Search Results

Chapter three addresses the texts of the Apocrypha related to Jewish wisdom. In ancient Israel wisdom was associated with Proverbs and the education of elite males, especially scribes. But there were important developments in wisdom, each phase expanding on the previous one without rendering it obsolete. The wisdom texts of the Apocrypha are analyzed both in terms of how they fit within the earlier history of wisdom genres, and how they reflect the changes of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Theological themes such as revelation are expanded within these texts, and social issues such as gender, class, and Jewish identity come into sharper focus. Wisdom is more present as a female figure and is at times a cosmic savior figure or involved in creation (similar to Isis). Wisdom is also identified with law (Ben Sira and Baruch), and is seen as a force in Israelite history (Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon). In these texts Wisdom is also personified as Woman Wisdom. Texts treated here are Ben Sira (or Sirach), Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Letter (or Epistle) of Jeremiah, Fourth Maccabees, and Fourth Baruch (or Paralipomena of Jeremiah).

In Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other, Or the Prosthesis of Origin, a theory about the universal and constitutive alienation of the speaking subject from language finds its exemplary grounding in Derrida’s own experience as an Algerian Jew, one whose relationship to the French language is both totalizing and exiled: “I have only one language, it is not mine.” He equates speaking not only with contingent citizenship and a divestment of what one never really had in the first place, but also with the extreme experiences of torture, threat, and physical violence. He indeed uses the words “passion” and “martyr” to describe his experience. This chapter reads Derrida “backwards,” and against the universalizing move Derrida and those following him make, in order to suggest a way of reading some scenes of so-called martyrdom as scenes about diasporic cultural divestment. The chapter argues that the last words of martyrs can be read as archives of the inescapable expenses of entering dominant cultural “languages.” In a renegotiation of the linguistic turn with regard to describing real experiences that appear off dominant grids, this chapter stakes a claim for the cultural materiality of speech.

This essay proposes a new approach to an anonymous Greek-Jewish martyrology written during the period of the early Roman Empire in a city of the eastern provinces: the text known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. Whose martyrology was 4 Maccabees? Diaspora Jews with a Greek education are reasonably mooted as the original core hearers/readers of this blend of Greek thought with the Torah, yet the work actually belongs in that ‘marketplace’ of religions and ideas that characterized the early second century ce. We should thus envisage 4 Maccabees as sitting between several cultural and religious groups, speaking from a mixed world and to a mixed world. This perspective also helps to explain the remarkable Nachleben of the text in the early Christian Church, including the emergence of the cult of the Maccabean martyrs at Antioch near Daphne, which clothed the fiction in reality.

Some scholars have traditionally battled over distinctions between resurrection and immortality. This chapter examines the problem as reflected in early Jewish writings. Josephus and Pseudo-Phocylides reveal how the two concepts might stand in some complementary relation to each other. In these cases, resurrection demonstrates its adaptability to differing philosophical contexts within Judaism and its clear compatibilities with conceptions of immortalization. Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, and 4 Maccabees, however, may be viewed as more intentionally avoiding overt reference to resurrection in an exclusive preference for immortality. These writings indicate that within some approaches to theodicy in early Judaism, the immortality of the soul was a sufficient expression of divine justice on its own, apart from resurrection. Such tensions between resurrection and immortality comprise yet another facet of diversity within ancient Jewish reflection on the future life.

For Paul and the Gospel writers, “wisdom” is problematic. On the one hand they propound something that is clearly wisdom-like. On the other hand the New Testament writers identify the death and resurrection of Jesus with the inauguration of a new era. They reject the legitimacy of human authority based on ruling knowledge and the notion that wisdom derived from such knowledge is adequate to order human life. In keeping with prophetic criticisms of kings and other leaders, the New Testament writers are skeptical of the “wise” and the “powerful” who rule over the many. Their claim that wisdom is fully identifiable with Jesus entails a rejection of human claims to wisdom. It is consistent with a program for human flourishing based instead on solidarity, shared suffering, and sacrificial love. These form the basis for a way of life marked less by knowledge than by piety and integrity.