The Bible, Sibylline oracles, and divination

Reading Pieter W. van der Horst's article "Sortes: Sacred Books as Instant Oracles in Late Antiquity"* recently, two thoughts occurred to me:

1. I wonder how many Christians realize that randomly opening your Bible and taking the first verse your eyes happen to light on as a divine response to a problem or question is (a) a practice that is at least as old as Hellenistic times and (b) a form of divination that is not any different, functionally, from inspecting the liver of a sacrifical animal or interpreting the flight of birds or consulting Tarot cards or New Age channellers. Bibliomancy.

2. Although the official Roman collection of Greek Sibylline oracles appears to have functioned in precisely this way, the pseudepigraphic collections of Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles that the Church Fathers were familiar with apparently did not.

We are accustomed to referring to Sibylline oracles as unsolicited prophecies because they were not composed in response to a question posed to the prophet(ess) or the god (as, e.g., consultations of the Pythia/Apollo at Delphi). But they weren't read as unsolicited prophecies by their Roman handlers; quite the opposite: they were consulted in order to identify appropriate responses to crises deemed serious enough by the senate to instruct the official board of interpreters (originally duumviri/"2 men" but eventually rising to quindecemviri/"15 men") to approach them with questions.

The precise method of approach employed is never described. For instance, did the duumvirs read through the [Sibylline] books till they came on a significant passage or were they supposed to have an index? Alternatively, did they employ some method like the sortes vergilianae, unrolling the books at random and lighting on a particular passage? (Parke, Sibyls, p. 191).

Either way, though, they were read, against the grain of their composition, as solicited prophecies.

Not so with the Church Fathers' use of Sibylline oracles. (And let me mention in passing that there appears to have been very little overlap [if any] between the Sibylline oracles that made up the official Roman collection and those that the Church Fathers knew.) It was the Hebrew prophets who provided the model for Patristic use of the Sibylline Oracles (among, i.e., those Church Fathers who regarded the Sibylline Oracles as inspired by God . . . not all of them did). Roman reception of Sibylline oracles was anisomorphic with their composition: unsolicited prophecies were read as solicited ones. In contrast, Patristic reception of Sibylline oracles and their (early Jewish and Christian) composition were isomorphic: the Hebrew prophets served as a model for both writing and reading Jewish and Christian Sibylline oracles. Nothing (at least nothing I have come across) suggests that the Jewish and Chrisitian Sibylline oracles were ever actually used for divination by Jews or Christians in late antiquity.

This seems a bit odd to me, given van der Horst's quite detailed catalog of divination-by-scripture among Jews and Christians (as well as Greeks and Romans) in late antiquity. But perhaps, although viewed as inspired by God, they were also perceived as too gentile/pagan to be legitimately consulted; they would, after all, most likely have been read as (religiously) Greek, not Jewish or Christian, compositions. On the other hand, when did a little thing like that ever stop some people?
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*Pieter W. van der Horst, "Sortes: Sacred Books as Instant Oracles in Late Antiquity", in L. V. Rutgers et al. (eds.), The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (Leuven: Peeters, 1998) 143-173.

Migne's Patrologia Graeca series and other Very Useful Books

Steven C. Carlson at Hypotyposeis provides links to the places where Mischa Hooker provides links to numerous Very Useful Books for the study of the Bible, Judaism, Christianity via Google Book Search, as well as to Greek and Latin literature generally. Especially nice, from the perspective of this blog, at least, and because I've always had Too Much Trouble locating the volumes I needed, is the convenience provided by the index to Migne's Patrologia Graeca, as well as the several Pseudepigrapha links.

I would like to add . . . links to the full texts of Alexandre's invaluable Excursus ad Sibyllina, and of Geffcken's critical edition of the SibOr.

And many thanks also to Mischa Hooker for the link to Elpenor's elegant pages devoted to texts and translations from Migne's PG.

On the generic diversity of the Sibylline Oracles

The author of the anonymous prologue to the Φ recension of the SibOr writes:

Ἔδοξε . . . κἀμὲ τοὺς ἐπιλεγομένους Σιβυλλιακοὺς χρησμοὺς σποράδην εὑρισκομένους καὶ συγκεχυμένην τὴν τούτων ἀνάγνωσιν καὶ ἐπίγνωσιν ἔχοντας εἰς μίαν συνάφειαν καὶ ἁρμονίαν ἐκθέσθαι τοῦ λόγου, ὡς ἂν εὐσύνοπτοι τοῖς ἀναγιγνώσκουσιν ὄντες τὴν ἐξ αὐτῶν ὠφέλειαν τούτοις ἐπιβραβεύσωσιν.

"Having found them scattered, and reading and knowledge of them in a state of confusion, I was determined to publish the collected Sibylline Oracles in a unified and orderly volume, so that, now that they are readily available to readers, they might get the benefit of them" (SibOr Prologue 8-13).

