Latest / The Podcast of Jewish Ideas / 87. Sefer Yosippon | Dr. Carson Bay
Transcript
- 0:20Speaker 1: Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the podcast of Jewish Ideas,
- 0:23Speaker 1: a Torah in motion production.
- 0:24Speaker 2: I'm jj Kimbri.
- 0:26Speaker 1: On today's episode, we will be exploring Cephei Yossi Pon,
- 0:29Speaker 1: sometimes pronounced Yossi pun, a remarkable medieval Hebrew chronicle that
- 0:33Speaker 1: recasts Jewish history from the Biblical period through.
- 0:35Speaker 2: The destruction of the Second Temple.
- 0:37Speaker 1: Written around the tenth century in southern Italy, this text
- 0:40Speaker 1: was long one of the most circulated works of Jewish
- 0:42Speaker 1: historiography and served for many centuries as the standard narrative
- 0:46Speaker 1: of ancient Israelite history from Jewish communities across the Mediterranean
- 0:49Speaker 1: and Europe. Although it was traditionally attributed to Josephus, Yossipon
- 0:53Speaker 1: is not a direct translation, but rather a dynamic, richly
- 0:56Speaker 1: crafted adaptation that draws upon many sources and reshaped history
- 0:59Speaker 1: according to its own world view. To guide us through
- 1:02Speaker 1: this fascinating material, we are the lighted to be joined
- 1:04Speaker 1: by my colleague, doctor Carson Bay, Associate Professor of Classics
- 1:08Speaker 1: and Biblical Studies at the University of Austin, Texas, a
- 1:10Speaker 1: specialist in Greco Roman and Judaea Christian antiquity, as well
- 1:13Speaker 1: as on the reception of Josepha's. Professor Bay's writings on
- 1:16Speaker 1: the topic included twenty twenty three book Biblical Heroes and
- 1:20Speaker 1: Classical Culture in Christian Made Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press.
- 1:24Speaker 1: It is a pleasure to welcome Professor Bay to the
- 1:27Speaker 1: podcast today.
- 1:28Speaker 3: Professor welcome, Thank you, it's good to be here. Thanks
- 1:30Speaker 3: for having me on JJ. Thanks Lisha for running this thing.
- 1:34Speaker 3: And it's yeah, it's a pleasure to talk about this
- 1:35Speaker 3: with someone as ever.
- 1:37Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent. I'm very excited. This is really a fascinating corner.
- 1:41Speaker 1: And what's interesting about this corner of Jewish ideas and
- 1:44Speaker 1: Jewish text is.
- 1:44Speaker 2: How few people know anything about it.
- 1:46Speaker 1: It really for many people has slipped under the radar,
- 1:48Speaker 1: especially you have a more traditional Jewish education.
- 1:50Speaker 2: So we're gonna have to start, I'm afraid at the
- 1:52Speaker 2: very beginning.
- 1:53Speaker 1: So for listeners who have never or scarcely heard of it,
- 1:56Speaker 1: what exactly is Cefa yosipond You know, if you have
- 1:59Speaker 1: to describe it to an ail like what's in it is?
- 2:01Speaker 2: What is it? What is it purport to be?
- 2:03Speaker 3: Yeah, So Cefri Josapan or the Book of Joseph Ben
- 2:07Speaker 3: Gurion is a is a chronicle that the narrative starts
- 2:11Speaker 3: with the table of nations that we find in uh,
- 2:15Speaker 3: you know, Genesis, Genesis five and first Chronicles one, and
- 2:19Speaker 3: so it starts at this table of nations, the sons
- 2:21Speaker 3: of Noah, the sons of Jfith, and it sort of
- 2:24Speaker 3: lays out the world, and then it goes very quickly
- 2:27Speaker 3: through a conflation of ancient Israelite in ancient Roman history,
- 2:33Speaker 3: does a few chapters on kind of Judeo Persian history,
- 2:36Speaker 3: and then it spends most of its narrative on the
- 2:41Speaker 3: Maccabean revolt hasmini in history through the destruction of the
- 2:45Speaker 3: Jerusalem Temple and seventy by Vespasian and Titus, and then
- 2:49Speaker 3: the aftermath at Masada in seventy four, where there's this
- 2:53Speaker 3: famous mass death of these last Judaean Judaean rebels again,
- 3:00Speaker 3: and so the narrative spends most of its time in
- 3:03Speaker 3: the latter portion. It's but basically it's a Second Temple
- 3:07Speaker 3: Jewish history. It appears to have been written close to
- 3:10Speaker 3: the year nine hundred, so early tenth century in southern Italy,
- 3:15Speaker 3: and it's written in Hebrew, and so all of those
- 3:17Speaker 3: things in early tenth century date, the Hebrew language, the
- 3:21Speaker 3: scope of the narrative itself are as you well know,
- 3:26Speaker 3: they're striking in Jewish literary history. And so that's what
- 3:31Speaker 3: this work is, as we're going to talk about, it's
- 3:33Speaker 3: based upon the Josephin tradition, and so it's a Jewish
- 3:38Speaker 3: telling of kind of Second Temple history through to the
- 3:41Speaker 3: very end. For an early medieval Jewish audience, it would
- 3:45Speaker 3: seem excellent.
- 3:46Speaker 1: So, as Rea, before we get into the sort of
- 3:49Speaker 1: the crop stitching together the book in terms of genre,
- 3:53Speaker 1: where would you place this, especially with regards to other
- 3:56Speaker 1: more familiar genres of Jewish history. I mean, we're talking
- 3:58Speaker 1: about a straight histor book about something closer to Midrash?
- 4:01Speaker 1: Are we talking about something closer to the Musa? I
- 4:06Speaker 1: think all tales? Like how, where exactly would you place
- 4:09Speaker 1: this on this kind of constellation of genres that we're
- 4:12Speaker 1: familiar with in Jewish jew texts.
- 4:15Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's really interesting question. I mean genre genre
- 4:20Speaker 3: is a sticky issue. I guess using his storiography as
- 4:24Speaker 3: a sort of catch all to begin with is very
- 4:26Speaker 3: helpful for several reasons. One is that the text clearly
- 4:30Speaker 3: presents itself as doing history in a way distinct from
- 4:34Speaker 3: anything else I'm aware of in Jewish literature before the
- 4:39Speaker 3: you know, the High Middle Ages or even thereafter. So
- 4:42Speaker 3: it's just one example of this. The text inserts into
- 4:46Speaker 3: its narrative of Judah the Maccabee after he kind of
- 4:51Speaker 3: takes up takes up arms and takes on the Hasminian
- 4:54Speaker 3: cause we have a number of documents letters written from
- 4:58Speaker 3: Romans and Greeks to Judah and two each other that
- 5:02Speaker 3: sort of document this history in a way that's it's
- 5:06Speaker 3: anticipated in the Maccabean literature and first and second Maccabeees,
- 5:09Speaker 3: but Yosupon takes it kind of to a new level,
- 5:12Speaker 3: and so it's doing history in this classical mode. That's
- 5:15Speaker 3: that's what's so interesting about it. Like if we trace
- 5:18Speaker 3: the genealogy of genre, as it were, from yos Upon
- 5:22Speaker 3: all the way back, what you would do is you
- 5:24Speaker 3: would go through historiography as it was sort of you know,
- 5:28Speaker 3: pounded out by Christians in late antiquity, you Cbius being
- 5:32Speaker 3: a key figure there, but you would go all the
- 5:33Speaker 3: way back to thucidities, Herootus and Xenophon. So the type
- 5:37Speaker 3: of narrative, the content of the narrative and the types
- 5:40Speaker 3: of things that are that are inserted into it by
- 5:43Speaker 3: the author. They have their sort of traditionary beginnings, as
- 5:47Speaker 3: it were in classical historiography. So, for example, these expansive
- 5:52Speaker 3: speeches given to heroic characters at key moments in the
- 5:55Speaker 3: narrative as a way to sort of frame the history
- 5:58Speaker 3: as a way to maybe kind of the author's ethical
- 6:02Speaker 3: or philosophical or theological religious takes on things. These appear
- 6:07Speaker 3: throughout the narrative and they it's it's like you're reading
- 6:11Speaker 3: something like Josephus, who in the first century was himself
- 6:17Speaker 3: writing a history that sort of fused the what we
- 6:21Speaker 3: could call the sort of Jewish and Greco Roman historiographical traditions.
- 6:28Speaker 3: That having been said, there is material in it that
- 6:31Speaker 3: sounds what sounds like what some would call folkloristic or
- 6:39Speaker 3: even mythical. So you mentioned Midrash. Stephen Bowman has wrote
- 6:45Speaker 3: an essay in nineteen ninety three, I think it was
- 6:47Speaker 3: called Sepher jos Upon, History and Midrash, and so he
- 6:51Speaker 3: talks about the fact that jos Upon does all this
- 6:54Speaker 3: whole historiographical work while at the same time exercising these
- 6:58Speaker 3: kinds of word plays and literary sort of literary styles
- 7:02Speaker 3: that are that are that are resonant of what we
- 7:05Speaker 3: call midrash, that are sort of like creatively interpretive, and
- 7:10Speaker 3: you know mid rash sick interesting.
- 7:14Speaker 1: Fair enough, Okay, so then this is a this is
- 7:15Speaker 1: an odd book. Let's just put it out there. There's
- 7:17Speaker 1: a strange book in the.
- 7:18Speaker 3: Sense that it's strange.
- 7:20Speaker 1: Appears in the tenth century, but it is building off, reworking,
- 7:25Speaker 1: stitching together. I don't know exactly what the correct words are.
- 7:27Speaker 1: Lots of sources from antiquity. Can you just sort of
- 7:29Speaker 1: take us through the list of sources, Like what is
- 7:31Speaker 1: sitting on mister Yosupon's bookshelf in southern Italy in the
- 7:34Speaker 1: tenth century, What is he reading?
- 7:37Speaker 2: What are what are the various stages that.
