Abstract
The first section surveys selectively, in eight subsections, scholarly receptions of the narratives about Simon Magus. Was the historical Simon a Gnostic? Was he a magus, or a sorcerer, or neither? A claim even makes him a grammarian. We consider David Flusser’s insights connecting Simon Magus’ theology to the pagan syncretism with monotheistic trends of a Roman-age goddess from Samaria, the great Kore. Simon Magus was sometimes associated with Irish Druidism, or with the Antichrist, or with Muhammad. We then turned to levitation or flight as evidence of sainthood, rather than of sorcery, across cultures. The twelve subsections of the second section begin by considering artwork about Simon Magus’ flight and then enumerate (for the sake of typology), and sometimes discuss in some depth, such occurrences. There is the episode of Griffolino of Arezzo from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Canto 29, lines 73–120. Bladud, King of Bath (the father of King Lear), flies to London and crashes down. Among Victorian London’s esotericists, flying in and out of windows was claimed (and we are not talking about Peter Pan). In the Buddhist Far East, we considered the flight contest between the Buddhist monk Milaraspa (Milarepa) and Tibet’s Bon magician Na ro Bon chung (Bon was the religion that preceded Buddhism in Tibet). An especially saintly lama floats over the pine tree tops while being shot by a Soviet guard, silently implores the guard to desist, and when he is killed, the executioner sees a large flower and converts, in a tale from Buryat folklore. Levitation is a successful argument for conversion to Manichaeism concerning the King of Turan. We also considered a fowler and bird allegory in an early modern German broadsheet: a man clad like a fool flies to his doom. There are some Jewish narratives, for example, Balaam flies, but comes crashing down upon being shown the High Priest’s forefront pendant. The biblical patriarch Jacob’s military prowess and superhero superpowers in the medieval imagination: he leaps two thousand cubits, and Judah, his son, leaps like a flea while fighting the army of Nineveh, in the thirteenth-century Hebrew Book of Tales from Northern France. Simon Magus is still a fertile subject for research and more general interest.
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Notes
- 1.
Concerning Simon Magus, apart from the old surveys by Meeks (1977) and Rudolph (1977), see now especially Alberto Ferreiro’s book (2005a) Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions. ‘[S]everal of his [Ferreiro’s] studies make recourse to the Acti [The Acts of St. Peter] touching the confrontation of Sts. Peter and Paul with Simon Magus in Rome, an encounter that produces the story of the Magus’s flight and ultimate downfall, an event frequently the focus of the depiction of Simon Magus in churches throughout Europe. This event becomes the motif for the altar in the Counter-Reformation chapel in Oviedo, depicting St. Peter’s triumph over the first great heretic, and popularized by numerous authors, most notably in Jacobus of Voragine’s Golden Legend (which Ferreiro sees as the inspiration for the chapel)’ (Jenkins 2007, p. 492).
- 2.
See, for example, Lugano (1900). An important step in the tradition is the account concerning Simon Magus as given in the medieval Golden Legend (the Legenda Aurea). It is surprising that in a denominational Catholic periodical published in Dublin, The Catholic Layman of September 1853, an unsigned article (Anon. 1853), the first in that issue, had this to say, on p. 98, col. 2, concerning the story of Simon Magus the way it appears in The Golden Legend: “It might, in our opinion, be more properly called, the ‘Brazen’, than the ‘Golden’ Legend; for it required no ordinary amount of brazen assurance in any writer, to invent such a story, and then pawn it off upon the world as a true record, intended to confirm and propagate the Christian faith. From what we know of the character of Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, (who, as we before remarked, is the author of this legend), we need not wonder at the amount of barefaced, incredible lies, which it contains. He is described by Melchior Canus, an eminent Roman Catholic canonist, in no very flattering terms. ‘That legend’ saith he, ‘was written by a man, that had a mouth of iron, and had a heart of lead, and who had neither justice nor prudence in him. The miracles that we read there, are rather monsters of miracles than true ones’. Yet this is the narrative which Cardinal Baronius and other Roman Catholic writers consider to be a true record, which Father McCorry asserts that a great many Roman Catholics, in England and Scotland, as well as Ireland, believe to be a real history, and, on the authority of which, he would seek to persuade us, that St. Peter lived and died at Rome!”
- 3.
“The manner of Simon’s death is sometimes drawn out with a view to demonstrating the particular vileness of his life. Arnobius, for instance, [in Against the Heathen II, xii] has him live on a little after his fall and broken leg, in the manner of the Vercelli Acts, but then, in shame, commit suicide by throwing himself from the roof of a high house” (Flint 1991, p. 343, fn. 18).
- 4.
“I can make myself invisible to those who would seize me, and again, if I wish to be seen, I can appear before them. If I should wish to flee, I would bore through mountains and pass through rocks as if they were clay. If I should hurl myself from a high mountain, I should be brought to earth unharmed, as if borne up. If I be bound, I will lose myself, and those who fettered me I will lay in bonds; if confined in prison, I will make the doors open of themselves. I will animate statues, so that those who behold them will suppose them to be living men. I will make new trees spring up at once and cause thickets to grow up suddenly. I will throw myself into the fire and I shall not be burned. I change my countenance so as not to be recognized; nay I can show to men that I have two faces. I will turn myself into a ewe or a she-goat. I will cause beards to grow on the faces of little boys. I will fly up into the air, I will produce gold in great quantities, I will make kings and cast them down […] and once when my mother Rachel ordered me to go to the field to reap, and I saw a sickle lying, I ordered it to go and reap; and it reaped ten times more than the others. Lately, I produced many new sprouts from the earth, and made them bear leaves and produce fruit in a moment” (Pseudo-Clementine Recognitiones, II, 9). Shamma Friedman (2014) and Gideon Bohak (2008, p. 360) mentioned this passage in relation to a Talmudic mention of harvesting cucumbers by magic.
- 5.
“Within the Church is a dented slab of marble that purports to bear the imprints of the knees of Peter and Paul during their prayer” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus).
- 6.
This passage comes after Patricia Karlin-Hayter points out, on the previous page, that Nero was popular in some quarters and that, according to Tacitus, upon Nero’s death the plebs sordida, the habitués of the circus and the theaters, and the lowest slaves grieved and hung upon rumors.”
- 7.
“Priests of the Hellenes,” whereas per Byzantine usage, the Hellenes are pagan, whereas the Byzantine speakers of Greek are “Romans.”
- 8.
See Baldwin (2005). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Peter explains: “The Acts of Peter is one of the earliest of the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The majority of the text has survived only in the Latin translation of the Vercelli manuscript, under the title Actus Petri cum Simone. It is mainly notable for a description of a miracle contest between Saint Peter and Simon Magus, and as the first record of the tradition that St. Peter was crucified head-down. ¶ The Acts of Peter was originally composed in Greek during the second half of the 2nd century, probably in Asia Minor. Consensus among academics points to its being based on the Acts of John, and traditionally both works were said to be written by Leucius Charinus, whom Epiphanius identifies as the companion of John.”
- 9.
On this point, also see Jay Corwin’s paper (2016) “[Jorge Luis] Borges, the Magi and Persian Histories.” Hans Dieter Betz, in a review (1999) of a book by Florent Heintz (1997), Simon Simon ‘Le magicien’: Actes 8.5–25 et l’accusation de magie contre les prophètes thaumaturges dans l’antiquité, remarked that Heintz’s “thesis is that Simon Magus is presented in Acts in terms derived from the rhetoric of invective current at the time. This type of rhetoric is defined further as that used in defaming thaumaturgic prophets as magicians” (Betz 1999, p. 239).
- 10.
“The comparison of the oldest version of Faust’s legend, the Faustbuch (1587), with several episodes of Simon Magus’ legend showes [sic] that the writer of the Faustbuch knew the simonian tradition and that he used it in order to draw up the character of his own doctor” (from the English abstract of Pouderon 2008). In the Greek-language Homilies within the Pseudo-Clementines, Faustus is the name of a character (Clement’s old father), but it is Faustinianus in the Latin version. Simon Magus bestows his own looks upon Faustus, so that Simon may escape the imperial police by which he is sought (Pouderon, ibid., p. 139). An abridgement, the Story of Faustus (Περὶ Φαύστου πατρὸς τοῦ Κλίμεντος πάπα ‘Ρώμης ἱστορία), is in the codex Bodleianus lib. Holkham gr. 58, at folios 303r–307v (Pouderon, ibid., p. 140). A version of the German Faust-Buch is the English Faust Book of 1592 (preserved in a unique copy in the British Museum).
There existed a historical Faustus: the magician “Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus iunior, fons nectromanticorum, astrologus, magus secundus” (the fountainhead of necromancers, astrologer, the second Magus) decried in a letter of August 1507 by Abbot Trithemius of Würzburg to his friend Virdung, himself a court astrologer. See a study by Karl Wentersdorf (1978). “The Sabelli, a collective name for a group of Oscan-speaking Italic tribes including the Marsi and the Paeligni, were famous for the practice of magic and particularly for divination” (ibid., p. 220, fn. 9).
Simon Magus is possibly the ultimate model for Goethe’s Faust (see Palmer and More 1936) and possibly of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (see Brown 1939; the association is accepted by Moore 2005, p. 42). In an “essay [being] an investigation of the Gnostic influences within the intertextual relationships between Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Giordano Bruno’s Moral Dialogues,” Alessandro Rebonato claims that “like Icarus and [Marlowe’s] Faustus, Simon flies too high” (Rebonato 2003, p. 109 and p. 112 respectively). Carlo Ginzburg (1986) discussed the theme of forbidden knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Doctor Faustus demonstrates Marlowe’s fascination with the themes and aspirations of Gnostic thought, a fascination that extends to The Jew of Malta” (Moore 2005, p. 42), a play whose protagonist, Barabbas, disregards norms or (unless it suits him) his Jewish identity, and, for example, poisons nuns with porridge and carpenters with wine (and he claims to have poisoned wells abroad: an accusation levelled against Jews); Moore claims: “This sort of antinomianism was sometimes a byproduct of ancient Gnosticism. As Irenaeus maintains, many Gnostic groups felt that their inner divinity released them from care about bodily activities” (ibid., p. 46). “Like Marlowe’s other protagonists, Barabas disdains his connection to his earthly environment and the people around him. Unlike them, he dismisses the world with only a quip and a flip of the hand” (ibid.).
- 11.
