Review: Bickerman's Collected Studies

Author(s): Judah Goldin

Review by: Judah Goldin
Source: History of Religions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Aug., 1977), pp. 73-85
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062498
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

BICKERMAN'S COLLECTED STUDIES

Studies in Jewish and Christian History (Part One). By ELIAS BICKERMAN.

Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums,
Band 9. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Pp. 288.
In this, the first of what will be three volumes before long, Professor
Elias J. Bickerman has assembled the following ten studies which he
had published in German, French, and English between 1930 and 1965:
(1) "'Couper une alliance"' (1950); (2) "Les deux erreurs du prophete
Jonas" (1965); (3) "The Edict of Cyrus in Ezra 1" (1946); (4) "Zur
Datierung des Pseudo-Aristeas" (1930); (5) "Some Notes on the
Transmission of the Septuagint" (1950); (6) "The Septuagint as a
Translation" (1959); (7) "Two Legal Interpretations of the Septuagint"
(1956); (8) "The Colophon of the Greek Book of Esther" (1944);
(9) "Notes on the Greek Book of Esther" (1951); (10) "The Date of
Fourth Maccabees" (1945). The papers, then, are not arranged according
to date of their original publication but according to historical sequence,
from an archaic rite reflected by a biblical expression down to a lecture
on the power of reason guided by Torah, composed about A.D. 35. There
are three indexes: subjects, sources, and Greek and Hebrew terms. In
the footnotes especially, but also in the text at times, new material has
been added (see, for example, pp. 152-53).
I have itemized the contents of the volume for, like art books these
days, scholarly books have become so expensive (the price for this
volume is 110 guilders, which the manager of the local bank tells me
today, October 6, 1976, come to $44.50) that pretty soon even university
libraries may be unable to afford them unless they get their own plump
endowments. Scholars, therefore, ought at least to be informed what
subjects are being discussed and where, and budget accordingly.
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

The contents of the volume may be fairly divided in two parts, the
first treating subjects in pre-Hellenistic literature and the second in
Hellenistic and Hellenistic-Roman (particularly those having to do with
the Greek Bible). But the author's method, his style of investigation as
I would like to call it, is consistent for all epochs and compositions and
can be outlined briefly as follows:
1. When studying a literary work, get as precise a date as you can
for its origin. When, for example, was the biblical book of Jonah
composed? The way Jon. 3:3 reads, "And Nineveh was [hayetah] an
enormously large city" (lit., a large city of God) suggests that Nineveh
existed no longer, and "was" might plausibly be taken in the pluperfect
as "had been." Bickerman does much better than that. In the seventh
verse of that chapter when the king calls upon his countrymen to
repent, the proclamation goes forth "by decree of the king and his
nobles." A royal edict by king and nobles, our savant says, was a
Persian procedure, unknown either to Jews or Assyrians. But the book
of Tobit, which was written in the fourth century B.C., already quotes
Jonah. "Ainsi le livre de Jonas fut ecrit au Ve s. av. J.C. ou quelque
decades plus tard."
Now this is not simply an answer to the question, When was Jonah
written, and no more. Date here recovers an age when prophets are still
to be met with in the land, and the author of Jonah could still hear
"leur message delirant." Later interpreters, familiar with other notions
about prophecy in the Gospels no less than among rabbis, might well
miss the intent of the book, and many did and still do. (See further
below.)
Another example. From the third century B.C. on, under the influence
of the Alexandrian school of criticism, colophons appear at the end of
literary rolls to furnish provenance of a manuscript when the authorship
of a book or a reading was challenged. Now, at the end of the Greek
book of Esther we read of a Dositheus and his companions bringing a
letter of Purim "in the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleo-
patra." There were however "three Ptolemies associated with a
Cleopatra in the fourth year of their reign." Neither Ptolemy IX
(114-113 B.C.) nor Ptolemy XIII (49-48 B.C.) will do, for "the Queen
acted as regent for her son or brother, respectively," and the verb for
"ruling" was in the plural, and in protocols of documents the queen's
name preceded the king's. But in the Esther colophon "ruling" is in the
singular (basileuontos) and Ptolemy is named before Cleopatra. Thus we
are led to Ptolemy XII (80-58 B.C.) and his sister-wife Cleopatra V,
whose name in public and private documents does follow her husband's
from the second year of his reign on. "Accordingly, the colophon was
written between September 12, 78 and September 11, 77 B.C."
Here again date recalls to us something beyond itself as well, for time,
like place, provides framework. About the time Dositheus brought his
Purim letter, Apollonius Molon published "the first Greek pamphlet
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History of Religions