- 7:38Speaker 1: He's going through from antiquity to his day that he's
- 7:40Speaker 1: sort of taking and putting in, Like what are the
- 7:43Speaker 1: constituents components that get woven together in order to produce
- 7:46Speaker 1: this particular book of history.
- 7:48Speaker 3: Yes, this is a great question, It's a key question.
- 7:50Speaker 3: I guess I'll begin by saying that on the on
- 7:53Speaker 3: the author's conceptual bookshelf is the Hebrew Bible. So both
- 7:57Speaker 3: the language and the content of the Jewish Scripture are
- 8:02Speaker 3: as far as I can tell, they represent what might
- 8:04Speaker 3: be called sort of like the author's thought language, and
- 8:06Speaker 3: he uses that literature to guide his own grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.
- 8:11Speaker 3: But he also uses it, for example, to write his
- 8:15Speaker 3: Table of Nations with which he begins his narrative. That
- 8:18Speaker 3: having been said, he updates it, and so he uses
- 8:21Speaker 3: early medieval categories when he's doing that, which is why
- 8:25Speaker 3: we're able to date the text to when we are.
- 8:27Speaker 3: But so beyond that, chapter two. Chapter two is very unusual.
- 8:31Speaker 3: Chapter two. It reflects the use of traditions that trace
- 8:35Speaker 3: back to Virgils in Need and to Livy's history, but
- 8:40Speaker 3: it does not appear to sort of cite these per se. So,
- 8:43Speaker 3: for example, you have this version of the Rape of
- 8:45Speaker 3: the Sabines, which appears early in Livy, and it has
- 8:48Speaker 3: to do with sort of like how Rome became Rome,
- 8:51Speaker 3: how the early Romans found wives when they didn't have
- 8:54Speaker 3: any women, and they went and took them for someone else.
- 8:56Speaker 3: So josupon there seems to be using a no longer extant,
- 9:02Speaker 3: so far as we know, early medieval rewriting of these
- 9:06Speaker 3: classical these classical histories. So this is what so David Flusser,
- 9:12Speaker 3: who created the critical edition of cefrios Upon in nineteen
- 9:14Speaker 3: seventy eight to nineteen eighty, he sort of says this,
- 9:18Speaker 3: I think he's right. So in the early medieval period,
- 9:20Speaker 3: we have, you know, you have a lot of ancient
- 9:23Speaker 3: sources that get that get reworked in ways that are
- 9:27Speaker 3: that are kind of novelistic and that are not that
- 9:30Speaker 3: don't have the sort of like gravitas of the ancient sources,
- 9:33Speaker 3: but that retell a lot of the same stories. Jos
- 9:35Speaker 3: Upon seems to reflect those. But basically chapter two it
- 9:38Speaker 3: reflects knowledge of let's say, the Livian tradition, the Virgilian tradition.
- 9:43Speaker 3: It combines these with biblical history. So you have Romulus,
- 9:46Speaker 3: the famous, you know, eponymous figurehead of Rome, being put
- 9:50Speaker 3: in conversation with and as historically co evil with King David.
- 9:54Speaker 3: We're told that Romulus was like always really scared of
- 9:57Speaker 3: King David, and it caused them to form treaties. And
- 10:00Speaker 3: this is indicative of Sephar Josupon's style. So David is
- 10:03Speaker 3: this like proto Jewish king, and he's so formidable that
- 10:07Speaker 3: the you know, the figurehead of Rome is like, this
- 10:11Speaker 3: guy's going to take me out. I need to make
- 10:13Speaker 3: peace with him. And so you have this fusion of traditions.
- 10:16Speaker 3: You also have Zepho ben Elifaz, the grandson of Esau.
- 10:20Speaker 3: He's inserted into the tale. He becomes a sort of
- 10:22Speaker 3: like Jewish Heracles figure. He gets in a fight with
- 10:26Speaker 3: Joseph about Jacob's bones when he's taking about of Egypt.
- 10:29Speaker 3: But he basically becomes and this is very interesting, he
- 10:32Speaker 3: becomes edom. So he becomes the sort of the er
- 10:38Speaker 3: ancestor of Rome. So chapter two is a fusion of
- 10:42Speaker 3: kind of ancient traditions that puts Jewish and Roman history
- 10:46Speaker 3: together as this sort of like these things happened together
- 10:49Speaker 3: and they were both importantly ancient, noble, powerful people. After that,
- 10:55Speaker 3: you've got a few chapters on the biblical Daniel. We
- 10:58Speaker 3: should talk about those because there's textual difficulties. You have
- 11:01Speaker 3: some Persian history, so you have Drias, you have Cyrus
- 11:05Speaker 3: and some things that are going on vis A VI
- 11:07Speaker 3: the Jews of the time. You have the Esther and
- 11:10Speaker 3: Mordecai Ahasueris Hayman narrative, and then you have Alexander the
- 11:17Speaker 3: Great and then things slide into the Hasmani in history.
- 11:21Speaker 3: That's also something we should talk about briefly, but then
- 11:23Speaker 3: very quickly, so by book thirty you're into the John
- 11:29Speaker 3: Hyrcanes and his sons and this whole thing with the
- 11:33Speaker 3: Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Ascenes, whom the author
- 11:36Speaker 3: calls the Hasidim, and then things slide very quickly into
- 11:41Speaker 3: the first century. So like its major source, which is
- 11:46Speaker 3: a Latin text, which we'll talk about most of the
- 11:49Speaker 3: narrative is about sixty six to seventy CE, so the
- 11:54Speaker 3: Roman Jewish war that ends in Jerusalem's destruction, So you
- 11:59Speaker 3: get there by book fifty, and there are eighty nine
- 12:04Speaker 3: books in the work, so half of the work is
- 12:06Speaker 3: about that. But in the first you know, the first
- 12:09Speaker 3: fifty books, you go from sort of like the origins
- 12:12Speaker 3: of peoples all the way down there. The very interesting
- 12:17Speaker 3: thing about Sefrijos upon sources is that the early Biblical material,
- 12:22Speaker 3: so Daniel Esther Mordecai, et cetera, this is almost all apocryphal,
- 12:27Speaker 3: and it is based upon Latin Christian biblical traditions, so
- 12:31Speaker 3: it is based upon the apocryphal additions to the Christian
- 12:35Speaker 3: Scriptures as they articulated in Jerome's Vulgate, the Latin text
- 12:41Speaker 3: that's the basis for these writings, and then the latter
- 12:45Speaker 3: half of the work is based upon Books thirteen to
- 12:50Speaker 3: sixteen of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities. It's based upon the Latin
- 12:55Speaker 3: version thereof. And the major work which sits beneath yos
- 13:02Speaker 3: Upon for basically the last forty chapters of the last
- 13:06Speaker 3: forty books, is this late fourth century text called on
- 13:10Speaker 3: the Destruction of Jerusalem or de e Scidio Hierusalem Atano,
- 13:14Speaker 3: which the author is sometimes called pseudo Hegisippus. It's sometimes
- 13:18Speaker 3: attributed to Ambrose of Milan. I'm not sure that he
- 13:21Speaker 3: wrote it, there's some evidence there, but this is a
- 13:23Speaker 3: five book Latin Christian work that paraphrases Josephus's earlier Greek
- 13:29Speaker 3: Jewish War and basically turns it into a Christian history.
- 13:33Speaker 3: And so one of the most just absolutely astounding things
- 13:37Speaker 3: about sefriijos Upon is that it is a work written
- 13:40Speaker 3: in Biblical Hebrew in the early tenth century, so obviously
- 13:43Speaker 3: it is written to Jewish readers, but it is based
- 13:46Speaker 3: almost completely on Latin Christian historical sources. And not only that,
- 13:53Speaker 3: these are the Latin Christian historical sources that did the
- 13:56Speaker 3: Lion's share of the work of cementing a super sessionist
- 14:00Speaker 3: understanding of history, the history of the destruction of Jerusalem
- 14:05Speaker 3: into the sort of late Antique and medieval cultural fabric
- 14:09Speaker 3: of Western Europe and beyond. So for Cefrios upon to
- 14:13Speaker 3: base itself on those sources is just you know, wild,
- 14:18Speaker 3: there's no other word for it.
- 14:20Speaker 2: Yeah, so fussy.
- 14:22Speaker 1: Thank you for that total falseyns great sort of chapter
- 14:25Speaker 1: by chapter source basis for this.
- 14:28Speaker 2: And as you say, he's weaving.
- 14:29Speaker 1: Together the Bible Josepha's this fifth four fifth century Latin text,
- 14:33Speaker 1: which we don't know. So before we go onto some
- 14:35Speaker 1: of the specifics in the book, I do want to
- 14:38Speaker 1: ask a little bit about this tenth century author.
- 14:40Speaker 2: So, I mean, do we know anything about him?
- 14:44Speaker 1: Do we you know you said Southern Italy tenth century?
- 14:47Speaker 1: Do we know why he's doing this, as we say,
- 14:49Speaker 1: a very very unusual weaving together and and weveing together
- 14:54Speaker 1: many many different sources and trying to provide a rich
- 14:57Speaker 1: Jewish history. You know, why is he doing this? And
- 15:01Speaker 1: what sort of what circumstances it is life can we
- 15:04Speaker 1: know about? What can we guess or can we trying
- 15:06Speaker 1: to understand that would shed light on this interesting work.
