, see Mulchahey, ‘‘First the Bow is Bent in Study,’’ passim. 16. Though this was unusual, the pope did have the authority to elevate someone who had been passed over by the usual authorities to the magisterium. The chapter general meeting at Bologna in 1380 says that George ‘‘ascended to the cathedra’’ at that time. The fact that George had been made Biblicus at the provincial studium at Florence rather than being sent to university suggests that the Dominicans meant for that to mark the limit of his education. In order to become a master in theology through ordinary channels, George would have had to attend university, which he did not do. The language of the Dominican necrology supports the theory that George attained the rank of master by other than the usual means, stating apologetically that George ‘‘honorably ascended to the post of master’’ at the chapter general meeting in Bologna (1380), after which he returned ‘‘truly a master in theology, persevering in his devotion, reflecting with singular grace whether in preaching or hearing confession’’

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(Laurent, I Necrologi , 17–18). I am indebted to M. Miche`le Mulchahey for guidance on the training of Dominican theologians. On the Dominican schools, see Mulchahey, ‘‘First the Bow is Bent in Study,’’ and Jacques Verger, ‘‘Studia et Universite´s,’’ Le Scuole degli Ordini mendicanti (secoli xiii–xiv): Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualita´ medievale XVII (Todi: Presso l’Accademia Tudertina, 1978), 175–203. 17. I am indebted to Roberto Rusconi and Letizia Pellegrini for sharing their expertise in medieval sermon literature and for helping me to ascertain that none of George’s sermons are to be found in the extensive unpublished materials they and other colleagues in the field have studied. 18. Thanks to the work of G. Fioravanti, we know of at least two fifteenthcentury figures, Pietro Rossi of Siena and Pietro Bruti, bishop of Cattaro, who incorporated George’s treatise into their anti-Jewish polemic. G. Fioravanti, ‘‘Aspetti della polemica anti-giudaica nell’italia del quattrocento.’’ 19. On this development in Christian approaches to Judaism, see the now classic work by Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Mendicant Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and essays and comments by David Berger, Jeremy Cohen, and Gavin Langmuir in the American Historical Review forum on the subject in AHR 91.3 (1986): 576–624. 20. Bologna, 3r. The rubric is in a different hand from the body of the text; whether it was put there by the original owner or a later reader is unclear. 21. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews. 22. George utilized Jewish ‘‘error’’ to highlight Christian ‘‘truth’’ in exegesis much as Gilbert Crispin and other eleventh- and twelfth-century authors had done for doctrine. See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c. 1000–1150) (Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998). 23. A distinction between literal and carnal reading may be found in Augustine in book 3 of On Christian Doctrine (see esp. chaps. 5 and 9). For Augustine, the distinction between literal and carnal lies in the status of the passage relative to Christian theology: ‘‘When what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner’’ (bk. 3, chap. 9). In the later Middle Ages, Christian exegetes gave much greater weight to the value of the literal sense of passages that also contained future significance, relegating Augustine’s figurative letter to the allegorical sense. On the use of and divergence from Augustine, see Margaret Gibson, ‘‘The De doctrina christiana in the School of St., Victor,’’ in Reading and Wisdom: The De doctrina christiana in the Middle Ages, ed. E. D. English (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 41–47; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24. While Christianity had from earliest times insisted that evidence for New Testament truths could be found in the Old, a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan theologians, concerned that acceptance of scriptural proof was dependent upon a preexisting Christian faith, disputed the effectiveness of proving the advent of Christ from Jewish Scripture. See Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), chap. 3. What is most interesting here is George’s insistence that literal

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reading of Old Testament prophecy necessarily contained a layer of subsequent Christian meaning. When he says that the truth of Christ’s advent can be proved according to the literal sense, then, he has in mind something quite different from the sort of proofs Dominican missionaries to the Jews believed would be effective. For an in-depth discussion of changes in late medieval Christian hermeneutics, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics. 25. Henri de Lubac, Exe´ge`se me´die´vale: Les quatre sens de l’e´criture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64). 26. See, for example, Richard of St. Victor’s attack on Andrew of St. Victor for judaizing. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 110. 27. Cf. Augustine, as cited in note 23 above. 28. This stands in marked contrast to figures like Andrew of St. Victor or Herbert Bosham, for whom, as Beryl Smalley once quipped, Jewish exegesis stood as the equivalent of ‘‘telephoning to the Old Testament’’ itself. Smalley, ‘‘Hebrew Scholarship among Christians in XIIIth Century England as Illustrated by Some Hebrew Latin Psalters,’’ in Lectiones in Vetere Testamento et in rebus judaicis 6 (London, 1939), 1. 29. For the history of literal exegesis in medieval Christianity, see Smalley, The Study of the Bible. On the Dominican mandate, see Monumenta ordinis fratrum praedicatorum historica 4 (Rome, 1899), 34, 38. 30. Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 22. 31. Ibid., 216. 32. Ibid. 33. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 1–36. 34. On textual narrative and the literal sense, see Michael Signer, ‘‘Peshat, Sensus Literalis, and Sequential Narrative: Jewish Exegesis and the School of St. Victor in the Twelfth-Century,’’ in The Frank Talmage Memorial Volume, ed. B. Walfish (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1993), 203–16. 35. Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 32–60. 36. See Theresa Gross-Diaz, ‘‘What’s a Good Soldier to Do? Nicholas of Lyra on the Psalms,’’ in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. P. Krey and L. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 111–28; Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 32–37. 37. On Thomas Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s understanding of verbal signification and the parabolic literal sense, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 21, 38–43. 38. Philip Krey, ‘‘The Apocalypse Commentary of 1329: Problems in Church History,’’ in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, 285. 39. In Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Medieval England (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), Ruth Nisse argues that Nicholas’s literal postilla moves so far in the direction of Jewish exegesis as to stand almost outside normative Christian hermeneutics. 40. So widespread was Nicholas’s Postilla that hundreds of manuscript copies are still extant in libraries all across Europe. Philip Krey and Lesley Smith put the number of extant manuscripts at eight hundred, Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, 16. For more on the manuscript and printed traditions, see note 44 below. Lyra’s Quaestio de adventu Christi (1309), De differentia nostrae translationis ab Hebraica littera Veteris Testamentis (1322), and Responsio ad quendam Iudaeum (1334) all contain material similar or identical to that found in the Postilla and sometimes circulated along with it. On the uses of Nicholas of Lyra in the later Middle Ages, see Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 109–33, and Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 179–83. 41. These concerns may be seen in the systematic critique of Nicholas’s Post-

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illa composed in the fifteenth century by the Jewish convert Bishop Paul of Burgos and which circulated as ‘‘Additions’’ to the Postilla in many printed editions of the work. 42. See Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels chre´tiens et les juives au moyen aˆge (Paris: Cerf, 1990), and Jeremy Cohen, ‘‘Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,’’ American Historical Review 91 (1986): 592–613. Through virtually universal access to Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, along with numerous other texts that copied portions of Nicholas’ work, the teaching of Jewish interpretations of Scripture was quite widespread. See also Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 109–17. 43. ‘‘Whether it is possible to prove effectively the advent of Christ from Scriptures received by the Jews.’’ See Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 82–108. 44. Although it traveled more often as an independent treatise, it existed in very many copies and was widely available even from the early fourteenth century. For more on the manuscript tradition, see Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 109–17, 135–42; the introduction to Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, 1–18; Henri Labrosse, ‘‘Œuvres de Nicolas de Lyre,’’ E´tudes franciscaines 19 (1908): 41– 52, 153–75, 368–69; 35 (1923): 171–87, 400–32; and E. A. Gosselin, ‘‘A Listing of Printed Editions of Nicolaus de Lyra,’’ Traditio 26 (1970): 399–426. In incunabula and early printed editions, Bishop Paul of Burgos’s systematic response to Nicholas’s use of Jewish exegesis often circulated with the Postilla as well, along with a defense of Nicholas by the German Franciscan Matthew Do¨ring. 45. Unlike their French or English counterparts, George and his students lived in contact with vibrant Jewish communities. The contradiction between Jewish biblical wisdom as highlighted by scholars like Nicholas of Lyra and the persistence of Jewish ‘‘error’’ as evidenced in surrounding communities could not have been lost on him. 46. On the Jewish community of Siena in the late fourteenth century, see Sofia Boesch Gojano, ‘‘Il Comune di Siena e il prestito ebraico nei secoli XIV e XV,’’ Aspetti e problemi della presenza ebraica nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (sec. IV e IV) (Rome: Ripoli, 1983), 175–225, and Robert Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell’epoca del Rinascimento (Florence: Sansoni, 1991). 47. See Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, and Chazan, Daggers of Faith. 48. Nicholas of Lyra, Quaestio de adventu Christi (1309), here from Paris, BNF lat.13781, 60r. 49. Vat. Chigi, 6v. 50. Ibid., 9r. 51. Ibid., 1v. George reiterates this point later in his discussion of Daniel 9, Vat. Chigi, 43r. 52. Ibid., 1r–v. 53. This demonstrates George’s communication with a Christian audience rather than a Jewish one. Since the thirteenth century, those involved in efforts to convert the Jews had insisted that proofs against Jewish error come exclusively from texts accepted as authoritative by the Jews themselves. See Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, passim, and Chazan, Daggers of Faith, passim. George did not limit himself to such texts, but utilized the whole of Christian Scripture and theology in his readings. 54. For this interpretation of Nicholas’s Quaestio de adventu Christi, see Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers. 55. On the two variant incipits to the question and the dating of the treatise to a single 1309 edition, see Klepper, ‘‘The Dating of Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio

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de Adventu Christi,’’ Archivum Fransciscanum Historicum 86 (1993): 297–312. Note that a more overt critic of Nicholas’s exegetical approach, the Jewish convert Archbishop Paul of Burgos (d. 1435; formerly Rabbi Solomon Halevi), opened his polemical dialogue against Jewish tradition with Scrutamini scripturas as well. 56. BNF lat.13781, 55v. 57. BNF lat.13781, 71v. 58. Vat. Chigi, 1r. 59. Ibid., 1v. 60. 2 Cor 3.6. 61. Vat. Chigi, 1v. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 1r. 64. Mt 12.40. 65. Vat. Chigi, 49v. 66. Ibid., 48v. 67. Ibid., 9r, 13v. 68. BNF lat.13781, 61r. 69. On this charge, see Irven M. Resnick, ‘‘The Falsification of Scripture and Medieval Christian and Jewish Polemics,’’ Medieval Encounters 2 (1996): 344–80. 70. Vat. Chigi, 33v. 71. Ibid. 72. In addition to his extensive work reconciling Latin translations with the Hebrew Bible in his Postilla, Nicholas composed an entire treatise on the differences between the Latin Bible and the Hebrew text. 73. Vat. Chigi, 41v. 74. Biblioteca communale di Todi MS 98. On Raymond Rigauld and questions on proving the Advent from Jewish Scripture, see Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 61–81. 75. George seems not to have used Raymond Martini at all, for example, though some of Martini’s attitudes filtered into George’s text, as when he talks about modern Jews being ‘‘alienated from the faith of their fathers’’ (Vat. Chigi, 1r). The innovative anti-rabbinic work of Raymond Martini may not have been as widely diffused as many assume. Giovanni Fioravanti, in a study of fifteenthcentury Sienese anti-Jewish polemic, found that two of George’s readers, Pietro Rossi and Pietro Bruto, seem similarly unacquainted with Martini’s works. Fioravanti found that whenever Martini was mentioned in these works, it was second hand through Paul of Burgos’s early fifteenth-century Additiones to Nicholas’s Postilla. Fioravanti, ‘‘Aspetti della polemica anti-giudaica nell’italia del quattrocento,’’ 37. 76. Scholarship on the parallel development of peshat and the literal sense is vast. For a representative selection, see Smalley, Study of the Bible; Herman Hailperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963); Sarah Kamin, Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991); and J. D. McAuliffe, B. D. Walfish, and J. W. Goering, eds., With Reverence to the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 77. In a recent essay, ‘‘Does Rashi’s Torah Comentary Respond to Christianity? A Comparison of Rashi with Rashbam and Bekhor Shor,’’ in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. H. Najman and J. H. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 449–72, Shaye Cohen rejects the notion that Rashi’s exegetical innovations were devised as a response to Christianity, contrasting

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Rashi’s work in his Torah commentary with the explicitly polemical commentaries of later disciples (particularly Rashbam and Bekhor Shor). In a related manner, the first generation of medieval Christian literal exegetes, including Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor, tended to utilize Jewish peshat interpretation uncritically, while the later Nicholas of Lyra utilized peshat interpretation much more extensively but with a much more critical eye. 12. Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy I wish to thank Seth Jerchower, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Philadelphia, for his precious help in revising the first draft of this text. 1. It is not the aim of the present essay to provide an exhaustive list of all the Hebrew and Latin commentaries on Job composed in Italy during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Besides those works that will be taken into account in the following pages, I will quote only, among the Hebrew works, the Commentary on Job by Abraham Farissol (see D. B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol [Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 1981], 114–17); by Moshe Provenzal; by Isaac Abravanel; by ‘Obadya Sforno, entitled Mishpat tsedek (Right Judgment); by Solomon Yedidya Norsa, comprised in the author’s treatise Minh.at Shay (The Offering of Solomon Yedidya). Moreover, we are informed of an exegetical note on the book of Job, possibly composed in early sixteenth-century Italy: see H. Hillel Ben Sasson, ‘‘The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes,’’ Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 4 (1970): 239–326, 270–72. Until the sixteenth century, Christian moral and allegorical interpretations of the book of Job mainly relied on Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob, whereas literal exegesis depended on Thomas Aquinas’s Expositio in librum Iob ad litteram and on Nicholas of Lyra. However, with the humanist revival of philological interest in the Hebrew Bible, new commentaries on Job were composed in Italy, the most important being Agostino Steuco’s Enarrationes in librum Iobi. See also M. Engammare, ‘‘Olive´tan et les Commentaires Rabbiniques—Historiographie et recherche d’une utilisation de la litte´rature rabbinique par un he´braı¨sant chre´tien du premier tiers du XVIe`me sie`cle,’’ in L’He´breu au temps de la Renaissance, ed. I. Zinguer (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 27–64. For his commentary on Job, Olive´tan used also the Hebrew commentaries published in the first and the second editions of the Rabbinic Bible (Venice, Bomberg, 1516/17; 1524/25), i.e., Nahmanides’ and Farissol’s, Ibn Ezra’s and Gersonides’. 2. From a literary point of view, the biblical book was generally considered a dialogue, although in the late Renaissance it was held also as a sacred drama. In the first of his Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche, composed around 1556, Leone ( Judah) de’ Sommi wrote that the first-ever written drama of mankind’s literature was the book of Job: see Y. David, ‘‘L’ispirazione ebraica nei dialoghi di Leone de’ Sommi,’’ La Rassegna mensile di Israel 60 (1994): 119– 28. The figure of Job became a crucial paradigm for the self-analysis in autobiographical writings of late Renaissance Italian Jews: see, for instance, Abraham Yagel’s Ge H . izzayon (The Valley of Vision), a whole section of which deals with an imaginary encounter of the author with the biblical character, and Leone da Modena’s autobiography H . aye Yehuda (The Life of Judah), where the author points out the affinities between his own life and Job’s story. Cf. F. Lelli, ‘‘The Origins of the Jewish Autobiographic Genre: Yohanan Alemanno (1434 to after 1504) and Abraham Yagel (1553 to after 1623),’’ European Association for Jewish

Notes to Pages 214–215

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Studies Newsletter 12 (2002): 4–11. Mystery plays on Job had been performed in Western Europe since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the theater may have been influential on the medieval iconography of Job; see L. L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); S. Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 94. 3. A. T. Hanson, ‘‘Job in Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism,’’ Church Quarterly 2 (1969/70): 147–51; E. Dassmann, ‘‘Hiob,’’ Reallexicon fu¨r Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1991), vol. 15, cols. 366–442. 4. See G. Dahan, Les intellectuals chre´tiens et les juifs au moyen age (Paris: Cerf, 1990). 5. On the intellectual relationships between Jewish and Christian scholars in Italy, see G. Sermoneta, ‘‘L’incontro culturale tra ebrei e cristiani nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento,’’ in Ebrei e Cristiani nell’Italia medievale e moderna: Conversioni, scambi, contrasti: Atti del VI Congresso Internazionale dell’AISG, ed. M. Luzzati, M. Olivari, and A. Veronese (Rome: Carucci, 1988), 183–207. On the humanist approach to the Bible, see S. Garofalo, ‘‘Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia,’’ Biblica 27 (1946): 338–75. 6. See F. Lelli, ‘‘Prisca Philosophia and Docta Religio: The Boundaries of Rational Knowledge in Jewish and Christian Humanist Thought,’’ JQR 91 (2000): 53– 100. 7. See F. Lelli, ‘‘Jews, Humanists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom, Associated with the Conception of Dignitas Hominis,’’ in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. P. Coudert and J. S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 49–70. 8. On Ficino’s and Pico’s major role in the formulation of humanist thought, see B. P. Copenhaver and C. B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143–76. 9. See Sermoneta, ‘‘L’incontro culturale tra ebrei e cristiani’’; F. Lelli, ‘‘Yoh.anan Alemanno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la cultura ebraica italiana del XV secolo,’’ in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494–1994), ed. G. C. Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 303–25. 10. Not only did Christian artists seek the advice of Jewish scholars for the iconographic projects of their works. During the Renaissance the case of Jewish patrons who commissioned works from Christian artists was not infrequent: see, e.g., M. Haraszti-Takacs, ‘‘Fifteenth-Century Painted Furniture with Scenes from the Esther Story,’’ Jewish Art 15 (1989): 14–25; E. Cohen, The Rothschild Mahzor (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990). 11. On the artistic representation of Job, see J. Durand, ‘‘Notes sur une iconographie me´connue: Le ‘Saint roi Job,’ ’’ Cahiers arche´ologiques 32 (1984): 113–35; G. Se´d-Rajna, The Hebrew Bible in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, trans. J. Bacon (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 133–34; ‘‘Job’’ in G. Duchet-Suchaux and M. Pastoreaux, The Bible and the Saints (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 193; Terrien, Iconography of Job. 12. See Se´d-Rajna, Hebrew Bible, 133–34. 13. On Job in Byzantine illuminations, see especially P. Huber, Hiob: Dulder oder Rebell? Byzantinische Miniaturen zum Buch Hiob in Patmos, Rom, Venedig, Sinai, Jerusalem und Athos (Du¨sseldorf: Patmos, 1986). See also J. M. Andrews, ‘‘Paris, Grec. 135, a 14th Century Illustrated Commentary on Job in the Peloponnese of

