Network Transmissions of Scholarly Knowledge between Babylonians and. Jews. CRASIS Annual Meeting 2012

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1 Network Transmissions of Scholarly Knowledge between Babylonians and Jews CRASIS Annual Meeting 2012 Mladen Popović, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen 1. Introduction Simplicius, the late-antique commentator on Aristotle s works, wrote that (according to Porphyry) Aristotle had asked Callisthenes, who was in Babylon with Alexander the Great, to send from Babylon astronomical observations to Greece. 1 In De caelo Aristotle himself refers to observational data by the Egyptians and the Babylonians as the basis for much of their (i.e. the Greeks ) evidence about particular luminaries. 2 Regardless of whether such a request was really made by Aristotle, the anecdote illustrates how some in late antiquity imagined such intercultural contacts and the transmission of knowledge between Babylon and Greece: reports were simply sent from Babylon directly to Greece by a Greek visitor of certain status. Unfortunately, the anecdote does not really provide us with much concrete information. The nature of the reports is not specified, nor their number: what kind of sources and how many? Nor is it clear what language they were in (a late-antique writer would probably not have thought of Akkadian anymore): 3 did Simplicius imagine the reports were in Greek? Also, there is no explanation 1 FGrH 124 T a. There is no reason to think that Aristotle made any such request to Callisthenes. More likely, Aristotle s reference in De caelo to observational data from the Babylonians set commentators thinking how the information could have been obtained, and one obvious hypothesis, it seems, was that Callisthenes supplied it, 2 although that ignores the reference to the Egyptians. 3 Cf., however, M.J. Geller, The Last Wedge, ZA 87 (1997): (50). For an argument about the Greeks lack of interest in learning others languages, see A. Westenholz, The Graeco-Babyloniaca Once Again, ZA 97 (2007): (275 78). See also A. Momigliano, The Fault of the Greeks, Daedalus 104/2 (1975): 9 19 (15). 1

2 as to how exactly Callisthenes obtained these sources or through whom. It was not as if astronomical reports were just lying around to be picked up by anyone. How did he know where to go? Did Callisthenes walk into a temple in Babylon, the Esangila, for example? Did he know individual Babylonian astronomers? 4 Such questions were probably not on Simplicius mind, but from a socio-historical perspective on science we need to address some of these questions as to possession, accessibility and mobility in order to better understand the transmission of scholarly knowledge, in this case astronomical learning. In this presentation I wish to offer some reflections on the transmission of astronomical learning in ancient Judaism. Previous research has assumed, tacitly or explicitly, that Jewish scholars had direct access to Babylonian centres of learning. 5 Indirect evidence in ancient sources has been adduced to support such inferences; one can think, for example, of the portrayal of Daniel s position at the Neo-Babylonian court. Insights from Social Network Analysis theory may help to conceptualize concrete conditions for the transmission of knowledge, in this case between Babylonian and Jewish astronomical and astrological learning during the first millennium B.C.E., by focusing on social relationships and with a special emphasis on networks. How and through whom did ancient Jewish scholars get to know about some of the things that Babylonian scholars knew? On the level of textual comparisons, it is evident that elements of Babylonian origin appear in ancient Jewish texts; this is not disputed at all. However, the occurrence of 4 For a brief discussion of individual astronomers known by name to Greco-Roman authors as Chaldean astronomers, see Jones, Evidence for Babylonian Arithmetical Schemes in Greek Astronomy, 88 89; Geller, The Last Wedge, 49; T. Boiy, Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 297 n. 24. See also below for an inscription from Larisa in Thessaly that refers to a certain Antipater from Hierapolis as a Chaldean astronomer. Of course, there are numerous references to the Chaldeans and their skills in Greek and Latin sources, but they function more often than not as stock characters for authors to talk about astrologers or their skills. Not much specific information as to the transmission of their learning or in what respect it was of Babylonian origin can be gleaned from these sources. The references to the expulsion of Chaldeans from Rome indicate that they were regarded as undesirable for various reasons at various times, but these references hardly give us specific data as to the concrete people and circumstances involved. 5 See, for example, the discussion and references in J. Ben-Dov, Head of All Years: Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran in their Ancient Context (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 266, See also H. Drawnel, The Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208-4Q211) from Qumran: Text, Commentary, and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51, 53, 70, 301, 304, and the contribution by James VanderKam in this volume, p. XXX. 2

