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Speaker 1: Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the podcast of Jewish Ideas,

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a Torah in motion production.

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Speaker 2: I'm jj Kimbri.

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Speaker 1: On today's episode, we will be exploring Cephei Yossi Pon,

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sometimes pronounced Yossi pun, a remarkable medieval Hebrew chronicle that

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recasts Jewish history from the Biblical period through.

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Speaker 2: The destruction of the Second Temple.

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Speaker 1: Written around the tenth century in southern Italy, this text

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was long one of the most circulated works of Jewish

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historiography and served for many centuries as the standard narrative

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of ancient Israelite history from Jewish communities across the Mediterranean

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and Europe. Although it was traditionally attributed to Josephus, Yossipon

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is not a direct translation, but rather a dynamic, richly

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crafted adaptation that draws upon many sources and reshaped history

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according to its own world view. To guide us through

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this fascinating material, we are the lighted to be joined

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by my colleague, doctor Carson Bay, Associate Professor of Classics

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and Biblical Studies at the University of Austin, Texas, a

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specialist in Greco Roman and Judaea Christian antiquity, as well

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as on the reception of Josepha's. Professor Bay's writings on

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the topic included twenty twenty three book Biblical Heroes and

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Classical Culture in Christian Made Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press.

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It is a pleasure to welcome Professor Bay to the

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podcast today.

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Speaker 3: Professor welcome, Thank you, it's good to be here. Thanks

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for having me on JJ. Thanks Lisha for running this thing.

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And it's yeah, it's a pleasure to talk about this

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with someone as ever.

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Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent. I'm very excited. This is really a fascinating corner.

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And what's interesting about this corner of Jewish ideas and

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Jewish text is.

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Speaker 2: How few people know anything about it.

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Speaker 1: It really for many people has slipped under the radar,

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especially you have a more traditional Jewish education.

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Speaker 2: So we're gonna have to start, I'm afraid at the

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very beginning.

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Speaker 1: So for listeners who have never or scarcely heard of it,

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what exactly is Cefa yosipond You know, if you have

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to describe it to an ail like what's in it is?

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Speaker 2: What is it? What is it purport to be?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, So Cefri Josapan or the Book of Joseph Ben

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Gurion is a is a chronicle that the narrative starts

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with the table of nations that we find in uh,

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you know, Genesis, Genesis five and first Chronicles one, and

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so it starts at this table of nations, the sons

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of Noah, the sons of Jfith, and it sort of

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lays out the world, and then it goes very quickly

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through a conflation of ancient Israelite in ancient Roman history,

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does a few chapters on kind of Judeo Persian history,

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and then it spends most of its narrative on the

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Maccabean revolt hasmini in history through the destruction of the

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Jerusalem Temple and seventy by Vespasian and Titus, and then

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the aftermath at Masada in seventy four, where there's this

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famous mass death of these last Judaean Judaean rebels again,

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and so the narrative spends most of its time in

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the latter portion. It's but basically it's a Second Temple

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Jewish history. It appears to have been written close to

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the year nine hundred, so early tenth century in southern Italy,

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and it's written in Hebrew, and so all of those

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things in early tenth century date, the Hebrew language, the

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scope of the narrative itself are as you well know,

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they're striking in Jewish literary history. And so that's what

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this work is, as we're going to talk about, it's

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based upon the Josephin tradition, and so it's a Jewish

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telling of kind of Second Temple history through to the

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very end. For an early medieval Jewish audience, it would

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seem excellent.

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Speaker 1: So, as Rea, before we get into the sort of

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the crop stitching together the book in terms of genre,

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where would you place this, especially with regards to other

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more familiar genres of Jewish history. I mean, we're talking

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about a straight histor book about something closer to Midrash?

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Are we talking about something closer to the Musa? I

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think all tales? Like how, where exactly would you place

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this on this kind of constellation of genres that we're

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familiar with in Jewish jew texts.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's really interesting question. I mean genre genre

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is a sticky issue. I guess using his storiography as

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a sort of catch all to begin with is very

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helpful for several reasons. One is that the text clearly

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presents itself as doing history in a way distinct from

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anything else I'm aware of in Jewish literature before the

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you know, the High Middle Ages or even thereafter. So

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it's just one example of this. The text inserts into

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its narrative of Judah the Maccabee after he kind of

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takes up takes up arms and takes on the Hasminian

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cause we have a number of documents letters written from

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Romans and Greeks to Judah and two each other that

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sort of document this history in a way that's it's

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anticipated in the Maccabean literature and first and second Maccabeees,

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but Yosupon takes it kind of to a new level,

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and so it's doing history in this classical mode. That's

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that's what's so interesting about it. Like if we trace

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the genealogy of genre, as it were, from yos Upon

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all the way back, what you would do is you

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would go through historiography as it was sort of you know,

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pounded out by Christians in late antiquity, you Cbius being

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a key figure there, but you would go all the

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way back to thucidities, Herootus and Xenophon. So the type

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of narrative, the content of the narrative and the types

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of things that are that are inserted into it by

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the author. They have their sort of traditionary beginnings, as

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it were in classical historiography. So, for example, these expansive

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speeches given to heroic characters at key moments in the

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narrative as a way to sort of frame the history

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as a way to maybe kind of the author's ethical

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or philosophical or theological religious takes on things. These appear

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throughout the narrative and they it's it's like you're reading

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something like Josephus, who in the first century was himself

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writing a history that sort of fused the what we

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could call the sort of Jewish and Greco Roman historiographical traditions.

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That having been said, there is material in it that

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sounds what sounds like what some would call folkloristic or

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even mythical. So you mentioned Midrash. Stephen Bowman has wrote

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an essay in nineteen ninety three, I think it was

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called Sepher jos Upon, History and Midrash, and so he

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talks about the fact that jos Upon does all this

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whole historiographical work while at the same time exercising these

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kinds of word plays and literary sort of literary styles

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that are that are that are resonant of what we

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call midrash, that are sort of like creatively interpretive, and

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you know mid rash sick interesting.

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Speaker 1: Fair enough, Okay, so then this is a this is

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an odd book. Let's just put it out there. There's

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a strange book in the.

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Speaker 3: Sense that it's strange.

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Speaker 1: Appears in the tenth century, but it is building off, reworking,

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stitching together. I don't know exactly what the correct words are.

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Lots of sources from antiquity. Can you just sort of

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take us through the list of sources, Like what is

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sitting on mister Yosupon's bookshelf in southern Italy in the

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tenth century, What is he reading?

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Speaker 2: What are what are the various stages that.

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Speaker 1: He's going through from antiquity to his day that he's

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sort of taking and putting in, Like what are the

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constituents components that get woven together in order to produce

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this particular book of history.

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Speaker 3: Yes, this is a great question, It's a key question.

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I guess I'll begin by saying that on the on

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the author's conceptual bookshelf is the Hebrew Bible. So both

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the language and the content of the Jewish Scripture are

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as far as I can tell, they represent what might

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be called sort of like the author's thought language, and

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he uses that literature to guide his own grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.

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But he also uses it, for example, to write his

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Table of Nations with which he begins his narrative. That

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having been said, he updates it, and so he uses

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early medieval categories when he's doing that, which is why

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we're able to date the text to when we are.

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But so beyond that, chapter two. Chapter two is very unusual.

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Chapter two. It reflects the use of traditions that trace

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back to Virgils in Need and to Livy's history, but

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it does not appear to sort of cite these per se. So,

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for example, you have this version of the Rape of

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the Sabines, which appears early in Livy, and it has

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to do with sort of like how Rome became Rome,

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how the early Romans found wives when they didn't have

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any women, and they went and took them for someone else.

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So josupon there seems to be using a no longer extant,

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so far as we know, early medieval rewriting of these

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classical these classical histories. So this is what so David Flusser,

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who created the critical edition of cefrios Upon in nineteen

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seventy eight to nineteen eighty, he sort of says this,

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I think he's right. So in the early medieval period,

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we have, you know, you have a lot of ancient

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sources that get that get reworked in ways that are

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that are kind of novelistic and that are not that

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don't have the sort of like gravitas of the ancient sources,

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but that retell a lot of the same stories. Jos

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Upon seems to reflect those. But basically chapter two it

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reflects knowledge of let's say, the Livian tradition, the Virgilian tradition.

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It combines these with biblical history. So you have Romulus,

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the famous, you know, eponymous figurehead of Rome, being put

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in conversation with and as historically co evil with King David.

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We're told that Romulus was like always really scared of

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King David, and it caused them to form treaties. And

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this is indicative of Sephar Josupon's style. So David is

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this like proto Jewish king, and he's so formidable that

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the you know, the figurehead of Rome is like, this

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guy's going to take me out. I need to make

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peace with him. And so you have this fusion of traditions.

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You also have Zepho ben Elifaz, the grandson of Esau.

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He's inserted into the tale. He becomes a sort of

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like Jewish Heracles figure. He gets in a fight with

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Joseph about Jacob's bones when he's taking about of Egypt.

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But he basically becomes and this is very interesting, he

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becomes edom. So he becomes the sort of the er

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ancestor of Rome. So chapter two is a fusion of

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kind of ancient traditions that puts Jewish and Roman history

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together as this sort of like these things happened together

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and they were both importantly ancient, noble, powerful people. After that,

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you've got a few chapters on the biblical Daniel. We

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should talk about those because there's textual difficulties. You have

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some Persian history, so you have Drias, you have Cyrus

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and some things that are going on vis A VI

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the Jews of the time. You have the Esther and

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Mordecai Ahasueris Hayman narrative, and then you have Alexander the

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Great and then things slide into the Hasmani in history.

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That's also something we should talk about briefly, but then

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very quickly, so by book thirty you're into the John

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Hyrcanes and his sons and this whole thing with the

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Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Ascenes, whom the author

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calls the Hasidim, and then things slide very quickly into

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the first century. So like its major source, which is

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a Latin text, which we'll talk about most of the

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narrative is about sixty six to seventy CE, so the

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Roman Jewish war that ends in Jerusalem's destruction, So you

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get there by book fifty, and there are eighty nine

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books in the work, so half of the work is

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about that. But in the first you know, the first

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fifty books, you go from sort of like the origins

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of peoples all the way down there. The very interesting

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thing about Sefrijos upon sources is that the early Biblical material,

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so Daniel Esther Mordecai, et cetera, this is almost all apocryphal,

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and it is based upon Latin Christian biblical traditions, so

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it is based upon the apocryphal additions to the Christian

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Scriptures as they articulated in Jerome's Vulgate, the Latin text

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that's the basis for these writings, and then the latter

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half of the work is based upon Books thirteen to

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sixteen of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities. It's based upon the Latin

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version thereof. And the major work which sits beneath yos

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Upon for basically the last forty chapters of the last

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forty books, is this late fourth century text called on

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the Destruction of Jerusalem or de e Scidio Hierusalem Atano,

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which the author is sometimes called pseudo Hegisippus. It's sometimes

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attributed to Ambrose of Milan. I'm not sure that he

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wrote it, there's some evidence there, but this is a

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five book Latin Christian work that paraphrases Josephus's earlier Greek

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Jewish War and basically turns it into a Christian history.