- 15:10Speaker 3: Yeah, well what we can know is basically nothing. What
- 15:15Speaker 3: we can make educated guesses at is a lot. More So,
- 15:20Speaker 3: it does seem that the author, the author clearly had
- 15:25Speaker 3: a knowledge of Latin. It seems like maybe the author
- 15:28Speaker 3: did not have a knowledge of Greek. The author clearly
- 15:31Speaker 3: had a working knowledge of Hebrew and probably thought in
- 15:34Speaker 3: that language. And so something we know about the author
- 15:37Speaker 3: is that this person is interfacing with both Hebrew and
- 15:40Speaker 3: Latin literature at a high level, which would probably not
- 15:44Speaker 3: have been true of most Jews in Byzantium, and so
- 15:49Speaker 3: probably is doing some sort of like subcultural translational work,
- 15:54Speaker 3: like bringing important information from a different sort of linguistic
- 15:59Speaker 3: and cultural fear into his own. And I think this
- 16:03Speaker 3: may also be reflected in the rather simple Hebrew prose
- 16:08Speaker 3: of Sefarios upon. So it's not the it's not like
- 16:11Speaker 3: an esoteric Hebrew that could only be read by scholars
- 16:14Speaker 3: and delites. It's a Hebrew that you could sort of
- 16:17Speaker 3: like say out loud and people could people could follow
- 16:20Speaker 3: it in terms of the person's life circumstances. This means
- 16:24Speaker 3: the person who wrote this needs to have had access
- 16:28Speaker 3: not only to language, but to the Latin literature upon
- 16:31Speaker 3: which he bases his narrative. So you know, what kind
- 16:35Speaker 3: of person is this? This is something that so you know,
- 16:39Speaker 3: David Flusser has a nineteen eighty seven essay in this
- 16:43Speaker 3: book Josephist Judaism in Christianity edited by Louis Feldman in
- 16:48Speaker 3: Gohai Hata, the Japanese scholar, and so here he sort
- 16:52Speaker 3: of distills a lot of work he had done earlier
- 16:54Speaker 3: in Hebrew and German. He says that the author apparent
- 16:58Speaker 3: appears to have local knowledge of Naples and other places
- 17:02Speaker 3: in Italy, and that's totally true. So, for example, the
- 17:04Speaker 3: author talks about how the residents of Naples they collect
- 17:08Speaker 3: this oil that comes from the bottom of the sea
- 17:10Speaker 3: and like sits on the top of the sea, and
- 17:12Speaker 3: that it sort of like shows up right in the
- 17:14Speaker 3: water there. And he has all these you know, topographical
- 17:17Speaker 3: and geographical vocabularies that suggest that the author is sort
- 17:21Speaker 3: of from there. And so it's interesting about Naples is
- 17:24Speaker 3: that the Duke of Naples in the ninth century dedicated
- 17:29Speaker 3: a number of Latin Josephus manuscripts to the library there,
- 17:34Speaker 3: and the Duke of Naples in the mid tenth century
- 17:38Speaker 3: after the wife of his the death of his wife
- 17:41Speaker 3: in nine point fifty one, he had a Latin manuscript
- 17:46Speaker 3: of Josephus made for the library there, and so flusser
- 17:52Speaker 3: A pined that maybe the author of Josepon was a
- 17:58Speaker 3: court physician for the Duke of Naples and therefore had
- 18:01Speaker 3: access to all this literature, because accessing this type of
- 18:04Speaker 3: literature in the tenth century is very different than the
- 18:07Speaker 3: ways that we have access to literature today, Like these
- 18:10Speaker 3: things would only have existed in libraries where where money
- 18:16Speaker 3: and institutional organization were implicated. And so, you know, how
- 18:20Speaker 3: are you going to sit down with texts like this,
- 18:22Speaker 3: especially if you're you know, if you're a Jewish person,
- 18:25Speaker 3: if you're sort of a you know, if you're a
- 18:27Speaker 3: cultural minority who also has certain limited legal abilities to
- 18:33Speaker 3: sort of like do things and whatnot, And so the
- 18:36Speaker 3: author could have been someone like that. So there's language
- 18:39Speaker 3: throughout the narrative when people are dying and when like
- 18:42Speaker 3: people are getting like these gross diseases. The way that
- 18:45Speaker 3: the author describes these things, does seem in a few
- 18:51Speaker 3: places to reflect medical knowledge, and so putting all these
- 18:56Speaker 3: things together, this is the type of educated educated guests
- 19:00Speaker 3: can make about the author. Well, like, okay, maybe the
- 19:02Speaker 3: author was somehow a court physician and then had and
- 19:06Speaker 3: thus had access to these sort of like arguably hard
- 19:10Speaker 3: to access Latin Christian documents that would only appear in libraries.
- 19:15Speaker 3: Maybe so maybe so.
- 19:16Speaker 1: Yeah, fair enough, I guess Partly the problem with this
- 19:19Speaker 1: is that because it's tenth century, it's so rare. In
- 19:23Speaker 1: other words, had this been written I don't know, in
- 19:25Speaker 1: the height of the Spanish Jewish Convivencia, when you know,
- 19:28Speaker 1: we have so many such intellectuals, or in the eighteenth
- 19:30Speaker 1: century Germany where you had you know, court physicians. So
- 19:33Speaker 1: so then you could say, ah, you know, this seems
- 19:35Speaker 1: like what others were doing, all the kinds of education
- 19:37Speaker 1: other Jews had. But to have a book like this,
- 19:39Speaker 1: which does rework a wide array of sources I into
- 19:42Speaker 1: created a Hebrew in the tenth century, I mean sort of,
- 19:44Speaker 1: it's quite difficult.
- 19:46Speaker 2: So let us let's dive in a little bit.
- 19:49Speaker 1: One of the central points that you've made in the
- 19:50Speaker 1: past is that CEO sipon is sort of an act
- 19:55Speaker 1: of what Michael historical reclamation. Other words, it's king back
- 20:00Speaker 1: Jewish history. Almost probably these other sources I mean again,
- 20:03Speaker 1: Josephus published or the version we have published in Greek,
- 20:07Speaker 1: foreign non Engwish audience and the fifth century. It's also
- 20:11Speaker 1: a text is also published in late text, also published
- 20:13Speaker 1: in foreign languages for non Jeish audiences, and sefios Upon
- 20:17Speaker 1: seeks to I don't know, domesticate them, reclaim them, judaize
- 20:20Speaker 1: them in a certain way. So can you elaborate on this?
- 20:22Speaker 1: What does the book do and how does it do
- 20:25Speaker 1: it in such a manner that it brings the text
- 20:28Speaker 1: and the ideas and the history, that the actual events
- 20:30Speaker 1: of the history back into the Jewish fault?
- 20:31Speaker 2: Like how does it achieve this?
- 20:33Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like the core question. And so to
- 20:37Speaker 3: answer this real quick, we should talk in slightly greater
- 20:41Speaker 3: depth about stefrijos upon sources in their nature. So, as
- 20:44Speaker 3: you say, in around seventy five, the year seventy five,
- 20:49Speaker 3: Josephus writes his Bellumudaicum his Jewish War in Greek for
- 20:52Speaker 3: sort of like a yeah, a Roman audience maybe also
- 20:56Speaker 3: assumes that Jews will be in the sort of readership
- 20:58Speaker 3: or hearership rather, and then twenty years later, in ninety
- 21:01Speaker 3: five or something like that, he writes his Great Jewish Antiquities.
- 21:04Speaker 3: And these are works that famously are basically picked up
- 21:07Speaker 3: by Christian authors and taken as you know, gospel or
- 21:12Speaker 3: at least sort of like gospel handbooks, and ignored largely
- 21:17Speaker 3: within Rabbinic Judaism. They become extremely important within Christian historiography.
- 21:21Speaker 3: In the fourth century, Josephus's Jewish War gets translated into Latin.
- 21:27Speaker 3: The translation is rather wooden, it's not super good, and
- 21:31Speaker 3: in the very same year, maybe around the year three
- 21:33Speaker 3: seventy five, it gets paraphrased into this other work on
- 21:36Speaker 3: the Destruction of Jerusalem, which I mentioned. So there's like
- 21:40Speaker 3: two Christian Latin versions of josephus Jewish War that exists
- 21:43Speaker 3: already within less than a century of Constantine and Eusebius,
- 21:47Speaker 3: which is remarkable. Sefri Jos upon uses on the Destruction
- 21:51Speaker 3: of Jerusalem. Pseudo Hegesippus does not seem to have known
- 21:55Speaker 3: the Latin translation of the Jewish War. If he did,
- 21:59Speaker 3: he never really references it in a way that's trackable,
- 22:02Speaker 3: which is very interesting. Also another interesting thing. Josepha's The
- 22:06Speaker 3: Jewish War, at least one book of it existed in
- 22:08Speaker 3: Syriac by the end of the fourth century. That's another story.
- 22:11Speaker 3: And then in the middle of the sixth century Cassiodorus
- 22:14Speaker 3: his great sort of book making industry of Vivarium. He
- 22:20Speaker 3: initiates the translation of the Jewish Antiquities into Latin, and
- 22:24Speaker 3: among other things, he tells us that like, people don't
- 22:26Speaker 3: really know who translated the Jewish War into Latin. Some
- 22:29Speaker 3: people say Ambrose, some people say Jerome, some people say Refiness,
- 22:33Speaker 3: but I don't really know. So anyway, those texts exist
- 22:37Speaker 3: by the sixth century. And what the larger interpretive Christian
- 22:41Speaker 3: tradition does and what on the destruction of Jerusalem or
- 22:46Speaker 3: pseudo Hegesippus does within the Josephin narrative is makes it
- 22:51Speaker 3: explicitly and overwhelmingly Christian, which is to say, he frames
- 22:56Speaker 3: the narrative in such a way that the reader and
- 23:00Speaker 3: escape the conclusion that the destruction of Jerusalem is a
- 23:04Speaker 3: result of the jews rejection of Jesus there would be savior. Therefore,
- 23:10Speaker 3: in revenge, God's basically destroys Jerusalem, which represents his abandonment
- 23:16Speaker 3: of his people, and of course, for the Christian authors
- 23:20Speaker 3: and readers of these texts, the idea is that actually
- 23:23Speaker 3: were his new people, and so this is like a
- 23:26Speaker 3: historical event that kind of catalyzes and realizes that historical
- 23:31Speaker 3: spiritual reality or what have you. So this is very
- 23:40Speaker 3: widely and commonly known within late Antique Christianity. This is
- 23:44Speaker 3: the way that people understood the history of the Roman
- 23:48Speaker 3: Jewish War. The reason that Josephus was such an important
- 23:51Speaker 3: source for these authors is because he told that story.
