2. Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science*
Philip S. Alexander
The Jews and Natural Science
[☞ p2.1] In his 1995 monograph Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe David Ruderman discusses the question of Jewish attitudes towards and involvement in science.1 There is, as has long been noted, an intriguing problem here. Jews in modern times have made a massive contribution to the advancement of the natural sciences, a contribution out of all proportion to their numbers. How is this striking fact to be explained? Are Jews genetically predisposed to be good at science, as some have seriously but implausibly argued. Or does the explanation lie in cultural factors, such as the nature of traditional Jewish education or traditional Jewish love of learning? Or are social forces at work—the desire to escape from exclusion and gain acceptance and influence in the host society which has come to accord great prestige to scientific knowledge? Ruderman problematizes the question by showing that Jewish involvement in science did not begin with emancipation in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but can be traced back to the early modern period. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Jews were already studying science, especially medicine, and their numbers were sufficiently large as to have had an impact on Jewish religious thought.2 As a preface to his study of the early modern period, Ruderman briefly surveys Jewish attitudes towards nature in the Middle Ages but makes no serious attempt to investigate Jewish engagement with science any earlier in Jewish history.
[☞ p2.2] In the present paper I shall attempt, somewhat speculatively, to carry the story further back. I realise that in doing so I run considerable risks. The enterprise may seem grossly anachronistic, and I may project modern debates and modern ideas onto earlier and very different societies. Science today and the society in which it functions look nothing like science or society in the Middle Ages or in antiquity. I am prepared to run that risk. As an historian I am still wedded to the construction of grand narratives. I also hold that analogy is one of the historian’s fundamental tools: the past, if it is understandable at all, is accessible only through analogy, through a risky but inevitable process of ‘translation’ into narratives that make sense in terms of our own experience of the world. And, I would suggest, it is no less meaningful to talk about Jewish science, or the lack of it, in antiquity than it is to talk about Greek or Babylonian science, both of which have been the subject of extensive investigation.3
[☞ p2.3] Before we go any further we need a working definition of “science”. For our present purposes it is vitally important to avoid one that is too theoretical or exclusive. Since the collapse of Newtonian physics, the supreme exemplar for two centuries of a scientific view of the universe, the nature and definition of science have become philosophically problematic. I am not interested here in this philosophical debate.4 I am writing as an historian, and as an historian it seems to me obvious that science is a social construct which changes over time. History is littered with sciences—alchemy is a case in point—which have become discredited, and which today are excluded from the scientific curriculum. In the past, however, these subjects were most assuredly regarded as sciences. Though not “true” in the sense that contemporary science is “true”, they are ‘science-like’: they display the assumptions and the articulation of scientific disciplines and in some cases can be shown by historians to have contributed directly to the rise of modern science. For our present purposes we can identify “science” wherever we find a strong interest in understanding how the physical world works, provided three simple conditions are fulfilled: (1) There is an explicit or implicit assumption that nature is regular and is governed by immutable laws which are accessible to the human mind. (2) An attempt is made to produce a rational model of the physical world which reduces the bewildering complexities of natural phenomena to a small number of underlying primary elements, or to the operation of a small number of fundamental laws. (3) Explicitly or implicitly, a significant element of direct observation of the physical world is involved.
[☞ p2.4] In attempting to trace the earlier history of science two points should be borne in mind. First, experiment plays a major role in modern science. Hypotheses are formulated and experiments devised to test them. In early science, however, experimentation of this type seems to have been rare. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that if such experimentation is absent, then science is absent. Such an argument has been used in the past to deny that the Greeks possessed any science in any serious sense of that term. Though planned experimentation in the modern sense was comparatively rare, science in antiquity was, to varying degrees, empirically based (one thinks of how the Babylonians’ painstaking observations over many centuries of the motions of the heavenly bodies formed the bedrock of early astronomy). And, indeed, I doubt that we can meaningfully talk of science unless there is an element of direct observation of nature. Any proposed scientific model should be, however inadequately or obliquely, either inferred from observation of natural phenomena, or verified by such observation. Second, it may be difficult to distinguish sharply in pre-modern times between science on the one hand and technology and magic on the other. Craftsmen and magicians are, like scientists (at least applied scientists), concerned with exploiting the forces of nature. Technology in the past, as today, has been a great promoter of scientific discovery, but there is surely a distinction to be drawn between the craftsman and the scientist: both may be interested in knowing how things work, but it is the scientist who tries to explain why they work as they do, who formulates theories of nature. The scientist and the magician can be distinguished in a similar way. Magic may seem at times to be predicated on rational assumptions about the mechanistic workings of nature, which the magician can influence by employing the right verbal formula or materia magica, but magical texts do not make these assumptions explicit or create a model of nature to make their magical praxis intelligible. The prescriptions of a magician to cure an ailment, even when they contain proposals which are sensible and which may prove efficacious, are an intellectual world away from the rational medicine of a Galen. The scientist, the craftsman and the magician are distinguishable, and were distinguished even in antiquity, though one may merge imperceptibly into the other.5
Science and the Talmudic Mind
[☞ p2.5] Jewish involvement in science is not hard to document in the Middle Ages and even in Gaonic times, when Jews engaged seriously with Islamic philosophy.6 But can we find evidence for scientific interest among Jews in the preceding Talmudic age? Jacob Neusner has argued that not only is science absent from classic Rabbinic Judaism but more fundamentally the logic of Rabbinic discourse, as exemplified in the Mishnah, the foundation document of Rabbinism, is incompatible with scientific modes of thinking and discovery.7 The implication seems to be that Rabbinical Jews, by their very mental formation, were inhibited from doing science. Menachem Fisch has responded to Neusner’s claim by arguing that, on the contrary, the rationality that lies behind the modern scientific enterprise is highly congruent with the rationality of Talmudic discourse.8 The argument is interesting, but far too essentialist for my purposes.9 If we descend from this highly abstract, theoretical plane, and look pragmatically at historical realities, we find that there is, in fact, considerable evidence for interest in the workings of nature in Rabbinic literature and Rabbinic society, and, indeed, at a theological level statements occur in the classic Rabbinic sources which can be taken as encouraging and legitimating such an interest. Certain factors may, indeed, have inhibited serious Rabbinic involvement in science. Cosmology (Ma‘aseh Bere’shit) was famously declared to be an esoteric subject, which could not be expounded before two people (that is to say it could only be studied and taught one-to-one).10 If this injunction was followed to the letter it would certainly have hampered interest in one fundamental scientific discipline, since it is hard to see how science could have flourished in the rabbinical schools without a free exchange of ideas. There was also the so-called ban on the study of ‘Greek wisdom’ (hokhmat yevanit), which, whatever this term embraced, would surely have included Greek science.11 Since the dominant science of the Rabbis’ day was Greek, to cut oneself off from Greek science was to condemn oneself to a scientific backwater.
