8. “Ancient Jewish Sciences” and the Historiography of Judaism
Annette Yoshiko Reed*
[☞ p8.1] Even a decade or so ago, it might have been difficult to imagine an entire conference and volume devoted to “ancient Jewish sciences.” In Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, for instance, David Ruderman noted how he had “originally intended to begin … with an overview of attitudes towards the natural world in ancient Judaism,” only to encounter “a vast body of material in an area that has not been fully studied.”1 Such was the dearth of research that it warranted its own Appendix—a bibliographical essay sketching possible paths ahead.2 Similarly, in 2002, when Y. Tzvi Langermann investigated the “beginnings of Hebrew scientific literature,” the period that he had in mind was the eighth and ninth centuries CE, and the works in question were Baraita de-Shmuel, Sefer Yetzirah, Mishnat ha-Midot, and Yetzirat ha-Walad, as well as possible “products of the same creative spurt” such as Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, Midrash Konen, and Sefer Asaf ha-Rofe.3 Shortly after, Shlomo Sela cited many of the same works as “early” precedents for the twelfth-century “rise of medieval Hebrew science,” albeit stressing that even these can be “hardly described as a homogenous corpus … belonging to a continuous scientific tradition.”4
[☞ p8.2] The possibility of even earlier precedents was among the points that I sought to raise a few years later, in an essay bringing Second Temple and other Jewish sources to bear on broader historiographical problems pertaining to “religion” and “science.”5 Although materials of possible relevance had been discussed since the 1970s in specialist research on sapiential and apocalyptic traditions in Second Temple Judaism,6 little had been done to bring them into the purview of the scholarly project of Ruderman and others who sought to forge “a new area of inquiry in Jewish cultural history” by “open[ing] a meaningful conversation about the dialogues between science and Judaism” in their shifting social, discursive, and disciplinary contexts.7 And thus, even in 2007, it was still pertinent to ask “Was there science in ancient Judaism?”8 and to begin an inquiry into the question by stressing that “[t]he topic of science in ancient Judaism has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention.”9
[☞ p8.3] The difference, since then, is stunning. The possibility that evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls might transform our views about this topic, as with so many others, was raised already in the wake of J. T. Milik’s publication of the Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch from Qumran.10 Yet, here as elsewhere, the full realization of the ramifications awaited the publication of the entire corpus, and the new syntheses thus made possible. In this sense, the very notion of “ancient Jewish sciences” owes much to two monumental monographs on the evidence from Qumran: Mladen Popović’s Reading the Human Body in 2007 and Jonathan Ben-Dov’s Head of All Years in 2008. By considering the full range of relevant Hebrew and Aramaic fragments discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in their broader Jewish, Mesopotamian, and Hellenistic contexts, Popović and Ben-Dov have opened startling new vistas onto the engagement of ancient Jewish scribes and scholars with the scientific discourses, discoveries, and disciplines of their non-Jewish counterparts.
[☞ p8.4] Through a focus on 4Q186 and 4Q561, Popović11 recovers a physiognomic tradition “the existence of which was unknown before the Qumran discovery”: not only do these fragments reveal the surprising ways in which “Second Temple period Judaism participated in forms of learning that were current in surrounding cultures,”12 but 4Q186 offers “exceptional textual evidence for physiognomic and astrological learning in antiquity in general” inasmuch as physiognomics is here used “to determine a person’s zodiacal sign.”13 Ben-Dov’s comprehensive and comparative treatment of calendrical materials from Qumran achieves something similar with respect to astronomy.14 Further establishing the value of the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence for the intercultural connectivity of knowledge in the Hellenistic Near East, he stresses that ancient Jewish engagement with Babylonian astronomy was far more involved and sustained than previously assumed (e.g., with adoption of Mul.Apin-type astronomy, as well as concepts which arose subsequent to it).15 At the same time, Ben-Dov makes a persuasive case for understanding Jewish appropriation of such knowledge as more than mere “borrowing,” and he thus opens the way for a fresh approach to “ancient Jewish sciences” as a “unique amalgam” that can be analyzed “from within” as a “self-contained intellectual construct.” 16
[☞ p8.5] In what follows, I would like to revisit some concerns from my earlier essay in the light of this new research. Here as there, my focus shall be less on the place of Judaism within the history of science, and more on the place of “science” in the history of Judaism. Accordingly, I shall not be concerned to argue for this or that Jewish text as “really scientific,” whether by the standards of non-Jewish cultures of the past, or by the standards of modern ideals of rationalism, empiricism, secularism, or progress. My interest, rather, is in trying to recover some of the ways in which knowledge about the stars, cosmos, and human body was represented, taught, and transmitted in premodern Jewish literary cultures—particularly in relation to pedagogies and practices more distinctively marked as “Jewish” (e.g., halakha, biblical exegesis, parabiblical literary production).
[☞ p8.6] What I shall suggest, in the first section of this essay, is that the case of ancient Judaism might provide an apt test-case for exploring the evolving place of cultural specificity in the perception and practice of “science.” I begin by considering Jewish attempts to insert Jews into Greek, Roman, and Islamic histories and taxonomies of knowledge. I point to continuities in the ancient and medieval Jewish appeal to biblical figures for such aims, but also to the character and degree of cross-cultural translatability thereby presumed. Jewish examples prove especially useful—I propose—for tracing the movement of knowledge across local and linguistic boundaries, and for illumining the shifting imperial contexts in which such knowledge found expression in written forms.
[☞ p8.7] Yet attention to “science” might prove useful for the historiography of Judaism as well. In the second section, I argue that recent insights from the history of science help to highlight anachronistic assumptions about “religion” and “science” in research on ancient Judaism, while also modeling some alternate frames of analysis. Attention to “ancient Jewish sciences,” in turn, may help us to navigate more integrative approaches to Jewish cultural history, wherein our data for ancient Judaism is not artificially reduced to modern notions of “religion.”
[☞ p8.9] Finally, in the third section, I sketch out some of the ramifications, particularly with respect to our understanding of diversity and continuity within Judaism. Not only does new work on “ancient Jewish sciences” offer new vantage-points on relevant Rabbinic materials, but it pushes us to reconsider possible continuities in Jewish reflection on the cosmos into Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Is the evidence of Hebrew fragments like 4Q186 or 4Q317, for instance, merely a curious footnote to Langermann’s location of the “first chapter in the history of Hebrew scientific literature … sometime during the very late Umayyad and early Abbassid caliphates,” as an inner-Jewish reflex of the “surge of interest in science” in the Islamic imperial cultures of the time?17 Might any lines of continuity connect the astronomical and cosmological concerns in the Enoch literature and at Qumran, with those that find expression at the end of Late Antiquity, in works like Baraita de-Shmuel, Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, and Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit? Might some of these lines run through the classical Rabbinic literature as well? Could new insights into the most ancient of known “ancient Jewish sciences” make it newly possible to imagine a history of Jewish engagement in sciences, as something more than a collection of disconnected instances of the engagement of individual Jews in the knowledge-enterprises of Babylonian, Hellenistic, Islamic, European, and other peoples?
1. Cultural specificity and premodern heurematography18
[☞ p8.10] First, and by means of preface, it is perhaps important to ask: What do we even mean when we speak of “Jewish science,”19 “Islamic science,” “Babylonian science,” or so forth? Isn’t part of the point of speaking of “science” to signal types of knowledge that are not bound to the cultural specificities of their points of origin—those bodies of wisdom, ways of knowing, and aligned pedagogies, techniques, and technologies that remain falsifiable or utile, irrespective of creed and culture? Or, in other words: if we have to call it “ancient Jewish sciences,” are we actually talking about “science” at all?
[☞ p8.11] At first sight, it might seem easy enough to side-step such questions. Indeed, even today, “science” is far from a monolith, bearing coherence and unity mainly as an ideology shared by multiple distinct disciplines.20 Research on its early modern history, moreover, has exposed the cultural contingency and constructedness of the very category, as a product of specific intellectual and institutional developments in Europe, particularly in the nineteenth century.21
[☞ p8.12] Yet the problem of the cultural specificity of knowledge still remains. After all, our modern Western concept of “science” may be culturally and historically specific, but—as scholars of colonial sciences have recently stressed22—its prehistory, production, and practice are inextricably embedded within a cross-cultural matrix. The rhetoric of universalism may mask the Eurocentrism of some modern ideologies of “science,” but it also signals a notable self-consciousness concerning the consolidation and theorization of knowledge culled from an interreligious oikoumenê, fostered within transnational contexts, and promoted and naturalized within global networks to this day.23
[☞ p8.13] Significantly, for our purposes, a similar dynamic seems to have been present in premodern times, and perhaps even acknowledged as such. Curiosity about the culturally-specific origins of various cross-culturally-diffused technai was among the hallmarks of ancient Greek ethnography, as first attested in the sixth century BCE, and consolidated as part of the reflection on “Greekness” and cultural difference during and after the Persian Wars. 24 Likewise, the Greek practice of heurematography functioned, in part, to telegraph world-histories, handily resolving the tensions between local and universal knowledge by mapping cultural difference along the axis of time: just as the ancient Greek category of technai encompassed the scientific, technical, and other skills deemed cross-culturally constituent of human civilization, so the listing of a single inventor or source-culture for each element thereof served to posit a common human past.25
[☞ p8.14] That such commonality was constructed for a Greek gaze and present, however, made such discourses readily adaptable for later imperial contexts.26 Indeed, it is perhaps not coincidental that the historiography of sciences first flourished in the immediate wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Hellenistic empires of Alexander’s successors seem to have facilitated the diffusion and development of scientific knowledge across an increasingly interconnected Mediterranean and Near East, but also a cross-cultural discourse about the origins and diffusion of such knowledge. Surviving fragments from Eudemus of Rhodes (ca. 330–285 BCE), for instance, attest an interest among Greeks in tracing the development of mathematics and astronomy27 already by the late fourth century BCE. Fragments from the writings of the Babylonian priest Berossus (ca. 330–280 BCE) and the Egyptian priest Manetho (fl. ca. 280–260 BCE) speak to a parallel development in the Hellenistic Near East shortly thereafter, whereby native elites wrote in Greek to mount competing claims to priority and antiquity in disciplines such as astronomy/astrology.28
[☞ p8.15] The results of Greek ethnography, Hellenistic sciences, and Near Eastern competitive historiography were later appropriated by Roman elites as well. Even if pragmatic and political aims displaced the characteristically Greek concern with intellectual prestige,29 the organization of knowledge from and about different peoples seems to have remained a powerful tool for articulating totalizing claims of empire. Within the Roman Empire and its Christian heirs, cultural difference continued to be conceptually managed, in part, through literary practices like scientific encyclopedism and universal history—with the promise of empire, to unite a multiplicity of locales in harmonious singularity, mirrored by the claim to comprehensiveness conveyed by the anthological forms of many of the literary genres used for explaining, organizing, or transmitting scientific knowledge.30
[☞ p8.16] So too in later Islamic empires. The resurgence of interest in Hellenistic sciences in the Abbasid age, for instance, was accompanied by a literature on “firsts” [awā’il] that encompassed a variety of peoples and pasts, thus helping to mediate the imperial paradox of unity in diversity, while buttressing new claims to authority as the natural center and arbiter of human knowledge.31 As in Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and other empires before them (and modern European nation-states after them), the historiography of sciences seems to have proved particularly powerful for promoting and naturalizing Abbasid claims to the status as true heir to the totality of cross-culturally valuable information discovered in the past and throughout the world.
[☞ p8.17] Partly as a result, the problem of the cultural specificity of “science” has formed part of the theorization of the history of knowledge within Judaism as well. In ancient and medieval Jewish sources written under Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic rule—in Greek and Arabic, as well as Hebrew and Aramaic—one finds assertions of participation or priority in the cross-cultural study of the stars, cosmos, and human body.32 Such claims are sometimes articulated within the frameworks of the imperial discourses of harmonized difference that we find attested also in non-Jewish sources, and at other times, in terms that resist the totalizing rhetorics and epistemologies of ruling powers. What proves consistent, however, is the appeal to biblical figures, categories, and models. Writing in variety of genres, languages, and contexts, ancient and medieval Jews seem to have situated themselves within imperial and other cross-cultural histories of human knowledge primarily with reference to the narratives, heroes, and categories of the Torah/Pentateuch and other biblical traditions.33
[☞ p8.18] Already at the dawn of the Hellenistic age, the Jewish scribes responsible for the Aramaic Astronomical Book and Book of Watchers (ca. third century BCE) point to the antediluvian sage Enoch (cf. Gen 5:18–24) as the ultimate source and conduit for true knowledge about the structure and workings of the cosmos.34 In these most ancient Enochic works, it is unclear whether Enoch is meant more to connect the histories of Jewish knowledge with those of other peoples, or more to distinguish them. Enoch’s association with Babylonian astronomy in the Astronomical Book, for instance, may be articulated in deliberate resistance to the newer Hellenistic astronomy spreading at the time;35 if so, it may signal a concern to assert true knowledge about the stars as preserved only or especially among the Jews. In the association of Enoch and his revelations with the hybrid Hellenistic–Babylonian geography and cosmology of the Book of Watchers,36 by contrast, we may glimpse more of a concern to assert the ancient Jewish origins for ideas and disciplines well-known to be widespread across different cultures, thus establishing the place of the Jews in world-history and the debt of other cultures to their discoveries (or, rather—according to these works—to their mediation of heavenly knowledge down to earth). And perhaps, in both cases, the choice of a figure of such extreme antiquity as a spokesman for “ancient Jewish sciences” might signal some ambivalence about precisely these issues: Enoch, after all, lived prior to what the Torah/Pentateuch presents as Israel’s genealogical distinction with Shem, its chosenness with Abraham, and its peoplehood with Moses, and long before what Greek historians even deemed recorded history.
[☞ p8.19] Whatever else can be inferred from Enoch’s presentation as prôtos heuretês, however, it remains that the earliest Enochic works exhibit an interest in tracing the genealogy of knowledge shared by contemporary authors like Berossus and Eudemus. Rather than lauding Babylonian archives or Greek sages as privileged loci for the history of human knowledge, the Jewish authors/redactors of the Astronomical Book and Book of Watchers promoted the literary heritage of Israel. Whether or not they sought primarily to stake a Jewish claim over the origins or character of sciences, their appeal to Enoch thus functions to assert the unique place of Jewish texts and traditions for transmitting the earliest history of human knowledge.37
[☞ p8.20] Shortly afterwards, in the second century BCE, the Book of Jubilees more decisively marks Enoch and his astronomical knowledge as “Jewish,” by associating them with a line of books and teachings preserved solely by the descendants of Abraham, Jacob, and Levi, and articulated in contrast to the transmission of divinatory texts and teachings in lineage from the fallen angels and in languages other than Hebrew.38 Yet Enoch is also conscripted for more cosmopolitan approaches to the place of Jews in the history of knowledge, such as in the Greek writings of the unknown Jewish or Samaritan author whom scholars call “Pseudo-Eupolemus,” who equates Enoch with Atlas.39 Even there, however, one might glimpse a telling tension between the impulse to laud Jewish priority in the history of knowledge and the impulse to situate the Jews within non-Jewish histories of knowledge: Pseudo-Eupolemus lauds Enoch/Atlas as the one who discovered astronomy (9.17.8), but he doubles the claim of discovery to include the father of the Jews, claiming that Abraham “discovered astronomy/astrology and the Chaldean art” (astrologion kai Chaldaikên [sc. technê] heurein; 9.17.3), taught the Phoenicians “the movements of the sun and moon” (9.17.5), and introduced the Egyptians “to astronomy/astrology and the rest.” That this tension continues to resonate is suggested by the writings of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (ca. 37–100 CE), who wrote in Greek under Roman patronage and drew upon earlier traditions of the sort attested by Pseudo-Eupolemus.40 In Josephus’ presentation in the Antiquities (1.69–70, 154-168), Abraham is the father of Jews and inventor of monotheism, but remains meaningfully “Chaldean” in one important sense—as the astronomer from Ur, lauded by Berossus, who taught astronomy and mathematics to Egyptians.41
[☞ p8.21] Similar traditions appear at the tail end of Late Antiquity, with similar tensions. For the author of Jubilees in the second century BCE,42 and again for the author of Sefer Asaf ha-Rofe around the eighth or ninth century CE, medicine originates with angelic revelations to Noah.43 Yet, whereas Jubilees stressed its transmission solely to Shem, and hence the Jews, Sefer Asaf explores the cross-cultural implications: it asserts that the Jews are those through whom medicine came to Indians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians, and its list of famous physicians includes Greeks like Hippocrates and Galen, alongside Jews like Jonathan ben Zavda, Judah ha-Yarhoni, and Asaf himself.44 Shortly after Sefer Asaf, moreover, one finds positions on the Jewishness of other sciences similar in concern to the Astronomical Book and similar in orientation to Jubilees: in Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer (ch. 6), for instance, calendrical astronomy is described as a secret handed down in a priestly line from Adam to Moses, geographically-bound to Israel.