- 23:54Speaker 3: It's not just that he just has this very brief
- 23:57Speaker 3: mention called the Testimony of Flavianum where he meant Jesus
- 24:00Speaker 3: of Nazareth. It's that Josephus tells that story. And Josephus
- 24:04Speaker 3: actually tells the story in a way that's kind of
- 24:06Speaker 3: critical of the Jews. Now, he kind of limits that
- 24:09Speaker 3: criticism to the sort of hardcore Judean rebels, and he's
- 24:14Speaker 3: at pains to make this distinction between like bad Judeans
- 24:19Speaker 3: and like the rest of the Judaeans and the bad
- 24:21Speaker 3: Judeans like caused this major problem for the rest of
- 24:24Speaker 3: us by being too zealous and like poking the Roman
- 24:28Speaker 3: bear Christians took that and were like, oh, Josephus is
- 24:32Speaker 3: kind of right, but he didn't really understand what was
- 24:33Speaker 3: going on, and so it gets rewritten. I mean, that's
- 24:37Speaker 3: an appropriation of like emic Jewish history written by Josephus,
- 24:42Speaker 3: where the Christians are like, this is what really is happening,
- 24:45Speaker 3: and that was the status quo for like, you know,
- 24:48Speaker 3: more or less the first millennium of the Common Era. Now,
- 24:51Speaker 3: of course Jewish readers were not reading that and like, oh, yeah,
- 24:54Speaker 3: they must be right, this is like a Christian thing.
- 24:57Speaker 3: But surely they were aware of these types of narratives,
- 25:01Speaker 3: and or maybe these types of narratives came to the
- 25:06Speaker 3: awareness of particular Jews in southern Italy in the early
- 25:10Speaker 3: tenth century or something like that. But in any case,
- 25:13Speaker 3: the author of sefri jos Upon is aware of these
- 25:16Speaker 3: narratives and rewrites the history in a way that in
- 25:20Speaker 3: the first instance, it deletes all of the Christianization of
- 25:24Speaker 3: the narrative. So on the Destruction of Jerusalem. This this
- 25:28Speaker 3: Latin Christian text. It begins with the preface that sort
- 25:31Speaker 3: of explains how everything works naturally that that's not in
- 25:36Speaker 3: sephri jos Upon, but there's also all these tidbits across
- 25:40Speaker 3: the narrative that are not in Sephri Jos Upon, and
- 25:42Speaker 3: sometimes this means like the completely working of key chapters. So,
- 25:46Speaker 3: for example, I wrote my dissertation on chapter five point
- 25:50Speaker 3: two of on the Destruction of Jerusalem, which takes this
- 25:53Speaker 3: like very brief mention in Josephus's Jewish War where he
- 25:57Speaker 3: sort of like talks to Jerusalem for a second and
- 25:59Speaker 3: he's like, oh, how could this happen? This is like
- 26:02Speaker 3: super sad, I can't believe you kind of led yourself
- 26:06Speaker 3: to be destroyed by refusing to sort of come to
- 26:10Speaker 3: some sort of agreement with the Romans. The author on
- 26:13Speaker 3: the Destruction of Jerusalem turns this into a thirteen hundred
- 26:17Speaker 3: and fifty word sort of like lamentation oration Dia tribe
- 26:21Speaker 3: aimed at Jerusalem and by proxy of the Jews, and
- 26:24Speaker 3: is sort of like, how could this happen to you, Jerusalem? Well,
- 26:28Speaker 3: let's think about that for a second. And then it
- 26:29Speaker 3: has all these sort of poetic ways of saying, well,
- 26:32Speaker 3: what happened was you rejected Jesus and God sent Jesus
- 26:35Speaker 3: to save you guys, and you didn't want to do that.
- 26:38Speaker 3: And so now you've basically destroyed yourselves through the sort
- 26:42Speaker 3: of theodical vehicle, if you will, of Rome. This is
- 26:45Speaker 3: what's happened. Sephri jos Upon remarkably contains this chapter but
- 26:50Speaker 3: deletes all of the Christianization from it. So there's no
- 26:54Speaker 3: mentions of Jesus, there's no mentions of all of these
- 26:58Speaker 3: sort of like Christian assumptions. But the bulk of the
- 27:02Speaker 3: speech is still there, and so the author uses that
- 27:04Speaker 3: and it rewrites it in this Jewish idiom where it
- 27:09Speaker 3: kind of reads like one of the prophets of the
- 27:11Speaker 3: Hebrew Bible, and it's like, how could this happen? Oh,
- 27:14Speaker 3: you first century Jews who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem,
- 27:18Speaker 3: you were sort of out of step with the Covenant.
- 27:22Speaker 3: God did need to come in and chastise you. But
- 27:25Speaker 3: of course this is the type of chastisement you see
- 27:28Speaker 3: across the scriptural tradition and across the sort of Jewish history.
- 27:33Speaker 3: From the perspective of the Jewish consciousness, we are always
- 27:36Speaker 3: God's people, and whenever kind of bad things happen to us,
- 27:40Speaker 3: this is God checking whatever we've forgotten or whatever we've
- 27:44Speaker 3: neglected to do, and so sefri Jo Supon does this
- 27:48Speaker 3: all over the place, and the place you really see
- 27:51Speaker 3: it is in these speeches where the Christian author of
- 27:54Speaker 3: the Latin text has inserted these like implicit or explicit
- 27:58Speaker 3: christianizations into the narrative, like this is what's really going on.
- 28:02Speaker 3: It's the Christian kind of replacement theology view, and the
- 28:07Speaker 3: Hebrew writing author of sefrios Upon has taken that and
- 28:11Speaker 3: has not omitted the chapter, but has rewritten the chapter.
- 28:16Speaker 3: So now it's it's like for us, by us, it's remarkable.
- 28:22Speaker 3: So that's what cefrijos Upon is. It's a reclamation. It's
- 28:25Speaker 3: a taking back of the story of Second Temple Judaism,
- 28:28Speaker 3: of the story of the Roman Jewish War, of the
- 28:31Speaker 3: story of Jerusalem's destruction and the mass death upon Masada
- 28:35Speaker 3: for a Jewish perspective that does not write the Jews
- 28:39Speaker 3: out of history. To use language I've used before, that's
- 28:42Speaker 3: what the Christian authors were trying to do with the
- 28:45Speaker 3: destruction of Jerusalem's story. That's what they thought it meant.
- 28:48Speaker 3: They thought it meant that the Jews had been God's people,
- 28:51Speaker 3: and the year seventy marks their decimation from the historical record,
- 28:55Speaker 3: and the Jewish author of Sefrijos upon the shortest summation
- 28:59Speaker 3: of that narrative is no.
- 29:03Speaker 2: A very short summation. Indeed, I like that.
- 29:05Speaker 1: But it's curious because of course you mentioned the office
- 29:08Speaker 1: of doing this with the Christian authors, but he's also
- 29:11Speaker 1: he's also doing that.
- 29:12Speaker 2: With Josephus, who was of course a Jewish author.
- 29:15Speaker 1: Now, and you know, not just a Jewish author, but
- 29:17Speaker 1: you know, in many ways he was a Jewish author
- 29:20Speaker 1: who didn't turn anti Jewish, he didn't, you know, use
- 29:23Speaker 1: his historical skills to undermine the country, sort of provides
- 29:26Speaker 1: an apologio almost for the Jews and his works in
- 29:29Speaker 1: what sense does your upon different from him as well?
- 29:31Speaker 1: And it's easy to see how he differs and sort
- 29:34Speaker 1: of rejudaizes from the and pushes out the Christian perspectives,
- 29:37Speaker 1: which sees the destruction of the temple, on the miseries
- 29:39Speaker 1: of Jewish history as punishment for the rejection of Jesus,
- 29:42Speaker 1: et cetera. Are there ways in which he also reworks
- 29:45Speaker 1: Josephus's point of view or do you see like a
- 29:48Speaker 1: much greater convergence between those two world views.
- 29:51Speaker 3: Let's say, yeah, yes, there are all sorts of ways
- 29:55Speaker 3: that he does that. So the one that's most on
- 29:59Speaker 3: the nose, say, so, Josephus represents a brand of Judaism,
- 30:06Speaker 3: so Hellenistic Judaism, or Jewish Hellenism, as it were, that
- 30:09Speaker 3: as as Louis Feldman has documented, to the tune of
- 30:12Speaker 3: like thousands of pages, uses the Greco Roman idiom of
- 30:18Speaker 3: kind of ancient national history and culture heroes to present
- 30:24Speaker 3: the Jewish tradition and Judaism and Jews to itself and
- 30:29Speaker 3: to others as this sort of noble, robust national past
- 30:33Speaker 3: that's it's old like Egypt and strong like Rome. And
- 30:37Speaker 3: Josephus does this as well as anyone. Sepri jos Upon
- 30:41Speaker 3: does that like twice as much. It's like it's like
- 30:46Speaker 3: two point zero. So the language I use to describe
- 30:49Speaker 3: this is I say that sefri jos Upon resurrects the
- 30:52Speaker 3: spirit of Hellenistic Judaism. But when it resurrects the spirit
- 30:56Speaker 3: of Hellenistic Judaism, the zeitgeist of that period and of
- 31:00Speaker 3: the sort of like literary and cultural and conceptual and
- 31:03Speaker 3: ideological flavor of the Greek writing Jews of the of
- 31:06Speaker 3: the last centuries b c. In the first century. Ce
- 31:10Speaker 3: jose Upon does that on steroids. So so, just by
- 31:13Speaker 3: way of example, when he tells the story of well,
- 31:18Speaker 3: this is a problematic example, but I'm gonna give it anyway.
- 31:20Speaker 3: So because everybody knows the story of Daniel and the
- 31:22Speaker 3: lions Den, right, So in the story of Daniel, the
- 31:25Speaker 3: Lions Den and cefri jos Upon. So so these these
- 31:28Speaker 3: are these chiefs of the king. They conspire against Daniel
- 31:31Speaker 3: to have him break the law by by praying, and
- 31:33Speaker 3: in sefri jos Upon, the king actually sees what these
- 31:36Speaker 3: guys are doing, and he calls him out on it.
