All posts by Gildas Hamel

Luke-Acts

Paper topics

In class I spoke briefly about the following topics for the 2d paper on Luke:

  1. An analysis of the way the author presents women from chapter 1 to where we are (chapter 8-9). This entails reflecting upon three areas: the biblical background (as we saw in the author’s presentation of Elizabeth and Mary), the social expectations of the time regarding women, whether from the Greco-Roman or Hellenistic background or the Palestinian side, and finally the practices of the early Christian communities that the author is familiar with and is addressing or reflecting (to change them or support them).
  2. A literary and sociological commentary on one of the healing stories we have seen so far. One may look at the structure of the story proper, its location and role in the larger Lukan framework, the possible imitation of either biblical or Hellenistic models of healing stories, and the author’s use of the story.
  3. Thirdly, a literary and philosophical reflexion on the nature of language, and especially parabolic language, through the study of the parable of the sower in Luke 8.4-15. Isn’t all language parabolic?

Green will be very helpful for the three topics. But the most important source is the Lukan text itself, and your reflections on it.
Please let me know if you have questions (comment button below).

General

Fisk on Egypt, Feb 03, 2011

1 Comment

Please read Robert Fisk’s [commentary on the Egyptian uprising](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-blood-and-fear-in-cairos-streets-as-mubaraks-men-crack-down-on-protests-2202657.html). Terrible turn of events has been triggered, Mubarak’s counter-revolution is on.

Luke-Acts

Parable of the sower

The gospel parables appear to be the mark of a new genre of literature in the Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Near East. It’s not entirely true, see more on this below.

They bring four aspects of life to the hearer’s attention: One, the hidden nature of life, especially in its most commonly accepted aspects. Secondly, its irrevocable dynamism and its urgency (the parables are almost all about urgency: this has often been seen as part of the apocalyptic slant of Jesus and the gospels, but it is wider than this). Thirdly, the event encapsulated in a parable, however small, leads to a definition or re-definition of human relations and justice. Finally, all parables raise the possibility of radical change and reparation.

But first, what constitutes a parable? Is it identifiable by its shape? It would have a distinctive opener, for instance, or a chiastic structure, without firm conclusion, and would be in need of explanation? How would it be different from a simile or an allegory? Does one think immediately of a didactic point, a moral point? But what do we mean by “moral?” A lesson obvious to all, easy to point to and to remember and transmit to others? But then, why speak in parables?

Secondly, is it “self-determined” text, or is it intended? that is, an authorial voice or intention underlies the text.

A short history of the genre

Fables have along history:

  • for instance contest fables in Sumerian and Akkadian, as in the the debate between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk: (unknown no. of lines missing)

    Lines 1-10 The Tamarisk opened his mouth and spoke. He addressed the Date Palm: “My body …. the bodies of the gods. (The reference is to statues of tamarisk wood.) You grow your fruits but someone places them before me like a maid approaching her mistress. You do not provide the measuring vessels. You are …. minor crops, but I …. Your attendants …. before me for you.”
    Lines 11–19 In his anger the Date Palm answered him. He addressed his brother the Tamarisk: “You say: ‘If people build daises for me and beautify them too, they certainly do not swear by the gods before clay (?).’ — You may be the body of the gods in their shrines and people may name with a good name the daises of the gods, but it is silver that can pride itself as the overlay of the gods. …., describe your beauty!”

  • There are fables in Hebrew Bible: Judges 9.8-15 (Yotham); 2 Kings 14.9-10.
  • Parables using humans: there is a small number in the Hebrew Bible, which could all be seen as blame stories (blame mashals), used as legal stratagems:
    • Prophet Nathan and David, 2 Sam 12.1-14
    • the woman of Tekoah, 2 Sam 14.1-20
    • 1 Kgs 20.35-43
    • Isaiah 5.1-7 (see 27.2-6), the song of the vineyard (involving humans and plants): see below.
  • The fact that there are a few parables in the Hebrew Bible as well as in post-biblical Jewish literature means that the form was not borrowed from Hellenistic literature in Palestinian literature. Neither did Jesus invent the form, which would have been borrowed later by the rabbis. Indeed, D. Stern suggests that the small number of texts in this form in the Hebrew Bible and in early post-biblical Jewish literature might be due to “the social status of the literary form” (see D. Stern, Parables in Midrash, p. 187.). It was perhaps despised by a sophisticated scribal tradition writing for narrow audience. In fact, the popularity of the parable or mashal and the social status of its practitioners: popular preachers, may have led to its being discounted by scribes, though one would expect to see traces of this putative contempt or rift.
    The parables attributed to Jesus, then, would be the first extensive, abundant, and socially significant, evidence of a phenomenon that would be quite accepted as a literary form later in Talmudic literature, especially in the Midrashim.

