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THE BIBLE AND HELLENISM
 Copenhagen International Seminar

General Editors: Thomas L. Thompson and Ingrid Hjelm,

both at the University of Copenhagen

Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Müller,

both at the University of Copenhagen
Language Revision Editor: James West

Published
Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible
Philippe Wajdenbaum

The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish

and Early Christian Literature
Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History: Changing Perspectives 2

Thomas L. Thompson

Biblical Studies and the Failure of History: Changing Perspectives 3

Niels Peter Lemche

Changing Perspectives 1: Studies in the History, Literature and

Religion of Biblical Israel
John Van Seters

The Expression ‘Son of Man’ and the Development of Christology:

A History of Interpretation
Mogens Müller

Japheth Ben Ali’s Book of Jeremiah: A Critical Edition and Linguistic

Analysis of the Judaeo-Arabic Translation
Joshua A. Sabih

Origin Myths and Holy Places in the Old Testament:

A Study of Aetiological Narratives
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò
The Bible and Hellenism
Greek Influence on Jewish
and Early Christian Literature

Edited by
Thomas L. Thompson
and Philippe Wajdenbaum

Routledge
ROUTLEDGE

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published in 2014 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,

an informa business

Editorial matter and selection © Thomas L. Thompson

and Philippe Wajdenbaum, 2014.
Individual essays © contributors.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

Notices
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own
experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any
information, methods, compounds, or experiments described
herein. In using such information or methods they should be
mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including
parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the
authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any
injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of
products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use
or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or
ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN: 978-1-84465-786-5 (hardcover)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
 Contents

Contributors vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: making room for Japheth 1
Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

PART I: A MEDITERRANEAN OR
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN CONTEXT?
1. Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 19
Emanuel Pfoh
2. Editing the Bible: Alexandria or Babylon? 36
Étienne Nodet, o.p.
3. Greek evidence for the Hebrew Bible 56
Russell E. Gmirkin
4. The Philistines as intermediaries between the Aegean and
the Near East 89
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò
5. Narrative reiteration and comparative literature: problems
in defining dependency 102
Thomas L. Thompson

PART II: GREEK-JEW OR JEW-GREEK?

6. Stranger and city girl: an isomorphism between Genesis 24 and
Homer’s Odyssey 6–13 117
Yaakov S. Kupitz
7. Hesiod’s Heroic Age and the biblical Period of the Judges 146
Philippe Guillaume
vi Contents

8. Sex, violence and state formation in Judges 19–21 165

Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme
9. Israel, the antithesis of Hellas: enslavement, exile and return
in the Greek Solon tradition and the Hebrew Bible 175
Flemming A. J. Nielsen

PART III: FLEETS FROM KITTIM (NUMBERS 24:24) –

ROMAN-ERA TEXTS
10. The Books of the Maccabees and Polybius 189
Philippe Wajdenbaum
11. Text and commentary: the pesharim of Qumran in the context of
Hellenistic scholarship 212
Reinhard G. Kratz
12. Josephus in the tents of Shem and Japheth: the status of
ancient authors in Josephus’ treatise Against Apion 1.1–218 230
Ingrid Hjelm
13. Recognition scenes in the Odyssey and the gospels 247
John Taylor
14. Hesiod’s Theogony and the Book of Revelation 4, 12 and 19–20 258
Bruce Louden

Index of sources 279

Index of authors 291
 Contributors

Russell E. Gmirkin, Portland

Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme, University of Copenhagen
Philippe Guillaume, University of Bern
Ingrid Hjelm, University of Copenhagen
Reinhard G. Kratz, Georg August Universität, Göttingen
Yaakov S. Kupitz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bruce Louden, University of Texas at El Paso
Flemming A. J. Nielsen, University of Greenland
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, University of Warsaw
Étienne Nodet, o.p., Ecole Biblique et Archéologique de Jérusalem
Emanuel Pfoh, National University of La Plata
John Taylor, Tonbridge School, Kent
Thomas L. Thompson, Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen
Philippe Wajdenbaum, Brussels
This page intentionally left blank
 Abbreviations

ADPV Abhandlungen des deutschen Palästina-Vereins

AfO Archiv für Orientforschung
AGAJU Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und Urchristentums
AION Annali dell’Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
ANYAS Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BAR Biblical Archaeological Review
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BHS Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series
CIJ J. B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum, 2 vols (Rome, 1936–52)
CIS Copenhagen International Seminar
CRINT Compendium rerum iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum
DBAT Dielheimer Blätter zum Alten Testament
DBS Daily Bible Study
DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
DSS Dead Sea Scrolls
DTT Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift
EB Etudes bibliques
FBE Forum for bibelsk eksegese
FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Kultur des alten und neuen Testaments
GLAJJ M. Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols (Jerusalem:
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1970)
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
IOSOT International Organization for the Study of Old Testament
JANES Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
x Abbreviations

JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology

JHS The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures
JJS Journal of Jewish Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JSJSup Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplements
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements
JSRC Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture
LAI Library of Ancient Israel
LHB/OTS Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies
LSJ Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon
LXX Septuagint
MT Masoretic Text
NRSV New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OLA Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta
OTP J. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols (New York:
Doubleday, 1983)
RB Revue Biblique
SAP Sheffield Academic Press
SBL Society of Biblical Literature
SBLSymp Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series
SBTh Studies in Biblical Theology
SFSHJ South Florida Studies on the History of Judaism
SJOT Scandinavian Journal for the Old Testament
STDJ Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah
TSAJ Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplements
WO Die Welt des Orients
ZAW Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZDMG Zeitschrift des Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
 Introduction
Making room for Japheth

Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

May God make room for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem.
(Gen. 9:27)

In Genesis 9, after the Flood, Noah got drunk. When he awoke from his drunk-
enness, he cursed his son Ham who had seen him naked and told his broth-
ers, but blessed Japheth and Shem, who had covered their father’s nakedness
with a blanket. Noah’s blessing for Japheth prophesies that he will dwell in the
tents of his brother Shem. In Genesis 10, the genealogies of Noah’s three sons
are detailed. We learn that Japheth was an ancestor of the Greeks, who were
named Yavan (Gen. 10:2-5). Shem was an ancestor of the peoples of the Near
East, such as Eber (Gen. 10:24-5), who was himself an ancestor of Abram the
Hebrew (Gen. 11:26). Among the descendants of Yavan, Kittim is mentioned
(Gen. 10:4), which is the subject of a prophecy by Balaam: ‘But ships shall come
from Kittim, and shall afflict Ashur and Eber, and he also shall perish forever’
(Num. 24:24).
These two prophecies by Noah and Balaam, both in the Pentateuch, are
cast into a distant future, when Japheth’s descendants will invade the Fertile
Crescent in fleets from Cyprus (Heb. kittim = Kittion). Together, Genesis and
Numbers clearly point to the conquest over Southeast Asia by Alexander and
his Macedonians in 333–323 BCE. Few have identified this historical reference,
perhaps due to the traditionally early dating of Pentateuchal sources.1
Nevertheless, the prophecies of both Noah and Balaam clearly imply a post-
conquest context in the Hellenistic era, when Greeks (descendants of Japheth)
were indeed in the tents of Shem.2 It was in the 1970s that the patriarchal nar-
ratives and biblical origin stories from the patriarchs to the United Monarchy

1. Niels Peter Lemche, ‘The Old Testament – a Hellenistic Book?’, Did Moses Speak Attic?
– Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, L. L. Grabbe (ed.),
Journal for the Study of Old Testament Supplement Series, 317 (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1998), 287–318.
2. ‘May God make room for Japheth in the Tents of Shem’ became proverbial for the
Hellenistic era in rabbinic literature. Pieter W. van der Horst surveys the influence of
2 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

were first shown to be unhistorical,3 and Bernd Diebner first suggested that
the Hebrew Bible as a whole had been a Hellenistic project.4 Containing mini-
mal historical information, the Hebrew Bible offered a ‘mythic past’, allegori-
cally structured for theological and philosophical purposes.5 When John Van
Seters argued in 1983 for a strong similarity in theme and patterns between the
Primary History of the so-called ‘Deuteronomistic history’ and the Histories of
Herodotus, emphasizing that both works were written in prose (unlike ancient
Near Eastern literature),6 he complained of a resistance against any approach that
might suggest a link between the Bible and Greek texts.7 Moreover, unlike his
study on Abraham in 1975, Van Seters’s understanding of the Deuteronomistic
tradition of Joshua–Kings rejected any significant role for oral tradition behind
the biblical texts.8 Philip R. Davies, arguing for an understanding of biblical ‘his-
tory’ as literary fiction, written somewhere between the Persian and Hasmonean
eras, demonstrated that ‘ancient Israel’, as portrayed by biblical scholars, was a
theological construct with little resemblance to the historical kingdoms of Israel
and Judah or, indeed, to the literary construct of ‘biblical Israel’.9 In 1992, Niels
Peter Lemche opened a heated debate (which is still engaged today) with the
suggestion that, as there is no knowledge of the existence of the Bible before the
Dead Sea Scrolls, we should consider the possibility of the Hellenistic period as
a terminus ad quem for the Hebrew Bible.10

Hellenic culture on Jewish during the Hellenistic and Roman eras in Japheth in the Tents
of Shem – Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).
3. T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the
Historical Abraham, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 133
(Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1974); J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); J. H. Hayes & J. M. Miller (eds), Israelite and
Judean History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1977); D. Gunn, The Story of King
David (Sheffield: SAP, 1978).
4. See Diebner’s many essays in the Dielheimer Blätter des alten Testaments, beginning
with its first number: B. Diebner & H. Schult, ‘Argumenta e Silentio: Das Grosse
Schweigen als Folge der Frühdatierung der “alten Pentateuchquellen” ’, DBAT 1 (1975).
5. T. L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New
York: Basic Books, 1999) = The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1999).
6. John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the
Origins of Biblical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). See page 17
and those following.
7. Ibid., 8.
8. In his 1975 study of oral tradition, Van Seters closely followed H. Gunkel and
H. Gressmann, and was much inclined to the theory of an oral tradition, pre-existing
the first literary traditions of Gen. See J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), part 2; for a rebuttal, see T. L. Thompson,
‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal Narratives’, JAOS 98 (1978), 76–84; idem, The
Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel (Sheffield: SAP, 1987), 41–59.
9. Philip R. Davies, In Search Of Ancient Israel (Sheffield: SAP, 1992).
10. N. P. Lemche, ‘Det gamle Testamente som en hellenistisk bog’, Dansk Teologisk
Tidsskrift 55 (1992), 81–101; E. Nielsen, ‘En hellenistisk bog?’, DTT 55 (1992),
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 3

