Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters

383 Pages·2012·2.16 MB·English

by  Maren R. Niehoff

Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of
Ancient Interpreters
Jerusalem Studies in
Religion and Culture
Editors
Guy G. Stroumsa
David Shulman
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
VOLUME 16
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/jsrc
Homer and the Bible in the
Eyes of Ancient Interpreters
Edited by
Maren R. niehoff
LEIDEn • BOStOn
2012
this book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Homer and the Bible in the eyes of ancient interpreters / edited by Maren R. niehoff.
  p. cm. — ( Jerusalem studies in religion and culture, ISSn 1570-078X ; v. 16)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBn 978-90-04-22134-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Homer—Criticism and interpretation—
History—to 1500. 2. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. niehoff, Maren.
 PA3003.H63 2012
 809'.01—dc23
2011051167
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covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
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ISSn 1570-078X
ISBn 978 90 04 22134 5 (hardback)
ISBn 978 90 04 22611 1 (e-book)
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COntEntS
Contributors  ..................................................................................................... vii
SEttInG tHE StAGE
Why Compare Homer’s Readers to Biblical Readers?  ......................... 3
Maren R. Niehoff
Canonising and Decanonising Homer: Reception of the Homeric
Poems in Antiquity and Modernity  ..................................................... 15
Margalit Finkelberg
Scripture and Paideia in Late Antiquity  .................................................. 29
Guy G. Stroumsa
“Only God Knows the Correct Reading!” the Role of Homer, the
Quran and the Bible in the Rise of Philology and Grammar  ....... 43
Filippomaria Pontani
GREEK-SPEAKInG IntERPREtERS
the Ambiguity of Signs: Critical σημεῖα from Zenodotus to
Origen  ............................................................................................................ 87
Francesca Schironi
Topos didaskalikos and anaphora—two Interrelated Principles in
Aristarchus’ Commentaries  .................................................................... 113
René Nünlist
Philo and Plutarch on Homer  ..................................................................... 127
Maren R. Niehoff
Philo and the Allegorical Interpretation of Homer in the Platonic
tradition (with an Emphasis on Porphyry’s De antro
nympharum)  ................................................................................................ 155
Katell Berthelot
vi contents
the Dispute on Homer: Exegetical Polemic in Galen’s Criticism
of Chrysippus  .............................................................................................. 175
Sharon Weisser
Homer within the Bible: Homerisms in the Graecus Venetus ........... 199
Cyril Aslanov
HEBRAIC OR ARAMAIC SPEAKInG IntERPREtERS
the twenty-Four Books of the Hebrew Bible and Alexandrian
Scribal Methods  .......................................................................................... 221
Guy Darshan
noblest Obelus: Rabbinic Appropriations of Late Ancient Literary
Criticism  ....................................................................................................... 245
Yonatan Moss
Re-Scripturizing traditions: Designating Dependence in Rabbinic
Halakhic Midrashim and Homeric Scholarship  ............................... 269
Yakir Paz
the Agon with Moses and Homer: Rabbinic Midrash and the
Second Sophistic  ........................................................................................ 299
Yair Furstenberg
Midrash and Hermeneutic Reflectivity: Kishmu’o As a test Case  .... 329
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
From narrative Practise to Cultural Poetics: Literary Anthropology
and the Rabbinic Sense of Self  .............................................................. 345
Joshua Levinson
Index  ................................................................................................................... 369
COntRIBUtORS
Cyril Aslanov, alumnus of the Ecole normale Supérieure in Paris, is Asso-
ciate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he teaches
linguistics. His main fields of research are historical and comparative
linguistics, contact linguistics and poetics. Besides his specialisation in
Romance linguistics, he also deals with Greek linguistics and Jewish lan-
guages. He has been a member of the Academy of Hebrew Language since
2006. Among his publications: Pour comprendre la Bible: la leçon d’André
Chouraqui (1999); Le provençal des Juifs et l’hébreu en Provence: le diction-
naire Sharshot ha-Kesef de Joseph Caspi (2001); Evidence of Francophony in
Mediaeval Levant: Decipherment and Interpretation (2006); Le français au
Levant, jadis et naguère: la recherche d’une langue perdue (2006); Parlons
grec moderne (2008); Sociolingüística histórica de las lenguas judías (2011).
Katell Berthelot is researcher at the CnRS (national Center for Scientific
Research, France) and author of Philanthrôpia judaica. Le débat autour de
la “misanthropie” des lois juives dans l’Antiquité (2003) and L’ “humanité
de l’autre homme” dans la pensée juive ancienne (2004), co-director of the
French bilingual edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran Library Project)
at the Editions du Cerf.
Guy Darshan is an instructor in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. He is currently completing his doctoral disserta-
tion on stories of origin in biblical and Greek genealogical literatures. His