[☞ p2.6] However, we do not know to what extent, if at all, these injunctions were observed. And, despite them, knowledge of contemporary science can be found scattered throughout the Talmud and related literature. Given that the Talmud is essentially a book of law, the quantity of this material is actually rather impressive. Take one example, about which I have written at length elsewhere—Rabbinic knowledge of dream interpretation.12 Bavli Berakhot 55a-57b contains within it a substantial dreambook comparable in many ways to the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus Daldianus. Dream interpretation was a science in antiquity, with an extensive literature going back to Babylonia. In the case of its most sophisticated practitioners it was empirically based: Artemidorus spent a lifetime travelling around talking to professional dream interpreters and collecting data from them, which they had accumulated from contacts with their clients. Ancient dream interpretation, as Freud saw, anticipated modern psychology in much the same way as alchemy anticipated modern chemistry. The Rabbinic dreambook is not, as one might have expected, based upon the Bible, in which dream messages and dream interpretation play a significant role. It is firmly grounded in contemporary science.
[☞ p2.7] And what are we to make of the Sefer Yetzirah? This remarkable and enigmatic little book, which may have been composed in Palestine as early as the third or fourth century CE is essentially a scientific treatise.13 It was, of course, to become one of the foundation documents, along with the Hekhalot literature, of the Jewish mystical canon, but its mystical interpretation probably does not predate the late twelfth century.14 Certainly Saadya in his influential commentary on it treats it as a straight-forward treatise on cosmology.15 Sefer Yetzirah proposes essentially an atomic model of the cosmos, in which all the diverse entities of the phenomenal world are seen as different combinations of twenty-two primary elements, symbolized by the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The work is implicitly based on Genesis 1, in that it develops the basic assertion of Genesis that the world was created by the speech of God. God, of course, speaks Hebrew: therefore, it follows that the structure of Hebrew holds the key to the structure of the cosmos. The relationship is symbolic and metaphorical: just as the vast universe of Hebrew discourse is produced by endless combinations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, so the cosmos can be seen as the product of infinitely varying combinations of twenty-two basic elements. The author of the Sefer Yetzirah confirms this model by finding the number twenty-two (in patterns of twelve, seven and three, corresponding to the structure of the Hebrew alphabet) running through the three domains of the cosmos—space, time and the human body. Sefer Yetzirah may take Genesis 1 as its starting point but what strikes the reader most forcibly about it is its independence of the Bible. It also illustrates well how thin was the partition between science and magic in antiquity. It is obvious from a close reading that Sefer Yetzirah is advocating more than a passive knowledge of the physical world. If one understands how God created the world, then one may be able to control nature and even create new beings. Later Jewish magic seized on this aspect of the Sefer Yetzirah and believed that it held the secret of how to make a homunculus, or golem. This may sound like hocus pocus, but it is not too far removed from the modern scientific belief that if one knows nature’s laws, then one may be able to control nature and even replicate its processes in the laboratory.
[☞ p2.8] We do not know who wrote Sefer Yetzirah, or what his relationship was towards the Rabbinic establishment of his day. There may be an allusion to the work in the Talmud Bavli.16 Even if there is not, circumstantial evidence suggests that whoever wrote the Sefer Yetzirah belonged to what may broadly be termed Rabbinic society. The fact that he wrote in elegant Rabbinic Hebrew points in this direction: it is hard to envisage an audience for such a treatise in third or fourth-century Palestine outside Yeshivah-trained scholars. It should also be borne in mind that Sefer Yetzirah was transmitted to posterity through Rabbinic channels. It seems legitimate, therefore, to take it as evidence for scientific speculation within Rabbinic culture in the Talmudic period.
[☞ p2.9] There is other concrete evidence of scientific interest among Jews in late antiquity. As Raphael Patai has shown Jews were involved in alchemy, possibly from its earliest phases.17 And they were seriously interested in medicine already in Talmudic times: this is demonstrated by the Talmud itself (Julius Preuss collected and analysed the Talmudic material nearly a hundred years ago18), and by Sefer ha-Refu'ot attributed to Asaf ha-Rofe, which Elinor Lieber has expended much effort in elucidating for us.19 Whatever the deep ‘logics’ of the Talmud may be, it is simply not true as a matter of historical fact to say that Jews—even Rabbinic Jews—were totally uninterested in the natural sciences in late antiquity.
[☞ p2.10] I alluded earlier to the idea that the Rabbinic worldview was not necessarily hostile to the study of nature. This comes out in a striking manner in the pericope which opens Midrash Genesis Rabbah.20 This pericope is attributed to Rabbi Hoshayah of Caesarea Maritima, who was a contemporary of Origen and may have met and debated with the Christian sage. According to Hoshayah Torah is the blueprint of creation: ‘God looked into the Torah and created the world’. Torah is the underlying principle, the Hokhmah, of nature. Expressed here is a deep sense that Torah and nature are congruent. But from this it is easy to argue that the study of the one is as legitimate as the study of the other, and, to pick up Fisch’s point, that the study of both should be governed by the same rational procedures. Study of nature cannot on this view be inhibited by any fear of a conflict between ‘revelation’ and ‘science’, since both are a priori based upon the same laws. It is interesting to see how this insight works itself out later in Midrash Rabba. When questions arise about the workings of nature, the Rabbis sometimes find the answers in Torah, and sometimes in direct observation of nature itself.21 Logically it is all one to them. From a modern scientific point of view this position is naive and untenable. No modern scientist would accept a revealed text as evidence for how nature works: the only valid data for understanding nature are derived from nature itself. But at least this pericope implies that nature functions according to immutable laws that are knowable, and it hints at the idea that the study of nature is as desirable as the study of Torah. The Rabbis’ position may not be all that far from that of the devout scientist who believed that when discovering nature’s laws he was ‘thinking God’s thoughts after him.’