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Southern Greece’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998). On Hebrew manuscript illuminations representing Job, see J. Gutmann, Hebrew Manuscript Painting (New York: Braziller, 1978), 33–34, 37–38, 111–12. 14. See Lelli, ‘‘Jews, Humanists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom.’’ 15. On this conception, which was widespread in fifteenth-century Florence and which founded its roots in Averroistic thought, as rediscovered also by means of the intellectual cooperation between Italian Jewish and Christian scholars, see Lelli, ‘‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la cultura ebraica italiana del XV secolo,’’ in Garfagnini, ed., Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 303–25. See also n. 60. 16. The paradigm of the universal wise man, the man who attains an all-comprehensive knowledge, was shared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by both Italian Jewish and Christian scholars: on this view and that of the h.akham kolel (the Hebrew parallel of the universal wise man in Italian Jewish thought), see F. Lelli, ‘‘Umanesimo laurenziano nell’opera di Yoh.anan Alemanno,’’ in La cultura ebraica all’epoca di Lorenzo il Magnifico, ed. D. Liscia Bemporad and I. Zatelli (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 49–67; idem, ‘‘Biography and Autobiography in Yoh.anan Alemanno’s Literary Perception,’’ in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, ed. D. B. Ruderman and G. Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 25–38. 17. B. A. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984–87), 2:307–8. 18. See N. Pasternak, ‘‘Yitshaq ben Ovadia ben David of Forlı`: A Renowned Jewish Copyist Who Converted into Christianity?’’ (Hebrew) Tarbiz 68.3 (1999): 411–28; ead., ‘‘A Meeting Point of Hebrew and Latin Manuscript Production: A Fifteenth Century Florentine Hebrew Scribe, Isaac ben Ovadia of Forlı`,’’ Scrittura e civilta` 25 (2001): 185–200. 19. Pasternak, ‘‘Yitshaq ben Ovadia ben David of Forlı`,’’ 422–23. 20. Ibid. According to the midrash, the same cantillation would have been employed in the books of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms, ‘‘because their authors experienced a similar fate. Job was humiliated, but was afterwards restored to glory; even so were David [ . . . ] and Solomon was dethroned for a time [ . . . ], but later became king again’’ (L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. H. Szold [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1953], 5:390, n. 39). 21. Shailor, Catalogue, 2:308. 22. See A. Garzelli, Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento, 1440–1525 (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1985), 1:207. 23. See U. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’eta` del Rinascimento (Florence: Tip. Galletti e Cocci, 1918; repr. Florence: Olschki, 1965), 245–49 and passim. 24. See Terrien, Iconography of Job, 92–97. 25. See Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 245–49 and passim. 26. See Divre rivot ba-she‘arim, ed. D. Frankel (Hebrew; Husyatyn, 1902), fols. 1a–4a; S. Assaf, ‘‘From the Collection of the National Library in Jerusalem,’’ Minh.ah le-David (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Ha-Mimkar bi-yede R. Mas, 1935), 221–25. On Judah Messer Leon’s intellectual activity, see the introduction by I. Rabinowitz to the edition of his Sefer nofet zufim: The Book of Honeycomb’s Flow [Sepher Nophet Suphim] by Judah Messer Leon [. . .] A critical Edition and Translation by I. Rabinowitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 27. See Eliyyah H . ayyim ben Binyamin of Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, ed. F. Lelli (Florence: La Giuntina, 2002), 29–49. In his Iggeret h.amudot, addressed to

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David of Montalcino, Genazzano criticizes Scholastic and Neoplatonic trends of thought affecting the speculation of Tuscan Jewish society of his days. In order to prove his views, Genazzano does not hesitate to resort to theories that represented the core of the doctrinal debate of non Jewish scholars like Ficino and Pico. See Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 74–77. 28. See F. Lelli, ‘‘Prisca Philosophia and Docta Religio,’’ 56–58. 29. On Job as a priscus philosophus in Tuscan art, see below. 30. Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 152, 237. 31. Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962; reproduction of the 1576 edition published in Bale by H. Petri), 1:866–67. Mentions of Job appear also in Ficino’s Letter VIII, 4 to Filippo Valori, where, speaking on the latter’s absence, the author writes: ‘‘So let Valori return and at once our voice will return. ‘He gives us our power and he takes it away’ (Job 1.21)’’ (‘‘Ergo Valor redeat, subito vox nostra redibit. Ingenium nobis ille dat, ille rapit’’: Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:865). In Letter VIII, 40 (Oration to the College of Canons), Ficino quotes Job 29.10 (Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:865). I owe all references to Ficino’s letters and their English translation to the courtesy of Valery Rees. 32. ‘‘Numenius Pythagoricus [ . . . ] ait [ . . . ] nihilque aliud esse Platonem, quam alterum Mosem Attica lingua loquentem’’ (Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:866). See J. Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1972), 64–68. Numenius’s assertion is quoted also by Pico and by Genazzano: G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, ed. E. Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1942), 170–72; Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 153. 33. Job 38.4–6 and Plato, Laws IV, 709b, 716d. According to Ficino, Job is the humanist paradigm of the religious philosopher. On a parallel comparison between Job and ancient Greek philosophers in Pico’s thought, see nn. 73, 74. 34. Cf. Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 74–77. 35. Ibid., 140–43. See also, for instance, the quotation from Gersonides’ Commentary on Job in the derashot by the Florentine preacher Moshe ben Joab (1456– 59) in MS London, Jews’ College, Montefiore 17, fol. 65v. Gersonides’ Commentary on Job was one of the first Hebrew commentaries ever printed (Ferrara: Abraham ben H . ayyim, 1477). 36. Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 75–76. 37. Cf. Ioannis Pici Mirandulae, Expositiones in Psalmos, ed. A. Raspanti (Florence: Olschki, 1997); H. Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 38. Further details on this manuscript can be found in H. Wirszubski, ‘‘Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 171–99. 39. See Wirszubski, ‘‘Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,’’ 172. On Flavius Mithridates, see especially Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter. 40. On Pico’s major concern with Gersonidean exegesis, see also M. Andreatta, ‘‘La traduzione latina del Cantico eseguita da Flavio Mitridate per Pico della Mirandola,’’ Materia giudaica 8.1 (2003): 177–89. 41. See n. 7, and Lelli, ‘‘Jews, Humanists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom.’’ In the humanist intellectual context, which sought evidence for the biography of biblical figures on the basis of the widespread view of the prisca theologia, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola resorted to the talmudic treatise Bava Batra, quoted on the basis of Gersonides’ Commentary on Job. In order to support his theories concerning dates and places of Job’s life (Wirszubski, ‘‘Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,’’ 179) he demonstrated that the biblical man lived in the time of