The Book of Daniel is commonly dated to the late Hellenistic era, because
of the prophecies it contains about the defeat of the Persian Empire at the hands
of the Macedonians (identified as the Greeks, named Yavan, as in Genesis: Dan.
8:21; 10:20; 11:2), and the later disputes between the Lagids and the Seleucids
(Dan. 11). Since the prophecies in Daniel are so accurate, most scholars con-
clude that they were written after the facts, or ex eventu. Hence these retrospec-
tive prophecies provide a terminus a quo for the redaction of the Book of Daniel
in the second century BCE.11 We may consider that the prophecies of Noah and
Balaam in Genesis and Numbers, respectively, provide a similar terminus a
quo, since they also refer to the conquests of Alexander. However, even if the
Book of Daniel is commonly dated to the late Hellenistic era, Paul Niskanen
has noticed that scholars had never considered that this book might bear some
influence from Greek literature.12 Niskanen demonstrates that the notion of the
succession of world empires in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar seems to be bor-
rowed from Greek historiography, as found in Herodotus, Ctesias and Polybius
(but Niskanen thinks that Daniel pre-dates Polybius). Hence, a biblical book
that is dated to the Hellenistic era has long been thought devoid of any Greek
influence.
There are two other books from the Hebrew Bible that scholars usually
attribute to the Hellenistic era, whereas the religious tradition claims that they
were penned by Solomon himself: Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. In these
cases, scholars have compared the philosophical motifs from Ecclesiastes, and
related them to several Greek doctrines such as stoicism, Epicureanism and
scepticism.13 The Song of Songs is believed to be a Hellenistic production,
because of its similarities with Greek erotic poetry and the occurrence of at least
one Greek loanword. It is thought that its author might have borrowed some
motifs directly from Theocritus’ Idylls.14 Thus, in the case of Ecclesiastes and

161–74; F. Willesen, ‘Om fantomet David’, DTT 56 (1993), 249–65; N. P. Lemche,

‘The Old Testament – a Hellenistic Book?’, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament
7(1) (1993), 163–93; idem, ‘Det gamle Testamente, David og hellenismen’, DTT 57
(1994), 20–39; idem, The Israelites in History and Tradition, Library of Ancient Israel
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 159–60; T. L. Thompson, The
Bible in History: How Writers Create A Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); Grabbe,
Did Moses Speak Attic?
11. It is commonly held that the author of Dan. did not know the Maccabean revolt, an argu-
ment which allows a terminus ad quem for Dan. in 165 or 164 BCE; this date hardly allows
that the Kittim in Dan. refers to the Romans. See E. Nodet, ‘Les Kittim, les Romains et
Daniel’, Revue Biblique 118(2) (2011), 260–68.
12. P. Niskanen, The Human and the Divine in History – Herodotus and the Book of Daniel,
Journal for the Study of Old Testament Supplement Series, 396 (London: T&T Clark,
2004).
13. See R. N. Whybray, Ecclesiastes (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989, 1997).
Whybray dates the book from the mid-third century BCE (19), but doubts Greek influence
(51–5).
14. A. C. Hagedorn, ‘Of Foxes and Vineyards: Greek Perspectives on the Song of Songs’,
VT, 53(3) (2003), 337–52; J. B. Burton, ‘Themes of Female Desire and Self-Assertion
4 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

Song of Songs, a majority of biblical scholars accept that these two books were
written by authors who were (at least partially) Hellenized. Such comparative
argument, however, is rarely applied to biblical books thought to be older, and
the idea of the entire Hebrew Bible as a Hellenistic book continues to be unac-
ceptable to most biblical scholars. Some have relied on archaeology to support
the historicity of biblical narratives;15 others do not understand biblical narrative
as entirely historical16 and allow that some parts were written in the Persian and
Hellenistic eras.
Such late dating has bolstered new studies, comparing biblical with Greek
classical texts. The discovery of Sumerian and Akkadian texts in the mid-nine-
teenth century has provided us with the most ancient written versions of the
Enuma Elish and the story of the Flood, both clearly reiterated in Genesis 1–10.17
Moreover, the Hammurabi Code displays significant parallels with the so-called
Covenant Code (Exod. 20–23), and the tale of Sargon’s birth is reiterated with
striking detail in that of Moses (Exod. 2).18 However, the laws of Exodus 20–23
could also be closely paralleled to Plato’s Nomoi and the birth tale of Moses to
that of Oedipus. The Old Babylonian parallels to biblical narrative generated an
excessive trend of placing the origins of biblical literature in Babylon, whereas
the greatest part of biblical law and narrative displayed little resemblance to
the earliest texts from Mesopotamia, but reflected a much wider spectrum of
ancient literature, such as that of Ugarit, Egypt, Hatti, the later traditions of
the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods as well as Greek literature; not
least Homer and Herodotus.19 Recently, Russell E. Gmirkin has argued that

in the Song of Songs and Hellenistic Poetry’, Perspectives on the Song of Songs, A. C.
Hagedorn (ed.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 180–205.
15. William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and How Did They Know It?
What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Past of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2001).
16. Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Archaeology’s New
Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001); cf.
T. L. Thompson, ‘Methods and Results: A Review of Two Recent Publications’, JSOT
15(2) (2001), 306–25.
17. Van Seters, In Search of History, 21, identifies Gilgamesh as a prototype of Homer’s
Odyssey and the Enuma Elish of Hesiod’s Theogony.
18. D. Irvin & T. L. Thompson, ‘The Joseph and Moses Narratives’, Israelite and Judean
History, Hayes & Miller, 181–209.
19. Such ancient Near Eastern literature is easily accessed in a great number of standard
anthologies today, among which are: H. Gressmann (ed.), Altorientalische Texte zum
alten Testament (Berlin: Toppelman, 1926); J. B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern
Texts Related to the Old Testament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969);
W. W. Hallo & K. L. Younger (eds), The Context of Scripture, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill,
1997–2003); and the multi-volume, genre-oriented series of anthologies published since
1990 by the Society of Biblical Literature under the title Writings From the Ancient
World. On the influence of ancient Near Eastern thought and literature on classical Greek,
as well as Greek and Jewish thought of the Hellenistic period, see the very important
series of articles in J. M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. I, part I:
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 5

the Mesopotamian influence on Genesis 1–11 was drawn from the Hellenized
Babylonian priest Berossus. Whereas the closeness of the parallels – especially
between Atrahasis and Genesis 6–8 – are such that general theories of diffusion
have only limited explanatory power, Berossus’ Babyloniaca, written in Greek
in the late fourth century BCE, is a far better candidate as the Bible’s source of
inspiration than either oral tradition or Old Babylonian cuneiform texts. Thus,
Gmirkin places the Pentateuch in the early third century BCE.20
The earliest comparisons between Greek and biblical literatures are found
in apologetic writings of ancient Hellenized Jews, such as Aristobulus, Philo
of Alexandria and Josephus Flavius, as well as Christians such as Clement of
Alexandria, Origen and Eusebius. All were well aware of narratives and laws
that were similar in both Greek texts and the Bible. All were also aware of the
similarities of Plato’s doctrine concerning the divine and the ideal State and
the Pentateuch. Whether Jews or Christians, they assumed that Moses and the
prophets lived long before Plato and most Greek writers. Accordingly, there was
little question that the Greeks reused the stories and philosophy of the Bible.
‘Theft by the Greeks’ was a charge developed by Josephus in Against Apion, and
this was expanded by the Church Fathers for apologetic purposes. They argued
that the Jews had received direct revelation from the one true god, whereas the
Greeks had maintained an idolatrous religion, with immoral fables about many
gods. With Philo and Josephus, they argued that Plato was an exception among
the superstitious Greeks. Through philosophy and reason, Plato held a notion of
the divine similar to that found in the Bible.21 With few followers in the Greek
world, however, Plato’s philosophy was a mere beginning, whereas Moses and
the prophets had raised a holy nation and a perfect state governed with divine
laws.22 Eusebius did notice that the state in Plato’s Nomoi was much like bibli-
cal Israel. Plato, the greatest of philosophers, imitated Moses.23 As Christianity,
once recognized, became the state’s religion, Justinian closed the debate together
with the Academy in Athens, as the philosophers were reduced to silence.
In modern scholarship, such debates have often been judged irrelevant, under
the assumption that both parties had supported arguments for their own doc-
trines on what were merely vague resemblances. Plato is not thought to have
borrowed anything from the Bible. The emergence of his thought is usually
traced to so-called pre-Socratic philosophers, as well as Homer, Herodotus and

“The Ancient Near East in Western Thought” (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan,
1995), 3–120.
20. R. E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories
and the Date of the Pentateuch, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 433;
Copenhagen International Seminar, 15 (London: T&T Clark, 2006).
21. Josephus Flavius, Against Apion, II 167–8; on the similarity of Plato’s ideal State with
biblical Israel, see II 222–4; on Plato’s imitation of Moses, see II 257, 280–81; on
the reproach of Plato’s worship of idols, see Origen’s Against Celsus V 43; VI 17; on
Origen’s claim of the Bible’s independence, see Against Celsus, VI 19; VII 30.
22. Origen, Against Celsus V 43.
23. Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparation for the Gospel, XII 52:35.
6 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

Euripides, which Plato, indeed, cited. Similarly, Old Testament scholars rarely
pay attention to the Church Fathers. This dismissal of the traditional debate over
priority coincided with the nineteenth-century dominance of higher criticism in
Germany. In the eighteenth century, however, the supersessionist arguments of
both Josephus and the Church Fathers had influenced scholarship considerably,
as, for instance, in Bishop Dom Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique et critique de
la Bible (1722–28), which listed biblical figures in alphabetic order, and offered
comparisons with Greek heroes and gods, supporting the claim that mythic clas-
sical texts were dependent on historical biblical tradition. For instance, Samson
was historical, which the mythical story of Heracles reiterated. Most of the dic-
tionary’s comparisons can be traced to Clement, Origen and Eusebius. Radical
scepticism towards church traditions also influenced eighteenth-century thought.
Voltaire’s popular parody of Calmet, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764),
insistently mocked the early Christian claims.24 The parody concluded with an
argument that directly inverted Calmet’s: the Old Testament was a world made
of Greek myths translated into Hebrew.25 Voltaire’s critique closed the issue, as
nineteenth-century scholarship turned towards internal analysis in its search for
origins: a development which, in its turn, would eventually give place to the
immense discoveries of ancient Near Eastern texts, supporting the influence of
archaeology and its discoveries in both biblical and classical studies of the 1920s
and 1930s, finally dominating the field in the wake of World War II and shifting
historicity’s pendulum towards a historical Bible and Homer.26
Archaeological discoveries of Early West Semitic and Hittite texts have,
however, allowed scholars to compare the common literary ground between
Europe and Syria–Palestine already from the Bronze Age, not least in regard
to mythic development and implications for early religion. Most notable have
been the rich archives from Ugarit in Syria and Khattusha in Anatolia.27 These

24. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Voltaire often cites Origen
and Eusebius. See the articles ‘Genèse’, 281–95, ‘Fables’, 262–3, ‘Job’, 332–6. In the
article ‘Salomon’, 464–74, Voltaire claimed that not only the books attributed to Solomon
(Eccl. and the Song of Songs) had been written in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era,
but many other biblical books as well.
25. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, article ‘Abraham’, 44.
26. The development of Old Testament scholarship and the debates of the past seventy
years, let alone a comparable development in the classical field, goes far beyond the
interests of this volume. For one perspective on a much debated topic up to 1990,
see T. L. Thompson, The Early History of the Israelite People From the Written and
Archaeological Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1–126. For developments since 1990,
see idem, ‘Changing Perspectives on the History of Palestine’, Biblical Narratives and
Palestine’s History: Changing Perspectives 2 (London: Acumen, 2013), 305–42.
27. On the texts from Ugarit, see A. Caquot & M. Sznycer, Ugaritic Religion. Iconography
of Religions, Section XV: Mesopotamia and the Near East; Fascicle 8 (Leiden: Brill,
1980); J. C. De Moor, An Anthology of Religious Texts from Ugarit (Leiden: Brill, 1987);
S. B. Parker, The Pre-Biblical Narrative Tradition, SBL Resource for Biblical Study, 24
(Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989); N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit: the Worlds of
Ilimilku and his Colleagues, The Biblical Seminar, 53 (Sheffield: SAP, 2002). For those
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 7

texts have brought considerable support and refinement to the theories of the
mid-twentieth century that had understood that the Greek archaic period writers,
Homer, Hesiod and the earliest biblical writers, had drawn from a shared back-
ground since the Bronze Age. This, however, did not support the early theory
of Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour that early Greek mythology had West
Semitic origins.28 That is more than we can know. Indeed, both the Bible and
the Greek archaic literature are first-millennium refractions of a linguistic trad-
ition that had a common heritage from the Bronze Age. Today, new approaches
are needed.
Relying on a comparative analysis of existing and verifiable texts, Thomas
Brodie has recently suggested that we consider Homer as a direct source for
Genesis,29 and argues that its many repetitions are not the result of careless
editing of sources with similar narratives. They function rather as diptychs:
reiterated narratives, which mirror each other with thematic purpose. While this
argument finds support in John Van Seters’s claim that the purported ‘editors’
for a ‘Deuteronomistic history’ are part of an obsolete construct, which had
been modelled on seventeenth-century Homeric scholarship,30 Brodie reverses
Van Seters’s understanding of Herodotus as dependent on the ‘Deuteronomist’,
and would clearly prefer Flemming Nielsen’s preference for Herodotus’ pri-
ority.31 Also Jan-Wim Wesselius, inspired by Flemming Nielsen’s research,32

texts from Khattusha, see H. Hoffner, Hittite Myths, 2nd edn (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 1998);
idem, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition, Documenta Et Monumenta Orientis
Antiqui, 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
28. See the works of C. Gordon, Before the Bible: The Common Background of Greek and
Hebrew Civilisations (London: Collins, 1962); M. Astour, Hellenosemitica (Leiden:
Brill, 1965); Martin L. West, The East Face of Helicon – West Asiatic Elements in Greek
Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); John Pairman Brown, Israel and
Hellas, BZAW, Bd. 231 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1995).
29. Thomas L. Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical and Theological
Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Brodie supports, with
Wesselius and Wajdenbaum (see below), that a single writer wrote Gen.–Kgs (71–2).
On Homer as a direct source for Gen., see ibid, 447–94.
30. J. Van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the ‘Editor’ in Biblical Criticism
(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006).
31. Van Seters, In Search of History, is unequivocal in his argument that Herodotus was the
later text and dependent on Van Seter’s ‘Deuteronomist’. On Nielsen’s misunderstand-
ing of Van Seters, see I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in
Competition, CIS, 14 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), esp. 20–22, with reference to F. A.
J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History, Herodotus and the Deuteronomistic History, CIS, 4
(Sheffield: SAP, 1997), 14–15; 89–90; 163.
32. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History. See also S. Mandell & D. N. Freedman, The Relationship
Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993);
for an alternative understanding of biblical narrative as theological and mythic allegory,
see T. L. Thompson, ‘Why Talk about the Past? The Bible, Epic and Historiography’,
‘Historiography in the Pentateuch: Twenty-Five Years After Historicity’ and ‘Kingship
and the Wrath of God: or Teaching Humility’, Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History,
147–62, 163–82 and 205–34, respectively.
8 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

understands the biblical tradition to be dependent on Herodotus in both content

and technique.33 For example, the conquest of Canaan is likened to Xerxes’
march on Greece, denoting a victory, which also ultimately failed. Like Van
Seters, Wesselius also suggests that repetitive (though contradictory) biblical
narratives with similar plots do not mark an editor of disparate sources, but rather
are a stereotypical technique of a single author,34 closely akin to Herodotus’ use
of reiteration. What formerly seemed redundant now appears intentional, creat-
ing the appearance of a summary collection of a rich variety of sources.35
Several scholars have suggested that biblical and Homeric parallels were far
too numerous and detailed to be merely examples of literary diffusion.36 Bruce
Louden has argued that the pantheon of Homer reflects origins in West-Semitic
(e.g. Athena from Anath).37 Nevertheless, the Hebrew Bible (not to mention the
New Testament)38 has in its turn borrowed from both the Iliad and Odyssey.39
The Iliad’s shared motifs appear notably in the Prophets, lamenting the fall of
Jerusalem, much as Trojans foretell the fate of Ilion. Battle scenes in Joshua,
Judges, Samuel and Kings display patterns found in the Iliad. The Odyssey’s
theme of the nostos – the journey abroad and the return home – structures the
narratives from Jacob to Joshua. Similarly, the Odyssey’s theoxeny – the wel-
coming of a god in the guise of a human – not only occurs several times in
Genesis (18–19),40 but is itself the object of caricature in Judges 13. Odysseus’
return to Ithaca also finds a home in the story of Joseph (Gen. 37–50), reiterating
parallel motifs to structure pivotal turns of the narrative (Odyssey XIV–XXIV).
Both heroes interpret dreams, both test their loved ones and both hide their
identity from their families to await a dramatic moment of revelation. It is note-
worthy that Louden, like Wesselius, concludes his analysis with an observation
on the neglect that such comparison has received from scholarship, both biblical

33. Jan-Wim Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’ Histories as
Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible, JSOTS 345 (Londonk: SAP, 2002), 72.
34. See also the discussion of the three-fold wife-sister and shepherd-conflict episodes
of Gen. 12, 20 and 26 in T. L. Thompson, ‘A New Attempt to Date the Patriarchal
Narratives’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 98 (1978), 20–27.
35. A similar alternative to source theory had been offered for Exod.: T. L. Thompson,
‘Some Exegetical and Theological Implications of Understanding Exodus as a Collected
Tradition’, Fra Dybet: Festskrift til John Strange, Forum for bibelsk eksegese, 5, N. P.
Lemche & M. Müller (eds) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1994), 233–42.
36. See, however, Chapter 5.
37. B. Louden, The Iliad, Structure, Myth, and Meaning (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006).
38. See D. R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000).
39. B. Louden, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
40. See further, J. Taylor, Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition (London:
Duckworth, 2007).
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 9

and classical.41 Louden supposes that in antiquity, the Homeric epics journeyed
widely, notably in relationship to trade, and it seems likely to him that the Bible
has borrowed such motifs and structures from Homer.42
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò has shown that many motifs in the so-called
‘primeval history’ (Gen. 1–11) echo Plato. The creation narrative can be likened
to Plato’s Timaeus, the notion of human breath is comparable to Plato’s notion
of the soul in Phaedo and Phaedrus, and the separating from the primordial
human being into two of different sexes has similarities with the Symposium.43
Niesiołowski-Spanò goes on to suggest that the Genesis narrative is a Hellenistic
reiteration of Plato, the Platonic influence providing a simpler and thus more sci-
entific explanation of origin.44 He argues that this narrative, or perhaps Genesis
as a whole, post-dates a Torah, which comprises legislative books from the
Persian era. On the other hand, it has been noted by scholars, such as Moshe
Weinfeld and Yaakov Kupitz45 (and previously by Eusebius, Preparation for
the Gospel, XII), that Plato’s Ideal State bears a striking resemblance to bibli-
cal Israel: both are founded on land conquered by force, and divided by lottery
to twelve tribes, each subdivided into paternal families; each family receiving
its plot of land for cultivation, transmitted from father to son. If that father had
only daughters, such daughters would need to marry men from their own tribe
so that the land – which also could not be sold – would remain within the same
tribes, forever.46

41. Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel: ‘It is in a way amazing that its dependence
on Herodotus has never been noticed before, as it is in a way so evident that it proves
almost impossible to ignore it once one becomes aware of it’ (100).
42. Louden, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East: ‘When we consider which language,
Greek or Hebrew, had the greater number of speakers, which culture, Greek or Israelite,
was spread over a larger area, which people, by virtue of its maritime facility, was in
contact with a greater number of other peoples, the odds grow far greater that Greek
culture would have exerted its influence, direct or indirect, on Israelite culture, rather than
vice versa’ (321). T. L. Brodie has reached similar conclusions (Genesis as Dialogue,
472–81).
43. Ł. Niesiołowski-Spanò, ‘Primeval History in the Persian Period?’ Scandinavian Journal
of Old Testament, 12(21) (2007), 106–26; see also Ł. Niesiołowski-Spanò, Origin Myths
and Holy Places in the Old Testament: A Study of Aetiological Narratives, Copenhagen
International Seminar (London: Equinox, 2011).
44. Niesiołowski-Spanò, ‘Primeval History?’, 122.
45. M. Weinfeld, The Promise of the Land, The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the
Israelites (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 22–4. Yaakov S. Kupitz,
‘La Bible est-elle un plagiat?’, Science et Avenir, hors-série no. 86 (1997), 85–8. See
also A. C. Hagedorn, Between Moses and Plato – Individual and Society in Deuteronomy
and Ancient Greek Law (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Hagedorn states
that there was a common background to Greek and Hebrew law, and does not discuss
questions of possible borrowings (ibid., 38).
46. Compare Lev. 25:13-17, Num. 26, 27 and 36, with Plato, Laws, 741 b–c for the prohibi-
tion of selling the plots of land, and 745 b–c for the division by lottery through twelve
tribes, and 924 c–e for the epiclerate, the wedding of the inheriting daughter in her own
tribe.
10 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

Suggesting that Homer, Herodotus and Plato were sources for the Bible,
Philippe Wajdenbaum has built an argument on some fifty laws that are common
to both Plato and the Pentateuch, at times presented in the same order; as in the
so-called ‘covenant code’ (Exod. 20–23), others in Leviticus and Numbers, and
Deuteronomy 12–26.47 As Plato’s Laws have no narratives, but are discussed
by three protagonists in a dialogue, Wajdenbaum suggested the possibility that
Plato’s text may have been the framework used by biblical authors in creating the
biblical Israel and many of its secular laws, the specifically religious laws finding
no Greek equivalents. Indeed, Plato himself had suggested that the founder of his
would-be State use mythology in an effort to persuade the people of such laws’
divine origin and perfection. The legislator as poet should use stories to illustrate
how obedience is rewarded by God and how disobedience is punished.48
Wajdenbaum’s analysis fits well the observations of numerous parallels
between biblical and classical literature, which encouraged him to conclude
that the Pentateuch and Joshua may have reused the framework and laws from
Plato’s Laws, as well as moral precepts from The Republic. In the conquest nar-
rative, twelve-tribe Israel is created after a plan Moses received from Yahweh.
A series of tales from Exodus to Kings reiterate how Israel, which should have
been perfect and hence eternal, failed to obey Yahweh. They would choose their
own land even before they entered the Promised Land; they would have local
gods and be like other nations; they would have their own king (Deut. 17:15), a
head taller than his neighbour; David would build Yahweh a house!49 Saul would
not wait and made his own decisions (1 Sam. 15), David, the rich man, took
the one thing Uriah had (2 Sam. 11), and Solomon murdered his own brother
(1 Kgs 2:23-5) and collected horses, women and gold (1 Kgs 10:28–11:10, in
contradiction to Deut. 17:16-17). Such a mythic and philosophical framework is
also found in Plato’s Critias, in the story of Atlantis, in which a divinely founded
society should likewise have been perfect and eternal. The first ten kings of its
ten tribes made a covenant to obey its divine laws.50 Yet, with the passage of gen-
erations, its kings too grew more and more unfaithful. Zeus, like Yahweh with
Israel and Judah, destroyed Atlantis. The ancient debate of Jewish and Christian
writers comparing Platonic and biblical ideas and texts resurfaces again. One
might well surmise that the modern field of biblical studies was indeed a reac-
tion against the radical criticism of the Enlightenment’s efforts to provide a new
model for the origins of the Bible.51