Enoch as the Patron of Second Temple Jewish Science
[☞ p2.11] Is it possible to push the story back further still and to find an interest in nature among Jews in the Second Temple period? This brings us to Qumran. In the library of the Qumran sect, both in the sectarian texts and in writings such as the Books of Enoch and Jubilees, which the sect held in high esteem, we find a wealth of interest in the workings of nature and in modelling the cosmos. Different branches of science are represented: cosmology and cosmography, astrology and astronomy (the two disciplines were not clearly distinguished in antiquity), meteorology, calendrical science and physiognomy. The presence of physiognomy comes as something of a surprise, but is should be remembered that physiognomy was a science in antiquity, every bit as much as dream interpretation. It had a well-established technical literature going back to Babylonia, and in various guises (e.g. phrenology) it remained a ‘science’ down to the nineteenth century.22 Like dream interpretation, the more sophisticated forms of physiognomy appear to have been based on observation of the relationship of character to physical type, and it too anticipated certain aspects of modern science, particularly in the field of psychology.
[☞ p2.12] The calendar in 1 Enoch 72 provides on instructive example of this Second Temple Jewish science.23 It fits admirably the pragmatic definition of science which I proposed earlier. It clearly attempts to uncover the laws of nature (in this case those governing the sun’s motion through the heavens during a solar year), and it provides a rather sophisticated model which integrates in a reasonably satisfactory way a number of precise observations of natural phenomena (see Figure 1). The model is based on the fundamental observation that the sun rises and sets during the year at different points on the eastern and western horizons. From the standpoint of on observer in the northern hemisphere the southernmost point is marked by the winter solstice and the northernmost by the summer solstice. The sun reaches the mid-point between these two extremes at the spring and the autumn equinoxes. The length of daylight and darkness varies according to the position at which the sun rises and sets. The further south the shorter the daylight. The minimum period of light occurs at the winter solstice, the maximum at the summer solstice. The proportions of daylight to darkness are measured on a 18 point scale (implying an eighteen hour day), so that at the equinoxes the ratios are 9:9 and at the solstices 12:6. The eastern and western horizons between the solstice points are divided equally into six matching gates. The sun rises and sets twice in each of these gates as it moves northwards and southwards along the horizons, thus giving twelve months. This division is clearly based not on the movement of the sun but on the movement of the moon, and is dictated by an attempt to fit twelve lunations into the solar year. The author seems to be aware that this cannot be done, so he varies the length of his months. Normal months are thirty days in length, but the months in which the solstices and equinoxes occur are each given an added day. The result is a solar year of 364 days.
[☞ p2.13] All this may seem rather primitive and obvious, but we should not underestimate how revolutionary both in content and in method such a text must have seemed when it first appeared in Israel. 1 Enoch 72 belongs to the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries, the earliest section of 1 Enoch, and is probably to be dated to the late Persian period (around 400 BCE). No earlier text remotely similar to this in its attitude towards nature has survived in the literature of ancient Israel. And we are reasonably sure as to the origins of its doctrine: it is to be found not in earlier Jewish sources but in Babylonian astronomy. It marks the introduction of alien wisdom to Israel.
[☞ p2.14] The Enochic literature contains the highest surviving concentrations of Jewish science from the Second Temple period and much of this science is linked directly or indirectly with the name of the predeluvian patriarch. Enoch is depicted as a great sage, as the fount of all scientific wisdom. Enoch received this wisdom by divine revelation: it was disclosed to him by angels or in visions. There are parallels in Egyptian, Babylonian end other early scientific traditions for presenting science in the form of revelation from the gods, and it is tempting, at first sight, to suppose that in the Books of Enoch this is no more then a literary convention. But there may be more to it than meets the eye. At some point in the evolution of the Enochic literature an author or redactor must have known that the knowledge which he was presenting was not disclosed by angels but had come from contemporary, non-Jewish sources. Much of it, as we have already noted, appears to have been borrowed from Babylonian science some time in the Persian period. The author or authors, however, did not choose to present their information as simply borrowed from contemporary science. The cosmology of 1 Enoch is in many ways no more crude than the cosmologies of Anaximander or of the other pre-Socratic philosophers, yet they do not seem to have resorted to claims of divine revelation. One might equally contrast the attitude of the author of Genesis 1. His account of creation in its present redactional setting within the Pentateuch is implicitly claimed to be divine revelation, but, taken on its own, it makes no such claim. The author tells his tale simply and directly, and does not inform us how he knew such things. Why, then, do the authors of the Enochic literature wrap their doctrine up so comprehensively in the mantle of divine revelations and visions?
[☞ p2.15] I think the answer must, in part, lie in the fact that they were consciously attempting to domesticate within Jewish tradition a body of alien wisdom. They were, at least at the outset, fully aware of the newness of their doctrine—that they were propagating ideas never before heard in Israel. It was for this reason that they insisted so emphatically that in fact they were disclosing old wisdom that was already alluded to in the venerable traditions of Israel. The choice of Enoch as the patron on whom to pin this new teaching is interesting. The brief references to Enoch in Genesis 5 are highly suggestive and hint at a fuller story. It has long been suspected that in the form of the Pentateuch which we now have Enochic material has been edited out. Given that the P-strand of the Pentateuch to which Genesis 5:21-24 belongs is post-exilic, some have suggested that the Enochic literature may actually contain some of these excluded traditions. However, as I understand it, the dynamics of the relationship between the Enochic literature and Genesis 5 is quite different. I have argued elsewhere24 that the relationship is essentially midrashic. That is to say, the authors of the Enochic literature are exploiting a narrative lacuna in an authoritative text as a way of legitimating new teaching. This implies a certain distance—a discontinuity—between the legitimating text and the doctrine being legitimated. Whatever Genesis 5:21-24 alludes to, it was not Enochic science.