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Pharaoh. Midrashic and medieval interpretations related to Job allowed humanists to link Job’s life with that of the alleged writer of the Pentateuch, Moses, who, according to the same treatise (bBB 14b), would have been also the author of the book of Job: see Wirszubski, ‘‘Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,’’ 179; N. Pavoncello, ‘‘In quale epoca visse Giobbe?’’ Rivista Biblica 12 (1964): 285–91. See also nn. 48, 87. 42. ‘‘Et ita dicit levi Mosem fecisse hunc librum ad solvendum dubium hoc quod videtur impedire providentiam dei circa singularia.’’ See Wirszubski, ‘‘Giovanni Pico’s Book of Job,’’ 179. 43. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. S. Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:23. 44. Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), The Wars of the Lord, ed. and trans. S. Feldman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 1:38–42. 45. See Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera Omnia, vol. 26, Expositio super Iob ad litteram, cura et studio Fratrum Praedicatorum (Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. De Propaganda Fide, 1965), Praefatio, chap. 2, par. 19. 46. Writing to his addressee, David ben Benjamin of Montalcino, Genazzano affirms: ‘‘You know very well what Gersonides wrote on the verse ‘Hast Thou eyes of flesh etc.?’ [Job 10.4]. According to Gersonides’ opinion, Job would quote in this argument two strong [philosophic] proofs by which he wishes to refute the assumption that God knows the particular things [ . . . ] This is my reply to his statements. Says Elijah: Do all the philosophers not agree on the fact that God and his knowledge are but the same thing? By founding ourselves on this premise, as we are not in a position to apprehend the essence of the Lord, may he be exalted!, likewise we are not in a position to understand the nature of his knowledge [ . . . ]’’ (Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 140–43; for Gersonides’ Commentary I have followed the English translation by A. L. Lassen, The Commentary of Levi ben Gersom (Gersonides) on the Book of Job [New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1946], 72–73). 47. Genazzano, La lettera preziosa, 127–34. 48. See below, 227. 49. See Se´d-Rajna, Hebrew Bible, 138. 50. See Pasternak, A Meeting Point, 189–90, 194, and tab. n. 1, which reproduces the Medici’s insignia of Lorenzo il Magnifico appearing on the frontispiece of the manuscript (fol. 5r). 51. See reproduction in Se´d-Rajna, Hebrew Bible, tab. n. 158. On the iconographic tradition of ‘‘Job and his three comforters,’’ see Terrien, Iconography of Job, 33–35. 52. See Terrien, Iconography of Job, 133–34. A similar iconography of Elihu appears already in German thirteenth-century Hebrew MS Mu¨nich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Hebr. 5, fol. 183r. 53. Levi ben Gershom, The Wars of the Lord, 1:41–42. Italic words are in Feldman’s text. See above, 221, on Gersonides’ conception of divine providence extended on the wise men. 54. See S. Toussaint, ‘‘Ficino’s Orphic Magic or Jewish Astrology and Oriental Philosophy? A Note on spiritus, the Three Books on Life, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zarza,’’ Accademia 2 (2000): 19–33. 55. See A. M. Lesley, ‘‘The ‘Song of Solomon’s Ascents’ by Yohanan Alemanno: Love and Human Perfection according to a Jewish Associate of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’’ (Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, 1976); B. C. Novak, ‘‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Jochanan Alemanno,’’ Journal of the

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Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 125–47; F. Lelli, ‘‘Un collaboratore ebreo di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Yoh.anan Alemanno,’’ Vivens Homo 5.2 (1994): 401–30. 56. See Yoh.anan Alemanno, H . ay ha-‘olamim (L’Immortale): Parte I: la Retorica, ed. F. Lelli (Florence: Olschki, 1995). 57. See Lelli, ‘‘Prisca Philosophia and Docta Religio,’’ 53–99. Alemanno introduces his discourse by quoting Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord: see Lelli, ibid., 69. 58. Lelli, ‘‘Prisca Philosophia and Docta Religio,’’ 72, 76, 78, and passim. On Ibn Tufayl’s treatise, see Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale Translated with Introduction and Notes by L. E. Goodman (New York: Twayne, 1972). 59. See F. Bacchelli, ‘‘Pico della Mirandola traduttore di Ibn Tufayl,’’ Giornale critico della filosofia italiana VI s., 13 (1993): 1–25; idem, Giovanni Pico e Pier Leone da Spoleto: tra filosofia dell’amore e tradizione cabbalistica (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 60. Cf. E. P. Mahoney, ‘‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Elia del Medigo, Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo,’’ in Garfagnini, ed., Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 127–56, with an extensive bibliography on Jewish and Christian Averroists in fifteenth-century Italy. 61. Job 34.14–15. 62. The issue dealt with by Alemanno is to be inscribed within the already mentioned debate on God’s knowledge of universal or particular things. After reading this passage, we better understand that Genazzano’s criticism of Gersonides was motivated by his willingness to denounce those Jewish authors, such as Alemanno, who wrote their works according to the concerns of their non-Jewish contemporaries. Likewise, Genazzano reproached the use of Gersonides’ Commentary on Job, made by all those scholars who intended to seek proof of astral determinism in the biblical book: this was the case, for instance, of Marsilio Ficino and Alemanno. Pico, who had been influenced by Ficinian ideas in his early career, eventually denounced such an astral magic approach to religion in his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (Disputations against Astrology), composed in the same years of the Igeret h.amudot, under the strong impact of the antirationalist trends, which became dominant in Florence at the time of Savonarola. 63. Lelli, ‘‘Prisca Philosophia and Docta Religio,’’ 80. Translation is mine. 64. See above, 221. 65. On these iconographies, see Terrien, Iconography of Job, xxxiv. 66. Cf. Lelli, ‘‘Umanesimo laurenziano nell’opera di Yoh.anan Alemanno.’’ 67. On this issue, see Alemanno, H . ay ha-‘olamim, 39–55. On Elihu’s prophetic role, see also n. 72. 68. The Maimonidean concept of the necessity for man of a thorough knowledge of science was reappraised in the context of the humanistic concern with an all-comprehensive school education: see Alemanno, H . ay ha-‘olamim, 39–55. 69. Cf. D .B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 378. 70. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Plut. I, 43. The scientific sources of Joseph Israel’s treatise mostly derive from Gershon ben Solomon of Arles’s early fourteenth-century encyclopedia Sha‘ar ha-shamayim (The Gate of Heaven): see J. T. Robinson, ‘‘Gershon ben Solomon of Arles’ Sha‘ar ha-Shamayim: Its Sources and Use of Sources,’’ in The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy, ed. S. Harvey (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 248–76. 71. See Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze, 139–40, where the scholar quotes in footnote (140, n. 1) a document (dated 1461) found in a luxurious Mah.zor (now

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at the British Library: see G. Margoliouth, Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts of the British Museum [London: British Museum, 1905), 2:218–29], which informs us that the book was originally owned by Jacob ben Solomon of Perugia, until the latter had been obliged to borrow a huge sum of money in Florence from Yehiel ben Joab of Montalcino (a brother of the above-mentioned Jacob) and to give him his illuminated codex as a pledge. 72. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Plut. I, 43, fols. 123v–125v. Before transcribing the entire text of Job 38–41, Joseph Israel introduces his discourse on the necessary study of nature by quoting a passage from Midrash H . azit, attributed to R. Simeon bar Yoh.ai, in which ‘‘the priest Elihu ben Barakhel the Buzite’’ is referred to as a prophet who reveals the secrets of God’s creation: cf. Midrash Shir ha-Shirim rabbah I, 28. See n. 67. 73. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Discorso sulla dignita` dell’uomo, ed. F. Bausi (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2003), 36: this passage, in my opinion, should be referred to the opening of the Oration, where Pico deals with the central role of man in God’s creation on the basis of Hermetic texts that had recently been translated from Greek into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (see especially Asclepius, VIII–IX): Discorso sulla dignita` dell’uomo, 1–23. 74. See G. Pico, Conclusio cabalistica XXIV secundum secretam doctrinam sapientum Hebraeorum Cabalistarum, in idem, Conclusiones nongentae: Le novecento Tesi dell’anno 1486, ed. A. Biondi (Firenze: Olschki, 1995), 58. On Pico’s kabbalistic sources for this Thesis, see Wirszubski, Pico’s Encounter, 40–41. 75. See above, 217–21. 76. See H. Nu¨tzmann, Alltag und Feste: Florentinische Cassone und Spalliermalerei aus der Zeit Botticellis (Berlin: UNZE Verlags- und Druckgesellschaft, 2000), 28– 29. According to recent studies, the five paintings of the Gema¨ldegalerie may be interpreted either as decorations to be hung on the walls of the hall of a brotherhood (confraternita) entitled to Saint Job (on this issue, see below, 231) or for domestic use. 77. The biblical figures of Job and Jobab had already been associated by Aristeas, as we read in the final additions to the book of Job in the LXX and in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica: see Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 2:231 and n. 14. 78. Taddeo Gaddi painted The Trials of Job in the Camposanto of Pisa, ca. 1355. The sudden emergence of the interest of Tuscan late medieval painters in Job was probably due also to the 1348 plague (the ‘‘Black Death’’), interpreted as a divine punishment for mankind’s sins. 79. Bartolo di Fredi painted The Stories of Job in the Collegiata of S. Maria Assunta, San Gimignano, ca. 1367. 80. R. P. Spittler, ‘‘Testament of Job [. . .] A New Translation and Introduction,’’ in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. J. Charlesworth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 1:829–68. See also M. R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota [⳱ Texts and Studies, V] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899). English version: The Testament of Job: An Essene Midrash on the Book of Job, ed. K. Kohler, in Semitic Studies in Memory of Rev. Dr. Alexander Kohut, ed. G. Kohut (Berlin: Calvary, 1897); The Testament of Job: Greek Text and English Translation, ed. R. A. Kraft et al. (Missoula. Mont.: Scholars Press, 1974). 81. On Job’s depiction as a monarch, in both Byzantine and Latin medieval manuscripts, see J. Durand, Iconographie me´connue, 123; Terrien, Iconography of Job, 45. 82. Cf. Haraszti-Takacs, Fifteenth-Century Painted Furniture. As I observed in n.