47. Philippe Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible,
Copenhagen International Seminar (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011).
48. Plato, Laws, 817 a–d.
49. Compare Samuel’s warning of the dangers of kingship in 1 Sam. 8:11-18 with Theseus’
speech against tyranny in Euripides, The Suppliants, 430–60.
50. Plato, Critias, 119 d–120 c. Compare with Exod. 24:1-11. In both cases, the assembly
swears to respect the divine laws forever, engaging their offspring. Bulls or oxen are
sacrificed and their blood is dashed on the assembly.
51. Roland Boer, ‘The German Pestilence: Re-assessing Feuerbach, Strauss and Bauer’,
‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus,
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 11

Current biblical and classical scholarship has reached a turning point where,
on the one hand, a dating of the Hebrew Bible to the Persian and Hellenistic
eras grows increasingly likely, and, on the other hand, a number of biblical and
classical scholars have begun to observe that the influence of Greek literature
on the composition of the Hebrew Bible becomes increasingly clear. However,
Niels Peter Lemche, who has been at the forefront of support for a Hellenistic
dating of the Hebrew Bible, has also warned scholars against the temptation of
a ‘Panhellenism’.52 Such religious practices as the Sabbath, circumcision and
the specific alimentary prohibitions of Leviticus are not found in ancient Greek
practices, and may thus be considered as original to Samaritan and Judean custom.
Moreover, the observation that the Hebrew Bible reused many mythical and
legislative themes of Greek literature does not alter its similar dependencies on
ancient Near Eastern literature, not least in relationship to royal ideology.53 The
sophistication of biblical reiteration of Greek literature is well compared to that
of Hellenistic and Roman epics, such as Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica or
Virgil’s Aeneid – both multiplying, in almost every verse, references to Homer and
other Greek authors.54 If, indeed, the authors of the Hebrew Bible had their part in
a Hellenistic literary milieu, they were familiar with such baroque techniques of
writing. Reiterating yet more ancient authors – Homer being the most prestigious
one – was not a form of ‘plagiarism’, which is a modern, anachronistic notion.
Quite the contrary; it is the hallmark of literary craftsmanship.55 The way the
biblical authors appropriated Greek tradition, and transformed it into allegorical
epic, parallels the way Roman authors, such as Virgil, drew on Greek literature.56
This book offers a collection of essays comparing the Hebrew and Greek
Bibles with the Greek classics, as well as methodological discussions of the his-
torical conditions under which Greek literature may have influenced Jewish and
early Christian writings. These essays are collected in three parts. The first part,
‘A Mediterranean or Ancient Near Eastern Context?’, consists of discussions of
methodology regarding a Persian or Hellenistic dating of biblical tradition and
the implications of such a dating. The second part, ‘Greek-Jew or Jew-Greek?’,57

Thomas L. Thompson & Thomas S. Verenna (eds), CIS (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012),
33–56.
52. Niels Peter Lemche, ‘Does the Idea of the Old Testament as a Hellenistic Book Prevent
Source Criticism of the Pentateuch?’, Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament, 25(1)
(2011), 75–92.
53. T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Ancient Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). On the status of such traditions in the Hellenistic period,
see R. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis.
54. On this literary technique in the third century in Alexandria, see Virginia Knight, The
Renewal of Epic. Responses to Homer in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Leiden: Brill,
1995).
55. See Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue, 426–7.
56. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, 119; Wesselius, The Origins of the
History of Israel, 63–6.
57. This expression originally comes from James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Bodley Head,
1960), 622, and was coined by Robert P. Carroll, ‘Jewgreek Greekjew: The Hebrew Bible
12 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

consists of comparative studies of specific books or chapters of the Hebrew

Bible. The third part, ‘Fleets from Kittim (Numbers 24:24): Roman-era Texts’,
gathers contributions related to Roman era texts, such as 1–2 Maccabees, the
Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and the New Testament.
In the first chapter of Part I, Emanuel Pfoh addresses questions related to
the historical and cultural contexts in which literary influence and dependence
of biblical stories may have occurred. A historical and cultural epistemology is
employed, when one interprets the biblical narrative in hopes of understanding
how such stories depict reality, past and present, in ancient and modern inter-
pretive contexts, respectively. He then attempts to construct a historical context
for producing stories, in order to provide potential intentions and functions for
their existence. Finally, Pfoh relates such influence and dependence to a broad
cultural background from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, during the second
half of the first millennium BCE, while giving special emphasis to the spread
of Hellenism in the Levant. Pfoh compares how Roman authors appropriated
Greek literary tradition with the way biblical authors may have done the same.
Étienne Nodet argues that the recent discovery of a large Israelite–Samaritan
shrine on Mount Gerizim has significant consequences of challenging a Jewish
bias in biblical studies. After assessing biblical hints at the importance of
Shechem, Nodet opens the question of why the Samaritan Bible is so short,
containing only the Pentateuch, along with a Chronicle of little authority, and
beginning with a short variant of Joshua, poorly preserved, but akin to the ver-
sion of Joshua that Josephus used. Nodet then asks how we are to explain the
huge difference in the ideologies of Ezra, Nehemiah and 1 Maccabbees, whose
views are strictly legal and national, and the Prophets as a whole, including
‘post-exilic’ layers, where the general mindset is both ethical and eschatological.
Finally, Nodet points out that the common view held by Jews since (at least) the
writings of the priest Aristobulus, in the second century BCE, and later by early
Christian writers, was that the Greek philosophers (especially Plato) borrowed
from Moses. Nodet suggests that an answer to all such problems is, first of all,
that no biblical editing had ever been done in Babylonia. Second, the final shape
of most of the Hebrew Bible was given at the library of Alexandria, in two major
steps: the Pentateuch in the third century BCE and the Prophets and Writings in
the second century BCE after the final split between Samaritans (= Shechem in
the biblical allegory) and Jews, which occurred first after the Maccabean crisis.
The main sources used by Nodet in this survey, besides Josephus, are Ben Sira
and the Letter of Aristeas.
Russell E. Gmirkin discusses how the Hebrew Bible relates events, earlier or
contemporary to the rise of classical Greek culture. Having previously argued that
the Pentateuch was written around 270 BCE, using Greek sources from the Library
of Alexandria, he also responds to Lester Grabbe’s critique of his Hellenistic
dating on the strength of the alleged testimony of Hecataeus of Abdera (late

is All Greek to Me. Reflections on the Problematics of Dating the Origins of the Bible in
Relation to Contemporary Discussions of Biblical Historiography’, Grabbe, Did Moses
Speak Attic?, 91–107.
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 13

fourth century BCE), quoted by Diodorus Siculus. Gmirkin attempts to show both
that this testimony cannot be attributed to Hecataeus and is not evidence for a
pre-Hellenistic dating of the Hebrew Bible. He concludes that understanding the
Hebrew Bible as an ancient text, drawing primarily from Near Eastern influences,
as Grabbe does, is not a valid position, and that the evident Greek influence on the
Bible, as witnessed by comparative analysis, should now be accepted.
Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, in Chapter 4, suggests a new way of understand-
ing oriental influence on Aegean literature. Although an assertion of Near Eastern
influence on the Aegean is dominant in much scholarship, there are numerous
indications of a change in this perspective, which does not deny such influence,
but suggests a reciprocal cultural transmission from West to East. Niesiołowski-
Spanò takes up the role of Philistines, who had originally settled in Palestine as
refugees from the Mycenaean world, to point out possible media, forms and time
of transmitting traces of ‘Aegean’ elements in the religious traditions of Palestine.
Thomas Thompson closes Part I with a discussion on narrative reiteration,
in a comparative literary analysis, to point out some of the difficulties related to
assertions of borrowing and dependency in ancient literature. Primarily using
his previous analyses of birth stories, testimonies of the good king and the poor-
man’s song, he concentrates on the problematic flexibility of literary transmis-
sion and diffusion. Taking his starting point in an acceptance that chronological
priority, coupled with judgments of uniqueness of the elements shared between
two texts, as well as explicit or implicit citations of an earlier text do sup-
port judgments of dependency, the cultural-wide developments of stereotypical
narrative motifs, epithets, plot-lines, themes, narrative structures and episode
patterns, as well as scene and tale types, typically create a complex narrative
rhetoric, the recognition of which precludes most judgments of direct literary
dependence or borrowing related to concrete examples of such reiterations.
Opening Part II, Yaakov Kupitz discusses how the English scholar Zacharias
Bogan, in his book Homerus Hebraizon (Oxford, 1658), noticed the striking
similarity between the scene of the young Rebecca, a pitcher of water on her
shoulder (Gen. 24:15), going to meet Eliezer, who had come as a stranger seek-
ing a bride for Isaac, with that of Athena meeting Odysseus in the guise of a
young maiden, also carrying her pitcher of water (Hom. Od. 7.19–20), who takes
him to meet the family of his potential bride-to-be, Nausicaa. This ‘fingerprint’
is but one of many complex similarities between two highly romantic texts.
Kupitz points out these similarities, analyses them and tries to follow the trend
of associations of the author of Genesis 24, who, Kupitz thinks, without a doubt,
used Homer (Od. 6–7) as a source. He also analyses two other occurrences in
the Pentateuch of a man meeting a woman at a well, namely Jacob meeting with
Rachel (Gen. 29) and Moses with Zipporah (Exod. 2). Both can be compared
similarly with the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa.
Philippe Guillaume follows with a wide range of comparisons of characters
in Judges with Greek heroes, most notably from Hesiod’s myth of the races in
Works and Days. He first reviews references for the period of the Judges from
Ben Sira, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Nehemiah and Psalms, as well as texts from
Eupolemus and Demetrius the Chronographer. Guillaume reviews Hesiod’s
14 Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum

myth of the metallic races, representing different declining stages of humankind.