The unity that the 6th-century CE χρησμολόγος/"oracle-collector" imposed on his σποράδην . . . καὶ συγκεχυμένην/"scattered and confused" materials would seem to consist of little more than his εἰς μίαν συνάφειαν καὶ ἁρμονίαν ἐκθέσθαι τοῦ λόγου/"publishing them in a unified and orderly volume", i.e., (more or less) just as he found them, only now between the two covers of a single codex. At least, (most of) what he archived doesn't appear to be substantially different from what we know Lactantius had been reading nearly two centuries earlier. As Buitenwerf notes, "Each time Lactantius announces that he is going to quote a different Sibyl [than the one(s) he has just previously quoted], the oracle he quotes can indeed be found in another book of the extant [Φ] collection" (Book III, p. 82). Kudos to Φ's nameless Byzantine Christian editor, then, for (evidently) keeping his own finger out of the pie.

Whatever unity the Φ recension of the SibOr might have beyond that, however, it's not generic. Five of its eight constituent λόγοι/"books" (SibOr 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8) could, I suppose, be labeled "oracle collections", but I'm still not convinced that that's a very accurate or helpful descriptor for all of these texts. Some are more coherent and cohesive (and narrative) than others (SibOr 7, little more than a series of not necessarily related fragments, comes closest, IMHO, to deserving the appellation "oracle collection"), and each is at least as different from the others as any five early Jewish and Christian apocalypses, or any five modern American novels, would be from one other. If these are oracle collections, then, like the apocalypse, or the novel, the oracle collection would have to be regarded as an inherently mixed genre, by which I mean both (1) that its incorporation of a variety of genres is basic to its own generic identity, and (2) that any two given examples of the genre may or may not look anything at all like one other. One book in the collection, SibOr 6, is not an oracle collection, but an early Christian hymn. Finally, books 1-2 belong together as a single work, but it isn't an oracle collection either: it's a didactic poem masquerading as a historical review apocalypse disguised as a Sibylline prophecy.

The Φ recension of the SibOr is often mistaken for an oracle collection, but I would argue that it's not . . . in spite of the fact that it was clearly so regarded by its late ancient/early medieval readers . . . rather, it's an anthology that includes oracle collections alongside texts belonging to other genres. (By the same token, are gospels biographies or not? It all depends on what you mean by "biography". It's a similar kind of question about generic classification, here.) Dactylic hexameter verse, figurations of the Sibyl, and archive fever are, inter alia, what hold the gathered materials together, not literary genre.

Moving beyond New Testament Greek

Two new Yahoo! discussion groups that aim to encourage reading Greek outside the New Testament box both look good.

1. From Dr. Jim West I learned of the recent creation of Reading the Apostolic Fathers, whose moderator, David McKay, writes:

This group is for people who would like to expand their facility in reading New Testament Greek by reading through The Apostolic Fathers, whose writings appeared a little after the completion of the New Testament.

And he continues in his inaugural e-mail:

This group is for people who would like to improve their Greek by reading something other than the New Testament, and a few of us hope to read through some of the Apostolic Fathers, commencing with the Didache. I'm up to chapter 3, but the first few chapters are short!

I'm reading from Michael Holmes' Apostolic Fathers: Greek texts and English translations, but you can access the Greek text at ccel.org, with the Didache being available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apostolicfathers/.

[But the link appears to be bad; it's actually here.]

Why read The Apostolic Fathers? They are an important source of information about the early days of the church immediately following the New Testament period. Some people think they give us insights on how to interpret the New Testament, while others think they show how quickly the church strayed from the path.

Why read them in Greek? There's something about reading a book in its original language, if you are able. Even if you're a beginner, like me, you will gain something you can't get from a translation.

It is hopefully a way to improve your knowledge of Greek and increase your enjoyment of reading the NT in Greek.

. . . and I found what he had to say next a bit shocking . . .

F F Bruce and J I Packer have pointed out there's something odd about thinking you can read Greek, if you can actually only read one book in Greek! Packer is rather scornful of people who translate the NT who have never read anything else in Greek, but he candidly admitted that most of his ESV translation colleagues are in this boat!

I am shocked! just shocked! Evidently the ghost of the idea of Holy Ghost Greek is still roaming the halls . . .

2. From Brandon Wasson at Novum Testamentum I learned of the commencement of Greek Geeks, moderated by Bryan Cox, who writes:

Greek Geeks is a discussions group for those who have learned or are in the process of learning ancient Greek, classical and/or Koine, and would like a place to discuss various aspects of the language. Discussions of any type of ancient Greek works are welcomed and encouraged.

* * *
If you're new to Greek, ask questions and don't be intimidated. If you've been around Greek forever, share a bit of your knowledge and experience by helping to answer some questions. Have an idea for a topic, project, trivia, game, or whatever, then speak up and let us all hear about it!