[☞ p2.16] But why precisely Enoch? Why not, for example, Adam? If antiquity was a virtue then surely the progenitor of humankind would have been an obvious choice. Adam is certainly used to validate doctrine in later pseudepigrapha. There is probably an element of opportunism in the choice of Enoch. Midrashists cannot pick and choose: they have to seize on lacunae wherever they happen to occur. But within the grand narrative of Biblical history Enoch suited well the purposes of the Enochic circles. He lay far back in time, before the Flood destroyed human life and disrupted human knowledge.25 And he was older and more venerable than Moses. I have suggested elsewhere that there is something anti-Mosaic in the Enochic literature.26 It cannot be accidental that it ignores Moses, and attributes its teaching to someone else. The earliest layers of the Enochic tradition must virtually coincide with the so-called reforms of Ezra. Whatever we may think about the historicity of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, they do seem to point to a successful attempt in the Persian period, possibly with Persian royal support, to reconstitute Jewish society in Judah on the basis of the Torah of Moses. That the earliest Enochic writings ignore these developments can hardly be accidental. And there is merit in the suggestion that when the Enochic writings came to be canonised into a Pentateuch, the intent was not simply to imitate the Mosaic Pentateuch, but to challenge it.
[☞ p2.17] Later tradition constantly senses a rivalry between Enoch and Moses. A number of the Enochic traditions were later transferred to Moses in a way that suggests that later writers were uneasy with the powers and authority being granted to Enoch and felt that they should be claimed for Moses. The well-known ambivalence of Rabbinic literature towards Enoch is, I would suggest, motivated by a sense that he is a rival to Moses.27 There is no way in which one religious system can accommodate two such figures of authority. The circles which stand behind the Books of Enoch were, I would argue, proposing an Enochic paradigm for Judaism in opposition to the emerging Mosaic paradigm—a paradigm based primarily on science as opposed to one based primarily on law. They were innovators: they had taken on board some of the scientific thought of their day and had used it aggressively to promote a new Jewish worldview.
[☞ p2.18] This analysis of the Enochic literature begins to suggest something of the profile of the shadowy group or groups that stand behind these texts. They were, in a sense, modernists. That is to say, they were intellectuals who had access to foreign ideas and were open to the scientific thought of their day. And they were prepared to integrate these novel ideas into a new form of Judaism. But the picture would be incomplete if we failed to spot a deep ambivalence in the Enochic literature towards new knowledge. This comes out in a startling contradiction that lies at the heart of the texts as we now have them. There are two great bodies of knowledge referred to in this literature. On the one hand there is the knowledge of nature conveyed by Enoch: this is good. On the other hand there is the body of knowledge conveyed by the Watchers: this is bad. It led directly to the corruption of human society, and to the catastrophe of the Flood. There is no suggestion that the knowledge brought by the Watchers was false knowledge. It was heavenly in origin and mediated by angels, just like Enoch’s knowledge. The Watchers were as much culture-bringers as was Enoch. But the knowledge they brought, like the knowledge of Prometheus, was knowledge which Heaven did not want to be disclosed to humankind.
[☞ p2.19] This is intriguing. How can we separate between these two types of knowledge? This brings us to another central theme of the Enochic literature—divine judgement. Side by side with the modernist science of the Enochic literature is a powerful strand of moralizing, conservative ethics. The scientific vision of the cosmos is constantly exploited to ram home the message of divine punishment for sin, and sin is defined not primarily in terms of breaches of the Sinai-covenant (as we would expect in a Moses-orientated worldview), but in terms of life-style, such as the use of cosmetics and jewellery. The vision of the world projected by the Enochic literature is paradoxically both modernist and reactionary. The circles which produced it saw a strong analogy between the state of society in their own times and the condition of the world before the Flood. There was the same radical corruption. The sins of the Watchers were being repeated in their day, and just as God had responded in the past to such radical evil with overwhelming punishment from which only a righteous remnant escaped, so he was about to do the same again. The world stood once more under the threat of imminent catastrophe. Just as Enoch, the preacher of righteousness, had warned the wicked in his day, so the Enochic circles were warning the wicked in their day and telling them to flee from the wrath to come.
[☞ p2.20] It is noteworthy that the knowledge brought by the Watchers is strongly technological in character: ‘magical medicine, incantations, the cutting of roots, and plants … the making of swords and knives, and shields and breastplates … bracelets, decorations, shadowing of the eye with antimony, ornamentation, the beautifying of the eyelids, all kinds of precious stones, and all colouring tinctures and alchemy’28. For all its modernism 1 Enoch has a whiff of technophobia about it: it is suspicious of technological change. I suspect that this stratum of the literature relates to a period of growing prosperity and materialism, allied to rapid technological development. The situation was not congenial to the conservative mentality of the group. I do not know whether there is anything in the archaeological or the historical record which would enable us to pin-point this time more exactly. I doubt that there is. It is all a matter of subjective perception, which may not correlate all that obviously with historical reality as we can now perceive it. But that the author or authors of these traditions were opposed to social and technological changes taking place in their society is hardly in doubt.