The Illusionist, published in 1983, is a novel by Anita Mason about Simon. In his Cantos, Ezra Pound mentioned (see Surette 1973) Helen of Tyre, this being the prostitute Simon Magus bought as a slave woman and exhibited by claiming she was an embodiment of a senior female divine being.
- 12.
The torments of the simoniacs or simonists, sinners guilty of simony, are described in Canto 19 of Dante’s Inferno (see e.g. Pagliaro 1967, Herzman and Stephany 1978, Herzman and Emmerson 1980, Davis 1998, Sherberg 2011); Charles Singleton (1965) was concerned with Simon Magus in particular, in that canto. Even in the modern belles lettres, in the first paragraph of James Joyce’s story “The Sisters” in Dubliners, one finds mention of “the word simony in the Catechism” (Senn 1987, p.467).
- 13.
The Acta Vercellenses. See Baldwin (2005).
- 14.
The conversion of Simon Magus (as related in the Acts of the Apostles 8,4–25) is the subject of a study by Patrick Fabien (2010).
- 15.
See a study by Étienne Nodet (2013).
- 16.
Nevertheless, Clemens Scholten (2015) claims that “The hometown of Simon Magus must not be a village in Samaria, but is perhaps the place of the old town of the Philistines Gittha in Idumaea” (from the English abstract). Note however that the literal sense of the toponym is “wine-press,” so we should not be surprised if that name was given to more than one place.
- 17.
Simon Magus was discussed by Ingrid Hjelm (2012) in relation to both Church Fathers and Samaritan sources.
- 18.
Whereas Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, is possibly the best informed source about early heretic movements (but some consider Hippolytus to have been a more accurate heresiographer: Grant 1959), depending upon him (including concerning Simon) is no without problem. “Working with Irenaeus as a witness to Gnosticism presents some methodological problems. First, Irenaeus is not a primary source. Secondly, Irenaeus is writing a polemic against Valentinianism, Gnosticism, and other ‘heresies’, so his account is not objective and may be colored by his antagonism” (Gaston 2015, p. 392).
- 19.
David Flusser died in Jerusalem on September 15, 2000, on his 83rd birthday. I dedicated to his memory, on the centennial of his birth, the article Nissan (2017a [2018]a), in which I took issue with a particular Italo-Romance zoonymic gloss he interpreted inside a Hebrew text from Italy. Nissan and Burgaretta (2017 [2018]) is a sequel of that paper.
- 20.
Beyschlag also published the article (1971) “Zur Simon-Magus-Frage.”
- 21.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus states: “He performed such signs by magic acts during the reign of Claudius that he was regarded as a god and honored with a statue on the island in the Tiber which the two bridges cross, with the inscription Simoni Deo Sancto, ‘To Simon the Holy God’ (First Apology, XXVI). However, in the 16th century, a statue was unearthed on the island in question, inscribed to Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity, leading most scholars to believe that Justin Martyr confused Semoni Sancus with Simon.”
- 22.
See, for example, Herzman and Emmerson (1980), which is in connection to Dante’s Canto 19 of Inferno.
- 23.
- 24.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Magus See Müller-Lisowski (1923, 1938).
- 25.
- 26.
Levitation is the subject of a book by Olivier Leroy (1928).
- 27.
Côté (2001, p. 520): “Comme nous l’avons vu, il y a peu de passages où Simon le Magicien défend des idées purement pauliniennes, simoniennes ou marcionites. Dans ce cas, peut-être vaudrait-il mieux, au lieu d’isoler les éléments jugés antipauliniens, antisimoniens ou antimarcionites, pour justifier l’hypothèse d’une polémique, les conjuguer, au contraire, aux autres éléments qui composent la figure du Simon clémentin, pour définir l’image d’ensemble du personnage. Cette conjugaison produirait, à première vue, une image de caractère disparate. […] Cette diversité, quelque peu choquante, a parfois reçu l’explication des remaniements successifs et maladroits, dictés par des polémiques différentes. On insiste, dans ce type d’explication, sur l’analyse du personnage, alors qu’il y aurait lieu de voir, selon nous, la synthèse possible que représente Simon le Mage. Autrement dit, avons-nous affaire à un produit de compilation, où les divers éléments s’ajoutent les uns aux autres, au gré des circonstances, ou à un produit de composition où les éléments s’ajustent les uns aux autres, suivant les contours de l’intentio operis? Nous émettons ici l’hypothèse que le Simon pseudo-clémentin est une figure de synthèse qui représente les thèses et les pratiques contraires à celles qui sous-tendent les Pseudo-Clémentines. C’est ainsi que les traits pauliniens et marcionites, que nous avons déjà mentionnés, s’ajustent aux traits tirés de certaines traditions simoniennes, attestées par les notices de Justin, d’Irénée et d’Hippolyte. Les Pseudo-Clémentines ont emprunté à ces traditions des éléments d’origines diverses qu’elles ont regroupés dans le personnage de Simon […].”
- 28.
The Acta Archelai is the most ancient sizeable Christian text refuting Manichaeism. It is dated to the mid-fourth century, according to Madeleine Scopello to c. 340, nearly 60 years after Mani’s death. See Mark Vermes’ (2001) English translation of the Acta Archelai, with Samuel Lieu’s commentary.
- 29.
For example, in the fourth century C.E., Priscillian was considered to be the founder of a heresy, Priscillianism. “Contemporary sources indicate that Priscillianism was the major heretical group in Spain, one that allegedly embodied the teachings of the Gnostics and Manichaeans. Monastic asceticism was also making its initial appearance in the Iberian Peninsula, and Priscillian was one of numerous ascetics who had a wide following of both men and women. The Priscillianist controversy ended tragically with Priscillian’s execution at Treves [Trier] at the hands of the usurper Emperor Maximian in 385/86. ¶ As Priscillianism spread outside of Spain well after his death into the sixth century, the response from non-peninsular writers became vigorous. In Southern France, where Priscillianism had a significant presence, Vincent of Lérins turned his attention to Priscillian within a broader consideration of heresy in his most well known work, the Commonitorium. Theological arguments aside, through the use of typology Vincent of Lérins invoked Simon Magus to oppose Priscillian. I propose to demonstrate the significant place of the Simon Magus ‘type’ in Vincent’s work” (Ferreiro 1995, p. 180). Studies on Priscillian and the Priscillianists that actually show the pseudo-succession of Simon Magus that Jerome created include Ferreiro (1993a, 1993b [1999, 2005]).
- 30.
Even though Mani was not a heretic from Christianity. He was born to a couple from the Iranian gentry, related to the Arsacid dynasty, who (a bit like people, including from the upper class, joining a hippy commune in the late 1960s) joined an Elḥasaite (Elchasaite) Gnostic community in Mesopotamia (hence Mani’s Gnostic antipathy for Moses, whom he did not enumerate among founders of religions); then Mani began to have visions, and eventually his own father became Mani’s apostle to India. However, in Persian-ruled Mesopotamia, apparently the new religion of Mani attracted especially Christians. In the West, he was portrayed in Persian attire, thus a Persian, the enemy. Moreover, Mani claimed he was Jesus’ apostle who understood Jesus best (just as Mani claimed he understood Buddha better than the Buddhists). Mani claimed that the problem with the founders of a religion is that they didn’t write down their doctrine, so it was distorted by followers (and he omitted Moses’ Pentateuch, abhorred by the Gnostics). Therefore, there was some ground for some Fathers of the Church to view Mani as a heretic, especially as there were Manichaean bishops in the Roman Empire. See the chapter “Simon Magus as the Archetype of Polemical Portrayals of Mani” in this book, and Nissan (in press).
- 31.
Also see how Mani was portrayed in relation to Simon Magus, in a paper by Eszter Spät (2004).
- 32.
“[Stephen] Haar [(2003)] concludes that no single answer to whether Simon was the first Gnostic is possible” (Brakke 2004, p. 322). “Although H[aar] recognizes that ‘Gnosticism’ is a modern construction, he nevertheless evaluates reports about Simon against the much-maligned definition from the Messina conference, with predictably inconclusive results ([Haar 2003,] pp. 296–99). H. examines closely two claims about Simon found in Justin, characterized as ‘an impartial witness without any particular interest in Gnostics’ (p. 267), and two in Hippolytus; and he finds the historical Simon plausibly to be ‘a charismatic figure adept in the traditions of the Magoi, who exercised considerable ability, authority, and influence. A self-proclaimed expert in divine things, Simon would not have rejected the notion of being a ‘Gnostic’; at least not in the classical sense…. He taught a source of truth and salvation that differed from mainstream Jewish thought and practice; he claimed the preeminent role of ‘Standing One’—some called him the ‘first God’, Christians viewed him as a ‘Christ pretender’—and he enjoyed public favour and widespread respect from Samaria to Rome’ (pp. 306–7)” (Brakke, ibid., his ellipsis dots).
- 33.
Note 850 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, p. 143 cites the sources for this being BaR, that is, Numbers Rabbah (i.e., Bammidbar Rabbah) and Midrash Tanḥuma: “BaR 22.3 (this passage has also the dissenting view that each tribe sent two thousand warriors); Tan. B. IV, 158-159; Tan[ḥuma] Mattot 3; Sifre N., 157; Targum Yerushalmi Num. 31.6; Sotah, Tosefta 7.17, and Babli 43a.” Those other sources are Sifre on Numbers, the Targum Yerushalmi to Numbers, tractate Sotah of the Tosefta, and tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud.
- 34.
Note 851 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, p. 143 cites the sources for this being Numbers Rabbah, Midrash Tanḥuma, the Sifre on Numbers, and tractate Sanhedrin in both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud: “BaR 20.20 and 22.5; Tan[ḥuma] Mattot 4; Sifre N., 157; Sanhedrin 106b and Yerushalmi 10, 29a.”
- 35.
Note 853 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, p. 144 cites the source for this being Midrash “Yelammedenu in Yalkut I, 785. In this source Balaam is said to have performed his feat by means of the [ineffable (i.e., unutterable) divine] Name [i.e., the Tetragrammaton]. Phinehas, who also knew the Name, flew after him and caught up with him at God’s throne, where he was begging for mercy. Phinehas held up to him the high priest’s plate of pure gold, upon which the Name was engraved, and thus caused him to descend (comp. vol. III, p. 409), and brought him before the Synhedrion, who sentenced him to death. Targum Yerushalmi Num. 31.8 and Aguddat Aggadot 78–79 follow Yelammedenu in the main. What is meant by the statement of Yelammedenu that Balaam, while flying through the air, stretched out his arms like the two tables of stone? In Jewish and Christian legends, flying through the air is one of the accomplishments of the sorcerers; comp., e. g., vol. III, p. 28 (the same expression [tafsu beṣiṣit rošo “they grasped him by the hair on his head” is used in Aguddat Aggadot, loc. cit., with regard to Balaam, as in [Midrash] Abkir in connection with Jannes and Jambres; comp. note 53), and the Christian legend concerning Simon Magus. Comp. the following two notes.”