Notes to Pages 226–227

323

76, the series of panels of the Gema¨ldegalerie could have been intended for domestic use: see Nu¨tzmann, Alltag und Feste, 29. 83. See J. Dan, Sefer ha-yashar (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1986), which raises doubts about the period of composition of this work; J. GenotBismuth, Sefer ha-yashar (Paris: Service des publications Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, 1986); Sefer ha-yashar: First Ladino Translation [ . . . ] A Critical Edition [ . . . ], ed. M. Lazar (Los Angeles: Labyrinthos, 1998). See also below, n. 94. See the English translation edited by M. Noah, Sefer ha-Yashar or The Book of Jasher, Referred to in Joshua and Second Samuel (New York: W. Reid Gould, [1840]). 84. Cf. Haraszti-Takacs, Fifteenth-Century Painted Furniture. 85. See S. Colvin, A Florentine Picture-Chronicle Being a Series of 99 Drawings Representing Scenes and Personages of Ancient History Sacred and Profane by Maso Finiguerra [ . . . ] (London: B. Quaritch, 1898). On the attribution of the drawings to Maso Finiguerra, see also A. Chastel, Arte e Umanesimo a Firenze al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico: Studi sul Rinascimento e sull’umanesimo platonico (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 191–92; L. Whitaker, ‘‘Maso Finiguerra, Baccio Baldini and the Florentine Picture-Chronicle,’’ in Florentine Drawings at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. E. Cropper (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1994), 181–96; L. Melli, Maso Finiguerra. I disegni (Florence: Edifir, 1995), 19–23. 86. See K. H. Kru¨ger, Die Universalchroniken (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); A. Borst, ‘‘Le storie universali nel Medioevo,’’ in Barbari, eretici e artisti nel Medioevo, ed. Borst (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1990), 80–89. 87. On the contemporaneous lives of Moses and Job, see also n. 41. On Sefer ha-Yashar, see n. 83. 88. Yashar Shemot 138b, on the basis of Ex 1.16; English translation by M. Noah, Sefer ha-Yashar or The Book of Jasher, 211–12. See also J. R. Baskin, Pharaoh’s Counselors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition (Chico: California State University Press, 1983). 89. Sefer ha-Yashar or the Book of Jasher, 216–17. 90. Petrus Comestor, Historia Scholastica, Exodus, V. See E. Shereshevsky, ‘‘Hebrew Traditions in Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica I Genesis,’’ JQR 59 (1968–69): 269–71. 91. Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II, 9, 7. 92. See D. Haitovsky, ‘‘Giorgione’s Trial of Moses: A New Look,’’ Jewish Art 16/17 (1990–91): 20–29. 93. Yashar Shemot 131b–132b; Sefer ha-Yashar or the Book of Jasher, 208–10; Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 5:402, n. 65. See also Midrash Shemot rabbah, I, 26; Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 2:272–75. 94. See n. 83; F. Lelli, ‘‘Rapporti letterari tra comunita` ebraiche dell’impero bizantino e dell’Italia meridionale: Studi e ricerche,’’ Materia giudaica 9.1–2 (2004): 217–30. 95. Christian milieus had been aware of the importance of midrashic literature long before the fifteenth century. See A. Grabois, ‘‘The Hebraica Veritas and Jewish-Christian Intellectual Relations in the Twelfth Century,’’ Speculum 50 (1975): 625–27; L. Brugger, ‘‘ ‘Hebraei dicunt’: Le soubassement de la fac¸ade occidentale de la cathe´drale de Bourges,’’ Cahiers Arche´ologiques 41 (1993): 111–39. On the cultural relationships between southern Italian communities and Byzantium throughout the Middle Ages, see J. Starr, The Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 641–1204 (Athens: Verlag der ‘‘Byzantinisch-neugriechischen Jahrbucher,’’ 1939); S. B. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 1204–1453 (Tuscaloosa: University

324

Notes to Pages 227–233

of Alabama Press, 1985); R. Bonfil, ‘‘Cultura ebraica e cultura cristiana in Italia meridionale,’’ in Tra due mondi: Cultura ebraica e cultura cristiana nel Medioevo, ed. Bonfil (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 1–63; idem, ‘‘Sulla storia culturale degli ebrei nell’Italia meridionale,’’ in ibid., 65–91. 96. On the impact of Savonarola’s preaching on Tuscan painting, see L’officina della maniera: Varieta` e fierezza nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento fra le due repubbliche (1494–1530), ed. A. Cecchi and A. Natali (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). 97. See the interpretation of Bellini’s painting suggested by S. Coltellacci and M. Lattanzi, ‘‘Studi belliniani: Proposte cronologiche per la Sacra allegoria degli Uffizi,’’ in Giorgione e la cultura veneta tra ’400 e ’500: Mito, Allegoria, Analisi iconologica (Rome: De Luca, 1981), 59–79. According to the two scholars, the main exegetic reference for this painting should be sought in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob. 98. See G. Busi, ‘‘Officina ebraica ferrarese,’’ in Vita e cultura ebraica nello stato estense: Atti del 1 convegno internazionale di studi. Nonantola 15–16–17 maggio 1992, ed. E. Fregni and M. Perani (Nonantola-Bologna: Comune di Nonantola, 1993), 189–211. 99. This is on the basis of Gregory the Great’s interpretation of the biblical character. 100. ‘‘Nisi verteret, optime Paule, fore nonnullos, qui vel pravitate ingenij, vel parvitate iudicij alio quam nos loquamur sensu captent, singula demonstrarem, Socratem et si non figura qua Iob atque Ioannes Baptista, tamen adumbratione forte quadam Christum salutis authorem, quasi (ut ita loquar) praesignavisse’’: Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:868. I owe this reference to the courtesy of Valery Rees. 101. Terrien, Iconography of Job, 90–92. 102. Ibid., 90. 103. J. Lauts, Carpaccio: Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon Press, 1962), 13. 104. We find, for instance, a church of St. Job in Bologna. 105. A mystical portrait of Job, executed by Carpaccio for the brotherhood of St. Job in Venice, is now kept in Sant’Alvise: see A. Gentili, Le storie di Carpaccio: Venezia, i Turchi, gli Ebrei (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). 106. Cf. V. Denis, ‘‘Saint Job, patron des musiciens,’’ Revue Belge d’Architecture, Histoire, Art 21 (1953): 253–98. 107. Testament of Job 3. See James, Apocrypha Anecdota, 2:103–37. English version: The Testament of Job: An Essene Midrash on the Book of Job, 264–338; see also n. 80. 108. Bellini’s altarpiece was commissioned by the Church of St. Job in Venice around 1487, after a terrible plague. 109. In much of northern Italy, Job, along with Sebastian (appearing in Bellini’s Allegory) and Roch, was considered the patron saint of lepers. 110. A. Sisti, ‘‘Giobbe,’’ in Bibliotheca Sanctorum (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Universita` Lateranense, 1965), VI, cols. 479–85: 484–85. 111. For a description of this codex, see M. Beit-Arie´, The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book. Studies in Paleography and Codicology (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 181–215. 112. The pattern of the wealthy Job in the Rothschild Miscellany, associated with the ritual of the New Year’s Festival, may betray an influence of contemporaneous Christian Books of Hours. Terrien, Iconography of Job, 104, remarks that Christian Books of Hours generally depict a prosperous rather than a suffering

Notes to Page 233

325

Job, ‘‘although the nine lessons from the Book of Job in the Books of Hours were read for the Office of the Dead.’’ 113. See Se´d-Rajna, Hebrew Bible, 134, 140, tab. 159. 114. On the basis of Job 42:13. Se´d-Rajna, Hebrew Bible, 141, tab. 160. 115. See Gutmann, Hebrew Manuscript Painting, 112–13, pl. 37. 116. An emphasis on Job’s wealth, instead of his calamities, is perceivable, for instance, in the Sinaxarion, which appears in the Mega Horologion of the Orthodox Church, within the liturgy of the sixth of May, when ‘‘the holy and righteous Job’’ is celebrated. See Mega Horologion, ed. Bartholomaeus of Imbros (Venice: La Fenice, 1857). I owe this reference to the courtesy of Joseph Gulka (Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Philadelphia), who was so kind as to provide me with the Greek original and the English translation of the liturgical text.

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Contributors

Adele Berlin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Department of English at the University of Maryland in College Park. Natalie B. Dohrmann is adjunct Assistant Professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Executive Editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Reuven Firestone is Professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles. Daniel Frank is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University Sara Japhet is the Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Bible, in the Department of Bible at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Deeana Copeland Klepper is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University. Israel Knohl is Professor of Biblical Studies in the Department of Bible at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Fabrizio Lelli is Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of Lecce (Italy). Joseph E. Lowry is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel Sheerin is Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. David Stern is the Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Megan Hale Williams is Assistant Professor of History at San Francisco State University.