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And so one of the most just absolutely astounding things

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about sefriijos Upon is that it is a work written

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in Biblical Hebrew in the early tenth century, so obviously

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it is written to Jewish readers, but it is based

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almost completely on Latin Christian historical sources. And not only that,

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these are the Latin Christian historical sources that did the

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Lion's share of the work of cementing a super sessionist

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understanding of history, the history of the destruction of Jerusalem

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into the sort of late Antique and medieval cultural fabric

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of Western Europe and beyond. So for Cefrios upon to

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base itself on those sources is just you know, wild,

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there's no other word for it.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so fussy.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for that total falseyns great sort of chapter

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by chapter source basis for this.

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Speaker 2: And as you say, he's weaving.

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Speaker 1: Together the Bible Josepha's this fifth four fifth century Latin text,

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which we don't know. So before we go onto some

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of the specifics in the book, I do want to

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ask a little bit about this tenth century author.

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Speaker 2: So, I mean, do we know anything about him?

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Speaker 1: Do we you know you said Southern Italy tenth century?

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Do we know why he's doing this, as we say,

253
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a very very unusual weaving together and and weveing together

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many many different sources and trying to provide a rich

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Jewish history. You know, why is he doing this? And

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what sort of what circumstances it is life can we

257
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know about? What can we guess or can we trying

258
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to understand that would shed light on this interesting work.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, well what we can know is basically nothing. What

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we can make educated guesses at is a lot. More So,

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it does seem that the author, the author clearly had

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a knowledge of Latin. It seems like maybe the author

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did not have a knowledge of Greek. The author clearly

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had a working knowledge of Hebrew and probably thought in

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that language. And so something we know about the author

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is that this person is interfacing with both Hebrew and

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Latin literature at a high level, which would probably not

268
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have been true of most Jews in Byzantium, and so

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probably is doing some sort of like subcultural translational work,

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like bringing important information from a different sort of linguistic

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and cultural fear into his own. And I think this

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may also be reflected in the rather simple Hebrew prose

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of Sefarios upon. So it's not the it's not like

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an esoteric Hebrew that could only be read by scholars

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and delites. It's a Hebrew that you could sort of

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like say out loud and people could people could follow

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it in terms of the person's life circumstances. This means

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the person who wrote this needs to have had access

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not only to language, but to the Latin literature upon

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which he bases his narrative. So you know, what kind

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of person is this? This is something that so you know,

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David Flusser has a nineteen eighty seven essay in this

283
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book Josephist Judaism in Christianity edited by Louis Feldman in

284
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Gohai Hata, the Japanese scholar, and so here he sort

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of distills a lot of work he had done earlier

286
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in Hebrew and German. He says that the author apparent

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appears to have local knowledge of Naples and other places

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in Italy, and that's totally true. So, for example, the

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author talks about how the residents of Naples they collect

290
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this oil that comes from the bottom of the sea

291
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and like sits on the top of the sea, and

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that it sort of like shows up right in the

293
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water there. And he has all these you know, topographical

294
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and geographical vocabularies that suggest that the author is sort

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of from there. And so it's interesting about Naples is

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that the Duke of Naples in the ninth century dedicated

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a number of Latin Josephus manuscripts to the library there,

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and the Duke of Naples in the mid tenth century

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after the wife of his the death of his wife

300
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in nine point fifty one, he had a Latin manuscript

301
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of Josephus made for the library there, and so flusser

302
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A pined that maybe the author of Josepon was a

303
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court physician for the Duke of Naples and therefore had

304
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access to all this literature, because accessing this type of

305
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literature in the tenth century is very different than the

306
00:18:07,880 --> 00:18:10,960
ways that we have access to literature today, Like these

307
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things would only have existed in libraries where where money

308
00:18:16,319 --> 00:18:20,640
and institutional organization were implicated. And so, you know, how

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are you going to sit down with texts like this,

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especially if you're you know, if you're a Jewish person,

311
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if you're sort of a you know, if you're a

312
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cultural minority who also has certain limited legal abilities to

313
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sort of like do things and whatnot, And so the

314
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author could have been someone like that. So there's language

315
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throughout the narrative when people are dying and when like

316
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people are getting like these gross diseases. The way that

317
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the author describes these things, does seem in a few

318
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places to reflect medical knowledge, and so putting all these

319
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things together, this is the type of educated educated guests

320
00:19:00,119 --> 00:19:02,839
can make about the author. Well, like, okay, maybe the

321
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author was somehow a court physician and then had and

322
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thus had access to these sort of like arguably hard

323
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to access Latin Christian documents that would only appear in libraries.

324
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Maybe so maybe so.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, fair enough, I guess Partly the problem with this

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is that because it's tenth century, it's so rare. In

327
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other words, had this been written I don't know, in

328
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the height of the Spanish Jewish Convivencia, when you know,

329
00:19:28,599 --> 00:19:30,599
we have so many such intellectuals, or in the eighteenth

330
00:19:30,640 --> 00:19:33,359
century Germany where you had you know, court physicians. So

331
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so then you could say, ah, you know, this seems

332
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like what others were doing, all the kinds of education

333
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other Jews had. But to have a book like this,

334
00:19:39,519 --> 00:19:42,240
which does rework a wide array of sources I into

335
00:19:42,240 --> 00:19:44,759
created a Hebrew in the tenth century, I mean sort of,

336
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it's quite difficult.

337
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Speaker 2: So let us let's dive in a little bit.

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Speaker 1: One of the central points that you've made in the

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past is that CEO sipon is sort of an act

340
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of what Michael historical reclamation. Other words, it's king back

341
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Jewish history. Almost probably these other sources I mean again,

342
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Josephus published or the version we have published in Greek,

343
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foreign non Engwish audience and the fifth century. It's also

344
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a text is also published in late text, also published

345
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in foreign languages for non Jeish audiences, and sefios Upon

346
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seeks to I don't know, domesticate them, reclaim them, judaize

347
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them in a certain way. So can you elaborate on this?

348
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What does the book do and how does it do

349
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it in such a manner that it brings the text

350
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and the ideas and the history, that the actual events

351
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of the history back into the Jewish fault?

352
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Speaker 2: Like how does it achieve this?

353
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Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like the core question. And so to

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answer this real quick, we should talk in slightly greater

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depth about stefrijos upon sources in their nature. So, as

356
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you say, in around seventy five, the year seventy five,

357
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Josephus writes his Bellumudaicum his Jewish War in Greek for

358
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sort of like a yeah, a Roman audience maybe also

359
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assumes that Jews will be in the sort of readership

360
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or hearership rather, and then twenty years later, in ninety

361
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five or something like that, he writes his Great Jewish Antiquities.

362
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And these are works that famously are basically picked up

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by Christian authors and taken as you know, gospel or

364
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at least sort of like gospel handbooks, and ignored largely

365
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within Rabbinic Judaism. They become extremely important within Christian historiography.

366
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In the fourth century, Josephus's Jewish War gets translated into Latin.

367
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The translation is rather wooden, it's not super good, and

368
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in the very same year, maybe around the year three

369
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seventy five, it gets paraphrased into this other work on

370
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the Destruction of Jerusalem, which I mentioned. So there's like

371
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two Christian Latin versions of josephus Jewish War that exists

372
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already within less than a century of Constantine and Eusebius,

373
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which is remarkable. Sefri Jos upon uses on the Destruction

374
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of Jerusalem. Pseudo Hegesippus does not seem to have known

375
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the Latin translation of the Jewish War. If he did,

376
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he never really references it in a way that's trackable,

377
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which is very interesting. Also another interesting thing. Josepha's The

378
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:08,599
Jewish War, at least one book of it existed in

379
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Syriac by the end of the fourth century. That's another story.

380
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And then in the middle of the sixth century Cassiodorus

381
00:22:14,119 --> 00:22:18,960
his great sort of book making industry of Vivarium. He

382
00:22:20,200 --> 00:22:24,279
initiates the translation of the Jewish Antiquities into Latin, and

383
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among other things, he tells us that like, people don't

384
00:22:26,759 --> 00:22:29,480
really know who translated the Jewish War into Latin. Some

385
00:22:29,519 --> 00:22:32,559
people say Ambrose, some people say Jerome, some people say Refiness,

386
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but I don't really know. So anyway, those texts exist

387
00:22:37,839 --> 00:22:41,880
by the sixth century. And what the larger interpretive Christian

388
00:22:41,880 --> 00:22:46,000
tradition does and what on the destruction of Jerusalem or

389
00:22:46,039 --> 00:22:50,839
pseudo Hegesippus does within the Josephin narrative is makes it

390
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:56,000
explicitly and overwhelmingly Christian, which is to say, he frames

391
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the narrative in such a way that the reader and

392
00:23:00,359 --> 00:23:04,400
escape the conclusion that the destruction of Jerusalem is a

393
00:23:04,519 --> 00:23:10,160
result of the jews rejection of Jesus there would be savior. Therefore,

394
00:23:10,799 --> 00:23:16,839
in revenge, God's basically destroys Jerusalem, which represents his abandonment

395
00:23:16,880 --> 00:23:20,000
of his people, and of course, for the Christian authors

396
00:23:20,000 --> 00:23:23,480
and readers of these texts, the idea is that actually

397
00:23:23,640 --> 00:23:26,160
were his new people, and so this is like a

398
00:23:26,319 --> 00:23:31,480
historical event that kind of catalyzes and realizes that historical

399
00:23:31,559 --> 00:23:38,680
spiritual reality or what have you. So this is very

400
00:23:40,119 --> 00:23:44,400
widely and commonly known within late Antique Christianity. This is

401
00:23:44,440 --> 00:23:47,920
the way that people understood the history of the Roman

402
00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:51,480
Jewish War. The reason that Josephus was such an important

403
00:23:51,519 --> 00:23:54,759
source for these authors is because he told that story.