3 textual similarities alone does not constitute enough evidence to argue for a direct chain of transmission. At least we need to further qualify the character of that connection. That Babylonian learning travelled far beyond its original geographic boundaries is undisputed, as is the fact that elements from the Enochic Astronomical Book, an early Jewish text, are ultimately rooted in earlier Babylonian astronomical models. Ancient sources also acknowledge such Babylonian origins, and we have examples of Jewish texts that put Abraham on a par with scholars from Egypt, Phoenicia and Babylon. Such anecdotes suggest that scholarly knowledge was exchanged in direct interaction between learned men. In general, such interaction no doubt shaped ancient contexts of transmission, but in concrete cases we probably have to differentiate: not all learned men would, as a rule, have interacted with all learned men from other cultural realms, this being dependent on various factors. My concerns in this presentation will circle around two issues that I find interesting to explore further. The first issue is that of ethnicity and intercultural contacts with regard to learned knowledge. The second issue is that of differentiation between different levels of learning on the one hand and how that is manifested through social relations between learned individuals on the other hand. In this presentation I argue that the transmission of Babylonian learning to Jewish scholars in Palestine was not a direct one and also that it went through different channels than the transmission of Babylonian astronomical science to Greek scholars. The level of learning that we encounter in early Jewish sources differs from contemporary developments in Babylonian and Greek astronomical science and points to a different trajectory of transmission. We should not assume as fact that Jewish scholars had direct access to Babylonian schools. We have no evidence for this. Due to the nature of the evidence at our disposal we cannot be very specific about the concrete ways in which 3

4 Babylonian scholarship reached Jewish Palestine sometime during the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. 2. Intercultural Transmission of Scholarly Knowledge In the wake of the Babylonian conquest of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. a Jewish Diaspora formed in the east, in Babylon. Jews integrated fully in economic every-day life in Babylonia, as is evidenced by their participation in very ordinary economic transactions in which they are recorded as the creditors and debtors in a variety of loan documents and receipts. 6 There is enough evidence for Babylonian Jewish villagers or merchants in Neoand Late-Babylonian documents, but we do not as yet have evidence for Jews accessing scholarly tablet collections directly. In general, the Babylonian temple archives indicate only a very small percentage of foreigners. 7 Modern anthropological and cultural studies have pointed out that social boundaries are often, in reality, fluid and fuzzy. Nonetheless, that boundaries are fluid, fuzzy or that they can be crossed does not imply the non-existence of such boundaries; boundaries are not completely ephemeral, sometimes they are very real. While ethno-linguistic and cultural borders can be crossed, they also function to create a persistent sense of difference. 8 In ancient Babylon ethno-linguistic boundaries may not have been absolute, but some form of boundary maintenance with regard to accessibility to and dissemination of literary and scholarly texts did seem to have been in effect. When we look at evidence from the Neo- and Late-Babylonian periods, it seems that the Babylonian urban elite had stricter 6 L. Pearce, New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia, in Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (ed. O. Lipschits and M. Oeming; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), (402). 7 Zadok, The Representation of Foreigners in Neo- and Late-Babylonian Legal Documents, There is an enormous amount of scholarly discussion on these issues. For interesting insights in this discussion, from a different field of study than Jewish or cuneiform, see, e.g., D. W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 4