Gospel parables

A list (among many possible lists. Note that it is possible to construct a
list on the basis of formal characteristics. See Via et al, as well as Propp):

1. the Sower: Mk 4.38, 13–20 // Mt 13.3–8a
2. the unforgiving slave: Mt 18.23–35
3. the workers in the vineyard: Mt 20.1–16
4. the lost sheep; lost coin; lost son (Mt / Lk)
5. the good Samaritan: Lk 10.25–37
6. the rich fool: Lk 12.16–21 and Thomas 63
7. the rich man and Lazarus: Lk 16.19–31
8. “parables of wisdom”
9. the unjust manager: Lk 16.1–8
10. faithful servant: Mt 24.45–51
11. the ten maidens: Mt 25.1–13;
12. cf. waiting slaves, Mk 13..34–37 and Lk 1.35–38
13. the two sons (Mt 21.28–32)
14. the friend at midnight (Lk 11.5–8)
15. the unjust judge (Lk 18.2–8)
16. the father’s good gifts (Mt 7.9–11 // Lk 11.11–13)
17. the barren fig–tree (Lk 13.69); other stories of fig-trees;
18. the slave at duty (Lk 17.7–10)
19. the talents (Mt 25.14–30);
20. the pounds (Lk 19.12–27)
21. the weeds in the wheat (Mt 13.24–30, 36–43, Thomas 57);
22. the dragnet (Mt 13.47–50)
23. final judgment (Mt 25.31–46)
24. the great banquet (Lk 14.16–24);
25. the wedding feast (Mt 22.1–14)
26. the wicked tenants (Mk 12.1–12; Mt 21.33–46 // Lk 20.9–19; Thomas 65–66)
27. Parables of the kingdom: growth
28. joy of finding…

The sower, Luke 8.4–8

Why does Jesus speak in parables? To be deliberately confusing? Ex. of Mk 4.1–9 // Mt 13.1–9 // Lk 8.4–8. We move backwards in a “night of time” towards a beginning, to moments of illumination lived at the dawn of language, to a well of being. The nature of life is hidden and tamed from the earliest moment by well-learned images and phrases. Parables are first of all a revelation of life as an gift made with some urgency and that claimed our attention and our response. The image of the sower is at the beginning of parables. I take this to be a serious invitation to consider these initial words in the light of our own lived “dawn of language” as we remember it.

Structure: Jesus is teaching by the sea of Galilee. Note the basic elements: sea, seed, soil, and rock. A great crowd gathers. Luke has no sea of Galilee, no climbing on a boat. The structure of the story in Luke goes something like this:

> The sower went out to sow. It happened that the seed fell:
(1) on (by) the path.
was trampled
birds ate it
(2) on the rock
grows
dries up
(3) in the middle of thorns
grows together
asphyxiated
(4) in good soil
grew
made fruit (x 100)

Still 3 negative soils and a positive one, but with pairs of verbs for each stage.

The interpreter’s goal is to transcend the historical, philological, and theological approaches and take seriously the recent developments in the study of language (Saussure? Jakobson? Austin?). See A.N. Wilder, “Telling from depth to depth: the parable of the sower,” ch. 3 of his Jesus’ Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 89–100.

First of all: How does it echo, what response does it evoke in us (?), in “the original listener,”or ‘reader,” since it becomes text early on and was framed within a particular frame of reference (though this frame would not be necessarily precise, since it is the function of language, esp. poetic language, to construct the frame of reference while giving new power to language).

The parable, according to Wilder, addresses two “deep sounding boards:” first, the relationship of human beings to the earth, but a mediated one, involving tilling, planting, the mystery of “tricking” nature, and its willingness to respond. Two, the effort of human beings to go out of themselves, to take a risk and yet trust there will be a response. How deeply?