Between the Bronze Age and Iron Age was the age of heroes, with its demi-gods
and terrible wars. He reviews how the notion of the ‘heroic age’ was a reference
for authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato, and suggests that this may
also have influenced the Book of Judges. Special attention is given to the figure
of Othniel, the first Judge as a transition from the period of Joshua and Caleb,
which can be compared to Hesiod’s Bronze Age. Further, Guillaume compares
the tribe of Dan with the Greek myth of the Danaids. The abduction of women
as the cause of a war that put an end to the heroic age appears in Judges 19–21,
as well as in the Trojan epic, leading Guillaume to conclude that Judges may
have emulated Herodotus and Thucydides in creating an age of heroes that might
mirror contemporary conflicts like the Hasmonean wars.
In Chapter 8, Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme proposes a comparison of
the episode of the rape of the Levite’s concubine by the men of Gibeah, and the
subsequent war of Israel’s tribes against Benjamin, with the foundation myth
of the abduction of the Sabines by the Romans, known notably from Livy and
Plutarch. The motif of the dismemberment of the concubine is reminiscent of
the myth of Osiris, known widely from ancient Egyptian to Hellenistic sources
and Plutarch. Gudme raises the question of a shared context between Egyptians,
Jews and Romans, resulting in stories showing similar patterns.
Flemming Nielsen compares Greek and biblical traditions of heroes. Solon
unifies functions that biblical texts ascribe to Solomon and Moses, respectively.
Like Solomon, Solon was a poet, and fragments of his poetry have been trans-
mitted by classical and later authors. On the other hand, Solon was a lawgiver,
and can be compared to Moses. The motif of the forgiveness of debts, for which
Solon was famous, is reminiscent of the books of Ezra–Nehemiah.
Part III gathers contributions about biblical and para-biblical texts from the
Roman era. Philippe Wajdenbaum compares 1 Maccabees to Polybius. Scholars
have noticed that historical information about the Seleucids, the Lagids and
Rome displayed in 1 and 2 Maccabees, as well as in chapter 11 of the Book of
Daniel, often seems to be confirmed by Polybius’ Histories. 1 Maccabees and
Polybius both tell of the stories of the Seleucid kings and their weakening in
the face of the rising power of Rome as the new ruler of the Mediterranean. In
his contribution, Wajdenbaum compares common narratives and other details
in Polybius and 1 Maccabees. As the Books of the Maccabees were likely writ-
ten in the late Hellenistic or early Roman era, this study raises the question of
whether Polybius might have been used as a source for historical information by
1 Maccabees.
Reinhard G. Kratz (Chapter 11) addresses the relationship between the Dead
Sea scroll commentaries (pesharim) on Prophets and Psalms and Hellenistic
commentaries on pagan authors. The chapter focuses on the Pesher Nahum and
Greek commentaries on Aristophanes, and it provides a comparison of formal
aspects, interpretation techniques and content, as well as the hermeneutic con-
cept behind two types of commentaries. Kratz concludes that the method of phil-
ological interpretation of Alexandrian provenance must be taken into account in
explaining the Qumran pesharim.
 Introduction: Making room for Japheth 15

Ingrid Hjelm’s contribution discusses the status of Greek authors in Josephus’

Against Apion. Hjelm surveys how Josephus considered Greek authors to be less
reliable than Eastern authors, such as the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians and the Jews.
As the Jews faced accusations of being a recent religion, Josephus opposed the
arguments of such authors as Apion, by claiming the high antiquity of the Jewish
nation and its institutions. In this perspective, Josephus claimed that the Greek
authors and philosophers had borrowed many of their notions from the Jews.
John Taylor explores, once again, themes outlined in chapters 1 and 4 of
Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition. He focuses particularly
on similarities between the Odyssey and Mark, Luke and John, though without
attempting to demonstrate a direct debt. The function of recognition scenes in
both biblical and Greek literature is also considered, as Taylor shows how stories
in both traditions function as theological and literary parables or metaphors.
In Chapter 14, Bruce Louden discusses striking parallels between Hesiod’s
Theogony and the Book of Revelation. Revelation, the youngest book of the
New Testament, employs motifs found in some of the oldest surviving myths.
Though common in Near Eastern myths, the motifs are also central to Hesiod’s
Theogony. A heavenly choir ceaselessly sings praises of the Sky Father. Both
choirs are associated with a similar formula (what is, what was, what will be).
An immortal being waits to devour the immortal offspring of a ‘goddess’, who
safely gives birth and takes refuge in a place prepared for her. The special child
and future ruler over all is whisked away to safety. A war breaks out in heaven,
between two groups of immortals. The defeated group is imprisoned in the
underworld, and a dragon, who wants to rule the universe, is defeated, and
also imprisoned in the underworld. Earth is personified, and acts as an agent.
According to Louden, the Theogony unexpectedly provides a context for inter-
preting and understanding aspects of Revelation. Using Hesiod’s poem as a lens
to engage Revelation not only reaffirms its own significance, but also extends
its scope to subject areas with which it is rarely associated. Christian myth
uses some of the same genres of myth to depict Jesus and his reign, much as
Hesiod used Zeus. Louden suggests that the authors of Revelation were aware
of Hesiod’s Theogony and, in some instances, saw themselves as ‘correcting’ it.
The fourteen contributions gathered in this volume all agree that Hellenic cul-
ture influenced, directly or indirectly, the Hebrew Bible and later texts such as the
Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Pesharim, Josephus and the New Testament.
Although each chapter offers a unique understanding of how Hellenic influences
permeated the Near East, we are in general agreement that most of the books
known as ‘the Bible’ were written when ‘God made room for Japheth in the
tents of Shem’ – that is, at a time when the influence of Hellenism was likely
to have reached Samaritans and Jews. Japheth, known in Genesis as the son of
Noah and the ancestor of the Greeks, is known in the Greek tradition as Iapetos,
the father of Prometheus, himself the father of Deucalion, who had survived the
great Flood in the Greeks’ version of the myth. Among Deucalion’s descend-
ants was one named Ion: biblical Yavan. Our title indeed implies not only that
the Hebrew Bible was written in a Hellenistic context, but that the authors of
Genesis had made room for Hesiod’s Theogony.
This page intentionally left blank
 I

A Mediterranean or
ancient Near Eastern context?
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 1

Ancient historiography, biblical stories

and Hellenism
Emanuel Pfoh

A prelude on the cultural and intellectual contexts

of reading the Bible

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

1. On the cultural relativization of historical consciousness, cf. F. Hartog, Régimes

d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps, La Librairie du XXIe Siècle (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 2003). For approaches to the history of exegesis and biblical inter-
pretation, see the (now dated but still of value) synthesis in J. H. Hayes, ‘The History
of the Study of Israelite and Judaean History’, Israelite and Judaean History, J. H.
Hayes & J. M. Miller (eds) (London: SCM Press, 1977), 1–69; and more recently,
N. P. Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History: A Critical Survey
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 31–43; and in greater detail, P.
Gibert, L’invention critique de la Bible, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, Bibliothèque des Histoires
20 Emanuel Pfoh

for the interpretation of Scripture: it contends that for something to be real and
evoke truth, it must be inscribed in history; therefore, the theological truth of
the biblical narrative had to be inscribed in history as well: biblical events must
be historical events. It is thus that biblical archaeology, as a modernist historical
enterprise, finds its intellectual legitimation.2
From a theological perspective – and especially from within a confessional
community – the Bible ‘speaks to us’ now, in the present, and such a transhis-
torical code of communication seems to have been expanded to the same extent
into our contemporary understanding of ancient evocations of the past: the Bible
evokes the past historically, as we do in modern times. This situation, of course,
started being criticized and challenged with a new emphasis, particularly in
biblical studies, some forty years ago.3 Yet still, the cultural disposition of under-
standing the Bible as history, as generally depicting actual historical events to
some degree, lingers nowadays; and it is widespread in the general public and,
not least, among many biblical scholars.
This deconstructive awareness forces us to go beyond the simple historiciza-
tion of biblical events, enabling a spectrum of sounder interpretative alterna-
tives for the historian. We need, for instance, to approach the interpretation of
biblical stories from a critical cultural and historical epistemology. By this, I
mean to foster a socio-anthropological or ethnographic sensitivity in our inter-
pretation of ancient texts in order to understand biblical evocations according
to the most probable cultural, intellectual and historical contexts in which they
originally appeared or were produced. As impossible to reach as this principle
would seem to be, I believe the historian can expect and aim at no less from a
critical methodological point of view.4 Once we have acknowledged the cultural

(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010); and M. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise
of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On a more theoretical level,
one should not exclude (at least, so easily) in this respect the epistemological discussion
in M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:
Routledge, 2002 [orig. French edn, 1966]), esp. ch. 7.
2. Regarding this assertion, see, for instance, G. E. Wright, Biblical Archaeology, abridged
edn (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), ix: ‘Biblical faith is the knowledge of
life’s meaning in the light of what God did in a particular history. Thus the Bible cannot
be understood unless the history it relates is taken seriously. Knowledge of biblical his-
tory is essential to the understanding of biblical faith.’ Cf. the address to this question
in T. L. Thompson, The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel. I: The Formation of Genesis
and Exodus 1–23, JSOTSup, 55 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), 11–15, 22–8; also E.
Pfoh, The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological
Perspectives, CIS (London: Equinox, 2009), 58–68.
3. I refer to the most recent synthesis in T. L. Thompson, ‘Changing Perspectives on the
History of Palestine’, Biblical Narrative and Palestine’s History: Changing Perspectives
2, T. L. Thompson, CIS (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013), 305–41.
4. See E. Pfoh, ‘Anthropology and Biblical Studies: A Critical Manifesto’, Anthropology
and the Bible: Critical Perspectives, E. Pfoh (ed.), Biblical Intersections, 3 (Piscataway,
NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 15–35. For a useful discussion on reconstructing, constructing
and deconstructing history, see A. Munslow, Deconstructing History, 2nd edn (London:
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 21

otherness of biblical epistemology regarding its use of the past, we may be able
to overcome the problematic situation of blending historical reconstruction and
biblical evocation by, first, setting the context for the creation of biblical texts
and finding the purpose of its production; and then, attempting to understand
how the Bible evokes the past and to what extent all this is of direct or indirect,
primary or secondary, use for the historian interested in writing historically
about Israel and ancient Palestine.

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

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

The exile in this way has two roles to play. It at one and the same time dis-
connects and unites the present and the past. It is also the instrument that
guarantees that the transgressors are punished because of their sins and never
allowed to return, and that their country is cleansed of their sins. The genera-
tion that returns to the land of their fathers will at the same time understand
that it is their land. It belonged to their fathers and was left without inhabit-
ants as long as the exile lasted, which says that nobody except the generation
that returned should be allowed to stay in the land. As the true heirs of their
fathers, the sons will take up and fulfill their obligation to Yahweh and the
land in the place where their fathers failed. The exile is in this way clearly
seen as a foundation myth of the Jewish people that arose sometime in the
latter part of the first millennium BCE. Without the idea of an exile there could

Routledge, 2006). I do not necessarily follow each and every argument presented by
Munslow in this work; however, his survey is most enlightening on the matter.
5. What follows is abstracted and slightly revised and expanded from Pfoh, The Emergence
of Israel in Ancient Palestine, 26–39, 44–7.
6. Actually, there is no firm evidence for a historical ‘mass return’: see B. Becking, ‘“We
All Returned as One!”: Critical Notes on the Myth of the Mass Return’, Judah and the
Judeans in the Persian Period, O. Lipschits & M. Oeming (eds) (Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2006), 3–18.
22 Emanuel Pfoh

be nothing like the purified remnant of Isaiah, residing on Mount Zion under
the palladium of their God.7

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

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

We could think, then, of the Hellenistic period as a very probable historical,

social and material context for the beginning of what is referred to as ‘biblical
historiography’. In sum, this involves imagining a scribal process that was per-

7. N. P. Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, LAI (Louisville, KY: Westminster
John Knox Press, 1998), 87. Cf. also E. T. Mullen, Jr., Narrative History and Ethnic
Boundaries: The Deuteronomistic Historian and the Creation of Israelite National
Identity, SBLSymp (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993). On ‘the Exile’, see the dis-
cussion in L. L. Grabbe (ed.), Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and
Ideology, JSOTSup, 278/ESHM, 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); and the
perspectives in Lipschits & Oeming, Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period.
8. P. R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures, LAI
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 71. On the spread of Hellenism,
see M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during
the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1974), vol. I, esp. 58–65
(diffusion of Greek language in Palestine), 65–83 (expansion of education, i.e. the gym-
nasium), and 83–102 (Greek philosophy and literature in Palestine); also, in general, A.
M. Berlin, ‘Between Large Forces: Palestine in the Hellenistic Period’, BA 60 (1997),
2–51; and, on the socio-economic developments fostered by Hellenism, H.-P. Kuhnen,
‘Israel unmittelbar vor und nach Alexander der Groβen. Geschichtlicher Wandel und
archäeologischer Befund’, Die Griechen und das antike Israel: Interdisziplinäre Studien
zur Religions- und Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Landes, S. Alkier & M. Witte (eds),
OBO, 201 (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2004), 1–27.
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 23