404
00:23:54,960 --> 00:23:57,119
It's not just that he just has this very brief

405
00:23:57,160 --> 00:24:00,720
mention called the Testimony of Flavianum where he meant Jesus

406
00:24:00,720 --> 00:24:04,160
of Nazareth. It's that Josephus tells that story. And Josephus

407
00:24:04,240 --> 00:24:06,039
actually tells the story in a way that's kind of

408
00:24:06,039 --> 00:24:09,200
critical of the Jews. Now, he kind of limits that

409
00:24:09,240 --> 00:24:13,839
criticism to the sort of hardcore Judean rebels, and he's

410
00:24:14,000 --> 00:24:18,839
at pains to make this distinction between like bad Judeans

411
00:24:19,240 --> 00:24:21,519
and like the rest of the Judaeans and the bad

412
00:24:21,559 --> 00:24:24,160
Judeans like caused this major problem for the rest of

413
00:24:24,240 --> 00:24:28,000
us by being too zealous and like poking the Roman

414
00:24:28,039 --> 00:24:32,039
bear Christians took that and were like, oh, Josephus is

415
00:24:32,119 --> 00:24:33,880
kind of right, but he didn't really understand what was

416
00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:37,920
going on, and so it gets rewritten. I mean, that's

417
00:24:37,960 --> 00:24:42,440
an appropriation of like emic Jewish history written by Josephus,

418
00:24:42,440 --> 00:24:45,200
where the Christians are like, this is what really is happening,

419
00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:48,519
and that was the status quo for like, you know,

420
00:24:48,599 --> 00:24:51,440
more or less the first millennium of the Common Era. Now,

421
00:24:51,480 --> 00:24:54,359
of course Jewish readers were not reading that and like, oh, yeah,

422
00:24:54,400 --> 00:24:56,720
they must be right, this is like a Christian thing.

423
00:24:57,200 --> 00:25:00,599
But surely they were aware of these types of narratives,

424
00:25:01,000 --> 00:25:06,079
and or maybe these types of narratives came to the

425
00:25:06,119 --> 00:25:10,440
awareness of particular Jews in southern Italy in the early

426
00:25:10,519 --> 00:25:12,839
tenth century or something like that. But in any case,

427
00:25:13,119 --> 00:25:16,240
the author of sefri jos Upon is aware of these

428
00:25:16,319 --> 00:25:20,200
narratives and rewrites the history in a way that in

429
00:25:20,240 --> 00:25:24,039
the first instance, it deletes all of the Christianization of

430
00:25:24,039 --> 00:25:28,680
the narrative. So on the Destruction of Jerusalem. This this

431
00:25:28,759 --> 00:25:31,559
Latin Christian text. It begins with the preface that sort

432
00:25:31,599 --> 00:25:36,559
of explains how everything works naturally that that's not in

433
00:25:36,599 --> 00:25:40,039
sephri jos Upon, but there's also all these tidbits across

434
00:25:40,079 --> 00:25:42,559
the narrative that are not in Sephri Jos Upon, and

435
00:25:42,640 --> 00:25:46,480
sometimes this means like the completely working of key chapters. So,

436
00:25:46,559 --> 00:25:50,440
for example, I wrote my dissertation on chapter five point

437
00:25:50,480 --> 00:25:53,799
two of on the Destruction of Jerusalem, which takes this

438
00:25:53,960 --> 00:25:57,039
like very brief mention in Josephus's Jewish War where he

439
00:25:57,119 --> 00:25:59,759
sort of like talks to Jerusalem for a second and

440
00:25:59,759 --> 00:26:02,240
he's like, oh, how could this happen? This is like

441
00:26:02,279 --> 00:26:06,279
super sad, I can't believe you kind of led yourself

442
00:26:06,279 --> 00:26:10,359
to be destroyed by refusing to sort of come to

443
00:26:10,400 --> 00:26:13,319
some sort of agreement with the Romans. The author on

444
00:26:13,359 --> 00:26:17,440
the Destruction of Jerusalem turns this into a thirteen hundred

445
00:26:17,480 --> 00:26:21,839
and fifty word sort of like lamentation oration Dia tribe

446
00:26:21,920 --> 00:26:24,799
aimed at Jerusalem and by proxy of the Jews, and

447
00:26:24,960 --> 00:26:28,000
is sort of like, how could this happen to you, Jerusalem? Well,

448
00:26:28,079 --> 00:26:29,839
let's think about that for a second. And then it

449
00:26:29,880 --> 00:26:32,119
has all these sort of poetic ways of saying, well,

450
00:26:32,279 --> 00:26:35,559
what happened was you rejected Jesus and God sent Jesus

451
00:26:35,599 --> 00:26:37,839
to save you guys, and you didn't want to do that.

452
00:26:38,079 --> 00:26:42,039
And so now you've basically destroyed yourselves through the sort

453
00:26:42,079 --> 00:26:45,480
of theodical vehicle, if you will, of Rome. This is

454
00:26:45,519 --> 00:26:50,680
what's happened. Sephri jos Upon remarkably contains this chapter but

455
00:26:50,880 --> 00:26:54,599
deletes all of the Christianization from it. So there's no

456
00:26:54,759 --> 00:26:58,480
mentions of Jesus, there's no mentions of all of these

457
00:26:58,480 --> 00:27:02,240
sort of like Christian assumptions. But the bulk of the

458
00:27:02,279 --> 00:27:04,839
speech is still there, and so the author uses that

459
00:27:04,880 --> 00:27:08,920
and it rewrites it in this Jewish idiom where it

460
00:27:09,240 --> 00:27:11,440
kind of reads like one of the prophets of the

461
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:14,079
Hebrew Bible, and it's like, how could this happen? Oh,

462
00:27:14,559 --> 00:27:17,960
you first century Jews who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem,

463
00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:22,359
you were sort of out of step with the Covenant.

464
00:27:22,759 --> 00:27:25,799
God did need to come in and chastise you. But

465
00:27:25,920 --> 00:27:28,720
of course this is the type of chastisement you see

466
00:27:28,720 --> 00:27:33,279
across the scriptural tradition and across the sort of Jewish history.

467
00:27:33,319 --> 00:27:36,480
From the perspective of the Jewish consciousness, we are always

468
00:27:36,519 --> 00:27:39,720
God's people, and whenever kind of bad things happen to us,

469
00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:44,279
this is God checking whatever we've forgotten or whatever we've

470
00:27:44,319 --> 00:27:48,000
neglected to do, and so sefri Jo Supon does this

471
00:27:48,799 --> 00:27:51,599
all over the place, and the place you really see

472
00:27:51,599 --> 00:27:54,559
it is in these speeches where the Christian author of

473
00:27:54,599 --> 00:27:58,319
the Latin text has inserted these like implicit or explicit

474
00:27:58,680 --> 00:28:02,359
christianizations into the narrative, like this is what's really going on.

475
00:28:02,680 --> 00:28:07,079
It's the Christian kind of replacement theology view, and the

476
00:28:07,480 --> 00:28:11,640
Hebrew writing author of sefrios Upon has taken that and

477
00:28:11,680 --> 00:28:16,160
has not omitted the chapter, but has rewritten the chapter.

478
00:28:16,480 --> 00:28:21,559
So now it's it's like for us, by us, it's remarkable.

479
00:28:22,119 --> 00:28:25,240
So that's what cefrijos Upon is. It's a reclamation. It's

480
00:28:25,240 --> 00:28:28,160
a taking back of the story of Second Temple Judaism,

481
00:28:28,440 --> 00:28:30,960
of the story of the Roman Jewish War, of the

482
00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:35,319
story of Jerusalem's destruction and the mass death upon Masada

483
00:28:35,440 --> 00:28:39,400
for a Jewish perspective that does not write the Jews

484
00:28:39,400 --> 00:28:42,279
out of history. To use language I've used before, that's

485
00:28:42,279 --> 00:28:45,119
what the Christian authors were trying to do with the

486
00:28:45,119 --> 00:28:47,799
destruction of Jerusalem's story. That's what they thought it meant.

487
00:28:48,200 --> 00:28:51,240
They thought it meant that the Jews had been God's people,

488
00:28:51,559 --> 00:28:55,319
and the year seventy marks their decimation from the historical record,

489
00:28:55,519 --> 00:28:59,240
and the Jewish author of Sefrijos upon the shortest summation

490
00:28:59,359 --> 00:29:02,039
of that narrative is no.

491
00:29:03,519 --> 00:29:05,160
Speaker 2: A very short summation. Indeed, I like that.

492
00:29:05,559 --> 00:29:08,559
Speaker 1: But it's curious because of course you mentioned the office

493
00:29:08,640 --> 00:29:11,200
of doing this with the Christian authors, but he's also

494
00:29:11,720 --> 00:29:12,400
he's also doing that.

495
00:29:12,359 --> 00:29:15,000
Speaker 2: With Josephus, who was of course a Jewish author.

496
00:29:15,039 --> 00:29:17,559
Speaker 1: Now, and you know, not just a Jewish author, but

497
00:29:17,680 --> 00:29:20,279
you know, in many ways he was a Jewish author

498
00:29:20,279 --> 00:29:23,880
who didn't turn anti Jewish, he didn't, you know, use

499
00:29:23,920 --> 00:29:26,599
his historical skills to undermine the country, sort of provides

500
00:29:26,599 --> 00:29:29,839
an apologio almost for the Jews and his works in

501
00:29:29,880 --> 00:29:31,920
what sense does your upon different from him as well?

502
00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:34,000
And it's easy to see how he differs and sort

503
00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:37,920
of rejudaizes from the and pushes out the Christian perspectives,

504
00:29:37,920 --> 00:29:39,599
which sees the destruction of the temple, on the miseries

505
00:29:39,640 --> 00:29:42,000
of Jewish history as punishment for the rejection of Jesus,

506
00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:45,359
et cetera. Are there ways in which he also reworks

507
00:29:45,759 --> 00:29:48,200
Josephus's point of view or do you see like a

508
00:29:48,279 --> 00:29:51,200
much greater convergence between those two world views.

