Publication Preview: Hellenistic Jews and Consolatory Rhetoric

Christine R. Trotter. Hellenistic Jews and Consolatory Rhetoric: 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Thessalonians, and Hebrews. WUNT 2/600. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023.

I began research for this book captivated by the idea of joy in suffering, a widely shared ideal in the ancient Mediterranean, espoused, for example, by the prophet Habakkuk, the author of 2 Maccabees, Jesus, Seneca, Paul, and Plutarch. Of course, these individuals disagree regarding why one ought to rejoice in suffering. In my mind, that is the beauty and complexity of ancient consolatory rhetoric. While ancient Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Christians often agreed concerning how a person should behave in adversity, they justified their prescriptions according to their various worldviews. In other words, they employed different consolatory arguments towards the same aim of guiding people out of grief and into joy. As my students discovered last year when analyzing modern sympathy cards, this process of adopting and adapting received wisdom about how to effectively comfort someone continues today.

In my initial stage of research, I cast the net wide, seeking answers to how ancient Jews and Christians consoled persecuted or bereaved audiences and attempted to persuade them to rise above their challenging circumstances. I read voraciously, traversing the Bible, Pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic Jewish literature, Greco-Roman literature, the papyri, and early Christian writings. I delighted in the sermons, consolatory letters, and commentaries of church fathers like Cyprian, Tertullian, Jerome, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, and Theodoret of Cyrus. These men were trained in consolatory rhetoric and could seamlessly combine the methods used by their non-Christian counterparts with models drawn from the Bible. Because of their education and shared culture, they could identify consolatory rhetoric in the Bible that modern interpreters often fail to recognize because our perception of what is “consolatory” in the twenty-first century does not always align with the standards of the biblical authors. Very little of my research on the use of consolatory rhetoric among Christians in the second through fifth centuries made it into my book, but it was an essential step in helping me read the Bible and other Hellenistic Jewish writings through the lens of established practices for comforting someone in Greco-Roman culture.

Ultimately, I decided to narrow my focus on the use of consolatory rhetoric among Hellenistic Jews because I was frustrated by a scholarly conversation about how “Christian consolation” is both similar to and different from “Greco-Roman consolation.” The contributions of ancient Jewish consolatory rhetoric to the development of “Christian consolation” rarely appeared in this debate, even though early Christians drew on both Greco-Roman and Jewish precedents. Why was there not more discussion of how Christian authors utilized the consolatory methods of ancient Jews? It turns out that there had never been a thorough study of Jewish consolatory rhetoric in the Hellenistic period, leading Paul A. Holloway to note that “a monograph length description of consolation in Second Temple Judaism remains a major desideratum.”[1] Having discovered this gap in knowledge, I set out to write a book that explained how Hellenistic Jewish authors utilized the tools of both their biblical heritage and Greco-Roman culture to ameliorate grief and encourage admirable behavior in hardship.

My book paints the broad contours of how Hellenistic Jews employed consolatory rhetoric and analyzes four texts in detail to illustrate the diversity among Hellenistic Jewish consolers and showcase what unites them across theological borderlines. The authors of 2 Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon were thinking within and across multiple traditions of consolation as they attempted to ameliorate grief concerning the public torture and execution of faithful Jews. The author of 2 Maccabees focused his consolatory efforts on Antiochus IV’s persecution of the Jews of Jerusalem (168–167 BCE), while the author of the Wisdom of Solomon responded to the persecution of the Jews of Alexandria in 38 CE under Aulus Avillius Flaccus, the Roman governor of Egypt. I examine two texts written by Hellenistic Jews in the Jesus movement, 1 Thessalonians and Hebrews. The apostle Paul and the Paulinist author of Hebrews operated with diverse cultural influences as they attempted to strengthen communities of Christ-followers facing various traumas, from persecution and bereavement (common to both texts) to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE (addressed by Hebrews). I demonstrate that the gospel message of Jesus’s death, resurrection, and future coming again did not precipitate a radical change in how Hellenistic Jews comforted persecuted or bereaved audiences; it simply offered variations on preexisting themes and consolatory arguments.