Good luck and Godspeed to both groups!

4 ways good things come in 3s

(1) The 3 most important factors in real estate: Location, location, location.

(2) The 3 most important faculties of an orator, according to Demosthenes: Delivery, delivery, delivery (ὑπόκρισις, ὑπόκρισις, ὑπόκρισις).

(3) How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

(4) How do you learn a dead language well? Read, read, read.

6 degrees of Homer and Hesiod

As a follow-up to my previous post on the importance of laying a solid foundation in Homeric Greek for reading the SibOr:

(1) I came across an item mentioned briefly in passing by Chris Weimer at Thoughts on Antiquity that led me to

(2) the front page of The BibleWorks Blog where, after a little browsing, I found

(3) an announcement posted by Michael Hanel about a user-database of the entire Homeric/Hesiodic corpus that can be imported into BibleWorks, made possible (and free!) by the generous dedication of

(4) John Jackson at Handheld Classics, who also, incidentally, offers some excellent and compelling 2nd-hand advice on efficient 2nd- (or 3rd- or 4th-)language learning; and not only that, but

(5) a surprisingly wide variety of other user-created BibleWorks files by (no doubt) equally dedicated and generous persons is available here. It all seems too good to be true, and

(6) if this isn't also a shameless plug for BibleWorks, then I don't know what is!

On preliminary studies

It's one thing to read the SibOr in translation, and another thing entirely to read them in Greek, especially if the Greek you're most familiar with is NT/Koine, and prose. That they're composed in dactylic hexameter verse isn't so much of a problem (the metrical conventions are learned easily enough), but the archaic/arcane morphology and vocabulary that come along with it can be daunting.

The best advice I ever got about learning how to read patristic Greek well was: begin by immersing yourself in the great Attic orators. Why? Because they set the lexical, rhetorical, and stylistic standards that so many Church Fathers aspired to emulate, that's all. Similarly, if you want to learn how to read the SibOr well, you should begin by immersing yourself in Homer. Here are three good places to start:

• Allen Rogers Benner, Selections from Homer's Iliad (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1931).
  
• Clyde Pharr, Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), rev. John Wright.
  
• P. A. Draper, Iliad, Book 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

Even among the OT Pseudepigrapha, the SibOr are overwhelmingly under-read, and that's surely mostly due to their (actual or perceived) peripherality to biblical studies, more narrowly construed. Still, I wonder how much their marginalization might also be due to the (perceived) difficulty, or at least strangeness, of the kind of Greek they're written in? Form and content would seem to be totally anisomorphic here: God's own Word in truly pagan dress. Are the SibOr too pagan, in language as well as in (ostensible) authorship, to be more than an antiquarian curiosity, a literary/theological dead end? Would the SibOr have more of an audience today if they had only come down to us in more maddeningly fragmentary condition, in more fashionably exotic languages like Ethiopic or Coptic?

If there were a scriptural canon of ancient Greek literature, the Homeric corpus would be its Torah. We might then think of the Jewish and Christian Sibyls as aspiring to be (respectively) its Jeremiah and Matthew. That alone should be worth the price of admission, I'd think.

Ἄγε Ὁμηρίδης ὢν πιστὸς ἀναγίγνωσκε/"Go and read, being a loyal admirer of Homer". You might be surprised at the extent to which facility in reading dactylic hexameter verse can open up new windows on early Jewish and Christian literature.

UPDATE (2.4.07) Also well worth considering are these two recently developed resources for learning Homeric Greek that I came across lately . . .

• Frank Beetham, Beginning Greek with Homer: An Elementary Course based on Odyssey V (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996).
  
• Raymond V. Schoder, S.J. and Vincent C. Horrigan, S.J., A Reading Course in Homeric Greek, Book 1 (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2004), revised, with additional materials by Leslie Collins Edwards.

. . . both of which (like the volume by Draper listed above) are designed to function "teacherlessly", if need be.

On Syriac and Arabic Sibylline Oracles

In a comment on my 10.2.07 post, bulbul raises the question of "the transmission of SibOr in Syriac and Arabic Christian milieux". I must confess that this intriguing subject lies outside both my (current) linguistic competence and my present line of inquiry into the Greek SibOr tradition, but here are a couple of leads I've come across in that direction, for anyone who might be interested. And if anyone has anything to add, please do!

• S. Brock, "A Syriac Collection of Prophecies of the Pagan Philosophers", Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 14 (1983) 203-46.
  
• idem, "Some Syriac Excerpts from Greek Collections of Pagan Prophecies", Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984) 77-90.

