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Heraclitus's Homeric Problems and Midrash Genesisrabbah

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Heraclitus's Homeric Problems and Midrash Genesisrabbah Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems and Midrash Genesis Rabbah: Comparisons and Contrasts Philip Alexander 1 The Culture of Commentary in Late Antiquity The culture of late antiquity had one overarching characteristic that sets it apart from classical antiquity: it was a culture of commentary. In every intel- lectual and cultural sphere it tended to start from canons of truth and excel- lence, acknowledged as authoritative, and present its own ideas and artifacts in relation to them.1 That is why it seemed to some modern historians deriva- tive and unoriginal, why late antiquity used to be written off as a time of deca- dence and decline by those who did not understand how canons work and who failed to see that subscribing to them does not necessarily preclude origi- nality. Commentary in the strict sense of the term, the literary expression of this phenomenon, is the hallmark of all three of the great intellectual tradi- tions of the period: the pagan, the Christian, and the Jewish. As time went by, these three traditions converged, in the sense that increasingly they crystal- lized around canonic texts: Judaism around the Tanakh, Christianity around the Old and New Testaments, and reformed paganism, as represented by, for example, Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, around Homer or the Chaldean Oracles; and the hermeneutics which each applied to its scriptures had much in common—a point recognized ever since it was first observed that the allegorical method of Bible interpretation beloved of the Church Fathers was simply a variation of the allegorical method applied by pagans to Homer. That there is an analogy between the role of the Homeric epics in Greek paganism and the role of the Bible in Christianity and Judaism has become 1 This is one of the themes of the work of Pierre Hadot. See, e.g., chapter 8 of his What is Ancient Philosophy? (trans. Michael Chase; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). There is a sense in which all cultural production has, to some degree, to follow existing models or conventions, otherwise it fails to communicate, but the past weighs particularly heavily on the culture of late antiquity. This creates an “anxiety of influence,” but it can be overcome. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/97890043�4749_005 Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems and Midrash Genesis Rabbah 39 something of a truism, and I will take it for granted.2 I want to move beyond it to a more nuanced understanding of the similarities and differences, and I would suggest that one way forward is not to make sweeping generalizations, or to cherry-pick parallels from here, there, and everywhere, as comparison has often done in the past, but to compare whole text with whole text. The two texts I will compare in this short paper are the Homeric Problems of Heraclitus the Allegorist and the compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Book of Genesis known as Genesis Rabbah. This procedure has weaknesses as well as strengths. The most obvious weak- ness is that it runs the risk of underplaying the similarities between pagan and Jewish hermeneutics in late antiquity. We may end up comparing apples and pears. More similarities might emerge if we were to choose another compar- ator to set alongside Genesis Rabbah, say, the medical commentaries on the Hippocratic corpus, or legal commentaries on the Twelve Tables, though the narrative, “epic” content of Genesis makes Homer an obvious choice. There are plenty of alternatives—not just in the Greek, but in the Latin tradition of commentary as well.3 So the comparison between the Homeric Problems and Genesis Rabbah might not, in the end, be the most productive we could have made. But that, in itself, would be an important discovery: though there are similarities, there are also differences. Comparison of whole document with whole document forces us to face differences as well as similarities, and when similarities do arise we can then see them in their proper literary con- text. In this essay I will approach the task from the Heraclitean side: that is to say, I will first try to characterize the Homeric Problems, and then see how well this characterisation fits the rabbinic midrash. A dispassionate description of Genesis Rabbah, a theoretical desideratum in an exhaustive analysis, can- not be attempted in this short study. The analysis is somewhat truncated. My expertise lies in midrash, and I will read the Homeric Problems with the kind of 2 I made the case myself in “ ‘Homer the Prophet of All’ and ‘Moses our Teacher’: Late Antique Exegesis of the Homeric Epics and the Torah of Moses,” in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (L. V. Rutgers et al., ed.; Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 127–42. See more recently the rich collection of essays in Maren Niehoff, ed., Homer and Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 3 For an overview see Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Further: René Nünlist, The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Franco Montanari and Laura Pagani, eds., From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), and the classic general history of L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (3d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1991)..
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