[☞ p8.22] In both ancient and medieval literature, Jewish histories of knowledge are also articulated with appeal to figures who belong more unequivocally to historical time and Jewish peoplehood. Biblical claims about the scope and influence of the knowledge of Solomon (1 Kings 4:29–34), for instance, were redeployed already by the first century CE to speak to Hellenistic ideals of knowledge about the cosmos. Writing in Greek, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon famously makes the following claims in the name of the Israelite king:
[☞ p8.23] For it is [God] who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists,
[☞ p8.24] to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements;
[☞ p8.25] the beginning and end and middle of times,
[☞ p8.26] the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons,
[☞ p8.27] the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars,
[☞ p8.28] the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts,
[☞ p8.29] the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men,
[☞ p8.30] the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots;
[☞ p8.31] I learned both what is secret and what is manifest.
[☞ p8.32] For Wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me. (Wisdom of Solomon 7:17–22; RSV)
[☞ p8.33] Centuries later, when writing of the relationship of Judaism and philosophy in Judeo-Arabic, Judah Halevi (ca. 1075–1141) similarly appeals to Solomon to claim all sciences as originally “Jewish”:
Did he not, with the assistance of divine, intellectual, and natural power, converse on all sciences [‘ulūm]? The inhabitants of the earth traveled to him, in order to carry forth his learning, even as far as India. Now the roots and principles of all sciences were handed down from us [i.e., the Jews] first to the Chaldaeans, then to the Persians and Medians, then to Greece, and finally to the Romans.45
[☞ p8.34] Whether or not the latter knew the former,46 the parallels remain significant. Both the Wisdom of Solomon and Kitab al Khazari use the famously wise and cosmopolitan king to evoke a vision of Jewish wisdom as encompassing the totality of scientific knowledge current, valued, and sought among non-Jews of their times. If the first-century author of the Wisdom of Solomon did so to counter the totalizing claims and intellectual prestige of Hellenistic paideia in early Roman Egypt,47 Judah Halevi answers much the same problem, many centuries later, in the context of the recovery and cultivation of Hellenistic texts and traditions by Islamic intellectuals.48
[☞ p8.35] Perhaps telling, however, is the caveat with which Judah Halevi here concludes: “On account of the length of this period [of transmission], and the many disturbing circumstances, it was forgotten that they had originated with the Hebrews” (Kitab al Khazari II 66). Even as he proclaims the Jewishness of “all sciences,” he also admits that this ancient history is not acknowledged by the very peoples among whom this knowledge flourishes in his own times.49 In this caveat, we may glimpse something of what is at stake in the assertion of the antiquity of Jewish contribution to scientific knowledge for some earlier authors as well. In contra Apionem, for instance, Josephus complained that Apion charged that the Jews “have not produced remarkable men, such as inventors [heurêtas] of some technai” (2.135) and that Apollonius Molon called the Jews “the most untalented of barbarians and … the only ones to have contributed no invention [heurêma] of use to human life” (2.148).50 If Louis Feldman is correct, his characterization of Abraham as astronomer in the Antiquities may have been shaped, at least in part, by the concern to counter precisely such accusations.51
[☞ p8.36] In the first century and the twelfth—even if not necessarily always before or in between—assertions of Jewish primacy or participation in cross-cultural endeavors of learning like astronomy, mathematics, or medicine could serve to answer accusations against the Jews for an allegedly misanthropic isolation from the cosmopolitan endeavor of furthering human knowledge. This concern, however, makes it all the more poignant that such challenges could simultaneously serve as opportunities for reflection on the proper scope and bounds of Jewish inquiry and learning. After all, for Josephus, as for Judah Halevi, the claim of the antiquity of Jewish involvement in sciences draws its power from the perception of certain types of knowledge about the cosmos, the human body, and the stars as valuable across the bounds of different cultures, traveling between them without diluting or corrupting the ancestral customs or distinctive cultural identities of any of them.52 By such accounts, to be a Jewish astronomer like Enoch or Abraham, or a Jewish doctor like Noah, Shem, or Asaf is to be no less “Jewish,” even if it is also to master domains highly valued beyond the bounds of Judaism.
[☞ p8.37] These various premodern attempts to insert Jews into the history of sciences, and “science” into the history of Judaism, thus share an important set of assumptions with the Greek, Roman, and Islamic approaches noted above. In all of them, disciplines such as astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, and/or medicine are deemed forms of knowledge eminently translatable across different times and cultures—whether by virtue of connection to the visible world or human body, or to shared theoretical models or observational methods for collecting, preserving, and systematizing cross-culturally accumulated bodies of knowledge about them.53 In ideological import and cross-cultural prestige, their ancient forms can be heuristically likened to the disciplines now arrayed under our modern category of “science” (even if constructs of that sort must remain ever-shifting, e.g., with antecedents in antiquity sometimes including astrology, alchemy, physiognomics, etc., while antecedents in the Middle Ages sometimes excluding those types of empiricism so strongly associated with “the scientific method” today).54 In this sense, then, the notion of “ancient Jewish sciences” may prove interesting for the history of knowledge precisely because it seems a bit paradoxical. What might appear as a paradox is perhaps, rather, a productive tension, which finds expression in the range of ways in which ancient and medieval Jews engaged knowledge simultaneously within and beyond Judaism.
2. Rethinking “religion” and “science”
[☞ p8.38] I have dwelt in some length upon premodern perspectives on knowledge and cultural specificity in part because similar concerns still resonate today. Running through much of the scholarship on “ancient Jewish sciences” are questions not so dissimilar to those that seem to have troubled Josephus and Judah Halevi. Did ancient Jews contribute anything to the progress of human knowledge in their time? Or was ancient Jewish engagement with ancient sciences largely limited to “borrowings” from Babylonian or Hellenistic traditions? Do Jewish sources of the sort that one finds at Qumran have any place in scholarship on the history of science?
[☞ p8.39] Of course, scholars of ancient China and Mesopotamia have long faced similar challenges arguing for a place in a history of science still commonly presumed to be a story about Greeks in antiquity and Europeans in modernity.55 Yet, just as popular surveys of the history of science sometimes read like a litany of discoveries leading to the modern West, as if extending the line of ancient Greek heurematography,56 so interdisciplinary efforts at the inclusion of other peoples can run the same risks as the ancient Jewish responses noted above: some arguments for inclusion can unintentionally re-inscribe the assumption that “science” is a stable category with a singular lineage, inevitable in its progress towards the politically-dominant power of the present.57
[☞ p8.40] An essentialist ideal of “science” formed part of the vision of the history of science promoted by founding figures in the field, who popularized an enduring narrative of Greek/European exemplarity, even as they stressed the uniquely transcultural and transhistorical character of their topic.58 Especially since the 1960s, this vision has been widely critiqued for “essentialist universalism,” “Whig history,” and Eurocentrism, as well as for the misleading projection of continuity in the “Western” production and transmission of knowledge.59 Nevertheless, it remains widely diffused due to its integration into textbooks and teaching,60 and it is often reinforced by the criteria chosen to defend the scienticity of ancient and/or non-European traditions in particular. Speculation about possible motives for interest and inquiry into the visible world, for instance, frequently privilege disinterest as a mark of the scientific character of knowledge, consistent with modern ideals of “science” as knowledge pursued “for its own sake,” especially in contrast to knowledge in the service of religious aims. Similarly, discussions of methods of inquiry often argue for the scienticity of practices with some basis in observation that can be likened to the empiricism and experimentalism of the modern “scientific method.” When assessing the results, moreover, it can be tempting to celebrate as “science” those developments that seem to make “progress” towards our own present.
[☞ p8.41] What is significant, for our purposes, is the double challenge thus posed for the emergence of “ancient Jewish sciences” as an area of study. Recent historiographical shifts have resulted in divergent assumptions about what even constitutes “science” among historians of science, on the one hand, and historians of Judaism, on the other. Among the former, it is largely taken for granted that “science” is a modern construct. Yet among the latter—as in the popular press and public imagination—older notions of “science” and “the West” remain widespread. We shall return below to consider some of the challenges posed to the study of “ancient Jewish sciences” by the destabilization of the category of “science” among historians of science and by the emphasis on the modern European contexts of its construction. First, however, it may be helpful to delve in a bit more detail into the challenges of defending the topic to what has so far been the main presumed audience for studies of “ancient Jewish sciences,” namely, historians of Judaism.
[☞ p8.42] Particularly insofar as much of the relevant data for “ancient Jewish sciences” concern calendrical, astrological, and physiognomic practices widespread in antiquity but not perceived as “scientific” today, recent attempts to make a place for the study of “ancient Jewish sciences” have largely centered on analogy and filiation to their Greek and Mesopotamian counterparts.61 As perhaps to be expected at this preliminary stage of the emergence of new approaches to “ancient Jewish sciences,” moreover, recent works have been faced with the need to answer past studies that had been pursued without the benefit of newer evidence or approaches. It was Otto Neugebauer’s 1964 assessment of the Babylonian astronomy of the Enochic Astronomical Book as “primitive,”62 for instance, that lead Michael E. Stone63 to interpret the choice as “a deliberate act of archaism … aris[ing] either from the conscious rejection of Greek science or else the creation of a social context into which such science did not penetrate.” For Stone, thus, the astronomy of the Astronomical Book was not evidence for “ancient Jewish sciences” as much as an expression of an anti-scientific and ultra-traditionalist stance, likely cultivated in “separatist” circles.64
[☞ p8.43] Similar assumptions about the linearity of scientific progress inform another important precedent for the present discussion, albeit with the opposite results. P. S. Alexander sought to argue that “the approach to nature displayed in the Enochic Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is unprecedented in Jewish literature,” reflecting an anti-traditionalist stance, cultivated among Jews less interested in the Torah than in “alien wisdom.”65 To do so, he pressed for a pre-Hellenistic date for the Astronomical Book, prior to the developments that led Stone and others to dismiss its science as “out-dated.”66 What Stone interpreted as reflecting “an intellectual cast that was not interested in contemporary scientific knowledge,”67 Alexander thus asserted as evidence for “a turning-point in Jewish intellectual history—the emergence, for the first time, of what might properly be called a scientific attitude.”68
[☞ p8.44] More recent discussions suggest the situation was more complex than known to Stone or Alexander at the time of their ground-breaking essays. Popović rightly stresses, for instance, how publication of the full range of relevant materials from Qumran has since shed doubt on any simple equation of dependence on Babylonian astronomy with the archaizing retention of “out-dated” views or the self-conscious rejection by separatists of some self-evidently superior Hellenistic science.69 In addition, newer evidence and approaches—masterfully synthesized by Ben-Dov70—now push us to rethink the notion that any seriously “scientific” interest or engagement with Babylonian traditions must have pre-dated the Hellenistic period.
[☞ p8.45] Traditionally, Mesopotamian influence on Judaism has been associated with the Near Eastern cultural contexts of ancient Israel and the earliest traditions in the Hebrew Bible, in contrast to the Hellenistic influence deemed determinative after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Recent insights into the Nachleben of cuneiform culture, Akkadian sciences, and their scribal pedagogies and curricula, however, have demonstrated the continued vitality and development of Babylonian sciences under Seleucid rule and beyond,71 as well as their continued and dynamic impact on Judaism, possibly well into Late Antiquity.72 As Popović rightly emphasizes, the Jewish literature of the Hellenistic age attests the influence of both Mesopotamian and Greek traditions of astronomy, cosmography, geography, and physiognomy.73 Furthermore, Ben-Dov raises the possibility that Jews may have played some role in the circulation of scientific traditions, not merely as passive receivers of knowledge radiating from some single Greek center, but rather as part of a dynamic constellation of interconnected locales.74
[☞ p8.46] If recent research has done much to transform our image of the place of Jews with the history of ancient sciences, it has perhaps been trickier to move beyond older assumptions about “science” and ancient Judaism. In the above-noted essay,75 I noted a tendency to define “Judaism” in terms of a modern characterization of “religion” (esp., ethics, halakha) and, thus, to interpret evidence for Jewish engagement with sciences as cases of “foreign” influence or examples of the engagement of individual Jews in the knowledge-enterprises of their non-Jewish rulers and neighbors. What is assumed and asserted by such a move—I suggested—is an anachronistic understanding of “religion” and “science” as self-contained and mutually-exclusive approaches to explaining the world and human experience. Inasmuch as ancient Judaism is thereby reduced to the religious, much can be lost in the process. To neglect of the Jewishness of Jewish engagement with ancient sciences is to skew our understanding of the richness of reflection on the stars, cosmos, and human body within the history of Judaism.
