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Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity

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Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity by Amy Marie Fisher A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto © Copyright by Amy Marie Fisher 2015 Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity Amy Marie Fisher Doctorate of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation explores the cartographic descriptions and depictions of the heavens in antiquity, specifically the 1st century BCE through the early 5th century CE. The physical nature of the heavens and the loci each portrayal includes or excludes tells the reader a great deal about the communities creating and engaging with these various understandings of the heavens. This study offers a series of snapshots of differing depictions of the heavens from various times and places in early Judaism and Christianity; the poetic Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the depictions of 1st Century CE apocalypses, the first explicitly Christian tour of heaven in the Visio Pauli, and the artistic renderings of late antique Palestinian synagogue mosaics. In order to read these many spaces and their mythic places out, the study engages with various critical spatial theories, demonstrating that a nuanced deployment of modern spatial theory can yield fruitful results in the study of antiquity. In addition it offers one answer to the question of why the heavens developed and became so complex in the second temple and post second temple period. This dissertation suggests that this complexity was a natural development of pre-exilic proclivities for seeing the earthly temple as a miniature copy of the heavenly one; albeit one forced to develop due to imperial expansion upon the earth. The expanded holdings of heaven, while losing their importance as loci from the mythic past, were retained in early Christian maps of the heavens as the resting places of so many different sorts of righteous. ii Acknowledgments This project owes much to many people, some of whom receive multiple thanks in different capacities below. First and foremost, thanks to my committee members, my adviser John Kloppenborg, and Professors Judith Newman and Jennifer Harris. All three offered copious and constructive feedback on the project and made it a much stronger and coherent piece than it would have been without them. The idea for this project was born on a hot summer afternoon in the upper Galilee, in a brainstorming session with my undergraduate adviser and constant mentor, Nanette Goldman. I hope you are proud of the final product Nanette! Thanks go to my colleagues and peers in my dissertation writing group, Rebecca Bartel, Michelle Christian, Jairan Gahan, Nathalie LaCoste, and Justin Stein, who all offered up ample and honest feedback on an early draft of the introduction. Nathalie and Michelle, along with Maria Dasios, Brigidda Bell, and Sarah Rollens also provided feedback and aid in other chapters of this piece, for which I am most grateful. Emily Springgay, Laurie Drake, Yaniv Feller and Jessica Radin offered ‘outsider’ support and advice at various stages of this project. Students in RLG203Y1Y, Introduction to Christianity, all got the chance to read descriptions of Visio Pauli’s City of Christ and work through its geography in group work, which allowed their instructor to reflect on its set up too. Versions of chapters two and three were presented at Society of Biblical Literature panels; the feedback from those audiences has at least been gestured to in the footnotes here. I also presented a version of chapter two at my departmental colloquium, at which Dr. Simon Coleman offered helpful feedback. The Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, with Dr. Doris Bergen as the Director of Graduate Studies there, provided me with top up funding for all five years of my doctoral studies, travel grants for my work in Israel in the summer, and part time employment in my upper years, for which I am most grateful. In addition the staff at the Centre, Sol, Emily, and Galina have offered much career and life advice throughout my PhD. Thank you all for the supportive environment you work so hard to maintain. The staff at the Joint Archaeological Expedition to Omrit has been a constant source of encouragement throughout my entire doctoral program; thanks go to Dr.s Andrew Overman, Daniel Schowalter, Benjamin Rubin, Jason Schlude, Michael Nelson, and Jennifer Gates-Foster. Indeed, I both wrote the proposal for and last bits of this project at the site, in the “free time” of the afternoons and evenings. I began work on another project with Dr. Peter Richardson, shortly after I started this dissertation, and I must thank Peter for the use of his office, his advice on all iii matters academic, and his patience with my falling behind on deadlines for that project as I slogged away on this one. I promise I will now work as hard on “the Herod book” as I have been working on this dissertation. My parents, who have moved me from school to school, receive many thanks for their lenghty support of my pursuit of higher education. My far flung American friends receive simcere thanks for all the long distance phone calls and short visits throughout my five years as an ex-pat; many thanks for your cheerful chats Anne Stewart, Claire Wan, Maureen Ragalie, Megan Roberts, and Samantha Petty. Lastly, especial thanks for all the encouragement, advice, picnics, outings, and in this last year, when like the railway we were trans-Canadian, the care packages that always contained loose leaf tea, to Dan. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction to the Work …………………………………………………………... 1 1.1 Critical Spatial Theory …………………………………………………………….. 6 1.2 Overview of the Project …………………………………………………………… 20 1.3 The Primary Texts Under Consideration …………………………………………. 21 Chapter 2: The Poetics of Temple Space: the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’s Heavenly Temple and Temple-ish Heaven ………………………………………………………………. 25 2.1 An Overview of the Shirot ………………………………………………………. 27 2.2 Ekphrases of the Tabernacle and the Temple …………………………………… 33 2.3 Elsner’s Ritual Visuality and the Politics of Viewing …………………………... 37 2.4 The Politics of Temple Ekphrasis ………………………………………………... 39 2.5 The Spatiality of the Shirot ………………………………………………………. 43 Chapter 3: Catastrophe and the Stoic Spaces of Coping: the Hidden Places of 3 Baruch …… 56 3.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 56 3.2 Third Baruch …………………………………………………………………….. 59 3.3 A Brief Review of the Literature on 3 Baruch to Date …………………………… 62 3.4 Introduction to the World of 3 Baruch …………………………………………… 64 3.5 The Heavenly Places of 1st Century CE Apocalyptic Texts ……………………… 72 3.6 Bachelard’s Poetics of Space ……………………………………………………... 82 3.7 The Continuation of Cosmic Time in 3 Baruch’s Heavens ………………………. 85 3.8 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 89 Chapter 4: The Heavenly Holdings of Souls: the Visio Pauli’s Confused Cartography …….. 91 4.1 Introduction to the Visio Pauli …………………………………………………… 92 4.2 The Relation of the Visio Pauli to Other Early Apocalypses ……………………. 99 4.3 The Places of the Heaven in the Visio Pauli …………………………………….. 100 4.4 A Cosmological Introduction? The Opening Scene of the Visio Pauli as Cosmology ……………………………………………………………………. 106 4.5 The Problem of Placing the ‘Land of Promise’ and the Purpose of Cartography in the Visio Pauli ……………………………………………………………………. 111 4.6 Addendum: the Lack of a Heavenly Temple in Visio Pauli ……………………… 116 4.7 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 119 v Chapter 5: Tessellated Territories: Mosaic Maps of the Late Antique Jewish Heavens ……... 121 5.1 The Synagogue Mosaics ………………………………………………………...... 122 5.2 Early Scholastic Reception of the Synagogue Mosaics ………………………...... 125 5.3 Trends in the Depiction of Hebrew Bible Scenes in Late Antique Christian Art .... 130 5.4 Mosaics as Maps: a Non-polemical and Spatial Reading of the Synagogue Zodiacs ………………………………………………………………………... 139 5.5 Polemic or Cultural Borrowing: Physical Places as the Cosmos Writ Small in Late Antiquity ……………………………………………………………………… 151 5.6 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………….. 152 Chapter 6: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………… 153 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 158 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………… 173 vi List of Tables Table 4.1: Traditional Division of Vis. Paul ………………………………………………….. 101 Table 4.2: Proposed Division of Vis. Paul …………………………………………………..... 104 Table 4.3: Opening Section of Vis. Paul as Map of the Heavens …………………………….. 109 Table 5.1: The Various Schematics of the Heavens ………………………………………….. 142 vii 1 Chapter 1 1 Introduction to the Work In the Phaedo, Socrates, speaking of the soul’s journey to the afterlife, remarks the journey is not as Telephus says in the play of Aeschylus; for he says a simple path leads to the lower world, but I think the path is neither simple nor single, for if it were, there would be no need of guides, since no one could miss the way to any place if there were only one road. But really there seem to be many forks of the road and many windings; this I infer from the rites and ceremonies practiced here on earth (Plato, Phaedo 107b-108a).1 While Socrates is specifically talking about the journey to the underworld, he could have been speaking of the journeys of various adepts and prophets into the heavens of antiquity. No two narratives of the heavens of early Judaism and Christianity agree with one another as to the layout of the heavens, which mythic topoi are within them, or in what order one reaches these various sites. While the idea of heaven was not new in the late Second Temple period, this era, and the period of time just after it, witnessed an explosion of texts dealing with the topography and geography of the heavens, which was accompanied by an increase in the complexities of these heavens. No longer was heaven a simple plane with the heavenly temple seated upon it, as Enoch in the Book of Watchers had claimed (1 Enoch).
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