Israel and Hellas: Israel and Hellas. [I]

432 Pages·1995·13.18 MB·English

by  John Pairman Brown

John Pairman Brown
Israel and Hellas
W
DE
G
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die
alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
Herausgegeben von
Otto Kaiser
Band 231
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1995
John Pairman Brown
Israel and Hellas
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1995
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI
to ensure permanence and durability
Library of Congress Catalogwg-in-Publication Data
Brown, John Pairman.
Israel and Hellas / John Pairman Brown.
p. cm. - (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft ; Bd. 231)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-014233-3
1. Bible. O.T.—Extra-canonical parallels. 2. Bible. O.T.—Compar-
ative studies. 3. Greek literature—Relation to the Old Testament.
4. Jews-Civilization-To 70 A.D. 5. Greece-Civilization. I. Tide.
II. Series.
BS410.Z5
[BS1171.2]
221.6 s-dc20
[880.9'4221] 95-34023
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft / Beihefte]
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. - Berlin ;
New York : de Gruyter.
Früher Schriftenreihe
Reihe Beihefte zu: Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
NE: HST
Bd. 231. Brown, John Pairman: Israel and Hellas. — 1995
Brown, John Pairman:
Israel and Hellas / John Pairman Brown. — Berlin ; New York : de Gruy-
ter, 1995
(Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ; Bd.
231)
ISBN 3-11-014233-3
ISSN 0934-2575
© Copyright 1995 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Printed in Germany
Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin
for
SAUL LEVIN

AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Thanks to the commitment of Otto Kaiser and the superlative typography of
Walter de Gruyter & Co., readers have in their hands the very first book to
compare at length classical Hebrew and Greek texts—and sometimes Latin
as well. (The English font was typeset off my disk, but the foreign fonts
keyed in manually with great accuracy, off my far-from-perfect hand, by
Oliver Roman.) Naturally, those with some minimal proficiency in the two
languages and their scripts will be at an advantage. But everything is translated
into English; and the Hebrew .frequently as well into the Greek of the Septu-
agint, or the Latin of the Vulgate, or Luther's German as modernized. (I
regret that the German version I cite is less lutheranisch than some others;
native users of German will know how to compensate.) So anybody interested
in the twin foundation literatures of Western civilization should be able to
use the book with profit. Nobody is more aware than myself that, dealing
with so wide a variety of texts, studied for centuries by so many scholars, I
have discussed some wrongly or inadequately, and overlooked others of
equal or greater interest. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, I cannot explain all the
poems that ever were invented. My fondest hope is that a reader or two,
overlooking my deficiencies, will conclude that the literatures of Israel and
Hellas, for some of the reasons I suggest and on the basis of some of my
examples, are in fact comparable. I would have liked to support the discussions
much more fully by the results of archaeology; but non omnia possumus
omnes.
Seven of the nine chapters here have previously appeared in print, in one
form or another. But Chapter 1, a systematic introduction to these studies, is
new; as are Chapter 8 on the treaty and the Excursuses. And everything has
been rethought and revised; I saw no reason to perpetuate my initial limitations.
So I hope that reviewers who habitually just list the contents of "collected
essays" will give these a second look. The original articles, published between
1968 and 1981, record the investigation by which I came to realize the
comparability of Israel and Hellas—the first free societies, cultivating rain-
watered fields around a fortified citadel, recording their words about the
human situation in a widely-accessible alphabetic script. After several efforts,
I have not found a better mode of presentation than the original one. Each
chapter represents one segment of a coherent train of thought, and all refer
to each other. They do not need to be read in sequence; rather, each individual
Vili AUTHOR'S PREFACE
comparison asks to be judged on its own merits. Still, I will be bold and
claim that this book, for the first time, documents as a unified event the
double emergence, around Jerusalem and Athens respectively, of full humanity
as we know it.
The primary clue to the comparability of Hebrew and Greek texts—and of
the societies they reveal—is the surprising fact of their shared vocabulary,
mostly of nouns. The majority of the chapters here rest on that basis. From
1981 to 19941 published a further series of nine articles in the same realm—five
of them, by the kindness of Prof. Kaiser, in the Zeitschrift für die alttesta-
mentliche Wissenschaft—, listed here on p. 9. In them, the common vocab-
ulary, while nowhere absent, is less prominent, and is supplemented by
more general grounds of comparison; Etruria and primitive Rome appear;
the merger of Israelite and Hellenic culture in the early Christian church is
emphasized. They substantially complete the enterprise of the present volume,
and I hope that some day they can likewise be gathered together. But the
essays of the present work, as being older, stood in more need of revision;
and I am clear also that they should be read first.
The indexes are an integral part of the work, and make various comparisons
not underlined elsewhere. Index 1, of words whose phonetic equivalents in
other languages are discussed, contains, among other things, a complete
listing of the common nouns (so far as I have determined them) shared by
Greek and Hebrew before Alexander; in conjunction with the text, it is a
tiny etymological dictionary. Index 2, of passages cited (long even though
selective), will be useful to anybody studying a particular text who wishes
to determine whether I have put it in a new context. Index 3, of objects
described, is a key to the plates I would like to see in an imaginary illustrated
edition. Index 4, of modem authors cited, takes the place of a full bibliography
(whose function I have never been able to determine), with the advantage
that it indicates where they are quoted. Index 5 includes whatever does not
fall in one of the preceding categories.
I spell Greek and Hebrew names in what I judge to be the most familiar
English form. For mere simplicity I name the God of Israel "Yahweh." I call
the composer of the two Greek epics "Homer," and the author of the
Prometheus Vinctus "Aeschylus," without committing myself to historical
judgements. I print Greek and Latin inscriptions in large and small capitals
when I wish to emphasize their epigraphic character—particularly for Greek
dialects where the Byzantine apparatus is inapplicable. For consistency in
the series "BZAW" I abbreviate Biblical books in its form. When I occasionally
transcribe Hebrew, I recognize seven full vowels α ε e i o o u along with
three short ones ä ε 5\ and treat y or w after a vowel as a consonantal
off glide. So as not to overload the typography, I mostly refrain from marking
AUTHOR'S PREFACE IX
Latin long vowels; I leave off vowels in the Mishna for lack of a critical
edition of the Kaufmann codex; I omit vowels also from Targum and Peshitto,
along with Hebrew accents other than the pausai, and the overhead lines on
fricatives marked in the best MSS of the Hebrew Bible. My occasional
citations from other ancient languages do not rest on any deep understanding
of their scripts or grammar; and my transcriptions, drawn from different
sources, are not fully consistent.
I have done all I could to make the actual text of citations from foreign
languages correct, according to the editions under my hand. In the course of
compiling Index 2 I have corrected a number of the references. But it has
proved impossible to verify in their entirety the thousands of references to
authors ancient and modern, some of which go back thirty years or more in
my papers, printed and MS. I beg the reader's indulgence for the residual
errors, and will welcome any list of them.
Even when I do not specifically refer to works in the select bibliography,
readers can be assured that I have often consulted them, and that they will
derive much profit by doing so themselves. In particular I could have cited
much more frequently than I did the new Cambridge Iliad and the Oxford
Odyssey; M. L. West's commentaries on Hesiod; Menahem Stern's learned
collection of authors on Judaism; Emilia Masson's judicious study of Semitic
loan-words in Greek, with its history of scholarship; and the admirable new
Dictionnaire de la civilisation phénicienne et punique edited by Edouard
Lipiiíski.
I first understood the overlap between the Hebraic and Hellenic worlds
during my seven years at the American University of Beirut, a stone's throw
from the old Roman law school, and under the remnant forests and snows of
Jebel Sannin—not quite as Tacitus knew it, tantos inter ardores opacum
fidumque niuibus. This book would have been impossible without twin trea-
sures, a quarter mile apart: the Classics Seminar of the University of California
at Berkeley; and the Library of the Graduate Theological Union, which
kindly designated me a visiting scholar. I am especially in debt to the
knowledgeable and industrious staff of the Interlibrary Loan Service at the
latter place.
Fifty years ago at the Harvard Society of Fellows I met Saul Levin, now
Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York at Binghamton,
to whom this work is dedicated. A full accounting of what I owe him would
make him seem a joint author, which in a true sense he is. Without his
constant encouragement, I would probably have given up this enterprise
long ago. Taking time out from his own comparison of the Semitic and
Indo-European languages at an older period, he reviewed the manuscript of
each article redone here once or several times before its original publication.
χ AUTHOR'S PREFACE
(His big Semitic and Indo-European Comparative Grammar, expected from
the press shortly after the present work, will treat at an earlier period many
of the etymologies studied here.) He carefully checked these chapters in
their present form before they went to the press, and read the first proofs in
their entirety. He detected much lurking political correctness in my MS, of
which I have deleted some but not all. Again and again he has found counter-
examples to puncture premature generalizations. He knows the grammar
and texts of all three languages —Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—better than I
do; he has saved me from many errors (for those remaining I claim exclusive
authorship), and made many perceptive additions. As Pindar says about
Theron of Acragas (Olympian 2.98), "Who could say what joys he has
brought to others?—for the sand escapes counting," έπεί ψάμμος αριθμόν
περιπέφευγεν.
January 20, 1995