At an early stage of this project, I had planned to include a chapter on Philo, for his voluminous writings provide an overview of the emotions (especially grief and joy) and proper comportment in adversity and bereavement from the perspective of a highly educated first-century Hellenistic Jew. Instead, I decided to integrate my insights from the Philonic corpus into every chapter to more efficiently demonstrate how Philo’s work illuminates the consolatory rhetoric seen in 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Thessalonians, and Hebrews.

For the first two years of my research, my focus was consolation regarding religious persecution, unjust suffering, and death. I did not anticipate that I would soon end up immersed in rabbinic consolations concerning the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. I was first attracted to Hebrews because of its glorious depiction of life in heaven (e.g., 12:22–24) and the curious similarities between the consolatory rhetoric in Hebrews and 1 Thessalonians. However, in the process of analyzing Hebrews in relation to the consolatory rhetoric used by Jewish authors to offer comfort after the loss of the temple in 70 CE, it became clear to me that this text was composed, in part, to resolve grief and theological disorientation caused by the loss of Jerusalem and the temple.

My research led me to question a number of assumptions commonly held in our field. For example, I no longer think that bodily resurrection is the position on the afterlife espoused by 2 Maccabees. Rather, the author of 2 Maccabees presents multiple options regarding how God might reward the righteous after death, including immediate embodied life in heaven. The idea that the Wisdom of Solomon is notoriously hard to date because its reflections on persecution are too vague must also be abandoned. Once the author’s indebtedness to the compositional practices of consolatory rhetoric has been identified in chapters 11–19, more indications of the date of composition emerge that have henceforth escaped notice. What surprised me most in my research is my discovery that we have been translating the verb ἡσυχάζειν incorrectly in 1 Thessalonians 4:11. Paul did not urge the Thessalonians “to live quietly,” the translation of ἡσυχάζειν adopted by the NRSVUE, but “to be calm.”[2] This meaning of ἡσυχάζειν in consolatory contexts is so well established that I am puzzled that it has not been used in translations of 1 Thessalonians 4:11 before. In the very next sentence, Paul asks that the Thessalonians “not grieve” concerning their dead (4:13)!

The question of how Hellenistic Jewish authors attempted to comfort those living in the midst of and in the wake of persecution and violence is not new, but my book takes a new approach to answering it. Whereas scholarship has tended to investigate this question by analyzing the development of Jewish apocalypticism, afterlife beliefs, and theodicy during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, my analysis of consolatory rhetoric in Hellenistic Judaism offers a more comprehensive approach. Apocalypticism, the afterlife, and theodicy are central to the texts I examine, but they remain pieces of a larger puzzle, in which expressions of sympathy, arguments based on honor and shame, and advice for concrete action in the present (such as giving thanks) are also essential to achieving the larger goal of transforming the emotions and actions of troubled addressees.

To fast-forward to our contemporary world, levels of depression and anxiety are at an all-time high among college students.[3] Last year, I taught “Suffering, Grief, and Consolation” at the University of Chicago. Several of my students told me that learning about ancient methods and strategies of consolation was personally helpful to them, whether in navigating their own hardships or supporting a friend or roommate. While I am thrilled to contribute to the academic study of the Bible, I am also delighted that my research has practical utility. Undergraduates are genuinely excited about reading consolation literature, making it an ideal gateway to introducing students to ancient philosophy and religion in an engaging manner. I am eager to see how the study of consolatory rhetoric develops in our field and hope you will join me in discovering what we can learn about early Judaism and Christianity by analyzing their texts through this lens.

[1] Paul A. Holloway, Coping with Prejudice: 1 Peter in Social-Psychological Perspective, WUNT 244 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 105 n. 194.

[2]Christine R. Trotter, Hellenistic Jews and Consolatory Rhetoric: 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Thessalonians, and Hebrews, WUNT 2/600 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023), 178–183.

[3] Mary Ellen Flannery, “The Mental Health Crisis on College Campuses,” NEA Today, 29 March 2023, https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/mental-health-crisis-college-campuses.

Christine R. Trotter is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University.