- 36.
Note 854 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, p. 144 cites the source for this being the Book of Zohar: “Zohar III, 194a–194b, where two different versions of the legend are combined into one. According to one version, Jannes and Jambres were killed shortly after they had fashioned the golden calf; see vol. III, p. 120. Zohar remarks that the tribe of Dan produced four heroes: Samson, Zaliah, Ira, David’s friend (see 2 Sam. 20.26), and Seraiah who, as assistant of the Ephraimite Messiah [the predecessor of the Davidic Messiah], will cause great havoc among the Gentiles. The connection between this Seraiah and the Christian legend concerning the Danite descent of the anti-Christ is obvious, although it is difficult to trace the exact nature of this connection. Comp. Index, s. v. ‘Danites.’”
- 37.
Note 855 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, pp. 144–145 cites the source for this being Targum Yerushalmi to Numbers: “Targum Yerushalmi Num. 31.8, where, in accordance with Sanhedrin 106b, it is said that Phineas killed Balaam; comp. note 853. On the identity of Balaam with Laban, and on the long list of his crimes, see vol. III, p. 354. On the sword, see notes 44 and 852, as well as vol. Ill, p. 367 (top) and note 59 on vol. IV, p. 94. See Index, s. v. ‘Methusalem, Sword of,’ and ‘David, Sword of.’ The different legends concerning the death of Balaam show many points of resemblance to those about the death of Jesus (comp. the rich collections of such legends by Krauss, Leben Jesu). But this does not furnish any basis for the hypothesis that Balaam is used as a cryptic name for Jesus; see note 722. According to the legend given in the Masorah, ([36 22]) it was Joshua who killed Balaam. Is this based upon the reading [Joshua] instead of [Phinehas] in Sanhedrin 106b? Comp. note 34 on vol. IV, p. 10.”
Abraham Geiger (1868) proposed that Balaam’s appearance was a disguise for Jesus, but this conclusion is unwarranted: in folk narratives, the same plot may be applied to different characters. For a critique of Geiger (1868), see Van Voorst (2000, p. 115).
See Krauss’s Leben Jesu (1902) and now Meerson and Schäfer (2014) and Schäfer et al. (2011); the subject is also prominent in a paper by Schoeps (1948), “Simon Magus in der Haggada?” Harris Hirschberg began an article (1943) by claiming: “One of the epoch-making hypotheses of the ‘Tübingen School’ in the last century was the theory that Simon Magus, mentioned in the Acts and the Patristic literature, was but a nickname given to Paul by his Jewish Christian antagonists. Modern research has subjected this view to a revision and has proved that Simon Magus was a historical character; but that at least in the Clementina his name was used as an allusion to the Apostle to the Gentiles. A strong proof of the extent to which the confusion Paul-Simon Magus had penetrated even Jewish circles is presented in a Talmudic passage the importance of which has been overlooked heretofore.” Hirschberg’s evidence is not conclusive, though.
In note 722 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, pp. 123–124, he stated, at first concerning identifications of Balaam: “Sanhedrin 105a (Beor is taken here as an epithet of Balaam; this explanation is against that of Rashi); Targum Yerushalmi Num. 22.25; BR 57.3 (Balaam is identified here with Kemuel; see Theodor ad loc, Hadar, Exod. 1.10, and Num 22.5; Da‘at, Gen. 22.23, and Exod., loc. cit., Mahzor Vitry 549); Ye[l]ammedenu in Yalkut I, 766. Comp. also vol. I, pp. 376, 424; vol. II, pp. 159, 163,165, 254, 272, 277, 287, 296, 332, 334, 335; vol. III, pp. 364, 373, 411; vol. IV, p. 30. In the sources quoted above, three different views can be easily recognized: Balaam is identified with Laban; Balaam is Laban’s grandson; Balaam is Laban’s nephew. But there is still a fourth view which maintains that Balaam died at the age of thirty-three, and accordingly could not have been a close relative of Laban, and certainly not identical with him, see Sanhedrin 106b. The view held by many modern authors, Jewish as well as Christian, that in Sanhedrin, loc. cit., as well as in many other passages of the legendary literature of the Jews, Balaam is used as an alias for Jesus (comp. the literature on this point given by Laible, Jesus in Talmud, IV, 50, seq., Schorr, He-Haluz X, 32–46; Herford, Christianity in Talmud, 65 seq.) is decidedly wrong; comp. Ginzberg, Journal Biblical Literature, 41.121, note 18. On the descent of Balaam, see also Lekah, Num. 22.6, where he is described as belonging to the family of Kemuel.” See Herford (1903), a book by R[obert] Travers Herford (b. 1860, d. 1950).
- 38.
Note 856 in Ginzberg’s Vol. 6, p. 145 cites the source for this being the Book of Zohar: “Zohar III, 194. Onkelos, the son of Titus’s sister, succeeded by means of necromancy to have a talk with Balaam, who told him that his punishment consisted in being boiled in scalding semen virile corresponding to his sin, for he was responsible for the unchaste acts committed by the Israelites with the daughters of Moab; Gittin 57a. The same passage stated that Balaam advised Onkelos not to adopt the Jewish religion. His words were: ‘Seek thou not their (Israel’s) peace and prosperity all thy days for ever’. And he gave this advice to Onkelos, though he had to admit that Israel is the foremost nation on earth.”
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
Involving his urethra, but according to the version, emitting either urine or semen. The purpose was to defeat the magic effect that had enabled flying in the air.
- 42.
Rather than ignorance, this can be reformulated by reference to which kind of competence was (or, in Eisenstein’s case, is) valued. A striking example of this is Paul of Tarsus, whose background made him proficient in the kind of cultural intercourse he learned in Tarsus (or among immigrants in Jerusalem), but also disadvantaged him in Jerusalem in such circles where he had been longing for recognition. What they valued was different. On his way to Damascus, he had the time to reflect about how by proposing to Gamaliel I that he, Saul/Paul, would go to Damascus and persecute a given community, he had shot himself in the foot: he did not gain Gamaliel’s respect, but, I guess, could read in his eyes a sense of relief that could be translated into “Good riddance,” perhaps along with a nuance of disgust at the kind of vicarious promotion the self-appointed persecutor was seeking. On the way to Damascus, Paul could reflect that for Gamaliel and his circle, he was an academic failure, whereas he himself knew he could be quite proficient if he could apply a kind of cultural competence in which he excelled. It is somewhat ironic that the community in Damascus he was targeting, with the change of plan, was still going to be used.
The direction into which Paul took that community was not uncontroversial in early Christianity: consider the anti-Pauline polemic of the Kerygmata Petri about the struggle between Peter and Paul. Interestingly, in the Jewish counter-biography of Jesus, Paul was regarded positively, in appreciation of how he had distanced Christianity from Judaism: it was “half in, half out” that was least appreciated.
Also consider the attitude to Paul of Tarsus by Jacob Emden (b. Altona, 1697, d. Altona, 1776), a famous rabbi based in Altona (where his relations with the city’s rabbinate were rife with tension), the son of the famous Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi (the Ḥakham Tzvi, b. Habsburg, Moravia, 1656, d. Lviv/Lemberg, 1718, based in Altona in 1690–1709, and Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Amsterdam in 1710–1712). Emden was modern in that he left an autobiography, indeed a tell-it-all autobiography (Emden 2011; Schacter 1998). We know that he had a nervous temperament, and that he had no patience for what he perceived as heresy within the Jewish fold. Both Emden and his father were keen to fight crypto-Sabbatean heretics, and Emden also recorded how an awkward heretic of another hue paid him visit at home, while he was in the loft. As the visitor proceeded to expound his ideas, Emden, angered, threw him downstairs. Emden, a traditionalist, was definitely not a member of the Enlightenment (nevertheless, Moses Mendelssohn, one generation younger, used to consult him reverently). Emden however was responsive to the ideas of toleration (except within Judaism), and in fact, he considered both Christianity and Islam to be providential instruments for the betterment of humankind (an idea already found in the medieval Maimonides), and Paul of Tarsus to have been well-meaning.
Langton (2010) discussed Jewish perceptions of the apostle Paul, especially in the intellectual history of Reform (and Britain’s Liberal) Judaism. In the entry “Saul of Tarsus” on pp. 79–87 in Vol. 11 (1905) of the Jewish Encyclopedia, Kaufmann Kohler, a Reform rabbi and scholar who was President of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, claimed on p. 82, col. 1: “Evidently Paul entertained long before his vision those notions of the Son of God which he afterward expressed; but the identification of his Gnostic Christ with the crucified Jesus of the church he had formerly antagonized was possibly the result of a mental paroxysm experienced in the form of visions.”
- 43.
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/DantInf 29to34.php
- 44.
In antiquity, visual representations of Medusa sometimes showed her with wings.
- 45.
I have discussed the myth of Medusa myself (Nissan 2018), by way of an overview, in:
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7. The Minotaur and the Medusa
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7.1. Kaplan’s Rationalisation, within a Multitude of Aetiological Attempts
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7.2. The Narrative Motif “Women with Petrifying Powers”
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7.3. Medusa in the Visual Arts, and Instances of Self-Identification1454”
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[also on Jaffa, Andromeda, and Perseus]
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7.4. Medusa, between Alternative Narrative and the Visual Arts
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7.5. Medusa as Metaphor and in Allegory: Envy, Truth, Revolution
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7.6. Medusa’s Association with Wisdom
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7.7. The Name of Medusa Invoked in Scholarly Debates
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7.8. Uses of Medusa in Early Imperial Roman Literature
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7.9. Medusa’s Explicit or Implicit Presence in Literary Writing: Dante.
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- 46.