'Against the Jews"'; shortly before, in 88-87 B.C., the first anti-Jewish
riots of which we know broke out in Alexandria and Antioch. The date
in short may help us to understand the mood of the Greek Esther as it
deviates from or adds to the Hebrew.
A final example, more complex and more drastically paraphrased.
Since J. L. deVives and Scaliger it has been suspected that Aristeas is a
fiction rather than history, and modern scholars have again and again
offered critical-historical proofs that this is indeed so. Bickerman is of
the moderns: "Die Schrift ist ein plasma, das zur Verherlichung der
Juden dient." But that tells us little unless we pin down the date of the
writing. Granted by all. Yet in what can you detect the romancer's
anachronism? It is one thing to suspect a fake and another to prove it.
If Aristeas speaks of Syria and Phoenicia, he is simply employing "die
amtliche Bezeichnung des ptolemaischen Gebietes in siidlichen Syrien."
But when earlier in his diegesis he refers to Coele-Syria and Phoenicia
for the same region, then "verretet [er] dadurch dass er nach der
seleukidischen Eroberung vom Siidsyrien (im J. 200) schrieb." In short,
we are clearly beyond the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus (282-246 B.C.),
but still a long distance from the date of composition of our treatise.
So, by proceeding to analyze formal salutations like Xagpelv and
7rAei7-a Xa'peWv, by noting that Xa1pe6v Kal pp5auOat begins to appear
only about eighty years after Philadelphus's death and is already
disappearing about 50 B.C., that Aristeas employs adv ovv #acviTra&
(which appears first about 160 B.C.) rather than the third-century
formula Eav aool alvTrat, that the geographical description of the Holy
Land reflects the period of 145-100 B.C.-for although Aristeas "singt
Preise des gelobte Landes" and, like Philo's, his description of the land
is affected by Bucherlebnis, "Er projektiert nicht ein biblisches Bild"-
we come in the end to the period of Ptolemy VIII, that is, to 145-16 B.C.
And since Aristeas makes no reference to the Maccabean rulers of his
time (perhaps for reasons of political delicacy) or to territories acquired
by their conquests, the date of composition can be narrowed down to
145-125 B.C. (in a later essay Bickerman puts it as circa 130).
It goes without saying that this is what every historian tries to do or
should try to do; and given the proper antennae (plus the learning !-it
is hard to decide which is Bickerman's preferred reading, papyri of
diplomatic and chancellery communications or the church fathers) such
or similar results can be arrived at. But they do not come by themselves.
They demand recognition of how people address dignitaries (or one
another) at different times. And the following closing lines of the essay
on dating Aristeas draw us to reflection which does not depend on the
calendar, but the calendar discloses how old, deep-seated, are a craving
and its risks (but rewards too!) still with us: ". . . wie 150 Jahre spater
Philo, gehort auch Ps. Aristeas, wie es gerade sein Bild Jerusalems zeigt,
zugleich beiden Welten, der von Athen und der von Jerusalem, an. Auch
er ist, um mit Tertullian zu reden, 'Graeciae discipulus et coeli,' der auf
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