[☞ p2.21] I have already noted that two major images of Enoch dominate the surviving Second Temple period literature—Enoch the Sage who reveals the secrets of nature, and Enoch the Preacher of Righteousness who rebukes the sins of his generation and warns of divine judgement. Corresponding to these two images are the two major themes of 1 Enoch—‘science’ and ‘ethics’, descriptions of the cosmos and divine judgement. The two images and the two themes are tightly intertwined in 1 Enoch. Part of the cosmography is devoted to describing the places of punishment of the Watchers and those who follow their evil ways. A close analysis of the literary traditions leaves me in little doubt that the Enoch the Sage and the Culture-bringer is earlier than Enoch the Preacher of Righteousness. Enoch was first exploited in order to validate and domesticate a body of foreign scientific knowledge. Only later—perhaps some one hundred and fifty years later—was this same Enoch the Sage transformed, for reasons which are not entirely clear, into Enoch the Preacher of Righteousness, and the Enochic traditions spun to present a sombre message of impending divine judgement. The same analysis suggests that the Watchers have also undergone a transformation. It is probable that originally they were good—heavenly messengers who descended to earth to bring mankind divine knowledge and to promote the advancement of human culture. When those cultural advances, again for reasons that are no longer apparent, came to be regarded as negative the Watchers were transformed into fallen angels, who had brought forbidden knowledge to mankind and corrupted them, and they were linked with the Sons of God in Genesis 6 who entered into illicit union with the daughters of men.29
Science in the Achaemenid Empire
[☞ p2.22] Can we sketch in any more detail the profile of the group or groups that produced the Enochic literature, and relate them more precisely to their times? Most would agree that 1 Enoch has strong links with ancient Jewish wisdom tradition. Within that tradition two contrasting views of physical world can be found in the Persian period.30 First there is the attitude expressed in the speeches of Yahweh at the end of the Book of Job (chapters 38-41). There Yahweh confronts Job with a catalogue of the wonders of nature. No explanation is offered as to how nature works, only a lyrical description of its mysteries. Indeed the speeches are predicated on the assumption that the ways of God in the physical world are unfathomable to the human mind; the appropriate response to them is one of humility and praise, not study and explanation: ‘The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkens counsel without knowledge? Gird up now your loins like a man; for I will demand of you, and declare you unto me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if you have understanding. Who determined the measures thereof, if you know? Or who stretched the line upon it? Whereupon were the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof?’ (Job 38:1-6).31 The author of these lines would surely have regarded it as futile, if not impious, to attempt to discover and to explain how nature works. The dating of the Book of Job is notoriously uncertain, but these speeches probably come from roughly the same time as the Enochic Book of the Heavenly Luminaries. The widely accepted fifth-century dating for Job would suit my present argument very well.
[☞ p2.23] The second attitude towards nature is implicit in a text also dating from around the same period—Proverbs 8. There wisdom is personified as the master craftsman who assisted God in the creation of the world. The world is based on wisdom; hokhmah, to use the terminology of Heraclitus, a Greek near-contemporary of the author of Proverbs 8, is the Logos of nature32—an equation which Philo was later perceptively to develop.33 But it is this very same wisdom which is said to reside with men, and which they are called upon to embrace and to make their own: ‘When God marked out the foundations of the earth, then I [Wisdom] was by him, as a master craftsman (אמון); and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in his habitable earth; and my delight was with the sons of men. Now, therefore, my sons, hearken unto me: for blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction, and be wise’ (Prov 8:29-33). It would not be hard to deduce from this passage, though the text does not explicitly do so, that it is perfectly possible, legitimate, and, indeed, desirable to study the wisdom that fashioned the world.
[☞ p2.24] The circles that inaugurated the Enoch tradition took the Proverbs 8 line. They were as impressed as the author of Job by the wonders of nature, but they saw this as no bar to studying or to explaining how nature worked. They had, as Isaac Newton would have appreciated, the attitude of the true scientist: awe before nature, but at the same time an irresistible urge to probe its mysteries, and when the mystery is explained, the awe is not dispelled but only deepened. The circles that stand behind 1 Enoch seem to have emerged in Israel in the later Persian period. Their science, as we have already noted, appears to have been drawn largely from Babylonian sources. This is hardly surprising. Babylonia dominated early science, particularly the exact sciences,34 and Babylonian scientific ideas were certainly transmitted westwards to the Greeks, and, as 1 Enoch and related texts make clear, to the Jews.
[☞ p2.25] This westward transmission of Babylonian ideas would have been facilitated by the political and cultural conditions that prevailed under the Persian Empire. It is surely highly significant that the language of the Enochic traditions is Aramaic. This fact is usually not paid the attention it deserves. In the fifth or early fourth century BCE in Judah it was probably something of an innovation to write a work such as the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries in Aramaic. Aramaic was, indeed, spoken by many in post-exilic Judah (though not precisely the Aramaic of 1 Enoch, which is in a high, literary register), but Hebrew was by no means dead, and it remained unquestionably the language of literature. The reason for the Aramaic is quite simple: Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Persian Empire for administrative and diplomatic purposes; and it probably functioned as the language of international culture as well. It was in Aramaic that the Enochic circles received the Babylonian scientific traditions; it was in Aramaic that they preserved them. The ideas were new in Israel and Hebrew as yet lacked a technical, scientific vocabulary in which to express them. An analogous situation arose in the early Middle Ages, when Jews began to write in Arabic, not so much because it was the vernacular, but because it was the language of high culture and science, and Hebrew had yet to develop a scientific vocabulary. But the Arabic scientific literature which the Jews read, was not, at least initially, transmitting Arabic ideas, but rather Greek ideas in Arabic dress.
[☞ p2.26] The Enochic circles were obviously well educated: they had mastered literary Aramaic and they had access to foreign literature. Most likely, therefore, they belonged to the scribal and priestly classes in Jerusalem. They seem to have retained some sort of existence over a considerable period of time, and to have continued to work on and develop the Enochic traditions. That development, as we have noted, earlier was increasingly in a moralising direction. The science was put directly to the service of religion, to support a message of impending divine judgement. The Enochic literature was, as we know, taken up by the Qumran community, for reasons which are not immediately apparent. The Qumran community had its own sectarian view of the world, focused sharply on a model of time which portrayed nature as moving purposefully towards a climactic final conflict between the cosmic principles of light and darkness (a notion very probably indebted to Persian thought). The message of impending catastrophic judgement in the Enochic literature was doubtless congenial to them in a general way, but there is little sign of the detailed Enochic cosmographies playing a central role in sectarian thinking.