5 limitations for entry into the scholarly elite than the Assyrians had before them during the Neo-Assyrian period. 9 In addition to the Babylonian priests and scholars the old urban nobility there was, however, another group of scribes. The so-called sepīru scribes did not belong to the old Babylonian nobility, but they were recognized as important persons who were well integrated in the temple organisation. 10 They appear to have been originally Aramaic speakers who had assimilated into Babylonian culture. 11 The exact relations between Babylonian scholarly elite and Aramaic sepīru scribes who were well integrated in the temple organisation merit further investigation. Although there is thus far no evidence for these sepīru scribes to have worked on literary or scholarly texts, the question is how strict such boundaries were maintained. 12 Why are these Aramaic sepīru scribes important for the question of how Jewish scholars gained knowledge of certain elements of Babylonian astronomical learning? The suggestion has been put forward that Jews having been part of the general Aramaic milieu, a somewhat vague entity, they may very well have been among such Aramaic sepīru scribes, perhaps having taken up Babylonian names even, making it more difficult for us to identify them as Jewish and thus also calling into question the aptness of such neat taxonomic distinctions. In any case, for this suggestion, Jews being Aramaic writing sepīru scribes, no concrete evidence has as of yet turned up. What remains, however, is to consider the Aramaic language as a medium for transmission. 9 R. Zadok, The Representation of Foreigners in Neo- and Late-Babylonian Legal Documents (Eighth through Second Centuries B.C.E.), in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (ed. O. Lipschits and J. Blenkinsopp; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), (483 84); Beaulieu, Official and Vernacular Languages, P. Clancier, Les scribes sur parchmin du temple d Anu, RA 99 (2005): (93 98); idem, Cuneiform Culture s Last Guardians: The Old Urban Notability of Hellenistic Uruk, in The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (ed. Radner and Robson), (764 65). 11 Beaulieu, Official and Vernacular Languages, Given the fact that sepīru scribes seem to have been well integrated in the temple organisation and with the temple having been the place of learning in Babylonia future research might show that some sepīru scribes also had access to Babylonian higher learning. But at this stage of Assyriological research we have no such evidence. 5

6 Because the Aramaic language as a medium for the transmission of such astronomical learning is possibly the connecting link. Scholars have argued for the importance of Aramaic for early Jewish scholarly texts, the Enochic Astronomical Book being originally in Aramaic as the Qumran manuscripts have indicated, and suggested that the westward transmission of scientific ideas from Babylonia occurred through Aramaic sources. 13 Although during the first millennium B.C.E. Aramaic became the dominant vernacular in the ancient Near East, and was used for administration, the evidence indicates that Babylonian urban elites from the Neo-Babylonian period onward were reluctant to acknowledge the role of Aramaic and instead kept to traditional cuneiform as the sole official culture of Babylonia. It is, therefore, questionable whether any significant corpus of cuneiform was ever translated into Aramaic. 14 Ethno-linguistic boundaries as well as prohibitions on tablet movement expressed through secrecy formulae, which appear as important topoi in the colophons of scholarly texts, may not have been absolute, but some form of boundary maintenance with regard to literary and scholarly texts did seem to have been in effect in Babylonia, limiting the accessibility and mobility of scientific knowledge. The evidence for the involvement of non- Babylonians is meagre, at best. These considerations argue against the assumption that Babylonian elites would have been actively involved in transmitting some of their astronomical knowledge to Jews who were, relatively, only quite recently in their midst, 15 as opposed to the Aramaeans who settled there earlier but against whom a persistent sense of difference was maintained up until the Hellenistic period. 13 See the references in Popović, The Emergence of Aramaic and Hebrew Scholarly Texts, See Beaulieu, Official and Vernacular Languages, 198, 201, 212; De Breucker, Berossos between Tradition and Innovation, 638; Clancier, Cuneiform Culture s Last Guardians, 756. See also S. Pollock, Power and Culture Beyond Ideology and Identity, in Margins of Writing (ed. Sanders), , especially pp Cf. also Boiy, Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon, 187,