- 31:39Speaker 3: He says, what are you gonna do when Daniel's God
- 31:41Speaker 3: rescues him from the dead, allions, then you're gonna have
- 31:43Speaker 3: to take his place? And Daniel's accusers are like, okay,
- 31:45Speaker 3: so be it. And so there's this back and forth,
- 31:48Speaker 3: and then you know, the king comes back and and
- 31:50Speaker 3: he he spends like a bunch of time trying to
- 31:53Speaker 3: save Daniel from the hands of these of these other
- 31:57Speaker 3: leaders who are who are against Daniel. And he says,
- 32:00Speaker 3: you've conspired against Daniel, and I have this quote here.
- 32:03Speaker 3: Leave him alone, for he is a yehooti and his
- 32:06Speaker 3: God is awesome and terrible and mighty, and he will
- 32:10Speaker 3: demolish and destroy you. And we read that he spends
- 32:13Speaker 3: all night trying to save Daniel, and these guys who
- 32:16Speaker 3: have it out for Daniel aren't having it, but they
- 32:19Speaker 3: have a lot more sort of chance to repent, as
- 32:21Speaker 3: it were. And then they kind of threatened the king back,
- 32:26Speaker 3: and they're like, if Daniel doesn't go to the lions den,
- 32:29Speaker 3: we're going to know that you've broken the law of
- 32:31Speaker 3: the Meads and the Persians, which of course can't be
- 32:34Speaker 3: you know, can't be gain said, And so the king
- 32:36Speaker 3: has no choice, and so the king gives Daniel into
- 32:39Speaker 3: their hands to put him into the lions lions den,
- 32:43Speaker 3: and then this remarkable thing happens. The prophet Habakuk happens
- 32:46Speaker 3: to be having a feast at the same time Daniel's
- 32:48Speaker 3: put in the lions den. Daniel goes down in the
- 32:50Speaker 3: lions den and the lions start licking him and wagging
- 32:54Speaker 3: their tails like I didn't know lions could wag their
- 32:56Speaker 3: tails like dogs, but this is what the text says.
- 32:58Speaker 3: And they come up and they're having like a great time,
- 33:01Speaker 3: and it says like dogs when their master comes in
- 33:04Speaker 3: from the field, so it's like a happy golden retriever.
- 33:07Speaker 3: This is the way the lions are around Daniel. Habit
- 33:10Speaker 3: Cook is having a feast at the same time, and
- 33:13Speaker 3: God shows up to him in a vision is like, hey,
- 33:16Speaker 3: Daniel's hungry too, so Habit Cook brings some food and
- 33:19Speaker 3: the Angel of the Lord brings that to Daniel in
- 33:21Speaker 3: the lions den. Daniel and the angel sit there and
- 33:24Speaker 3: have a nice like three course dinner, you know, and
- 33:27Speaker 3: then the narrative continues. The next morning, you know, the
- 33:29Speaker 3: lions haven't heard Daniel. The people who accused him and
- 33:32Speaker 3: their families are thrown in. The lions crush their bones,
- 33:35Speaker 3: the author tells us because the lions hadn't eaten for
- 33:37Speaker 3: many days. So it's like there's another extra detail. And
- 33:40Speaker 3: then the lions give out this great roar when they
- 33:43Speaker 3: chomp up all these families, and we're told that this
- 33:46Speaker 3: roar is heard far and wide, so people are like, oh, no,
- 33:49Speaker 3: the lions got out of their cages because we hear
- 33:52Speaker 3: we hear this huge roar from the city center. So
- 33:54Speaker 3: it's like if you take biblical narratives or if you
- 33:58Speaker 3: take biblical biblical narratives and imagine what they look like
- 34:01Speaker 3: in Hollywood. That's something like what you get in sefri
- 34:05Speaker 3: jos Upon and so and so. Josephus did this to
- 34:08Speaker 3: some degree. Sefri Josupon does it way more so. Severri
- 34:12Speaker 3: jos Upon is convinced that the Jewish national tradition is
- 34:15Speaker 3: one of political power, is one of ethical probity, is one.
- 34:21Speaker 3: It's this ancient, weighty, powerful people who exist alongside the
- 34:29Speaker 3: Romans and the Persians and what have you, and they
- 34:33Speaker 3: do great deeds. So so one other answer to your question.
- 34:37Speaker 3: So Josephus famously may or may not have have identified
- 34:41Speaker 3: as a Pharisee, right like he he has this famous,
- 34:45Speaker 3: this famous portion of the Jewish War where he he
- 34:47Speaker 3: talks about what he calls the three or four Jewish
- 34:50Speaker 3: philosophies in book two, and he's like, this is what
- 34:52Speaker 3: the Sadducees believe, this is what the Pharisees believe, this
- 34:54Speaker 3: is what the Asins believe.
- 34:57Speaker 1: Only is one of our only good sources about what
- 35:00Speaker 1: they about these the sex in the whole second type
- 35:04Speaker 1: of period.
- 35:04Speaker 2: It's amazing how much is based on this sort of yeah,
- 35:06Speaker 2: throw away part of Josephus, but yeah, gone.
- 35:09Speaker 3: No, that's exactly right. So basically Sefrioson is not as
- 35:12Speaker 3: impressed with the Pharisees. So when John Hrcanus has his
- 35:15Speaker 3: sort of like run in with the Pharisees because there
- 35:18Speaker 3: they sort of inform his leadership, and he's like, let
- 35:21Speaker 3: me know if I do anything wrong, and the Pharisees
- 35:23Speaker 3: are like, you're awesome, we would never say you do
- 35:25Speaker 3: anything wrong. And he's called a priest and a king,
- 35:28Speaker 3: which is not in the ancient sources. But then there's
- 35:30Speaker 3: this we're told there's this wicked Pharisee who shows up
- 35:33Speaker 3: and he's like renounced the priesthood and just be satisfied
- 35:37Speaker 3: with the kingship, and then Hyrcanus is like super mad
- 35:39Speaker 3: and they have a falling out. But basically the way
- 35:41Speaker 3: that the Pharisees are portrayed in the narrative is not
- 35:44Speaker 3: as positive with what we find in Josephus. And so
- 35:47Speaker 3: the author of Sefrio s Upon is different than Josephus,
- 35:51Speaker 3: even though they both inhabit, like, if you will, the
- 35:55Speaker 3: Jewish side of the Jewish Christian register. So it's not
- 35:58Speaker 3: like it's not like a third way the author in
- 36:01Speaker 3: Josephus clearly agree upon sort of basic tenets of the world,
- 36:06Speaker 3: which is to say, the Jews are the people of God,
- 36:10Speaker 3: and God maintains a relationship with their people in the
- 36:13Speaker 3: events of history, whereas the Christians have been at pains
- 36:17Speaker 3: to sort of complicate that message, to use the euphemism.
- 36:22Speaker 3: But but yeah, he does differ from Josephus in in
- 36:26Speaker 3: narrative ways, in the ways that he the ways that
- 36:30Speaker 3: he portrays Jewish greatness, and in certain of his sort
- 36:33Speaker 3: of like religious proclivities.
- 36:35Speaker 1: All right, So there was a lot there, and one
- 36:37Speaker 1: of the things you did, I didn't want to discuss
- 36:39Speaker 1: or didn't want to touch on a few specifics of
- 36:41Speaker 1: those sort of rewriting stories. And there are a few
- 36:43Speaker 1: different ways in which this is done. Another one like
- 36:45Speaker 1: to draw our attention to it. And if you could
- 36:47Speaker 1: outline this, because I think there's a classic case of
- 36:49Speaker 1: sort of jossipon and his ways of doing.
- 36:52Speaker 2: Things or redoing things.
- 36:54Speaker 1: Is the SENTI the mcgilla story, the story of Monai
- 36:56Speaker 1: and Asta and how he tells it and retells them
- 36:58Speaker 1: because of course, you know, we'll very form with the story.
- 37:00Speaker 1: But under the pen of Yood. It undergoes quite quite
- 37:04Speaker 1: a retelling. So you walk us through that retelling, and
- 37:07Speaker 1: what does he seek? What is seek to gain by
- 37:09Speaker 1: doing it in this way? Why does he retails? What
- 37:11Speaker 1: is the benefits of the upside of reworking the material
- 37:14Speaker 1: in this way?
- 37:15Speaker 3: Yeah, So sep Josupon's chapter nine, which is on Esther
- 37:20Speaker 3: and Mordecai. What's so interesting about it is that it
- 37:23Speaker 3: is largely based upon the so called additions to the
- 37:26Speaker 3: Book of Esther that appear in the Septuagint and so
- 37:28Speaker 3: exist in the Greek and Latin Christian versions, and the
- 37:33Speaker 3: textual relationships. They are very complicated, because the est textural
- 37:36Speaker 3: tradition is very complicated, as you probably know. But in
- 37:39Speaker 3: terms of the narrative as it appears in seph for Josupon,
- 37:44Speaker 3: I'll just read the first brief paragraph of how this
- 37:47Speaker 3: narrative begins to sort of give you a flavor of
- 37:49Speaker 3: what Yosupon does with this story. So he says, only
- 37:52Speaker 3: in the days of a Hatsuwares was the memory of
- 37:54Speaker 3: Judah nearly lost from the entire realm of Persia through
- 37:58Speaker 3: the hatred of one Amalakite named Haman, who stole the
- 38:02Speaker 3: heart of King Hasaweres. So already the narrative stakes of
- 38:06Speaker 3: this story are larger than life, the characters are larger
- 38:09Speaker 3: than life. Hayman is an Amalekite, and so you have
- 38:12Speaker 3: this sort of axis of evil between Macedonians and Amalekites
- 38:16Speaker 3: who team up to try to eradicate the Zira, the
- 38:23Speaker 3: seed of the Jewish people, from the face of the earth.
