Some Proposed Connections between the Visions of Amram and the Four Kingdoms in View of the Aramaic Literature from Qumran

The Visions of Amram (4Q543–549) and Four Kingdoms (4Q552–553) are two Aramaic compositions from Qumran that have been recognized to contain apocalyptic dream-visions. In this article I propose some special connections between the dream-visions in these two works, centered on similar dialogues that take place between the seers in each text and characters seen in the dreams. These connections suggest that the Visions of Amram and Four Kingdoms emerged from a shared or closely related authorial setting. I also suggest that the connections discussed in this article are indicative of other literary affinities exhibited more generally among the Qumran Aramaic corpus, affinities that point toward a broader literary movement of which the Visions of Amram and Four Kingdoms were part.

Dante’s Other Worlds

When Dante chose to situate his Commedia in the three realms of the Catholic afterlife, he had many sources to draw upon: Aeneid VI, the legacy of Scripture, medieval dream visions, theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, iconography, and perhaps even Mohammed’s Night Journey. What he borrowed, however, he invariably made his own. His hell brings order and psychological depth to the traditional welter of infernal retribution. His purgatory spirals above ground along the radiant slopes of an antipodean mountain, while paradise moves from one light show to another before blossoming into a white rose. The cities and landmarks of the world he knew also become ways to conjure the imagined other world, forging a lively connection between the two. Each afterlife realm, moreover, explores a spiritual disposition articulated through landscape, dialogue, and imagery: the claustrophobic egotism of Inferno, the dynamic of transformation in Purgatorio, and the luminous intersubjectivity of Paradiso.

Visions and the Afterlife

Merovingian writings provide rich evidence for the importance of visionary claims and vision texts in early medieval religious and political culture. Visions (including dream-visions) provided a means for political commentary in religious and secular arenas. Saints were often depicted as visionaries in hagiography. They appeared in dreams to their suppliants at major pilgrimage sites, as witnessed by shrine records. In an era with great curiosity about the afterlife, the Vision of Paul and Gregory the Great’s Dialogues were important influences on Merovingian ideas about the otherworld, as evidenced in the Vision of Barontus, a Merovingian account of a near-death experience which described the immediate judgment of the soul at death. Visions of the otherworld aided a developing theology of the afterlife and contributed to later medieval afterlife accounts. Yet sources reveal caution about visionary claims and new ideas about the afterlife. The near silence of Merovingian writers about postmortem purgation (purgatory), an idea known to them and gaining currency among their neighbors, may indicate a calculated concern for orthodoxy.

Praying and Witnessing

This chapter examines the role of prayer (dova) in Muslim life. The act of prayer belongs to the villagers’ repertoires of vital exchange whereby blessing, prosperity, and vitality are accessed, and relations between life and the afterlife, and between the living, the dead, and the divine are maintained and cultivated. Prayer is thus crucial in villagers’ temporal orientations toward the past, present, and the future. The chapter focuses on two major forms of prayer. First, it explores how prayer is deployed to address matters here and now, and/or prospectively by introducing examples of Islamic healing, and dream visions and divination. Second, it analyzes how acts of prayer intersect with and shape the ethics of memory. It shows how the idiom of dova provides village Muslims with a vocabulary with which to engage with the critical events of the past and becomes a mode of historical experience. Specifically, it focuses on how prayer is performed by the living for the souls of the dead, including war martyrs from the 1992-95 war, as well as from the Ottoman era.

Dream Visions and Prophecies

This chapter compares dream visions and prophecies in mythic historiography with analogous stories in the gospels. Most of the visions and prophecies reveal the birth of a divine child. Fathers have dreams or oracles instructing them not to thwart the divine will. Older prophets play a role and have intimate conversations with mothers. The comparison of Simeon in Lukan myth and the Roman Nigidius Figulus is developed at length.

Flesh and stone: William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Chaucer’s dream visions

John Ganim unpacks William Morris’s eroticised but anxious politics in News from Nowhere. Ganim highlights the significance of the emotional attachment to environment in the formulation of Morris’s utopia. He also considers the enabling influence of the medieval dream vision, especially Chaucer’s, for promoting ‘psychological experience and fantasy’. Both themes illuminate Morris’s conflicted approach to subjects that caused him discomfort due to his perverse familial situation.