7 However, before we conjure up an image of ancient Babylonian elites in splendid isolation, it is important to consider their interaction with Greeks and Greek culture from the Hellenistic period. When the urban Babylonian elite opens up, so to say, it is to Greek culture and language, and this is significant. The case of Berossos clearly suggests that there were Babylonians who had an interest to disseminate elements of their culture to non- Babylonians but not just to any non-babylonians. Ethno-linguistic and cultural boundaries are neither absolute nor ephemeral; concrete social, political, economic and cultural circumstances determine how such boundaries are maintained in specific historical contexts. Thus, we must differentiate between Aramaic and Greek in relation to how the tradents of cuneiform culture in Late Babylonia perceived of themselves vis-à-vis others around them and how this influenced their stance toward others. The Babylonian urban elite, with its thoroughly cuneiform culture and identity, positioned itself differently with regard to Greek culture and language than it had done with regard to Aramaic culture and language. Apparently, Babylonian elites attributed to Greek culture and language a certain prestige, a prestige or status that the Aramaic language never seems to have attained in first-millennium B.C.E. Babylonia. Greek thus probably enhanced the self-esteem and identity of Babylonian elites, which Aramaic presumably did not, despite these Babylonian elites having Aramaic as their spoken language. 16 This is not only illustrated by Berossos work and the so-called Graeco-Babyloniaca tablets, but also by the ample evidence for the direct transmission of advanced Babylonian mathematical astronomy to Greek scholars in Babylonia, such as Hipparchus, and through travelling scholars, for which we even have Greek epigraphic evidence. 16 Beaulieu, Official and Vernacular Languages, 211. On the languages spoken by the Babylonian elites in the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E., see also, e.g., Geller, The Last Wedge ; idem, Graeco-Babyloniaca in Babylon, in Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne (ed. J. Renger; Saarbrücken: SDV, 1999), ; Westenholz, The Graeco-Babyloniaca Once Again. 7

8 With regard to the westward transmission of cuneiform astral sciences we should, therefore, differentiate between Greek and Aramaic and assume a difference in prestige attributed to both languages by Babylonian scholarly elites. Moreover, there is a relation to the level of astronomical learning that was transmitted. We may observe the transmission of complex mathematical astronomy to the Greeks, on the one hand, while we may notice a different phase of Babylonian astral scholarship being attested in, for example, the Aramaic astronomical Enoch texts, on the other hand. It is to this latter aspect that I will turn to briefly now. 3. Different Levels of Astronomical Learning When we look at the early Jewish evidence for scholarly texts at our disposal, three general observations can be made. First, elements from older types of Mesopotamian astronomy and astrology such as Enūma Anu Enlil and Mul.Apin from the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. resurfaced in Aramaic in the early Enochic corpus sometime in the third century B.C.E. 17 In this form, this type of astronomy continued to influence new compositions in Hebrew up until at least the second half of the second century B.C.E. (4Q317 and 4Q503) and possibly later (4Q334), as is clear from the manuscript evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Second, alongside the ongoing transmission of older elements of Babylonian astronomy from Enūma Anu Enlil and Mul.Apin, also more recent features appear that postdate that type of astronomy but predate developments in advanced Babylonian mathematical astronomy of the second century B.C.E. These features include knowledge of 17 Maybe the composition should be dated already to the fourth century, although I see insufficient reason to assume a date for the Astronomical Book that much earlier than the manuscript evidence of 4Q208, especially since it can be debated whether the Aramaic Enoch manuscripts from Qumran should be equated with the Astronomical Book from Ethiopic Enoch; see the references in n. Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. above for a discussion of these issues. 8

9 the zodiac, which was developed sometime in the fifth century B.C.E., and possibly the socalled Lunar Three scheme from Late-Babylonian nonmathematical astronomical texts. Third, the ancient Jewish sources show a level of astronomical competency that was far less sophisticated compared to the advanced methods of contemporary astronomers in Babylonian and Greek societies. During the second century B.C.E. Greek astronomy changed tremendously because of the transmission of new advanced Babylonian astronomical methods. The extant Jewish sources do not attest likewise to this influence from advanced mathematical astronomy from Babylonia. What ramifications does this discussion have for understanding the channels of transmission through which ancient Jewish scholars learned about Babylonian astral sciences? How did Jewish scholars in Palestine relate to the current advanced astronomical developments in Seleucid Babylonia? Did Jewish scholars consciously ignore these developments for some reason? Was the more recent and advanced Babylonian mathematical astronomy too difficult for them to appropriate? Or were they completely unaware at the time of these developments because they were not connected in the same way to the same networks as those that transmitted Babylonian learning to the Greek world? I think that a focus on social relations and networks may help to put such questions into a new perspective. We should look for an explanation in terms of social relations and networks, as we know that direct personal contacts were crucial for the transmission of advanced Babylonian mathematical astronomy to Greek scholars such as Hipparchus. The different levels of learning should make us careful not to simply equate the learned elites from different localities as interacting with each other on the same level. For example, mindful of Pierre Bourdieu s concept of cultural capital, we can appreciate the scholarly learning in the early Enochic and Qumran texts as a prized piece of knowledge 9

