Jewish Authors Writing in Greek: How and What They Learned During the Hellenistic and Early Roman Periods
Caruthers II, Rodney
2019
Abstract
Innovative kinds of Jewish narrative in Greek began to flourish during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Traditional Jewish literature was reworked and expanded, often with features that reflected Hellenistic writing practices, and new accounts were also created. The production, genre, function, and authority of these texts, however, is difficult to determine because of the lack of explicit evidence or descriptions for how they originated. Most scholars agree that Jews learned Greek rhetorical techniques in their writings, but questions remain about which specific rules were followed, under what circumstances they were learned, and what this tells us about a text’s status. This study seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing the educational curriculum by combining narrative comments from classical and Jewish authors and writing exercises. The nuance of the study is that the reconstruction is based on the author’s perspective; that is, how writers (such as Philo, Josephus, Theon, and Quintilian) from roughly the same time periods experienced and understood composing narrative. These sources describe the instructions students learned as well as what they thought or expected about writing Greek narrative, which was not always included in school exercises. The comparison of classical and Jewish authors is diachronic and represents multiple locations, which offers a panoramic view of education. Additionally, how writers thought about the content of their work is deduced from collective comments about literary research, manipulating texts, and the inclusion of supernatural or embellished material. The results of this project help to explain how Jewish authors learned to write Greek (e.g., specific rules, stage in curriculum, and location), how it functioned, and what its authority was in several ways. First, the historical background to pre-Hellenistic Jewish education showed how merging cultural patterns from surrounding nations, such as Egypt and Babylon, set a precedent for how they assimilated educational and writing practices under the Achaemenid and Greco-Macedonian empires. Second, education during the Hellenistic period showed which Jewish and Greek institutions were available to students. Students were taught Torah and Hebrew grammar, while simultaneously studying Greek language or attending the gymnasium. Third, the study showed how “narrative” as a modern genre does not reflect the ancient conception. To prevent miscasting narrative using modern analysis, it should be viewed through ancient categories, which saw it as a broad designation that included multiple subgenres, writing styles, elements, and expectations. Instead of examining the content, status, and function of a Jewish narrative (e.g., Joseph and Aseneth) according to modern conventions, we can now evaluate whether it agrees with ancient styles, authorial intentions, and rhetorical practices. When a Jewish text aligns with features of Greek narrative, it makes it plausible that the author learned the same rules and had similar expectations. One expectation, usually expressed in the introduction of a text or defined in writing exercises, is that narrative had a didactic function. Lastly, a comparison of authors’ comments about narrative literature showed that it was dependent on the author’s reputation, their belief in divine mediation, or a text’s reception history. The case studies on Philo’s De vita Mosis and the Letter of Aristeas, offered practical examples of how compositional education could be applied to explain writing techniques, as well textual variants. Reconstruction of compositional education helps to improve our understanding of the production, function, authority and interpretation of narrative texts during this formative period.Subjects
Jewish Education Composition Writing Jewish Narrative Greek Narrative Second Temple Hellenistic
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