seine Art und nach seinem Vermdgen das grundlegende Problem der
abendlandischer Geistesgemeinschaft, jene Frage Tertullians: 'quid
Athenis et Hierosolymis, quid Academiae et Ecclesiae?' zu iiberwinden
versucht."
2. Find out what is going on in the world (not only in your own
parish). Obvious in the abstract, and hardly a historian would dispute
this today, but in practice we discover how difficult it is: Where
specifically in the world is one to look for the relevant assistance ? For
example. The first chapter of the biblical book of Ezra quotes in Hebrew
an edict of Cyrus the king of Persia permitting the exiled Jews to return
to Jerusalem. A similar, but not identical, text in Aramaic is preserved
in the sixth chapter of the same book. The fact has been observed by all
readers of Ezra of course, and many have also scrutinized the vocabulary
in both chapters. The tendency has been not to take the Hebrew edict
as authentic, to propose that the two texts record two different edicts,
and so on. Not so Bickerman. The text in chapter 6 is called a dikrona,
in other words, he says, a memorandum, and is a specimen of instru-
ments initiating "administrative action in the day-book of the Persian
arsenal at Memphis, from 484 B.C." Such records were "destined for the
bureaux" and not for the public.
On the other hand, as the very first verse in the book reports, the
Hebrew edict is a public proclamation by heralds. "Oral announcements
of matters the authorities desired to make known to the population was
the usual method of publication in the ancient world." Heralds are
mentioned in cuneiform texts; in Egypt and Jerusalem there was an
office of the Royal Herald. Pseudo-Smerdis sent messengers throughout
the Persian Empire to announce his coming to the throne. And though
royal letters were always written in Aramaic (even when addressed to
the Greeks), oral announcements were made in the language of the
specific people addressed. How else would they have understood the
herald ? Cyrus's permission to the Jews to return to their ancestral land
must have been proclaimed by heralds in different parts of his empire in
many languages and to the Jews in Hebrew (still intelligible obviously).
These and other data appropriated from Bickerman's essay lay the
groundwork for establishing the authenticity of the very formulae in
the Hebrew edict. For instance, the Hebrew edict is suspected because,
among other things, some of its expressions, like "the God who is in
Jerusalem" at the end of 1:3, appear superfluous. But such lingo is a
mark of bureaucratic style. "As a matter of fact, the Persian insistence
on the formula 'God in Jerusalem' . . . reappears in Darius' and
Artaxerxes' decrees, [and] is rather significative of the authenticity of
Cyrus' edict." In this manner each of the expressions in the Hebrew
edict is tested and vindicated.
But the vindication could take place only because of a knowledge of
the conduct of bureaucracies, of forms of diplomatic correspondence (a
subject Bickerman never wearies of); of an awareness of the attitude of
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History of Religions

the ancients toward the tutelary gods or god of a city-so that what
some are tempted to regard as the invention of a biblical author to
glorify his people really turns out to be commonplace royal or con-
queror's curtsy, to attract the favor or support of the neighborhood
gods. In the book of Ezra Cyrus says, "All the kingdoms of the earth
has YHWH the god of heaven given me." (Jews of Elephantine also
speak of their God of heaven.) When he entered Babylon he made known
that Marduk had "appointed him to lordship over the whole world."
At Ur the Persian king proclaims that "'the great gods' of this city
'had delivered all the lands into my hand."' And in the temple of the
moon-god Sin, that deity gets the credit for Cyrus's extensive dominions.
(However, our author's grammatical wrestling with Ezra 1:4 is only
impressive, not convincing, despite the help he believes he has found in
the syntax of Lev. 18:29-which is lucidity itself compared with the
twists and turns of the Ezra verse. But Bickerman himself observes
sensibly, "If obscurity were a solid argument against authenticity, few
ancient documents would stand this objection.")
A religio-literary composition no less than documents of state requires
a wide-angle lens. For example, the language of the Septuagint (Penta-
teuch) is often indeed infelicitous Greek, but not because the translators
wrote a so-called ghetto Jewish Greek. "Fresh linguistic evidence
brought up by discoveries of Hellenistic documents of the same age as
the Septuagint has shown... that although offending the literary
standard, the Greek Pentateuch basically agrees with the common
speech of the contemporary Greeks." The translators knew Greek syntax
and knew how dragomans of their own time and even previously went
about translating-with the help of elementary word lists, with
determination to render the original clause by clause, with mechanical
reproduction of a preposition even when the result might be un-
intelligible, or forcing the meaning of common Greek vocables. This sort
of thing went on everywhere, at times even after the art of translation
was developed by the Romans. Moreover, like all of us, the ancient
translators could also blunder at times or take liberties with the original
(out of a sense of decorum, or to bring things up-to-date, or to harmonize
biblical law with practice in Ptolemaic Egypt, or to make things clear,
and so on). In translating a literary composition the literal and down-
right atomistic can coexist with the paraphrastic, then as now. See, for
example, Monsignor Knox's version of the Vulgate in modern English.
Or to put it in summary fashion, quoting Bickerman at the very
beginning of his study, "The Septuagint as a Translation": ".. the
translators of the Septuagint practised the traditional art of translation
as it was understood in their time."
And as is often (?) the case, recognition of the common denominator
makes it possible to locate the unique properly. There were numerous
works of religious propaganda of Oriental deities, says our author, but
no Greek versions of the sacred books of the East: not a line of the
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