Whereas the lotus is associated with Buddhism, it also appears within Manichaeism. According to a Manichaean narrative (preserved in Ibn al-Nadim, Fihrist, 60.7–61.13), Al-Ṣindīd, the principal archon initially ruling the created order, taught Eve how to seduce Adam, but once Eve gives birth to a baby (Seth), Al-Ṣindīd is jealous and convinces Eve to kill the baby, who is saved by being taken away by Adam. The archons prevent Adam from accessing cattle and trees, in order to deny him milk and fruits for Seth. Adam overcomes this by magic and prayer. Adam feeds the baby with milk flowing from a lotus plant (Reeves 1999, p. 433). “He [Mani] said, ‘Then there appeared to Adam a tree called the lotus, and milk flowed from it, and he fed the boy with it. He named him [the boy] after its name, but sometime later he renamed him Shathil [i.e., Seth]. Then that Al-Ṣindīd declared enmity against Adam and those who were born’” (ibid., Reeves’ brackets).
“Adam first named the child ‘L-ṭ-s’ after the name of the tree […] which miraculously suckled the infant, and later reversed and manipulated the sounds of the name to form the new name ‘Š-ṭ-l’ […]. For discussion of this unusual name, found only in texts with Syro-Mesopotamian gnostic roots, see Reeves [(1996)], Heralds, 112–17” (Reeves 1999, p. 433, fn. 11, my brackets).
- 47.
Having one son join the celibate clergy is also known from other cultures. In medieval northern France, the scholastic philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142), most famous because of his love for Heloise and his being castrated in revenge, complained in writings that whereas among the Jews, all sons are given a religious education, in Christian families it was customary that one of the sons was made to enter the clergy, which according to Abelard was so that the inheritance obtained by his siblings would be enhanced, as he would die childless.
- 48.
- 49.
This author was to become a literary character himself, in Edmond Rostand’s heroic comedy Cyrano de Bergerac, first represented in Paris in 1897 and first published there with the publisher Fasquelle in 1898 (s.v., pp. 315–318, in Beaumarchais and Couty 1994).
- 50.
See Beaumarchais and Couty (1994, pp. 552–556, s.v.).
- 51.
A man who (instead of dying) was transported from earth and lives alone on the moon does not necessarily imply a positive evaluation of such a man. In German folklore, a man who was cutting wood on Sunday is punished by being exiled forever (or until the Last Judgement?) to the moon. Violation of the Sabbath by cutting wood is evidently taken from the episode of the man who was gathering wood (meqošéš ‘eṣím) on the Sabbath and was punished for that, in Ch. 15 of Numbers. Cutting wood and gathering wood is not the same, both activities being particular cases of “going out for wood” and each being an adaptation to the environmental circumstances and the related cultural oikotype (in folklore studies parlance), in the Near Eastern desert versus in wooded Germany.
Bear in mind that in the Dolomites, a mountain range on the border between the Veneto and Trentino regions of northeast Italy, the following legend explains why there is a glacier on Marmolada, the tallest mountain: an old woman, notwithstanding the protest of fellow villagers, went collecting hay on Mary’s festival of August the fifth, now known as the Madonna della Neve. As retribution, that night it began snowing, and it kept snowing until that area was buried under the glacier.
At the site https://www.agordinodolomiti.it/en_GB/index.php/cosa-vedere/le-dolomiti-in-agordino/marmolada/the story is related in English: “A popular Dolomitic legend tells the story of the birth of the Marmolada Glacier. Long time ago, where nowadays the glacier rises, there were green meadows and the inhabitants of the nearby valleys used them for glazing and haymaking. An old lady was haymaking in disregard of the Our Lady of the Snows day (August, 5th); this day is still considered a very important religious festivity in the Dolomites, and in the past it prescribed rest and prayer. Despite the severe reprimands of her fellow countrymen, she kept making her work. The legend says that, to punish her arrogance, it suddenly started snowing for several days, heavily and without interruption; the old lady, her shelter and all the grassland of the Marmolada were covered by snow that eventually turned into ice: it was the birth of the Marmolada Glacier.” Cf. https://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Marmolada
A distinction is to be made between a man considered to be living on the surface of the moon and the perhaps more widespread notion from folklore of the moon as visible being considered to show the facial features of a human holy character. It is not unheard of that some Jewish community ascribed this to Moses. The availability of such an Islamic tradition about the face of a holy man of its own enabled a new version to emerge within the propaganda rhetoric of Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. At a time when the revolution was unfolding, but Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had not gone back to Iran as yet from him exile in France, revolutionarypropaganda spread the notion that his face could be seen on the moon. I leave the question open, of whether this was poetic license or some members of the public were expected to take it at face value. Soon after Iran’s revolution, an urban legend maintained that the man appearing to be Khomeini was not him, but a usurper, and that whereas the latter’s hands have five fingers, the real cleric has either four, or six in one of his hands (Omidsalar 1993). Polydactyly (having fingers in excess) does occur. Henry II the Pious, King of Poland during the first Mongol invasion, was beheaded. His wife was only able to identify his body because he had six toes on his left foot. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyly. According to 2 Samuel 21:20–21 (cf. 1 Chronicles 20:6), a nephew of David slays in Gath an enemy who has twenty-four fingers and is from a family of giants. The medieval commentators from present-day France, Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzḥaki), Radak (Rabbi David Ḳimḥi), and Joseph Kara explained that the text specifies “six and six,” to exclude the interpretation as seven fingers (in each foot) versus five fingers (in each hand). A Chinese idiom from Jehol province is: “The man with six fingers plays guess-fingers,” a play whose participants extend a number of fingers of one hand while shouting the total of fingers put forth by yourself and your opponent together (proverb 216 on p. 58 in Serruys 1947).
- 52.
In Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil (in Nouvelles Œuvres, Paris: Sercy, 1662), Dyrcona, the protagonist—whose name is the anagram of Cyrano—meets on the Sun the philosopher Tommaso Campanella and witnesses the arrival of the soul of René Descartes. See Beaumarchais and Couty (1994, pp. 556–558, s.v. Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil).
- 53.
A precedent of that title can be found in Seneca’s tragedy Hercules Furens, the fury of Hercules (out of pain) being—as per the mythological account—a consequence of his donning the poisonous shirt sent to him by his wife Deianira, who had been misled about the effect by the dying centaur Nessus, who had her believe that his own blood could be used by her as an ointment that would ensure Hercules’ love for her. Hercules (or Heracles, as per his Greek name) chose to hasten his death and conclude his death agony, by burning himself on the stake. Then Athena carried him in a chariot to the Olympus. Mutatis mutandis, an angel takes Elijah to Heaven in a chariot amid flames.
- 54.
Note moreover that a pogrom against the Jews of Ekaterinoslav erupted on a day of celebration, namely, the day of St Elijah (according to the Russian Orthodox liturgicalcalendar), on July 20, 1882. The pogrom unfolded during two days and made nearly 500 Jewish families destitute.
- 55.
Literally, “sheep-fold,” but metaphorically “home” or “abode.” The Italian masculine noun ovile is from the Latin neuter noun ovile, itself from the adjective ovilis, and this from the noun ovis “sheep.” Ovilio Urbisci was a judge in 1970s Italy.
- 56.
Clearly the Jewish tradition about the Ten Tribes is combined, here, with the medieval European traditions about Alexander the Great and about the Caucasus as preventing an invasion by savage peoples. The Ten Tribes are coalesced, in Tromba’s epic (1525), with traditions about Gog and Magog. Yet, in the Christian tradition, the Zosimos story gives the Rechabites (i.e., the offspring of Jonadab the son of Rechab) a role similar to the one assigned by the controversial early medieval traveller Eldad the Danite to the Children of Moses, who live in bliss, secluded from the rest of the world by an unsurmountable physical obstacle, like in later Jewish traditions, the Ten Tribes are, by the River Sambation (cf. Benite 2009).
- 57.
Profetato is the word in the original Italian. Wierzbicka (1987) discussed the semantic domain of “predict” versus “forecast” or “prophesy.”
- 58.
Toaff (1996, pp. 68–72) explains that the inconvenient fact that the Ten Tribes cannot be made liable for the Passion is circumvented, in Tromba’s epic, by making them forever liable for the idolatry of the golden calves. This is, according to Toaff, a response to Jewish portrayals of the Ten Tribes which, when catering to Gentile audiences, would deny the charge of deicide at least for the Ten Tribes that had been exiled centuries before the Passion. Toaff points out that Tromba’s epic was published by Perugia’s foremost printer, who was himself a business associate of Jews and used to distribute in Umbria, from his shop, the Jewish printed literature published by Girolamo Soncino, who was based at that time in Pesaro.
King Jeroboam, who brought about the secession of the Ten Tribes from the unified kingdom whose capital was Jerusalem, sought to sever his subjects from the cultic center in that city, as well as from the Levite (indeed Aaronid) priesthood, loyal to the Davidic dynasty. Actually the golden calves as introduced by the cultic reform of Jeroboam (not to be confused with the Golden Calf from when Moses was late coming down from Mt. Sinai) are thought to have been considered when instituted as mere pedestals for the invisible one God. Thus Jeroboam combined the Hebrew aniconism (i.e., refraining from representing the deity in a visualized body), with a representational convention known from elsewhere in the Near East, in which a sculpture of a deity is shown standing on the back of a bull.
Consider the cherubs, whose name is now considered to be a cognate of the Greek etymon of griffin. The cherubs made by Moses and placed on the Ark gave rise to a Christian tradition about an angelic order whose representation in art is as a winged baby. In the Jewish tradition, too, the cherubs are conceived of as looking like children, and a folk-etymology was invoked in support in the rabbinic tradition in the Babylonian Talmud, Ḥagigah, 13b, where reference is made to Ezekiel 1:10, stating that the face of the bull was changed into that of a cherub. However, still referring to Ezekiel 1:10, the cherubs are identified with images of bulls in the Reuel Scrolls (Steiner 1995), two tenth-century exegetic documents of Byzantine origin, in Hebrew with interspersed Greek glosses in Hebrew script, preserved in the Egyptian Genizah and is now held at the Hebrew University (MS JNUL 4° 577.7/1). Reuel was the exegete or copyist who signed himself in the colophon. The gloss to Ezekiel, 10:14, translated here from Hebrew, reads: “the face of the Cherub, i.e., the face of the bull […]. Whence you learn that also the Cherubs made by Moses in the Tabernacle and that he placed in the Ark […] were bulls” (Steiner 1995, p. 42). Raanan Eichler of Bar-Ilan University, in his doctoral dissertation and his 2021 book, The Ark and the Cherubim, rejects the prevailing scholarly view of the cherubim as having constituted an “empty throne” or footstool, rather proposing they were an “empty frame,” going even further in avoiding anthropomorphism in how the Deity was conceived in a cultic context.