- 38:26Speaker 3: And of course this is also in the Estra story
- 38:28Speaker 3: the Biblical text, but it is way more prominent in
- 38:32Speaker 3: the Josupon version. And so here's what we read. Hasawares
- 38:35Speaker 3: gave Hayman license to act as he wished throughout the kingdom,
- 38:38Speaker 3: even to wipe out the memory of Judah from the
- 38:40Speaker 3: entire Persian realm, because Mordecai, a Jew of the nobles
- 38:44Speaker 3: of Benjamin, did not rise before him. Again, this is
- 38:47Speaker 3: how the Estra story starts in Josupon. These nobles were
- 38:52Speaker 3: the patricians benjamin Nite heroes who accompanied their king Saul
- 38:56Speaker 3: on the field of Amelek and delivered Amelek, a mighty
- 38:59Speaker 3: and power will blow all the way from hobby law
- 39:02Speaker 3: unto sure a land of many days journey. They slew
- 39:05Speaker 3: more than five hundred thousand dead of the Amalekite people
- 39:08Speaker 3: all destroyed. And King Saul's war against the Amalekites, truly,
- 39:13Speaker 3: he's slaughtered souls throughout the land of Amelek, men, women
- 39:16Speaker 3: and children, more than one hundred myriads in all. This
- 39:19Speaker 3: is why this man, Hayman, preserved a hatred against the
- 39:22Speaker 3: Jews and especially against the tribe of Benjamin. So you
- 39:25Speaker 3: can see there that the story of Esther and Mordechai
- 39:28Speaker 3: has been integrated into this very old, very sort of
- 39:32Speaker 3: like prominent, prominent political historical framework. So the Jews from
- 39:38Speaker 3: ancient times, King Saul and the Benjaminites they killed like
- 39:43Speaker 3: a crapload of Amalekites. And so you know, centuries later,
- 39:47Speaker 3: this sort of quintessential Amalekite Hayman just has it out
- 39:51Speaker 3: for the Jews. And you get this in the very
- 39:52Speaker 3: first paragraph of the narrative, and so you know, and
- 39:56Speaker 3: so he goes after the Jews there within their of itself,
- 40:01Speaker 3: as we already saw, Mordecai hears about what these eunuchs
- 40:04Speaker 3: want to do to the king. Where again we get
- 40:07Speaker 3: gratuitous details. We're told that the eunuchs he hears them
- 40:09Speaker 3: plotting they're like, they're going to kill him, and they're
- 40:12Speaker 3: going to take his head. They're going to take his
- 40:14Speaker 3: head to the to the the King of Macedon, and
- 40:18Speaker 3: this is the way they're going to sort of like
- 40:19Speaker 3: prove their loyalty and take him out. And Mordecai tells
- 40:22Speaker 3: the king, and the king kills those guys, hangs them
- 40:24Speaker 3: on trees, and Hayman of course ends up getting his
- 40:28Speaker 3: come uppance as well. He's exceedingly angry when his two
- 40:31Speaker 3: eunuchs get found out by Mordecai. We're also told their names.
- 40:35Speaker 3: Mordecai has this dream, this dream of these competing dragons
- 40:39Speaker 3: where the global political framework is placed in this image
- 40:43Speaker 3: that Mordecai sort of imagines. And then you've got these
- 40:46Speaker 3: long prayers of Esther and Mordecai, which are you know,
- 40:49Speaker 3: which are famous additions to the Esther narrative in the
- 40:52Speaker 3: in the so called apocryphal tradition. And so basically what
- 40:55Speaker 3: we see Esther doing in the cefrijos Upon version is
- 40:58Speaker 3: praying like she does act and she goes into the king,
- 41:01Speaker 3: of course, but before she does so, she has this
- 41:04Speaker 3: elaborate prayer, and so there's a lot of prayer in
- 41:07Speaker 3: the chapter, which for the megalaw kind of makes a
- 41:10Speaker 3: lot of sense. And so what's so interesting about it
- 41:14Speaker 3: is that the basic narrative upshot of the Esther story
- 41:19Speaker 3: is not different in Sefrios upon Visa via the Book
- 41:21Speaker 3: of Esther, Like the bad guys and good guys are
- 41:23Speaker 3: still the same. What happens to him and what happens
- 41:26Speaker 3: to Esther and Mordecai is still pretty much the same.
- 41:29Speaker 3: What doesn't happen to the Jews, but that with which
- 41:32Speaker 3: they're threatened is still the same. But the scale on
- 41:38Speaker 3: which the story is told, it seems like this is
- 41:41Speaker 3: like the big global political event that's going on at
- 41:44Speaker 3: the time, and like the complete eradication of the Jews
- 41:49Speaker 3: is planned by this person who hails from this ancient
- 41:54Speaker 3: people who have hated the Jews forever, and we're told
- 42:00Speaker 3: this a number of times to the chapter. I mean,
- 42:01Speaker 3: the chapter is not very long, it's shorter than the
- 42:03Speaker 3: Book of Esther, but yeah, so that's that's uh. The
- 42:08Speaker 3: Esther Mordecai story is is it's a perfect example of
- 42:11Speaker 3: how Seffrias upon the tools traditional narratives inserts them into
- 42:16Speaker 3: this historiographical trajectory of ancient Israelite history and does and
- 42:20Speaker 3: does so in a way where the Jews appear more
- 42:24Speaker 3: politically potent, more i would say, more kind of ethically laudable,
- 42:33Speaker 3: and more divinely attended than even we find in the
- 42:38Speaker 3: Biblical narrative.
- 42:39Speaker 1: So this is fascinating, especially because as you say this,
- 42:42Speaker 1: this is sort of the paradox of Yozi put in
- 42:45Speaker 1: a way and that on the one hand, he is,
- 42:46Speaker 1: in fact, you know, judaizing to put it, put it crudely,
- 42:49Speaker 1: and sort of taking a bunch of texts, amount of sources,
- 42:52Speaker 1: a bunch of stories, and we're into a Jewish history
- 42:55Speaker 1: and putting it in a readily understandable Hebrew and putting
- 42:59Speaker 1: it within more recognized the Jewish theological framework. On the
- 43:01Speaker 1: one hand, on the other hand, he feels kind of
- 43:04Speaker 1: free to take these very canonical stories like the modehain
- 43:08Speaker 1: Esta story and add to them, yes, embellish them, you know,
- 43:12Speaker 1: in soe those of things. And so it's sort of
- 43:14Speaker 1: on the one hand conservative, on the other hand, very
- 43:17Speaker 1: free wheeling.
- 43:18Speaker 2: Would that be fair?
- 43:19Speaker 3: That's that's exactly right, And I couldn't have put it better.
- 43:23Speaker 3: Somewhat conservative and somewhat free wheeling. And I think it's
- 43:27Speaker 3: very true to say that the author feels very free
- 43:30Speaker 3: to deal with the sources and in this way. And
- 43:33Speaker 3: so this is what's so interesting about the narrative. So
- 43:35Speaker 3: one thing that like if you're if you are really
- 43:38Speaker 3: familiar with sort of like the language and the idioms
- 43:40Speaker 3: and whatnot of the Hebrew Bible, if you're reading through
- 43:43Speaker 3: sefrios Upon's Hebrew every one or two or three sentences,
- 43:47Speaker 3: you you will look at it and you'll be like, oh,
- 43:51Speaker 3: this phrase, this is like a Biblical phrase. This appears
- 43:54Speaker 3: in like I don't know this, this is like a
- 43:57Speaker 3: Psalm phrase. So this is like we find this in
- 43:59Speaker 3: the book of that it is so cephri yez Upon
- 44:02Speaker 3: is written in like a a literally biblical Hebrew idiom.
- 44:08Speaker 3: And so I would say that, you know, that does
- 44:12Speaker 3: something to the fabric of the tech. It sounds kind
- 44:15Speaker 3: of like you're reading the Bible like there's a there's
- 44:17Speaker 3: a sort of I don't know what you would want
- 44:19Speaker 3: to call it, but there's there's like a scriptural depth,
- 44:22Speaker 3: the depth of sanctity like built into the language itself,
- 44:26Speaker 3: where that you can't escape. At the same time, in
- 44:28Speaker 3: terms of narrative, the text is very free, and the
- 44:32Speaker 3: author is very comfortable being like I'm gonna, I'm gonna
- 44:35Speaker 3: sort of like reshape what's going on here.
- 44:37Speaker 2: Now.
- 44:37Speaker 3: Of course this doesn't this sits I would say it was.
- 44:41Speaker 3: It sits less uncomfortably with the mid Rash tradition than
- 44:45Speaker 3: it does with the you know, with the sort of
- 44:51Speaker 3: like Protestant ethic of needing to needing to be like
- 44:58Speaker 3: directly faithful to biblical narrative, and so here. You know,
- 45:02Speaker 3: when we think of historiography today as a genre, I
- 45:05Speaker 3: would say there's a relationship between the way that Protestantism
- 45:09Speaker 3: came to understand the Bible and the way that twentieth
- 45:13Speaker 3: and twenty first century Western thought came to understand historiography.
- 45:18Speaker 3: And both are affected by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
- 45:21Speaker 3: not just the Reformation. And it's that like his historical
- 45:25Speaker 3: narrative is like precise, it needs to be exactly recognized
- 45:31Speaker 3: and adhered to, and if you depart a little bit
- 45:33Speaker 3: from that, it creates all sorts of problems. One interesting
- 45:37Speaker 3: place we've seen this in popular culture in recent years
- 45:39Speaker 3: is when I don't know if you ever saw the
- 45:42Speaker 3: film Noah that came out in twenty fourteen with Russell Crowe.
- 45:46Speaker 3: But and so this is like, this is a classic,
- 45:48Speaker 3: classic mid Rashic take on this, on this biblical narrative.