509
00:29:51,279 --> 00:29:55,799
Speaker 3: Let's say, yeah, yes, there are all sorts of ways

510
00:29:55,799 --> 00:29:59,240
that he does that. So the one that's most on

511
00:29:59,319 --> 00:30:06,240
the nose, say, so, Josephus represents a brand of Judaism,

512
00:30:06,440 --> 00:30:09,720
so Hellenistic Judaism, or Jewish Hellenism, as it were, that

513
00:30:09,960 --> 00:30:12,920
as as Louis Feldman has documented, to the tune of

514
00:30:12,960 --> 00:30:17,599
like thousands of pages, uses the Greco Roman idiom of

515
00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:23,240
kind of ancient national history and culture heroes to present

516
00:30:24,400 --> 00:30:29,000
the Jewish tradition and Judaism and Jews to itself and

517
00:30:29,039 --> 00:30:33,279
to others as this sort of noble, robust national past

518
00:30:33,480 --> 00:30:37,599
that's it's old like Egypt and strong like Rome. And

519
00:30:37,880 --> 00:30:41,720
Josephus does this as well as anyone. Sepri jos Upon

520
00:30:41,799 --> 00:30:45,920
does that like twice as much. It's like it's like

521
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:49,640
two point zero. So the language I use to describe

522
00:30:49,640 --> 00:30:52,599
this is I say that sefri jos Upon resurrects the

523
00:30:52,640 --> 00:30:56,039
spirit of Hellenistic Judaism. But when it resurrects the spirit

524
00:30:56,079 --> 00:31:00,440
of Hellenistic Judaism, the zeitgeist of that period and of

525
00:31:00,480 --> 00:31:03,319
the sort of like literary and cultural and conceptual and

526
00:31:03,319 --> 00:31:06,279
ideological flavor of the Greek writing Jews of the of

527
00:31:06,319 --> 00:31:09,119
the last centuries b c. In the first century. Ce

528
00:31:10,079 --> 00:31:13,599
jose Upon does that on steroids. So so, just by

529
00:31:13,640 --> 00:31:18,400
way of example, when he tells the story of well,

530
00:31:18,799 --> 00:31:20,880
this is a problematic example, but I'm gonna give it anyway.

531
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:22,599
So because everybody knows the story of Daniel and the

532
00:31:22,640 --> 00:31:25,160
lions Den, right, So in the story of Daniel, the

533
00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:28,079
Lions Den and cefri jos Upon. So so these these

534
00:31:28,079 --> 00:31:31,119
are these chiefs of the king. They conspire against Daniel

535
00:31:31,200 --> 00:31:33,759
to have him break the law by by praying, and

536
00:31:33,799 --> 00:31:36,480
in sefri jos Upon, the king actually sees what these

537
00:31:36,559 --> 00:31:39,519
guys are doing, and he calls him out on it.

538
00:31:39,599 --> 00:31:41,519
He says, what are you gonna do when Daniel's God

539
00:31:41,559 --> 00:31:43,680
rescues him from the dead, allions, then you're gonna have

540
00:31:43,680 --> 00:31:45,920
to take his place? And Daniel's accusers are like, okay,

541
00:31:45,960 --> 00:31:48,240
so be it. And so there's this back and forth,

542
00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:50,200
and then you know, the king comes back and and

543
00:31:50,279 --> 00:31:53,759
he he spends like a bunch of time trying to

544
00:31:53,799 --> 00:31:56,799
save Daniel from the hands of these of these other

545
00:31:57,079 --> 00:32:00,319
leaders who are who are against Daniel. And he says,

546
00:32:00,599 --> 00:32:03,160
you've conspired against Daniel, and I have this quote here.

547
00:32:03,839 --> 00:32:06,759
Leave him alone, for he is a yehooti and his

548
00:32:06,880 --> 00:32:10,319
God is awesome and terrible and mighty, and he will

549
00:32:10,359 --> 00:32:13,200
demolish and destroy you. And we read that he spends

550
00:32:13,319 --> 00:32:16,960
all night trying to save Daniel, and these guys who

551
00:32:16,960 --> 00:32:19,519
have it out for Daniel aren't having it, but they

552
00:32:19,519 --> 00:32:21,920
have a lot more sort of chance to repent, as

553
00:32:21,960 --> 00:32:25,519
it were. And then they kind of threatened the king back,

554
00:32:26,079 --> 00:32:29,200
and they're like, if Daniel doesn't go to the lions den,

555
00:32:29,519 --> 00:32:31,759
we're going to know that you've broken the law of

556
00:32:31,799 --> 00:32:33,519
the Meads and the Persians, which of course can't be

557
00:32:34,119 --> 00:32:36,200
you know, can't be gain said, And so the king

558
00:32:36,279 --> 00:32:39,480
has no choice, and so the king gives Daniel into

559
00:32:39,640 --> 00:32:43,039
their hands to put him into the lions lions den,

560
00:32:43,240 --> 00:32:46,640
and then this remarkable thing happens. The prophet Habakuk happens

561
00:32:46,640 --> 00:32:48,640
to be having a feast at the same time Daniel's

562
00:32:48,640 --> 00:32:50,759
put in the lions den. Daniel goes down in the

563
00:32:50,759 --> 00:32:54,240
lions den and the lions start licking him and wagging

564
00:32:54,240 --> 00:32:56,440
their tails like I didn't know lions could wag their

565
00:32:56,480 --> 00:32:58,519
tails like dogs, but this is what the text says.

566
00:32:58,759 --> 00:33:01,039
And they come up and they're having like a great time,

567
00:33:01,240 --> 00:33:04,880
and it says like dogs when their master comes in

568
00:33:04,880 --> 00:33:07,440
from the field, so it's like a happy golden retriever.

569
00:33:07,839 --> 00:33:10,119
This is the way the lions are around Daniel. Habit

570
00:33:10,119 --> 00:33:13,000
Cook is having a feast at the same time, and

571
00:33:13,079 --> 00:33:15,319
God shows up to him in a vision is like, hey,

572
00:33:16,039 --> 00:33:19,440
Daniel's hungry too, so Habit Cook brings some food and

573
00:33:19,480 --> 00:33:21,759
the Angel of the Lord brings that to Daniel in

574
00:33:21,799 --> 00:33:24,640
the lions den. Daniel and the angel sit there and

575
00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:27,119
have a nice like three course dinner, you know, and

576
00:33:27,160 --> 00:33:29,680
then the narrative continues. The next morning, you know, the

577
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:32,400
lions haven't heard Daniel. The people who accused him and

578
00:33:32,480 --> 00:33:35,119
their families are thrown in. The lions crush their bones,

579
00:33:35,319 --> 00:33:37,640
the author tells us because the lions hadn't eaten for

580
00:33:37,720 --> 00:33:40,799
many days. So it's like there's another extra detail. And

581
00:33:40,839 --> 00:33:43,559
then the lions give out this great roar when they

582
00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:46,359
chomp up all these families, and we're told that this

583
00:33:46,440 --> 00:33:49,200
roar is heard far and wide, so people are like, oh, no,

584
00:33:49,519 --> 00:33:51,440
the lions got out of their cages because we hear

585
00:33:52,119 --> 00:33:54,759
we hear this huge roar from the city center. So

586
00:33:54,799 --> 00:33:58,480
it's like if you take biblical narratives or if you

587
00:33:58,480 --> 00:34:01,240
take biblical biblical narratives and imagine what they look like

588
00:34:01,400 --> 00:34:05,559
in Hollywood. That's something like what you get in sefri

589
00:34:05,599 --> 00:34:07,960
jos Upon and so and so. Josephus did this to

590
00:34:08,119 --> 00:34:12,000
some degree. Sefri Josupon does it way more so. Severri

591
00:34:12,079 --> 00:34:15,760
jos Upon is convinced that the Jewish national tradition is

592
00:34:15,840 --> 00:34:21,480
one of political power, is one of ethical probity, is one.

593
00:34:21,960 --> 00:34:29,519
It's this ancient, weighty, powerful people who exist alongside the

594
00:34:29,639 --> 00:34:33,239
Romans and the Persians and what have you, and they

595
00:34:33,280 --> 00:34:37,119
do great deeds. So so one other answer to your question.

596
00:34:37,519 --> 00:34:41,679
So Josephus famously may or may not have have identified

597
00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:45,280
as a Pharisee, right like he he has this famous,

598
00:34:45,519 --> 00:34:47,880
this famous portion of the Jewish War where he he

599
00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:50,360
talks about what he calls the three or four Jewish

600
00:34:50,400 --> 00:34:52,679
philosophies in book two, and he's like, this is what

601
00:34:52,719 --> 00:34:54,800
the Sadducees believe, this is what the Pharisees believe, this

602
00:34:54,840 --> 00:34:55,800
is what the Asins believe.

603
00:34:57,840 --> 00:35:00,440
Speaker 1: Only is one of our only good sources about what

604
00:35:00,480 --> 00:35:04,119
they about these the sex in the whole second type

605
00:35:04,119 --> 00:35:04,400
of period.

606
00:35:04,400 --> 00:35:06,760
Speaker 2: It's amazing how much is based on this sort of yeah,

607
00:35:06,920 --> 00:35:09,159
throw away part of Josephus, but yeah, gone.

608
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:12,639
Speaker 3: No, that's exactly right. So basically Sefrioson is not as

609
00:35:12,639 --> 00:35:15,880
impressed with the Pharisees. So when John Hrcanus has his

610
00:35:15,960 --> 00:35:18,559
sort of like run in with the Pharisees because there

611
00:35:18,800 --> 00:35:21,559
they sort of inform his leadership, and he's like, let

612
00:35:21,559 --> 00:35:23,199
me know if I do anything wrong, and the Pharisees

613
00:35:23,239 --> 00:35:25,400
are like, you're awesome, we would never say you do

614
00:35:25,400 --> 00:35:28,519
anything wrong. And he's called a priest and a king,

615
00:35:28,639 --> 00:35:30,800
which is not in the ancient sources. But then there's

616
00:35:30,840 --> 00:35:33,679
this we're told there's this wicked Pharisee who shows up

617
00:35:33,679 --> 00:35:37,159
and he's like renounced the priesthood and just be satisfied

618
00:35:37,199 --> 00:35:39,400
with the kingship, and then Hyrcanus is like super mad

619
00:35:39,440 --> 00:35:41,920
and they have a falling out. But basically the way

620
00:35:41,960 --> 00:35:44,280
that the Pharisees are portrayed in the narrative is not

621
00:35:44,639 --> 00:35:47,519
as positive with what we find in Josephus. And so

622
00:35:47,559 --> 00:35:51,039
the author of Sefrio s Upon is different than Josephus,

623
00:35:51,079 --> 00:35:54,920
even though they both inhabit, like, if you will, the

624
00:35:55,039 --> 00:35:58,599
Jewish side of the Jewish Christian register. So it's not

625
00:35:58,840 --> 00:36:01,079
like it's not like a third way the author in

626
00:36:01,159 --> 00:36:06,400
Josephus clearly agree upon sort of basic tenets of the world,

627
00:36:06,719 --> 00:36:10,320
which is to say, the Jews are the people of God,

628
00:36:10,719 --> 00:36:13,480
and God maintains a relationship with their people in the

629
00:36:13,519 --> 00:36:17,239
events of history, whereas the Christians have been at pains

630
00:36:17,320 --> 00:36:22,360
to sort of complicate that message, to use the euphemism.

631
00:36:22,960 --> 00:36:26,320
But but yeah, he does differ from Josephus in in

632
00:36:26,519 --> 00:36:30,079
narrative ways, in the ways that he the ways that

633
00:36:30,119 --> 00:36:33,440
he portrays Jewish greatness, and in certain of his sort

634
00:36:33,440 --> 00:36:35,079
of like religious proclivities.

