Trojan Horses: The Counterintuitive Use of Dinah, Helen, and Goliath in Joseph and Aseneth

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Michael Kochenash
Keyword(s):  
Greek Literature ◽  
Romantic Attraction ◽  
Jewish Scriptures ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth

Abstract A primary theme of the first story in Joseph and Aseneth (Jos. Asen. 1–21) is the conversion of an Egyptian to the worship of the living God, motivated by romantic attraction. In this respect, Joseph and Aseneth is one among many ancient novelistic writings to use a story about intermarriage, in this case the marriage of a Hebrew to an Egyptian, as a means to explore themes related to hybridity. Though different in tone, I propose that the second story (Jos. Asen. 22–29) is equally concerned with hybridity and that it can likewise be read as expressing an intercultural sensibility that is open to gentile incorporation and intermarriage through its imitation—and subversion—of literary models from two different cultural domains, the Jewish Scriptures (the rape of Dinah; the slaying of Goliath) and classical Greek literature (the abduction of Helen).

Book of Judith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Wills
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Jewish Scriptures ◽  
Ethiopian Orthodox ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth ◽  
Book Of Judith

Judith is one of the books of the Apocrypha, the Jewish texts that were included in the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments (including Armenian, Syrian, and Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles), but not in the Protestant Old Testament or Jewish scriptures. Judith was placed with the history texts of the Old Testament, and, more specifically, it was located with Tobit and Esther, texts that were probably also seen as entertaining or didactic history. (The question of why Judith was not canonized as part of the Hebrew Bible is raised in Why Wasn’t the Book of Judith Included in the Hebrew Bible? [Atlanta: Scholars, 1992] and Esther not Judith: Why One Made it and the Other Didn’t (Crawford 2002), [Bible Review 18 [2002]: 22–31, 45] both cited under Texts of Judith and Reviews of Scholarship.) That Judith seemed to be inaccurate “history” was noticed in the ancient church, but the genre is now much discussed. It is sometimes taken as didactic or parabolic history, but it (along with Tobit, Esther, Susanna, and Joseph and Aseneth) is compared also with the developing genre of short and long novels (see Das Buch Judit (Haag 1995) [Dusseldorf, Germany: Patmos, 1995] cited under Commentaries and The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Wills 1995) [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press] cited under Comparative).

Jewish Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Gruen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth ◽  
Central Tension

This chapter explores a central tension in Jewish writings of the era broadly defined as Second Sophistic. Many Jewish authors were deeply immersed in and regularly employed the genres, forms, and themes that long had characterized Greek literature and thrived once more (or still) in the age of the Roman Empire. At the same time, however, the homage paid to Jewish traditions and the sense of distinctiveness, even exceptionalism, retained a strong hold. The chapter discusses four very different authors or texts, Philo, 4 Maccabees, Pseudo-Phocylides, and Joseph and Aseneth, illustrating philosophy, history, gnomic poetry, and the novel. In each case, the author utilizes the Hellenic genres that were an ingrained part of his cultural makeup while conveying the sense of his people’s own distinctive character and contribution. And in each case the blend, smooth on the surface, betrays the signs of strain beneath it.

Genesis Remix

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Hicks-Keeton
Keyword(s):  
Subsequent Transformation ◽  
The People ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth

The divine title “(the) living God” in Joseph and Aseneth is used in conjunction with the narrative’s other language and imagery of “life” and “living” to construct a totalizing paradigm of life-versus-death that initially excludes Aseneth but ultimately, because of her shift in cultic loyalty and subsequent transformation by God, embraces her. Chapter 2 presents manuscript evidence in order to show that each of the earliest families of witnesses to Joseph and Aseneth employs creation language and imagery from Genesis 1–2 LXX to represent Aseneth’s transformation as a re-creation by the life-giving, creator God. Aseneth’s story draws on the inaugural Genesis creation narratives as it constructs an ideology of Israel’s “living God” which allows for, and even hopes for, gentile inclusion in the people of this God.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Hicks-Keeton
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth ◽  
Literary Phenomenon ◽  
Minor Character

The Introduction claims that the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. Aseneth’s story is a tale of the heroine’s transformation from exclusion to inclusion. It is simultaneously a transformative tale. For Second Temple-period thinkers, the epic of the Jewish people recounted in scriptural texts was a story that invited interpretation, interruption, and even intervention. Joseph and Aseneth participates in a broader literary phenomenon in Jewish antiquity wherein authors took up figures from Israel’s mythic past and crafted new stories as a means of explaining their own present and of envisioning collective futures. By incorporating a gentile woman and magnifying Aseneth’s role in Jewish history, Joseph and Aseneth changes the story. Aseneth’s ultimate inclusion makes possible the inclusion of others originally excluded.

How Wilde Read John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Nisbet
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon

As a student at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde was often seen with his copies of an acclaimed (and locally infamous) new popular survey of Greek literature, John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (in two series, 1873/6). Those copies survive, and are extensively annotated. Although they must be read with caution, these annotations show Wilde to have been a widely read and increasingly confident young classicist, and hint at his nascent ambition as a translator. Together with relevant manuscript material, the annotations take on more than merely academic significance: they show how the young Wilde, at Symonds’s prompting, was turning ancient Greek cultural insights into present-day possibilities. His intense formative engagement with Studies was to prove fundamental to the mature Wilde’s self-fashioning as a novelist, playwright, and cultural phenomenon.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Hornblower ◽  
Giulia Biffis
Keyword(s):  
Greek Literature

The Introduction begins by briefly summarizing the remaining chapters. After a prefatory section, it examines the word nostos and cognates. A long section on nostos in Greek literature and history pays special attention to the Argonauts and to Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and seeks to fill other gaps in the coverage of the remaining chapters. A section on exile and return from it, and the special vocabulary it attracted, is followed by a Conclusion: were nostoi always happy?

Rhythmic Prose in Imperial Greek Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
System A ◽  
First Time

The chapter looks at the division between poetry and prose in ancient and other literatures, and shows the importance of rhythmic patterning in ancient prose. The development of rhythmic prose in Greek and Latin is sketched, the system explained and illustrated (from Latin). It is firmly established, for the first time, which of the main Greek non-Christian authors 31 BC–AD 300 write rhythmically. The method takes a substantial sample of random sentence-endings (usually 400) from each of a large number of Imperial authors; it compares that sample with one sample of the same size (400) drawn randomly from a range of authors earlier than the invention of this rhythmic system. A particular sort of X2-test is applied. Many Imperial authors, it emerges, write rhythmically; many do not. The genres most likely to offer rhythmic writing are, unexpectedly, narrative: historiography and the novel.

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