CLASSICA ET RABBINICA I: THE BULL OF PHALARIS AND THE TOPHET

BY

GIDEON BOHAK Tel Aviv University

The study of Classical motifs that made their way into rabbinic liter- ature has been going apace for a century and a half now, but much remains to be done in this important and difficult field. The present paper will focus on two items only, namely, the brazen bull inside which the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris is said to have burned his enemies alive, and the grisly ritual by which the Carthaginians were said to sacrifice their own children. The two themes may be intimately con- nected, as it has often been suggested that the original Bull of Phalaris was some Sicilian adaptation of what went on in the Carthaginian Tophets. There might also be a connection between them within the rabbis' world as well, as it was for setting up such a Tophet in (among other actions which the Deuteronomistic historians found abom- inable) that Manasseh was said to have been punished by God in the instrument of torture whose appearance shall be examined below. Both connections, however, make little difference for the present study, for the two motifs did not enter the rabbis' world together, and their analy- sis poses quite different problems. We may therefore focus on each item separately.

I. The Bull of Phalaris

In 2 Chr 33:1 l, the chronicler recounts how God punished the wicked king Manasseh by sending against him the Assyrians, "who captured Manasseh in chains (E:'MMn)and bound him in bronze fetters and brought him to Babylon." The identity of the ?'tli? and the 0'nt?rt7 in which Manasseh was placed seems to have aroused much specula- tion among the story's ancient readers. Some took both implements as 204 some kind of fetters, an interpretation which is supported by the other occurrences of both words in the and accepted by most modem commentators.' Other readers, however, made much more of the r'nvnl in which the king was imprisoned, as can be seen from the following discussion of Manasseh's fate, in Midrash ha-Gadol to Gen 4:13 (pp. 121-2 Margulies):

When the army commanders of the king of caught him, "and they captured Manasseh I'nnr and they imprisoned him R. Levi bar Haita said, "They made for him something like a bronze pan,2and they made it perforated and they put him inside it and lit a fire underneath." Abba Shaul said, "They made for him a statue' which looked like a bull, and they placed him inside it and they lit a fire under- neath... [Manasseh invoked all the idols in the world, but to no avail; he then invoked God, who forgave him and decided to save him] ... and Gabriel came and went inside the statue, and the bull sneezed and he (Manasseh) came out of its nostrils and Gabriel placed him in And that is (what is written, in 2 Chr 33:13) "and God returned him to Jerusalem, to his kingship." The two instruments of torture mentioned here are well known from other late-antique sources. The first interpretation, that of R. Levi bar Haita (3rd cent. CE), identifies Manasseh's !m!Sn3 with a rrjyavov, a well known instrument of torture in late antiquit?,.' The second inter-

' For this, more obvious, interpretation, see, e.g., the LXX ad loc.: KCx1.xaiE?,a(3ov tov MavacrO'1'1ev 6£Jpolq xai £6qJav œùtàv ev x16aiq xai fiyayovF-iq Bap1JÂcÎ)Va; Const. Apost.2.22.10 (p. 85 Funk): Èv1t£oatç xaÂKaîç; Greek Prayer of Manasseh(LXX, ed. Rahlfs, vol. 2, p. 181): KataKa?1t'tó?êVOÇ oêcr?0crto1ÍP01J; Hebrew Prayer of Manasseh(ed. Leicht, in JSQ 3 (1996), p. 370): bmr (note that in the Pr. Manass,the shackles are of iron, not bronze; the same is true for Africanus, as cited in a scholion to John Damascene, Sacraparallela 463 [PG 95, 1436], etc.). For the numerous rabbinic sources that identify Manasseh's as i.e., *x£ipop6viKaor *?Ei.po?avtKt(x, "handcuffs," see Samuel Krauss, Griechischeund lateinischeLehnze?oi-ter im , Midrasch und Targum,2 vols., Berlin, 1898-99 (repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), vol. 2, 286. 2 i.e., t1Íyavov. 3 a Persian loan-word (meaning "statue, idol"), which appears often (in a variant spelling, 7rDn) in the Targumim (e.g., to Isa 8:21, Amos 5:26, Zeph 1:5 etc.), and in the magical literature of late antiquity (e.g., Joseph Naveh & Shaul Shaked, Amuletsand MagicBomls: Aramaic Incantations of LateAntiquitY, Jerusalem, 1985, 276). ' I am not sure which Greek word lurks here, but the presumed meaing is clear; the parallel in PesiktadeRav Kahana (p. 366 Mandelbaum) merely follows the biblical verse, "and He returned him to Jerusalem, to his kingship." 5 In addition to the sources adduced by G.W.H. Lampe, A PatristicGreek Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon, 1961, 1392, s.v. t1Í'Yavov,see also John Chrysostom, De gloria in trib.(PG 51, 161);Exh. ad mart.23; Eudocia in Photius Codex 184 (vol. 2, 199 Henry). For the rabbinic familiarity with this instrument of torture, see also PesiktadeRav Kahana,