Avesta was rendered into Greek though it is said that there were Greek
rolls containing 2 million lines ascribed to Zoroaster; although admitted
to the Greek Olympus, Mithra never learned Greek, a satirist sneered
(E.B.'s word); and so forth. "The sacred books of all other religions,
from the Avesta to the commentarii of the Roman pontifices, were ritual
texts to be used or recited by priests." On the other hand, the Torah of
Moses was intended to be read to all the people, the scroll held open, so
to speak, because it had no secrets to hide. ("There is nothing esoteric
in the Torah." The Mishnah forbids doreshin, exposition of the theme of
Gen. 1 where more than one is present, not qorin, not reading or
studying by oneself.) Bickerman calls attention to a nice iconographic
detail in the Mithra temple and in the synagogue in Dura, reflecting the
contrast: in the one the scroll closed in the hand of the Magian and in
the other a layman reading from an open scroll (still another such nice
observation on p. 139). The reason the Septuagint (Pentateuch) was
unique was not because of a dialect of its own or artificialities for lack of
better knowledge. It was unique because the Torah was unique.
3. Negative commandments. More than once (the index has mis-
prints; see pp. 143, 191, and 228) the author reminds us that the verb
semaino (sesemantai) in Aristeas 30 does not mean "translate" but
"notare, mark with writing," and therefore the statement refers to
Hebrew copies of the Bible and not to some carelessly (earlier) translated
versions of the Torah. The term threskeia ("religion"), L. Robert has
shown, "was never used in the Hellenistic age but became modish from
Augustus onward." Therefore, although in 4 Macc. the Temple and
Temple service are regarded as existent, when we attempt to arrive at
the date of composition of this work we must admit at least that it
could not have been written before the beginning of the Christian era.
(Bickerman in fact continues analysis and settles on a date of A.D. 20-54.)
Once again, by means of suggesting how to arrive at proper dating,
Bickerman has provided us with more than a date, for we can now
observe when the "protomartyr" Eleazar was promoted to nomikos
after having been a grammateus in 2 Macc. (see p. 276, n. 9), and this is
instructive too as regards the talmudic teachers: "Under the Roman
Empire the Jews styled their men learned in the Torah with the term
used for Greek and Roman jurists." (On nomikos, see also S. Lieberman,
Hellenism in Jewish Palestine [New York, 1962], pp. 81-82.) And I
might add that the fashionable rhetoric Bickerman calls attention to in
Antiochus holding up as example to his own soldiers the virtue of the
martyr-victims appears also as a motif in the rabbinic accounts of the
war of 66-70 against Rome (Abot de-Rabbi Natan, ed. S. Schechter
[Vienna, 1887], version A, p. 33, and version B, p. 20).
The correct meaning of a word can resurrect a text (and more!).
"The quality of mercy is not strain'd" comes to life the moment we
learn that it means the quality of mercy is not constrained, not com-
pelled, and thus responds directly to the immediately preceding
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History of Religions