[☞ p8.47] Here, I would like to highlight a related scholarly tendency with similarly wide ripples of ramifications, namely, the tendency to overlay the modern dichotomy of “religion” vs. “science” upon other dichotomies common in the modern historiography of ancient Judaism, including traditional contrasts like Semitic vs. Greek, Near Eastern vs. Hellenistic, and Jewish vs. foreign, but also newer ones like “Mosaic” vs. “Enochic.”76 To understand the logic behind this move, as well as its puzzlingly perennial appeal, we might note a broader pattern in the study of the ancient Near East. In a recent study of Mesopotamian sciences, for instance, Francesca Rochberg points to a long-standing tendency to dismiss Near Eastern knowledge-enterprises as not truly “scientific” by virtue of the “religious” motives imputed to their inquiries:
… a clear distinction between science and religion, and therefore also between knowledge and belief, was an important device in the defining of science by the 1960s. The opposition rendered between reason and scientific knowledge on one hand and religion, superstition, and unscientific belief on the other informed a historiography that saw the necessity of a break with some religious or mythological tradition … before the “birth” of science was possible … This view evoked not only an Enlightenment sensibility but also a neoevolutionist cognitive anthropology, as Near Eastern forms of inquiry into natural phenomena were deemed necessarily more primitive than those of the Greeks.77
[☞ p8.48] Modern notions of the timeless and essential conflict between “science” and “religion”—Rochberg here suggests—were not only paired with older notions about the cognitive differences between Greek/“Western” and Near-Eastern/“Oriental” peoples, but they served as one means of construing “science” as a primarily “Western” phenomenon and as exemplar of the Greek exceptionalism to which modern Europe is deemed as heir:
Despite the acknowledgment of an intellectual transmission from Babylonia to the Greeks, when it came to general histories of science, Babylonian learning (along with that of other non-Greek ancient sources such as those from Egypt, India, and China) would be contrasted with Greek “knowledge” in one of two ways. What the eastern ancients “knew” was categorized either as mere craft … or as theological speculation not anchored by logical, causal, or rational inquiry into physical phenomena. 78
[☞ p8.49] Hence, for instance, scholars such as E. H. Hutton could posit that “the philosophers of the Ionian school combined theorizing about the universe with knowing some facts and this made their work so unique … Eastern ‘sages’ too were speculating about the world, but they were guided by religious and moral feelings rather than by the desire to understand external reality … [and] thus the Orientals never developed science.”79
[☞ p8.50] What is interesting, for our purposes, are the echoes of such ideas even in relatively recent research on ancient Judaism. In the above-noted essay by Alexander, for instance, the contrast between “religion” and “science” is embraced in precisely such terms. What Alexander ultimately wishes to argue, in fact, is that early Enochic interest in sciences is akin to “the rise of the Ionian school of Greek philosophy and science”—a cognitive shift resulting in “a view of nature which … was radically new and which can for the first time be meaningfully labeled as ‘scientific’” precisely because of an alleged “break from pre-existing mythical and epic pictures of the world.”80
[☞ p8.51] It is only with some hermeneutical gymnastics, of course, that the early Enochic literature can be presented as an exemplar of a break with the mythical. To do so, Alexander must read these ancient sources against the grain, dismissing their appeal to Enoch as simply a ruse. He downplays the richness of the Mesopotamian roots and matrix of both the Hebrew Bible and the early Enochic literature.81 Partly as a result, Alexander reduces the latter’s appeal to Enoch as a “recourse” to pseudepigraphy to conceal the true motives of the authors, which—he speculates—was “to domesticate within Jewish tradition a body of alien wisdom … fully aware of the newness of their doctrine—that they were propagating ideas never before heard in Israel.”82
[☞ p8.52] This argument forms part of Alexander’s broader project to posit a bifurcation in Jewish intellectual history between a putative Enochic/“priestly” paradigm, producing “scientific” and “mystical” traditions, and the more familiar Mosaic paradigm associated with the Torah and its Rabbinic interpreters.83 The problems with approaches of this sort are well known, not least because similar theories84 have met with intensive criticism from specialists in every field with which they intersect (e.g., Enochic literature, Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish calendar, Rabbinics, Hekhalot literature).85 For our present purposes, it suffices to note the degree to which Alexander draws upon the modern contrast between “religion” and “science” to ground the plausibility of a dichotomous understanding of ancient Judaism as split between “Enochic” and “Mosaic” paradigms, as in the following assertion:
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.86
[☞ p8.53] The claim of a distinction between “Enochic” and “Mosaic” worldviews, in other words, is here tied to the contrast between “science,” on the one hand, and law and myth, on the other—with Jewish interest in the former further associated with an embrace of “alien wisdom” and a radically innovative break from Torah-centered Judaism.
[☞ p8.54] To be sure, Alexander frames his 2002 essay as a speculative foray, and his assertions are largely un-referenced, and explicitly experimental and exploratory in tone.87 Yet, for our present purposes, it provides an interesting example to illustrate some of the ways in which modern assumptions about “science” and “religion” can inform the interpretation of ancient Jewish texts and history, making explicit some of the assumptions possibly implicit in other discussions as well.88 In addition, as an early example of a forceful call to see Second Temple Jewish evidence as important for the history of science, Alexander’s 2002 essay has been widely cited in recent research on “ancient Jewish sciences.”
[☞ p8.55] A recent article by Popović, for instance, articulates the significance of texts such as 4Q186, 4Q317, 4Q318, and 4Q561 by means of comparison and contrast with “scientific interests evinced by 1 Enoch and the lists of revealed things in apocalyptic texts,” in order to “extend Alexander’s discussion of ancient Jewish science by taking into account some of the texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus.”89 Following Alexander, Popović describes the varying degrees of scientific engagement attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls as “adaptations and emulations of alien wisdom” that can be contrasted with the “Hebrew wisdom” of the Hebrew Bible and the Wisdom of Ben Sira.90 Alexander’s characterization of the motives behind the early Enochic materials also provides the basis for his contrast of these materials with other evidence for Jewish engagement with ancient sciences discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls. Just as Alexander interprets the appeal to Enoch as a ruse to “domesticate” and justify the “alien wisdom” of Babylonian astronomy in biblical, Jewish, and “religious” terms,91 so Popović posits for 4Q186, 4Q317, 4Q318, and 4Q561 that “the apparent lack of an attribution to a pseudepigraphical figure as an authoritative voice … indicates [that their] scientific interests did not need such justification.”92 Inasmuch as the latter seem to have lacked the “Enochic interest in divine, eschatological judgment” as well as “any scriptural exemplar,” moreover, Popović suggests that they may attest a category of writings otherwise unknown in ancient Judaism, namely, what he terms “purely scientific texts.”93
[☞ p8.56] Although Popović repeatedly signals the dangers of anachronism in applying terms like “religious,” “scientific,” and “secular” to ancient cultures, he nevertheless maintains these terms as heuristic for analyzing the physiognomic materials from Qumran and arguing for their character as “science.”94 When he argues that “physiognomic and physiognomic-astrological lists from Qumran … represent forms of ancient Jewish science,” for instance, he stresses that these “lists from Qumran were possibly not framed by religious interests” and, as such, could attest “a well-educated body of people in ancient Jewish society … both priestly and secular scribes or scholars … interested in contemporary scientific learning, not just in ‘outdated’ forms of Mesopotamian astronomy as in the Astronomical Book.”95 Despite his own caution and concerns, his application of these terms may unintentionally reinforce older essentialist assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of “religion”/Judaism and “science”/secularity—in part, because of the conceptual baggage carried by the very distinction, and in part, by virtue of his dependence on Alexander in applying this distinction dichotomously to ancient Jewish materials.96 Inasmuch as this distinction is used to draw out the differences between “scientific material that has been framed or reworked into other writings such as apocalyptic texts and … those Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran that provide manuscript evidence for ‘actual’ scholarly/scientific texts,” it may distract from an argument that may prove critical—as we shall see—for mapping new approaches to the transmission of scientific knowledge within Judaism.97
[☞ p8.57] In comparison with Popović, Ben-Dov argues for understanding “ancient Jewish sciences” both as more “scientific” and as more “Jewish.” He deals with much the same range of evidence, albeit defining “ancient Jewish sciences” a bit more broadly to include astronomy, astrology, geography, metrology, physiognomy, and exorcism.98 Programmatic for his 2008 monograph, for instance, is his aim to “demonstrate that the Jewish scientific tradition … constituted an integral part of the astronomical knowledge current in the Ancient Near East during the Persian and early Hellenistic periods” but also that “the emulation of this knowledge in Jewish circles lead to a new synthesis, perceptibly different from the main streams of astronomical teaching existent in Babylonia, Greece, Egypt, and India … a self-contained intellectual construct.”99 What he suggests, in other words, is the coexistence of a range of practices of “ancient Jewish sciences” akin the continuum we have seen in ancient and medieval representations of them—with “sciences” as a crossing or meeting-point between Jewish and other cultures, akin in spirit to that imagined by Pseudo-Eupolemus and Josephus, on the one hand, and as a distinctively Jewish domain of knowledge, akin in spirit to what is imagined in Jubilees and Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, on the other.
[☞ p8.58] For Ben-Dov too, the comparison of Enochic and other Qumran materials proves pivotal. Whereas Popović focuses largely on differences in literary forms and settings, Ben-Dov stresses differences in language.100 That so much of the earliest known scientific literature is attested in Aramaic provides a key for him to solving multiple puzzles pertaining to Jewish engagement in cross-cultural scientific endeavors, and to the transmission of scientific knowledge within and beyond Judaism. With the aid of the evidence from Qumran, Ben-Dov mounts a persuasive case that the Aramaic language served as a vehicle for the transmission and cross-cultural diffusion of Mesopotamian traditions known to us primarily in cuneiform, down to the Hellenistic era, into Judaism, and westwards to Hellenistic and other learned elites in the rest of the Mediterranean world.101
[☞ p8.59] The cross-cultural and scientific connotations of the Aramaic language also—Ben-Dov suggests—serve to place the choice of Hebrew, instead, in 4Q186 and 4Q317 into sharper relief. If this choice reflects a renewed association of the Hebrew language with Jewish peoplehood and pedagogy, then it may simultaneously signal an emergent sense of “ancient Jewish sciences” as Jewish, perhaps concurrent with the evolving autonomy, systemization, and hyperrealism of the calendrical system; if the translation into Hebrew placed practical constraints on transmission, this limitation may have been deliberate, reflecting a self-conscious decision between [1] participating in an Aramaic discourse, at a nexus of translatability and transmission between multiple cultures, with a cosmopolitan horizon, and [2] creating a new Hebrew qua inner-Jewish discourse, marked by multiple levels of specificity and secrecy (e.g., Jewish peoplehood, priestly pedagogy, transmission among elite experts).
[☞ p8.60] Popović remains skeptical about just how much can be inferred from 4Q186 and 4Q317.102 His call for caution is well taken, particularly given the preliminary state of the present discussion. In the present context, however, we might hazard some speculations as to the ramifications if Ben-Dov is correct. Foremost for the history of Jewish knowledge is the possibility that the Second Temple period might have seen something akin to what Langermann identifies at the tail end of Late Antiquity as emergent “Hebrew scientific literature”103—with the embrace of Hebrew as a potential technical language, in anonymous or pseudonymous works using traditional literary forms and genres, concurrent with attempts to begin to create some distinctively Jewish synthesis, which may be part of a broader cross-cultural surge of interest in the cosmos but remains ultimately irreducible to “borrowing.”
[☞ p8.61] For the history of science more broadly, Ben-Dov’s findings may also hold promise. For many decades, specialists in that field have stressed the constructedness and contingency of “science,”104 sometimes even to the degree that the category might seem to be meaningful primarily as a modern or European invention. Peter Dear, for instance, thus questions whether the “essentialist universalism” of older studies105 has now given way to the myopia of “hyperhistoricism.”106 The focus on the specific contexts and dynamics of local phenomena is laudable. What might have been lost in the process, however, is some sense of “science” as constituted by a premodern as well as modern history, both marked by cross-cultural connectivity:
… there ought to be some way of speaking coherently about those knowledge enterprises … that had a career that spread across the Eurasian continent, where Ptolemaic planetary models show up in seventeenth‐century Jaipur as well as ninth‐century Cologne. In such cases, techniques spread through adoption, rather like the apparently organic growth and decline of language groups, even though, as in the case of historical linguistics, we know that the spread is effected by countless episodes of human social interaction.107
[☞ p8.62] Above, I suggested that it is precisely the element of interconnectivity—and the self-conscious negotiation of universality and difference often surrounding it—that makes modern “science” a potentially interesting analogy for exploring the practice and perception of “ancient Jewish sciences” in their broader Jewish and non-Jewish contexts. Particularly in light of Ben-Dov’s work, moreover, we might reverse the arrow of comparison as well, bringing the example of ancient Judaism to bear on the problem of situating “science” simultaneously in local and trans-local contexts.108
[☞ p8.63] In a recent essay on global history and early modern science, for instance, Lissa Roberts extends Dear’s insights, stressing the need for historians of science to “attend to and connect two seemingly different orientations: the specifically local character of individual encounters and the increasingly global networks that both afforded and attributed meaning to the conditions and outcomes of these local exchanges.” She points to a number of recent studies that have begun such work for the modern period (esp. 18th and 19th centuries), positing that:
… in place of a view of science as the West’s gift to the world or histories that focus on western science primarily as a tool of imperialist domination, a dynamically balanced approach is emerging which seeks to highlight the productive role played by globally situated intercultural exchanges in the history of science and history more generally, while simultaneously recognising the asymmetrical character of the conditions that often attended such encounters.109
[☞ p8.64] As we have seen, Ben-Dov’s analysis of the Jewish astronomical traditions at Qumran achieves something similar for a neglected set of premodern sources for the study of ancient sciences. He posits “ancient Jewish sciences” as an integral part of the networks of scientific knowledge interlacing the Hellenistic world, serving perhaps even as one of the channels by which information circulated westwards. Yet he also allows for its status as a “self-contained construct,” articulated and practiced in local language, idioms, and aims—best studied as part of a broader cross-cultural network but also, simultaneously, “from within” Judaism.
[☞ p8.65] Nevertheless, even as Ben-Dov makes a powerful argument for bringing ancient Jewish sources to bear on the history of science, his account still leaves “ancient Jewish sciences” on the margins of the history of Judaism. To be sure, he sidesteps the contrast between “religion” and “science,” stressing that the two coexist inextricably intermingled in “ancient Jewish sciences” as in their Babylonian predecessors.110 Whereas Popović maps different possible motives for Jewish engagement with sciences,111 however, Ben-Dov locates the “cosmological imperative” of ancient Judaism largely in an apocalyptic impulse. Furthermore, he traces this trajectory in terms distinct from sapiential and other streams of Second Temple Judaism, and he asserts their articulation in increasingly esoteric terms precisely in their Hebrew-language expressions.
[☞ p8.66] It may be tempting to dismiss the various instances of scientific engagement within Jewish texts as exceptions to a religious tradition marked by a lack of any interest of this sort. Indeed, as we have seen, much of the discussion of “ancient Jewish sciences”—both past and present—seems to assume as much. Much cited, for instance, are Ben Sira’s warnings about speculation into hidden things (3:21), the Mishnah’s limitation on the exposition of cosmogony and cosmology (m. Ḥagigah 2.1), and the Talmudic use of the former to expound the latter (y. Ḥagigah 2.1/77c; b. Ḥagigah 13a).112 It might seem natural, thus, to assume that any “cosmological imperative” among Enochic or Qumranic scribes must have been limited in time and influence, standing at some remove from the Judaism of the Torah and its Rabbinic interpreters—or, in other words, that “ancient Jewish sciences” have very little to tell us about Judaism.113 Moreover, as we have seen, assumptions of this sort also dovetail with broader tendencies common in some recent synthetic approaches to Jewish intellectual history,114 whereby the complexity of the ancient literary evidence is resolved with appeal to a series of dichotomies (e.g., Enochic vs. Mosaic, apocalyptic vs. sapiential, mystical vs. mainstream, priestly vs. Rabbinic), often overlaid tidily upon one another.
[☞ p8.67] In what follows, I would like to suggest that a focus on “ancient Jewish sciences” might help us to recover some of this complexity in new and interesting ways, particularly if we situate recent findings concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls within a broader scope of Jewish literature and history. New insights from the study of astrology and physiognomy in Second Temple Judaism may enrich our understanding of the Jewish literatures of Late Antiquity, just as the late antique evidence may allow us to “test” these insights across broader historical trajectories within Judaism. By drawing methodological insights from the work of Popović, in particular, we may be able to highlight some of the lines of continuity connecting Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval Jewish writings about the cosmos.