At this imaginary level, it would be detrimental to allegorize. There is no need to think of the sower as being the divinity (God: what does this mean?), the “King.” The sower going out and meeting with four types of soil (one being not a soil exactly, the other a pretend-soil, the third a soil with the requisite depth). The parable tells about something deeply felt but differently expressed. The anguish of risking all (sowing is risk-taking; agriculture everywhere, and especially in dry-farming zones, is about trying to reduce risk, by using different crops, staggering, changing plots or exchanging them, etc., and distributing the yield widely), the risking failure is an effort, a conatus, as Wilder says.

It is noteworthy that in the use of the “sowing grain” metaphor, no weeding or hoeing can happen once the field has been sown. The essential work is done, it is hoped that the rains will come in time, and diseases and pests won’t attack the crop.
One just has to wait for the results (a long season). The crop is seen as bounty, miracle, grace. It is perhaps because there has been that period of waiting and worrying, without direct care and in the impossibility of changing the fateful sowing and field?

The mystery of this story is the absence of a middle point, an average yield. The reality of farming was of low averages, precisely because of birds, disease, lack of soil, weed competition. Yet Jesus and successors tap into a basic ground here: the hope, which drives the peasant (anyone) to see plenitude when things work “right,” and celebrate it. Perhaps this is less true of our times of plenty, when we have become experts at seeing rarity everywhere, beginning with our economics textbooks, because enough of us (with power) are in a world of plenty.

The extraordinarily fruitful response (to history? can one conflate the individual and the society at this point, because surely all ancient thinking was organically centered around the group’s needs) takes time. Sowing itself must be done at a certain time in the year, and there is an urgency to it as there is to harvesting and all other possibilities. Growth itself, up to fruitfulness, is long delayed, a theme often taken up in other parables of growth and frustration (see e.g. the story of the fig-tree). In this parable too, the fruitfulness is not only a matter of depth of soil or hearing, it is a matter of patience.

The bird doesn’t sow or “harvest” but just picks as it goes from the path. Agriculture, and so risk and worry, are absent. More on the path: it is trampled, and would be set away from the good soil. There is no process at this point, but also little seed having this fate.

The rocky part of the field—rock ledges on terraced fields all through Palestine—is the area with a little soil, so there is the beginning of germination (and a hope on the part of this uncalculating sower), it takes some time for the grain to germinate, grow, and die. In this respect, one has here more of a loss than before with the birds, because there was some hope of a yield, and it is likely to be a more common situation.

The third type of soil is deep but “thorns” (of several kinds in Palestine, and quite common, as all of agriculture is a struggle with weeds) grow also and take advantage of the richness of the cultivated soil. The thorns and weeds grow together with the good grain and cannot be removed easily. It takes time, right up to the harvest, to realize one gets only “thorns” rather than grain or fruit.

The fourth kind of soil is just right, like the brick house in the story of the three little pigs or the food in the story of the three little bears. The farmer or sower has done his best to ensure its receptivity to the seed. When it gives fruit, it will be in time, and the labor, worry, and long wait will be forgotten while hope will be transformed into joy. An exaggerated joy? Or just the feeling that the abundance of nature is to be celebrated. The sower’s work and inherent risk-taking are forgotten, or rather take their proper place as a service of preparation. The harvest is a miracle. In the seed proper, there is the miracle of something dry that will “fall” and “die” to become another plant that feeds many.

The preceding remarks are based on paying close attention to the concrete situation of the sower: the time factor, the risk and hope versus the plenitude of the harvest, the lack of “average” or middle way when it comes to fruiting.

Allegorizations are possible. Narrowly conceived, i.e. term to term, it is possible to equate the sower with the divinity, the seed with the “word” or Torah, the first soil or path as those too brutish to understand, and the birds as Satan, the second soil as the enthusiasts, the third soil as the worriers and busy bodies, etc., as the gospel does already. Another possibility is to allegorize as previously done the notions of sower, seed, soil, but adding the implicit ideas of risk, time, plenitude, and lack of a middle position or average. The allegory in this case is more open and deals with more dynamic quantities. The parable could be widened to a view of history—assumed by a culture steeped into the Torah, its Exodus story, especially the Deuteronomy and the Prophets—in which the seed or ferment is the word indeed, that is to say, the revelation that has been kept, treasured, sifted and refined (filtered), repeated, and then cast, repeatedly throughout history, and orientates or vectorizes everything. One can’t but respond. The more urgent responses are not necessarily the more fruitful.