- 59.
What is rendered by “exceedingly,” in the biblical Hebrew texts is ʿad bosh, which literally means “until shame” (i.e., waiting further would have been embarrassing). Rashi’s gloss ad locum explains: “He was ashamed of them, lest they say: ‘He does not want to meet his master; as he has taken his greatness [i.e., his status], he does not want him to come back’. All of this I found in the Tosefta of [tractate] Sotah [12,5].” (See in the Zuckermandel edition of the Tosefta, Jerusalem, 5723 Anno Mundi = 1962/3, 3rd reprint.)
- 60.
A book by Daniel Matt (2022) stands out as it devotes special attention to how Elijah has been imagined in Jewish mysticism.
- 61.
In fact, the Book of Malachi (where the latter-day Elijah appears) is part of the Hebrew Bible, and at least by the traditional positioning along sacred history, it is “later” than the Book of Kings, but earlier than the midrashic literature which depicts Elijah in an angelic role, intervening in the life of the talmudic Sages within ordinary history, and this in turn is earlier than medieval, early modern, and contemporary narratives about the angelic Elijah appearing to people.
- 62.
I mentioned this earlier, but am repeating this out of convenience. In a book in literary and forensic attribution studies intended for a broad public, Don Foster (2001) has presented his contribution to the controversy about the authorship of the poem “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” first published on December 23, 1823, in the Sentinel in Troy, New York. Foster was eventually able to corroborate the claim that the poem was authored by Henry Livingston Jr, against the more usually credited attribution to Clement Clark Moore.
- 63.
“A chariot of fire and horses of fire” took Elijah “up by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). It is not impossible to find another tale in which, at the end of his life, a hero is carried out into the sky on a chariot. At the end of the life of Heracles from Greek mythology (the Hercules of the Romans)—when, suffering atrociously because of the poisonous shirt he donned, he resolves to burn himself on the stake and thus bring his death agony to a close—according to the mythical account, the sky was thundering while Heracles burnt; a cloud appeared, and the goddess Athena came down flying in a chariot. She had Heracles mount and carried him to immortal life among the gods on the Olympus.
- 64.
1 Kings 18:45–46. Achab had acquiesced in Elijah’s public contest against the priests of Baal on Mt Carmel and even in his slaying them afterwards (at the River Kishon). Elijah brings rain and tells Achab to go back to his capital city before road conditions would deteriorate because of it. (This reminds of Sisera’s chariots becoming stuck at River Kishon.) And then the next thing that happens is that Achab tells his wife Jezebel about what Elijah did, including about his slaying her protégés, the Baalist clerics. She promises revenge, and Elijah flees (ibid., ch. 19).
- 65.
Jehu killed the King of Israel and the King of Judah during a summit. The King of Israel assuaged the concerns of the King of Judah, when the latter spotted Jehu pursuing them, by stating that this is simply his own general driving as a madman, as usual. Jehu, his chariot, and the biblical witness to his usual crazy driving have a record in the English tradition. See Kennelly (1989a, b), for what Jonathan Swift made of his name and the background in early modern English political discourse.
- 66.
The Jewish medieval exegetes differed among themselves in how they interpreted the dialogue between Jehu and Jonadab: either it is Jonadab who answers the question (which contains the word ha-yesh “is there…?”) with Yesh va-yesh, literally, “There is and there is,” i.e., “And how!” and then goes on to ask Jehu to extend his hand and help him mount on board of his chariot; or otherwise Jonadab simply answered: Yesh!, which led then Jehu to retort: Va-yesh… (“If so, …,” i.e., “As your answer is Yesh!, …”) and to invite Jonadab to extend his own hand, so that Jehu would pull him on board.
- 67.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jaffe-samuel-ben-isaac-ashkenazi (based on the Encyclopaedia Judaica) explains: “His works are (1) Yefeh Mareh [= Mar’eh] (Constantinople, 1587; Venice 1590), expositions of the aggadot of the Jerusalem Talmud. In the preface Jaffe explains that it was his aim to interpret the aggadot of the Jerusalem Talmud ‘because they are very similar to the aggadot of the Midrash Rabbah in style and in language’; (2) Yefeh To’ar, commentary to the Midrash Rabbah: Genesis (Venice, 1597–1606); Exodus (Venice, 1597); Leviticus (Constantinople, 1648; Wilmersdorf, 1714, with a preface by his grandson); (3) Yefeh Einayim, pt. 1 (Venice, 1631), homiletical discourses on the weekly portions of the law; (4) Yefeh Anaf (Frankfurt on the Oder, 1696), a commentary on Ruth Rabbah, Esther Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah: (5) Yefeh Kol (Smyrna, 1739), a commentary on the Song of Songs Rabbah; (6) Tikkun Soferim (Leghorn, 1789), glosses on the formulas of documents of Moses Almosnino. His responsa, Beit Din Yafeh, are still in manuscript.” Most of those titles recycle the family name of the author, Yafeh, “handsome.”
- 68.
- 69.
A patron of the arts and sciences, Rudolf II (about whom, see e.g. Evans 1973 [revised, 1997]) employed the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Rudolf II was born in Vienna in 1552 and died in Prague in 1612. “From 1564–1571 Rudolf was sent to Spain to be educated under the supervision of Philip II. He was crowned King of Bohemia in 1575, and elected Holy Roman Emperor the following year. In 1583 he moved the imperial capital from Vienna to Prague. Rudolf never married, though he spent much energy on failed matrimonial plans. Consequently he was succeeded by his hated brother Matthias (1557–1619), who usurped Rudolf’s titles and forced him into retirement in 1611” (Godwin 2006, p. 1021). “In Spain, Rudolf had been indoctrinated with Spanish court ceremonial and a strict Catholic faith. He adhered to the former all his life, in his black costume and the rigid etiquette of his court. The latter had the contrary effect: the sight of an auto da fe (execution) of heretics in Toledo had inclined him to a lifelong policy of non-compulsion in religious matters. For a long period he avoided all rites of the Church. From 1601–1608 his friend Johannes Pistorius (1546–1608) persuaded him to confess and communicate at Easter, but Rudolf died, as his father [Maximilian II] had done, without receiving the sacraments. Given his eirenic disposition, Rudolf was frightened by fanaticism, whether it was that of the Czech Brethren and the Utraquists, that of the Calvinist princes plotting against the Habsburg monarchy, or that of the ultra-Catholic Philip II of Spain and the papal nuncios whom Rudolf’s mother had installed in Prague. The Bohemian Estates (nobility) were largely Protestant, and they put pressure on the Catholic emperors by withholding taxes to support the war against the Turks. Political unrest drove Rudolf increasingly into the Catholic camp, until the Estates forced him to sign a ‘Letter of Majesty’ (1609) proclaiming religious freedom. Rudolf II lost all support in 1611, after a Catholic mercenary army had ravaged the countryside and invaded Prague. ¶ Rudolf’s lack of enthusiasm for any particular Christian sect was certainly due also to his hermetic and esoteric inclinations” (Godwin 2006, p. 1021). Godwin mentions the Maharal, who had a meeting with Rudolf II, while also mentioning a work of Christian Kabbalah compiled by Johannes Pistorius, the Emperor confessor: “The Jewish community of Prague was a center for Lurianic Kabbalistic studies […], especially under Rabbi Judah Low [i.e., the Maharal] (1520?–1609) who met with the Emperor in 1592. Rudolf’s confessor Pistorius edited the important collection Artis Cabalisticae, hoc est reconditae theologiae et philosophiae scriptorum Tomus I (1587)” (Godwin 2006, pp. 1021–1022).
- 70.
Offering a lethal rose is a ruse in one of the Islamic versions of Moses’ death, but this even turned up in an episode from the Fall of the Parthenopean Republic (conquered by the clerical Sanfedists, the Naples Bourbon loyalists, and the British admiral Horatio Nelson), as per an oral life narrative by the Neapolitan [= Parthenopean, Naples’] Jacobin Raffaele Settembrini, as captured in writing by his son, the writer Luigi Settembrini, who heard the report as a child. An intellectual elite had set up a Jacobin republic in Naples, but the French army withheld its help, and the new polity succumbed to the onslaught of a peasant army rallying to the cause of the Old Regime, combined with Horatio Nelson’s intervention from the sea. The counter-revolutionary, clerical, so-called Sanfedist armies in 1799, led by [Fabrizio] Cardinal Ruffo, operated in the Kingdom of Naples, where they would be active again during the era of Napoleonic rule by proxy. A mob captured Raffaele Settembrini in the street, accusing him of being a Jacobin. Stripped naked and wounded, he was carried to the seashore, so he would be shot dead. On the seashore, a man slapped him, to mislead the mob, and whispered to him that he was acting on behalf of a monarchist friend of the captured man. The man who had claimed so, took Raffaele Settembrini away from the mob, claiming that he had to be brought to the Ponte della Maddalena, for him to be shot dead in the presence of Cardinal Ruffo. Raffaele Settembrini, barefoot, half-naked, and with bloody wounds, was taken to the Ponte della Maddalena indeed and imprisoned there at the Granaries, which had been turned into a makeshift prison. In front of the door of the prison, there was a man holding a rose in his hand. He told Raffaele Settembrini: “Poor young man, you are half dead. Smell this rose, refresh yourself!” Settembrini complied, and a long needle penetrated his nose.
- 71.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Loew_ben_Bezalel Supposed descendants of Maharal include, e.g., the violinist Yehudi Menuhin; the aerodynamic theoretician Theodore von Kármán; the artificial intelligence researchers Gerald Sussman, Marvin Minsky, and Joel Moses; and scientists including John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. This simply reflects a frequent occurrence of Maharal in genealogy.
- 72.
In 1909, the year on which Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935) moved from Warsaw to Lodz, he published Nifla’ot Maharal mi-Prag [The Wonders of the Maharal of Prague] (Piotrkow, 1909). In some stories, he even made him into sort of a Sherlock Holmes; it has been pointed out that one such narrative was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Purloined Letter (Leiman 2002, cf. Segal 1991, Brody n.d.). Yudel Rosenberg eventually moved to Canada and had a career in the rabbinate. Among devout Jews, it was a literary work by Yudel Rosenberg that brought about the current perception of the Maharal as being associated with the Golem, but it was an idea imported across cultures, having apparently originated among German writers as a literary invention, as early as the 1834 book Der Jüdische Gil Blas by Friedrich Korn.