[☞ p2.27] The standard explanation of Qumranian interest in Enoch is that the Qumranians, in opposition to the Jerusalem priesthood, had adopted the Enochic solar calendar, and needed both the Enochic science and the authority of the Enochic literature to sustain its position. However, this view is not without problems. It is likely that the Enochic 364-day solar calendar did, originally, represent an attempt to reform the Jewish calendar, in accordance with the best science of the day. It is possible that the new calendar was presented as a way of living more in accord with the laws of nature and of God. But, of course, the calendar does not work, and it would not have taken long for people using it to notice that it does not work: without correction it should have been obvious within thirty years that it was badly out of synch with nature. And in a community that may have lasted almost two hundred years, the discrepancy would have become glaring and disastrous. The calendar may have been retained as an ideal model of time—a kind of model not unknown to modern science. It may have come to represent how time ideally should run, and perhaps would run in the future, when the natural order was no longer disturbed by evil. It is, of course, possible that as a community of scholars, the Qumranians valued the Enochic texts for their own sake as learned, and, indeed, edifying literature, without being too deeply influenced by them. But the simplest explanation is surely that Enoch features at Qumran because the circles who founded Qumran were linked in some way to the circles that studied the Enochic tradition. Enoch was part of their intellectual baggage. The Jerusalem Temple in the Second Temple period was probably a locus not just of ritual, but of a vigorous intellectual life, and may have housed a school or schools. This should, in principle, cause no surprise: great temples had from hoary antiquity been centres of learning in the Near East. Qumran was founded by renegade Jerusalem priests. The founders of Qumran were associated with the school, or the circle, in the Jerusalem Temple which had preserved and studied the Enochic literature, and they brought copies of the texts with them from there to Qumran.
[☞ p2.28] Be this as it may, if my analysis is even half correct, then it points to a rather interesting conclusion. Sometime in the late Persian period, say around 450-400 BCE, under the influence of Persian and, ultimately, of Babylonian ideas, Jews for the first time became interested in producing scientific models of the workings of the natural world. Though to some extent anticipated by the simplified, largely demythologized account of the origin of the world in Genesis 1 and by the assertion that behind the natural order lies a hokhmah accessible to the human mind in Proverbs 8, the approach to nature displayed in the Enochic Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is unprecedented in Jewish literature. It seems to mark a turning-point in Jewish intellectual history—the emergence, for the first time, of what might properly be called a scientific attitude.
[☞ p2.29] One might compare the analogous intellectual revolution which had taken place about a hundred years earlier in the Greek world, under the influence, possibly, of the similar intellectual stimuli. I refer to the rise of the Ionian school of Greek philosophy and science. The Ionians too produced new, rational models of the cosmos—models little more sophisticated than those of the Jewish Enochic circles, but which in the Heilsgeschichte of western civilization are traditionally seen as the beginnings of Greek, and indeed of European, science. In both cases—the Jewish and the Greek—the new models of the universe marked a qualitative break from pre-existing mythical and epic pictures of the world. In the case of the Greeks those earlier pictures were to be found in Homer and in Hesiod; in the case of the Jews they were enshrined primarily in the opening chapters of Genesis. In both cases some reference was made in the new models to the old mythical ideas. This is certainly the case in 1 Enoch which, at least in its present form, bears a loosely exegetical relationship to Genesis 1, but there seem to have been allusions to the traditional cosmogonies in the Ionian cosmologies as well.
[☞ p2.30] The question of eastern influences on the Ionians is controversial, but in the wake of the “orientalizing revolution”35 it is now widely acknowledged that external ideas played a significant role in the development of Ionian thought.36 The source or sources of those ideas is not entirely clear. The Greeks themselves looked to Egypt, but modern scholarship points more emphatically to Babylonia and Persia. The Ionians are unlikely to have known much about Persian ideas before 540 when the Persians reached the Aegean coast. Only in the time of Heraclitus do we find more or less convincing evidence of distinctively Iranian influences on Greek thought.37 However, the rather sharp distinctions often draw between Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian and Canaanite thought may be misleading. The picture that is now emerging is of an increasingly internationalized culture in the Near East in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, with a remarkably free interchange of ideas among the educated elites. This may have come about in part through migration of individuals (Martin West assigns a major role to wandering Magi38), but politics, and concomitant linguistic and commercial factors, were probably more decisive. In the sixth century the Babylonians dominated the Near East politically: that doubtless fostered trade and gave the whole region a lingua franca, Babylonian. When the Persians succeeded the Babylonians as the political masters, Aramaic replaced Babylonian as the lingua franca. This almost certainly did not mean the end of Babylonian cultural influence, since Babylonian ideas were probably carried over into Aramaic. Local intellectual elites were able to buy into this international culture by learning Babylonian and Aramaic. Greeks would have had a flying start in the case of Aramaic, given that it was written in basically the same alphabet as they had adapted for their own language.