[I have to translate this] Toujours à propos du semeur et en continuant à allégoriser: la métaphore de la semence exprime l’idée que la parole constitue l’audience dans l’acte de l’écoute. Là où il n’y a que passage, préoccupations, soucis de mille ordres, il peut aussi y avoir attention, écoute qui peut devenir profonde et donner naissance à une grande générosité. Mais il n’y a pas de milieu. La semence ou se perd ou fructifie. Une fois “mise en terre,” elle ne peut être “capitalisée” ou “mise en réserve.” Ceci est proposé comme métaphore pour toute parole ou tout geste humain, pour la Torah, inspirée de Dieu.

The sower goes out to sow grain. The preparation of the seed and even of the soil is bracketed out, or assumed. Worrying about having enough and a seed of good quality, plowing and composting, weeding, hoeing, for a hoped for harvest, for an eventual return, full and joyous. Home, the room at home is the goal of the voyage. Sowing is an emptying, a casting out of something precious that has been saved (perhaps in spite of hunger), it is a risk, a fateful gesture. On the horizon, there may be the Yizreel of Scripture, not the plain itself, but the stories in which God is the sower of life.

The word for sower is masculine in Aramaic and Greek (a male activity), whereas the earth or soil is feminine. But it is a complex soil, whose complexity is beyond gender, comprising a path, rocks, weeds. The grain falls, though note that grain is never mentioned: Anything can happen. It is the virtue or miracle of grain that, given a little soil and humidity, it will grow, no matter what.

Luke-Acts

Forgiveness and Lk 6.27–38

Shouldn’t we agree with Nietzsche who thought forgiveness doesn’t break the cycle of revenge but rather perpetuates it (quotation?). Nietzsche’s ethics of heroic, generous, managnimous gift-giving would be better. Though this gift-giving looks like another version of ancient philanthropy (or the modern version, with its trickle down counterpart)? For Nietzsche, forgiving is a tool of the weak to have their turn at the levers of power and perpetuate their weakness (they are non-heroes). A contemptible, weasely trick. The weak are not in a position to forgive actually, are they? Doesn’t one need to be in power in order to forgive? All of these are questions I’d like to discuss tomorrow.

Below are a few notes I took when thinking about the way forgiveness works, at least in interpersonal relationships. A very good book on the topic is Vladimir Jankélévitch’s forgiveness (Chicago, 2005).

What forgiveness is not: the hope that the trickling of time, drop by drop, will wear out or efface the fault or offense, as if it were sand and not very consistent. Would that forgetfulness would erode the fault with the memory of it! People will be quick to say, “Time heals” or, “after all, this is how history works…” Id est, violence, injustice, etc., lose their capacity to hurt and be recognized as something that may happen to oneself and become part of the machinery or unfolding of history. Perhaps, as in a misunderstood concept developed by Adam Smith, history too, or the somnolence of time, like the global market, would correct things magically, with the wave of an invisible hand. No anamnesis here, or painful effort to recognize something or someone and at least mark a possible ground for forgiveness. No, rather forgetfulness and a naturalizing of history, that is, the suffering of others, long buried, or to whom one may be indifferent (not recognized).

What forgiveness is not either, to continue with Jankélévitch: an effort to understand all the dimensions and causality of an act, however wicked or offensive, because “tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner” (to understand is to forgive everything). It was a question of knowledge or lack thereof, after all, or simple ignorance. Proper knowledge would have set things right.

Finally, it is not a resetting of accounts either, or an attempt to set the counter back to zero, in a seemingly magnanimous gesture of “letting go”. So for instance the powerful forces behind the ethics/market/psychologizing ways of smoothing personal difficulties in proclaiming a “move on” attitude. No consignment to silence of this kind.