3. Maaseh bereshit, “science,” and secrecy
[☞ p8.68] At first sight, the evidence of the classical Rabbinic literature might seem to resist any connection to “ancient Jewish sciences.” In the case of Second Temple Judaism, we find texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek that intersect with non-Jewish discussions and debates about the origins and spread of cross-cultural forms of knowledge and expertise. Such concerns, as we have seen, find intriguing parallels in early medieval Jewish reflections on the place of “science” in Judaism, as attested in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic literature from Sefer Asaf to Judah Halevi and beyond. The surviving Jewish literature of the period in between, however, is almost wholly Rabbinic,115 and it is characterized by some notable breaks from the taxonomies and genealogies of knowledge that connect Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic imperial discourses, and ancient and medieval Jewish engagement with them. There are notable literary and discursive differences both [1] from Second Temple Jewish discussions about the stars, cosmos, human body, and the history of knowledge, and [2] from the Mesopotamian, Hellenistic, and Roman traditions that such earlier discussions engaged.
[☞ p8.69] As we have seen, the literary representation of ancient sciences in Second Temple Judaism can be read against the background of Hellenistic and Roman imperial claims about the history of knowledge, as well as in relation to Babylonian, Egyptian, and other counter-claims. Furthermore, just as a range of Jews in the Second Temple period seem to have engaged with types of knowledge that were cross-culturally cultivated and discussed, so Jewish intellectuals in the early Middle Ages variously engaged in scientific inquiries, and in debates about the prehistory of such inquiries, together with and parallel to their Muslim counterparts and contemporaries. By contrast, discussions of the cosmos, stars, and human body in the Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity largely defy interpretation in such terms, not least because of the Rabbinic innovation of new categories, which organize knowledge in ways that depart from the Second Temple Jewish precedents noted above and—perhaps not coincidentally—resist translation into the cross-cultural terms and non-Jewish taxonomies of their own time as well.
[☞ p8.70] Most significant, for our purposes, is the category of maaseh bereshit, wherein the innovative character of the Rabbinic reconfiguration of Jewish knowledge is both achieved and effaced by a neologism that embodies claimed continuity with the Torah.116 To my knowledge, there is no clear non-Jewish precedent or pre-Rabbinic counterpart for this category, which encompasses the divine creation of the cosmos (e.g., t. Sanhedrin 8.7–9), the account thereof in Genesis 1 (e.g., m. Taanit 4.2–3; m. Megillah 3.6), and the cosmic order resultant from it. 117 The term itself explicitly evokes Genesis, using the first word of that work (i.e., bereshit, “in-the-beginning”) to telegraph creation and its products.
[☞ p8.71] Yet if, at first sight, the Rabbinic development of such a Torah-based category even to describe and delineate knowledge about the cosmos might seem to offer a “parade example” of the subordination of “science” to “religion,” closer examination reveals a more complex situation, which resists any easy reduction to modern categories. When we first encounter maaseh bereshit in the Mishnah, it is in seemingly contrasting contexts. The term occurs in a number of mishnaic discussions of, and allusions to, the place of Genesis 1 and the visible world in Jewish liturgy and ritual practice (e.g., m. Taanit 4.2–3; m. Megillah 3.6), including calls to bless God as “the One who makes maaseh bereshit” when one sees geographical phenomena (mountains, hills, rivers, etc.; m. Berakhot 9.2). Yet the Mishnah and Tosefta also include strictures and stories about the dangers of expounding maaseh bereshit, in association with discussions of the dangers of speculation into what lies before and beyond the visible world.118 It is the latter, as Alon Goshen-Gottstein has noted, that have attracted the most scholarly attention, and as a result, the topic of maaseh bereshit has been discussed almost solely in relation to Jewish mysticism.119
[☞ p8.72] At the center of the discussion has been the famous mishnah in which maaseh bereshit appears alongside the merkavah (i.e., the divine chariot and description thereof in Ezekiel), in a curtailing of exegetical inquiry followed by the denunciation of prideful speculation into pre-creation, cosmology, and eschatology:
It is not permitted to expound [doreshin] aravot among/to three, nor maaseh bereshit among/to two, nor the merkavah among/to one, unless he is wise and understands on his own.
Anyone who speculates about four things, it would be merciful for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what is before, what is after. Anyone who has no concern for the honor of his Creator, it would be merciful for him if he had not come into the world. (m. Ḥagigah 2.1)
[☞ p8.73] Not only have scholars largely taken for granted that maaseh bereshit forms part of Jewish mysticism, but m. Ḥagigah 2.1 has been treated by some scholars as a key that unlocks the secret history of Jewish mysticism as an esoteric and/or priestly movement evolving from the early Enochic materials discussed above into later Hekhalot traditions.120 Just as the embrace of “mysticism” and “science” are sometimes paired in arguments for distinct Enochic and/or priestly stream of Judaism in Second Temple times, so resistance to both has been posited as characteristic of the Rabbinic tradition that is construed as its polar opposite, with ambivalence or antipathy towards visionary experience, etc., sometimes extended to “science” and cosmology, as exemplary of knowledge pursued apart from the Torah.121
[☞ p8.74] Yet it is only with some difficulty that one constructs a monolithic “Rabbinic” opinion towards such issues, let alone an attitude or mindset consistently opposed to “science.”122 Just as the limits placed on human inquiry in biblical books such as Deuteronomy and Job are broached in apocalyptic and parabiblical works in the Enochic literary tradition, as well as in scientific texts from Qumran, so the constraints on cosmogonic and cosmological inquiry in the Mishnah are broached already within the Rabbinic literary tradition, in works like Genesis Rabbah123 and the Talmud Bavli;124 indeed, the Bavli’s own concerns with cosmology provide the immediate context in which we must try to understand later Hebrew treatises like Sefer Yetzirah, Midrash Konen, and Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit. When one does find Rabbinic resistance to cosmological speculation, moreover, it is most often expressed—as Peter Schäfer has shown—through the appropriation of the ideas in question.125 Rather than a rejection of “science,” what we see is a more of a totalizing impulse to encompass all varieties of knowledge, while maintaining the epistemological monopoly of the Torah. If Rabbinic discussion about the cosmos and human knowledge about it resists the totalizing claims of the imperial taxonomies and genealogies of knowledge discussed above, it is by offering alternatives that are no less global in scope, remapping the cosmos in the image of the Torah and the Torah in the image of the cosmos.
[☞ p8.75] Elsewhere, I have thus argued against the tendency to read the esotericism of the Rabbinic discussion of maaseh bereshit primarily in relation to a reaction against “mysticism,” and I have proposed that it might be better understood in terms of the rhetoric of secrecy associated with calendrical and other specialist knowledge elsewhere in the Rabbinic literature.126 I suggested that the rhetoric of secrecy surrounding maaseh bereshit might be likened to the discourse surrounding sod ha-ibbur (i.e, “the secret of the calendar”; b. Rosh Hashanah 20b), reflecting “an effort to articulate, isolate, and elevate a certain domain of expertise, while enhancing the intellectual prestige and ‘religious’ authority of those few who can master it.”127 If more recent research has revealed the richness of the scientific heritage from Second Temple Judaism that Rabbis might have inherited, it also raises the possibility that the secrecy surrounding maaseh bereshit and sod ha-ibbur might be something more than rhetoric. On the basis of the Qumran evidence, for instance, Ben-Dov suggests that “ancient Jewish sciences” depart from the public availability and circulation of knowledge often associated with modern science:
… the science of the Dead Sea Scrolls adheres to a different model, by which speculative wisdom is an esoteric venture, to be concealed from laymen and revealed to the initiated only. This esoteric science was the norm in ancient Mesopotamian literature, which … was the source for a great part of what later appears in the scrolls.128
[☞ p8.76] If Ben-Dov is correct, we might further wonder whether the Rabbinic discussion of maaseh bereshit, sod ha-ibbur, etc., might reflect a long-standing structural feature of the ways in which calendrical, astronomical, and/or other scientific knowledge was preserved and taught within Jewish cultures—whether in continuity with the emergence of Hebrew scientific literature at Qumran129 or due to later points of contact with Babylonian sciences and pedagogy.130 This is particularly the case if we follow the lead of Popović, accepting that “secrecy does not only have to refer to a specific content of a body of knowledge or its comprehensibility” but may be “better understood as a means to organise the accessibility and availability of information and learning, and this in connection with the social status that it bestows on those possessing it.”131
[☞ p8.77] In support of such possibilities, we might adduce the scattered references in the classical Rabbinic literature to Sages said to be experts in astronomical, calendrical, and medicinal matters. Despite a lack of concerted or focused discussions of such concerns, for instance, one does find depictions of R. Gamaliel with lunar diagrams, showing witnesses to the phases of the moon in m. Sanhedrin 2.8. Six people are granted the title “physician” (i.e., rofe or asya), namely, Theodos/Theodoros, Tobiya, Bar Ginte, Minyomi/Benjamin, R. Ammi, and Bar Nathan.132 Mar Samuel, in addition, is lauded as an expert in eye diseases (b. Avoda Zara 28b; b. Shabbat 78a, 108b; cf. b. Bava Metsia 85b), in the treatment of medical complications such as those arising from circumcision (b. Shabbat 133b–134b, 137a–b; b. Ketubot 110b; b. Nedarim 37b, 41a, 54b; b. Gittin 70a; b. Bava Batra 146a; b. ʿAvodah Zarah 28a), in astronomy and bloodletting (b. Berakhot 58b; cf. b. Shabbat 129a–b, 156b), as well as in the information about lunar, solar, and planetary cycles needed for the calculation of the lunisolar calendar and intercalation of months (b. Eruvin 56a; b. Rosh Hashana 20b; b. Sanhedrin 12b; b. Arakhin 9b). In addition, even the seemingly routine exaltation of God as Creator is sometimes expressed with reference to surprisingly detailed matters of astronomical and calendrical cycles. In b. Berakhot 59a, for instance, one finds the injunction to bless God as “the One who makes maaseh bereshit” whenever one “sees the sun at its turning-point [tequfah], the moon in its power, the stars in their orbits, and the mazzalot in their orderly progress”—something that happens, according to Abaye, “every twenty-eight years when the cycle [tequfah] begins again and the tequfat Nisan (i.e., spring equinox) falls in Saturn on Tuesday evening, going into Wednesday” (cf. Leviticus Rabbah 23.8).133 That the cultivation of expertise in such areas went beyond the specific Sages associated by name with astronomical or medicinal expertise, moreover, is suggested by the scattered but significant references to astrological tropes and medicinal therapies.134
[☞ p8.78] In addition, some Rabbinic awareness of non-Jewish cosmology seems to be signaled by the baraita about planetary motion in b. Pesahim 94b, which culminates in an intriguingly positive assessment of non-Jewish knowledge about the cycles of the sun:
Our Rabbis taught: The Sages of Israel maintain: “The galgal [celestial sphere?] is stationary, while the mazzalot [planets?] revolve.” But the sages of the nations of the world maintain: “The galgal revolves and the mazzalot are stationary” … The Sages of Israel maintain: “The sun travels beneath the sky by day and above the sky at night.” But the sages of the nations of the world maintain: “It travels beneath the sky by day and below the earth at night.” Rabbi said: “And their view is preferable to ours, since wells are cold by day but warm at night.”
[☞ p8.79] Likewise, just as halakhic discussions about the human body sometimes recall physiognomic concepts and debates known from Greek and Roman scientific literature,135 so some allusions to embryology in Rabbinic aggadot resonate with their Roman as well as Persian counterparts.136 Some interaction of Palestinian sages with Roman healing practices may be signaled by the importation into Hebrew of Greek technical terms for some physician’s tools,137 and Talmudic allusions to therapies raise the possibility that some Babylonian sages may have been familiar with Babylonian healing practices otherwise known to us only from Akkadian sources.138 Further examples of the sort might be cited in relation to other areas like botany, zoology, and geography.139 What is important for our purposes, however, is that such references seem to attest some scientific interests, expertise, and information among late antique Sages, even despite the lack of sustained engagement with such topics within the classical Rabbinic literature.140
[☞ p8.80] The classical Rabbinic literature provides little information for the student who might wish to follow in the footsteps of R. Gamaliel in lunar expertise or Mar Samuel in the treatment of disease, and it even provides few details on how precisely one learns to assess the relative value of different ideas about celestial cycles or to determine the equinox. One could infer, for instance, that the challenges of maintaining the lunisolar calendar through intercalation must have necessitated the cultivation of some pedagogical methods for preserving, teaching, and transmitting more information about calendrical astronomy than we now find recorded in the extant literary records of Rabbis from Late Antiquity.141 That medieval authors must try to reconstruct the calculations behind Talmudic statements, however, only serves to emphasize the apparent separation of such domains of knowledge from other areas of Rabbinic expertise and practice which came to be more richly preserved in writing, such as halakha.142
[☞ p8.81] Was the astronomy, medicine, etc., of late antique Sages too ad hoc, local, or eclectic to warrant systematic preservation or transmission in written forms? Was it mostly a matter of the engagement of some Jewish intellectuals in the learning of their broader non-Jewish cultural contexts? Or should we imagine some more cohesive tradition(s) transmitted primarily through oral channels, perhaps only among select sets of Rabbinic or other experts, who fostered some sense of secrecy? Might such transmission been facilitated by didactic texts of the sort only known from the Second Temple period due only to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls? To what degree did the authors of the later Hebrew scientific literature collect and preserve earlier oral and/or written traditions, and to what degree did they retroject their own scientific interests back into the tannaitic past? Might any lines of continuity stretch back even into Second Temple times?143
[☞ p8.82] Even if such questions cannot be answered with any certainty, they do point to one of the most helpful contributions of recent research on “ancient Jewish sciences”: they have profitably reoriented the discussion of science and ancient Judaism to focus not only on questions about “progress” (i.e., who discovered what first and before whom), but also and particularly on questions of pedagogy (i.e., how, where, why, and by whom accumulated scientific knowledge was systematized, preserved, taught, and transmitted). Popović, in particular, has pressed for attention to choices of literary form and framing, as possible clues as to the different settings of “scientific” training and transmission;144 he thus pushes us, not just to consider the content of the extant records of “ancient Jewish sciences,” but to ask what their literary context might reveal about the “context of transmission of scholarly knowledge”—“what textual formats or genres of scientific writings are attested? And what sort of authorial strategies did ancient Jewish scholars pursue?”145
[☞ p8.83] Popović thus pinpoints critical questions, not just for the early materials, but maybe for later ones too. It may be tempting to search our literature for clues to the origins of scientific “attitudes,” “interest,” or “thought” within Judaism, but it is unclear whether literary evidence can even answer such questions.146 What it can help to address, however, is the question of when, where, and how such interests came to be expressed explicitly in written forms and integrated into Jewish scribal and literary cultures. The extant data, after all, offer us only a small window onto the actual content of the knowledge about the cosmos, stars, and human body that circulated among ancient Jews, but richly attest the range of Jewish perspectives on the proper scope of human knowledge, the purposes of Hebrew writing, and the ideal purview and aims of investigating the cosmos.