- 73.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dike_(mythology) “She ruled over human justice, while her mother Themis ruled over divine justice” (ibid.). “According to Hesiod (Theogony, l. 901), she was fathered by Zeus upon his second consort, Themis. She and her mother are both personifications of justice. She is depicted as a young, slender woman carrying a balance scale and wearing a laurel wreath. The constellation Libra (the Scales) was anciently thought to represent her distinctive symbol. ¶ She is often associated with Astraea, the goddess of innocence and purity. Astraea is also one of her epithets, referring to her appearance in the nearby constellation Virgo which is said to represent Astraea” (ibid..). “One of her epithets was Astraea, referring to her appearance as the constellation Virgo. According to Aratus’ account of the constellation’s origin, Dike lived upon Earth during the Golden and Silver ages, when there were no wars or diseases, men raised fine crops and did not yet know how to sail. They grew greedy, however, and Dike was sickened. […] Dike left Earth for the sky, from which, as the constellation, she watched the despicable human race. After her departure, the human race declined into the Bronze Age, when diseases arose and humanity learned how to sail” (ibid.). Not the archaeologists’ Bronze Age.
- 74.
Damien Nelis remarked: (2004): “Given that the famous description of the departure from earth of Justice is imitated by Vergil at Georgics 2.473f (extrema per illos / Iustitia excedens terris vestigia fecit), he clearly has Aratus in mind at the end of book 2. Both texts mark the eating of bulls as a key element of the fall from the Golden Age, a decline which also leads to war. But Aratus in turn has in mind an Empedoclean description of the Golden Age” (ibid., p. 5). “Where Empedocles had Aphrodite, Aratus has Dike. For the former, mankind lives in the time of the gradual waning of Love and of growing Strife, an idea which must have influenced Aratus’ image of the departure of Justice. After her withdrawal comes the Silver Age, until the Bronze Age brings war and the eating of oxen. For Vergil then, the references to war which bring Georgics 2 to a close are a crucial element in his double-allusion to Empedocles and Aratus” (ibid., p. 7). The influence of Empedocles on Aratus is the subject of Traglia (1963).
- 75.
Here Maharal was championing the then extant autonomy of rabbinic courts, as being the jurisdiction to which litigation between Jews must be submitted. Interestingly yet unsurprisingly at his time, he claims that any legal system is grounded in religion. Time and again, it did happen that of two Jewish litigants, one would expect, given the situation at hand, a more favorable outcome were the adjudication to be made by the court of general society, rather than by a rabbinic court, because of a different normative. Understandably, Jewish communities shuddered at that expedient, but historically, sometimes rabbinic courts had to adapt their attitudes to the attitudes of non-Jewish courts, so that litigants would have little reason to seek non-Jewish adjudication. When one litigant was Jewish and the other was not, in diasporic conditions the adjudication typically was by the courts of the dominant (non-Jewish) culture. In the twenty-first century, when turning to arbitration is often encouraged in Western countries, rabbinic courts as well as (for Muslims) Sharia courts are available, if both litigants agree to submit to such a court. I recall that at a Jewish studies international conference held in Manchester in 2008, there was a panel, in which several Jewish experts (including a judge from Israel) gave advice to a panellist who was a representative of British Muslim communities, about how to learn from the experience in such matters of Jewish communities. One panellist related that it so happens that in Manchester, two non-Jewish litigants turned to a rabbinic court for arbitration in their business dispute, because one of them had previous experience of it when the other litigant was Jewish. Some individuals in the business community in town found that advantageous, because the procedure is considerably cheaper and quicker. Another advantage is that whereas state courts impose a rigid order on testimony from the litigants (first the claimant/plaintiff, then the other party, then the first’s direct interrogation and counter-interrogation, and then the same for the other party)—something that in practice may encourage the party that was brought to court to engage in perjury, as the plaintiff will not be called back to refute them—at a rabbinic court the procedure is more informal, so one may be able to retort, at the adjudicator’s discretion. Of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, the religious leader of the Jews of Jerusalem until his death around 1515, it is said that even Muslims called upon him to decide judicial cases.
- 76.
These are known as the seven Noahide laws: see on these, e.g., Enker (1991) and Stone (1991) in the Cardozo Law Review. In Judaism, Adam’s original sin does not have implications for the fate of the souls of his descendants, and non-Jews are only required to abide by the Noahide laws, a small set of very general rules of conduct (such as having courts of justice or not eating the flesh of animals while these are still alive). In that manner, the legitimacy of specific differences is recognized. Steven Fraade has remarked: “One function of the Noahide laws (most of which rabbinic traditions trace back already to the time of Adam and Eve in Eden) is to establish a skeletal legal/moral code prior to the full revelation at Sinai. Otherwise, it could be argued, that, for example, Cain could not have been held accountable for his murder of Cain in the absence of a law prohibiting murder. Our present text [the Sifre Deuteronomy version of the midrashic story of God’s having offered the Torah to the nations before revealing it to Israel alone] seems to assume that whatever its earlier status, the Noahide laws had ceased to be operative (or at least followed) by the time Israel received the Torah at Sinai” (Fraade 2019, p. 137, fn. 10). “But as the midrash goes on to argue, by way of a parable, not only did the nations decline God’s offer of the minimalist, universal (Noahide) moral commandments, but they actively spurned them, hea** them onto Israel instead, which now had to carry both its own legal load and that intended for the other nations. The implied a fortiori argument is that being unable to bear the minimal moral commandments (previously accepted, it may be presumed, by the descendants of Noah), the nations certainly did not deserve, nor would they have been receptive of, the Torah as a whole. ¶ It is only when God approached Israel at Sinai, where they accepted the Torah without hesitation, or even needing to know what it contained, in all of its fine points (that is, future [rabbinic] interpretations already incorporated into revelation), that God found suitable recipients of the Torah and its laws, both written and oral. No one could say that the nations, both individually and collectively, were not given the full opportunity to receive the Torah. Having been offered the Torah, they proved themselves unworthy of it. However much the nations are given ample opportunity to receive the Torah, their reasons for not doing so are conveyed in a mocking tone” (ibid., p. 138, Fraade’s own brackets). Yalquṭ Shim‘oni 687, to Ch. 2 of Numbers, states: “The world was night[time], and once Israel accepted the Torah, the world was enlightened.”
“For [Hugo] Grotius [in De iure belli ac pacis] and [John] Selden [in De iure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum], the Noahide laws were an early model for the Roman ‘law of nations’ ” (Stone 1991, p. 1162). “Grotius gave these universal obligations a legal emphasis consonant with the theory that the Noahide laws were a Jewish version of ius gentium. The Noahide laws, he argued, are the foundations for the theory of the civil state and international law” (ibid., p. 1165). Isaac Newton was aware of the doctrine of Noah’s seven precepts and incorporated this in his own esoteric doctrine of macrohistory. Garry Trompf has written: “Newton held that the fundamental principles of all knowledge relevant to our present order were divinely granted to Noah after the Flood. This knowledge springs from the ‘true religion’ of Noah who received seven precepts from God (prohibiting idolatry, blasphemy, fornication, murder and theft; and enjoining care of animals, and the setting up of governments [cf. Talmud, Sanhredr.] {Quod corrige: Sanhedrin. More precisely: Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, at the bottom of folio 56a and at the beginning of 56b}). In Biblico-Christian terms this religion was expanded in the Mosaic decalogue, reaffirmed by the prophets, distilled by Jesus (love God and your fellow human), used as a guide by the early Church (cf. Acts 15:20, 29), and discreetly embraced by Newton himself as the self-inscribed champion of vera religio in the Last Times. But it was relayed to the Gentiles—the Sabaeans, Confucius, the Brahmins (who owed their name to Abraham), and Pythagoras all passing on the Noachian ‘basics of civilization’. Thus a step**-stone model of recurrent reinstantiation is suggested, but different from the prevening one of the philosophia perennis” (Trompf 2006, p. 710; Trompf’s own brackets; my added braces containing a correction to his brackets). “Noah’s religion was enmeshed with natural philosophy. Thus Newton’s own work on the spectrum of light was connected back to the post-diluvian rainbow; and mathematics derived from the proportions of the Ark [of Noah, not of Moses] and the cubit unit of measure used for it. Gentiles had their place in mediating this prisca scientia” (ibid., p. 711). Cf. Trompf (1991). Concerning the rainbow, see, e.g., Nissan and Bar-Ilan (2018 [2020]).
- 77.
First published in Venice in 1599, Maharal’s Tif’eret Yisra’el is a philosophical exposition on the Torah, intended for the Jewish Pentecost, that is, the festival of Shavuot (Weeks).
- 78.
Geopiety is the ascription of sacred status to a place. Geopiety is “a term coined by geographer John Kirtland Wright for geographical piety. Wright regarded geopiety as a province in a larger kingdom of ‘georeligion’, where religion and geography meet” (Kark 1996, p. 47; cf. Wright 1996). Ruth Kark further points out that Yi-Fu Tuan (1976) adopted Wright’s term, but gave it a different meaning, and that “Vogel in his study on Americans and the Holy Land in the nineteenth century further expanded Wright’s and Tuan’s definition of geopiety, and convincingly used the term for the first time in an explicitly Holy Land context” (Kark 1996, p. 48). Lester Irwin Vogel claimed: “Geopiety, then, in the sense being used here, is the expression of dutiful devotion and habitual reverence for a territory, land, or space. In this broader form, the term seems tailor-made to describe the range of national attachments to the Holy Land, a place that has evoked devotion and habitual reverence among peoples and cultures in various ages” (Vogel 1993, cited by Kark 1996, p. 48). Also Richard Hecht (1994) and Allan Grapard (1994) are concerned with geopiety. Grapard (1994) distinguishes it from geosophia and geognosis. Also note the distinction between place attachment (Altman and Low 1992) and geopiety. Allan Grapard provides the following definitions (1994, p. 375): “Both geosophia and geognosis are connected with systems of symbolic representation, but their epistemological frameworks and intentionality differ in each case. Whereas geosophia might be characterized as the establishment of a wise use of the earth by humans and to [sic] a certain instrumentality, geognosis refers to a specific knowledge that is claimed to have been extracted from the earth itself, to correspond in mysterious ways to sacred scriptures and to divine rule, and to lead either to mystical achievement or to religious salvation. ¶ Geopiety usually refers to a primarily religious mood of relation to sacred places. I see it as a set of beliefs and practices subsumed under geognosis as if it were its protosecular form, i.e., a distinct set of conceptualizations and practices that stand halfway between the mystical aspects of geognosis and the secular, modern forms of relationship to place. This attitude is evident in a number of texts and is related to the premodern practices of pilgrimage, which are themselves related to a certain form of government. In geopiety the emphasis is on the attitude of pious reverence to what has been called ‘sacred space’ by historians of religions. ¶ Of these terms, only geopiety has been widely used by geographers and historians of religions. One could add to these categories that of geopolitics, but with the understanding that on the level of nationalism the practices of geopolitics are not self-critical and are, in fact, informed by geosophia, geognosis, and geopiety. Geopolitics is related to the consolidation of modern nation-states, which always evidences particular techniques for occupying space and for establishing ever more precisely defined social spaces. […].”