question, "On what compulsion must I ?" But in addition to lexical and
philological and stylistic uses and abuses, there are methodological
analogies and deductions our author fixes his eyes on.
For example, as moderns, following de Lagarde, try to arrive at the
"authentic" text of the Septuagint they first turn to the three forms
thereof which circulated in the East in Jerome's time: Eusibius's
edition of Origen's revision and the recensions of Hesychius and Lucian.
". .. Lagarde was the first to argue that the reconstruction of the three
recensions known to Jerome may lead, by their comparison to the
archetype which lies behind them, that is the basic text of the
Septuagint as it circulated about 200 c.E."
This method, when applied to Septuagint textual research, Bickerman
protests, is based on misunderstanding. The method was invented for
dealing with medieval manuscripts, where as a rule only a unique copy
of a manuscript chanced to survive the Dark Ages. He illustrates:
"Common corruptions prove that some fifteen extant manuscripts of
Pindar, copied in the XII-XIV c. all go back to the same archetype."
But of the Greek Bible or of some of its parts there are extant about
1,500 exemplars. "How can it be supposed that these manuscripts from
the Vaticanus, written in the fourth century, to the copies transcribed
in the fifteenth century, all derive from the same ancestor. ..?"
Moreover, before the whole Bible was transcribed onto codexes, its
individual books had been written on papyrus rolls. Hence behind a
fourth-century volume in Jerome's time "we must visualize not another
volume which is their common source, similar to the archetype of
medieval copies, but a confused plurality of divergent papyrus rolls,"
and Origen in fact complains of such diversity. To complicate the
matter even further, since in private and arbitrarily revised copies there
appear readings different from the common text, how is one to tell if
what lies before him preserves an original or a corrected rendition
("made by a Jewish reviser in the second century B.C.E. in order to
improve upon the uncouth original reading") ?
Another and no less interesting illustration. The odd Hebrew ex-
pression, almost a contradiction in terms if it is not an ellipsis, karat (cut)
berit for to "make a covenant" recalls what was indeed once upon a time
an actual rite, a cutting of an animal (victim) in two and passing
between the two parts. It might be (a) as ceremony of purification or
(b), as in the Bible, to reenforce a promise. The latter significance of the
rite is attested only for the Hebrews, the Arameans, and probably for
Asia Minor in antiquity. Sacrificial cutting of an animal in two occurs
in a number of rites, but (with one exception) "le passage a travers la
victime ne se trouve que sur une aire bien limitee." It appears for the
first time among the Hittites in Asia Minor. The berit (etymology of this
word still uncertain; see p. 4, n. 11, and Koehler-Baumgartner, Lexicon,
152b, "Additions-Corrections," 142b) never has imprecation, it is not
identical with oath of execration: though vigorously to prevent its
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

violation, a berit may be sanctioned by imprecatory oath. First and

above all, however, the berit creates shalom, "cette communaute qui
ne saurait etre rompue," between the parties of berit. Gradually berit
may come to refer to any pact, and because in granting a berit one may
of course impose conditions, berit may also get to mean ordinance.
A number of theologians picked up Bickerman's observations about
the berit appearing first among the Hittites and proceeded to compare
Hittite treaties with the biblical berit. For their naive (or questionable)
scholarly method, they here (in supplementary discussion since 1950
when "Couper une alliance" first appeared) get their wrists slapped.
These men pay no attention to diplomatic or legal idiom and history;
what is fundamental: We do not have the foggiest notion of the text of
a Hebrew berit. And "pour comparer deux faits juridiques, il faut
connaitre l'un et l'autre." No more substantial has been the talk of the
"historical prologues" of the treaties supposedly reappearing in the
biblical accounts of the berit. "Ajoutons que le 'Prologue historique'
manque dans les traites assyriens et arameens au premier millenaire."
(For another telling reproof on another subject, see p. 48, n. 55.)
We return therefore to the rite of passing through the two parts of
the victim which the expression karat berit initially directed our
attention to, a rite which appears in connection with oaths as well as
purification ceremonies. "La portee du passage entre les morceaux du
sacrifice etait partout et toujours la meme chose. En coupant en deux
le corps de la victime, on faisait sortir son souffle vital entier. Celui-ci
communiquant sa qualite a l'operateur qui passait entre deux sections,
rendait plus forte sa disposition. Le fluide de la vie, extraite de la
victime, rendait la promesse, qui en absorbait, contraignante."

