Vered Noam, Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Parallels between rabbinic literature and the writings of Josephus are a problem: how would the rabbis have known Josephus? On the one hand, we can assume that the rabbis knew Josephus in some form. Either they knew Greek and/or there was an Aramaic Josephus (a claim Josephus himself makes in Jewish War I, 3). Our other possibility is that the shared traditions come from a common storehouse, or “repository” of stories, traditions, and narratives: in its suggestion of an unknown source, this option bears a close resemblance to the famous “Q” document of New Testament criticism.[1] Where it differs is in the lack of an actual reconstruction of this putative text.
The parallels have been noted for as long as the academic study of Talmud and Greek literature has been around, but analytical studies on them are few and far between.[2] From the earliest comprehensive study of these parallels, published in 1867 by Joseph Derenbourg,[3] to the more recent essay by Shaye Cohen, in 1986,[4] there has been very little written: this is why Vered Noam, of Tel Aviv University, has written Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature. Noam’s book is a contribution both to the comparative study of these corpora, as well as the reception history of the Hasmonean dynasty.
Noam has, for a number of years, been part of a group of researchers studying the entire Josephan corpus and its various parallels in rabbinic literature. The resulting volume was recently published in Hebrew by Noam and Tal Ilan.[5] Their conclusions, by and large, have confirmed the second possibility: Noam says that “classic rabbinic literature never used Josephus’ writings, neither in an earlier version nor a later reworking.”[6] This book is a related facet of that larger Hebrew study, focusing only on parallel traditions about the Hasmoneans. Thinking with this putative third source, Noam claims, can even help us to account for the shifting attitudes towards the Hasmoneans that have for so long confused scholars of rabbinic texts.
Noam’s methodology is rigorous, and her findings are important, even if scholars might still disagree on their interpretation. Perhaps the most significant observation surrounds the location of these parallel traditions: all the parallels discussed in this book, at least, exist only in the Antiquities, rather than the War, the Life, or Against Apion.[7] Additionally, Noam identifies them as “closed” narrative units, which, in general, suggests that they are interpolations from an external source into the main narrative of Josephus’ writing. There are other indications of this putative external source, as well: these include the mention of cross-references that never appear again, appeals to an “ancestral tradition” as the source for a story, conformity to a certain pattern, “repetitive resumption” (returning to an earlier sentence after a narrative tangent), and the use of the phrase “about this time,” or κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν καιρόν in Greek.[8]
Noam shies away from firmly positing the existence of a concrete document or text that served as the shared source of rabbinic and Josephan traditions. Rather, she suggests that we conceive of a “pool of traditions,”[9] a shared storehouse of stories and narratives, perhaps containing multiple documents, likely written in Hebrew and Aramaic, to which the rabbis and Josephus both had access. Such a suggestion is tantalizing, especially in light of recent scholarship on the fluidity and plurality of Jewish texts during the Second Temple period—and even beyond this, it is generally a good idea to continually remember that the texts which we are able to access are but a tiny percentage of the texts that circulated at any point in the ancient Mediterranean. That being said, as (some) scholars of Q and adherents of New Philology continually remind us, arguments that rely on the existence of a text that no longer survives, whose onetime existence we can’t even definitively claim, stand on shaky ground. In this light, it makes sense that Noam speaks only about a “pool of traditions.” Indeed, Noam even states that “the various stories considered here reflect different styles and did not originate in a single work or collection.”[10] The possible texts in this pool include an Aramaic chronicle of the Hasmonean dynasty, legends of the Temple, and a corpus that did its best to downplay the rupture between Pharisees and later rulers in the dynasty.[11]
Noam posits that both the rabbis and Josephus were working with the same pool of traditions, and she identifies the various documents from that pool by cataloguing Josephus’ own self-professed reliance on outside source material. These sources, however, are only documented internally in Josephus’ writing. It remains more of an open question, I think, whether or not they ever actually existed as independent texts that might have been available, in some form, to the rabbis. The dominant literary movement in the latter part of the first century CE for authors writing in Greek was the Second Sophistic. While it would be naïve to claim that writing in Greek in this period makes Josephus a part of this movement—and, in fact, he is rarely included in it—we should not dismiss out of hand that he made use of some of the literary techniques and topoi that were growing popular, just as he also made use of earlier Greek historiography, such as Thucydides. What if the changes in style that we might identify as simple reliance on an outside source are, in fact, marks of Josephus’ own participation in a broader elite literary culture? This might place the “pool of traditions” on shakier ground. I don’t know that such possibilities would discount Noam’s arguments completely, and I doubt that they would even be true across the board: but they would necessarily complicate the picture, and force us to question yet again how, exactly, the rabbis accessed these narratives—quite possibly through a combination of Josephan and other texts, rather than simply one or the other.
As if the interrelation of two complicated and difficult-to-read literary corpora were not a heady enough problem, Noam takes on another in her choice of subject matter: the supposed inconsistency present in rabbinic attitudes towards the Hasmoneans. Her solution to this problem sheds significant light on the question of their reception—as suggested by the book’s title, she is able to parse out a variety of attitudes that seemed to change over time. In general, Noam argues (as well as deftly shows), both Josephus and the rabbinic corpus praise the early Hasmoneans, become critical when Jannaeus takes power, and blame the final generation for the dynasty’s downfall.[12] Noam also suggests that the original source of these stories maintains this trajectory, arguing that since it is shared by later literature, such a viewpoint must have been received by both, rather than imposed by later authors and editors. Noam’s presentation of this arc is nothing short of magisterial: while the book left me with more questions than certainty about shared sources, the analysis of how (and why) attitudes changed is utterly convincing.
Noam takes six narrative parallels as her case studies, and these constitute the main body of the book. The scope ranges from military and political (Nicanor’s defeat in chapter 1, the rupture with the Pharisees in chapter 3, the murder of Onias in chapter 6) to the more personal, religious and intimate (John Hyrcanus hearing a heavenly voice in chapter 2, a Hasmonean being pelted with etrogim in chapter 4). All these events were shared and retold in later historiography and narrative, a fact that suggests a wide range of interests operating in the continual retelling of the Hasmoneans’ story. It is in the conclusion that Noam parses out what some of these interests might be, placing them into the broader timeline of the rabbinic movement in late antiquity.
These chapters are fluidly connected, but independently well-constructed: any one of them might serve beautifully as an independent reading assignment on the rabbis and Josephus, or the later history of the Hasmoneans, in an undergraduate classroom. For each chapter, Noam outlines the various sources of the narrative, and even goes into what we can know if the event’s actual historicity: while she says early on that such investigations are not the point of the book, the inclusion serves as a tacit reminder that we can never truly disentangle “history” from its reception—and more than that, we can never truly separate our own reception from that of those who have received before us.
[1] Page 17
[2] Page 10
[3] Joseph Derenbourg, Essai sur l’histoire et la géographie de la Palestine, d’après les Thalmuds et les autres sources rabbiniques. Paris: Impr. Impériale (1867).
[4] Shaye Cohen, “Parallel Historical Tradition in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature,” in Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 4-12, 1985, Division B, Volume 1. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies (1986) 7-14.
[5] Tal Ilan and Vered Noam, in collaboration with Meir Ben Shahar, Daphne Baratz, and Yael Fisch, Josephus and the Rabbis (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press) 2017 [Hebrew].
[6] Page 18
[7] Page 19
[8] Page 21-22
[9] Page 26
[10] Page 196
[11] Page 219
[12] Page 209