Situating Burned Books and Oral Transmission Between Judea and Rome

• In Event: Kinship and Networks in Antiquity

Abstract

In Greco-Roman antiquity, “literary texts are conceived of as immune to material destruction” (Howley 2017). Drawing on recent work on colonial “hybridity,” I suggest that Josephus adopts or transculturates this Greco-Roman discourse in order to assert a distinctively Jewish attitude towards the materiality of text.

Josephus states that the Homeric epics were first transmitted carelessly and without writing, producing a discrepant and unreliable text (C.Ap. 1.12); but when a Roman soldier burned a Torah scroll in a Judean village, it was “as though the whole country had been consumed in flames” (BJ 2.228–31, A.J. 20.115). I suggest that Josephus here takes over and inverts a Greco-Roman discourse that deemphasizes the materiality of texts. Thus he castigates the transmission of Homeric epic as lackadaisical, while underscoring and valorizing the Jewish emphasis on the materiality of Mosaic law.

In order to substantiate this reading, I situate both episodes—Josephus’ account of the burning of the Torah scroll, and of the transmission of Homeric epic—alongside other passages in which the Judean historian emphasizes the importance of writing in the Jewish tradition (C.Ap. 1.1–19, 1.38–42, 1.293, 2.155–56; A.J. 1.118, 4.197, 5.226, 10.106, 20.263). I also situate the two accounts within the context of Second-Temple texts like the Book of Jubilees and the Parabiblical Testaments, which thematize the disruption of writing in narratives of exile and death, miscegenation, scattered speech, and the disordering of the calendar.

In light of these contexts, I suggest that Josephus upholds traditional Jewish constructions of writing and its ruptures, but projects them onto the Greco-Roman cultural heritage as a foil. That is, if Jubilees leverages the narrative of Babel to thematize the disruption of written transmission, Josephus finds a similar theme in his account of the burning of the Torah scroll, and inverts this same theme in his account of the transmission of Homeric epic. In emphasizing the framework of transculturation, my argument thus also bears on the important question of Josephus’ audience.

Author

• Nathan Levine, Jewish Studies (Berkeley)