Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period
Preface to Volumes V and VI
IN THE FIRST THREE volumes of this series we reviewed the data of Jewish art (except for the Old Testament paintings of Dura) and saw that they presented a new problem. Jews had borrowed a vocabulary of pagan symbols which they mingled with their own symbols of menorah, shofar, and the rest in such a way as to make it seem inevitable that the pagan symbols were as meaningful for the Jews who used them as were the Jewish ones.
The phenomenon was not local, for it appeared with amazing uniformity in almost every place from Rome to Mesopotamia where Jewish remains were found at all.
It was not a phenomenon of a few paganized Jews or a small sect, for these symbols appear not only in wide geographical distribution, but on almost all official Jewish structures, such as synagogues and catacombs.
Since many of the symbols appear also on amulets with Jewish divine or human names, amulets which seem for the most part made for Jewish use, there is strong suggestion that the forms had operative power and were not mere decoration.
The conclusion is thus beyond debate that this vocabulary of forms was an integral part of the Judaism of the Roman world, though at the end of Volume III I left open the question of whether it was more than a decorative vocabulary.
The phenomenon, in itself indisputable, raised the question which the first three volumes only defined as a problem: what this art, and especially the pagan borrowings, implied for the Jews who used it.
As a thesis I suggested in those volumes that the borrowed symbols showed the Jews to have been deeply affected by the sort of mystic and eschatological hope which the same symbols indicated for paganism and Christianity.
I hoped to give evidence in the later volumes to support this thesis. My more intelligent reviewers took the attitude that we should have to see in these later volumes whether I made my case.
Others, of course, at once said with finality that I had or had not done so.
The first task in appraising the art forms was obviously to see what light the literary sources of the period could give us.
There are a variety of ancient Jewish writings, but virtually only one body of them come from the period when most of the designs were made.
The writings of Philo, as well as the bulk of the so-called apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books, were apparently composed during the first century before or the first century after Christ, while the archeological material suggests that the public use of pagan symbols began really in the second century and that most of the material is from the third to the fifth centuries.
From these centuries we have a few Jewish mystic documents, or references to such documents, but none of them is at all satisfactory for showing the general trends of Judaism in the period.
The great documents—and a great literature they truly constitute—were written by the rabbis. So true is this that modern Jewish historians of the period have largely described the Judaism of those years on the basis of rabbinic writings. 4
In setting out to answer the question put by the art remains, accordingly, I had to begin Volume IV by examining what the rabbis had had to say on the subject of art.
Here we at once met with disappointment. A few rabbis had given grudging permission to make some sorts of art objccts, “had not stopped them,” but the whole weight of rabbinic judgment had been much against artistic representations, and we accordingly had to conclude that the initiative in such borrowing would never have come from them and that most of them would have thought it blasphemy.
Our problem is: What sort of Jews could have borrowed these art forms—art forms, indeed, especially associated with pagan gods and their cults—and why did Jews want them?
When we try to explain a movement in history, we are looking for the source of initiative, not for passive observers.
And this, at most, is what the negative statements of the rabbis, or their silences, would make them.
Furthermore the inscriptions show that throughout the Roman world, even for the most part in Palestine, the language of Jews was Greek (later, in the West, Latin): they had lost Hebrew and Aramaic so early that the Septuagint had been begun at least in the middle of the third ccntury b.c.
The rabbis had recognized the necessity of providing a second Greek translation when the Christians appropriated the Septuagint, but they had never made any attempt to translate their own writings.
The talmudic life of the Jews of medieval and modern times was possible only through knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic.
These languages the Jews of the Roman world did not have.
There seemed no reason to suppose, therefore, that the Jews who made the monuments must all have been guided by the rabbis and their writings.
Yet it is quite as unjustified to jump at once to Philo, the apocrypha, and the pseudepigrapha and to treat their ideas as authoritative for these hidden Jews.
To be sure, the writings of Philo are at least in Greek, and I am sure that they are not so isolated from the thinking of other Jews as many scholars insist who do not like to face their implications for either Judaism or Christianity.
But one of my most sympathetic reviewers said that I “consider Philo the principal teacher of the hellenized Jews throughout the Greco-Roman era.
His books, written in Greek, were in a sense the scriptures of the literate hellenized Jews who derived their knowledge of the Bible and the Law from his works.”
If I am giving that impression I want earnestly to correct it. As my publication continues, it will be explained why I believe that Paul and the authors of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Fourth Gospel cannot be understood apart from Philonic conceptions, but I see no reason to suppose that any one of the three had ever read a line of Philo’s writings.