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Index of Persons

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aaron b. Elijah, 138 Aaron b. Joseph, 137 Abba Shaul, 90 ‘Abd al-Razza¯q al-S.an‘a¯nı¯, 150–52, 156, 159 Abraham, 26–27, 31, 109, 144–45; family drama, 109–22 Abu¯ Hanı¯fa, 141, 149 Abu¯ H . ayya¯n al-Tawh.¯ıdı¯, 135 Abu¯ ‘Ubayd, 150 Abu¯ ‘Ubayda, 150 Adam, 38, 207 al-Akhfash, 150 Akiba, R., 57, 90–91, 94–95, 97, 106, 115, 155, 182 Alemanno, Yohanan, 222–24 Alexander, Philip S., 95 Alexander the Great, 117 Algasia, 83 Amalarius of Metz, 169, 174 Ambrose of Milan, 66, 69, 72–73 Ameimar, 129 Anan b. David, 129–31, 133–34 Anastasius Bibliothecarius, 180 Andrew of St. Victor, 200, 211 Ankori, Zvi, 136 Anselm, 173 Antoninus Pius, 52 Apollinaris of Laodicea, 67, 81 Aristotle, 62, 215, 219 Augustine of Hippo, 66, 76, 165, 169, 200, 204 Azariah, R., 100, 115 Balaam, 227 Baldini, Baccio, 227 Baranina, 84 Bartolo di Fredi, 226 Bashyachi, Elijah, 138 Bathsheba, 175

Baumgarten, J. M., 41 Bede, 210 Bellini, Giovanni, 229, 231, 232 Ben Azzai, 96-97 Benjamin al-Naha¯wandı¯, 129–31 Benjamin ben Joab of Montalcino, 219 Ben Shammai, Haggai, 130 Berlin, Adele, 15–16 Bernold of Constance, 170–73, 175 Berno of Reichenau, 170–73, 175 Bloch, Renee, 4–8 Bloom, Harold, 45, 69 Bloomfield, Morton, 92 Bonaventure, Saint, 201 Boyarin, Daniel, 74–75, 88 Bradley, Keith, 61 Briggs, C. A., 24 Brown, Peter, 70, 72–73 Bruno of Segni, 168 Cain, 16; demonic origins, 41, 46–50; genealogy, 38, 41–44; murder of Abel, 43, 44, 46; precocity, 39; shining face of, 39; son of God and Eve, 39; tragic hero, 44–45, 50 Carpaccio, Vittore, 229, 230 Carr, David, 104 Carruthers, Mary, 7 Cassian, John, 66 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 197 Charles the Bald, 180 Christ. See Jesus Clark, Elizabeth, 104 Claudianus Mamertus, 165 Cohen, Gerson, 91–92 Cohen, Martin, 95 Comestor, Peter, 227 Constantine, 70 Cyrus, 30

330

Index of Persons

Damasus, Bishop, 78 Damasus, Pope, 174 Daube, David, 10 David, King, 145, 175, 201 David ben Benjamin of Montalcino, 219, 221 Dedan, 117 Didymus of Alexandria, 67, 79 Diocletian, 70 Dodds, E. R., 71 Dohrmann, Natalie, B., 15, 16–17 Donatus, 67 Dupont, F., 62–63 Durandus of Mende, 180 E (Elohist Source), 25 Eliezer, R., 59, 94, 115 Eliezer b. Zadok, R., 128 Elihu, 216, 222 Elijah, 132, 137 Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano, 219–21, 225 El-Kodsi, Mourad, 124, 138 Elon, Menachem, 124 Enoch, Book of, 37 Enosh, 42 Eustochium, 69 Eve: as partner of God, 38–39; seduction by Samael, 47–48; sex with the serpent, 46, 48 Ezekiel the Tragedian, 34 al-Farra¯’, 150 Ficino, Marsilio, 215, 219, 222 Finiguerra, Maso, 227 Firestone, Reuven, 17 Fish, Harold, 92 Fishbane, Michael, 9, 92 Flavius Mithridates, 220 Fowden, Garth, 71 Frank, Daniel, 17 Frankfurter, David, 72 Gabriel (angel), 227 Gaddi, Taddeo, 226 Gaius, 52, 61, 89 Geiger, Abraham, 108 Gelasius, Pope, 174 Genazzano. See Elijah Hayyim of Genazzano Gennadius, 165 George (Naddi) of Sienna, 18, 196, 200;

anti-Jewish polemic, 211; and Nicholas of Lyra, 202–5, 212 Gersonides (Levi ben Gershon), 217, 219–22 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 226 Ginzberg, Louis, 4, 33, 39, 154 Giorgione, 227–29, 228 Godfrey of Admont, 178 Goshen-Gottstein, Alon, 103–4 Gottlieb, Isaac, 94 Gozzolo, Benozzo, 227 Grant, Robert M., 2 Gratian, 73 Gregory I, Pope, 172, 174 Gregory of Nazianzus, 67 Gunkel, Herman, 21 Hadassi, Judah, 10, 137 Hagar, 109. See also Keturah Hanina bar Papa, R., 94 Hanson, R. P. C., 1, al-H . asan al-Basrı¯, 149 al-H . asan b. Muhammad b. al-H . anafı¯ya, 149 Hermes Trismegistus, 215, 219 Hezekiah, 90 Hezser, Catherine, 59 Hillel, 83 Holm-Nielsen, S., 28–29, 31–33 Honorius Augustodunensis, 173–78 Hugh of St. Victor, 200 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 18, 107, 182, 183 Ibn Ezra, Moses, 2 Ibn Qutayba, 127, 158 Ibn Taymı¯ya, 152, 160 Ibn Tufayl, 222 Ibn Wahb, 150 Irenaeus, 81 Irimbert, 178 Isaac, 26, 109; versus Ishmael, 109–22 Isaac, R., 101, 105–6 Isaac ben ‘Ovadya of Forlı`, 217, 222 Ishmael, 109; and Islam, 109–22 Ishmael, R., 95, 115 Isidore of Seville, 165, 168 Isodoro Ugurgieri Azzolini, 197–98 Ivo of Chartres, 168 J (Jahwist Source), 25, 42–50 Jacob, 26–28 Jacob ben Benjamin of Montalcino, 217

Index of Persons Jacopo del Sellaio, 226 Jala¯l al-Mah.allı¯, 159 Jala¯l al-Suyu¯t.¯ı, 159 Japhet, 168 Japhet, Sara, 13, 18, 55, 107 Japheth b. Eli, 134–35 Jeremiah, Book of, 28 Jerome, Saint, 16, 165, 174, 200; and the figure of the ‘‘Jew,’’ 66, 78; and Jewish teachers, 66, 78–79, 82–86 Jesus of Nazareth (Christ), 2, 122, 144, 156, 168, 201, 231 Jethro, 227 Job, 19; as Aristotle, 222; counselor of Pharaoh, 227; figuring Christ, 231; as priscus philosophus, 215, 225, 234–35; ‘‘saintly,’’ 225–33; ‘‘suffering,’’ 216–25 Jobab, 226 John the Baptist, 231 Joseph, in fetters, 29–31 Joseph Israel of Forlı`, 224 Josephus, 2, 4, 60, 67, 227 Joshua b. Levi, R., 60 Joshua ibn Shuaib, 98 Judah Messer Leon, 219 Justinian, 52 Kadari, Tamar, 94, 100–102 Kara, Joseph, 182 Kedar, 117 Kedar, Benjamin, 67 Keturah, 112; as Hagar, 113, 117 Klepper, Deeana Copeland, 18 Knohl, Israel, 15–16 Kugel, James, 7, 33, 35, 39 Lactantius, 81 Lamech, 40, 43 Lelli, Fabrizio, 19 Levi, 28 Levi, R., 115 Lieberman, Saul, 10–11, 94–97, 155 Lorenzo de’Medici, 222 Lorenzo il Magnifico, 222 Lowry, Joseph, 17 Luqma¯n, 145 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 221–22 Malachi, 207 Ma¯lik al-Ramlı¯, 132 Ma‘mar b. Ra¯shid, 152

331

Mariano del Buono, 217, 218, 223 Markus, Robert, 73–74, 77 Marmorstein, A., 103 Martelli, Braccio, 219 Martini, Raymond, 198 Mas‘u¯dı¯, 121 Ma¯turı¯dı¯, 127 Maximus the Confessor, 180 McKinnon, James, 161 McLynn, Neil, 72–73 Meir, R., 94, 155 Millar, Fergus, 71 Mitridate (Flavius Mithridates), 220 Moses, 4, 126, 133, 154–55, 216; birth of, 41; as a child, 227; luminousity of, 41 Muh.ammad, 111, 119, 122, 140, 144–45, 148; and his wives, 146–47 Muja¯hid b. Jabr, 150 Muqa¯til b. Sulayman, 127, 150–52 Musaeus of Marseilles, 165 Muslim b. Kha¯lid al-Zanjı¯, 141 Nahmanides (Moshe ben Nahman Gerondi), 2 Nicholas of Lyra, 18, 198; in George of Siena, 202–5, 212–13; and literal sense, 199–201; and Rashi, 200–201, 212 Noah, 134, 168; birth of, 41; offspring of an angel, 39 Numenius, 219 Ocker, Christopher, 200–201 Oceanus, 84 Olyan, Saul, 56, 58 Origen, 1, 79, 86, 88, 97–98, 102–6, 167–68 Orpheus, 215 P (Priestly Source), 42–50 Pammachius, 84 Patterson, Orlando, 56, 62 Paul, Saint, 5, 82, 177, 206 Paula (Roman noblewoman), 69 Paulinus of Nola, 66 Pharaoh, 30, 114, 120 Philo of Alexandria, 2, 57, 67 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 215, 220–25 Pirkoi b. Baboi, 158–59 Plato, 215, 219 Porchetto de Salvatici, 198 Price, Simon, 71

