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