[☞ p2.31] What I am suggesting, then, is that we can identify at least two groups within this international culture, one in Miletus in western Anatolia and one in Jerusalem in Judah, which independently of each other but influenced by the free circulation of ideas through the Levant and the Near East, developed a view of nature which within their own societies was radically new and which can for the first time be meaningfully labelled as ‘scientific’. This interest in nature, inaugurated among Jews in the Persian period, continued in fits and starts down to the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, as Ruderman has shown, it gathered pace. In the nineteenth century, as a result of political emancipation, many Jews again rediscovered the natural world. The result, in the twentieth century has been some of the greatest achievements of scientific thought. From Enoch to Einstein is a long and tortuous road. At times the traces are scuffed and the track almost disappears. But it looks like a road which the historian of Judaism could and should map along the whole of its length.39
Figure 1: The Enochic Model of the Sun’s Motion
[☞ endnote-chapter2-asterix] * I have chosen not to revise this article, though tempted to do so, since it contains the text to which others have reacted. I should, however, make clear that I have now modified some of my views expressed here. I hope to return to the question of early Jewish science in the not too distant future.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-1] 1 David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-2] 2 A case in point is the sixteenth century Italian scholar Ovadiah Sforno whose philosophical and medical training are very evident in his Bible commentaries.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-3] 3 See, for example, Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-4] 4 It is clearly summarized in Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1-39.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-5] 5 In other words I am using “science” in broadly the sense in which it is used by standard historians of science such as George Sarton (Introduction to the History of Science, 5 vols. [Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1927-48]), Lynn Thorndike (A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols, [New York: Macmillan, 1923-58]), and Joseph Needham (Science and Civiilization in China, 6 vols, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954-96]). If their enterprise is valid, then, si parva licet componere magnis, so is mine.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-6] 6 One thinks of Levi ben Gerson with his Jacob’s Staff, his modified astrolabe and his criticisms of the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion, or of Abraham ibn Ezra with his interests in mathematics and astrology. For an excellent overview of Jewish science in the Middle Ages see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Science, Jewish”, in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 11 (ed. J.R Strayer; New York: Scribner’s, 1989), 89-94. Further, Charles Singer, “Science and Judaism”, in The Jews: Their History Religion and Culture, vol. III (ed. L. Finkelstein; New York: Schocken, 1960), 216-265, with the postscript by Bernard Goldstein, “The Jewish Contribution to Astronomy in the Middle Ages”, 270-275. Further bibliography may be gleaned from Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 375-382.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-7] 7 Neusner first published his views in the pamphlet Why No Science in Judaism? (New Orleans: Jewish Studies Program of Tulane University, 1987), and then in a modified form as “Why No Science in the Mind of Judaism?,” in his The Making of the Mind of Judaism: The Formative Age (Scholars Press: Atlanta, 1987), 139-160. It is hard to see how the position adopted there squares with his later book Judaism as Philosophy: The Method and Message of the Mishnah (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1991), in which he argues that “the method and the message of the Mishnah fall into the classification of philosophical methods and messages of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. The method is like that of Aristotle; the message, congruent with that of Neo-Platonism” (xi). But if the rationality of the Mishnah is congruent with the rationality of philosophy but not congruent with the rationality of science, it seems to follow that the rationality of philosophy is not congruent with the rationality of science. This is surely a paradoxical conclusion, questionable both in terms of history (which has never sharply differentiated between philosophy and science) and in terms of logic. See further his Jerusalem and Athens: The Congruity of Talmudic and Classical Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Fisch also notes this problem with Neusner’s position (Rational Rabbis, 197).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-8] 8 Fisch, Rational Rabbis.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-9] 9 I find myself very much in agreement with Ruderman’s comment: “Although there are some truth and considerable insight in their [Neusner’s and Fisch’s] positions, neither offers, to my mind, an adequate historical explanation of the dynamic and complex interactions between science and Judaism. Such theoretical-typological discussions tend to reduce reality to a single categorization or abstract definition, flattening the differences of specific times and places into homogeneous, immutable and predictable entities called science and Judaism.” (Jewish Thought, 4).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-10] 10 m. Ḥagigah 2:1.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-11] 11 m. Sotah 9:14; t. ʿAvodah Zarah 1:20; b. Menaḥot 99b; b. Bava Qamma 83a. See further my essay “Hellenism and Hellenization as Problematic Historiographical Categories,” in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen; Louisville, London, Leiden: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 63–80.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-12] 12 “Bavli Berakhot 55a-57b: The Talmudic Dreambook in Context,” JJS 46 (1995): 230-248.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-13] 13 See Joseph Dan, “The Three Phases in the History of Sefer Yetzira,” FJB 21 (1994): 7-29. The contrast between Sefer Yetzirah and another early Jewish cosmological work, the Seder Rabba di-Bereshit, helps to point up just how “scientific” Sefer Yetzirah is. Seder Rabba di-Bereshit offers a model of the cosmos, arranged in concentric circles, but it is essentially a symbolic model and apparently arbitrary—symmetry for theological rather than cosmological reasons; it shows no relation to the world as we experience it, or to the science of the day. In no way could Seder Rabba di-Bereshit be treated as scientific.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-14] 14 Among the earliest to give it a mystical interpretation was the “Unique Cherub” Circle of the Rhineland: see Joseph Dan, The “Unique Cherub” Circle (Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 1999), 36-45.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-15] 15 All the major early commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah treat it as a scientific work: see Raphael Jospe, “Early Philosophical Commentaries on Sefer Yetzira: Some Comments,” REJ 149 (1990): 369-415.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-16] 16 b. Sanhedrin 67b: “Abaye said: The laws of sorcery are like the laws of Sabbath: certain actions are punished by stoning, certain actions are exempt but forbidden, and certain actions are entirely permitted. He who does a deed is stoned; he who holds the eyes is exempt, yet it is forbidden. What is entirely permitted? Such as the action of Rav Ḥanina and Rav Hoshayah, who spent every Sabbath eve studying the Laws of Creation (hilkhot yetzirah), by means of which they created a third-grown calf and ate it.”