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

9. See R. P. Carroll, ‘Exile! What Exile? Deportation and the Discourses of Diaspora’,
in Leading Captivity Captive: ‘The Exile’ as History and Ideology, L. L. Grabbe (ed.),
JSOTSup, 278/ESHM, 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 62–79. As Carroll
observes, ‘we are on safer ground treating these tropes [exile and return] as literary and
cultural rather than as necessarily having purely historical referents’ (64).
10. See R. Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament, 2 vols; OTL
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), vol. 1, 156–80; A. Schoors, Die
Königreiche Israel und Juda im 8. und 7. Jahrhundert v. Chr., Biblische Enzyklopädie,
5 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1998), 108–81; W. Houston, ‘Was there a Social Crisis
in the Eighth Century?’, In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel. Proceedings of the Oxford Old
Testament Seminar 2001–2003, J. Day (ed.), JSOTSup, 406 (London: T&T Clark, 2004),
130–49; H. M. Barstad, ‘Can Prophetic Texts Be Dated? Amos 1–2 as an Example’, Ahab
Agonistes: The Rise and Fall of the Omri Dynasty, LHB/OTS, 421/ESHM, L. L. Grabbe
(ed.), 6 (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 21–40, esp. 36–7, in relation to prophetic literature.
See, however, the pertinent remarks in Lemche, The Israelites, 27–8 and 94–5; idem,
The Old Testament between Theology and History, 212–34; Davies, Scribes and Schools,
107–25; E. Ben Zvi, ‘Beginning to Address the Question: Why Were Prophetic Books
Produced and “Consumed” in Ancient Yehud?’, Historie og konstruktion. Festskrift
til Niels Peter Lemche i anledning af 60 års fødselsdagen den 6. september 2005, M.
Müller & T. L. Thompson (eds), FBE, 14 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag,
2005), 30–41; and in M. Nissinen, ‘How Prophecy Became Literature’, SJOT 19 (2005),
153–72. Cf. also the interpretive disposition in T. L. Thompson, The Bible in History:
How Writers Create a Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 388–91, against such a
historical view of biblical prophets.
11. See especially T. L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and
David (New York: Basic Books, 2005), chapters 5–10.
24 Emanuel Pfoh

Biblical, Greek and Roman uses of the past

The comparison of biblical stories with Greco-Roman historiography has some

relevant antecedents in recent scholarship as a means of exposing influences,
parallelisms and borrowings, but also dating the composition and production
of biblical literature.12 This goes along with the opportunity of readdressing
our understanding of how ancient Eastern Mediterranean elites constructed and
evoked the past. (Elites are not the whole of the population; since the textual
remnants of ancient stories and traditions are the products of a scribal class – an
important component of ruling elites in antiquity – we hardly have access to
what most of the people, peasantry and other anonymous and voiceless social
elements thought or experienced.)13
Traditionally, the study of recalling the past among the peoples of the
Eastern Mediterranean basin and the Near East established a watershed between

12. See, among other studies and with different conclusions, N. P. Lemche, ‘The Old
Testament – A Hellenistic Book?’, SJOT 7 (1993), 163–93; S. Mandell & D. N. Freedman,
The Relationship between Herodotus’ History and Primary History, SFSHJ, 60 (Atlanta,
GA: Scholars Press, 1993); F. A. J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus and the
Deuteronomistic History, JSOTSup, 251/CIS, 4 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1997); J. C. Poirier, ‘Generational Reckoning in Hesiod and in the Pentateuch’, JNES 62
(2003), 193–9; L. D. Hawk, ‘Violent Grace: Tragedy and Transformation in the Oresteia
and the Deuteronomistic History’, JSOT 28 (2001), 73–88; K. Stott, ‘Herodotus and
the Old Testament: A Comparative Reading of the Ascendancy Stories of King Cyrus
and David’, SJOT 16 (2002), 52–78; J.-W. Wesselius, The Origin of the History of
Israel: Herodotus’ Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible, JSOTSup,
345 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); H.-P. Mathys, ‘Das Alte Testament
– ein hellenistisches Buch’, Kein Land für sich allein: Studien zum Kulturkontakt in
Kanaan, Israel/Palästina und Ebirnâri für Manfred Weippert zum 65. Geburstag, OBO,
U. Hübner & E. A. Knauf (eds), 166 (Fribourg: Academic Press/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2002), 278–93; T. B. Dozeman, ‘Geography and History in Herodotus and
in Ezra–Nehemiah’, JBL 122 (2003), 449–66; G. A. Knoppers, ‘Greek Historiography
and the Chronicler’s History: A Reexamination’, JBL 122 (2003), 627–50; G. Larsson,
‘Possible Hellenistic Influences in the Historical Parts of the Old Testament’, SJOT 18
(2004), 296–311; N. Na’aman, ‘The Danite Campaign Northward (Judges XVII–XVIII)
and the Migration of the Phocaeans to Massalia (Strabo IV 1,4)’, VT 55 (2005), 47–60; Ł.
Niesiołowski-Spanò, ‘Primeval History in the Persian Period?’, SJOT 21 (2007), 106–26;
and the challenging studies by R. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus:
Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch, LHB/OTS, 433/CIS, 15 (London:
T&T Clark, 2006), which places a date for the composition of the Pentateuch c. early
third century BCE, following the works of Berossus and Manetho (as its title indicates)
under the literary patronage of Ptolemy II; and P. Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert:
Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, CIS (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), which proposes
a direct dependence of biblical stories from Greek mythical and philosophical traditions
(see further below).
13. On Judean scribes, see Davies, Scribes and Schools, 74–88. See also, for a comparison
with Mesopotamian history, M. van de Mieroop, Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of
History, Approaching the Ancient World, 6 (London: Routledge, 1999).
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 25

Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Israelites, on the one hand, and Greeks and
Romans, on the other.14 The latter were thought of as the real historians of
antiquity. In fact, the Greeks are still viewed as the proper fathers of ancient
history-writing, after the works of Hecataeus of Miletus (c. late sixth century
BCE), Herodotus (c.490–424 BCE), Thucydides (c.460–400 BCE) and Xenophon
(c.430–354 BCE), in spite of some views attempting to grant this title to ‘biblical
historiography’.15 This general distinction must be evaluated critically, since
it seems to place all the attention on the variation of a cultural trait (to talk or
write about the past) and not the key social function of that cultural trait in all
its expressions.
Aside from this distinction, it is clear that Near Eastern civilization had
an important intellectual influence on many aspects of Greek culture in pre-
classical times, especially on mythic and religious conceptions, proving in this
way the existence of open channels of communication between the regions (and
their peoples) of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia.16 This conceptual
influence, however, did not prevent the emergence in Hellas of a singular, spe-
cific historical understanding with its own characteristics.17 Nor, however, does

14. See A. Momigliano, La historiografía griega (Barcelona: Crítica, 1984 = La storiografia

greca [Torino: Einaudi, 1984]); A. Kuhrt, ‘Israelite and Near Eastern Historiography’,
IOSOT Congress Volume – Oslo 1998, A. Lemaire & M. Sæbø (eds), VTSup, 80
(Leiden: Brill, 2000), 257–79; L. L. Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians? On
the Origins of Critical Historiography’, Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography
and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, L. L. Grabbe (ed.), JSOTSup, 317/ESHM, 3
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 156–81. See also the overview in J. Van
Seters, ‘The Historiography of the Ancient Near East’, Civilizations of the Ancient Near
East, J. M. Sasson (ed.) (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1995), vol. IV, 2433–44, placing
Israelite historiography closer to Greek rather than to Near Eastern ‘historical’ works.
15. See especially on this B. Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History
(San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988).
16. See, in general, W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence
on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, Revealing Antiquity, 5 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992); M. L. West, ‘Ancient Near Eastern Myths in Classical
Greek Religious Thought’, Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, J. M. Sasson (ed.)
(New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1995), vol. I, 33–42; E. Van Dongen, ‘The Study of Near
Eastern Influences on Greece: Toward the Point’, Kaskal: Rivista di storia, ambienti e
culture del Vicino Oriente Antico 5 (2008), 233–50. In particular, see the recent study
by B. Louden, Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
17. It is also relevant to note here, for instance, the apparent difference that scholars have
observed between the biblical conception of time (broadly speaking, teleological or
linear), and the Greek one (cyclical); cf. T. Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with
Greek (London: SCM Press, 1960); see also Momigliano, La historiografía griega,
66–93. It must be pointed out here that this difference is indeed relative, as time circular-
ity in the enactment of rituals can be identified in most cultures, as argued, for instance,
by M. Eliade in Le mythe de l’éternel retour: Archétypes et répétition (Paris: Librairie
Gallimard, 1954); for Israel, see G. von Rad, ‘Les idées sur le temps et l’histoire en Israël
et l’eschatologie des prophètes’, Maqqél Shâqédh, la branche d’amandier: Hommage à
26 Emanuel Pfoh

that difference imply diametrically opposite worldviews. It is true that Greeks

created a singular manner of evoking the past, ‘searching for the cause’ of things,
as in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.18 Furthermore, as
Marcel Detienne has indicated, ‘Herodotus seems to be the first in Greece to sep-
arate as clearly as possible the history of the gods and the history of humans.’19
Nevertheless, and despite the differences between ‘biblical historiography’, in
which God is an essential participant and there is no explicit authorship, and a
more human-oriented Greek historiography with explicit individual authors, it
must be noted that a common philosophy of history underlay both evocations
of the past, mythic or not, which demonstrates that their relevance lay in their
didactic functions rather than in historical or historicist ones.
Ancient biblical and Greek authors have more in common than the ancient
Greeks have with modern historians. As Detienne also observes, ‘for Thucydides,
the past, the archaiologia, is neither interesting nor significant. It is a sort of
preamble, a prelude to [the] present … The present is actually the basis for under-
standing the “past”.’20 On the other hand, it is true – as L. L. Grabbe notes – that
Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, and Polybius, in his history
of Rome from the First Punic War on, have pursued ‘scientific’ aims and have
appealed to the testimonies of direct witnesses – given the chance. In sum, they
have tried to separate mythos from logos.21 Yet, the main sociological function of
such critical method was far from equivalent to modern, academic research. We
should also observe that this Greek ‘history’ (ίστορία), this ‘survey’ or ‘investiga-
tion’, was far closer to ethnography, to the description and representation of others,
as F. Hartog defined it in regard to Herodotus, than is modern history-writing.22
Livy’s (59 BCE to 17 CE) Ab urbe condita – the history of Rome from its
origins until the Principate of Augustus – evokes the past as linked to the politi-