The essays in this volume called Studies in Jewish and Christian

History (Part One) are devoted principally to themes and problems of a
literary and cultural nature and are marked by painstaking attention
to institutional realities. The learning (the opulence of examples in the
course of argumentation and exposition), the independence of judgment
refreshingly united with discriminating receptiveness of ancient
authorities whom moderns tolerate condescendingly, if they read them
at all-such scholarship inevitably places this book among works one
reads to learn what he did not know, or to learn to correct what he had
learned, and then to consult as guide or at least admonition in continued
study. And almost offhandedly, when occasion warrants our author is
capable of saying something which transforms a hypothesis one some-
times entertains with many hesitations (not by our author!) into a spur
to reconsider what one's major premises possibly ought to be. "Both the
legitimate offsprings and the heirs of Hellenistic Judaism, the Catholic
Church and the Pharisaic Synagogue. .. ." The legitimate offspring and
heirs of Hellenistic Judaism: from Alexandria to Jerusalem? from
Jerusalem to Alexandria? This too is still mechanical-the distance
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 History of Religions

between Alexandria and Jerusalem keeps growing shorter and

shorter.
Perhaps as counterpoint, therefore, it is not amiss to take up one
essay in particular, not only because (like the other essays) it is a
treasury of information, but also because it exhibits what can be learned
from a historical review of literary interpretation and recovers an over-
whelming Jewish theme. The essay is "Les Deux erreurs du prophete
Jonas" (this, by the way, Bickerman translated into English and
published in his Four Strange Books of the Bible where the annotations
in our volume are omitted but several new notes are offered).
Mohammed also knows the story of Jonah, and "every" age has
attempted to interpret it. How could Jonah even imagine that he could
escape from the Lord? Fact is, Jonah is not the only recipient of a
divine message who refused to deliver it. Examples in Bickerman.
Jonah is so obstinate in his refusal to go to Nineveh he takes flight in a
ship sailing in the opposite direction. It is of no avail; a terrible storm
threatens the ship, and Jonah knows that he is responsible. But
apparently he would rather die than carry out the assignment (whenever
he is frustrated, Jonah would rather die than go on living; see 4:3 and 8),
so he tells the crew to dump him overboard. In that way the sea will be
calmed and they will be saved; and (I suggest, Jonah feels) better
drown than be His mouthpiece. Bickerman writes, "I1 y a trois per-
sonnages dans l'histoire de Jonas: Dieu, le peuple pecheur de Ninive et
le prophete. Dieu est en dehors des dimensions du temps et de l'espece."
True, of course. But this does not mean that He is inactive. On the
contrary, from the moment God raises the storm at the sea he never
ceases to be active (and this is not inconsistent with Bickerman's
conclusion). Four times the book says wa-yeman, and the Lord ap-
pointed, prepared, provided; and the verb is used in connection with
the miracles intended to correct Jonah's mistakes. The big fish (in
medieval imagination, a whale) swallows Jonah and prevents his
"suicide." We shall see whose will will be done!
In all ages students have wondered about that fish and its prophet in
residence.1 Pious naiveties (ancient and modern), mockeries of En-
lightenment philosophes or pamphleteers, European and American
misinterpretations offer explanations which turn out to be self-portraits,
and prejudices attributed to the prophet Jonah reveal a striking
resemblance to the prejudices distinguishing Jonah's commentators.
This is inescapable in the history of interpretation as in the history of

1 Paradox though it seem at first sight, Jonah inside the fish (obviously miracle)
reveals the storyteller's desire to provide also a "rational" explanation for what
happened. Jonah prefers to drown rather than do what God wants of him. He tells
the sailors to throw him overboard; that will be the end! But God will not let him
drown; He will not even let him land on a raft or on a fish, for Jonah could still
drown himself then. In the sea a big fish swallows him and God keeps him alive
inside that fish. If he died there, he might as well have drowned-and there is no
story.
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

