When Blood Cries: Abel and the Appeals of the Dead

I've been waiting a long time to work a Prince allusion into a blog title.  You might recall from Sunday school that after Cain kills his brother in the book of Genesis he decides to play dumb. Unfortunately for him, YHWH finds out about the crime, and confronts him during their little post-murder interrogation: "What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground." (Gen 4:10)  

One of the fascinating things about the history of interpretation is that one little verse can give rise to a rich and varied tradition.  When we look at later Jewish and Christian literature we see that YHWH's claim that Abel's blood cried out from the ground inspired some sacred speculation about Abel and the postmortem cries of the murdered and the martyred.  For instance, in 1st Enoch 22 the antediluvian visionary Enoch gets a tour of the abode of the dead by an angelic docent.  While there are some difficulties with the text as we have it, the gist is this: the souls of the dead are being kept in hollows/caves carved into a mountain in the west.  Unlike popular Protestant conceptions of the afterlife, the souls of the dead are not divided into two realms with the righteous souls ascending to heaven and the unrighteous descending to hell.  Instead, all souls go to the same non-heavenly realm where they are placed into four (or three?) bins for safekeeping until judgment day.  When traveling towards judgment you can fly first class, business class, coach, or be neatly stowed in the baggage compartment.  Kensky compares this intermediate state to a jail, where prisoners are kept during trial, which is different from prison where they get sent after sentencing (the final judgment).  

While surveying the mountain Enoch notices something interesting, which he asks Raphael to explain for him:

"There I saw the spirit of a dead man making suit, and his lamentation went up to heaven and cried and made suit.  Then I asked Raphael, the watcher and holy one who was with me, and said to him, 'The Spirit that makes suit -- whose is it -- that thus his lamentation goes up and makes suit unto heaven?'  And he answered me and said, 'This is the spirit that went forth from Abel, whom Cain his brother murdered.  And Abel makes accusation against him until his posterity perishes from the face of the earth, and his posterity is obliterated from the posterity of men." (22:5-7)

Leaves on a Tree: Homer and Ben Sira on Human Mortality

What does Jerusalem have to do with Ionia?  

At the moment my research focuses on the influence of Homer's epics, particularly the Iliad, on early Jewish literature.  While there continues to be academic disagreement over the extent of Greek literary influence on some early Jewish texts, it is indisputable that some ancient Jewish writers read/heard the blind bard's epics and allowed his voice to echo off the nooks and crannies of their own works. (See, for example, my earlier notes on Theodotus and Sosates).  One passage where there has been some scholarly agreement on Homeric influence is Ben Sira 14:18, which scholars like Th. Middendorp, R.A.F. MacKenzie, Benjamin Wright, Martin West, and Jack T. Sanders believe is influenced in some way by Iliad 6.146-149.  Check out the similarities between the two texts:

     

Ben Sira 14:18 (MS A)

 {כפרח עלה על עץ רענן / שזה נובל ואחר גומל {צומח

כן דורות בשר ודם אחד גוע ואחד גומל

“As leaves grow upon a green tree, Whereof one withereth, and another springeth up;

So of the generations of flesh and blood, One perisheth, and another ripeneth.” (Schechter and 

Taylor, XXX)

Baby Bear will be your master: climate and ethnocentrism in the Greco-Roman world and Jubilees

Kids who grow up on dull children's programming like Dora the Explorer or Bob the Builder don't know what they're missing out on.  Back in the day parents used to tell their children wonderful stories about trespassing little girls who stole strangers' food and nearly got themselves eaten by ursine homeowners.

In the ancient world there was a belief that physical environments shaped the people who lived within them.  The physical, social, cultural, and political characteristics of entire people groups could be explained based on the climate and terrain of their homelands.  Some writers in Greco-Roman antiquity argued that harsh and mountainous terrains created tough warriors, while flatter areas with nicer terrains created soft people who naturally ended up in servitude to others.  There's a particular strand of this tradition that I like to call the "Goldilocks climate."  Some writers argued that some regions were extremely cold and other regions were extremely hot, and that the peoples in these climates exhibited an extreme set of strengths and an extreme set of weaknesses.  Greece (for Greek writers) or Rome (for Roman writers) was in the center of the world and therefore had the perfect blend of hot and cold.  This meant the peoples of Greece or Rome exhibited the strengths of those in the extreme regions, but without the accompanying weaknesses.  This of course made them perfectly suitable for ruling the world.  Aristotle had this to say:

The Jewish Homer

The blind bard, not Simpson.

Hisdem temporibus Sosates cognoscebatur ille Ebraicus Omirus in Alexandria.  (Excerpta Latina Barbari, 278)

There are all sorts of seldom studied texts from the medieval world, and sometimes scholars find fascinating nuggets tucked away in such writings.  In an article published in 1981, Shaye Cohen alerted scholars to one of these nuggets (it had been noted by some scholars before, but Cohen really put it on the academic radar).  In a 7th/8th century Latin translation of an earlier (5th or 6th century) Greek work, we find the line quoted above, which Cohen translates as: "At this same time Sosates, the Jewish Homer, flourished in Alexandria." (391)

The Epic of Theodotus

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries some brave and adventuresome souls began to experiment with mixing peanut butter with other food stuffs, including oranges, mayonnaise, and cream cheese.  In a bold act whose specific origins have been lost, someone combined peanut butter with jelly on a sandwich, and from this act of culinary syncretism an American staple was born.  (The first published reference to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was in 1901)

Much like food, fascinating things happen when cultures collide.  It can be a wonderfully messy business, as stories and styles combine to form something entirely new.  The Epic of Theodotus illustrates this well.  Written by a Jew possibly in the 2nd century BCE, this text retells stories of the Jewish patriarch Jacob and his family in the language and style of Greek epic.  Like the blind bard Homer, the Epic is written in Greek hexameter and uses Homeric vocabulary.  Interesting, right?  This is just one of many examples of Jewish writings from the Greco-Roman period that synthesized Jewish and Greek traditions and cultural expressions in creative ways.