Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. DOI: 10.1017/9781139030847. x+353 pp.
They said about Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, that he took up scripture and Mishnah, halakha and aggada, minutiae of Torah and scribal minutiae, arguments a fortiori and synkrisis pros ison, astronomy and geometry, parables of launderers and parables of foxes, the speech of palms and the speech of reeds, the speech of demons and the speech of angels, a big matter and a little matter […] to uphold that which is said (about Wisdom, Prov 8:21): Endowing with wealth those who love me, and filling their treasuries. (b. Bab. Bat. 134a = b. Suk. 28a = AdRN A 14, ed. Schechter 29a)
This tradition, about a legendary prominent Rabbi in the first century, lists a curriculum for exceptional people: scripture and Mishnah, yes, but also astronomy and geometry, angelology and demonology. In the rabbinic imagination, it is clearly meant for exceptional people: the bulk of rabbinic literature concerns itself more with scripture and Mishnah than with fox-parables and talking trees. Angels and demons exist, clearly, but traditions about them and how to get rid of them, are outnumbered by the more rarefied interests of the rabbis (and admittedly only rabbis would care more about minutiae of halakha than about demons).
Annette Reed, in Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, opens a door to a world in which this curriculum is turned entirely on its head: where demons and angels, astronomy and geometry, are at the center of a scholarly enterprise of codifying and organizing knowledge about life, the universe, and everything. Angels and demons are actors in this curriculum as well, revealing important knowledge to exceptional humans. These humans are scribes, whose skill in writing allows them to have this knowledge transcend their own existence. Writing enables the transmission of this heavenly knowledge to other scribes, including the ones creating and copying the literature at the center of Reed’s work.
Reed’s primary focus is the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, a rather small corpus within the Qumran library. Some of these works, like parts of the book that later became 1 Enoch, were known in late antiquity. Others, like the Aramaic Levi Document, found their way to the Cairo Genizah, only to be subsequently forgotten. These works are perhaps the earliest of all Jewish literature not included in the Biblical canon. Reed holds them up as a foundational moment in the history of Jewish knowledge-ordering: the moment when knowledge production such as heurematography (the writing and recording of who discovered what), angelology and demonology, astronomy and medicine, assumed prominence. This moment, sometime in the third century BCE, when the Ptolemies ruled the land known as Yehud or Ioudaia, moved some scribes to begin to reflect on the role angels and demons might play in human history and existence, and, for the first time, to organize this knowledge with lists, narrative, and systematization.
This very description — an attempt to paraphrase Reed — is a novelty. Often, “Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha” are lumped together, studied as a repository of traditions about biblical material and interpretations of it, in the four centuries during which the Second Temple stood. But Reed claims that placing the Bible, a canon whose boundaries were fluid enough to admit the book of Daniel in the second century BCE, at the center of the discussion, blinds us to time-bound dynamics and currents that shaped these works. In her introduction, Reed admonishes us not to follow contemporary canons in our inquiries. “Post-biblical” or “intertestamental” are not useful categories unless your focus is on the Hebrew Bible or the two Testaments. Context, says Reed over and over in the book, matters. And so she offers us this study of one corpus — one of the earliest ones that survived — and it is an impressive example of what we might see if we peer at these exciting new forests, instead of constantly collating trees with those that we know from “our” bibles.
What happened at this moment? Reed points to the Hellenistic empires that strove to acquire knowledge, to systematize it, and to catalogue it in libraries and compendia. This urge was picked up and adopted by a cadre of scribes fluent in Official Aramaic, who — having been put out of the business of imperial bureaucracy since the language of empire changed suddenly to Greek— put their talents to a similar endeavor. (Reed is careful not to use the word “influence,” and hedges often on the nature of this relationship, but the resemblances are there, and they are interesting.) Supernatural actors are not only the subject of these inquiries but also their transmitters, offering the Aramaic works a claim to primacy and authenticity that Greek ones do not. This lends a subversive air to this endeavor: “us” Aramaic scribes know more and have better sources than “those” Greek ones.