original cantos, since human beings are not outside the dimensions of
time and space and perhaps of their adopted patriotisms.
Bickerman's parade of exegetes from Philo and the rabbis and church
fathers, down through deists and hypocritical theologians (whom he
punctures again in his analysis of the Esther story) and their disciples
is a survey of the interpretation of the book of Jonah through the
centuries. It is simultaneously a blueprint of what might be done with
other biblical books and a guess of what the outcome might be.
To return to Jonah, however. Since he wants to get out of that fish,
like a pious man he prays to God to be delivered. His prayer is answered,
and now he submits to God's command. This time when ordered to go
to Nineveh and proclaim what he is told, he goes. Note that Jonah does
not call upon the Ninevehites to repent: he simply delivers a message
of doom: "Forty days from now Nineveh shall be overthrown."
As we know, the Ninevehites from the king and nobles down repent
of their evil ways (this is likely to happen only in miracle plays or
parables) and therefore God did not do to them what he had said he
would do (3:10). This made Jonah very mad. He was mad, he said,
because he knew all along that God was merciful and would change his
mind about punishing sinners. (Note again: Jonah like Joel says this
about God, God does not say this about himself, except possibly in
Exodus; cf. Num. 14:18. He lets his actions speak first, then he explains:
the Sovereign spares! See Bickerman on hus.) It takes another miracle,
this time with a plant, to teach Jonah a lesson. The book does not say
whether Jonah learned it, but the author of the book of Jonah did,
which is what really counts in the long run.
What was the lesson? Drawing on Greek categories, Bickerman
undertakes to describe the phenomenon of prophecy and foretelling in
the ancient, and that includes the biblical, world. There was what was
called fata conditionalia which "un homme sage pouvait eviter en
obeissant a l'oracle": "If, then, you agree and give heed, you will eat
the good things of the earth; but if you refuse and disobey, you will be
devoured (by) the sword, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken"
(Isa. 1:19-20). The choice is still yours. Over against this was fata
denunciativa "which works like a spell. Willy-nilly, Macbeth will be
Thane of Cawdor and king of Scotland." Now, there were times when
the Hebrew prophets admonished Israel by invoking fata conditionalia,
as the quotation above from Isaiah demonstrates. But at other times
they too could speak out in terms offata denunciativa: "Thus says the
Lord ... I will send fire into the house of Hazael" and so on, "says the
Lord" (Amos 1:4-5). "Such words are not guesses like a weather
forecast, [which can teach a prudent man how to protect himself from
predicted showers] but stimuli which evoke the dormant fates." And
such was Jonah's unconditional message: In forty days Nineveh will be
overthrown.
Nineveh, however, was not overthrown, and Jonah was furious
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History of Religions

because that made him appear as a false prophet. Even a heathen

mantis knew that if the Lord does say something it will happen, for
unlike men he does not lie (Num. 23:19). Hence if a prophet predicted
in the name of the Lord and the prediction did not come to pass, that
oracle was not spoken by the Lord (Deut. 18:22).
Because Jonah like many others knew all along that God was
merciful, he refused to proclaim a doom that would not come. But there
was a dilemma here reaching beyond Jonah's personal resolve, namely,
How can what God foretold remain unfulfilled? This bothered the
ancients long after Jonah too, and they answered inevitably in terms of
their own times and their own circumstances.
However, it was the prophet Jeremiah, himself like Jonah ready to
complain when what he had announced failed to arrive (Jer. 20:7-8),
who came to challenge "the determinism of the fata denunciativa (and)
offered a new perspective in theology." If, as he witnessed with his own
eyes, a potter could refashion the clay of a spoiled vessel into another
vessel, then "just like clay in the hands of the potter... are you in
My hands, 0 house of Israel" (Jer. 18:4-6). "L'oracle ne se realise pas
automatiquement; la realisation depend de la conduite de l'homme."
And it is against this view, already popular in his time, that Jonah
rebels, not because he is necessarily mean spirited or narrow minded
(that certainly did not show up in his behavior on the ship's voyage to
Tarshish), but because it raises serious problems of its own, as Jerome
indignantly remarked in his attack on Origen for teaching that repent-
ance brings full pardon. In Bickerman's paraphrase, if so, then in the
end is there to be "no difference between the Virgin Mary and a street-
walker, between Gabriel and the Devil, between martyrs and their
torturers ? "
The author of the book of Jonah creates a confrontation between the
"thesis" of Jeremiah and several other prophets (if you repent, so will
God) and the "antithesis" of Jonah (once pronounced the sentence is
beyond appeal). "The thesis... and the antithesis... are reconciled
and surmounted in a so-to-say Hegelian synthesis by the author of the
book, who, as the ancient Jewish commentators noted, wrote a parable
of Jerusalem .... God's mercy saves even the worst sinners," even the
notorious Ninevehites whose wickedness was remembered for centuries
beyond Israel too.
Everyone is chosen. So be it; but few get into a passion over the
selection, much less recognize that the caller might really be free. The
Athenian lawgiver (Jeremiah's contemporary) is confident that Pallas
Athene will always protect the city; what threatens the city's existence
is the citizens' own cupidity and lawlessness. "Les rapports entre un
peuple et son protecteur celeste etaient choses naturelles ailleurs, mais
le lien entre l']ternel et Israel provenait d'un libre choix." Bickerman
continues (with an emphasis made at length also by Yehezkel Kaufmann
in his discussion of monotheism, himself profoundly influenced by
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Bickerman's Collected Studies