332

Index of Persons

Qata¯da, 150, 159 Qata¯da b. Di‘a¯ma, 152, al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, 128, 130, 134–36 al-Qu¯misı¯, Daniel, 48, 131–31, 135–36 Rapp, Birke, 99 Rashbam (R. Samuel b. Meir), 18, 107, 182; and peshat, 183–95 Rashi (R. Solomon ben Isaac; R. Solomon), 18, 107, 182–84; in Christian exegesis, 200–203, 212; and peshat, 201 Raymond Rigauld, 211 Recanati, 225 Rupert of Deutz, 173, 176–80 Saadya Gaon, 126, 127, 133–34 Sæbø, Magne, 2–3 Salmon ben Yeruh.im, 127 Samael (satanic angel), 47 Sarah, 109 Sarna, Nahum, 8 Satan (devil), 47 Savonarola, Girolamo, 229 Scha¨fer, Peter, 14, 68 Scholem, Gershom, 95 Schwartz, Seth, 74–76 Se´d-Rajna, Gabrielle, 222 Seeligman, Isaac, 8 Sepulcius Severus, 66 Seth, 40–44 al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯, 140; legal hermeneutics, 141–52; and rabbinic influence, 152, 156–60; on Sunna and h.ikma, 141–52 Shammai, 83 Sharira Gaon, 152–53, 156 al-Shayba¯nı¯, 141 Sheba, Queen of, 175–76 Sheerin, Daniel, 18 Shekhina, 59, 107 Shem, 168 Shimon bar Yohai, R., 115–16 Sicardus, 180 Sidonius Apollinaris, 165

Simeon, 28 Simon, R., 94 Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, 169–70 Solomon, King, 90, 99, 175–76 Solomon b. Afeda Ha-Kohen, 138 Solomon b. Yeruh.im, 127 Sufya¯n al-Thawrı¯, 150 Sufya¯n b. ‘Uyayna, 140 T.abarı¯, 127, 140, 158 al-T.abrisı¯, 159 Tacitus, 117 Tarfon, R., 58 Tema, 117 Tertullian, 81 Theobald de Sezanne, 198 Theodosius I, 69, 71–74; legislation of, 75 Theodosius II, 77 Theophilus of Antioch, 69 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 201, 212, 221 Tobiah b. Eliezer, 137 ‘Umar II, 122 ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Azı¯z, 121 Uriah, 175 Vermes, Geza, 2, 4–6 Victorinus, 74, 81 Wansbrough, John, 127 Wegner, Judith, 153 Williams, Megan, 16–17 Wirskubski, Hayyim, 220 Yah.ya¯ b. Abı¯ Kathı¯r, 152 Yannai, 76 Yehoshua b. Hananiah, R., 116 Yohanan, R., 93–94, 105, 116, 155 Yudan, R., 99 al-Zamakhsharı¯, 159 Zoroaster, 215, 219 al-Zuhrı¯, 150

Index of Sources

Hebrew Bible Genesis 1:12, 23 3:17–19, 45 4, 16 4:1, 38, 45, 47 4:1–16, 41 4:14, 43 4:16, 45 4:17, 45 4:25–26, 42–43 5:1–7, 42 5:3, 44 5:28, 40, 44 5:29, 42 6:1–4, 40–41, 49 8:20, 129, 133 8:20–21, 44 9:20, 44 12, 26 15:3–6, 26 16:1, 111, 113 16:4, 113 16:12, 116 17:10–14, 56 17:12–13, 54 17:18, 27 17:18–21, 110, 113 17:20, 116 20, 26 21:9, 112–13, 115 21:10–13, 110, 115 21:14, 113 21:15–21, 112 21:17, 113, 116 24:62, 112 25:5, 117 25:7, 117 25:8–18, 112 25:11, 113

25:18, 113 26, 26 34:30, 28 36:33, 226 45:5, 30 45:7, 30

Exodus 6:1, 33 6:26, 32 9:25, 32 10:15, 23–24 11:2, 33 12:33–36, 33 12:43–49, 56 12:51, 32 13:21, 34 14:19, 34 15:12, 97 16:4, 35 16:8, 35 16:12, 35 16:13, 35 20:10, 54 21:2–11, 55 21:5–6, 56 23:12, 54 24:7, 194 25:20, 35 33:9–10, 34

Leviticus 1:14, 129–30 1:16, 131 11, 128, 138 11:13–19, 137 11:15, 132 12:6, 130 14:4, 130 16:2, 34 22:10–13, 56

334

Index of Sources

25:39–55, 55 25:40, 55 25:44–46, 55 25:55, 55, 57 26:26, 28 26:42, 25

Numbers 14:14, 34 15:37–41, 127 27:17, 92

48:16, 203 50:1, 30 51:2, 26, 30 52:3, 30 52:4, 28 54:14, 28 59:11, 130 63:16, 26, 33 64:6, 43 66:20, 194

Jeremiah Deuteronomy 4:27, 28–29 4:31, 25 11:25, 34 14, 128, 138 14:11, 130 15:12–18, 55 16:11–14, 54 21:16–17, 109 21:17, 117 22:12, 127 26:5, 29 28:62, 28–29 28:48, 29 30:5, 25 30:11, 126 32:9, 27 32:11, 35, 135 33:19, 194

8:7, 132 33:16, 209 33:26, 26 44:28, 28 50:33, 28

Ezekiel 4:16, 28 5:16, 28 14:13, 28 16, 9 16:55, 80 33:24, 26

Hosea 10:12, 136

Joel 2:12–19, 170 2:23, 132

2 Samuel 20:3, 187

Jonah 2, 207

1 Kings 5:5, 32 8:17, 35 10, 176

2 Kings 18:31, 32 25:7, 29

Isaiah 1:26, 194 4:5–6, 34 11:2, 180 21:13–17, 116 40–55, 26, 31 41:8, 26

Psalms 27:1, 164 27:7, 164 29:2–3, 164 34:22, 164 44, 208–9 44:7, 169 51:21, 194 67:2, 164 67:6–7, 164 77:1, 164 78, 20–22 78:23–25, 35 78:47–48, 32 87:2, 179

Index of Sources 101:26, 169 102:7, 135–36 104, 21 105, 15, 20–22 105:6, 26 105:6, 27 105:10, 27 105:11, 27 105:12, 25, 28–29 105:14, 28 105:16–22, 26, 28 105:17, 30 105:18, 24, 29–31 105:20, 30 105:23–24, 26, 30 105:25–41, 26 105:26, 26 105:30, 32 105:33, 32 105:35, 23 105:37, 31 105:38, 24, 33–34 105:39, 34 105:39–41, 31 105:37–38, 32 105:40, 35 105:42–43, 26 106, 20–22 135, 20–22 136, 20–22

Proverbs 3:9–10, 164 8–9, 167 8:9, 126 25:1, 90

Job 1:1–11:5, 220 1:3, 233 11:5, 220 14:7, 229 19:25, 229 25:2, 225 38:36, 132 42:7–16, 220 42:12, 233

1:5–6, 93, 104–5, 189 1:6, 105, 107, 189 1:7, 93, 189 1:7–10, 189 1:8, 93 1:12, 95 1:15–16, 189 2:2, 95 2:4, 189 2:5, 191 2:5–6, 189 2:7, 105, 190–91 2:8, 189 2:8–9, 95 2:10, 189 2:15–16, 190 2:16, 97 3:5, 105, 190 3:7–10, 190 3:9–11, 94 3:11, 190 4:11, 94 4:16–5:1, 94 5:2, 95 5:2–7, 190 5:8–6:3, 189–90 5:9, 97, 189 5:10, 97 5:10–16, 96–97, 189 5:11–16, 95, 100–103, 106 5:12, 101 6:1, 97, 189 6:2–3, 189 6:3, 97, 106 6:4, 92 7:11, 90 8:4, 190 8:8–10, 190 8:11–12, 190 8:13–14, 190

Lamentations 1:14, 33 3:44, 34 5:13, 33

Ecclesiastes 11:9, 90

Song of Songs

Esther

1:1, 191 1:2, 99, 105, 189

8:17, 34 9:2, 34

335

336

Index of Sources

Daniel 9:24, 210

Nehemiah 9:7, 26

1 Chronicles 28:18, 35

New Testament Matthew 12, 208 26:29, 81

Luke 18:9–14, 164

John 1:1–14, 169 1:1, 169 1:3, 169 1:10, 169 5:39, 196, 199, 205, 207

2.223, 150 2.231, 143, 146, 148, 150–51 2.251, 145 2.262, 145 3.7, 126 3.48, 144, 156 3.81, 144 3.164, 143, 145, 148, 150–51 4.54, 144 4.113, 143, 146, 148, 150 5.110, 144, 156 6.151–53, 127 16.125, 144 17.39, 144 31.12, 145 33.28–34, 146–47 33.34, 144, 150–51, 156–57, 159 35.42–43, 142 37.99–113, 119 38.20, 145 43.63, 145 54.5, 145 62.2, 143, 145, 151

