Metabiblical

Someone looking for the first time at an example of Jewish or Christian biblical exegesis of [the first centuries C.E.] may form the impression that this was a completely tendentious practice that approached the text with absurd methods and that the interpreters were reading their own meanings out of it. However, this is not the case.

The Hebrew Bible tells a story which stretches from the depths of mythological time to the Persian Period, the time in which the people who came to be known as Jews lived under the imperial rule of Persia. This period began in 539 BCE when Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian Empire, and lasted until Alexander the Great conquered the Levant in 332.

Alexander’s conquests usshered in the Hellenistic Period, which lasted until 63 BCE, and it was during this time that Judaism interacted with Greek thought in a way that would permanently shape the future of Judaism and Christianity. Among the features of Greek culture imported into Jewish contexts was a way of reading classic texts.

The Greeks did not have a Bible, but they did have the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems attributed to an author known as Homer. These poems were used as standard coursework in the education of Greek boys, and Homer became central to Greek culture.

“… through [Homer] all culture (παιδεία) and finally philosophy itself entered our lives.” — Dionysius of Helicarnassus, Letter to Gnaeus Pompey 1.13, as quoted in The Measure of Homer (2018) by Richard Hunter, p. 2.

We do not think there is a poet other than Homer, and there is virtually no one who does not know Homer. — Callistratus, as quoted in The Measure of Homer (2018) by Richard Hunter, p. 44.

[Homer’s poetry is] so sublime and grand and also so sweet that it has for so long enthralled not just men who have the same tongue and language as the poet, but also many of the barbarians. Some men who speak two languages and are of mixed race know his verses very well, though they are ignorant of much else which is Greek, and some too who live far away. It is said that the Indians sing Homer’s poetry and have translated it into their own speech and language. — Dio Chrysostom, as quoted in The Measure of Homer (2018) by Richard Hunter, p. 22.

Like the Bible, Homer’s works have a murky early history, but let’s just oversimplify everything for the moment and stipulate for the sake of discussion that Homer composed the works attributed to him, and did so in the first half of the eighth century BCE.

Hundreds of years later, as Greek philosophy gets rolling, Homer is being used as a textbook, used not just for instructing pupils in the mechanics of reading, but also for examples in the proper way to behave. And it is here that a problem arises.

From the standpoint of educated Greeks in the sixth century and later, Homer’s work appeared to contain a variety of materials that were ethically or theologically problematic. In particular, the gods lie, steal, commit adultery, and behave in all sorts of unsavory ways, sometimes seeming a bit more like comic book villains than the kind of deities that philosophically-minded Greeks might consider worthy of praise.

This produced a tension that would need to be resolved in one way or another. One resolution might be to renounce Homer, and certainly some of the ancient Greeks did criticize Homer. But there was something unseemly, as a Greek man raised on Homer from grade school, about asserting that today’s morality is superior and that Homer contains major errors.

Instead, given the well-known fact that Homer was the wisest of all poets, it must be the case, when Homer says something ridiculous, that Homer in fact means something else. Reventlow introduces Theagenes, who found allegories about the elements of nature in the conflicts between the gods, and reinterpreted some of the statements about the gods as in fact statements about the human soul’s various qualities.

These sorts of allegorical (re)-interpretations of Homer went on for centuries, although here and there someone would disagree. “The most noted was the protest of Plato, who decisively rejected the stories of the gods in Homer as immoral, especially when it came to the instruction of youth. He also considered allegorical interpretation of them to be impossible” (Reventlow, p. 37). However, Plato was not even able to convince his own star pupil, Aristotle, to follow his thinking on Homer. Aristotle went right back to using Homer alegorically.

In the first three centuries CE, the Stoics did quite a bit of Homeric interpretation, and simultaneously became more influential throughout the Roman Empire. Reventlow credits them with intensifying the use of etymological explanations of names, and with developing what Reventlow calls “the realistic (or historical) allegory”, in which the stories of the gods are considered to be embellished stories of real human beings who left a strong imprint on history. This is also known as euhemerism.

According to Reventlow, Philo borrows from Stoicism the exegetical methods that he brings to bear on the Septuagint. Though Reventlow does not mention this here, it seems to me that the emphasis on etymology by the Stoics produces a happy accident for Philo, as in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Genesis, the names of characters often are etymologically related to their functions in the narrative.

We will look at Philo in the next installment.