[☞ endnote-chapter2-17] 17 Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-18] 18 Biblisch-talmudische Medizin (Berlin: S. Karger, 1911; repr. Farnborough, Hants: Gregg International, 1969; English version trans. F. Rosner; New York and London: Sanhedrin Press, 1978).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-19] 19 See, for example, her excellent survey, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines: A Hebrew Encyclopedia of Greek and Jewish Medicine, Possibly Compiled in Byzantium on an Indian Model” in Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. J. Scarborough; Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 233-249.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-20] 20 Genesis Rabbah 1:1: “In the beginning God created (Gen 1:1). R. Hoshayah commenced [his exposition thus]: Then I was by Him, as a nursling (amon); and I was daily all delight (Prov 8:30). Amon means tutor; amon means covered; amon means hidden; and some say, amon means great. Amon means tutor, as you read, As an omen (nursing-father) carries the sucking child (Num 11:12). Amon means covered, as in the verse, Haemunim (they that were clad—i.e. covered) in scarlet (Lam 4:5). Amon means hidden, as in the verse, And he concealed (omen) Hadassah (Est 2:7). Amon means great, as in the verse, Are you better than No-amon (Nah 3:8)? which is rendered, Are you better than Alexandria the Great, which is situated among the rivers? Another interpretation: ’amon means a workman (uman). The Torah declares: ‘I was the working tool of the Holy One, blessed be he.’ In human practice, when a mortal king builds a palace, he builds it not with his own skill but with the skill of an architect. The architect, however, does not build it out of his head, but employs plans and diagrams to know how to arrange the chambers and the wicket doors. Thus God consulted the Torah and created the world, while the Torah declares, In the beginning God created (Gen 1:1), Beginning here referring to the Torah, as in the verse, The Lord made me as the beginning of his way (Prov 8:22).” The darshan has correctly identified the basic assertion of Proverbs 8, namely that Hokhmah is the underlying, rational order of the universe. He simply assumes that Torah and Hokhmah must be identical. See further below.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-21] 21 See, for example, Genesis Rabbah 4:4 and 6:8.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-22] 22 See further my essay, “Physiognomy, Initiation and Rank in the Qumran Community,” in Geschichte—Tradition—Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. P. Schäfer, H. Cancik and H. Lichtenberger; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), I 385-394.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-23] 23 See the fundamental discussion by Otto Neugebauer in The Book of Enoch or I Enoch (ed. M. Black; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 386-419.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-24] 24 “From Son of Adam to Second God: Transformations of the Biblical Enoch” in Biblical Figures outside the Bible (ed. M.E. Stone and T.A. Bergren; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), 90-94.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-25] 25 It is also possible that he is being tacitly equated with some Mesopotamian culture-bringer, such as Enmeduranki.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-26] 26 “From Son of Adam to Second God,” 117-110.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-27] 27 See especially Genesis Rabbah 25:1.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-28] 28 1 Enoch 7:1 + 8:1. I quote here the translation by Ephraim Isaac in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. I (ed. J.H. Charlesworth; New York, 1983), 16. Isaac’s rendering “alchemy” is speculative and based on his Ms A (Kebran 9/II). The Ethiopic literally means “transmutation of the world”. It should be noted that the third/fourth century CE alchemical writer Zosimus attributes the introduction of alchemy to the Watchers, and that Enoch came to be closely linked with alchemy through his identification with Hermes Trismegistus. See Patai, Jewish Alchemists, 16 and 33.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-29] 29 Jubilees 4:15 hints at this more positive evaluation of the Watchers.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-30] 30 In general see Hartmut Gese, “Wisdom Literature in the Persian Period,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. I, Introduction; The Persian Period (ed. W.D. Davies and H. L. Finkelstein; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 189-218.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-31] 31 Qohelet 3:11 is sometimes cited as evidence of scepticism towards man’s ability to understand the physical world: את הכול עשה יפה בעתו גם את העלם נתן בלבם מבלי אשר לא ימצא האדם את המעשה אשר עשה האלהים מראש ועד סוף, but the text is a well-known crux. The NRSV probably correctly conveys the sense: ‘He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.’
[☞ endnote-chapter2-32] 32 See, e.g., Diels-Kranz11 Frgs 1, 2, 50 and 114, with the commentary in Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (ed. G.S. Kirk; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 32-71: Frg. 1: “Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they [men] are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.” Frg. 2: “But although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding.’ Frg. 50: ‘Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree [homologein] that all things are one.” Frg. 114: “Those who speak with sense must rely on what is common to all, as a city must rely on its law, and with much greater reliance: for all laws of men are nourished by one law, the divine law; for it has as much power as it wishes and is sufficient for all and is still left over” (translations by Kirk).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-33] 33 Philo’s Logos is indebted not only to the Platonic Logos but to the ancient Hebrew concept of Wisdom.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-34] 34 See Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (New York: Dover, 1969, 2nd ed).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-35] 35 See Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, (trans. M. E. Pinder and W. Burkert; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-36] 36 For an overview of the question see Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1972), 1-31. Though his account is generally balanced, Hussey still wants to reserve something unique for the Ionians. He maintains that ‘the core of the Milesian revolution, namely the development of a reformed theology based on general principles, and the correlative vision of a universe governed by universal law, cannot be paralleled, as yet, from anywhere outside Ionia’ (p. 29). But if the argument of the present paper is correct then a group of Jews seem to have reached more or less the same position at more or less the same time as the Ionians. Hussey notes the attitude towards nature in Job and shrewdly compares it with Pindar, but he misses the significance of Proverbs 8, or even of the heavily demythologized account of the origins of the world in Genesis 1, which, as we noted earlier, in itself makes no claim to prophetic revelation. Hussey’s grasp of ancient Jewish sources is notably uninformed. He also tends to tie the Milesian revolution too tightly to the political conditions of the city-state. This seems to imply that science and philosophy can only flourish under “democracy”. The Milesian philosophers were almost certainly from a rather different social background from that of the members of our Enochic circles in Jerusalem. The former seem to have been men of affairs, with no obvious religious role, whereas the latter were probably priests. But it would be wrong to deduce from this that these two groups would automatically have held fundamentally different views of the world, and that the priests could not have been rational or scientific. Nevertheless Hussey’s willingness seriously to entertain the possibility of eastern influences on the Ionians marks a seismic shift from the older histories of the Presocratics such as Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957, 1st ed.) and William K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vols I-II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962-65).
[☞ endnote-chapter2-37] 37 See Martin L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1971), 111-202.
[☞ endnote-chapter2-38] 38 Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. chap. 7, “The Gift of the Magi”. There are persistent rumours in the Greek doxographical tradition that some of the Ionian thinkers were actually themselves of ‘oriental’ stock, but it hard to know what credence to give to these traditions. West provides a wealth of oriental parallels to the Presocratics, some more convincing than others, which build cumulatively into a conclusive case. However, his historical explanation of these parallels leaves something to be desired. He is a Pan-Iranist, who paints a rather romantic picture of Magi scattering from Persia eastwards into India, where they lay the foundations of Indian philosophy and westwards into Asia Minor where they profoundly shape Greek thought. And like most writers on these subjects he ignores the linguistic question: through the medium of which language did these ideas spread?
[☞ endnote-chapter2-39] 39 Whether or not it is meaningful to talk about Jewish science cannot be discussed here. For the historian of Judaism the important point is the extent to which religious ideas and scientific ideas interacted in Judaism. See further Patai, Jewish Alchemists, 517-518.