- 45:52Speaker 3: And if you if you looked, I actually present a
- 45:54Speaker 3: paper on this, one of the first academic papers I
- 45:56Speaker 3: ever presented. If you went online and looked at the
- 45:58Speaker 3: reactions to the story, Jewish reactions to like tended to
- 46:05Speaker 3: recognize what midrash does and sort of found it interesting
- 46:07Speaker 3: and could engage with it. But it's like the American
- 46:10Speaker 3: Protestant imagination couldn't even like people's brains were exploding. They
- 46:16Speaker 3: couldn't like deal with, you know, what had happened to
- 46:20Speaker 3: this narrative because it's like that didn't happen. That's not
- 46:22Speaker 3: the way it happens. And so you know, some of
- 46:25Speaker 3: those you know, some of those dynamics I think you
- 46:27Speaker 3: can take as useful heuristics going back a thousand years
- 46:31Speaker 3: and looking at sever yos upon where you've got this
- 46:33Speaker 3: this combination of an author who's arguably pious based upon
- 46:39Speaker 3: a number of indicators we can look at, but at
- 46:42Speaker 3: the same time has no issue, has no issue. You know,
- 46:49Speaker 3: let's say reconstructing biblical and parabiblical narrative, rewritten Bible, et cetera.
- 46:56Speaker 2: Making his own midrash essentially indeed, indeed excellent.
- 47:01Speaker 1: So let's move on a little bit to the last section,
- 47:03Speaker 1: John wanzccover, which is the reception of this book and
- 47:07Speaker 1: the way it was read and used in the subsequent centuries,
- 47:10Speaker 1: as you So, let's first talk about the Jewish reception.
- 47:12Speaker 1: As you mentioned, this book is written sometime in the
- 47:14Speaker 1: tenth century, but already quite soon after it.
- 47:17Speaker 2: Is being referenced to it.
- 47:18Speaker 1: I believe it's referenced by rashly Bybinezra, by various other
- 47:21Speaker 1: medieval and early modern Jewish thinkers. And I mean they
- 47:25Speaker 1: seem to refer to They seem to take this book
- 47:27Speaker 1: to be to be history. They seem to take this
- 47:29Speaker 1: book to be, you know, somewhat authoritative or at least
- 47:32Speaker 1: a source that they can quote and rely upon. So
- 47:34Speaker 1: I'm I'm curious, what can you say about the way
- 47:38Speaker 1: this text was used and utilized in the centuries following
- 47:43Speaker 1: within the Jewish traditionion.
- 47:45Speaker 3: Yeah, so, the I would say the most important broad
- 47:50Speaker 3: spectrum thing to know about its reception is that the
- 47:52Speaker 3: text is treated as an open text, which, given the
- 47:56Speaker 3: nature of the text that we were just discussing, this
- 47:59Speaker 3: actually fits pretty well with the sort of vibe laid
- 48:02Speaker 3: down by the original Yoseupon, whatever that was, is that
- 48:06Speaker 3: it was treated as as an open text, which means
- 48:09Speaker 3: it was added to very early on and pretty extensively.
- 48:14Speaker 3: And so by the twelve thirteenth and fourteenth century you
- 48:18Speaker 3: have numerous recensions of this text, and these have been
- 48:22Speaker 3: the ones that most people have read since that time.
- 48:25Speaker 3: So not until really the twentieth century, and frankly the
- 48:29Speaker 3: twenty first century with the work of Saskia Donits, this
- 48:32Speaker 3: Jewish studies scholar at now at the University of Frankfurt online,
- 48:36Speaker 3: not until recently have we appreciated, like the original text
- 48:39Speaker 3: what that looked like. And we still don't have like
- 48:41Speaker 3: a perfect idea. So for example, I gave you the
- 48:43Speaker 3: Daniel and the lions Den example. But in the earliest
- 48:48Speaker 3: text of Yosupon, so far as we can tell, based
- 48:50Speaker 3: upon fragments from the kiro Ganesa and some of the
- 48:53Speaker 3: best manuscripts, chapters four through six, which has the Daniel
- 48:56Speaker 3: material did not exist in the earliest iteration of Yosupon,
- 49:00Speaker 3: but in later editions. You have all sorts of interesting
- 49:03Speaker 3: stuff that gets added. You have you have an account
- 49:06Speaker 3: of the crowning of the Emperor of the spasiin which
- 49:08Speaker 3: is manifestly based upon tropes in medieval crowning narratives. You
- 49:14Speaker 3: have material about Christians, and about Jesus and about all
- 49:20Speaker 3: sorts of crazy stuff that gets added to the text.
- 49:23Speaker 3: But so I guess the first thing to say is
- 49:26Speaker 3: that the text makes it into Judeo Arabic by the
- 49:31Speaker 3: eleventh century, which is which is pretty early. And so
- 49:36Speaker 3: there you have Jewish readers in a different linguistic milieu
- 49:41Speaker 3: engaging the text. And that's that's interesting, that's a that's
- 49:45Speaker 3: a sort of that's another story. So in southern Italy,
- 49:50Speaker 3: also in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, Rochamil
- 49:54Speaker 3: ben Schlomo he includes a coffee of Sefriosa pon in
- 49:58Speaker 3: his cepher hazik Renote. So these these sort of chronologically
- 50:02Speaker 3: are chronographically oriented texts about the Jewish tradition that crop
- 50:08Speaker 3: up more and more in in what what we're called
- 50:11Speaker 3: in medieval studies, the High Middle Ages. These very often
- 50:16Speaker 3: include large portions of cephri jos upon or themselves based
- 50:21Speaker 3: upon sefri jos Upon sorry the Sefer Huziker note, as
- 50:25Speaker 3: you may know, that's Eliezer ben Asher's work, and so
- 50:28Speaker 3: a fourteenth the fourteenth century anthology of Rockmeil integrates that
- 50:34Speaker 3: into it. Abraham even Daoud in the twelfth century and
- 50:37Speaker 3: his Dora Dorote Olam and his other works uses jos Upon.
- 50:42Speaker 3: And if you put the Hebrew texts next to each other,
- 50:45Speaker 3: you can tell that this is this is explicitly taken
- 50:48Speaker 3: from sefri jos Upon, so cefri jos Upon itself. It
- 50:52Speaker 3: becomes a bedrock for different types of historiographically oriented literature,
- 51:00Speaker 3: and this occurs all over the place. One of the
- 51:03Speaker 3: greatest expansions of it are made by Judah Iven Moscone
- 51:07Speaker 3: in the fourteenth century, and that becomes the basis for
- 51:12Speaker 3: what's called the Constantinoble Edition, an edition of the texts
- 51:16Speaker 3: that's published in fifteen ten. The first edition printed was
- 51:21Speaker 3: printed by Abraham Knat in Mantua in fourteen seventy five
- 51:26Speaker 3: or fourteen seventy nine or fourteen eighty or something like that.
- 51:29Speaker 3: They're sort of arguments about exactly when and yes, so
- 51:33Speaker 3: Rashi read the work. It appears to have been part
- 51:36Speaker 3: of the part of Rashi's curriculum, as it were. So
- 51:40Speaker 3: it's a text that gets read, gets expanded and integrated
- 51:43Speaker 3: into kind of like a living tradition and used in
- 51:46Speaker 3: all of these other texts. And what's interesting about sefrijo
- 51:52Speaker 3: s Upon is that the text itself it cites Joseph Benngurion,
- 51:59Speaker 3: who is a conflation of the historical author Josephus who
- 52:05Speaker 3: lived in the first century, and another Joseph who is
- 52:10Speaker 3: identified in book three of this Again, the source of
- 52:15Speaker 3: sefrijos Upon deeg. Scidio here is Limitano on the Destruction
- 52:19Speaker 3: of Jerusalem by Pseudo Hegesippus, and book three it is
- 52:23Speaker 3: listing the leaders of Judea and Galilee in the Roman
- 52:26Speaker 3: Jewish War. It mentions a certain Joseph Gorrionidez, son of Goryon,
- 52:31Speaker 3: and the author of sefrijos Upon identifies that with Josephus
- 52:35Speaker 3: the historical author, and so in the Jewish tradition and
- 52:41Speaker 3: the Christian tradition pre sixteenth century. So it seems many,
- 52:45Speaker 3: most or all readers of sefrijos Upon understood the work
- 52:50Speaker 3: to be a product of the first century and the
- 52:53Speaker 3: writing of a first century author to be identified with
- 52:58Speaker 3: the person we call flabyas josephiz And this is the
- 53:03Speaker 3: way people looked about looked at it until the until
- 53:06Speaker 3: the sixteenth century with Azariah de Rassi and a few
- 53:11Speaker 3: other figures. And if listeners are interested, the authoritative work
- 53:16Speaker 3: on this reception tradition is Saskia Donates's twenty thirteen book
- 53:22Speaker 3: Uber le frungmund Reception des Sefrio Supan, and it's a
- 53:26Speaker 3: spectacular study. She's done some important work since then, and
- 53:30Speaker 3: a lot of that is picked up more recently in
- 53:33Speaker 3: a book written by Nadiat Celdez in twenty twenty.
- 53:38Speaker 1: So so then let me ask sort of a more
- 53:41Speaker 1: general question on even so as you mentioned, it's it's
- 53:43Speaker 1: used in various ways by the justraition, and in fact
- 53:46Speaker 1: we've written in today, what is the sort of historical
- 53:50Speaker 1: importance of the Book of Josipot In other words, you know,
- 53:53Speaker 1: obviously we recognize that this author is rewriting. We write
- 53:57Speaker 1: all the traditions from josiphas through through Latin Christendom than
- 54:00Speaker 1: other works. So then today when we look at the
- 54:03Speaker 1: Hebrew of Husband, what can we see what are the
- 54:06Speaker 1: sort of historical nuggets that are useful from this work itself,
- 54:10Speaker 1: you know, about Jewish life in the medieval period, or
- 54:14Speaker 1: Hebrew writing or religious acknowledge. What is the historical value,
- 54:19Speaker 1: let's say, of this book as it sits on our
- 54:21Speaker 1: shelf today.
- 54:21Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great question. I think there are
- 54:23Speaker 3: a couple of different ways to answer it. I will
- 54:25Speaker 3: note that sever Josupon has largely let's say, evaded or
- 54:30Speaker 3: been excluded from the broader scholarly imagination because people did
- 54:34Speaker 3: not recognize any sort of historical value in it. And
- 54:38Speaker 3: this has to do with ways that historiography have been
- 54:41Speaker 3: understood by modern scholars. So sefri Josupon has been called
- 54:43Speaker 3: by some something like folk literature, and so because it's
- 54:47Speaker 3: telling a much older story, and it's doing so in
- 54:49Speaker 3: a way that's clearly sort of romanticized or something like that.