Hegel), "The pagan gods were inseparable from their respective peoples
since these gods were parts of nature, like the landscape of their cities.
In all ancient mythologies, from India to Egypt and Greece, matter
precedes the gods who are only the organizers of the universe. The
cosmic order and its truths are above the gods as well as men. But the
God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob is the Creator ... is the absolute
causality." Dame Helen Gardner once characterized this as the "tre-
mendous leap of the religious imagination." And if so, He alone is
omnipotent, and will not be hamstrung even by His own words. The
reason He is merciful, despite His earlier verdict, Down with guilty
Nineveh, is that He is the Creator of all, "whatsoever He created in
His world, He created for His own glory only (Abot de-Rabbi Natan)."
When He forgives, it is for the same reason.
Since talmudic times (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 31a) the book
of Jonah has been read in the synagogue in the afternoon service of the
Day of Atonement. As one of the penitential prayer formulae of the day
(cf. the idiom in Dan. 9:19) puts it, "For Your sake, 0 our God, do it
(i.e., be merciful), not for ours."
"A humanistic interpretation of the story of Jonah," says Bickerman,
"is fallacious." He concludes with quotation of Ps. 115:1.

That each of the studies in this volume can still be read and reflected
on by itself is obvious. Nevertheless their interrelationship is un-
mistakable, above all from the essay on the dating of Aristeas through
the rest of the volume. As I have tried to suggest, the concern with
precise dating (as far as possible) is constant and therefore informing of
cultural and social aspects or expressions of specific times; no less the
concentrated attention to what is going on in the milieu at large, the
customary and the unique, the novel and simultaneous continuity of
older practices among native populations; so too the emphasis on the
exact signification of terms-in literary works, in diplomatic cor-
respondence, in legal instruments-when that can be established; the
criticism of misleading comparisons. And in connection with each of
these, the testing of the relevant texts and of alternative interpretations.
Over all, however, is the sensitivity to two worlds, what may be
called the Aramaic world and the Hellenistic (or Hellenistic-Roman)
world. Though it was not a simply "process of adoption," the Hebrew
mohar (bride-price, given by the bridegroom) becomes a (Greek) dowry.
Our author explains why and when. A Septuagint rendering of a law in
the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 22:4, LXX 22:5) is made intelligible by the
economic and governmental policies of Ptolemaic Egypt. In the Orient
the work of Aramaic scribes continues over a very wide geographical
expanse even after the conquests of Alexander. For an Oriental, clan
membership is primary, residence secondary; for a Greek, fatherland is
primary. The reason for the Christian adoption of the codex form for its
Bible (rather than retaining the earlier scroll form) is probably technical,
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History of Religions

to bring "the Holy Writ within the compass of a few bindings"; the
codex could thus serve "as a means of unification and ecclesiastical

discipline." Taken together, throughout these studies the many

examples to establish a point or an interpretation or to confirm earlier
suggestion and the accompanying analytic discussions demonstrate the
relation of material factors to intellectual-religious ones in the two
worlds which the student of Judaism and early Christianity must
explore.
JUDAR GOLDIN
University of Pennsylvania

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