Wilhelm Vischer, D. Lys et al. (Montpellier: Causse, Graille, Castelnau, 1960), 198–209;
J. Barr, Biblical Words for Time, SBTh 33 (Naperville, 1962). See also the more up-to-
date, yet brief address in E. S. Gruen, ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’, The Oxford Handbook
of Hellenic Studies, G. Boys-Stone, B. Graziosi & P. Vasunia (eds) (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 129–39.
18. See Momigliano, La historiografía griega, 9–45; M. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative
Historicities’, Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent
Research, A. de Pury, T. Römer & J.-D. Macchi (eds), JSOTSup, 306 (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2000), 174–88; Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians?’, 161–71.
19. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 186. On Herodotus, see the important
study of F. Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1980), which characterizes him more as an ethnographer than a
proper historian: Herodotus would have an image portrayed of Asiatic peoples as a means
for reassuring Greek identity.
20. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 185; see also F. Hartog, Évidence de
l’histoire: Ce que voient les historiens, Folio Histoire, 157 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard,
2007), 91–108.
21. Grabbe, ‘Who Were the First Real Historians?’, 164–71.
22. Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote, passim.
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 27

cal realities of the author, with clear interests in legitimizing the rule of Julius
Caesar. As R. Syme noted many years ago:

the story of the first days of the city, established as the old poet recorded
‘augusto augurio’, called for a consecrated word and for commemoration
of the Founder of Rome – ‘deum deo natum, regem parentemque urbis
Romanae’. But it would not do to draw too precise a parallel. The Romulus
of legend already possessed too many of the authentic features of Caesar the
Dictator, some of them recently acquired or at least enhanced.23

Livy’s intention and Virgil’s, in his Aeneid, are analogous: offering a legitimation
of the present by using the past. Indeed, ‘Virgil was engaged in writing an epic
poem that should reveal the hand of destiny in the earliest origins of Rome, the
continuity of Roman history and its culmination in the rule of Augustus.’24 The
political motivations behind such historiographic works are undeniable: ‘Virgil,
Horace and Livy are the enduring glories of the Principate; and all three were on
terms of personal friendship with Augustus. The class to which these men of let-
ters belonged had everything to gain from the new order’,25 and they legitimized
their situation by appealing to a past that was created in reflection on the present.
We should remember that, for Livy, history was ‘the teacher of life’, a concep-
tion fully expressed by Cicero (106–43 BCE) in De oratore II.IX.36: ‘Historia
vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetus-
tatis, qua voce alia nisi oratoris immortalitati commendatur?’26 In that sense:

History, in the Roman style, is more a memory than a survey: memoria, it has
been observed, in the sense of an ‘awareness of the past’ that establishes the
present and implies a certain kind of behaviour inherited from the majores,
the ancestors. A past heavily present, that is authoritative but also knows how
to open up in the direction of the future, that of a nation sure of itself, and for
long centuries.27

There also existed a close relationship between rhetoric and history, as can
be observed in Quintilian (c.40–100 CE) in Institutio Oratoriae, or in Cicero,

23. R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1939]), 464;
see also 459–75; and Momigliano, La historiografía griega, 115–16.
24. Syme, The Roman Revolution, 462. See also the Aeneid I.286ff.
25. Syme, The Roman Revolution, 464.
26. See N. P. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History: The Greek Connection’, Rethinking the
Foundations: Historiography in the Ancient World and in the Bible. Essays in Honour
of John Van Seters, S. L. McKenzie & T. Römer (eds), BZAW, 294 (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 2000), 127–40, esp. 133–5; idem, ‘How Does One Date an Expression of
Mental History? The Old Testament and Hellenism’, in Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish
Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, L. L. Grabbe (ed.), JSOTSup,
317/ESHM, 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 200–22, esp. 202–3 and
221–2.
27. Detienne, ‘A Debate on Comparative Historicities’, 182.
28 Emanuel Pfoh

in De oratore, Brutus and Orator, as Lemche has observed.28 In this way, his-
tory becomes a medium of persuasion: an intellectual strategy anchored in the
political present.

The connection between rhetoric, philosophy, and historiography that is evi-

dent in Roman tradition can be traced back to the Greek and Hellenistic tradi-
tion. The sophists of the fifth century BCE – in particular Gorgias (485–375
BCE) – played an important part in this development. But the rhetor Isocrates
(436–338 BCE) was the central figure. On one hand, Isocrates represented a
continuation of the sophist tradition of the fifth century that had established
the connection between historiography and rhetoric. On the other, he built
on the connection made in Greek political theory (Plato, Aristotle) between
politics and ethics. Although he never composed a work of history, Isocrates
saw historiography as a means of transmitting ethical ideas; we may call this
‘ideological historiography’.29

The reason for presenting all this descriptive data is that a connection between
Greek and Roman historiographies and biblical stories concerning the ‘idea of
a past’ (in the so-called Primeval History) can be maintained,30 while acknowl-
edging the peculiarities of each tradition of ancient scholarship, because there
seems to exist a certain linkage, not so much temporal as cultural, between these
apparently irreconcilable literary productions. This linkage permits finding intel-
lectual unity in textual diversity.

A shared intellectual world

Ultimately, the separation between the ‘essence’ of the ancient Near Eastern
world and the later world of Greece has been crafted by the West’s reflection on
its own cultural origins.31 The idea that ‘the West’ was born in ancient Greece is
a rather modern one. However, it should not be forgotten that Greece was also

28. Cf. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 133–5; see also Hartog, Évidence de l’histoire,
43–52.
29. Lemche, ‘Good and Bad in History’, 134–5.
30. The idea is not novel here, as it can be found already in J. Van Seters, In Search of
History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), esp. 40–51; idem, ‘The Primeval Histories of
Greece and Israel Compared’, ZAW 100 (1988), 1–22.
31. Cf. M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. I: The
Invention of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987); but cf.
also the relevant critical address in Baines, ‘On the Aims and Methods of Black Athena’,
and M. Liverani, ‘The Bathwater and the Baby’, both in Black Athena Revisited, M.
R. Lefkowitz & G. MacLean Rogers (eds) (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1996), 27–48 and 421–7 respectively, and in many of the contributions
to that volume, correcting and even refuting Bernal. I think, nonetheless, that Bernal’s
historiographical gesture is a most valid one: to rethink our given knowledge!
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 29

part of a larger and older Eastern world (economically, religiously, etc.). Rather
than constituting a polarized neighbour to the East, as Greek writers (notably
Herodotus) have argued, ancient Greece was, simply, a variation of that world:
including its mythic evocations of gods and heroes, as well as its stories of the
past. As C. Grottanelli summed up the issue, regarding ancient narrative (and
recalling C. Gordon’s thesis):

Probably, a common repertoire of motifs and tales, widespread in the Eastern

Mediterranean koinē, was modified in similar ways independently by Greeks,
Arameans and Hebrews around the middle of the first millennium BCE, and
gave rise to the new type of narratives. Thus the Hebrew Bible with its char-
acteristic narrative style and the Greek narrative traditions whose first repre-
sentatives were authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Ctesias and Xanthus
of Lydia, and whose final product was the Greek novel, arose from similar
but autonomous transformations of a common tradition of myths, legends
and fairy-tales.32

Also, T. L. Thompson’s words about the ‘Greek (re)encounter33 with the East’
in Hellenistic times illustrate our point well here:

Not only is the world of Hellenism a direct descendant of the intellectual cul-
ture of the ancient Near East, from Babylon to Thebes, but that Hellenistic cul-
ture itself, with roots centuries old, is a product of a civilization that stretched
from the Western Mediterranean to the Indus valley and from the Anatolian
plateau to the Sudan. There is no particularly Greek way of thinking, any
more than there was a Hebrew or Semitic. There never was a pre-logical way
of thinking to contrast with Greek philosophy. Aristotle formulated and sys-
tematized what had been well understood for centuries. Formal philosophical
texts appear already with some of our earliest texts from ancient Sumer and
Egypt.34

32. C. Grottanelli, ‘The Ancient Novel and Biblical Narrative’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura
Classica NS 27 (1987), 7–34, here 33. Cf. C. H. Gordon, Before the Bible: The Common
Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
33. Since Greek mercenaries were a kind of forerunners of Hellenism; see W.-D. Niemeier,
‘Archaic Greeks in the Orient: Textual and Archaeological Evidence’, BASOR 322
(2001), 11–32; R. Wenning, ‘Griechischer Einfluss auf Palästina in vorhellenistischer
Zeit?’, Die Griechen und das antike Israel: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Religions-
und Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Landes, S. Alkier & M. Witte (eds), OBO, 201
(Fribourg: Academic Press/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 29–60; N.
Luraghi, ‘Traders, Pirates, Warriors: The Proto-History of Greek Mercenaries Soldiers
in the Eastern Mediterranean’, Phoenix 60 (2006), 21–47; E. Van Dongen, ‘Contacts
between Pre-Classical Greece and the Near East in the Context of Cultural Influences:
An Overview’, Getrennte Wege? Kommunikation, Raum und Wahrnehmung in der Alten
Welt, R. Rollinger, A. Luther & J. Wiesehöfer (eds), Oikumene – Studien zur antiken
Weltgeschichte, 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Antike, 2007), 13–49.
34. Thompson, The Bible in History, 380.
30 Emanuel Pfoh

A much clearer picture emerges if we perceive and integrate the question under
analysis into a broader comparative outlook. Before detecting direct depend-
ences in a void, we should accept the wide communicative scenario in which
stories and motifs transit. Again, as Thompson writes:

To argue for historical dependence and direct relationship between such texts
[i.e. Near Eastern and biblical], separated from each other as they are, is more
than we can do. Attempting to do so ignores many qualities of our texts and
carries us beyond simple questions about whether a particular work may
have been original or not. Common bonds of technique, rhetoric, function
and sentiment imply a relationship that is well beyond the sharing of phrases,
metaphors, motifs and themes, or even entire segments of a story or a song.
An intellectual world was shared. The Bible is a collection of specific com-
positions that Samaritan, Jewish and other Palestinian scribes produced and
contributed. They shared and transmitted a common ancient Near Eastern
intellectual and cultural world created by Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syrian,
Persian and Greek writers. Each of the ancient works we draw into our com-
parison was formed within a common stream of tradition and opened their
readers to a worldview that dominated the region for millennia.35

Within this cultural universe of shared symbolic perceptions, we find the rela-
tionships between Near Eastern (properly speaking), biblical, Greek and Roman
stories and compositions. Traditions and literary motifs travel through time
and space, and such travel must have been accomplished in what the Spanish
Egyptologist J. Cervelló Autuori used to explain the cultural origins of the
ancient Egyptian monarchy in an African context; namely, a ‘shared cultural
substratum’ (sustrato cultural compartido), in which a determined set of beliefs
is common among many peoples within a definable region (in his case, the Nile
basin). Such beliefs are shared and exchanged, but there is also a psychologi-
cal predisposition present, which enables the use and reuse of these beliefs and
representations of them in different forms over an extended period of time.36 We
can reaffirm the conclusion of J. L. Crenshaw:

35. Thompson, The Messiah Myth, 25. One is reminded by this statement of the conclusion
of an old and long article by C. H. Gordon: ‘No longer can we assume that Greece is the
hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, any more than we can consider Israel the vacuum-
packed miracle from Sinai. Rather must we view Greek and Hebrew civilizations as
parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterranean foundation’, from his ‘Homer
and the Bible: The Origin and Character of East Mediterranean Literature’, HUCA 26
(1955), 43–108, here 108.
36. Cf. J. Cervelló Autuori, Egipto y África. Origen de la civilización y la monarquía faraóni-
cas en su contexto africano, Aula Orientalis–Supplementa, 13 (Sabadell: AUSA, 1996),
§93. A ‘cultural substratum’ is a background but also a certain essence, a shared social
system of behaviour and collective values, a cultural worldview, etc. Indeed, the concept
can be compared to Clifford Geertz’s ‘symbol system’ (‘Religion as a Cultural System’,
The Interpretation of Cultures [London: Hutchinson, 1973], 91–9), as applied by T.
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 31