What is forgiveness then? the opposite of this weak hope of “wearing things out”. A confrontation done with some urgency, and a painful remembering, with another person (a person one can hurt, that is essential—see below), not an image or reconstruction of it. It cannot excuse on “rational” grounds. It is irrational to forgive, or must feel so. The gratuity or grace of the act, surely this is a waste, when rationality is about balance, measure, reciprocity, calculations of one’s due. One’s due: no forgiveness without a strong sense of justice, and even without the capacity to inflict punishment, at least on the horizon. No forgiveness if one cannot hurt the other party. On the other side of forgiveness, the recognition that the transformed landscape is as it should be, a new rationality.

Luke-Acts

Luke 6 for Wednesday

1 Comment

For this Wednesday, Luke 6.12–49 and Green 257–81. Volunteers for giving a few comments on the following pages?

  • Lk 6.12–16 and Green 257–60;
  • Lk 6.17–26 and Green 260–68;
  • Lk 6.27–38 and Green 269–75;
  • Lk 6.39–49 and Green 275–81;

Please let me know by entering a comment below. Wednesday, I plan to talk about the position of the Pharisees, teachers of the law, feasting and fasting.

Bible, General, Gospels, Luke

Temptation (Luke 4)

Commentators propose a number of explanations for the presence of the temptation scene in Luke 4. So François Bovon in his massive volumes, who sets it in the difficult, tense context of the pre-66 AD movements in Roman Palestine. As we know from Josephus, a well-informed and hostile witness, many of those movements were messianic and prophetic. It is difficult to distinguish between the two kinds of leadership. This is obvious when reading the gospels, which show evident unease, many years after the facts, when defining the respective roles of John the Baptist and Jesus. See Richard Horsley in numerous publications. The early followers of Jesus had to confront difficult political issues. We have echoes of them in texts from about 50 AD (Paul in his letter to the Galatians especially, as well as the hypothetical Q, and a proto-Mk?), from circa 80 AD (Mt and Lk), and 100 AD (John, Acts). Among these issues, a most fundamental one was display of fidelity, or faithfulness to a people, its institutions (the temple above all), its history (the Torah), its aspirations (to freedom, usually framed messianically). The early version of the story of the temptation was an answer to suspicions expressed regarding Jesus’ messiahship. The story in Q, with its three elements presumably arranged in the order we still have in Matthew, already dealt with the questions regarding the claims made by Jesus followers. It developed early on because it had become important and urgent to separate the understanding of Jesus’ messiahship from that which existed in Palestinian Jewish society.

One can give plausible explanations for why the Q story was kept by the Matthew and Luke gospels, whereas this tradition wouldn’t be interesting for the Mark community, supposing the author of the gospel of Mark had access to the tradition. One can also explain why the gospel of Luke transformed the story (re-arranging the order of the three temptations) in light of the concerns of a post-70 AD Judeo-Greco-Roman context in which political tensions had become even more exacerbated among the Jewish communities. The disaster of the 66–70 defeat was national, political, and religious. Messianic claims did not simply go underground, disguised in new apocalyptic colors, but they also became suspect. The intensity of the discussions is reflected in a passage among several from Josephus which describes the prophetic and messianic figures who arose in the period leading to the war. This well-connected priest had urgent survivalist’s reasons to please his imperial stoicizing, harmony-loving patrons after the Jewish revolt of 66–70. When he writes his account of the Jewish War, at about the time the gospels of Matthew and Luke were composed, he is quick to assume a take-no-prisoners approach:

Besides these there arose another body of villains, with purer hands but more impious intentions, who no less than the assassins ruined the peace of the city. Deceivers and impostors, under the pretence of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, they persuaded the multitude to act like madmen, and led them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance. [Jewish War 2.258–59]

The most suspect claim, from a Jewish community’s point of view in the post-70 period, one imagines, was that attached to Jesus. So, the defense of a messianic view of Jesus became even more concerned with the radical questioning Jewish communities couldn’t but direct at Jesus followers after the complete failure of all messianic movements.

All of this historical re-mapping, I admit, is fascinating but doesn’t get us one bit nearer the themes of the temptation story. It more or less satisfactorily explains its uses in the proximate context of later authors now called Matthew and Luke, or even its earlier context for its use in Q, but it remains a political, historicist analysis. It is story telling of a less inspired kind.