[☞ p8.84] Approached from this perspective, what is striking are the very different ways in which even seemingly recurrent concerns found expression in written forms in Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval Jewish literature. Post-Talmudic works like Baraita de-Shmuel, Sefer Yetzirah, Mishnat ha-Midot, Yetzirat ha-Walad, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, Midrash Konen, and Sefer Asaf ha-Rofe, for instance, claim continuity with the biblical and tannaitic past to varying degrees. All of them depart strikingly from the Hebrew Bible and classical Rabbinic literature, however, inasmuch as they discuss astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, and medicine in explicit and focused fashion. It is this feature that led Langermann to draw attention to such works as neglected evidence for the “first chapter in the history of Hebrew scientific literature … sometime during the very late Umayyad and early Abbassid caliphates,” even as he stressed that “I am not asking when Jews first began to evince an interest in science. The question I want to answer is when Jews first wrote Hebrew texts whose primary purpose was the exposition of scientific knowledge.”147
[☞ p8.85] Langermann thus makes a critical distinction akin to that raised by Popović with respect to the relevant Qumran materials. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, as we have seen, we find evidence for emergence of Jewish cosmography first in relation to apocalyptic literary production in Aramaic but also perhaps in Aramaic and Hebrew didactic texts dedicated wholly to topics like physiognomy and astrology. In the case of the post-Talmudic works in which scientific interests again find sustained written expression, it is first with a spate of anonymous or pseudonymous writings in Hebrew, primarily framed in anthological genres modeled on the Mishnah, prior to and perhaps preparatory for the later emergence of authored treatises in Hebrew more readily recognized—by medieval Islamic as well as modern Western criteria—as “science.”148
[☞ p8.86] Are there any lines of continuity between “ancient Jewish sciences” and later Jewish literatures? And is there anything that we might learn about the seemingly sudden rise of a focused concern for the stars, human body, and structures of the cosmos in Aramaic and Hebrew literary cultures, in the wake of Hellenistic conquests in the Second Temple period, by looking also to the seemingly sudden rise of the same concerns within Hebrew literary cultures, many centuries later, in the wake of Islamic conquests?
[☞ p8.87] As noted above, many of the relevant later works claim to contain (or were received as containing) faithful records in writing of the knowledge transmitted in secret by Sages of earlier times. Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit, for instance, circulated as the revelation of the secrets of maaseh bereshit mentioned by the Mishnah.149 Baraita de-Shmuel is associated with the contents of Mar Samuel’s astronomical wisdom, as possibly connected particularly to the baraita of the “secret of the calendar” [sod ha-ibbur] mentioned in the Talmud. In the hexaemeral chapters of Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer.150 Traditions about pre-creation, the substance from which earth and heaven were created, and the creation of heaven, angels, and the throne of God are attributed to R. Eliezer (PRE 3–4), while R. Yehoshua and R. Yehuda are associated with information about the ground, plants, earth, sun, moon, planets, zodiacal signs, and calendar (PRE 5–6), R. Eliezer and R. Meir with birds, fish, and insects (PRE 9). The most extensive astronomical materials, moreover, are here credited jointly to R. Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, R. Gamaliel, R. Ishmael, R. Eleazar ben Arach, R. Eliezer, and R. Akiva (PRE 7–8).
[☞ p8.88] One would certainly not wish to read these claims at face value, suggesting—as did Nicholas Séd—that all these works reflect some single unified tradition of Jewish cosmology, attested in the apocalypses of Second Temple times, condemned by the Mishnah, and transmitted in secret until finding preservation in writings in texts like Midrash Konen and Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit.151 Nor does Elior’s theory of a “secessionist priesthood” that paired ritual concerns and mystical practice with the “mathematization of the cosmos” hold much explanatory power for works of this sort, which draw from the Torah and Talmud Bavli as much as (if not more than) from the Book of Ezekiel and the early Enochic literature.152 Despite the allure of the quest to uncover a single esoteric movement running subterranean through ancient Jewish history, there is little to support the contention of a unified social or intellectual tradition connecting such materials, nor systematically distinguishing them from Rabbinic Judaism.153
[☞ p8.89] Nevertheless, just as scientific materials from Qumran and beyond attest the surprisingly long and winding afterlives of elements from ancient Near Eastern astronomical and divinatory disciplines, so we must ask whether any threads of continuity might link the scientific interests attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls with those attested at the very end of Late Antiquity. The appearance of parallels between them, notably, forms part of the broader puzzle of the reappearance of Second Temple Jewish traditions in early medieval Jewish literature—some examples of which were noted above, with reference to Sefer Asaf’s parallels with Jubilees and Judah Halevi’s possible knowledge of the Wisdom of Solomon.154 In past research, the investigation of such connections was largely motivated by the search for evidence to support Gershom Scholem’s passing musings about the possible prehistory of Jewish mysticism in the apocalyptic literature of Second Temple times.155 If the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls initially seemed to hold out hope for providing evidence for Jewish mysticism’s hidden heritage, however, many decades of concerted efforts to uncover concrete connections have achieved little more than the multiplication of impressionist parallels.
[☞ p8.90] The question of possible connections between Enochic literature and later Jewish mysticism remains puzzling, but recent discussions of “ancient Jewish sciences” may help to provide a fresh perspective for further investigation. That a focus on physiognomy might help us to reorient the discussion in more useful ways, for instance, was suggested already by Michael Swartz in an essay from 2001 reviewing and reassessing the evidence for parallels between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hekhalot literature. Swartz’s survey and analysis distinguishes between different types of materials for which parallels have been noted in the past (what he calls “mystical,” “magical,” and “divinatory”), with an eye to the functions of the different types of knowledge and practice encompassed by each. What he shows is that those materials typically deemed “mystical” reveal less trans-historical connections than those that have been studied under the rubrics of “magic” and “divination.” The latter, in fact, especially stands out: “the links between the physiognomic literature at Qumran and those from esoteric circles in late antiquity and the early middle ages are quite strong”:156
… the magical and divinatory traditions have undergone the least change. It is also easier to identify the role that the latter play in the life of the community. This factor should give us pause to think about how we look at the history of Jewish spirituality in antiquity. While we have become accustomed to seeking visions—that is, looking for evidence for visionary practices at Qumran and in the Rabbinic milieu—we may have been ignoring another important source of revelation and divine disclosure. If the divinatory tradition is more pervasive and recognizable, we might reconsider our view of Qumran sectarians and Rabbinic esotericists, and perhaps of their contemporaries, as given to charismatic enthusiasms, and consider how they engaged in disciplined, intricate forms of reading—not only of the Sefer he-Hagiu, but of the Sefer Toledot Adam.157
[☞ p8.91] Swartz’s findings prove significant, for our purposes, inasmuch as they point us both to the value of distinguishing different elements when theorizing the relationship between the Second Temple and later Jewish traditions, and to potential significance of “ancient Jewish sciences” for this task. Rather than continuing to debate the existence of some singular non-/anti-Rabbinic movement at the root of Jewish mysticism, it might prove more profitable to untangle the various threads that seemingly link the early Enochic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls with later Jewish literary cultures, with an eye to the possible social settings and functions for the cultivation and transmission of different types of knowledge.158 We know of a number of cases in which Second Temple Jewish traditions were seemingly lost or abandoned, but later recovered by Jews in the Middle Ages due to “back-borrowing” from Christian, Manichean, or Islamic tradents—as in the case of the circulation of the Wisdom of Solomon in Syriac among medieval Jews, or the recovery of the writings of Josephus; it is debatable whether something similar occurred in the case of other texts not preserved by late antique Rabbis, such as the Book of Watchers and Jubilees.159 In some cases, certain motifs from these texts seem to have continued to circulate among Jews by virtue of their connection to various types of specialized knowledge that we might call “magic,” and in other cases, due to their continued place in the oral-interpretative traditions surrounding certain biblical terms or verses.160
[☞ p8.92] A focus on “ancient Jewish sciences” may help us further to illumine such dynamics. With the benefit now of Popović’s work, it may be worth revisiting Swartz’s insights into physiognomy as a practice possibly linking Second Temple Jewish reflection on the human body with its non-Jewish counterparts but also its later Jewish heirs. In the course of his comprehensive analyses of 4Q186 and 4Q561, he makes note of a number of terminological parallels with later materials, including passages in the Talmud Bavli, the post-Talmudic tractate Baraita de-Mazzalot and the Physiognomy of R. Ishmael, and various materials preserved in the Cairo Genizah.161 The possibility that scientific traditions of this sort may have provided one possible channel for the transmission of some Second Temple traditions into later Judaism is also suggested by the intriguing evidence of a Genizah fragment preserving an apparently pre-Rabbanized form of Sefer Hekhalot, the Hekhalot text commonly called 3 Enoch.162 Whereas a focus on Enoch has lead scholars since Hugo Odeberg to suggest that Sefer Hekhalot/3 Enoch stands in an unbroken line of development with Second Temple works like 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, attention to the physiognomic concerns in its earliest attested form might help us to trace some of the separate threads that connect it with earlier tradition, apart from an expectation of simply proving or disproving direct filiation with earlier Enochic literature.163
[☞ p8.93] Attending also to Popović’s concerns for the literary framing and setting of knowledge, we might point to the enduring place of Genesis as a model for a number of the texts and traditions discussed above. The Astronomical Book, Book of Watchers, Jubilees, and Pseudo-Eupolemus, of course, represent some of our earliest evidence for the parabiblical tradition surrounding Genesis. If Josephus’ discussions of Abraham as Chaldean scientist can similarly be read in this fashion, so perhaps too with the later Rabbinic discussion of astrology with reference to Abraham as well. It may be telling, moreover, that Genesis 5:1 is re-read as precedent and proof-text for Jewish physiognomy,164 roughly around the same time that Enoch reappears as an emblem of cosmological knowledge in Sefer Hekhalot/3 Enoch and that Noah reappears as an emblem of medical knowledge in Sefer Asaf ha-Rofe.
[☞ p8.94] Attention to this particular trend in the Jewish form and framing of scientific knowledge, moreover, highlights one of the most striking threads of continuity linking the relevant Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval materials—namely, the use of the seven days of creation (Genesis 1:1–2:4) as a structure into which to integrate knowledge about the stars, cosmos, and human body gained both from biblical exegesis and from observation of the visible world and speculation into what lies beyond. One finds the expansion of the hexaemeron already with Jubilees, where it marks the “translation” of earlier Enochic materials in more ways than one—both from Aramaic into Hebrew, and also into the form of pentateuchal narrative. In one recension of 2 Enoch, one finds a similar translation of sorts, with Enochic traditions now rendered in Hellenistic terms, but again with appeal to the hexaemeron; as in the Book of Watchers, Enoch here ascends to heaven, and in this case through multiple heavens, the contents of which are explained with appeal to cosmology, angelology, and eschatology. What is perhaps most striking, however, is what is revealed to him in the highest heaven—an account of God’s creation of cosmos in seven days, retold in a manner that “updates” Genesis 1 but also remains within its bounds.
[☞ p8.95] In Rabbinic midrash, such as Genesis Rabbah, the interpretation of Genesis 1 is shaped by new efforts to theorize of the bounds of proper inquiry into maaseh bereshit, in conversation with the Mishnah and Talmud Yerushalmi, and possibly in reaction to competing “scientific-cosmological” approaches.165 That some association of the hexaemeron with scientific knowledge perhaps remains, however, might be suggested by an intriguing Talmudic reference to a passage from R. Joshua b. Levi’s notebook, wherein the character and fate of a person were foretold based on the day of the week of his or her birth, in a manner intertextually connected to the cosmogony days described in Genesis 1 (b. Shabbat 156a).
[☞ p8.96] Also notable, in this regard, is the calculation of tequfot associated with Abaye in b. Berakhot 59a, as quoted above. This calculation pertains to what is later explained more explicitly in later works like Baraita de-Shmuel (5–6) and Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer (ch. 7) as tequfat Shemuel—one of the two main methods for calculating solistices and equinoxes, assuming a mean tropical year equal to that of the Julian calendar (365¼ days) and the beginning of the cycle on the day on which the sun was created according to Genesis (i.e., “Tuesday evening, going into Wednesday” = at the start of the fourth day). As such, it exemplifies the degree to which the Rabbinic discourse about maaseh bereshit cuts across modern categories of “science” and “religion”; the calculation can be deemed “scientific” in the sense of trying to make sense of observed patterns in nature by means of a theoretical model, but its meaning is not exhausted by this aim, and it would be misleading to judge its value solely in terms of modern notions of “science.” Yet, as Sacha Stern has shown, one cannot understand such a system without a sense of the premodern creation of calendars as a practice for which accuracy was not the sole or even main criterion. With respect to tequfat Shemuel, in particular, Stern points to its conceptual value for conveying the orderliness of divine creation as well as its possible practical value as a mnemonic device.166 To these, we might add its function as a midrash of sorts: consistent with the approach to the Torah as blueprint for creation in Genesis Rabbah, the cycles of the cosmos are here read through the lens of the first chapter of Genesis, thereby naturalizing the connection between all of the various senses of maaseh bereshit (i.e., as the divine process of creation and the biblical narrative about it, but also the visible products thereof).
[☞ p8.97] Attention to issues of literary form and framing, however, also points us to the limits of midrash and maaseh bereshit to describe Rabbinic engagement with knowledge about the cosmos. Schäfer, for instance, has pointed to the dominance of another framework for organizing exegetical, observational, and speculative knowledge about the cosmos, namely, the seven heavens.167 Despite seemingly belonging more to the world of ancient Jewish apocalypses than that of late antique Rabbis, moreover, this framework is determinative in the most detailed discussion of the cosmos in the Talmud Bavli (i.e., b. Ḥagigah 12b–13a). Partly as a result, moreover, the contents of the seven heavens are richly discussed across a surprisingly broad range of Rabbinic and para-Rabbinic materials—including Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, Leviticus Rabbah, Deuteronomy Rabbah, and Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (A), but also Sefer Hekhalot/3 Enoch, Reuyot Yehezqel, Targumic Tosefta to Ezekiel 1, Midrash Konen, and Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit.
[☞ p8.98] Interestingly, it is not until the era that Langermann deems the “beginnings of Hebrew scientific literature” that the seven days return as a major organizational principle for Jewish knowledge about the natural world—whether together with the seven heavens or in place of it. In Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit and Midrash Konen, for instance, hexaemeral retellings function to frame and justify subsequent speculations about the contents of the seven heavens above, the seven earths below, classes of angels, and divine Throne. Perhaps more interesting, for our purposes, is the case of Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer. There, the schema of the seven heavens (cf. PRE 18) seems to be set aside in favor of an expansive retelling of Genesis 1 (esp. PRE 3–11), which interweaves astronomical, meteorological, calendrical, geographical, and even zoological materials, alongside midrashic and aggadic traditions that recall Jubilees no less than Genesis Rabbah.168 Not only does Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer appeal both to primeval figures and Rabbis to justify its integration of “scientific” information (e.g., tracing intercalation to Adam, while associating R. Eliezer and his colleagues with teachings of astronomy, etc.), but its treatment of the fourth day includes substantial astronomical material, largely paralleling the system in Baraita de Shmuel and reflecting a written expression of calendrical astronomy more explicit than in earlier traditions.
[☞ p8.99] In Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, moreover, ethical, ritual, and “scientific” materials are all presented in terms of a Listenwissenschaft that raises intriguing possibilities of some connection to pedagogical practice. Through numbered lists, the cycles and principles of Jewish piety are depicted as part of the divine order that permeates, enlivens, and supports the entire created world.169 If cosmological inquiry is justified with appeal to the Torah, so Jewish ethics and practice are naturalized with appeal to the cosmos. If it is difficult to extricate “scientific” and “religious” aims here, it is also difficult to try to isolate the meaning of the form or framing of the knowledge itself from the meaning of the knowledge itself; the medium is part of the message.
4. Conclusion
[☞ p8.100] Recent work on “ancient Jewish sciences” has much to tell us about the history of science, but it may speak to the history of Judaism, even beyond Second Temple times—not least by reminding us of what is lost when the history of Jewish knowledge is reduced to “religious” concerns or bifurcated along the lines of modern dichotomies. The data resist any easy reduction to familiar dichotomies like “religion” vs. “science,” Near Eastern vs. Greek, or Jewish vs. foreign. Inasmuch as research on them necessarily crosses a number of conceptual and disciplinary divides in modern scholarship, moreover, it may also help open the way for more integrative perspectives on ancient Judaism.
