Intertext and allusion in Jewish-Greek literature: An introduction

Abstract

In the introduction to this special volume, Dhont reflects on Jewish literature in Greek as a research topic and contextualizes the primary research question that lies at the heart of the volume, namely, how did Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic period navigate the multicultural encounter between Jewish and Greek traditions? The study of intertextuality and allusion provides a philological entry point into looking at the ways in which Jewish-Greek authors expressed their position in the cultural matrix of the ancient Mediterranean.

Jewish Literature in Greek

In response to the spread of Greek across the ancient Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, Jews in the diaspora and in Judea started using Greek: they used Greek not only as a spoken language in their daily lives, but as a literary language as well. Jewish-Greek literature occupies an interesting position in the cultural realm of antiquity, at the crossroads of the Jewish and the Greek traditions. Jewish-Greek authors represent a minority community who engage with the majority culture in the Hellenistic East. Yet, at the same time, as Jews writing for Jews, they also reflect the expansion of Jewish tradition in a multilingual setting. Jewish literature originated in Semitic and developed from the third century BCE onwards, with the translation of the Septuagint Pentateuch, in a decidedly multilingual configuration. From the second half of the Second Temple period onwards, Jews developed their literary traditions in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

These authors lived, moved, and wrote in the diverse and multicultural environment that characterized the Greek-speaking world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Hellenophone Jewish authors navigated the encounter of Jewish and Greek traditions, whether consciously or subconsciously, in their writings. What did the encounter of Judaism and Hellenism look like expressed in literary texts? How did Greek Jews navigate multiculturalism? The purpose of this volume is to further our understanding of how Jewish-Greek authors positioned themselves in relation to their cultural matrix.

The aim is to study these texts as literature. At the intersection of Classics and Religious/Jewish Studies, we are yet to describe Jewish-Greek writings as written artifacts of cultural expression. Our understanding of the intercultural nature of Greek-speaking Judaism has been hampered by a cross-disciplinary neglect of these texts as literature. In past scholarship, the varied corpus of Jewish-Greek writings has primarily been mined for biblical references and for evidence of exegetical practices. The writings were studied mainly as attestations to the form and interpretation of the biblical text in circulation among Jews in the Hellenistic period. It is in this scholarly context that, for example, the Septuagint has been used as a tool in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, ¹ or the writings of Eupolemus have been used as evidence for the circulation of Greek versions of Kings and Chronicles. ² However, these texts also function as cultural expressions of Jewish identity, and the lens through which we approach the aforementioned questions into this cultural reality, is that of allusion and intertextuality.

Intertextuality as Lens

Within the framework of this volume, intertextuality is defined broadly as textual operations through which authors draw on pre-existing traditions, narratives, characters, and distinctive vocabulary, to create new works that, in this specific case, express Jewish identity in the Greek language. Allusion is one such textual operation, and refers to “employments of anterior texts in which the anterior text is still linguistically recognizable in the posterior text but not morphologically identical with it.” ³ Morphological sameness is, after all, a problematic criterion in the ancient reality of textual plurality: we cannot be certain what version of an anterior text the author may have had in mind or in front of them, and whether that version was the same as the version(s) we have at our disposal, often reconstructed in modern critical editions, so that morphological sameness between the prior text and the new text cannot be established with any certainty. By drawing on pre-existing texts and traditions, Jewish-Greek authors give us a glimpse into their intellectual world: intertextuality shows us what texts these authors had available and how they used these texts to create a literary position for themselves. Studying intertextuality ties in with current scholarly trends in the study of Greek ⁴ as well as Jewish literature, and opens up a new path for the study of Jewish-Greek literature. ⁵