For a more appropriate literary view, better go to Amos Wilder or Gaston Bachelard, for instance the latter’s L’air et les songes. Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (1943). Bachelard, in his third chapter on the imagined fall (“La chute imaginaire”), uses Edgar Poe to examine the knowledge of an ontological fall:

This sensibility, sharpened by the decrease of being, is entirely governed by material imagination. It needs a mutation that turns our being into a less earthly, more ethereal, more variable being, less close to drawn shapes.

= Cette sensibilité, affinée par la décroissance de l’être, est entièrement sous la dépendance de l’imagination matérielle. Elle a besoin d’une mutation qui fait de notre être un être moins terrestre, plus aérien, plus déformable, moins proche des formes dessinées. [Page 126]

Beginning with the spirit—like a dove a few verses before—, continuing with the movement in the desert, the in-a-blink lookover of all the kingdoms of the world, and ending at the top of the temple’s pinnacle and the proposed dream of an unending fall, everything flies in this story. The movement of the dreamy fall itself not only creates the abyss but reminds one of the verticality of things. Only saints know temptation and fall and verticality: isn’t that what defines them? As Caird says in his commentary on Luke, the person who goes to the gate of his garden when there is a bit of weather doesn’t know temptation as does the person who is travelling through the gale, and even more the person who climbs mountains. Speech itself in the story of temptation induces breath and the life-sustaining air to move in new ways.

So, for Edgar Poe who knew the state in which, in our dreams, we glide through the air and struggle with the spirit of the fall (ghost?) who wants us to sink, the power of speech is very near a material power, governed by material imagination.

= Aussi, pour Edgar Poe, qui a connu l’état où, dans nos rêves, nous planons dans l’air, où nous luttons contre l’esprit de chute qui veut nous faire sombrer, la puissance des paroles est bien près d’être une puissance matérielle, gouvernée par l’imagination matérielle. [L’air et les songes 126, his emphasis]

Luke-Acts

Luke 4

Here is a pdf of what I was talking about this morning in class. The readings for Monday are: Luke 5.11 to 6.11 and Green’s pages 227–257.

I mentioned the idea of asking you, the students, to take turns in briefly presenting a few pages of Green in relation to the Luke passage. I need five volunteers for this Monday to be responsible for one of the following passages:

  1. Green 230–35 and Lk 5.1–11;
  2. Green 235–38 and Lk 5.12–16;
  3. Green 238–43 and Lk 5.17–26;
  4. Green 243–50 and Lk 5.27–39;
  5. Green 250–57 and Lk 6.1–11.

My idea is to have everyone take turns to give their reading and understanding of Green and Luke (briefly, not a formal presentation). In regard to grading, it will be part of the participation in class, of course. Any volunteers for Monday? Please let me know by leaving a comment below.
— gildas

General

Bar Kokhba war

Werner Eck, who is professor emeritus at the university of Cologne, gave a talk yesterday at Stanford on the use of epigraphy in assessing the importance of the Bar Kochba war: “Rewriting history from inscriptions: new perspectives on Hadrian and the Bar Kokhba revolt.” He and other scholars in Germany and Israel (Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University) are working on an important epigraphic corpus, the *Corpus inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae*, which has a broad historical, geographic and linguistic scope. It collects inscriptions from the area limited by the southern Negev, northern Golan, the Jordan river, and the sea, in several languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Thamudic, Nabataean, Latin, Greek, Armenian, and probably one or two more that I forget), and spans the period from Alexander to the rise of Islam. The first volume appeared last summer, gathering 704 inscriptions from Jerusalem.

Before I go on about the talk on the particular question at hand and the on-going discussions on the causes of the revolt, its extent, length, intensity, and consequences both for Jews and Rome, let me draw the reader’s attention to the book edited by Peter Schäfer, *The Bar Kokhba War reconsidered: new perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome*, volume 100, Texts and studies in ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr, 2003). In it, there is a chapter by Werner Eck, “Hadrian, the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the epigraphic transmission”, pp. 153–70, which gives the detail of the arguments presented yesterday at the Stanford talk. See also W. Eck, “The bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View”, *The Journal of Roman Studies* 89 (1999): 76–89. In the same book edited by Schäfer, however, there is also an interesting article by Glen W. Bowersock dowsing Eck’s fire: “The Tel Shalem arch and P. Naḥal Ḥever/Seiyal 8”, pages 171–80. Bowersock focuses mainly on the arch and monumental inscription Eck argues were set up in Tel Shalem or near after the war of Bar Kokhba (see below).

