Hebrew in Jerome's Literary Production

chapter 5 Hebrew in Jerome’s Literary Production

1 Introduction

On his arrival in Rome in 382 Jerome began a letter exchange with Damasus the bishop.1 In this exchanges Jerome laid out the importance of Hebrew for correct biblical reading.2 The first of these letters from Jerome discussed the vision that opens chapter 6 of Isaiah. About a third of the way into this letter, Jerome argued that the two seraphim in the vision have been misinterpret- ed by other commentators. Seraphim in Hebrew, writes Jerome, means either ‘fire’ (incendium) or ‘the beginning of his speech’ (pincipium oris eorum).3 He then argued that ‘fire’ refers to Christ, while ‘the beginning of his speech’ can only refer to the language of the Old Testament. Hebrew was, he wrote, the original, primary language and the construction of Babel was accomplished thanks to this common tongue.4 Looking more carefully at the Hebrew of Isa- iah would show the attentive reader that the two seraphim refer to the two Testaments. In these early letters from Rome, Jerome argued that Hebrew represented the true source of the Old Testament.5 In contrast to earlier Latin exegetes (particularly Hilary of Poitiers), Jerome claimed that his knowledge of Hebrew gave him unique access to this ‘well-spring’.6 These letters were released to the public because they demonstrated both Jerome’s prominence as a scriptural scholar and his close relationship with the bishop of Rome.7 The knowledge of Hebrew allowed Jerome to position himself as a unique mediator of a firm biblical text to Rome and in so doing he explicitly differentiated his own literary products from those already circulating in the Latin-speaking world. At the same time, these letters carefully situate Hebrew study within a wider linguistic

1 Cain, The Letters of Jerome, 53–55; Hayward, Saint Jerome’s Hebrew Questions, 10; Nautin, “Le premier échange épistolaire.” Jerome wrote Ep. 18 in Constantinople and then revised it and sent it to Damasus when he was in Rome. 2 Cain, The Letters of Jerome, 53. 3 Hier. Ep. 18A.6 (csel 54.81). 4 Hier. Ep. 18A.6 (csel 54.82); Edmon L. Gallagher, Hebrew Scipture in Patristic Biblical Theo- ry: Canon, Language, Text, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 133–134. 5 Ep. 20.2 (csel 54.104.14-105.1). 6 Rebenich, “Jerome: The “Vir Trilinguis,”” 56. 7 Cain, The Letters of Jerome, 62–64.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004417458_007 Hebrew in Jerome’s literary production 125 economy encompassing Latin interpretation and the linguistic abundance of human beings. This chapter will consider Jerome’s practice of biblical translation as it is applied to his study of Hebrew in the years 389–392. Leaving to one side questions about the depth or competence of Jerome’s knowledge of Hebrew in this period, the chapter will instead address how Jerome’s presentation of the Hebrew language shows us another way of thinking about the nature of language and literary production. Recent scholarship has suggested that while Hebrew became ideologically charged among certain late antique Jewish com- munities in the diaspora and in Palestine, early Christian writers never devel- oped a coherent ideology of Hebrew.8 For some Christians, Hebrew came to be seen as the criterion of canonicity in the Old Testament – and as the primeval language of creation – but it never took on a liturgical role.9 While Hebrew may indeed have been understood as the language of creation and the initial language of revelation, this did not generally lead to granting it theological or liturgical primacy in early Christian thought. While this is a fair reading of the evidence, this chapter will show that Je- rome does develop a particular theological account of Hebrew, that this model of Hebrew is deeply intertwined with his understanding of the supersession of the Jews by the Christians, and that it echoes in key respects the model of literary production evident in his other works, particularly the Pauline com- mentaries and his hagiography.10 In particular, this chapter will argue that Je- rome understands there to be an incongruity between the written Hebrew of the Old Testament and the sound of spoken Hebrew.11 Beginning at the turn of the 380s, but reaching full maturity over the course of a decade, Jerome came to articulate what he called hebraica ueritas. For Jerome, learning He- brew gave him access to a body of knowledge about the Bible that allowed a

8 Gallagher, Hebrew Scripture, 137; Steve Weitzman, “Why did the Qumran community write in Hebrew?,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1999): 44–45. 9 Gallagher, Hebrew Scripture, 106–141. 10 The use of the word ‘Jew’ as a descriptor of an ethnic-religious community dubbed Iudaios or Iudaeus in the late ancient Mediterranean risks obfuscating the complicated interrela- tionship between religion and ethnicity in the ancient world. See e.g. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries. Varieties, Uncertainties, Hellenistic Culture and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 69–139; Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007). 11 This removes some of the contradictions in Jerome’s use of Hebrew outlined by Sarah Kamin, “The theological significance of the Hebraica Veritas in Jerome’s thought,” in Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 5*-7*. Others remain, as I argue here.