635
00:36:35,679 --> 00:36:37,599
Speaker 1: All right, So there was a lot there, and one

636
00:36:37,599 --> 00:36:39,239
of the things you did, I didn't want to discuss

637
00:36:39,440 --> 00:36:41,519
or didn't want to touch on a few specifics of

638
00:36:41,559 --> 00:36:43,280
those sort of rewriting stories. And there are a few

639
00:36:43,280 --> 00:36:45,519
different ways in which this is done. Another one like

640
00:36:45,559 --> 00:36:47,119
to draw our attention to it. And if you could

641
00:36:47,159 --> 00:36:48,840
outline this, because I think there's a classic case of

642
00:36:49,119 --> 00:36:52,800
sort of jossipon and his ways of doing.

643
00:36:52,599 --> 00:36:53,559
Speaker 2: Things or redoing things.

644
00:36:54,079 --> 00:36:56,000
Speaker 1: Is the SENTI the mcgilla story, the story of Monai

645
00:36:56,000 --> 00:36:58,679
and Asta and how he tells it and retells them

646
00:36:58,679 --> 00:37:00,719
because of course, you know, we'll very form with the story.

647
00:37:00,880 --> 00:37:04,679
But under the pen of Yood. It undergoes quite quite

648
00:37:04,719 --> 00:37:06,960
a retelling. So you walk us through that retelling, and

649
00:37:07,280 --> 00:37:09,519
what does he seek? What is seek to gain by

650
00:37:09,559 --> 00:37:11,440
doing it in this way? Why does he retails? What

651
00:37:11,519 --> 00:37:14,920
is the benefits of the upside of reworking the material

652
00:37:14,960 --> 00:37:15,480
in this way?

653
00:37:15,679 --> 00:37:20,320
Speaker 3: Yeah, So sep Josupon's chapter nine, which is on Esther

654
00:37:20,440 --> 00:37:23,039
and Mordecai. What's so interesting about it is that it

655
00:37:23,079 --> 00:37:26,440
is largely based upon the so called additions to the

656
00:37:26,440 --> 00:37:28,599
Book of Esther that appear in the Septuagint and so

657
00:37:28,719 --> 00:37:33,119
exist in the Greek and Latin Christian versions, and the

658
00:37:33,719 --> 00:37:36,480
textual relationships. They are very complicated, because the est textural

659
00:37:36,519 --> 00:37:39,039
tradition is very complicated, as you probably know. But in

660
00:37:39,119 --> 00:37:41,159
terms of the narrative as it appears in seph for Josupon,

661
00:37:44,360 --> 00:37:46,960
I'll just read the first brief paragraph of how this

662
00:37:47,039 --> 00:37:49,239
narrative begins to sort of give you a flavor of

663
00:37:49,239 --> 00:37:52,480
what Yosupon does with this story. So he says, only

664
00:37:52,519 --> 00:37:54,840
in the days of a Hatsuwares was the memory of

665
00:37:54,920 --> 00:37:58,920
Judah nearly lost from the entire realm of Persia through

666
00:37:58,960 --> 00:38:02,760
the hatred of one Amalakite named Haman, who stole the

667
00:38:02,760 --> 00:38:06,599
heart of King Hasaweres. So already the narrative stakes of

668
00:38:06,639 --> 00:38:09,639
this story are larger than life, the characters are larger

669
00:38:09,679 --> 00:38:12,599
than life. Hayman is an Amalekite, and so you have

670
00:38:12,719 --> 00:38:16,480
this sort of axis of evil between Macedonians and Amalekites

671
00:38:16,480 --> 00:38:22,960
who team up to try to eradicate the Zira, the

672
00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:26,039
seed of the Jewish people, from the face of the earth.

673
00:38:26,159 --> 00:38:28,760
And of course this is also in the Estra story

674
00:38:28,840 --> 00:38:32,039
the Biblical text, but it is way more prominent in

675
00:38:32,079 --> 00:38:35,039
the Josupon version. And so here's what we read. Hasawares

676
00:38:35,079 --> 00:38:38,159
gave Hayman license to act as he wished throughout the kingdom,

677
00:38:38,440 --> 00:38:40,599
even to wipe out the memory of Judah from the

678
00:38:40,719 --> 00:38:44,119
entire Persian realm, because Mordecai, a Jew of the nobles

679
00:38:44,119 --> 00:38:47,119
of Benjamin, did not rise before him. Again, this is

680
00:38:47,159 --> 00:38:52,280
how the Estra story starts in Josupon. These nobles were

681
00:38:52,280 --> 00:38:56,760
the patricians benjamin Nite heroes who accompanied their king Saul

682
00:38:56,880 --> 00:38:59,559
on the field of Amelek and delivered Amelek, a mighty

683
00:38:59,599 --> 00:39:02,000
and power will blow all the way from hobby law

684
00:39:02,079 --> 00:39:05,440
unto sure a land of many days journey. They slew

685
00:39:05,519 --> 00:39:08,480
more than five hundred thousand dead of the Amalekite people

686
00:39:08,840 --> 00:39:12,760
all destroyed. And King Saul's war against the Amalekites, truly,

687
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:16,000
he's slaughtered souls throughout the land of Amelek, men, women

688
00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:19,000
and children, more than one hundred myriads in all. This

689
00:39:19,039 --> 00:39:22,000
is why this man, Hayman, preserved a hatred against the

690
00:39:22,079 --> 00:39:25,000
Jews and especially against the tribe of Benjamin. So you

691
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:27,920
can see there that the story of Esther and Mordechai

692
00:39:28,159 --> 00:39:31,920
has been integrated into this very old, very sort of

693
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:38,599
like prominent, prominent political historical framework. So the Jews from

694
00:39:38,719 --> 00:39:43,079
ancient times, King Saul and the Benjaminites they killed like

695
00:39:43,159 --> 00:39:47,320
a crapload of Amalekites. And so you know, centuries later,

696
00:39:47,519 --> 00:39:51,119
this sort of quintessential Amalekite Hayman just has it out

697
00:39:51,159 --> 00:39:52,840
for the Jews. And you get this in the very

698
00:39:52,880 --> 00:39:56,599
first paragraph of the narrative, and so you know, and

699
00:39:56,320 --> 00:40:00,760
so he goes after the Jews there within their of itself,

700
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:04,480
as we already saw, Mordecai hears about what these eunuchs

701
00:40:04,519 --> 00:40:07,039
want to do to the king. Where again we get

702
00:40:07,039 --> 00:40:09,840
gratuitous details. We're told that the eunuchs he hears them

703
00:40:09,880 --> 00:40:12,039
plotting they're like, they're going to kill him, and they're

704
00:40:12,079 --> 00:40:14,679
going to take his head. They're going to take his

705
00:40:14,840 --> 00:40:18,440
head to the to the the King of Macedon, and

706
00:40:18,480 --> 00:40:19,679
this is the way they're going to sort of like

707
00:40:19,679 --> 00:40:22,079
prove their loyalty and take him out. And Mordecai tells

708
00:40:22,119 --> 00:40:24,679
the king, and the king kills those guys, hangs them

709
00:40:24,679 --> 00:40:28,360
on trees, and Hayman of course ends up getting his

710
00:40:28,480 --> 00:40:31,239
come uppance as well. He's exceedingly angry when his two

711
00:40:31,280 --> 00:40:34,519
eunuchs get found out by Mordecai. We're also told their names.

712
00:40:35,199 --> 00:40:39,159
Mordecai has this dream, this dream of these competing dragons

713
00:40:39,239 --> 00:40:43,159
where the global political framework is placed in this image

714
00:40:43,199 --> 00:40:46,239
that Mordecai sort of imagines. And then you've got these

715
00:40:46,320 --> 00:40:49,440
long prayers of Esther and Mordecai, which are you know,

716
00:40:49,440 --> 00:40:52,039
which are famous additions to the Esther narrative in the

717
00:40:52,360 --> 00:40:55,159
in the so called apocryphal tradition. And so basically what

718
00:40:55,159 --> 00:40:57,880
we see Esther doing in the cefrijos Upon version is

719
00:40:58,679 --> 00:41:01,760
praying like she does act and she goes into the king,

720
00:41:01,960 --> 00:41:04,599
of course, but before she does so, she has this

721
00:41:04,679 --> 00:41:07,320
elaborate prayer, and so there's a lot of prayer in

722
00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:10,679
the chapter, which for the megalaw kind of makes a

723
00:41:10,719 --> 00:41:14,800
lot of sense. And so what's so interesting about it

724
00:41:14,880 --> 00:41:19,119
is that the basic narrative upshot of the Esther story

725
00:41:19,239 --> 00:41:21,800
is not different in Sefrios upon Visa via the Book

726
00:41:21,800 --> 00:41:23,760
of Esther, Like the bad guys and good guys are

727
00:41:23,800 --> 00:41:26,760
still the same. What happens to him and what happens

728
00:41:26,800 --> 00:41:29,159
to Esther and Mordecai is still pretty much the same.

729
00:41:29,639 --> 00:41:32,880
What doesn't happen to the Jews, but that with which

730
00:41:32,880 --> 00:41:37,960
they're threatened is still the same. But the scale on

731
00:41:38,000 --> 00:41:41,639
which the story is told, it seems like this is

732
00:41:41,679 --> 00:41:44,800
like the big global political event that's going on at

733
00:41:44,840 --> 00:41:49,559
the time, and like the complete eradication of the Jews

734
00:41:49,679 --> 00:41:54,760
is planned by this person who hails from this ancient

735
00:41:54,840 --> 00:41:59,960
people who have hated the Jews forever, and we're told

736
00:42:00,119 --> 00:42:01,960
this a number of times to the chapter. I mean,

737
00:42:01,960 --> 00:42:03,920
the chapter is not very long, it's shorter than the

738
00:42:03,920 --> 00:42:08,760
Book of Esther, but yeah, so that's that's uh. The

739
00:42:08,880 --> 00:42:11,920
Esther Mordecai story is is it's a perfect example of

740
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:16,199
how Seffrias upon the tools traditional narratives inserts them into

741
00:42:16,239 --> 00:42:20,920
this historiographical trajectory of ancient Israelite history and does and

742
00:42:20,960 --> 00:42:24,239
does so in a way where the Jews appear more

743
00:42:24,239 --> 00:42:32,400
politically potent, more i would say, more kind of ethically laudable,

744
00:42:33,159 --> 00:42:38,519
and more divinely attended than even we find in the

745
00:42:38,559 --> 00:42:39,480
Biblical narrative.