These studies are not about the authorial intent behind intertextuality but about determining the cultural realm of Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic era. The author of course had intentions, but we cannot know these in full. Those intentions also do not determine “the universe of legitimate meaning” that may be found in their work. ⁶ After all, “our inability to account in theory for a phenomenon does not mean that the phenomenon does not occur.” ⁷ Authorial intent is thus secondary to our purpose: what Jewish-Greek works evidence, and what our contributors carefully aim to show, is what texts our authors knew and what was acceptable to use. In his contribution in this volume, Max Leventhal uses the concept of “horizon of expectation(s)” ⁸ in this context. The term “horizon of expectations,” generally associated with Hans Jauss, ⁹ refers to the set of expectations and assumptions that an author’s contemporaries would have brought to the work, and these sets are culturally and generationally defined. Understanding and appreciating a literary work requires a reconstruction of that horizon of expectations. We therefore approach intertextual phenomena as individual points of contact between texts. Describing these textual operations in Jewish literary works in Greek provides us with information on what the cultural world of Hellenophone Jews would have looked like, and offers a glimpse into the nature of the encounter of languages and cultures in the ancient world. Intertext and allusion help us to discuss in a more nuanced, precise, and philological way what kind of literacy and literary knowledge the authors of these texts had and what kind of literacy and literary knowledge was expected from their readership. It also helps us to approach the corpus in a way that is more objective, moving beyond thinking about these texts in negative critical terms as many have done in the past.

The literary output of these authors shows that they were familiar with Jewish literary traditions. While the nature of Jewish education in antiquity is a topic with many unknowns, ¹⁰ Second Temple Jewish writings demonstrate that some form of transmission of tradition took place, whether formal in the context of a school or a synagogue, or informal in familial settings. Depending on the individual and their societal context, this could have been in Hebrew, Aramaic, and/or Greek.

The Greek literacy of these authors indicates they would have pursued a Greek-language education, most likely within the general Hellenistic Greek educational system of their time. Pupils were taught to read and write Greek with a curriculum that focused particularly on Homer and the Attic Tragedians. ¹¹ The curriculum of Greek-language education in antiquity appears to have been relatively stable across space and time. Jewish-Greek authors would thus have been familiar with the classical literary heritage to varying extents, depending on the educational levels each individual would have reached. Jews composed literature in Greek across a variety of genres, in both prose and poetry. In so far as they engaged with Greek models in terms of language and literary form to express Jewish content, Hellenophone Jews adopted and adapted Greek to fit their own context. In as much as they composed Greek literature during the Hellenistic period, these authors are also participants in and contributors to the history of postclassical Greek literature. With Ezekiel’s Exagoge, for example, the Jewish-Greek tradition provides the best-preserved Greek tragedy from the Hellenistic period. ¹²

Language and Cultural Identity

Scholars in Jewish and biblical studies have often made assumptions regarding language use and cultural-religious identity to establish a distinction between Jews in Judea and in Egypt. They differentiate between Egypt, and particularly Alexandria as the center of Hellenistic Greek culture, and Judea, where knowledge and use of Greek would have been peripheral in Jewish communities. ¹³ In recent scholarship, however, this clear-cut distinction between diaspora and homeland has rightfully been called into question. ¹⁴ In addition, we for the most part lack clear or convincing evidence for most Jewish authors’ locations. Establishing a link between an author’s perceived linguistic proficiency and their provenance is problematic. First, our scholarly understanding of these authors’ proficiency needs to be recalibrated: I have argued for a renewed appreciation of Jewish-Greek authors as postclassical Greek writers elsewhere. ¹⁵ Second, one indeed cannot “assume that every Alexandrian Jew wrote Greek as well as Philo did and that everyone in the Land of Israel wrote it as poorly as did the authors of the graffiti.” ¹⁶ Especially since Greek education is likely to have been more or less similar regardless of location, and because there is ample evidence for Jewish mobility in the ancient world, ¹⁷ the issue of the provenance of the writings under consideration is of secondary importance at this point. Finally, the link between language and cultural identity is much more complex than what can be represented on any binary axis, and I will say more on this below. Instead, we need to integrate Greek-speaking Judaism into our historical imagination of ancient Judaism. The contributions in this volume focus on establishing the broad intellectual world of Hellenistic Judaism. Jews across the ancient Mediterranean developed their literary tradition and cultural identity in Greek-language texts. They adopted the language and heritage of the cultural majority and used them to further the development of their own causes in a new context.