[☞ p8.101] We have seen, above, how traditions about the representation of the place of Jews in the history of knowledge serves as one thread connecting “ancient Jewish sciences” with their counterparts at the end of Late Antiquity. The connection is perhaps closest in the case of Jubilees and Sefer Asaf ha-Rofe, but even the less direct parallels share the appeal to the Hebrew Bible to explain the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge and the place of Judaism within it. The concern to do so, moreover, often seem shaped by the aim to argue that the history of Jewish knowledge encompassed the same topics as those of other cultures, albeit with a claim to extreme antiquity far greater than that of the Greeks, sometime paired with a claim to an unbroken tradition of written transmission rivaling even those of the Babylonians and Egyptians, and/or to a unique source for confirming the truth of such knowledge in angelic revelation, heavenly books, or eye-witness accounts of otherworldly realms. In both periods, new claims concerning the scope of Jewish scribal expertise may have also formed part of a defense of the ancient literary heritage of Israel—first against the challenges posed by the intellectual prestige of Hellenistic pedagogy and the cosmopolitan scientific discourse forged by learned elites in the Hellenistic Near East, and later against the challenges posed by the integration of Hellenistic sciences into Arabic pedagogy, translated and extended into a new cosmopolitan scientific discourse in the Islamic Near East.
[☞ p8.102] Another point of possible continuity, as we have seen, is a model of scientific pedagogy and expertise, perhaps Babylonian in ultimate origin, as involving more secrecy than other forms of Jewish knowledge–a model that might remain active in practice, at times, but may also inform the continued appeal to the rhetoric of secrecy to add the luster of esotericism to claims of expertise and authority. If many of the materials surveyed above are marked by the claim to reveal what has long been secret, this claim may root its plausibility and power in historical moments in which older knowledge was being preserved systematically in written forms. Just as Enochic scribes preserve older Mesopotamian knowledge at the dawn of the early Hellenistic age, so too at the flowering of Islam–what some of the first Hebrew scientific writings (e.g., Sefer Asaf) preserve is not the new Islamic knowledge, but rather older sciences, including Hellenistic traditions.
[☞ p8.103] Yet the cross-cultural and cosmopolitan horizon of much of the discussion—both in premodern texts and in modern scholarship—might lead us to overlook inner-Jewish concerns that may be no less significant for understanding “ancient Jewish sciences” and the various threads of their possible late antique and medieval afterlives. In the relevant later materials, as perhaps already at Qumran, the distinction of “science” and “religion” is more misleading than heuristic for understanding the ways in which different types of knowledge were organized, systematized, preserved, and transmitted. It may be telling, moreover, that the Rabbinic category of maaseh bereshit cuts directly across topics that might strike us—from a modern Western perspective—as obviously “religious” and topics that might strike us as obviously “scientific,” encompassing exegesis of Genesis 1, observation of the visible world, and speculation about the creation and structures of the cosmos (cf. Maimonides, Guide I, 6–7; Judah Halevi, Kitab al Khazari IV 25).
[☞ p8.104] If the Rabbinic discourse about maaseh bereshit thus cautions us against casually retrojecting our own assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of “religion” and “science” into earlier texts and periods, it also offers a sustained, self-conscious reflection on the bounds of proper Jewish knowledge and inquiry, and it reveals an important inner-Jewish dynamic—namely, the generative tension between the cosmographical reticence of the Torah itself, on the one hand, and the cosmological curiosity resultant from its claims that the God of Israel is the Creator of the cosmos, on the other. Whether or not one finds any pre-Rabbinic counterpart to the category of maaseh bereshit, it is worth wondering whether a similar dynamic is at play in Second Temple materials—perhaps somewhat neglected by virtue of the primary scholarly focus on whether and how “ancient Jewish sciences” relate to their non-Jewish counterparts and to modern standards of “science.” If so, the ancient and late antique sources may offer overlooked materials for the history of science, but also understudied resources for the history of Judaism, valuable perhaps precisely because they might strike us as paradoxical in their visions of “ancient Jewish sciences.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-asterix] * Earlier versions of this essay were pre-circulated for and presented at the ISAW conference on which the present volume is based. I am grateful to Jonathan Ben-Dov, Seth Sanders, and Mladen Popović for thought-provoking conversations before, during, and after the conference; I hope that the present essay captures even a little of what I have learned from them. Benjamin Wright, Lawrence Schiffman, Seth Schwartz, Steven R. Reed, and Benjamin J. Fleming also offered crucial feedback on various earlier forms. Special thanks to David Ruderman for theoretical insights and bibliographical suggestions on the penultimate draft, and to William McCants and Nicholas Harris for their aid in navigating the relevant Islamic and Judeo-Arabic materials.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-1] 1 David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 [1995]), 375.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-2] 2 Ibid, 375-382.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-3] 3 Y. Tzvi Langermann “On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and on Studying History through ‘Maqbilot’ (Parallels)”, Aleph 2 (2002): 169-176.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-4] 4 Shlomo Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 2–3, 7.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-5] 5 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism? Historical and Cross-Cultural Reflections on ‘Religion’ and ‘Science,’” SR 36 (2007): 461-495.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-6] 6 E.g., Michael E. Stone, “Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright (ed. F. M. Cross, W. Lemke, and P. D. Miller; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1976), 414-452; Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72-94; Philip S. Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings of Jewish Interest in Natural Science,” in The Wisdom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought (reprinted in this volume, ch. 2).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-7] 7 Ruderman, Jewish Thought, xv. To be sure, Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” cites Ruderman’s work as inspiration, but its concern is less with the cultural or social history of knowledge, and more with cognitive shifts; see further below.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-8] 8 Jacob Neusner, “Why No Science in Judaism?,” Shofar 6.3 (1988): 45–71.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-9] 9 Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?,” 461.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-10] 10 Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); Michael E. Stone, “Lists of Revealed Things in the Apocalyptic Literature”; James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 76-109; Otto Neugebauer, “The ‘Astronomical Chapters’ of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch (72 to 82)”, in Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition (SVTP 7; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 386-414.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-11] 11 Mladen Popović, “Physiognomic Knowledge in Qumran and Babylonia: Form, Interdisciplinarity, and Secrecy,” DSD 13 (2006): 150-176; idem, Reading the Human Body: Physiognomics and Astrology in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic-Early Roman Period Judaism (STDJ 67; Leiden: Brill, 2007).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-12] 12 Popović, “Physiognomic Knowledge,” 150-151; idem, Reading the Human Body, 68–118; cf. Markham Geller, “New Documents from the Dead Sea: Babylonian Science in Aramaic” in Boundaries of the Ancient Near Eastern World: A Tribute to Cyrus H. Gordon (ed. Meir Lubetski, Claire Gottlieb, and Sharon Keller; JSOTSup 273; Sheffield: Academic Press, 1998), 224-229.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-13] 13 Popović, “Physiognomic Knowledge,” 150-151, 165; idem, Reading the Human Body, 18–54, 119–208; cf. Philip S. Alexander, “Physiognomy, Initiation, and Rank in the Qumran Community,” in Geschichte—Tradition—Reflexion: Festschrift fur Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. H. Cancik, H. Lichtenberger, and P. Schäfer; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 385-394; Francis Schmidt, “Ancient Jewish Astrology: An Attempt to Interpret 4QCryptic (4Q186)”, in Biblical Perspectives: Early Use and Interpretation of the Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Michael E. Stone and Esther G. Chazon; STDJ 28; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 189-205.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-14] 14 Jonathan Ben-Dov, Head of All Years: Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran in their Ancient Context (STDJ 78; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 4–5.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-15] 15 Cf. Matthias Albani, Astronomie und Schöpfungsglaube: Untersuchungen zum astronomischen Henochbuch (WMANT 68; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1994).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-16] 16 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 1, 276-278, 286-287.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-17] 17 Langermann, “On the Beginnings,” 170, 175.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-18] 18 By “heurematography,” here and below, I mean the practice of pinpointing and listing the discoverers or inventors of specific skills and knowledge; see K. Thraede, “Erfinder II,” in RAC V: 1191-278; Leonid Zhmud, The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity (trans. Alexander Chernoglazov; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006); William F. McCants, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-19] 19 Inasmuch as my focus here is on premodern materials, I do not tackle the problem of the modern reception of disciplines like psychoanalysis as “Jewish sciences”—an issue that raises its own set of questions about “science” and cultural specificity, on which see further, e.g., Stephen Frosh, “Freud and Jewish Identity,” Theory & Psychology 18.2 (2008): 167-178.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-20] 20 Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (2005): 401-4.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-21] 21 Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8-18; John H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52–81, 286-289; John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (New York: Palgrave, 2002, 2nd ed.), 1–13.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-22] 22 Roy MacLeod, “Introduction: Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise,” Osiris 15 (2000): 1-13; David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge,” Osiris 15 (2000): 221-240.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-23] 23 Marwa Elshakry suggests, in fact, that even the notion of “Western science” owes much to the reception of European ideas and disciplines among intellectuals in the Middle East and Asia; see Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101.1 (2010): 98-109; also Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33 (2009): 9-30. These recent approaches contrast with older models for the spread of scientific knowledge across cultures. Once dominant but now rejected, for instance, is the diffusionist model of George Basalla, which posited a three-stage process whereby pre-scientific, non-Western nations first provided resources for Western science, then embraced them, and finally used them as a basis for developing their own, national sciences; see, e.g., Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 616-622.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-24] 24 Adolf Kleingünter, Protos Heuretes: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte einer Fragestellung (Leipzig: Akademie-Verlag, 1933); Arther O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1935]), 382-388.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-25] 25 Thraede, “Erfinder II,” in RAC V; Zhmud, Origin of the History of Science, 10–54; Marcella Farioli, “The Genesis of the Cosmos, the Search for Arche and the Finding of Aitia in Classical Greek Culture,” in Origins as a Paradigm in the Sciences and Humanities (ed. Paola Spinozzi and Alessandro Zironi; Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010), 195-209.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-26] 26 I.e., with the importance of the local or culturally-distinct origins of certain disciplines predicated on (and thus subordinated to) their delocalized and trans-cultural value. This delocalized value, notably, is determined from an imperial vantage-point, the agency of which is erased by the assertion of a “universal” horizon for their diffusion and reception. In other words: what can appear to be a nativizing discourse about competing claims to antiquity and cultural priority of scientific discovery is often also (if more invisibly) participation in a totalizing discourse of empires. On the place of imperial power and knowledge in the spread, organization, and theorization of knowledge to and about Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman periods—as well as the differences in Hellenistic, Roman, and Islamic imperial strategies and stances—see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist and Father of the Jews: Josephus, Ant. 1.154–168, and the Greco-Roman Discourse about Astronomy/Astrology,” JSJ 35 (2004): 145-156; McCants, Founding Gods.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-27] 27 Zhmud, Origin of the History of Science, 117-165.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-28] 28 Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Gregory Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephus, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (NovTSup 54; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 20-225.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-29] 31 Momigliano, Alien Wisdom.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-30] 31 Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-31] 31 Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge, 1998); John Walbridge, “Explaining Away the Greek Gods in Islam,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.3 (1998): 389–403; McCants, Founding Gods.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-32] 32 Abraham Melamed, The Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2010).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-33] 33 See, e.g., Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist,” on Josephus, his Hellenistic Jewish predecessors, and his Roman contemporaries; Giuseppe Veltri, “The Rabbis and Pliny the Elder: Jewish and Greco-Roman Attitudes toward Magic and Empirical Knowledge,” Poetics Today 19.1 (1998): 63-89, on late antique Rabbis and Pliny; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Science and the Kuzari,” Science in Context 10 (1997): 495–522, on Judah Halevi in his Islamic philosophical and scientific cultural contexts. For a comprehensive survey of the premodern articulations of the trope of Jewish priority in sciences in relation to parallel premodern claims about philosophy, as well as modern reticence about them, see now Melamed, Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-34] 34 Esp. 1 Enoch 17–36, 72–82; VanderKam, Enoch, 76–109; Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven, 72–94.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-35] 35 Michael E. Stone, “Enoch, Aramaic Levi and Sectarian Origins,” JSJ 19 (1988): 159-170.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-36] 36 Cf. Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen” (JSJSup 81; Leiden: Brill, 2003); Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Enoch, Eden, and the Beginnings of Jewish Cosmography,” in The Cosmography of Paradise (ed. Alessandro Scafi; London-Turin: The Warburg Institute-Nino Aragno, forthcoming).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-37] 37 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Origins of the Book of the Watchers as ‘Apocalypse’ and its Reception as ‘Apocrypha,’” Henoch 30 (2008): 57–58; eadem, “Enoch, Eden.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-38] 38 See esp. Jubilees 4:7, 21; 8:3–4; 10:10–14; 11:16; 12:16, 25–27; 19:14; 21:10; 45:16, on the medicinal knowledge transmitted from Noah to Shem in the broader context of a body of written and oral traditions about the stars, calendar, laws, festivals, agriculture, etc., transmitted in Hebrew in a line from Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Levi, to their heirs—here articulated in contrast to the non-Hebrew knowledge of celestial phenomena connected to the fallen angels and divination. Comparable but much less developed is the Book of Watchers’ earlier appeal to cosmological knowledge mediated by Enoch in contrast to knowledge about metals, mining, cosmetics, celestial auguries, root-cutting, etc., associated with the fallen angels (1 Enoch 6–16, esp. 7:1, 8:1–3); see further Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven; Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24–121.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-39] 39 Eusebius, Praep. ev. 9.17.3–9; Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist,” 136-142.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-40] 40 Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition, 282-284.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-41] 41 The tension, in fact, is perhaps exemplified by the very term. Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew terms for “Chaldean” can denote a Babylonian priest but also an astrologer of any ethnicity. The culturally-defined framing of astrological knowledge, however, stands in contrast to the astral sciences of the Hellenistic era, which was not solely Babylonian, but rather the product of a new fusion of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek elements. See further Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist”; Reimund Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der astrologischen Literatur der Juden (TSMJ 21; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 11–17.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-42] 42 Contrast the association of root-cutting, etc., with sorcery and other corrupting teachings of the fallen angels in the Book of Watchers (esp. 1 Enoch 7:1; 8:3). This range of attitudes, notably, resonates with the ambivalence towards medicine within ancient Greek literature as well, wherein this domain of knowledge and expertise is often placed at the charged margins of the very category of technê, at its intersection with mageia, etc.; Serafina Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–40. That the tracing of the origins of medicine, astrology, metallurgy, etc., to good and bad angels in Jewish writings like the Book of Watchers and Jubilees also fits within a broader Mediterranean and Near Eastern context (i.e., whereby the origins of ambivalent technê could be connected to semi-divine or intermediate figures; e.g., daimones, dactyls) is demonstrated by Fritz Graf, “Mythical Production: Aspects of Myth and Technology in Antiquity” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (ed. Richard Buxton; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 322-328.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-43] 43 For the possibility of some connection between them, see Martha Himmelfarb, “Some Echoes of Jubilees in Medieval Hebrew Literature,” in Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha (ed. J. C. Reeves; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 127-136; for theories about a lost “Book of Noah,” see now Michael E. Stone, Aryeh Amihay, and Vered Hillel (eds.) Noah and His Book(s) (SBLEJL28; Atlanta: SBL, 2011).