746
00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:42,559
Speaker 1: So this is fascinating, especially because as you say this,

747
00:42:42,559 --> 00:42:45,039
this is sort of the paradox of Yozi put in

748
00:42:45,039 --> 00:42:46,840
a way and that on the one hand, he is,

749
00:42:46,880 --> 00:42:49,880
in fact, you know, judaizing to put it, put it crudely,

750
00:42:49,880 --> 00:42:52,639
and sort of taking a bunch of texts, amount of sources,

751
00:42:52,679 --> 00:42:55,119
a bunch of stories, and we're into a Jewish history

752
00:42:55,159 --> 00:42:59,119
and putting it in a readily understandable Hebrew and putting

753
00:42:59,159 --> 00:43:01,960
it within more recognized the Jewish theological framework. On the

754
00:43:01,960 --> 00:43:04,119
one hand, on the other hand, he feels kind of

755
00:43:04,159 --> 00:43:07,880
free to take these very canonical stories like the modehain

756
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:12,880
Esta story and add to them, yes, embellish them, you know,

757
00:43:12,960 --> 00:43:14,559
in soe those of things. And so it's sort of

758
00:43:14,920 --> 00:43:17,000
on the one hand conservative, on the other hand, very

759
00:43:17,679 --> 00:43:18,320
free wheeling.

760
00:43:18,519 --> 00:43:19,199
Speaker 2: Would that be fair?

761
00:43:19,800 --> 00:43:23,840
Speaker 3: That's that's exactly right, And I couldn't have put it better.

762
00:43:23,960 --> 00:43:27,159
Somewhat conservative and somewhat free wheeling. And I think it's

763
00:43:27,280 --> 00:43:30,239
very true to say that the author feels very free

764
00:43:30,679 --> 00:43:33,119
to deal with the sources and in this way. And

765
00:43:33,199 --> 00:43:35,840
so this is what's so interesting about the narrative. So

766
00:43:35,920 --> 00:43:38,480
one thing that like if you're if you are really

767
00:43:38,480 --> 00:43:40,760
familiar with sort of like the language and the idioms

768
00:43:40,760 --> 00:43:43,039
and whatnot of the Hebrew Bible, if you're reading through

769
00:43:43,079 --> 00:43:47,599
sefrios Upon's Hebrew every one or two or three sentences,

770
00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:50,320
you you will look at it and you'll be like, oh,

771
00:43:51,039 --> 00:43:54,800
this phrase, this is like a Biblical phrase. This appears

772
00:43:54,840 --> 00:43:57,239
in like I don't know this, this is like a

773
00:43:57,280 --> 00:43:59,480
Psalm phrase. So this is like we find this in

774
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:02,719
the book of that it is so cephri yez Upon

775
00:44:02,840 --> 00:44:08,320
is written in like a a literally biblical Hebrew idiom.

776
00:44:08,880 --> 00:44:12,320
And so I would say that, you know, that does

777
00:44:12,360 --> 00:44:15,519
something to the fabric of the tech. It sounds kind

778
00:44:15,519 --> 00:44:17,599
of like you're reading the Bible like there's a there's

779
00:44:17,599 --> 00:44:19,519
a sort of I don't know what you would want

780
00:44:19,519 --> 00:44:22,679
to call it, but there's there's like a scriptural depth,

781
00:44:22,719 --> 00:44:25,840
the depth of sanctity like built into the language itself,

782
00:44:26,239 --> 00:44:28,599
where that you can't escape. At the same time, in

783
00:44:28,679 --> 00:44:32,320
terms of narrative, the text is very free, and the

784
00:44:32,360 --> 00:44:35,920
author is very comfortable being like I'm gonna, I'm gonna

785
00:44:35,920 --> 00:44:37,599
sort of like reshape what's going on here.

786
00:44:37,639 --> 00:44:37,800
Speaker 2: Now.

787
00:44:37,840 --> 00:44:40,920
Speaker 3: Of course this doesn't this sits I would say it was.

788
00:44:41,079 --> 00:44:45,559
It sits less uncomfortably with the mid Rash tradition than

789
00:44:45,559 --> 00:44:51,280
it does with the you know, with the sort of

790
00:44:51,800 --> 00:44:57,039
like Protestant ethic of needing to needing to be like

791
00:44:58,000 --> 00:45:02,280
directly faithful to biblical narrative, and so here. You know,

792
00:45:02,320 --> 00:45:05,599
when we think of historiography today as a genre, I

793
00:45:05,599 --> 00:45:09,280
would say there's a relationship between the way that Protestantism

794
00:45:09,400 --> 00:45:13,719
came to understand the Bible and the way that twentieth

795
00:45:13,719 --> 00:45:17,599
and twenty first century Western thought came to understand historiography.

796
00:45:18,159 --> 00:45:21,440
And both are affected by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,

797
00:45:21,519 --> 00:45:25,519
not just the Reformation. And it's that like his historical

798
00:45:25,639 --> 00:45:30,960
narrative is like precise, it needs to be exactly recognized

799
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:33,559
and adhered to, and if you depart a little bit

800
00:45:33,599 --> 00:45:37,119
from that, it creates all sorts of problems. One interesting

801
00:45:37,159 --> 00:45:39,679
place we've seen this in popular culture in recent years

802
00:45:39,840 --> 00:45:42,159
is when I don't know if you ever saw the

803
00:45:42,159 --> 00:45:45,559
film Noah that came out in twenty fourteen with Russell Crowe.

804
00:45:46,320 --> 00:45:48,400
But and so this is like, this is a classic,

805
00:45:48,559 --> 00:45:52,480
classic mid Rashic take on this, on this biblical narrative.

806
00:45:52,519 --> 00:45:54,400
And if you if you looked, I actually present a

807
00:45:54,400 --> 00:45:56,400
paper on this, one of the first academic papers I

808
00:45:56,400 --> 00:45:58,880
ever presented. If you went online and looked at the

809
00:45:58,920 --> 00:46:04,920
reactions to the story, Jewish reactions to like tended to

810
00:46:05,000 --> 00:46:07,719
recognize what midrash does and sort of found it interesting

811
00:46:07,719 --> 00:46:10,719
and could engage with it. But it's like the American

812
00:46:10,840 --> 00:46:16,719
Protestant imagination couldn't even like people's brains were exploding. They

813
00:46:16,760 --> 00:46:20,199
couldn't like deal with, you know, what had happened to

814
00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:22,440
this narrative because it's like that didn't happen. That's not

815
00:46:22,519 --> 00:46:25,480
the way it happens. And so you know, some of

816
00:46:25,480 --> 00:46:27,800
those you know, some of those dynamics I think you

817
00:46:27,840 --> 00:46:31,239
can take as useful heuristics going back a thousand years

818
00:46:31,280 --> 00:46:33,719
and looking at sever yos upon where you've got this

819
00:46:33,719 --> 00:46:39,719
this combination of an author who's arguably pious based upon

820
00:46:39,760 --> 00:46:42,280
a number of indicators we can look at, but at

821
00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:48,679
the same time has no issue, has no issue. You know,

822
00:46:49,400 --> 00:46:55,360
let's say reconstructing biblical and parabiblical narrative, rewritten Bible, et cetera.

823
00:46:56,599 --> 00:47:00,880
Speaker 2: Making his own midrash essentially indeed, indeed excellent.

824
00:47:01,360 --> 00:47:03,760
Speaker 1: So let's move on a little bit to the last section,

825
00:47:03,840 --> 00:47:07,239
John wanzccover, which is the reception of this book and

826
00:47:07,280 --> 00:47:10,159
the way it was read and used in the subsequent centuries,

827
00:47:10,199 --> 00:47:12,400
as you So, let's first talk about the Jewish reception.

828
00:47:12,920 --> 00:47:14,480
As you mentioned, this book is written sometime in the

829
00:47:14,480 --> 00:47:17,400
tenth century, but already quite soon after it.

830
00:47:17,400 --> 00:47:18,679
Speaker 2: Is being referenced to it.

831
00:47:18,719 --> 00:47:21,440
Speaker 1: I believe it's referenced by rashly Bybinezra, by various other

832
00:47:21,480 --> 00:47:25,480
medieval and early modern Jewish thinkers. And I mean they

833
00:47:25,519 --> 00:47:27,920
seem to refer to They seem to take this book

834
00:47:27,960 --> 00:47:29,719
to be to be history. They seem to take this

835
00:47:29,719 --> 00:47:31,840
book to be, you know, somewhat authoritative or at least

836
00:47:32,119 --> 00:47:34,280
a source that they can quote and rely upon. So

837
00:47:34,559 --> 00:47:38,280
I'm I'm curious, what can you say about the way

838
00:47:38,320 --> 00:47:43,199
this text was used and utilized in the centuries following

839
00:47:43,840 --> 00:47:44,800
within the Jewish traditionion.

840
00:47:45,119 --> 00:47:49,920
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, the I would say the most important broad

841
00:47:50,039 --> 00:47:52,840
spectrum thing to know about its reception is that the

842
00:47:52,880 --> 00:47:56,559
text is treated as an open text, which, given the

843
00:47:56,679 --> 00:47:58,960
nature of the text that we were just discussing, this

844
00:47:59,039 --> 00:48:02,440
actually fits pretty well with the sort of vibe laid

845
00:48:02,480 --> 00:48:05,639
down by the original Yoseupon, whatever that was, is that

846
00:48:06,960 --> 00:48:09,480
it was treated as as an open text, which means

847
00:48:09,559 --> 00:48:13,559
it was added to very early on and pretty extensively.

848
00:48:14,239 --> 00:48:18,280
And so by the twelve thirteenth and fourteenth century you

849
00:48:18,360 --> 00:48:22,000
have numerous recensions of this text, and these have been

850
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:24,960
the ones that most people have read since that time.

851
00:48:25,480 --> 00:48:29,239
So not until really the twentieth century, and frankly the

852
00:48:29,239 --> 00:48:32,039
twenty first century with the work of Saskia Donits, this

853
00:48:32,440 --> 00:48:36,039
Jewish studies scholar at now at the University of Frankfurt online,

854
00:48:36,559 --> 00:48:39,639
not until recently have we appreciated, like the original text

855
00:48:39,679 --> 00:48:41,400
what that looked like. And we still don't have like

856
00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:43,800
a perfect idea. So for example, I gave you the

857
00:48:43,880 --> 00:48:48,239
Daniel and the lions Den example. But in the earliest

858
00:48:48,239 --> 00:48:50,760
text of Yosupon, so far as we can tell, based

859
00:48:50,840 --> 00:48:53,079
upon fragments from the kiro Ganesa and some of the

860
00:48:53,079 --> 00:48:56,400
best manuscripts, chapters four through six, which has the Daniel

861
00:48:56,400 --> 00:48:59,800
material did not exist in the earliest iteration of Yosupon,

862
00:49:00,239 --> 00:49:03,199
but in later editions. You have all sorts of interesting

863
00:49:03,199 --> 00:49:05,920
stuff that gets added. You have you have an account

864
00:49:06,000 --> 00:49:08,320
of the crowning of the Emperor of the spasiin which

865
00:49:08,360 --> 00:49:14,880
is manifestly based upon tropes in medieval crowning narratives. You

866
00:49:14,920 --> 00:49:20,360
have material about Christians, and about Jesus and about all

867
00:49:20,400 --> 00:49:22,679
sorts of crazy stuff that gets added to the text.