Yesterday’s presentation went something like this. Nothing monumental, architecturally or literarily, is left regarding the second revolt. No Arch of Titus (under Domitian), and no Flavius Josephus. The lone literary evidence from the victor’s side comes from Dio Cassius (2d-3d c.), via the 11th c. abridgment done by Xiphilinus:
> In Jerusalem he founded a city in place of the one razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war that was not slight nor of brief duration, for the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites be planted there. While Hadrian was close by in Egypt and again in Syria, they remained quiet, save in so far as they purposely made the weapons they were called upon to furnish of poorer quality, to the end that the Romans might reject them and they have the use of them. But when he went farther away, they openly revolted. To be sure, they did not dare try conclusions with the Romans in the open field, but they occupied advantageous positions in the country and strengthened them with mines and walls, in order that they might have places of refuge whenever they should be hard pressed, and meet together unobserved under ground; and in these subterranean passages they sunk shafts from above to let in air and light. [13] At first the Romans made no account of them. Soon, however, all Judaea had been up-heaved, and the Jews all over the world were showing signs of disturbance, were gathering together, and giving evidence of great hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly by open acts; many other outside nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, almost, was becoming convulsed over the matter. Then, indeed, did Hadrian send against them his best generals, of who Julius Severus was the first to be despatched, from Britain, of which he was governor, against the Jews. He did not venture to attack his opponents at any one point, seeing their numbers and their desperation, but by taking them in separate groups by means of the number of his soldiers and his under-officers and by depriving them of food and shutting them up he was able, rather slowly, to be sure, but with comparatively little danger, to crush and exhaust and exterminate them. Very few of them survived. [14] Fifty of their most important garrisons and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most renowned towns were blotted out. Fifty-eight myriads of men were slaughtered in the course of the invasions and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine and disease and fire was past all investigating. Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate, an event of which the people had had indications even before the war. The tomb of Solomon, which these men regarded as one of their sacred objects, fell to pieces of itself and collapsed and many wolves and hyenas rushed howling into their cities.

> Many Romans, moreover, perished in the war. Wherefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors: “If you and your children are in health, it shall be well: I and the armies are in health.” (Dio Cassius 69.12–14; translation from project Gutenberg.)

The quality of Dio Cassius’ report and judgment are often questioned by modern scholars, however, who think he exaggerated numbers and was poorly informed (without access to the senate archives?) on the conduct of the war and its relative importance. Other literary evidence, Christian or Talmudic, is relatively late and influenced by traditions and opinions which took shape after the events, over a long period (two to three centuries).

The main point of Professor Eck, yesterday and in his publications, is that inscriptions and archaeology, if interpreted *à nouveaux frais* in a systematic, cohesive, and careful fashion, paint a drastic picture which does support the views found in the abridgement of Dio Cassius.

First of all, extra troop levies occurred, and the manner in which they were done indicate the urgency and intensity of the need. Against the custom not to levy troops in Italy, it is clear that there were levies in two of its areas. The only explanation for this highly unusual act must be an emergency situation. So, we have CPL 117: writings by soldiers in the fleet (staffed with peregrines) in 150 reveal that they were originally peregrines who were granted Roman citizenship, presumably because they were transferred from the fleet to other forces (legions). Roman military diplomas are more specific. We know that citizenship was granted after twenty-five years of service in the legions and this was signified by a diploma. Thirty diplomas of this kind, dated circa 160, i.e. twenty-five years after the second Jewish revolt, have been found so far, which is a considerable number if matched to the known survivability rate of diplomas. It is estimated that from 0.5 to 1% of such diplomas have survived from the Roman period. One concludes that approximately 1,300 to 2,600 diplomas were issued. Add to this estimation that not all soldiers lived long enough to obtain the diploma: many more than the estimated number (average: 1,950) must have fought in this war. In conclusion to this kind of evidence regarding the diplomas issued to peregrines serving in the fleet: there must have been a very large gap in the fleet, leading to a large recruitment of *delecti* from one area (Italy). Furthermore, we know that diplomas were also issued for auxiliary troops from Lycia and Pamphilia.