Jewish Sources

1 Corinthians 14, 176 15:1–10, 164

Prerabbinic Jewish Works 1Q19

Galatians

ll. 3–6, 40

2, 82 4:21–31, 110

11Q11 col. 5.6, 41

Colossians 2:20, 83

4QMMT, 48 n.63

Hebrews

Ben Sira

1:1–12, 169 1:8, 169 1:10, 169

24, 167 45:3, 32

1 Enoch 1 John

106, 39

3:9–11, 46 n.49

Genesis Apocryphon 2, 1–3, 40 n.11

Qur’a¯n Josephus, Antiquities 2.125, 119 2.129, 119, 143, 145, 150–51, 159 2.151, 143, 150–51

5.1, 31 14.4, 32 14.6, 32

Index of Sources 2.9.7, 227 n.93

337

bGitin 38b, 59

Josephus, Jewish War 3.10.10, 60 n.65 6.9.2–3, 60 n.65

bH . agigah

Life of Adam and Eve

mH . ulin

21.3, 39 n.4

3.6, 128

4 Maccabees

bH . ulin

18:7–8, 46 n.47

60b–61a, 129 n.30 63ab, 129 nn. 31, 32

Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 2.79–81, 57

Testament of Job 3, 231

Testament of Joseph 1.5–6, 31

Wisdom of Solomon 10:16b, 32

14a, 96

bKetubot 96a, 60

mKidushin 3.13, 58

bKidushin 22b, 57

bMegilah 13a, 155

Mishnah and Talmuds b‘Avodah Zarah 22b, 46 n.48

bBaba Batra 14b–15a, 90

bBaba Kama 15a, 58 88a, 59

mBaba Metsia

tSanhedrin 12.10, 90

bSanhedrin 86a, 59

bSotah 12a, 41 n.16 49b, 155

mYadayim

2.11, 154

3.4, 95 3.5, 89, 98

tBaba Metsia (ed. Lieberman)

Midrash and Other Rabbinic Works

5:72, 154–55 n.66

bBaba Metsia

Avot de-Rabbi Natan A (ed. Schechter) 2, 90

33a, 155

20, 93

b‘Eruvin

Avot de-Rabbi Natan B

53a, 155

39, 154

mGitin

Genesis Rabbah

4.6, 60

45.4, 114 n.33

338

Index of Sources

45.6, 114 n.33 60.14, 113 n. 24 60.16, 114 n.33 61.4, 113 n. 24 61.6, 113 n. 24

Postrabbinic Jewish Sources Aaron b. Elijah, Gan ‘eden chap 2, fol. 82d, ll. 16–24, 138 n.88 Aaron b. Joseph, Sefer ha-mivh.ar

Deuteronomy Rabbah

3:16–b, 137–38 n.86

§11, 41 n.17

Yohanan Alemanno, H . ay ha-‘olamim Exodus Rabbah

39–55, 222–24

12.4, 32 n.38

Judah Hadassi, Eshkol ha-kofer Lamentations Rabbah 3.1, 101

Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael Pish.a 15, 58 n.50 Beshallah. 3, 94 Shirata 3, 96, 106 Bah.odesh 1, 93 Bah.odesh 3, 94

Midrash ha-gadol

Alphabet 234, resh–shin, fol. 89c, ll. 42–50, 137 n.83

Ibn Ezra, Abraham, Commentary to the Song of Songs (ed. Mathew) Introduction, 184

Japheth b. Eli on Dt 14:11–20, 135 n.68

Midrash lekah. tov

on Ex 6:1, 33–34

Leviticus, fol. 63b, 136–37

Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer

Benjamin al-Naha¯wandı¯, on Leviticus, in Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim

§21, 47 n.53 §22, 41, 48 n.56

Seder ‘Olam 7, 15, 94

Sifra Behar 8, 60 Shemini, Mekhilta de-miluim 15–16, 94

Sifre Deuteronomy

179, 130 n.39

Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man 36, 225 n.73

al-Qirqisa¯nı¯, Kita¯b al-Anwa¯r I.19.3, 136 I.19.6, 136 II.2.2–5, 128 n.26 XII.2.2, 135 n.64

§333, 97

§139, 92

Daniel al-Qu¯misı¯, Book of Commandments, in Harkavy, Zikhron la-rishonim

Song of Songs Rabbah

187–89, 131 n.40 188, 131–32 nn. 43, 45

Sifre Numbers

1.1, 99 1.2, 93 1.4, 96, 101 1.6, 105 1.11, 96 1.41, 105 5.11, 100

Rashbam (R. Samuel B. Meir), Commentary to the Song of Songs Introduction, 185, 188 n.34 on Song 1.1, 191 on Song 2:5–7, 192–93 on Song 3:5, 188

Index of Sources on Song 4:16, 194 on Song 5:1, 194 on Song 5:8–6:3, 192–93 on Song 6:11–7:11, 192–93 on Song 8:5–7, 194 on Song 8:8, 193 on Song 8:12, 193 on Song 8:13–14, 194

339

PL 151:973–1022, 172 PL 151:1001B, 172 PL 151:1001D, 172 PL 151:1005C, 172 PL 151:1006C, 172 PL 151:1008B, 172 PL 151:1009D, 172 PL 151:1010C, 172 PL 151:1020D–1021A, 173

Rashi (R. Solomon ben Isaac) on Ex 6:26, 33 on Dt 4:6, 153

Peter Comestor, Historia Scholastica

Commentary to the Song of Songs

Durandus of Mende, Rationale divinorum officiorum

Introduction, 183

Exodus V, 227, n.90

6,126 [CCM 140A:557–58], 180

Rothschild Miscellany 64v, 233 65v, 233

Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9, 28–29, l. 214 [Ezekiel the Tragedian, Exagogue], 34

Saadya Gaon, Commentary on Genesis 180–81 (Hebrew), 126 n.10 181 (Hebrew), 126 n.15 186 (Hebrew), 126 n.13

Marsilio Ficino

Salmon ben Yeruh.im, The Book of the Wars of the Lord

Gennadius, De viris illustribus

Letter VIII.7, 219 Letter VIII.8, 231

80, 165 n.20

47–48, 127 n.25

Sharira Gaon, Igeret 51, 152 n.53

Christian Works

George Naddi of Siena, Scrutamini scripturas Vat. Chigi, 1r., 196 n.3, 206 n.58 Vat. Chigi, 1v., 206 n.61, 207 n.63 Vat. Chigi, 33v., 209 n.70 Vat. Chigi, 41v., 211 n.73 Vat. Chigi, 49v., 208 n.65

Admont homilies PL 174:549C–555C, 178–79 PL 174:550B, 178–79

Gospel According to Phillip

Amalarius of Metz, Liber officalis

Honorius, Gem of the Soul

I.iii.4, 170

PL 172:543–44, 172–73 PL 172:693D–694A, 174 n.61 PL 172:706D–707C, 175 PL 172:714–15, 175–76

Berno of Reichenau, On Some Matters Having to Do with the Liturgy of the Mass

61:5–10, 47 n.49

PL 142:1055–80, 171 PL 142:1066D–67D, 171 PL 142:1068B, 172

Ivo of Chartres, On the Harmony of the Old and the New Sacrifice

Bernoldus of Constance, Short Treatise about Church Observances

Jerome, Commentarii in Hieziechielem

PL 162:536A, 168 n.38

5,16,55, 81 n.53

340

Index of Sources

Jerome, Commentarii in Isaiam

Muslim Works

4,11,1.43, 82 n.58

Jerome, Ep. 121,10,10, 83 n.61

Jerome, Praef. in Iob, 84 n.63 Missale Aquileyensis Ecclesie fols. 170r2 –171v1, 163 n.12

al-Sha¯fi‘ı¯, Risa¯la §§245–51, 143–44 §§252–57, 147–48 §1001, 157 n.81 §§1045–46, 157 n.81 §1104, 157 n.81

Quaestio de adventu Christi BNF lat. 13781, 55v, 205

Roman Works

Rupert of Deutz, Liber de divinis officiis CCM 7:6, 176 n.64 CCM 7:31, 177 CCM 7:404, 178

Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistles 4.11.16, 165 n.21

Smaragdus, Exposito libri comitis PL 102:14CD, 169 PL 102:35C, 169

Gaius, Institutes 1.8, 61 n.84 1.52, 61 n.85

Justinian, Institutes 1.3.pr, 61 n.84 1.8.1, 61 n.85 1.16.4, 62 n.88 5.3, 63