While the existence of the Septuagint demonstrates that Jews used the Greek language, a tragedy such as the Exagoge shows us that Jewish authors adopted Greek genres. ¹⁸ As a varied corpus spanning prose and poetry, however, we can see more than just a Jewish use of Greek language and genres: Jewish-Greek literature attests to the nuance of the levels of literary creativity and hybridity in between language and form. Jewish-Greek authors used literary and poetic vocabulary: for example, Ezekiel the Tragedian, while clearly using a Septuagint version of Exodus close to what we now call the Septuagint, also draws extensively on vocabulary attested specifically in Homer and the Tragedians. ¹⁹ These authors also engaged imagery associated with the Greek literary tradition, as we see in the Homeric rewriting in the Greek version of the book of Ben Sira, ²⁰ for example, as well as specifically Greek literary features, such as meter in poetry, as in the work of Philo the Epic Poet and the Sybilline Oracles. The intricate nature of the dynamics of literary engagement in Jewish-Greek works has not yet been fully appreciated.

All too often, scholarship has conceived of these traditions as cultural monoliths in opposition: somehow, “more Greek” has often taken to be meant “less Jewish.” Modern ideas on language and culture, on nationalism and identity, have influenced the way in which to think about and historicize cultural identity in the ancient world. ²¹ As a result of this imagined dichotomy, scholarship has understood the use of Greek by Jews in the Second Temple period according to one of three frameworks.

First, Jewish-Greek works were often undervalued as literature: either the linguistic competency or the stylistic achievement of Jewish-Greek authors was described in decidedly negative terms. For example, Eupolemus’s use of Greek has routinely been characterized as poor. ²² In doing so, these authors were portrayed as outsiders in the Greek world. Grounds for such value judgments were limited, if any were even presented. Negative scholarly judgments on these authors stem from a misunderstanding of the ancient context and the horizon of expectations of ancient authors and their audience. While the deprecating value judgments of Jewish-Greek authors in nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship have repeatedly been noted and corrected, ²³ a negative understanding of Jewish-Greek cultural interaction lingers to this day. Even in recent scholarly works, for example, the Exagoge is still described as a paradox. ²⁴

Second, if the quality of these authors’ language or style was not seen as problematic, it was their Jewish identity that was called into question, positioning them as “hellenized” outsiders vis-à-vis the supposed actual (in casu, Semitic) Jewish community. ²⁵ Linguistic determinism, combined with an essentialist reduction of ancient Judaism to its Semitic roots, left little to no room for Greek-speaking Jews as integral part of a diverse Second Temple Judaism.

A third way of dealing with this corpus of texts involved defining the purpose of these Jewish-Greek writings as polemic, apologetic, or propagandistic in nature—meaning that these works were not intended for a community of Greek-speaking Jews, but for the outside, non-Jewish world. For example, the Exagoge was described as a “public relations endeavour.” ²⁶ As a result, the use of Greek language and heritage has hardly been contextualized as a legitimate development within ancient Judaism, but placed outside of it. While this hypothesis of the apologetic purpose of Jewish-Greek literature was rightfully and eloquently questioned by Victor Tcherikover, ²⁷ this view, too, lingers in late twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship. ²⁸

Proper linguistic contextualisation of Jewish-Greek translators and authors as postclassical Greek writers on the one hand, ²⁹ and a recognition of the diverse and multilingual character of Judaism in antiquity on the other, pave the way for a better understanding of these writers and their cultural identity. The time is right to study their works as cultural artifacts. This volume contributes to and models a nuanced approach to these texts, not as a fusion of traditions in which one’s position can be expressed as a location on a binary axis from Greek to Jewish, or as aimed primarily at a non-Jewish audience, but as multiple and varied expressions of Judaism in a multicultural environment and as a local culture’s reaction to the spread of Greek. All articles in this volume shed light onto the question of what happens when a minority community adopts the language associated with the cultural majority. They do this by focusing on a specific aspect of literariness, namely intertext and allusion.

Volume Outline

The contributions in this volume were first presented during a seminar, “Intertext and Allusion in Jewish-Greek Literature,” organized by the editors of this volume together with James Aitken at the University of Cambridge in June 2021. We are grateful to the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Classical Studies at the University of London for their support of this event. It was originally scheduled to take place in 2020, but the covid-19 pandemic interfered with those plans and we had to reconsider the format, making the seminar an online event with lots of time for discussion. The papers collected in this volume reflect the stimulating conversations this seminar facilitated.

The aim of the seminar, and by extension of the present volume, was to contribute to our understanding of how Jews as a minority culture participated in and contributed to the majority culture and how they developed their own literary tradition in what was to them a new language. What features do they adopt and how do they adapt them in function of their own purposes? How do Jewish authors writing in Greek engage their models in the process of their creative literary expression?