- 54:54Speaker 3: Even a scholar like Amos Funkenstein, even someone like him,
- 54:58Speaker 3: you Roushalmi in nineteen eighty two, in his famous book
- 55:01Speaker 3: Zachora Jewish History and Jewish Memory, he doesn't count sefri
- 55:04Speaker 3: jos Upon his history. It's it's like it's something else,
- 55:09Speaker 3: and there there is some truth to that, to be honest, like,
- 55:13Speaker 3: we don't read sefri jos Upon, So sefri Josupon's narrative
- 55:16Speaker 3: goes from sort of prehistory down to let's say seventy
- 55:21Speaker 3: four with Mesada. We don't look at sefrijos Upon to
- 55:26Speaker 3: sort of fill in gaps in our knowledge of that history.
- 55:31Speaker 3: Almost ever, there are some actually interesting exceptions to this,
- 55:34Speaker 3: So Kenneth Atkinson in our twenty twenty four volume From
- 55:38Speaker 3: Josephus to jose Upon and Beyond, which is open access
- 55:41Speaker 3: by the way, Kenneth Atkinson in there he explores this
- 55:44Speaker 3: datum from I think book thirty one books book thirty
- 55:48Speaker 3: one or twenty nine something like that in sefri jos
- 55:50Speaker 3: Upon and basically finds evidence that helps us read ancient
- 55:55Speaker 3: history in sefri jos Upon that doesn't appear in earlier sources.
- 55:58Speaker 3: But this is more the exception and then the rule.
- 56:01Speaker 3: I would say, the big answer to that question is
- 56:04Speaker 3: that sefrijos Upon it tells us about the language, It
- 56:07Speaker 3: tells us about the historical understanding and maybe something of
- 56:10Speaker 3: the sort of the self understanding of a Jewish author
- 56:15Speaker 3: in early tenth century southern Italy. So when the author
- 56:19Speaker 3: is making the expansions that he does. I assume, you know,
- 56:22Speaker 3: male authorship. When the author is making the expansions that
- 56:25Speaker 3: he does upon the basis of his Latin Christian sources
- 56:29Speaker 3: or what have you, the nature of those expansions tells
- 56:34Speaker 3: us something about the author's understanding of the Jewish tradition,
- 56:38Speaker 3: which I argue tells us something further about how the
- 56:41Speaker 3: author understands the Jewish people as a as a historical
- 56:45Speaker 3: collective and as a historical collective that still exists at
- 56:49Speaker 3: that time. And so I would say it contradicts narrative
- 56:53Speaker 3: where the Jews are politically powerless, and certainly one that
- 57:00Speaker 3: sees them as sort of I don't divinely abandoned or
- 57:06Speaker 3: sacrilegious or something like that. But it sees the Jews
- 57:10Speaker 3: as of people that uniquely inhabit this ongoing, living historical
- 57:14Speaker 3: covenant with the God of the universe, the God that
- 57:16Speaker 3: controls history. We also so in the Table of Nations
- 57:20Speaker 3: at the beginning of it, we get some data about
- 57:25Speaker 3: ethnonyms and toponyms about peoples and places of the time
- 57:30Speaker 3: that appear to be accurate. For example, the Russi we
- 57:36Speaker 3: might be translated something like Russians or proto Russians or
- 57:39Speaker 3: something like that, are located at Kiev and are identified
- 57:43Speaker 3: as Teutons, which appears to be correct. So we can learn,
- 57:47Speaker 3: you know, we can learn a little bit about the
- 57:49Speaker 3: time in that way when the author rewrites the story
- 57:52Speaker 3: of the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs and the Maccabean
- 57:56Speaker 3: Mother Martyr. The way that the sons respond to and
- 58:00Speaker 3: Hiakus and his henchmen includes a decent amount more about
- 58:04Speaker 3: the afterlife than what appears in the historic in the
- 58:08Speaker 3: books of the Maccabees as we know them. And so
- 58:11Speaker 3: the author of Cefrijos upon appears to have notions of heaven, hell,
- 58:17Speaker 3: of reward and punishment post mortem that would be difficult
- 58:22Speaker 3: to derive from the foregoing Jewish tradition, I think, as
- 58:28Speaker 3: far as I know. So one more important example, if
- 58:31Speaker 3: I may at the end of the book on top
- 58:34Speaker 3: of Masada, as Josephus tells the narrative, of course, these
- 58:38Speaker 3: nine hundred and sixty Jewish rebel holdouts under the leadership
- 58:42Speaker 3: of Eliezer Bennier. After a long speech of his They're
- 58:46Speaker 3: like it would be a shame to let the Romans
- 58:48Speaker 3: kill us. It is much more pious for us to
- 58:50Speaker 3: kill ourselves, because they're uncircumcised and we're holy. So they
- 58:55Speaker 3: kill their wives and children, then they kill themselves, and
- 58:57Speaker 3: the Romans finally break through the wall. Josephus tells us
- 58:59Speaker 3: this book seven of the Jewish War, and the Romans
- 59:03Speaker 3: are so impressed that they had the wherewithal to kill
- 59:05Speaker 3: themselves in this way, and it's like, wow, look at
- 59:08Speaker 3: these people. In Pseudo Hegesippus, in the late fourth century
- 59:13Speaker 3: Christian Latin rewriting of it, the same thing happens, except
- 59:16Speaker 3: the Roman soldiers are not impressed, and the very last
- 59:19Speaker 3: thing we read, basically is that the Romans show up.
- 59:22Speaker 3: All the Jews are dead the end, and so it's
- 59:25Speaker 3: very anticlimactic. In sefrijosupon remarkably, the Judean rebels kill their
- 59:32Speaker 3: wives and children, but then they go fight the Romans.
- 59:36Speaker 3: They do not kill themselves, They die hacking down Roman
- 59:40Speaker 3: soldiers like good warriors in battle. And so it's like
- 59:45Speaker 3: this this monumental overturning of what apparently had been the
- 59:49Speaker 3: sort of standard Masada narrative. And so in that narrative,
- 59:54Speaker 3: I think you see something of the author's understanding values
- 1:00:00Speaker 3: something like that.
- 1:00:01Speaker 2: Fascinating.
- 1:00:02Speaker 1: Okay, I'm afraid we have come to the close to
- 1:00:05Speaker 1: the end of however you go. I'm want to ask
- 1:00:10Speaker 1: one question, shame indeed, we better getting started. One one
- 1:00:14Speaker 1: question I'd like to ask you, which I ask of
- 1:00:15Speaker 1: any of my guests, which is something like this. If
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: you could sit down tonight to dinner with the author
- 1:00:20Speaker 1: of Yosipon this tenth century drew from Italy, and you
- 1:00:24Speaker 1: could converse with him and ask him something, what would
- 1:00:27Speaker 1: you be? What would you be asking him? What would
- 1:00:28Speaker 1: be curious to know? What would you what subject you
- 1:00:31Speaker 1: brought to them?
- 1:00:31Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this is gonna be kind of a
- 1:00:33Speaker 3: lame answer, but I would. I would get a pan
- 1:00:35Speaker 3: and pencil out and I would be like, all right,
- 1:00:36Speaker 3: I want you to tell me what all chapters were
- 1:00:39Speaker 3: in the version of this book that you wrote, because
- 1:00:43Speaker 3: because like a temporary scholarship, we can't we can't totally tell.
- 1:00:46Speaker 3: But no, honestly, I would Uh. I'm a scholar of antiquity,
- 1:00:51Speaker 3: so coming into the early Middle Ages is like I
- 1:00:54Speaker 3: get more uncomfortable every year I go beyond, like the
- 1:00:58Speaker 3: fifth century, and so I would love to know what
- 1:01:02Speaker 3: the author was reading and how we had access to it.
- 1:01:05Speaker 3: I would say, where did you find these Latin texts?
- 1:01:07Speaker 3: And where did you get the stories about Livy and Virgil?
- 1:01:09Speaker 3: And like, you know what, what all texts did you use?
- 1:01:13Speaker 3: Because we can only make sort of like partial and
- 1:01:15Speaker 3: educated guesses of these questions, and you know, they'd be
- 1:01:20Speaker 3: easy enough for the author to answer. I could come
- 1:01:22Speaker 3: up with a list of one hundred questions though that
- 1:01:24Speaker 3: I'd love to ask the author as well.
- 1:01:26Speaker 2: Sort of.
- 1:01:27Speaker 1: Yeah, basically you're saying that as a good historian, the
- 1:01:29Speaker 1: first thing you'd ask him is what kind of historian
- 1:01:31Speaker 1: are you? How do you do your your historian's work?
- 1:01:34Speaker 1: Let me see your tools, that sort of business.
- 1:01:36Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe something like that. I mean, of course, yeah,
- 1:01:39Speaker 3: I hope we talk about all sorts of things. We'd
- 1:01:41Speaker 3: certainly talk about sort of like religion, theology, you know,
- 1:01:46Speaker 3: these types of storytelling. You know, i'd get some tips
- 1:01:49Speaker 3: tips about good writing if I could.
- 1:01:52Speaker 1: So interesting Yeah, okay, professor at Cosson Bay, thank you
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: so much for joining us today on the podcast of
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: Jewish Ideas. This has been a pleasure and we look
- 1:02:00Speaker 1: forward to your future writings on this topic.
- 1:02:02Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you JJ.
- 1:02:05Speaker 1: This has been the podcast of Jewish ideas by Tora
- 1:02:07Speaker 1: in Motion, produced by Alisha Kellman and myself JJ Kimbri,
- 1:02:11Speaker 1: edited and mixed by Alisha Kelmer. You can stay up
- 1:02:14Speaker 1: to date by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. To
- 1:02:16Speaker 1: support the more thoughtful Jewish content like this, please visit
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- 1:02:20Speaker 2: Slash donated