Similarly the biblical allegory of Justin Martyr is clearly Philonic, but I could never believe Justin had worked with texts of Philo.
I feel the same to be probably true of hellenized Jews throughout the Roman world.
I turn to Philo because he is a palpably existent product of hellenistic Judaism and by and large except for the archeological monuments palpably the only one.
But Philo is the product of the hellenization of Jews, not the creator.
There is not the slightest reason to suppose that his writings were ever official for hellenized Jews, and it is a great question even how representative of them as a whole Philo was.
Clearly his writings cannot be supposed to give us all the facets of the Jewish thought and life in the Greco-Roman diaspora from 300 b.c. to a.d. 600.
The life of business, family relations, synagogue organization and worship, ethical standards, the forms of observing the Sabbath and the Festivals—these are a very small number of aspects of Jewish life about which Philo tells us almost nothing, certainly nothing which we can at once transfer to Jews in Rome and Tunisia.
Actually the monuments do not tell us about these things either, and any picture of the Judaism which lay behind the monuments must remain largely incomplete.
If I tried to answer all the questions people would like me to answer about these Jews, and that I should like to answer, I would leave my data, the archeological data, far behind indeed.
One of my most acute reviewers complained that, as he could see it in the first three volumes, my picture of hellenized Judaism was “oversimplified.”
This is like pointing out that we need iron for our civilization and complaining that in a copper mine we find only copper.
The picture of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world that finally will emerge from this study is still fluid in my own mind, and I shall attempt to formulate it only when I have completed a study of the material and its implications.
But I warn the reader at once that from a group of symbols primarily funerary and mystical in their origin the whole of the life of these Jews can never be inferred.
If I can get only copper from this mine, however, I propose to get all the copper possible.
We shall do this by using all the Jewish literary evidence of any kind that I can control.
I warn the reader again that the symbols, themselves largely borrowed from mystic and funerary hellenism in its later forms, will over and again find their most congenial association with ideas in hellenistic Jewish sources.
This does not seem strange to me; but I hope it will not appear to the careful reader that I am forcing the material into Philonic pigeonholes.
It is only that repeatedly he and later Jewish mystics will be found saying things which fit the mystic and funerary symbols.
The process is like that of fitting a formula to a curvc. From many experiments in ballistics, for example, one can get a series of dots representing what happens in a gun as one increases the charge exploded within it.
These dots can be joined in a curve, and then the mathematician sets to work to find out what kind of mathematical formula will, when plotted, produce a similar curve.
In that way the rough beginning of a science of ballistics, the physical laws of the phenomena, can be first envisaged.
In this study we are similarly at the crude beginnings, with a body of data we want to explain. We must fit literary material to it as we can.
It will be a great advance step if another scholar can show that I have ignored a body of rabbinical material which in spirit fits these mystic-funerary borrowings from Greco-Roman art better than the material which often seems to me to be closest to it.
But I have examined the field extensively enough to doubt that such a body of material exists within strictly rabbinic tradition.
Some of my Jewish reviewers have protested against my distinguishing between Cabbalists and the rabbinic tradition, and have pointed out very properly that the Cabbalists were all very observant halachic—that is, legalistic—Jews.
With this I agree fully, but my sense of the contrast between Cabbalism and rabbinic tradition proper is one I was taught by Jews themselves.
For although the Jewish mystics have been legally observant, most of the legalistic rabbis have not been mystics and have not liked mysticism.
Within Judaism the mystic tradition is as anomalous and as persistent as it is within Catholicism, where the Church has canonized many of its mystics but the parish priest and local bishop have rarely encouraged mysticism, or practised it.
Mysticism and the cabbalistic writings have just as rarely been standard training in the Ycshivahs. Indeed, the very scholar who in a review protested that I had contrasted rabbinic and mystic Judaism too strongly, himself said exactly what I had in mind: “What the Rabbis opposed were the extremes of mysticism.
They did not bestow sainthood on men who assumed that they saw visions or heard heavenly voiccs, or communed with the Infinite, or sought escape from life.
They preferred to call those men saints who sanctified the routine details of life, who retained respect for the human mind in striving for the Infinite.”
This list of mystic activities and aspirations contains precisely what I meant in saying that the rabbis as a whole did not like mysticism.
A scholar has to talk about types of religious experience, and the legalistic and mystical types are, as types, quite different.
That they are many times combined in individuals is perfectly true. In the great majority of cases, however, these two are not combined; indeed most legalists regard mystics with disfavor.
It is therefore interesting that in Jewish literature it is for the most part the Cabbalists along with the hellenists whose “curve” approximates the curve of the data.