10 signalling and confirming the status of those having access to and possessing it. 18 But the Jewish scholarly elite may not have been of the same standing as the Babylonian scholarly elite, or Greek for that matter. In their respective societies Babylonian and Jewish scholars may have been members of the elite, but, although stories about Abraham teaching Phoenicians and Egyptians or Daniel at the Babylonian court suggest otherwise, this need not imply that in real life the one recognized the other as equal, or that there was direct contact between them, as is often assumed. Especially important here is to balance the two elements of having or gaining access and giving or allowing access as these materialize in social relationships between individuals. It is not just a matter of textual comparisons to be made by modern scholars between Babylonian and Jewish texts. Texts do not influence texts, at least not by themselves. Real people in real life are a necessary condition. People transmit information and knowledge via different mediums in specific contexts defined by, for example, locality, social status, gender, age, kinship, nationality and ethnicity. The textual similarities between Jewish astronomical and astrological texts of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods and first millennium cuneiform sources from Babylonia are not of such a nature to suppose that the former are a direct translation or rendering of the latter. The similarities are structural rather than specific. The early Jewish texts do not presuppose direct access to cuneiform sources or direct contact with Babylonian scholars, as Greek astronomical texts clearly do. The levels of astronomical and astrological learning that we encounter in the Jewish sources force us to qualify the channels of transmission. It seems unlikely that in Babylon and Uruk, where impressive developments took place in mathematical astronomy from the mid-first-millennium B.C.E. onward, Babylonian scholars would have been active in 18 Popović, Physiognomic Knowledge in Qumran and Babylonia: Form, Interdisciplinarity, and Secrecy, DSD 13 (2006): (166 76); idem, Reading the Human Body, 81 83,

11 transmitting older forms of their astronomy to local Jews, or more recent insights if the Lunar-Three scheme should indeed be seen as having influenced Qumran calendar texts. So how did Jewish scholars get acquainted with some of the learning originating with Babylonian scholars? What network connections and channels of transmission can we suggest for Jewish scholars to have gained access to certain elements of Babylonian learning? As with the Greek evidence, no single trajectory or channel of transmission seems adequate to explain the different astronomical and astrological features attested in Enochic astronomy and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have to reason with different trajectories, not all of which are known to us anymore. However, the one channel of transmission ruled out on the basis of the evidence available is that of direct contact in Babylonia between Jewish and Babylonian scholars. This leaves us with two possibilities, namely contact with travelling scribes outside Babylonia or indirectly via a continuous tradition that had been transmitted to various localities through such travelling scholars. It is impossible to be specific as to the exact channels, localities and agents of transmission. It is important to realize that recent Assyrological studies, such as that of Eleanor Robson, suggest that we should no longer think of a disembodied Babylonian stream of tradition that was simply out there and available, and into which individual representatives of Jewish tradition could simply have tapped almost at will at certain moments in their history. We see the influence of advanced Babylonian mathematical astronomy in Greek sources, which suggests high-level contact between Greek and Babylonian scholars, either in Babylonia or elsewhere, or, at a later date when direct contact would not have been possible anymore, through a continuous tradition (which would explain the evidence in Ptolemy of Alexandria s work in the second century C.E.). Jewish scholars, at least as far as our sources are concerned (setting aside indirect testimonies, such as Abraham as astronomical teacher, or the Daniel narratives presenting a 11

12 Jewish sage at the Babylonian court), were not a part of that same network at such a high level: the Jewish sources testify to a different level of scholarship. Therefore, in this case we should look for the network connections in different places, not at the centres of Babylonian learning, as has often been assumed. Nor should we perceive of the transmission of Babylonian learning to Jewish Palestine in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods in a direct manner, but rather through various intermediaries, via Aramaic and other channels, and a more vague continuous tradition. Via such indirect channels, some elements of Babylonian, and also Greek for that matter, astronomical and astrological learning reached certain people and certain places in Jewish Palestine, at least those at Qumran and the movement behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were no Einsteins, but neither ignorant cave people. 12