What of command? Tineius Rufus (see Caesarea Maritima) was recalled. Was this because he failed to squelch the revolt? Regarding the recall or use of other officers, Dio Cassius uses the expression “his best generals”, which should be taken seriously, meaning that the plural is significant, though only one is named. Severus indeed was called back from Britain. After the war, *ornamenta triumphalia* were granted to several generals / governors. Scholars failed to relate this known fact, however, to the Bar Kokhba war. In reality, three generals received the triumphal ornaments from a Hadrian who was normally disinclined to give them. Another sign is that Hadrian himself didn’t accept imperatorial acclamations for many years (other emperors had many, Domitian for example). Hadrian eventually accepted an imperatorial acclamation, Eck argues, because he needed this to give in turn the *ornamenta triumphalia*.

Other evidence comes from the caves of Naḥal Ḥever and the coins of Bar Kokhba found in the area he controlled. There is also the question regarding the participation of neighboring peoples in the revolt: an inscription in Thamudic may indicate this, as do the texts found in the Judaean desert. So for instance there is a letter of Bar Kokhba addressed to Soumaios, a Nabataean (almost certainly), who was part of his army. Further evidence of the intensity of the war comes from the numerous hiding places revealed by recent archaeological surveys.

When did the war end? The usual answer is July or August 135, with the siege and fall of Bethar. The common opinion is that Hadrian became *imperator iterum* in the second half of 135 (see article by Eck, mentioned above). But an inscription from Lanuvium (CIL XIV 2088) shows that at the time of its engraving, in 136, the *imperator iterum* or *imp. II* mention is missing. So the war was not over at the end of 135. Eck is of the opinion that it was concluded at the beginning of 136. So, it lasted longer than previously thought.

There is also the matter of the change of name to Syria Palaestina, another sign of the importance of this war. But when did it happen, and at whose request or suggestion? The idea must have come from Greek cities, especially Scythopolis, Eck argues. In 1976, remains of a monumental inscription were found at Tel Shalem. The inscription, in Latin, is written in very large letters, whereas all inscriptions from Scythopolis are in Greek. The letters are 41 cm high and imply a total length of 11 m and height of 2 m. This is very unusual in the Roman world. This massive inscription must have been on an arch near Tel Shalem, 12 km south of Scythopolis. Was it near an army camp? Why there, and erected by whom? Eck proposes that it must have been by Leg X or SPQR, short in any case. According to Eck, this monumental inscription was part of a necessary demonstration by Rome that the disastrous and costly war was over. That it was found near Galilee perhaps means that the fight was even more intense in this area (hiding tunnels found in that area are another piece of evidence).

The demographic impact of the war was very significant (again going with Dio Cassius), and mostly affected the central area of Judaea. There would be a return of Jews eventually, especially to southern Judaea, by the end of the 2d c. but not massive. Jews would settle in other areas such as the coast and Galilee (as we know also from the Mishnah and the Yerushalmi). The economic loss, from the point of view of the Roman empire, must have been considerable also (Evidence??).

General

Homicides in the US

As usual, Bob Herbert puts the latest violence in Tucson, Arizona, in perspective. More than 150,000 murder victims in the US for the twenty-first century so far, one million since 1968, according to his NYT opinion piece. His last paragraph:
> For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners. The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it. The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

The FBI publishes annual information on US homicides. It reports 13,636 murder victims for 2009. But the Disaster Center reports 15,241 for 2009. See the 1960–2009 US crime rate table it puts out, based on FBI Uniform Crime Reports. There were 17,034 murder victims in 2006.

Luke-Acts

Luke 1–2

Here is the document I used this morning in class, but in a better format (PDF). At the end of it are the Josephus text from the Vita, as well as the song sung by Hannah in the story of Samuel’s birth at the beginning of the first book of Samuel, and texts from Exodus and Leviticus which help understand the background to the story of Jesus’ presentation at the Jerusalem temple. I will be adding my notes soon.