research interests include the history of biblical literature and its text.
Margalit Finkelberg is Professor of Classics at tel Aviv University. She is
the author of The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998), Greeks
and Pre-Greeks. Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (2005), and
about 70 articles, mostly on Homer and Greek epic tradition; co-editor
(with G. G. Stroumsa) of Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Reli-
gious Canons in the Ancient World (2003); and the editor of The Homer
Encyclopedia (3 vols.; 2011). She is a member of the Israel Academy of
Sciences and Humanities and was awarded the Rothschild Prize in the
Humanities for 2012.
viii contributors
Yair Furstenberg is a Mandel post-doctorate fellow at “Scholion”, Inter-
disciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Yair studied talmud and classics at the Hebrew University,
spending a year of his studies at the Department of Religion at Princeton
University. He has recently completed his dissertation on the issue of
purity in early rabbinic literature. In addition to publications on purity in
both rabbinic and Christian literature, Yair has contributed articles on the
impact of Graeco-Roman culture and religion on the evolution of rabbinic
law, thought and literature.
Joshua Levinson teaches in the Department of Hebrew Literature at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specialises in rabbinic literature of
Late Antiquity, and has published on various aspects of rabbinic narrative
and hermeneutics, including The Twice Told Tale: A Poetics of the Exegeti-
cal Narrative in Rabbinic Midrash (Hebrew, 2005).
Yonatan Moss is completing his doctorate in Early Christianity in the
Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Previously he studied
classics, linguistics and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. His recent publications, such as “Scholasticism, Exegesis, and
the Historicization of Mosaic Authorship in Moses bar Kepha’s On Para-
dise,” in HTR 104 (2011), explore the confluence of language, authority and
exegesis in late ancient and early medieval societies.
Maren R. Niehoff is Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish
thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published exten-
sively on Philo, Hellenistic Judaism and, more generally, on exegetical
contacts between Jews, Greeks and early Christians. Among her publi-
cations are: Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship (2011), Philo on Jew-
ish Identity and Culture (2001), The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish
Literature (1992). She is the editor of two volumes of Philo’s writings in
Hebrew (forthcoming at the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities
as well as the Bialik Institute). She is the winner of the 2011 Polonsky Prize
for Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines of the Hebrew University and
is currently preparing an intellectual biography of Philo of Alexandria
(forthcoming at Yale University Press).
René Nünlist is Professor of Classics at the University of Cologne. His
research interests include early Greek poetry, literary criticism (ancient
contributors ix
and modern) and papyrology (esp. Menander). He is a co-founder of the
Basel commentary on the Iliad (2000–) and the author of Poetologische
Bildersprache in der frühgriechischen Dichtung (1998) and The Ancient
Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia
(2009, pbk. 2011).
Yakir Paz is currently completing his doctorate at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem comparing the Alexandrian commentaries to Homer and
rabbinic exegesis to the Bible. His main interests are exegesis and exegeti-
cal contacts and polemics in the ancient near East and in Late Antiquity.
He is also part of a research group studying the various Akkadian com-
mentaries and is the translator of Philo’s de Agricultura into Hebrew. He
recently published an article, with Shraga Bar-On, entitled ‘ “the Lord’s
Allotment is his People”: the Myth of the Election of Israel by Casting
of Lots and the Gnostic-Christian-Pagan-Jewish Polemic,’ in Tarbitz 79
(2010–11) [Hebrew].
Filippomaria Pontani is Associate Professor of Classical Philology at the
University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari”. He is editing the scholia to Homer’s
Odyssey (two volumes published so far 2007, 2010), Prolegomena: Sguardi
su Ulisse (2005). He has published extensively on the Greek and Latin lan-
guage, poetry and prose, as well as on Byzantine literature and art and on
Humanist Greek (above all editing Politian’s Greek epigrams (2002). He
has also produced, an edition of Heraclitus’ Homeric Questions (2005).
Ishay Rosen-Zvi is Associate Professor and Head of the talmud and Late
Antiquity section at the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies at tel
Aviv University, where he teaches talmudic literature and culture. His
main interests are midrashic hermeneutics; the formation of the Mishna;
temple rituals in rabbinic literature; and gender and sexuality in Late
Antiquity. His book The Rite that Was Not: Temple, Midrash and Gender
in Tractate Sotah (2008) is currently being translated into English (forth-
coming at Brill). His monograph on the history of the “evil inclination”
from the Bible to rabbinic literature and early Christianity is forthcoming
(Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity).
Francesca Schironi is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.
Her research interests focus mainly on Hellenistic scholarship and literary
papyrology. She has worked on Oxyrhynchus papyri and edited the Oxy-