- 79.
This is about the country itself, rather than a sacred space which within the country is constituted by shrines or pilgrimage sites, which for the twentieth century, and in particular, between 1948 and 1967, is the subject of Bar (2008). “The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Jordan officially provided the Jews free access to the Western Wall, the holiest place for the Jews and a substitute for the destructed temple. In practice the agreement was not honored, and the Jews were prevented from reaching the Wall and the rest of the sacred sites in East Jerusalem and its surroundings. ¶ This cut-off of the Jewish population from most of its sacred sites brought about the re-designing of the sacred space in the State of Israel. The development of the map of Jewish sacred sites during these 19 years was manifested in various ways, the central one being the emphasis on and the signalization of some sacred places that held minor importance before the war and their development as central and important pilgrimage centers. ¶ Between 1948 and 1967, sacred sites such as King David’s Tomb in Jerusalem, the Cave of Elijah in Haifa, and the tombs of the saints in the Galilee attained great importance […]” (Bar 2008, p. 2). Bilu (2001) is concerned with sites catering to Moroccan Jews in Israel.
Also note an article by Zur Shalev (2003), discussing how sacred geography associated with the progeny of Noah in the Book of Genesis was interpreted in the early modern period by Benito Arias Montano, in the maps of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. Arias Montano felt able to trace the propagation of Noah’s progeny through a land bridge at Anian, that is, what we now know as the Bering Straits into the Americas, and, for example, some after him located the biblical Joktan (Yogṭán in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico.
- 80.
The Hebrew dictum “All Israel have a portion in the world to come”
כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעולם הבא
appears in the Mishnah (the legal code from the early years of the third century C.E., which forms the basis for both the Babylonian Talmud and Jerusalem Talmud), in tractate Sanhedrin (which is concerned with criminal law), Ch. 10, §1. As the commentary to the Mishnah by Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro (Italy, c. 1445–Jerusalem, c. 1515) explains: “All Israel have a portion in the world to come: even the ones given the death penalty by a court because of their wickedness, they have a portion in the world to come” (i.e., their punishment is expiation enough). Obadiah of Bertinoro clarifies that what is meant is not the afterlife of the souls of the dead in the present (i.e., before eschatological time), but rather the World to Come after the Resurrection of the Dead. The text of the Mishnah continues by enumerating categories that are excluded from the World to Come: ones who express overt disbelief in it; ones who say that the law is not from Heaven; and “Epicureans” who despise the law and its practitioners. Ch. 10, §2 enumerates “three kings and four laymen” who are excluded from the World to Come. One of them is Balaam. Obadiah of Bertinoro points out that Balaam was not Jewish, so the very fact that he is claimed to be excluded from the World to Come is to be considered along with the Jewish belief that “the pious among the Nations of the World do have a portion in the World to Come,” and Balaam was not one of those:,
ואף על גב דבלעם מאומות העולם הוה, ואנן כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעולם הבא תנןמשום דקיימא לן חסידי אומות העולם יש להם חלק לעולם הבא, אשמועינן דבלעם לאו.מחסידי אומות העולם הוא
- 81.
The following is quoted from the public-domain Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition (DRA), a Catholic Bible, from Daniel 14:33 ff. “(33) And the angel of the Lord said to Habacuc: Carry the dinner which thou hast into Babylon to Daniel, who is in the lions’ den. (34) And Habacuc said: Lord, I never saw Babylon, nor do I know the den. (35) And the angel of the Lord took him by the top of his head, and carried him by the hair of his head, and set him in Babylon over the den in the force of his spirit. (36) And Habacuc cried, saying: O Daniel, thou servant of God, take the dinner that God hath sent thee. (37) And Daniel said: Thou hast remembered me, O God, and thou hast not forsaken them that love thee. (38) And Daniel arose and ate. And the angel of the Lord presently set Habacuc again in his own place. [This is the end of the interpolation.] (39) And upon the seventh day the king came to bewail Daniel: and he came to the den, and looked in, and behold Daniel was sitting in the midst of the lions.”
- 82.
The nickname is an augmentative of zucca “pumpkin,” which stands for “large head” and is sometimes used in the sense “stupid,” possibly as an insult, and in that other sense, it implies that head is not any smarter than a pumpkin is.
- 83.
“Aminadab is portrayed with a grimacing expression, which had become a visual topos of Jewishness. He sits with hands crossed between his legs, evoking a bound barbarian captive from Roman triumphal monuments […] Such captives were usually distinguishable by their dress and coiffure as belonging to a particular ethnic group. Although Aminadab’s unruly hair is constrained with a band, like many of the ignudi [naked ones], he is the only male figure on the ceiling to wear earrings. Moors and Mongols, Black Africans and Ethiopians, infidels of diverse persuasions were often depicted in contemporary painting with earrings […] European men at this time did not adorn themselves in this manner. A pierced ear also marked a Hebrew slave who refused freedom, preferring to serve his master forever (Ex[odus] 21:5–6; Deut[eronomy] 15:16–17). Italian sumptuary laws had even proscribed their use for honourable women. Jewish women […] were specifically marked in this sexually charged and demeaning way” (Wisch 2003, p. 161) by law, for example, in Renaissance Ancona. The foregoing gives an idea of the paradox of mixed feelings towards Biblical characters appropriated from Judaism: the condition of contemporary Jews was sometimes extended to positive Hebrew characters from sacred history.
- 84.
One ḥadīth ascribes to Muḥammad the precept “Do opposite of the Jews” (khā́lifū al-yahūd). That principle of intentional differentiation is called mukhā́lafa in Islamic law (Kister 1989). Dying one’s beard and white hair is recommended to Muslims in some ḥadīthID="ITerm3s, because Jews refrain from this, and Jewish men do refrain indeed from dying their hair or wearing earrings based on the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat, 94b, itself based on the prohibition for men to wear women’s garments (cross-dressing), in Deuteronomy 22:5. Concerning the Jews of Medina in Muḥammad’s times, Haggai Mazuz remarks (2014, p. 82): “The fact that the ḥadīth mentions that they did not wear earrings or dye their beards and hair with henna demonstrates that the primary means of identifying them as Jews was their lack of certain external characteristics common to non-Jews.”
- 85.
This subsection is recycled from Sect. 9 in Nissan (2019–2020 [2021]).
- 86.
There actually is a passage in rabbinic homiletics (related in the Jerusalem Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, 10:2, end) claiming that some Sages debated whether King Solomon, owing to his intimacy with idolatrous women, had been a sinner and therefore should be expelled from Heaven; at which, a heavenly voice (bat qól) interfered, advising them that this is not for them to decide (cf. Midrash Tanḥuma, at pericope Metsora‘, 1).
As we are going to see, the sins of King Solomon were claimed to have resulted, as retribution, in material enablement for Rome to be founded. In the Jerusalem Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah, 1, 39c, a passage associates episodes from the history of the Israelite monarchy, with salient moments in the early history of Rome. The angel Michael stuck a reed in the sea, from which, by concretion, the landmass developed, on which Rome was eventually built, and Michael sticking the reed in the sea supposedly was on the same day that King Solomon was connected by marriage with Pharaoh Necho of Egypt, whose daughter he took for wife. Moreover, “on the day that Elijah was disappeared (šennistalléq), a king was installed in Rome”: the effect of Elijah’s ascent was his unavailability as a prophet on earth, a turn for the worse. The progression is towards Rome destroying the Sanctuary in Jerusalem.
- 87.
“Enoch is [the angel] Metatron, and has seventy names.”
- 88.
She was the only grandchild of Jacob who was still alive during the Exodus.
- 89.
In the Pentateuch, both Abraham and Moses are explicitly stated to have died, so they do not appear in this list among the characters from sacred history who were spared death.
- 90.
Jabez is a character mentioned in 1 Chronicles 4:9–10 as having had his prayers fulfilled.
- 91.
It is related that when his time to die had arrived, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi asked the Angel of Death to show him first his place in Heaven and then also asked him to give him his knife, so he would not be scared while on the way. At the walls of Paradise, the Angel of Death raised him so he could look inside, but the rabbi jumped inside alive. He was still held by his garment, but his colleagues inside clamored for him to stay inside. The Angel of Death asked for his knife to be returned, but it took a divine decree for that to happen (Babylonian Talmud, Ketubbot 77b). In the post-talmudic era, that story was expanded upon, in two texts: Ma‘aseh Riva"l (i.e., The Tale of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi) and Seder Gan ‘Eden (i.e., Chapter on Heaven). This is the subject of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: it is part of The Spanish Jew’s Tale:
Verse
Verse Rabbi Ben Levi, on the Sabbath, read A volume of the Law, in which it said, “No man shall look upon my face and live.” And as he read, he prayed that God would give His faithful servant grace with mortal eye To look upon His face and yet not die. Then fell a sudden shadow on the page, And, lifting up his eyes, grown dim with age, He saw the Angel of Death before him stand, Holding a naked sword in his right hand. Rabbi Ben Levi was a righteous man, Yet through his veins a chill of terror ran. With trembling voice he said, “What wilt thou here?” The angel answered, “Lo! the time draws near When thou must die; yet first, by God’s decree, Whate’er thou askest shall be granted thee.” Replied the Rabbi, “Let these living eyes First look upon my place in Paradise.” Then said the Angel, “Come with me and look.” Rabbi Ben Levi closed the sacred book, And rising, and uplifting his gray head, “Give me thy sword,” he to the Angel said, “Lest thou shouldst fall upon me by the way.” The angel smiled and hastened to obey, Then led him forth to the Celestial Town, And set him on the wall, whence, gazing down, Rabbi Ben Levi, with his living eyes, Might look upon his place in Paradise. Then straight into the city of the Lord The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel’s sword, And through the streets there swept a sudden breath Of something there unknown, which men call death. Meanwhile the Angel stayed without and cried, “Come back!” To which the Rabbi’s voice replied, “No! in the name of God, whom I adore, I swear that hence I will depart no more!” Then all the Angels cried, “O Holy One, See what the son of Levi here hath done! The kingdom of Heaven he takes by violence, And in Thy name refuses to go hence!” The Lord replied, “My Angels, be not wroth; Did e’er the son of Levi break his oath? Let him remain; for he with mortal eye Shall look upon my face and yet not die.” Beyond the outer wall the Angel of Death Heard the great voice, and said, with panting breath, “Give back the sword, and let me go my way.” Whereat the Rabbi paused, and answered, “Nay! Anguish enough already hath it caused Among the sons of men.” And while he paused He heard the awful mandate of the Lord Resounding through the air, “Give back the sword!” The Rabbi bowed his head in silent prayer; Then said he to the dreadful Angel, “Swear, No human eye shall look on it again; But when thou takest away the souls of men, Thyself unseen, and with an unseen sword, Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord.” The Angel took the sword again, and swore, And walks on earth unseen forevermore.