868
00:49:23,119 --> 00:49:26,079
But so I guess the first thing to say is

869
00:49:26,119 --> 00:49:31,599
that the text makes it into Judeo Arabic by the

870
00:49:31,679 --> 00:49:35,599
eleventh century, which is which is pretty early. And so

871
00:49:36,280 --> 00:49:40,679
there you have Jewish readers in a different linguistic milieu

872
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:45,760
engaging the text. And that's that's interesting, that's a that's

873
00:49:45,800 --> 00:49:50,159
a sort of that's another story. So in southern Italy,

874
00:49:50,280 --> 00:49:54,119
also in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, Rochamil

875
00:49:54,159 --> 00:49:58,000
ben Schlomo he includes a coffee of Sefriosa pon in

876
00:49:58,079 --> 00:50:02,280
his cepher hazik Renote. So these these sort of chronologically

877
00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:08,199
are chronographically oriented texts about the Jewish tradition that crop

878
00:50:08,280 --> 00:50:11,599
up more and more in in what what we're called

879
00:50:11,639 --> 00:50:15,960
in medieval studies, the High Middle Ages. These very often

880
00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:21,519
include large portions of cephri jos upon or themselves based

881
00:50:21,599 --> 00:50:25,599
upon sefri jos Upon sorry the Sefer Huziker note, as

882
00:50:25,639 --> 00:50:28,440
you may know, that's Eliezer ben Asher's work, and so

883
00:50:28,480 --> 00:50:34,440
a fourteenth the fourteenth century anthology of Rockmeil integrates that

884
00:50:34,519 --> 00:50:37,519
into it. Abraham even Daoud in the twelfth century and

885
00:50:37,559 --> 00:50:42,280
his Dora Dorote Olam and his other works uses jos Upon.

886
00:50:42,760 --> 00:50:45,119
And if you put the Hebrew texts next to each other,

887
00:50:45,199 --> 00:50:48,719
you can tell that this is this is explicitly taken

888
00:50:48,800 --> 00:50:52,000
from sefri jos Upon, so cefri jos Upon itself. It

889
00:50:52,119 --> 00:50:59,119
becomes a bedrock for different types of historiographically oriented literature,

890
00:51:00,119 --> 00:51:03,719
and this occurs all over the place. One of the

891
00:51:03,719 --> 00:51:07,559
greatest expansions of it are made by Judah Iven Moscone

892
00:51:07,559 --> 00:51:11,119
in the fourteenth century, and that becomes the basis for

893
00:51:12,639 --> 00:51:16,039
what's called the Constantinoble Edition, an edition of the texts

894
00:51:16,320 --> 00:51:21,039
that's published in fifteen ten. The first edition printed was

895
00:51:21,079 --> 00:51:26,039
printed by Abraham Knat in Mantua in fourteen seventy five

896
00:51:26,159 --> 00:51:29,000
or fourteen seventy nine or fourteen eighty or something like that.

897
00:51:29,639 --> 00:51:32,800
They're sort of arguments about exactly when and yes, so

898
00:51:33,280 --> 00:51:36,239
Rashi read the work. It appears to have been part

899
00:51:36,280 --> 00:51:39,880
of the part of Rashi's curriculum, as it were. So

900
00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:43,679
it's a text that gets read, gets expanded and integrated

901
00:51:43,679 --> 00:51:46,679
into kind of like a living tradition and used in

902
00:51:46,719 --> 00:51:52,199
all of these other texts. And what's interesting about sefrijo

903
00:51:52,239 --> 00:51:57,719
s Upon is that the text itself it cites Joseph Benngurion,

904
00:51:59,159 --> 00:52:05,519
who is a conflation of the historical author Josephus who

905
00:52:05,599 --> 00:52:10,159
lived in the first century, and another Joseph who is

906
00:52:10,239 --> 00:52:15,280
identified in book three of this Again, the source of

907
00:52:15,320 --> 00:52:19,519
sefrijos Upon deeg. Scidio here is Limitano on the Destruction

908
00:52:19,559 --> 00:52:23,039
of Jerusalem by Pseudo Hegesippus, and book three it is

909
00:52:23,360 --> 00:52:26,360
listing the leaders of Judea and Galilee in the Roman

910
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:31,000
Jewish War. It mentions a certain Joseph Gorrionidez, son of Goryon,

911
00:52:31,639 --> 00:52:35,119
and the author of sefrijos Upon identifies that with Josephus

912
00:52:35,159 --> 00:52:41,159
the historical author, and so in the Jewish tradition and

913
00:52:41,199 --> 00:52:45,599
the Christian tradition pre sixteenth century. So it seems many,

914
00:52:45,800 --> 00:52:49,920
most or all readers of sefrijos Upon understood the work

915
00:52:50,039 --> 00:52:53,800
to be a product of the first century and the

916
00:52:53,840 --> 00:52:58,119
writing of a first century author to be identified with

917
00:52:58,639 --> 00:53:03,760
the person we call flabyas josephiz And this is the

918
00:53:03,760 --> 00:53:06,840
way people looked about looked at it until the until

919
00:53:06,920 --> 00:53:11,320
the sixteenth century with Azariah de Rassi and a few

920
00:53:11,320 --> 00:53:16,239
other figures. And if listeners are interested, the authoritative work

921
00:53:16,280 --> 00:53:22,320
on this reception tradition is Saskia Donates's twenty thirteen book

922
00:53:22,840 --> 00:53:26,360
Uber le frungmund Reception des Sefrio Supan, and it's a

923
00:53:26,360 --> 00:53:29,920
spectacular study. She's done some important work since then, and

924
00:53:30,039 --> 00:53:33,599
a lot of that is picked up more recently in

925
00:53:33,639 --> 00:53:37,519
a book written by Nadiat Celdez in twenty twenty.

926
00:53:38,239 --> 00:53:41,239
Speaker 1: So so then let me ask sort of a more

927
00:53:41,280 --> 00:53:43,559
general question on even so as you mentioned, it's it's

928
00:53:43,679 --> 00:53:45,880
used in various ways by the justraition, and in fact

929
00:53:46,000 --> 00:53:49,480
we've written in today, what is the sort of historical

930
00:53:50,280 --> 00:53:53,079
importance of the Book of Josipot In other words, you know,

931
00:53:53,400 --> 00:53:57,280
obviously we recognize that this author is rewriting. We write

932
00:53:57,599 --> 00:54:00,199
all the traditions from josiphas through through Latin Christendom than

933
00:54:00,239 --> 00:54:03,519
other works. So then today when we look at the

934
00:54:03,559 --> 00:54:06,199
Hebrew of Husband, what can we see what are the

935
00:54:06,239 --> 00:54:10,639
sort of historical nuggets that are useful from this work itself,

936
00:54:10,960 --> 00:54:13,440
you know, about Jewish life in the medieval period, or

937
00:54:14,199 --> 00:54:19,480
Hebrew writing or religious acknowledge. What is the historical value,

938
00:54:19,519 --> 00:54:20,960
let's say, of this book as it sits on our

939
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:21,519
shelf today.

940
00:54:21,760 --> 00:54:23,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a great question. I think there are

941
00:54:23,880 --> 00:54:25,599
a couple of different ways to answer it. I will

942
00:54:25,639 --> 00:54:29,880
note that sever Josupon has largely let's say, evaded or

943
00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:34,880
been excluded from the broader scholarly imagination because people did

944
00:54:34,920 --> 00:54:38,679
not recognize any sort of historical value in it. And

945
00:54:38,719 --> 00:54:41,199
this has to do with ways that historiography have been

946
00:54:41,239 --> 00:54:43,920
understood by modern scholars. So sefri Josupon has been called

947
00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:47,559
by some something like folk literature, and so because it's

948
00:54:47,599 --> 00:54:49,679
telling a much older story, and it's doing so in

949
00:54:49,760 --> 00:54:54,360
a way that's clearly sort of romanticized or something like that.

950
00:54:54,800 --> 00:54:58,880
Even a scholar like Amos Funkenstein, even someone like him,

951
00:54:58,920 --> 00:55:01,280
you Roushalmi in nineteen eighty two, in his famous book

952
00:55:01,519 --> 00:55:04,679
Zachora Jewish History and Jewish Memory, he doesn't count sefri

953
00:55:04,719 --> 00:55:08,800
jos Upon his history. It's it's like it's something else,

954
00:55:09,159 --> 00:55:12,920
and there there is some truth to that, to be honest, like,

955
00:55:13,559 --> 00:55:16,679
we don't read sefri jos Upon, So sefri Josupon's narrative

956
00:55:16,800 --> 00:55:21,199
goes from sort of prehistory down to let's say seventy

957
00:55:21,280 --> 00:55:26,440
four with Mesada. We don't look at sefrijos Upon to

958
00:55:26,639 --> 00:55:31,159
sort of fill in gaps in our knowledge of that history.

959
00:55:31,360 --> 00:55:34,840
Almost ever, there are some actually interesting exceptions to this,

960
00:55:34,920 --> 00:55:37,960
So Kenneth Atkinson in our twenty twenty four volume From

961
00:55:38,039 --> 00:55:41,159
Josephus to jose Upon and Beyond, which is open access

962
00:55:41,199 --> 00:55:44,639
by the way, Kenneth Atkinson in there he explores this

963
00:55:44,840 --> 00:55:48,239
datum from I think book thirty one books book thirty

964
00:55:48,280 --> 00:55:50,159
one or twenty nine something like that in sefri jos

965
00:55:50,199 --> 00:55:55,679
Upon and basically finds evidence that helps us read ancient

966
00:55:55,760 --> 00:55:58,760
history in sefri jos Upon that doesn't appear in earlier sources.

967
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:00,679
But this is more the exception and then the rule.