A significant literature from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel possesses

such a sufficient thematic and formal unity as to suggest a common context of
origin and purpose, allowing for distinctions in the several areas. Those texts
comprise the ancient effort to acquire knowledge and to embody wisdom in
personal character.37

Adopting the notion of a shared intellectual world, and looking further for
structural similarities among the whole literary production of the history of the
ancient Near East (including biblical narrative) and those of Greece and Rome,
one can now comprehend the number of parallels and influences that may well
be detected. As noted above, during the last two decades or so many comparative
studies (mainly in the field of biblical studies) have appeared.38 Perhaps, and to
the point of our reflections here, one of the most relevant examples of these simi-
larities has emerged as a result of comparing the narrative pattern of Herodotus’
Histories and the Primary History and/or the Deuteronomistic History. The rea-
sons for this comparison seem to be most appropriate, as it is precisely during
the last half of the first millennium BCE that many ‘national historiographies’
appeared: not only Herodotus’, but Berossus of Chaldea (c. fourth century BCE)
and his Babyloniaca, the Egyptian priest Manetho (c. third century BCE), with
his Aegyptiaca, the later Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. late first century BCE)
and his Antiquitates Romanae, as well as Philo of Byblos (c. first century CE) and
his history of Phoenicia. Furthermore, and besides these ancient historiographi-
cal examples, the comparative possibilities with biblical structures and stories
include the works of Homer and Hesiod, or tragedies like Aeschylus’s dramatic
trilogy, the Oresteia. Briefly stated, these comparable compositions should be
understood as being the last expression of a larger cultural continuum covering
the whole of the ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean from Early
Mesopotamian times to the Roman period.
To sum up in this context, and as G. W. Trompf already noted, ‘so much of
what is usually associated with Greco-Roman historiography – recurring prin-
ciples in history, lessons learnt for the future from the past – is present in a
distinctively Hebraic form’,39 in the narratives of the Old Testament. Thus, we
can affirm that the biblical narrative from Genesis to Kings seems to have been
another Hellenistic example of a composition – an acculturated composition!40

L. Thompson in his ‘Kingship and the Wrath of God: Or Teaching Humility’, RB 109
(2002), 161–96, esp. 162 n. 2; also idem, The Bible in History, 293–374.
37. J. L. Crenshaw, ‘The Contemplative Life in the Ancient Near East’, Civilizations of
the Ancient Near East, J. M. Sasson (ed.) (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1995), vol. IV,
2445–57, here 2456.
38. See the bibliography in footnote 12.
39. G. W. Trompf, ‘Notions of Historical Recurrence in Classical Hebrew Historiography’,
Studies in the Historical Books of the Old Testament, J. A. Emerton (ed.), VTSup, 30
(Leiden: Brill, 1979), 213–29, here 223.
40. Cf. D. M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 253–85, who refers to ‘Hellenistic
32 Emanuel Pfoh

– aimed at an analogous purpose as the rest of these ‘historiographies’: to nar-

rate the origins of a particular people and their place in history as seen from a
Judean, then Jewish theological perspective, which created behavioural stand-
ards to reflect on.

On influence and borrowing – and the creation of texts

An important contribution germane to the general perspective offered in this

chapter is the recent publication of Philippe Wajdenbaum’s Argonauts of the
Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible.41 Wajdenbaum places a strong
emphasis on a direct borrowing from Greek literature, especially Plato’s philo-
sophical writings, in the creation of biblical stories (in particular, those belonging
to the books comprising the so-called Enneateuch) through an impressive cata-
logue of comparisons dealing with the structure and functions of literary motifs
and figures. Certainly, this work has set an empirical attestation of parallelisms
that is undoubtedly difficult to ignore: it is clearly apparent that many biblical
stories echo different episodes of Greek compositions and tales. Nevertheless,
I would better place the Greek influence Wajdenbaum finds in Genesis–Kings
within the larger, shared Eastern Mediterranean intellectual world or cultural
substratum argued above. This allows a wider range of Near Eastern influences
on biblical literature (i.e. from Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt), from numerous
centres where intellectual work of considerable proportion could have taken
place, such as Alexandria and Seleucia.42 It also creates the possibility of com-
munication between cultures over an extended period, in which literary elements
were borrowed, adapted, reused and so on for different purposes.
Hellenism appears to have been the dynamic factor behind Near Eastern
scholarship of this period, rearranging knowledge in new forms. We should not
think, however, that Alexander’s conquest spread a particularly Greek way of
thinking and speaking about the past in Western Asia. We have already seen that
the general practice of referring to the past in search of meaning was part of the
shared cultural universe throughout the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean
and Western Asia. What may have been spread by the Greeks is the structure of
a narrative ‘historiographical’ genre, through which such evocation was mani-
fest. This is certainly a historical possibility illustrated ethno-historically and
ethnographically by several cases of acculturation between societies in contact,

enculturation’ and a process of ‘education-enculturation’ as formative of the Hebrew

Bible in the Hasmonean period.
41. Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert.
42. As Lemche suggests, ‘[t]he Jewish Diaspora constitutes the context of the historiographer
and his public, not only the exile in Mesopotamia but the dispersal of Judaism in the
Persian or Hellenistic world’ (The Old Testament between Theology and History, 211).
See also N. P. Lemche, ‘How Does One Date an Expression of Mental History?’; idem,
‘Does the Idea of the Old Testament as a Hellenistic Book Prevent Source Criticism of
the Pentateuch?’, SJOT 25 (2011), 75–92.
 Ancient historiography, biblical stories and Hellenism 33

from one dominant culture to another, dominated one. Such acculturation is not
a mere diffusion of features, but an integration of foreign elements in a native
world that does not lose its original characteristics completely. They are rather
modified according to different factors, each of which must be studied in relation
to its historical situation.43
Understood from this perspective, Greek and Hellenistic influence seems
to be the strongest and probably most decisive factor in shaping many stories
in the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History, or in the ‘Primary History’, as
Nielsen, Wesselius, Gmirkin and Wajdenbaum rightly argue.44 However, we
must consider that the final shape of the ideology of the Old Testament, with
Jerusalem as a ‘mythic chrono-spatial centre’, seems to reflect clearly a ‘cen-
tralization of religious and secular power in a single place (Jerusalem)’,45 which,
in this context, is to be found (outside the biblical texts) in the rule of Palestine
by the Hasmonean priest-kings of the second century BCE. This means that, after
the intellectual process of influence and borrowing, which created the narrative
from Genesis to Kings in the Hellenistic centres of Western Asia, there must
have been a theo-ideological arrangement of this collection of stories within
the context of Palestine corresponding to the political situation in Hasmonean
Jerusalem.46 Accordingly, for instance, if we consider the stories about Abram
visiting Jerusalem (Gen. 14:17-20), the defeat of the king of Jerusalem by Joshua
(Josh. 10), the conquest of Jerusalem by David (2 Sam. 5:6-10; 1 Chron. 11:4-9)
and the foundation story of a rebuilt city by Ezra and Nehemiah,47 all could find
a proper background under Hasmonean rule from Jerusalem, legitimizing it with

43. See N. Wachtel, ‘L’acculturation’, Faire de l’histoire. I: Nouveaux problèmes, J. Le

Goff & P. Nora (eds), Bibliothèque des Histoires (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974),
124–46, esp. 124–5. Of course, Syria–Palestine in pre-Hellenistic times was the scenario
of diverse foreign presence with different impact on local societies: cf. M. Liverani,
‘Dall’acculturazione alla deculturazione: Consideracioni sul rolo dei contatti politici
ed economici nella storia siro-palestinese pre-ellenistica’, Forme di contatto e processi
di trasformazione delle società antiche. Atti del Convegno di Cortone (24–30 Maggio
1981), G. Nenci (ed.), Publications de l’École Française de Rome, 67 (Rome: École
Française de Rome, 1983), 503–20.
44. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History; Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel; Gmirkin,
Berossus and Genesis; Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert. It is still to be seen how
we can integrate the variant, although not mutually exclusive, analytical frameworks of
these different scholars into a general and coherent exposition of Greek and Hellenistic
influence in biblical narrative.
45. I. Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition, JSOTSup,
404/CIS, 14 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 3 and 1 respectively.
46. The Masoretic chronology seems clearly to depend on a system that takes the rededica-
tion of Jerusalem’s temple in 164 BCE as a key date: cf. T. L. Thompson, The Historicity of
the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, BZAW, 133 (Leiden:
Brill, 1974), 9–16, esp. 15; Davies, Scribes and Schools, 180–81.
47. See T. M. Bolin, ‘The Making of the Holy City: On the Foundations of Jerusalem in
the Hebrew Bible’, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition, T. L. Thompson (ed.),
JSOTSup, 381/CIS, 13 (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 171–96.
34 Emanuel Pfoh

evoked traditions of mythic proportion, resembling Greek and Roman tales of

heroes: visiting, conquering and founding particular places – giving laws and
establishing social order. Indeed, as T. M. Bolin observes:

[t]he stories of heroic foundations of a city in general and of colonization in

particular, that is, just the kind of tales about Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible,
are more typical of Hellenistic, rather than ancient Near Eastern, literature,
which prefers to offer divine origins for cities.48

In this way, we can think of a Hellenistic biblical collection of stories having its
final ideological shaping in Hasmonean Jerusalem. This scenario offers a prob-
able terminus ad quem for the theological production of biblical literature. Yet
this ‘editorial’ or canonical production may be extended into rabbinic times in
the second century CE.49

Conclusions

The authors of biblical, Greek and Roman collections of tradition refer to the
past, variously. However, that past is not the same one which modern historians
wish to write about. In paraphrase of what M. Liverani suggested years ago: all
such ancient narratives, many ‘historiographic’, should be interpreted as intel-
lectual products of an ancient society rather than as windows through which
the historian might witness an ancient society.50 For ancient authors, ‘history’
is not something we know ‘as it actually happened’. History is only valid as a
means of comprehending, for example, divine will, giving an account of the
origins of a specific people, explaining a common tradition or understanding

48. Bolin, ‘The Making of the Holy City’, 193.

49. Lemche, ‘The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book?’, 163; cf. further Davies, Scribes
and Schools, 169–84; in particular, Davies writes: ‘The likely creators of the canon
that the rabbis inherited were, therefore, the Hasmoneans, who appropriately blended a
veneration of stories of the past with knowledge of (and liking for) Hellenistic monarchy
and even alliances with Greeks and Romans. “Judaism” as defining a religious system
was in a sense a product of Hellenism, and so was its canon. Both are of course related
to each other and came about through a combination of imitation of, and reaction to, the
foreign culture. The Hasmonean bequest was national identity but also internal dissent.
It was in the name of their “Israel” that the Judeans fought Rome and lost the temple,
with the result that the rabbis again reconstituted a different “Israel”, and having iconized
the scriptures set about canonizing all over again’ (182). See also, more recently, on
the ‘Hasmonean initiative’ regarding canonization, P. R. Davies, ‘The Hebrew Canon
and the Origins of Judaism’, The Historian and the Bible: Essays in Honour of Lester
L. Grabbe, P. R. Davies & D. V. Edelman (eds), LHB/OTS, 530 (London: T&T Clark,
2010), 194–206.
50. M. Liverani, ‘Memorandum on the Approach to Historiographic Texts’, Orientalia NS
42 (1973), 178–94; cf. also Lemche, The Old Testament between Theology and History,
110–12.
Other documents randomly have
different content
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