Occasionally we found that rabbinic tradition fitted the curve beautifully, as in the rabbinic interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac.
But usually it is the mystic literature which fits it best.
From all this we return to the fact that although we must expect many things which we find in rabbinic and mystic literature to “fit” the data, the “curve” itself is a simplification set by the archeological data themselves.
Generalizations for the Judaism of the time as a whole can be made from any Jewish documents only as they harmonize with the archeological remains, since except for the Bible we have not a single written work that we know Jews were then universally reading.
We know that the Jews of the Empire were loyal Jews, living as observantly as they could by the Bible in Greek translation and by local legal traditions, since otherwise they would not so painstakingly have preserved their identity, built their synagogues, and buried one another in graves marked with Jewish symbols.
But were they loyal Jews as Philo was a loyal Jew, or as Akiba—or as the apocalyptists, or in still some other sense?
To try to get an answer to such a question from the monuments we had obviously to go on in Volume IV to construct a methodology of studying symbols in transition from one religion to another.
It was suggested that borrowed symbols keep a basic value, what we should often call an emotional value.
If a new religion that takes in foreign symbols is to keep its identity and not simply merge with the other religion from which it borrows, it must reject the mythical background in terms of which the old religion had explained those values.
The new religion must give the old symbols a new explanation—that is, a new mythological background and nomenclature from its own store.
A reader beginning with these volumes should by all means go back to read the second chapter of Volume IV, where this matter is more fully expounded.
For the general task of the present series of volumes is to see how far this hypothesis will help in understanding the Judaism expressed in the borrowed symbols.
We had to begin, in the rest of Volume IV, by studying the symbols on graves, synagogues, and the like which were not borrowed at all but had recognizably been taken from Jewish cult: the candlestick (menorah), the Torah shrine and scroll, the ethrog and lulab from Tabernacles, the shofar or ram’s horn from the New Year and the Day of Atonement, and a peculiar shovel, apparently one for ashes or incense.
In the present volumes we are now at last ready to consider the borrowed symbols themselves, and we begin with symbols of food: fish, bread, and wine.
These constitute a transition from the symbols of the fourth volume to those in the volumes which follow, for while the symbols examined in Volume IV are distinctively Jewish in nature and origin, the symbols we shall study later are obvious invasions from the outside, usually from Greco-Roman civilization, especially in its eastern forms.
Between these stand the three symbols we consider here, food symbols which in form of representation are borrowed but which refer to common materials of eating and drinking certainly not used by the Jews for the first time at this period. The question of this volume then is:
Why did Jews suddenly want to put symbols of fish, bread, and especially wine on their graves and synagogues, and what did they tell themselves and one another when they did so?
As I have tried to answer this question I have received help from many friends.
My research assistants contributed much to the preparation of these two volumes, chiefly Miss Beatrice Goffe and Mrs. Claude Lopez. Mrs. Katherine Sohler and my wife also took turns in the work.
As to help I had from other scholars, it is useless to rehearse all the names listed in previous volumes, but I must again mention my colleagues in the Departments of Classics and of the Near East, and Leon Nemoy, of the Yale University Library.
When we were in Egypt in 1951, everyone was most
helpful. I must name especially Alexandre Piankoff as well as the staffs of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Chicago House in Luxor. Charles Nims, of the latter group, spent days with us in the Theban tombs and the temples of Luxor and Karnak.
Pahor Labib, of the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo, similarly devoted himself to our interests.
For this volume and those which will follow, Miss Edith Porada and the officers of the Pierpont Morgan Library have provided many valuable photographs.
I should like again to thank the Soncino Press, London, for permission to quote from their translations of Hebrew texts; I have done so freely in these volumes.
I am also indebted to the following publishers for quotation from the works indicated: Cambridge University Press, for J. H. Bernard, The Odes of Solomon; Bloch Publishing Co., New York, for S. Singer, The Standard Prayer Book; Longmans, Green, New York, for S. A. B. Mercer, Pyramid Texts; Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Rome, for Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature; Princeton University Press, for James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts; and Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, for E. A. W. Budge, The Book of the Dead.
The two scholars to whom I have dedicated this book have done me immeasurable service, though they will disapprove of many things I say and leave unsaid.
The Bollingen Foundation has continued to be extremely helpful.
Those who think the scholar a lone wolf, or a dweller in a private tower, little know how deeply social a product he and his work must always be.
As before, acknowledgments for illustrations reproduced in these volumes will be found in the footnotes, at the pages indicated in the Lists of Illustrations; and likewise in the footnotes, acknowledgments for textual quotations. ~Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, Page vii-xi
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