968
00:56:01,119 --> 00:56:04,320
I would say, the big answer to that question is

969
00:56:04,360 --> 00:56:07,320
that sefrijos Upon it tells us about the language, It

970
00:56:07,360 --> 00:56:10,320
tells us about the historical understanding and maybe something of

971
00:56:10,360 --> 00:56:15,079
the sort of the self understanding of a Jewish author

972
00:56:15,280 --> 00:56:19,280
in early tenth century southern Italy. So when the author

973
00:56:19,360 --> 00:56:22,559
is making the expansions that he does. I assume, you know,

974
00:56:22,639 --> 00:56:25,880
male authorship. When the author is making the expansions that

975
00:56:25,960 --> 00:56:29,840
he does upon the basis of his Latin Christian sources

976
00:56:29,920 --> 00:56:34,239
or what have you, the nature of those expansions tells

977
00:56:34,320 --> 00:56:37,800
us something about the author's understanding of the Jewish tradition,

978
00:56:38,440 --> 00:56:41,920
which I argue tells us something further about how the

979
00:56:41,960 --> 00:56:45,639
author understands the Jewish people as a as a historical

980
00:56:45,719 --> 00:56:49,679
collective and as a historical collective that still exists at

981
00:56:49,679 --> 00:56:53,440
that time. And so I would say it contradicts narrative

982
00:56:53,559 --> 00:56:59,840
where the Jews are politically powerless, and certainly one that

983
00:57:00,039 --> 00:57:05,960
sees them as sort of I don't divinely abandoned or

984
00:57:06,039 --> 00:57:10,400
sacrilegious or something like that. But it sees the Jews

985
00:57:10,400 --> 00:57:14,079
as of people that uniquely inhabit this ongoing, living historical

986
00:57:14,119 --> 00:57:16,559
covenant with the God of the universe, the God that

987
00:57:16,599 --> 00:57:20,440
controls history. We also so in the Table of Nations

988
00:57:20,440 --> 00:57:25,519
at the beginning of it, we get some data about

989
00:57:25,719 --> 00:57:30,119
ethnonyms and toponyms about peoples and places of the time

990
00:57:30,239 --> 00:57:35,880
that appear to be accurate. For example, the Russi we

991
00:57:36,159 --> 00:57:38,960
might be translated something like Russians or proto Russians or

992
00:57:39,000 --> 00:57:43,480
something like that, are located at Kiev and are identified

993
00:57:43,599 --> 00:57:47,480
as Teutons, which appears to be correct. So we can learn,

994
00:57:47,920 --> 00:57:49,320
you know, we can learn a little bit about the

995
00:57:49,360 --> 00:57:52,519
time in that way when the author rewrites the story

996
00:57:52,679 --> 00:57:56,079
of the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs and the Maccabean

997
00:57:56,199 --> 00:57:59,800
Mother Martyr. The way that the sons respond to and

998
00:58:00,039 --> 00:58:04,679
Hiakus and his henchmen includes a decent amount more about

999
00:58:04,719 --> 00:58:08,320
the afterlife than what appears in the historic in the

1000
00:58:08,320 --> 00:58:11,360
books of the Maccabees as we know them. And so

1001
00:58:11,960 --> 00:58:17,280
the author of Cefrijos upon appears to have notions of heaven, hell,

1002
00:58:17,639 --> 00:58:22,679
of reward and punishment post mortem that would be difficult

1003
00:58:22,719 --> 00:58:28,400
to derive from the foregoing Jewish tradition, I think, as

1004
00:58:28,400 --> 00:58:31,719
far as I know. So one more important example, if

1005
00:58:31,760 --> 00:58:34,480
I may at the end of the book on top

1006
00:58:34,519 --> 00:58:38,679
of Masada, as Josephus tells the narrative, of course, these

1007
00:58:38,760 --> 00:58:42,079
nine hundred and sixty Jewish rebel holdouts under the leadership

1008
00:58:42,079 --> 00:58:46,440
of Eliezer Bennier. After a long speech of his They're

1009
00:58:46,519 --> 00:58:48,440
like it would be a shame to let the Romans

1010
00:58:48,519 --> 00:58:50,440
kill us. It is much more pious for us to

1011
00:58:50,519 --> 00:58:55,000
kill ourselves, because they're uncircumcised and we're holy. So they

1012
00:58:55,039 --> 00:58:57,400
kill their wives and children, then they kill themselves, and

1013
00:58:57,440 --> 00:58:59,800
the Romans finally break through the wall. Josephus tells us

1014
00:58:59,840 --> 00:59:03,039
this book seven of the Jewish War, and the Romans

1015
00:59:03,039 --> 00:59:05,760
are so impressed that they had the wherewithal to kill

1016
00:59:05,800 --> 00:59:08,960
themselves in this way, and it's like, wow, look at

1017
00:59:08,960 --> 00:59:12,920
these people. In Pseudo Hegesippus, in the late fourth century

1018
00:59:13,039 --> 00:59:16,360
Christian Latin rewriting of it, the same thing happens, except

1019
00:59:16,360 --> 00:59:19,519
the Roman soldiers are not impressed, and the very last

1020
00:59:19,559 --> 00:59:22,480
thing we read, basically is that the Romans show up.

1021
00:59:22,559 --> 00:59:25,599
All the Jews are dead the end, and so it's

1022
00:59:25,719 --> 00:59:32,679
very anticlimactic. In sefrijosupon remarkably, the Judean rebels kill their

1023
00:59:32,679 --> 00:59:36,440
wives and children, but then they go fight the Romans.

1024
00:59:36,480 --> 00:59:40,480
They do not kill themselves, They die hacking down Roman

1025
00:59:40,559 --> 00:59:45,159
soldiers like good warriors in battle. And so it's like

1026
00:59:45,280 --> 00:59:49,239
this this monumental overturning of what apparently had been the

1027
00:59:49,280 --> 00:59:54,320
sort of standard Masada narrative. And so in that narrative,

1028
00:59:54,360 --> 00:59:59,639
I think you see something of the author's understanding values

1029
01:00:00,840 --> 01:00:01,559
something like that.

1030
01:00:01,880 --> 01:00:02,440
Speaker 2: Fascinating.

1031
01:00:02,480 --> 01:00:05,320
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm afraid we have come to the close to

1032
01:00:05,320 --> 01:00:10,119
the end of however you go. I'm want to ask

1033
01:00:10,360 --> 01:00:14,079
one question, shame indeed, we better getting started. One one

1034
01:00:14,119 --> 01:00:15,320
question I'd like to ask you, which I ask of

1035
01:00:15,400 --> 01:00:18,480
any of my guests, which is something like this. If

1036
01:00:18,519 --> 01:00:20,800
you could sit down tonight to dinner with the author

1037
01:00:20,960 --> 01:00:24,360
of Yosipon this tenth century drew from Italy, and you

1038
01:00:24,360 --> 01:00:27,079
could converse with him and ask him something, what would

1039
01:00:27,079 --> 01:00:28,880
you be? What would you be asking him? What would

1040
01:00:28,920 --> 01:00:30,960
be curious to know? What would you what subject you

1041
01:00:31,000 --> 01:00:31,559
brought to them?

1042
01:00:31,800 --> 01:00:33,239
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this is gonna be kind of a

1043
01:00:33,320 --> 01:00:35,159
lame answer, but I would. I would get a pan

1044
01:00:35,239 --> 01:00:36,679
and pencil out and I would be like, all right,

1045
01:00:36,920 --> 01:00:39,360
I want you to tell me what all chapters were

1046
01:00:39,360 --> 01:00:41,880
in the version of this book that you wrote, because

1047
01:00:43,239 --> 01:00:46,079
because like a temporary scholarship, we can't we can't totally tell.

1048
01:00:46,280 --> 01:00:51,519
But no, honestly, I would Uh. I'm a scholar of antiquity,

1049
01:00:51,639 --> 01:00:54,000
so coming into the early Middle Ages is like I

1050
01:00:54,039 --> 01:00:58,519
get more uncomfortable every year I go beyond, like the

1051
01:00:58,920 --> 01:01:02,679
fifth century, and so I would love to know what

1052
01:01:02,760 --> 01:01:05,079
the author was reading and how we had access to it.

1053
01:01:05,119 --> 01:01:07,239
I would say, where did you find these Latin texts?

1054
01:01:07,280 --> 01:01:09,679
And where did you get the stories about Livy and Virgil?

1055
01:01:09,960 --> 01:01:13,119
And like, you know what, what all texts did you use?

1056
01:01:13,199 --> 01:01:15,559
Because we can only make sort of like partial and

1057
01:01:15,679 --> 01:01:20,039
educated guesses of these questions, and you know, they'd be

1058
01:01:20,039 --> 01:01:22,920
easy enough for the author to answer. I could come

1059
01:01:22,960 --> 01:01:24,360
up with a list of one hundred questions though that

1060
01:01:24,400 --> 01:01:26,159
I'd love to ask the author as well.

1061
01:01:26,360 --> 01:01:26,599
Speaker 2: Sort of.

1062
01:01:27,280 --> 01:01:29,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, basically you're saying that as a good historian, the

1063
01:01:29,840 --> 01:01:31,880
first thing you'd ask him is what kind of historian

1064
01:01:31,920 --> 01:01:34,159
are you? How do you do your your historian's work?

1065
01:01:34,800 --> 01:01:36,320
Let me see your tools, that sort of business.

1066
01:01:36,800 --> 01:01:39,280
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe something like that. I mean, of course, yeah,

1067
01:01:39,320 --> 01:01:41,360
I hope we talk about all sorts of things. We'd

1068
01:01:41,360 --> 01:01:46,159
certainly talk about sort of like religion, theology, you know,

1069
01:01:46,360 --> 01:01:49,400
these types of storytelling. You know, i'd get some tips

1070
01:01:49,920 --> 01:01:51,760
tips about good writing if I could.

1071
01:01:52,559 --> 01:01:56,039
Speaker 1: So interesting Yeah, okay, professor at Cosson Bay, thank you

1072
01:01:56,039 --> 01:01:57,679
so much for joining us today on the podcast of

1073
01:01:57,960 --> 01:02:00,480
Jewish Ideas. This has been a pleasure and we look

1074
01:02:00,480 --> 01:02:02,239
forward to your future writings on this topic.

1075
01:02:02,639 --> 01:02:03,519
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you JJ.

1076
01:02:05,119 --> 01:02:07,559
Speaker 1: This has been the podcast of Jewish ideas by Tora

1077
01:02:07,679 --> 01:02:10,960
in Motion, produced by Alisha Kellman and myself JJ Kimbri,

1078
01:02:11,559 --> 01:02:14,360
edited and mixed by Alisha Kelmer. You can stay up

1079
01:02:14,360 --> 01:02:16,880
to date by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. To

1080
01:02:16,920 --> 01:02:19,559
support the more thoughtful Jewish content like this, please visit

1081
01:02:19,639 --> 01:02:20,719
Toro in motion dot org.

1082
01:02:20,920 --> 01:02:21,840
Speaker 2: Slash donated