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-44] 44 The names in Sefer Asaf’s list of Jewish physicians are not elsewhere attested, although some MSS identify Asaf himself with the mysterious Asaf ben Berechiah of 1 Chronicles 15:17. Shlomo Pines “The Oath of Asaph the Physician and Yohanan Ben Zabda,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 9 (1975): 223-264; Elinor Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines: A Hebrew Encyclopedia of Greek and Jewish Magic, Possibly Compiled on an Indian Model,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 233-249; Reed, “Origins.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-45] 45 I am grateful to Nicholas Harris for consulting the Judeo-Arabic of this passage. Judah Halevi, Kitab al Khazari (trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld; London: Routledge, 1905), II 66, 124.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-46] 46 Interestingly, Nahmanides (ca. 1194–1270) knew an Aramaic version of the Wisdom of Solomon and quotes the above-cited passage in the preface to his commentary to the Torah/Pentateuch, see Alexander Marx, “An Aramaic Fragment of the Wisdom of Solomon,” JBL 40 (1921): 58-60.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-47] 47 Cf. John J. Collins, “Cosmos and Salvation: Jewish Wisdom and Apocalyptic in the Hellenistic Age,” History of Religions 17.2 (1977): 121-142.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-48] 48 Cf. Langermann, “Science and the Kuzari”; Abdelhamid I. Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam,” History of Science 25 (1987): 225-243; Walbridge, “Explaining Away the Greek Gods”; Gutas, Greek Thought.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-49] 49 Notably, Halevi does assert its continued cultivation within Judaism, albeit in service to the distinctively Jewish domain of halakhah (e.g., Kitab al Khazari II 64; III 41; IV 25). He stresses, e.g., that “our Sages were, without doubt, acquainted with the revolutions of the sun and the other planets,” inasmuch as “all branches of science were required for the practice of Jewish Law” (Kitab al Khazari II 64). See further Langermann, “Science and the Kuzari,” 495–522.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-50] 50 Even as Josephus answers such accusations in part through his portraits of Abraham and Moses, he also makes the argument that it is the very piety [eusebeia] of the Jews, their unwavering observance of their ancestral customs, that lies at “the origin of the charge that some have raised against us, that we have produced no inventors [heurêtas] of novel deeds or words” (contra Apionem 2.182). Although Josephus is certainly not the last Jewish thinker to contrast piety, as the domain of the Jews, with areas of interest and inquiry associated for the sake of contrast with the Greeks, this is just one of the ancient Jewish approaches to organizing knowledge—or so I attempt to suggest in Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-51] 51 Louis Feldman, Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 223-289.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-52] 52 Such a view is striking precisely because other types of knowledge are clearly perceived as corrupting when adopted from one culture into another. Paradigmatic in the case of ancient Judaism is knowledge about the divine, as richly demonstrated by Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (FAT 57; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). Note also, however, Greek and Roman attitudes towards various kinds of knowledge marginalized as mageia/magia, often with appeal to purported foreignness, in a manner akin to the Jewish discourse about “the nations,” “the ways of the Amorite,” etc.; see esp. Pliny, Natural History 30; Graf, “Mythical Production,” 20–60; Veltri, “The Rabbis and Pliny the Elder”. On Greek ideas about “ancestral customs” [ta patria ethê] and cultural difference, see now Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-53] 53 My use of the category of “translatability” here extends the model outlined in Smith, God in Translation, with respect to discourses about divinity.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-54] 54 Instructive is the example of shifting perspectives on alchemy, on which see Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” Isis 102.2 (2011): 305-312.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-55] 55 Cf. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Francesca Rochberg, “A Consideration of Babylonian Astronomy within the Historiography of Science,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A. 33 (2002): 661-684; eadem, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-56] 56 Cf. Zhmud, Origin of the History of Science, 1–22.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-57] 57 This is perhaps best exemplified by the discussion surrounding the “Needham question,” whereby the sciences and technologies of Chinese and other non-“Western” cultures have been studied through the lens of the question of why they were not home to the Scientific Revolution that occurred in 19th-century Europe. The question itself presumes—and thus reinforces—a model of the history of sciences as a singular line of inevitable progress towards the Western present. Cf. Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954-2004); Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity; Andrew Brennan, “The Birth of Modern Science: Culture, Mentalities and Scientific Innovation,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004): 199–225. On the ways in which assumptions about “progress” have similarly shaped scholarship on ancient technai, see Cuomo, Technology and Culture, 3–4.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-58] 58 On Paul Tannery, George Sarton, and Alexandre Koyré, in particular, see further Lewis Pyenson, “The ideology of Western Rationality: History of Science and the European Civilizing Mission.” Science & Education 2.4 (1993), 329-343. Often cited in this regard are Sarton’s assertions that “science” is “the only human activity which is truly cumulative and progressive,” as well as his promotion of its history as the record of a singular march of progress in “the acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge”; e.g., Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, vol. 1: From Homer to Omar Khayyam (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1929), 4. Yet, as Elshakry (“When Science Became Western,” 107) notes, “historians of science like Sarton (and Joseph Needham) were driven by the desire to demonstrate the ancient and medieval or early modern contributions of Eastern civilizations. But once the narrative of the rise of Western science was set in place, other counternarratives were implied, with their distinctive vocabulary of stagnation, decline, and dark ages”; it was the invention of the idea of the “Scientific Revolution” in the 1930s that decisively “sealed off the West from the rest” and “helped to set the agenda for how the discipline itself would subsequently view the world, as a new emphasis on a universal and unilinear history of science merged seamlessly with postwar modernization theories.” It is interesting to note in this regard that Sarton’s Introduction to the History of Science was notable in its own time for its inclusion of Jews; see further Joshua Finkel, “Review: Sarton on the History of Science,” JQR 18.4 (1928): 445-448.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-59] 59 The critique of early scholarship in the history of science for presentist biases was popularized by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1962]), see esp. pp. 1–3, 137-141. Relevant for our purposes is his emphasis on “the persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative” by reinterpreting the past to fit the epistemological values and assumptions of the present: “Partly by selectivity, and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems” (p. 138).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-60] 60 Consistent with the efforts of scholars like Sarton to promote the history of science as an integral part of a Humanistic education, such older views continue to shape ideas about the history of science in the popular imagination and, as a result, to have an enduring impact on interdisciplinary inquiries into ancient and/or non-Western sciences. On the success of the founding figures in the field in integrating these narratives into science textbooks, high-school and college courses on the “history of Western civilization,” see Kuhn, The Structure, 137-140; Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-61] 61 E.g., Popović, Reading the Human Body, 211-212; Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 3–4—both following the important precedent of Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 224.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-62] 62 Cf. Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 13.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-63] 63 Stone, “Enoch, Levi,” 251-252.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-64] 64 Stone, “Enoch, Levi,” 252; cf. Reed, Fallen Angels, 68–69.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-65] 65 This conjecture, as noted below, forms part of his broader project of positing a “Enochic”/priestly tradition running alongside a dominant “Mosaic”/legal tradition within Judaism, see, e.g., Philip S. Alexander, “What Happened to the Jewish Priesthood After 70?,” in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne (ed. Zuleika Rodgers, Margaret Daly-Denton, and Anne Fitzpatrick McKinley; Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3–34; cf. Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004); Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 240.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-66] 66 Notably, Alexander is thus among the minority of scholars who locate the Astronomical Book in the Persian period, rather than in the early Hellenistic period; cf. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth, 83–88. Hence, even those who might agree with his assessment of its stance towards Jewish and non-Jewish knowledge may well be wary of his speculation that “[s]ometime 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” (Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 237).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-67] 67 Stone, “Enoch, Levi,” 252.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-68] 68 Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 240.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-69] 69 Popović, “Physiognomic Knowledge,” 223-224.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-70] 70 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 12–13, 282-287.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-71] 71 E.g. Markham Geller, “The Last Wedge,” ZA 87 (1997): 43-95; Rochberg, Heavenly Writing.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-72] 72 E.g., Geller, “The Last Wedge;” idem, “Babylonian Influence on Hellenistic Judaism,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (ed. J.M. Sasson; New York: Scribner, 1995), vol. I, 43-54; idem, “The survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft in Later Tradition,” Melammu Symposia I (ed. S. Aro and R. M. Whiting; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2000), 1-6; idem, “An Akkadian Vademecum in the Babylonian Talmud,” in From Athens to Jerusalem, Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature (ed. S. Kottek, M. Horstmanshoff, G. Baader, and G. Ferngren; Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000),13-32; Henryk Drawnel, “Priestly Education in the Aramaic Levi Document (Visions of Levi) and Aramaic Astronomical Book (4Q208–211)”, RQ 22.4 (2006): 547-574; idem, “Between Akkadian tupšarrutu and Aramaic spr: Some Notes on the Social Context of the Early Enochic Literature,” RQ 24 (2010): 373-403; Ben-Dov, Head of All Years; idem, “Scientific Writings in Aramaic and Hebrew at Qumran: Translation and Concealment,” in Aramaic Qumranica: The Aix-en Provence Colloquium on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls (STDJ 94; ed. K. Berthelot and D. Stökl Ben Ezra; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 379-402.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-73] 73 Mladen Popović, “The Emergence of Aramaic and Hebrew Scholarly Texts: Transmission and Translation of Alien Wisdom” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and Production of Texts (STDJ 92; ed. S. Metso, H. Najman, and E. Schuller; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 84.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-74] 74 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 265-266.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-75] 75 Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?” 461-467.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-76] 76 Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1998); idem, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, From Ezekiel to Daniel (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2002).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-77] 77 Rochberg, Heavenly Writing, 18.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-78] 78 Rochberg, Heavenly Writing, 16.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-79] 79 Ibid, 16-18.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-80] 80 Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 230-236.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-81] 81 Cf. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth; Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (WMANT 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-82] 82 Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 232. See VanderKam, in this volume.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-83] 83 See now Alexander, “Jewish Priesthood.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-84] 84 E.g., Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis; idem, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism; Elior, The Three Temples.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-85] 85 See further, e.g., Sacha Stern, “Rachel Elior on Ancient Jewish Calendars: A Critique,” Aleph 5 (2005): 287-292; Martha Himmelfarb, “Merkavah Mysticism since Scholem: Rachel Elior’s The Three Temples,” in Wege mystischer Gotteserfahrung: Judentum, Christentum und Islam (ed. Peter Schäfer; Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), 19–36; John J. Collins, “‘Enochic Judaism’ and the Sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Early Enoch Literature (JSJSup 121; ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and John J. Collins; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 283-300; James C. VanderKam, “Mapping Second Temple Judaism,” in The Early Enoch Literature, 1-20; Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); Ra‘anan S. Boustan, “Rabbinization and the Making of Early Jewish Mysticism,” JQR 101.4 (2011): 482–501. As noted below, “science” also plays a part in Elior, The Three Temples; her argument about the emergence of Enochic/“priestly” circles is largely based on a claimed distinction between solar-calendar supporters and lunar-calendar supporters in Second Temple times. Stern’s detailed critique of her position in “Rachel Elior on Ancient Jewish Sciences” is predicated on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the evidence stands as a “parade example” of the importance of research on “ancient Jewish sciences”—and the study of calendrical astronomy in particular—for the historiography of Judaism more broadly.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-86] 86 Alexander, “Jewish Priesthood,” 234.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-87] 87 Notably too, I take issue here with only one portion of what is a richer and broader discussion (i.e., the portion on early Enochic materials, esp. Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 230-236). Even if some of his speculations have not survived further scrutiny, moreover, many of them have (e.g., his insights about language choice, as extended by Ben-Dov, on which see below), and many should be followed up further (e.g., his assessment of Rabbinic attitudes).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-88] 88 That “ancient Jewish sciences” can have consequences for the historiography of ancient Judaism is also clear from the similarly dichotomous model posited by Elior, The Three Temples, which pivots on a neatly schematic but largely unfounded contrast between solar and lunar calendars (cf. Stern, “Rachel Elior on Ancient Jewish Sciences”; Himmelfarb, “Merkavah Mysticism,”25–29; Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 4–5). Elior interprets early Enochic materials as attesting the origins of a visionary and sectarian “mystical” movement in early priestly defenders of a schematic solar calendar, purportedly in resistance to the proto-Rabbinic defenders of a more practically-oriented lunar calendar. Based on this contrast, she characterizes what she calls the “secessionist priesthood” as committed to “[t]he mathematization of the universe and its manifestations in the cycles of nature and the cycles of sacred service” in contrast to the proto-Rabbinic and Rabbinic factions “who refused to subjugate time and its divisions to an eternal, unchanging divine order” (Elior, Three Temples, 213). Although Elior (Three Temples, 212) claims to find in the sources “a sharp polar relationship between that [priestly] literature and rabbinic positions—an antithetical correlation, with one corpus negating what was advocated by the other,” her theory has been widely critiqued for misrepresenting the very texts that she cites to support it; see esp. Himmelfarb, “Merkavah Mysticism.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-89] 89 Popović, “The Emergence,” 82, 84–85.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-90] 90 Ibid, 83, 114. Even aside from the question of the degree to which one can take ben Sira’s traditionalist claims at face value, it remains that the contrast emblematizes the selective anachronism of the scholarly discussion. As Ben Wright, Seth Sanders, and others noted at the ISAW conference on which this volume is based, the Wisdom of Ben Sira and other sapiential writings provide perhaps the strongest precedents with Judaism for empiricism and observation-based inquiry; even in its earliest articulations, the Jewish Wisdom tradition is characterized by an emphasis on experience as a source of knowledge. To treat the Wisdom of Ben Sira only as a point of contrast with Enochic and other apocalypses vis-à-vis “science” is thus misleading in multiple ways, distracting from a potentially rich source for understanding the history of Jewish approaches to knowledge about the cosmos, etc., while also using the quotation of selected passages to suggest a larger contrast with Enochic materials than careful analysis of the entire works reveal. See now Benjamin Wright, “1 Enoch and Ben Sira: Wisdom and Apocalyptic in Relationship,” in The Early Enoch Literature, 159-179, and further references there.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-91] 91 Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 232.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-92] 92 Popović, “The Emergence,” 97–98. To place such emphasis on what is lacking in these texts to characterize their motives, etc., proves a bit tenuous given their fragmentary state of preservation. See below, however, further to the importance of Popović’s point concerning form and framing.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-93] 93 Ibid, 86, 87.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-94] 94 Popović, Reading the Human Body, 15, 222; idem, “The Emergence,” 82–83, 86.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-95] 95 Popović, “The Emergence,” 82, 84–85.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-96] 96 Alexander, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 230-236.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-97] 97 Popović, “The Emergence,” 83.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-98] 98 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 6–7; idem, “Scientific Writings,” 380-381.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-99] 99 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 1.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-100] 100 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years; idem, “Scientific Writings,” 238-239.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-101] 101 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 245-287, 140-146; idem, “Scientific Writings,” 393-397.