- 92.
The name Mlḥm for the Phoenix is unique to the Life of Ben Sira, and it is uncertain how it is to be pronounced (Melḥam? Malḥam? Milḥam? Melaḥem?). Actually, from elsewhere in Pseudo-Sirach, it is clear that the first one to earn immortality was the Phoenix, even though within the enumeration of the Ten Immortals in Heaven he doesn’t come first. Moreover, from Version B of the Life of Ben Sira, it appears that the Phoenix is not one of a kind (it is a species of birds), and that a town had been built up by the Angel of Death in order to host the original Phoenix and its progeny, these being immortal.
- 93.
Higger (1935) is an English translation.
- 94.
The brackets are Zwiep’s own.
- 95.
Pharaoh’s daughter who saved Moses was identified, in Jewish homiletics, with a daughter of some pharaoh who is mentioned in 1 Chronicles as having married an Israelite, and who realistically may be presumed to have been a different person from a younger generation. Moreover, having carried out as meritorious a deed as saving baby Moses, it was denied that she may have remained an idolater.
1 Chronicles 4:18 mentions “the daughter of Pharaoh, whom Mered took [as wife].” The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Megillah 13a, remarks concerning this: “Was Mered his name? Was not Caleb his name? [cf. 1 Chronicles 4:15] The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘Let Caleb, who rebelled (marád) against the plan of the spies [sent out by Moses and who on their return frightened the people concerning the Land of Canaan], come and take [as wife] the daughter of Pharaoh, who rebelled against the idols of her father’s house.’”
The latter claim concerning the religious attitudes of Pharaoh’s daughter was apparently related to the name Bithiah, which is Hebrew and literally means “daughter of God.” One would expect the compound to be bat Ya, and one finds indeed, in the modern Hebrew onomasticon, the female name Batya rather than Bitya as in the Hebrew Bible, but *bit Ya > Bitya is accurate from the viewpoint of historical linguistics; cf. Arabic bint “daughter,” and cf. Hebrew bittí “my daughter.”
- 96.
- 97.
Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (1909–1938), Vol. 4, p. 253, with a note in Vol. 6, p. 352. Ginzberg stated in Vol. 6, p. 351, note 38: “[Midrash] Tehillim 26, 220, where reference is also made to the widespread view that Jonah was the son of the widow of Zarephath resuscitated by Elijah […]. Since the son of the widow is said to be the ‘Messiah of the tribe of Joseph’ ([Eikhah Rabbati] 18, 97–98), the statement that Jonah was permitted to enter paradise alive is very likely to be understood in the sense that he awaits there the end of times to start on his Messianic mission. The ‘Messiah, the son of David’ likewise entered paradise alive, and awaits there ‘his time’. See Derek Erez Z[uta] 1 (end), and parallel passages cited by Tawrogi. It is, however, possible that the Messianic part attributed to Jonah (= the son of the widow of Zarephath) is a Jewish adaptation of the Christian view which considers him a prototype of Jesus; see Matth. 12.39; Luke 11.29.”
Let us turn to paper by an art historian, Bezalel Narkiss, “The Sign of Jonah” (1979). On p. 64, he claimed: “The first associations of Jonah with the redemption are in conjunction with the prophet Elijah, the immediate forerunner of the Messiah according to the Jewish tradition. Jonah is said to be the son of the widow of Zarephath (I Kings 17:17–23), who was resuscitated by Elijah and who is therefore a symbol of resurrection. Like Elijah, the midrash thinks of Jonah as one of the people who did not die, but were taken up bodily into heaven. One of his tasks in the Messianic Age is to bind and bring Leviathan, God’s playful creature (Psalm 104:26), to be feasted upon by the ‘righteous in Paradise’, and according to the ‘printed version’ of Midrash Jonah, his agreement to do so saved him from drowning at sea.”
- 98.
Endnote 48 in Admiel Kosman’s paper (2002) gives these sources (his brackets, my braces): “See the relevant narrative in b.Bat. {Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Batra} 58a; this was stated explicitly in Tractate Derekh Eretz 1: 18 (Michael Higger, ed., The Treatise Derek Erez [New York: Debe Rabanan 1935] 69); and in Midrash Aggadah on the Pentateuch edited by Solomon Buber (Vienna, 1894) on Gen{esis} 24:64, p. 60. See Daniel Sperber, ed., Masechet Derech Eretz Zutta (Jerusalem: Tzur-Ot Press, 1982) 95–96 (Heb{rew}), with references to additional parallels.”
Actually, at Bava Batra 58a one finds the following, in which Eliezer (or rather his soul) is associated with Abraham and Sarah in their burial cave (Soncino English translation: Epstein 1935–1948, their brackets, my braces): “R. Bana’ah used to mark out caves [where there were dead bodies]. {Footnote in the Soncino translation: He placed marks outside over the place of the graves, so that people should not walk over them and become unclean.} When he came to the cave of Abraham {the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron}, he found Eliezer the servant of Abraham standing at the entrance. He said to him: What is Abraham doing? He replied: He is slee** in the arms of Sarah, and she is looking fondly at his head. He said: Go and tell him that Bana’ah is standing at the entrance. Said Abraham to him: Let him enter; it is well known that there is no passion in this world. {In the afterlife. As therefore Abraham and Sarah are not being intimate, other people are not forbidden to intrude. Footnote in the Soncino translation: And therefore there could be no objection to his seeing Abraham slee** with Sarah.} So he went in, surveyed the cave, and came out again.”
- 99.
Rather than of King Solomon! But actually, Hiram claims to Ezekiel that he survived twenty-one kings of the House of David.
- 100.
The quality of Judicial Rigour (middát haddín) is here a hypostasis: it is personified.
- 101.
Note the following concerning the term magus. Abolala Soudavar remarks (2012, p. 71): “Xavier Tremblay had pointed out to me two odd aspects of the Avesta: (1) unlike all other priests of the Iranian world, who are called magu, the Avestan priest is called aθravan; and (2) despite the fact that the word ‘king’ is derived, in all Iranian languages, from either the root xšā (NP [New Persian] Shāh) or rāz (Old Ind. Rājā), no such word exists in the Avesta; we have instead the odd title of or ‘nation chief’. ¶ Since the magi were so reviled by Magophonia [the extermination of Median, Mithraic magi under the Zoroastrian Darius after throne usurpation by a magus, apparently a regent], Zoroastrian priests could not be called magu. Nor could they be called pārsā, which had become a kingly epithet. They therefore settled for an equivalent term, aθravan (‘fire keeper’), in lieu of the pārsā who stood by the fire and shared the same belief in Ahura Mazdā. The choice of this word, rather than magu, indicates that it was a compromise and adopted after the advent of the Achaemenids. Because artificial solutions never last, magu came back when Magophonia vanished after the demise of the Achaemenids.” Soudavar further states (2012, p. 74): “The fact that later Zoroastrian priests were designated by magu and mubad, instead of aθravan of the holy Avesta, can only be explained in terms of an artificial appellation that Zoroaster himself did not use, but that the authors of the Yashts adopted in reaction to Magophonia on the one hand, and in imitation of the pārsā designation of Achaemenid kings on the other. If later priests were not called aθravan, it was because it was an artifice that served its purpose during the Achaemenid period and was no longer useful afterwards.”
- 102.
- 103.
For the suburbium, see La Regina et al. (2001–2008). For example, in Rome the indigent were buried in mass graves (puticuli) just outside the pomerium a little to the north (MacMullen 2020, p. 53). The first to distinguish between the pomerium and the murus (the city wall) allegedly was King Servius Tullius (Carandini 2006, p. LIX). The pomerium or pomoerium (from post moerium, ‘behind the wall’, but see Kent 1913) was Rome’s (and other Roman walled cities’ in Italy) religious boundary, a sacred open space, and in legal terms, Rome existed within the pomerium. See Platner and Ashby (1929). According to Livy, Ab urbe condita, I.44, originally the ground of the pomerium was on both sides of the city walls, and it was an Etruscan ritual legacy for the pomerium to be consecrated by augury, and (although in his own times buildings in Rome were being built against the wall), the original purpose of the pomerium had been to prevent that happening, as it was unlawful to inhabit or to farm the area of the pomerium. Leaving this area clear served a military purpose, facilitating the defenders’ manoeuvres in case of attack upon the city. Originally in Rome, the pomerium surrounded four hills: the Esquiline, the Palatine, the Quirinal, and the Capitoline. For the pomerium, also see e.g. Andreussi 1999; Meurant 2003; Segaud 2008, pp. 100–103).
- 104.
As the journal PMLA is usually referred to by its acronym, which appears as its only name on its covers, I am sticking to the acronym, instead of adopting its full-fledged name Publications of the Modern Language Association.
- 105.
ר״ש שטיינר, בחינות לשון בפירוש ליחזקאל ולתרי־עשר שבמגילות העבריות מביזנטיון.
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Ferreiro, A., Nissan, E. (2023). Flying Simon Magus: The Motif of Flight in Hagiography and Counter-biography (Ephraim Nissan). In: Receptions of Simon Magus as an Archetype of the Heretic . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12523-2_2
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