The “Original Fragments” of the Bible and Homer:
Friday and Saturday February 16 and 17 at UC Davis
Paper titles, presenters, and abstracts
Curious readers have long wondered how the traditions of early Greek and Hebrew literature were transformed, reinvented, and even falsified by the people who transmitted them to us. Historically informed reading between the lines and against the grain suggests that our classics had a very different past than the ones they themselves present. This emerges if you just count the number of tribes of Israel (Judah, later the most famous one, doesn’t even appear in what is probably the oldest list, Judges 5). It becomes even clearer if you look at their religious loyalties, which are complex, shifting, and polytheistic–hardly a monolith. Similar patterns appear in the diverse cultures behind the mythic narrators of the most famous Greek poetry, “Homer” and “Hesiod,” who never quite considered themselves Greek. But what can we plausibly know about the “pre-Classical” nature and origins of these Western Classics, and what can they teach us?
After immersion in Pentateuchal scholarship and the histories of ancient Near Eastern literary formation, reading Joel Christensen’s incisive overview of some analogous issues in Classics, “99 Homeric Problems,” I was intrigued and, frankly, encouraged by the realization that Homer and the Bible have raised provocatively parallel questions for scholars themselves: researchers in these two fields have long been intrigued by very similar problems. The famous “Homeric Question” corresponded to a parallel biblical “Mosaic Question” about the nature and origins of Hebrew literature.
Without artificially homogenizing two sets of ancient literature with sharply distinct literary forms (in Greek, poetic epics vs. in Hebrew a heterogenous library including narrative prose, law, and poetry) and contexts of production (a local festival at Athens vs. a spectrum of sites in the Levant including royal courts and temples and later scholarly production) I see the questions as today raising four shared issues: 1) they are inherently multicultural works, in their nature, “not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.” 2) They are inherently multi-local works, with a range of contexts and audiences being forged (in both the generic and pointed senses) into one. What puts an edge on these questions is a problem that scholarship can neither resolve nor responsibly let go of: the facts that: 3) they are both rooted in a pre-Classical period of formation that spans between about 800-300 BCE but is only available to us in glimpses and fragments and 4) in their very linguistic form they represent vernaculars being monumentalized and standardized in order to shape the cultural, spatial, and chronological diversity into a desired unity.
While both the Homeric and Mosaic or biblical questions were shaped by their environment in scholarly exchange between the 18th and 19th centuries, they originate in a profound shared problem, the fact that both come to us as Classics, things certain types of people are supposed to know. Yet the texts themselves were formed in an unevenly documented pre-Classical context, intended to speak to a type of audience that is now lost. Their monumentalization had a shaping effect on Western European self-concepts via the paradigmatic opposition between “Athens” and “Jerusalem.”
This workshop is a way to brainstorm about what sorts of things we can take from the pre-Classical phases and conceptualize in order to move forward. Are there more illuminating ways to compare and conceptualize these literatures’ stages and periodizations? What are productive new ways to think about what we can say and what we should be asking?
Parallel Homeric and Mosaic Questions:
- Multicultural works
Scholars agree on the internal diversity of early Greek and Hebrew literature, indicating a variety of locales and variant versions. There is agreement on the diversity of contents in these traditions including early Iron Age and even Late Bronze Age cultural material, culturally ‘impure’ in the sense that these traditions first appear in geographically and culturally distant forms: “The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.” - Multilocal works
Both early Hebrew and Greek literature have local allusions being forged (in both bland and pointed sense) into unity, as in the constantly shifting tribes of Israel (with the earliest list in Judges not even including the later dominant Judah), the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah retroactively reimagined as one “Israel,” or multiple Greek sites that are later assimilated under a panhellenic “Athens.” - A Mostly Undocumented Formation, the period of which spans from the early to late first millennium BCE Mediterranean.
Both within a rough 800-300 year timeframe of undocumented preclassical/precanonical (where the Judean exile and the Peisistratid period represent an early cutoff for many though not all scholars) - The Problem of Monumentalization and Nationalization.
Was the Peisistratean Recension a charter myth or a historical event? By contrast what is the legacy of the once dominant, then lost and exiled kingdom of Israel in Judah’s bible, which narrates the story of a primordial people of Israel retroactively, in a language variety we know they never spoke? If the texts are inherently multicultural in origin, why do they exert such a gravitational pull after their canonization (or through it) towards homogeneity? Named after two of the prime sites of their homogenization, the contrast between ‘Athens’ vs ‘Jerusalem’ has become a rigid philosophical or theological paradigm, opposing reason to revelation and critical inquiry to religious inspiration. Can we turn this fixed paradigmatic opposition back into an open historical question?
sethlsanders 