Sean Adams, in “Memory as Overt Allusion Trigger in Ancient Literature,” investigates the use of memory language by ancient authors in Jewish, Greek, and Latin to signal overt intratextual and intertextual allusions. He shows that this feature is a transcultural phenomenon and serves a range of purposes within the text, including offering a way for the author to situate their work within and connect their work to the broader sociocultural context. This contribution demonstrates that in relation to allusion practices, Jewish authors use the same techniques we find in non-Jewish texts.

In “Jewish Greek Allusion in Theory and in Practice: Aristobulus and the Letter of Aristeas,” Max Leventhal looks at allusions in the extant writings of Aristoboulos and in the Letter of Aristeas. By surveying different ways in which Aristoboulos dealt with Greek heritage and Jewish tradition, Leventhal establishes a horizon of expectation for how Jewish-Greek writers might cite, refer to, and engage texts and literary traditions in their work. He then presents several intertextual resonances in the Letter of Aristeas, that have hitherto been overlooked or understudied, respectively to Herodotus, the book of Proverbs, and the theme of the Tower of Babel from the book of Genesis.

Max Kramer focuses on the Exagoge by Ezekiel the Tragedian. While Ezekiel of course attests to the reception of the Septuagint text of Exodus, the literary implications of this textual relationship have received relatively little attention. In “Ezekiel’s Exagoge and the Drama of Intertextuality,” Kramer seeks to illuminate the nature of this intertextual relationship as a deliberate literary choice and demonstrates the ways in which Ezekiel creatively engages with the Septuagint. In doing so, Ezekiel uses the same techniques as other Hellenistic poets, thus showing Ezekiel’s broader poetic conception to be thoroughly embedded in Hellenistic Greek practices.

In her contribution entitled “‘Virgil and Homer Opened my Books:’ The Sibylline Oracles and the Non-Jewish Canon,” Helen Van Noorden focuses on a passage in Book 11 from the Sibylline Oracles, where the Sibyl construct her own persona in relation to Virgil, the Latin poet, to shed light on Sibylline engagement with the Classical canon as well as to engage broad questions about modes of allusion in Jewish Greek literature and the reception of Virgil in the intercultural world of the Greco-Roman era.

Leventhal, Kramer, and Van Noorden all show the creativity with which Jewish-Greek authors engage various traditions to compose novel and meaningful intercultural artifacts. In doing so, they restore the status of these Jewish-Greek writings as literary works to be situated within the history of Greek literature. Particularly Kramer and Leventhal demonstrate the literary impact the Septuagint translation has had on subsequent literary production by Jews. The Septuagint is more than a translation: it became a literary model. ³⁰ Ezekiel and Aristoboulos are more than witnesses to the use of the Septuagint text; they are active receivers and creators. The way in which the Septuagint came to function as a literary model has been underappreciated in previous scholarship.

Bärry Hartog, in “The Ship of State: Metaphor and Intertextuality in Philo of Alexandria,” focuses on the use of the state is ship metaphor, found in various works across the Philonic corpus. He argues that Philo’s use of the metaphor goes back to and is a development from Plato’s use of the metaphor. Philo develops it particularly in the Legatio, to criticize emperor Gaius. Hartog demonstrates that the metaphor is not just a philosophical trope, but that the Platonic intertextuality serves the specific purpose of discrediting Gaius as unskilled in ruling. Van Noorden and Hartog both show how non-Jewish literary works resonate in Jewish composition in the Greco-Roman period. Together with Leventhal and Kramer, they clearly detail the various ways in which Jewish authors’ engagement with Greek heritage serves to create new meaning.

The studies in this volume demonstrate different dimensions in which not just the language but also cultural features from the Greek tradition were adopted and adapted to support and develop the expression of the Jewish tradition in a new context. We hope this volume opens up this fascinating and largely understudied corpus of literary texts to scholars in the fields of postclassical studies, biblical studies, and Jewish studies. We aspire for it to contribute to the integration of Hellenophone Jewish works both into the study of Hellenistic literature, demonstrating some of the literary practices of a minority community in the Hellenistic world, as well as into the study of Jewish literary traditions and cultural identity, as an expression of Jewish multilingualism in the Second Temple Period.