Buitenwerf, Book III (in my "Essential Reading" list, see right) p. 5 n. 1 provides some more references to other non-Greek SibOr, including:

• M. J. L. Young/R. Y. Ebied, "An Unrecorded Arabic Version of a Sibylline Prophecy", Orientalia Christiana Periodica 43 (1977) 279-307.

For still more such references, see DiTomasso, Bibliography (also in "Essential Reading") pp. 843-4.

This should be good.

James Davila's online Old Testament Pseudepigrapha course is up and running again. Woohoo!

Reading the Sibyl again for the first time

The MS tradition of the Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles (SibOr) consists of three interrelated collections, 14 books in all, of unsolicited oracles purportedly uttered by the Sibyls -- legendary prophetesses from the heroic age of Greek mythology -- but actually composed and compiled between the 2nd century BCE and the 7th century CE by an unknown number of anonymous Jewish and Christian "chresmologoi" ("oraclers") who transformed the Greek oracle-collection into a useful vehicle for Jewish and Christian apologetics and polemics.

Unlike most other texts that have come to be categorized as Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (OTP), the Jewish and Christian SibOr are not attributed to a Jewish patriarch or prophet but to a well-known gentile/pagan figure. Aside from these oracles, which have come down to us remarkably intact, all things considered, only fragments are left (mainly quotations in patristic writings) of what must once have been a thriving Jewish literary industry of writing under various Greek pseudonyms: Aristeas, Hecataeus, Hystaspes, Menander, Phocylides, Tages, and of course the great names of the classical tradition, Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, etc. Like the other less well-preserved examples of this generically diverse group of texts, the Jewish and Christian SibOr take their stand on the borderlines and at the intersections of Greek, Jewish, and eventually Christian worldviews in late antiquity.

The standard collection of the SibOr derives from three distinct but interrelated MS traditions, conventionally labelled Phi, Psi, and Omega.

1. The Phi MSS contain an anonymous prose prologue and eight books, numbered 1-8.

2. The Psi MSS contain the same eight books, but they lack the prologue and begin with bk. 8, followed by bks. 1-7; in one Psi MS (R) the books are renumbered accordingly (i.e., Psi bk. 1 = Phi bk. 8, Psi bk. 2 = Phi bks. 1-2, Psi bk. 3 = Phi bk. 3, etc.).

3. The Omega MSS contain bks. 9 (= Phi bk. 6; 7.1; 8.218-428) and 10 (= Phi bk. 4) and four new books, 11-14, not included in the other collections.

Because the Omega bks. 9 and 10 are redundant, they are not presented separately in the critical editions, with the result that the standard collection of the SibOr (as represented, e.g., in Geffcken's critical edition and Collins' ET) consists of 12 books numbered 1-8 (in Phi) and 11-14 (in Omega).

Of these 12 books, only three -- SibOr 3, 4, and 5 -- tend to be included in modern collections of the OTP. This is because modern collections of the OTP tend to be conceived as collections of texts for the study of early Judaism, and SibOr 3-5 are the only books of the SibOr that are regarded as originally Jewish compositions, with little or no Christian redaction. (Collins' ET of the complete SibOr in vol. 1 of Charlesworth's OTP is the exception that proves the rule.)

But -- as Davila, de Jonge, Kraft, and others have been arguing for years now -- the reason we have (most of) the OTP in the first place is because Christians (not Jews) thought it was useful to pass them down to us. The category "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha" itself is an overtly Christian category. As far as study of the SibOr, specifically, is concerned, to misconstrue the OTP as a collection of early Jewish literature is to marginalize most of the SibOr as too Christian to be included, even though the earliest extant (Phi) collection of the SibOr (without which we would not have had access to the full text of SibOr 3-5) presents itself to us as a decidedly Christian compilation! As a consequence of this misconstruction of the OTP, most of the SibOr (1-2, 6-8, and 11-14) not only are not as well-known as the "obviously" Jewish SibOr 3-5, they are hardly even noticed at all, and almost might as well not exist, for all the attention that has been paid to them (apart from the famous ICHTHYS acrostic at SibOr 8.217-250, the long shelf life of which, again, only goes to prove the rule).

So the purpose of this weblog is to invite you to explore along with me ways to (1) view the more familiar SibOr 3-5 a bit differently -- as parts of a late antique Christian compilation -- (2) revisit the question of the religious affiliation(s) of some of the other, less familiar SibOr, especially SibOr 1-2 and 8 (since they figure in my forthcoming dissertation on the Jewish and Christian editions of SibOr 1-2), and
(3) expand scholarly (re)construction of the intertextures of the Jewish and Christian SibOr beyond apocalyptic literature (the primary rubric under which they have been studied so far) to include didactic poetry, myths, oracles, paraenesis, philosophy, prophecy, sermons, wisdom literature, etc., as well.

What's been missing from the internet . . .

A weblog devoted to scholarly discussion of the Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles and related literature . . . if I ever get a round tuit . . . !