The ambit of the book is thus much broader than what Reed makes it out to be in her preface and conclusion: it is not only about the development of Jewish angelology and demonology — it is about the first stage of a long and complex encounter between Jewish scribal élites and the reflective knowledge of the Greek-speaking world writ large. The systematic inquiry into angels and demons, as well as into the stars and the planets, are products of this encounter. In some places local knowledge was translated into Greek — think of figures such as Berossus and Mantheo, and of the Septuagint — and in others, Greek knowledge was cast into the narratives and modes of transmission of local scholarly élites.
The book is divided into five chapters: the first lays the groundwork for the book by offering two overviews: one of the image of God, angels and demons, in the Hebrew Bible, and a description of scribal techniques used in ancient Israel to preserve and create memories, most notably lists. This provides readers with the requisite tools to understand all three components of the title — angels, demons and writing — in their various roles in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter is a reflection on what changed in the second temple period which prompted a creative outpouring of interest in angelology or astronomy. Reed rejects the usual theological explanation of divine distance (an easy cop-out if there ever was one) in favor of a cultural revolution born of the Ptolemaic period, in which we find “Hellenistic-era Jewish scribes newly asserting their own authority” (114). The Aramaic Dead Sea scroll corpus features, for the first time, first-person claims to total knowledge by scribes (mythical ones, yes, but scribes). Reed finds intriguing parallels for this in the Hellenistic authors Berossus (who wrote in Greek about Babylonian lore) and Ps.-Eupolemus (who did the same for Jewish traditions).
Chapters 3 and 4 are each studies of a different text embedded in the late ancient compendium 1 Enoch and offers both a genealogy of the work itself and a comparison with a different contemporary corpus. Chapter 3 focuses on the Astronomical Book, using Aratus’s Phaenomena as a comparand; chapter 4 focuses on the Book of the Watchers, using what Reed terms “practical efforts […] to combat demonic forces,” i.e. psalms of protection, as a comparand. In both cases, says Reed, knowledge — about demons, about planets and stars — becomes a privileged object of inquiry, systematization and narrative in a certain time and place.
Chapter 5, shows, through a careful reading of Jubilees just how different its concerns are from the earlier Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers. Jewish pride supplants scribal pride; Hebrew regains new prestige and standing over Aramaic; demons are now associated with gentiles; time management is a new concern, as are practical matters of Torah observance. Jubilees and the Aramaic Qumran corpus are so different: by the time I finished chapter 5, I wondered why Second Temple Literature could even be thought of as a thing.
What I did understand however was another rabbinic tradition: that the early sages were called “scribes” (b. Kid. 30a). Finding the precise thumbprint of these scribes in later Jewish tradition has been a hobby of scholars of Rabbinics for generations. Reed’s book highlights what might be finally termed a true period of the scribes: a time during which literature was produced not only by scribes but about them and for them, highlighting their special status and privileged lineage. Far from the text-critical function the rabbis attribute to them, these scribes were creative and cosmopolitan, creating brave new worlds that had existed forever. To lift a statement out of context: “the scribes created a new thing” (m. Kel. 13:7).
The book is built on a broad foundation of secondary literature and primary research, in which Reed is fluent and expert, and which she explains encouragingly to her readers. She cites generously, acknowledging her agreements, disagreements, and influences often and in the body of the text. The book creates the impression of being built on many layers of other research, reflecting a true appreciation of scholarship as a collective and cumulative effort. Its tone is collegial and friendly even when it disapproves of certain ideas, and when patiently explaining others.
Reed offers two paradigm shifts that future scholarship will need to contend with: first, we should stop talking about “Second Temple Literature” and start thinking about smaller, time-bound corpora and their relationships both to each other and to their contexts. Biblical interpretation cannot (just) be excerpted out of its context and served up next to similar excerpts. Second: Jewish angelology and demonology are not the legacy of the Jewish “Barbarian” past. Rather, they came into being in close contact with, if not under the influence of, Hellenization. They are the first stage of an attempt at an authentically Jewish “science.” This is thus a landmark for the study of so many fields: the Aramaic Qumran corpus, Enochic literature, the Jewish literature produced in the Hellenistic period, angelology, demonology and magic. Reed also offers novel ideas about the emergence of halakha. The result is broad and all-encompassing as it is textually rigorous.
Amit Gvaryahu is a fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University In Jerusalem.