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-102] 102 Popović, “The Emergence,” 105-6.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-103] 103 Langermann, “Hebrew Scientific Literature.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-104] 104 E.g. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-105] 105 E.g. Sarton, History of Science.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-106] 106 Dear, “What is the History of Science?” 406.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-107] 107 Ibid.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-108] 108 This historiographical point is made more broadly for the early modern period—also in relation to Jews and Judaism—by David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 12, with an emphasis on “the dialectical relationship between local conditions and continental or even global patterns.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-109] 109 Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-110] 110 Ben-Dov, Head of All Years, 276-278.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-111] 111 Popović, “The Emergence,” 98.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-112] 112 Less often noted but no less intriguing—particularly for our present purposes—is the Rabbinic paraphrase of ben Sira’s positive statements about physicians, etc. (e.g., Ben Sira 38:1ff; y. Taʿanit 3:6/66d; Exodus Rabbah 21.7).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-113] 113 Cf. Neusner, “Why No Science in Judaism?”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-114] 114 E.g., Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis; Elior, The Three Temples; Alexander, “Jewish Priesthood.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-115] 115 Piyyutim, notably, present potentially important but underutilized sources for this broader discussion; see, e.g., Michael Rand, “Clouds, Rain, and the Upper Waters: From Bereshit Rabbah to the Piyyuṭim of Eleazar be-rabbi Qillir,” Aleph 9 (2009): 13-39.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-116] 116 Cf. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “Creation and Classification in Judaism: From Priestly to Rabbinic Conceptions,” History of Religions 26.4 (1987): 357-381. The retrospectively normative status of the Mishnah and Talmud have meant that Rabbinic claims vis-à-vis continuity with the Hebrew Bible are often taken at face value. Helpful for our purposes are Martin Jaffee’s insights into the reorganization of knowledge attendant upon the early Rabbinic articulation, defense, and naturalization of new modes of pedagogy in Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87–92. Through a focus on Rabbinic “curriculum pericopes” (e.g., Mekhilta de R. Ishmael ad Exodus 15:26; Sifra Shemini par.1:9 ad Leviticus 10:10–11), for instance, he highlights “a hermeneutical procedure in which scriptural terms are systematically re-signified and reconfigured so as to anticipate and define the rabbinic taxonomy of traditional learning” (p. 88).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-117] 117 E.g., m. Berakhot 9.2; see further David J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1980), 19–63.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-118] 118 Esp. m. Ḥagigah 2.1; t. Ḥagigah 2.1–7. Cf. y. Ḥagigah 2.1/77a–c; b. Ḥagigah 11b–13a, 15a; Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, 19–63; Schäfer, The Origins, 180-185, 207-210, 233-234.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-119] 119 Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “Is Ma‘aseh Bereshit Part of Ancient Jewish Mysticism?” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1995): 185–201.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-120] 120 E.g. Nicolas Séd, La mystique cosmologique juive (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials, 1981); Elior, The Three Temples, 211, for instance, reads the different elements in m. Ḥagigah 2.1 as clues to the specific characteristics of a single monolithic “mystical” movement opposed by the Rabbis, speculating that “the unexplained prohibitions imposed by the Sages in tractate Ḥagigah … are precisely mirrored, in a striking fashion, by certain major obligations in the literature of the secessionist priesthood: the Merkavah as the cosmic prototype of the celestial Temple. .. ; maaseh bereshit as representing the totality of cosmological phenomena linking the sanctity of time and the solar calendar (four seasons, twelve months, seven days of the week, twenty-four hours of the day) with the sanctity of place and cult in a seven-based sequence guaranteeing the cycle of life with its correlated four-fold and twelvefold divisions; and ʿarayot, sexual union, representing the body of traditions relating to holy union, the Temple, and holy matrimony …” This characterization is certainly conceptually appealing, but it is not supported by the sources; see further, e.g., Halperin, The Merkabah (esp. 23) for a discussion of the meanings of maaseh bereshit, as based on a broader range of traditions from the classical Rabbinic literature. See also Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “Ma‘aseh Bereshit,” on the ways that our understanding of the Rabbinic idea of maaseh bereshit can be skewed when it is examined only in the context of discussions of the merkavah and Jewish mysticism.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-121] 121 Notably, Philip S. Alexander offers a more nuanced assessment of the Rabbinic evidence; see, e.g., Alexander, “Pre-emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabba’s Reading of the Story of Creation,” JJS 43 (1992): 230-245; idem, “Enoch and the Beginnings,” 229-230; cf. Neusner, “Why No Science in Judaism?”; idem, “Science and Magic, Miracle and Magic, in Formative Judaism: The System and the Difference,” in Religion, Science, and Magic In Concert and In Conflict (ed. J. Neusner, E. S. Frerichs, and P. V. M. Flesher; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 61-81. Nevertheless, Alexander too (“Enoch and the Beginnings,” 226) points to the strictures on maaseh bereshit as among the factors that “have inhibited serious Rabbinic involvement in science.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-122] 122 Cf. Neusner, “Why No Science in Judaism?”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-123] 123 Esp. Genesis Rabbah 1-8; cf. Alexander, “Pre-emptive Exegesis.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-124] 124 Esp. b. Ḥagigah 12b–13a; cf. Peter Schäfer, “Bereshit bara Elohim: Bereshit Rabba, Parasha 1, Reconsidered,” in Empsychoi Logoi: Religious Innovations in Antiquity: Studies in Honour of Pieter Willem van der Horst (ed. A. Houtman, A. de Jong, and M. Misset-van de Weg; Leiden: Brill, 2008), 267-289.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-125] 125 Peter Schäfer, “In Heaven as It Is in Hell: The Cosmology of Seder Rabbah de-Bereshit,” in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (ed. Ra‘anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 233-274; idem, “From Cosmology to Theology: The Rabbinic Appropriation of Apocalyptic Cosmology,” in Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 39-58; idem, “Bereshit Bara Elohim”.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-126] 126 Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?” 476-482.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-127] 127 Reed, “Was there Science in Ancient Judaism?” 479. For an example pertaining to medicine, see b. Berakhot 10b on the allegedly hidden Sefer Refuot of King Hezekiah.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-128] 128 Ben-Dov, “Scientific Writings,” 381.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-129] 129 Samuel Thomas, The “Mysteries” of Qumran: Mystery, Secrecy, and Esotericism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (SBLEJL 26; Atlanta: SBL, 2009).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-130] 130 Geller, “The Last Wedge.”; idem, “The survival of Babylonian Wissenschaft;” idem, “An Akkadian Vademecum;” idem, “Akkadian Healing Therapies.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-131] 131 Popović, “Physiognomic Knowledge,” 169-170; cf. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-132] 132 Of these, most is said about Theodos (m. Bekhorot 4.4; t. Ahilot 4.2; b. Nazir 52a; b. Sanhedrin 33a; b. Bekhorot 28b), whom some scholars have tried to connect, without much success, with references to figures named Theudas in the writings of Galen (e.g., De Meth. Med. 2.7 [10.142]; Andromachos in Comp. med. Genera 6.14 [13.925-926]; see further Julius Preuss, Biblical and Talmudic Medicine (trans. F. Rosner; New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1978 [1911]), 19–20; Samuel S. Kottek, “Alexandrian Medicine in the Talmudic Corpus,” Koroth 12 (1996–1997): 85–87. Galen does, however, make use of the work of another Jewish physician, Rufus of Samaria (fl. ca. 100 CE), who lived in Rome and was well-known for Greek commentaries on the sixth book of Hippocrates’ Epidemics; see further Galen in Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 5.10.2.2, pp. 213, 289, 293, 413; Franz Pfaff, “Rufus aus Samaria,” Hermes 67 (1932): 356-359; S. Muntner, “Rufus of Samaria,” Israel Medical Journal 17 (1958): 273-275; Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Asaph ha-Rofe,” “Domnus,” “Gamaliel VI,” “Rufus of Samaria,” “Samuel of Nehardea,” “Theodos of Alexandria,” and “Zakhalias of Babylon,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs (ed. Paul T. Keyser and Georgia Irby-Massie; London: Routledge, 2008), 168, 275, 342-3, 721, 726, 788-789, and 843. For further Rabbinic references to physicians, therapies, etc., see also Geller, “Akkadian Healing,” 1-60; Samuel S. Kottek, “Medical Interest in Ancient Rabbinic Literature,” in The Literature of the Sages, Second Part (ed. Shmuel Safrai, et al; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 485-496.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-133] 133 The cosmogonic ramifications of this cosmological calculation is noted by Sacha Stern, “Fictitious Calendars: Early Rabbinic Notions of Time, Astronomy, and Reality,” JQR 87 (1996): 105: “This 28-year cycle begins, according to bBer 59b, with the spring equinox (tequfat Nisan) occurring exactly at the beginning of the fourth day of the week (i.e., Tuesday evening). According to later sources, and as already implicit, perhaps, in the Babylonian Talmud, the first 28-year cycle began at the time of the world’s creation; indeed, the spring equinox occurred in ‘year 1’ at the beginning of the same fourth day of the week as when, according to Gen 1:14–19, the sun was created (in other words, the sun was created in a position of spring equinox). The occurrence of any subsequent tequfah can thus be worked out with reference to the time of the sun’s creation.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-134] 134 Geller, “An Akkadian Vademecum”; Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica, 39–106; Kottek, “Medical Interest”; Mira Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority, Medical Rhetoric, and Body Hermeneutics in Mishnah Nega‘im,” AJS Review 35.2 (2011): 323-346.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-135] 135 See further Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Semiotics of the Sexed Body in Early Halakhic Discourse,” in How Should Rabbinic Literature Be Read in the Modern World? (ed. Matthew Kraus; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 102.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-136] 136 Abraham Ofir Shemesh, “Therapeutic Bathing in Rabbinic Literature: Halachic Issues and their Background in History and Realia,” Jewish Medical Ethics 7.2 (2010): 510-511; Reuven Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person: The Genesis and Development of Embryological Theory in Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism,” lectio difficilior 2 (2009): 21–27 [http://www.lectio.unibe.ch].
[☞ endnote-chapter8-137] 137 Kottek, “Medical Interest,” 489.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-138] 138 Geller, “Akkadian Healing Therapies.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-139] 139 E.g., Abraham Ofir Shemesh, “Biology in Rabbinic Literature: Fact and Folklore.” in The Literature of the Sages, Second Part, 509-519; Zeev Safrai, “Geography and Cosmography in Talmudic Literature,” in The Literature of the Sages, Second Part, 497-508.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-140] 140 Notably, studies of Rabbinic treatments of the full range of relevant topics—astronomy, astrology, medicine, biology, geography, mathematic, etc.—have made note of this pattern. Mark Geller (“Akkadian Healing Therapies,” 4), for instance, cautions that “[a]ny references to medicine in the Talmud are purely coincidental and serendipitous, cited as aspects of daily life which were loosely associated with points of Jewish law or custom . . . . We never have a full medical text in the Talmud, but only fragments of such texts, often within an anecdotal context” (so too Kottek, “Medical Interest,” 485). Shemesh (“Biology in Rabbinic Literature,” 508) stresses with reference to biology, zoology, etc., that “[w]hile non-Jewish authors wrote books specifically on nature-related topics, the sages expressed their opinions on these topics in the framework of their religious-halakhic discussions. Consequently, reference to animals in the mishnaic and talmudic literature is random.” Indeed, as a result, even those who wish to consider Rabbinic perspectives on such topics must first engage in anthological endeavors (as already Preuss in his 1911 Talmudic Medicine). Likewise, those who wish to analyze Rabbinic perspectives on the workings of the body, stars, etc., solely on their own terms must nonetheless draw upon non-Jewish and/or post-Talmudic traditions to make sense of what are often extremely terse statements; for an interesting articulation of this challenge, see now on Rabbinic embryology Gwynn Kessler, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-141] 141 Cf. Otto Neugebauer, “The Astronomy of Maimonides and its Sources,” HUCA 22 (1949): 322-324; Eliyahu Beller, “Ancient Jewish Mathematical Astronomy,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 38 (1988): 51-66.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-142] 142 That halakha can be understood as “scientific” in the sense of an impulse to organize knowledge about the world in an orderly fashion, involving experience-based inferences and logic-based arguments, etc., has been stressed by Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Neusner, “Science and Magic,” and others. It also underlies early efforts—perhaps ripe now for revisiting—to compile Rabbinic traditions about the workings of the human body in the Talmud (e.g., Preuss, Talmudic Medicine), as Lawrence Schiffman aptly reminded us in his response to an earlier form of this essay at the ISAW conference on which this volume is based.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-143] 143 To be sure, any speculation about choices of oral and textual transmission runs up against the challenges posed by the complexity of Rabbinic textuality more broadly—on which see now Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). My point here is only that one’s sense of the relative plausibility of one or another channel of transmission makes a big difference in how one imagines the state of scientific knowledge and engagement among late antique Rabbis.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-144] 144 Popović, “The Emergence,” 83.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-145] 145 See Popović in this volume.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-146] 146 On the limitations of cognitive approaches to the history of science, and their special dangers when paired with potentially reified cultural identities (“Jewish,” “Greek,” “Chinese,” “Western,” etc.), see Francesca Rochberg, “A Consideration of Babylonian Astronomy within the Historiography of Science”; Brennan, “The Birth”.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-147] 147 Langermann, “Hebrew Scientific Literature,” 169-170; emphasis mine.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-148] 148 Cf. Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra, 7.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-149] 149 Séd, La mystique cosmologique juive, 79–106; Schäfer, “In Heaven as It Is in Hell,” 234. That Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit circulated primarily under the title Ma‘aseh Bereshit, e.g., is clear from MS Munich 22. For the text see Peter Schäfer, ed., Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981), §§429–462, §§518–524, §§743–784, §§832–854.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-150] 150 See further Reed, “Samuel of Nehardea”; eadem, “From Pre-Emptive Exegesis.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-151] 151 Séd, La mystique cosmologique juive.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-152] 152 Elior, The Three Temples.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-153] 153 Boustan, “Rabbinization.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-154] 154 On this broader issue, see further references and discussion in Reed, Fallen Angels, 233-272.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-155] 155 Gershom Scholem, Major trends in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1941).
[☞ endnote-chapter8-156] 156 Michael D. Swartz, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Later Jewish Magic and Mysticism,” DSD 8 (2001): 192.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-157] 157 Swartz, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” 193.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-158] 158 I suggested something similar with respect to the transmission and circulation of angelological tropes via “magical” traditions in Reed, Fallen Angels, 253-255.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-159] 159 See further Himmelfarb, “Some Echoes of Jubilees”; Reed, Fallen Angels.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-160] 160 E.g., angelological motifs; Reed, Fallen Angels, 253-255.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-161] 161 Popović, Reading the Human Body, 36–37, 105, 274-275, cf. 44 n. 105, 266 n. 2; also I. Gruenwald,. “New Fragments from the Physiognomic and Chiromantic Literature” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 40 (1970–1971): 301-319; Peter Schäfer, “Ein neues Fragment zur Metoposkopie und Chiromantik,” in Hekhalot-Studien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), 84-95.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-162] 162 T.-S. K. 21.95L; Peter Schäfer, ed., Geniza-Fragmente zur Hekhalot-Literatur (TSAJ 6; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), 136-137; see also idem, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 147-148.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-163] 163 As in the case of angelology, this may be a case of concerns that are attested also in earlier Rabbinic materials, in a less focused fashion, here developed in new directions. Discussing tannaitic traditions related to signs on the body vis-à-vis gender and its blurring, Charlotte Fonrobert (“Semiotics,” 102), for instance, remarks on “what appears as a close relationship between the halakhic literature on semiotics of the body and late antique physiognomy,” wherein parallels with Greek and Roman discussions occur despite a notable difference in orientation. See now Mira Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-164] 164 Popović, Reading the Human Body, 180, 277.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-165] 165 Alexander, “Pre-emptive exegesis”; Schäfer, “Bereshit bara Elohim,” 287-288.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-166] 166 Stern, “Fictitious Calendars."
[☞ endnote-chapter8-167] 167 Schäfer, “In Heaven as It Is in Hell;” idem, “From Cosmology to Theology.”
[☞ endnote-chapter8-168] 168 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “From ‘Pre-Emptive Exegesis’ to ‘Pre-Emptive Speculation’? Ma‘aseh Bereshit in Bereshit Rabbah and Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer,” in With Letters of Light–Otiyot Shel Or: Studies in Early Jewish Apocalypticism and Mysticism in Honour of Rachel Elior (ed. D. Arbel and A. Orlov; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 115-132.
[☞ endnote-chapter8-169] 169 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Who Can Recount the Mighty Acts of the Lord? Cosmology and Authority in Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer 1–3,” HUCA 80 (2009): 115-141.
