Two reviews

On the SBL Bookreviews site two reviews were published yesterday that is of relevance for students of Philo and diaspora Judaism:

James R. Davila
The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other?
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, 105
Leiden: Brill, 2005. pp. vi + 278. $142.00
Reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki

Logos Bible Software
The Works of Philo: Greek Text with Morphology. Bellingham, Wash.: Logos Bible Software, 2005. CD-ROM.

RGG

Most biblical scholars will know what the three abovementioned letters RGG stand for; the great German multivolume lexicon Religion im Geschichte und Gegenwart. Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft.

Some 'belated' news about this lexicon:
1) Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft now offers a CD version of the 3rd edition of this lexicon for the very acceptable price of 99 Euro. The price is, as usual, for members of the WBG, but membership is cheap, and the WBG has lots of books of interest to scholars and other students of the Bible and Judaism.

2) The 4th edition of this Lexicon is out, and has its own webpage; you can have a look at it here.

3) An English 10 volume translation of this large 4th edition is now also in the process of being published by Brill as Religion Past and Present. Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion. Further information about this edition can be found here.

New book and new series on Peter Lang

Peter Lang publishers has just established a new series, interesting for students of Philo: Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (ECCA). The editors of the series are from Germany - Ulrich Jörg, USA - David Brakke and the Danish scholar Anders-Christian Jacobsen.

The first volume of the series is a result of a conference in Aarhus in January (2005). The volume is called Beyond Reception. Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity.

I participated myself at the conference, so that is also why I might seem a little eager to tell about it. I have been reporting from the conference earlier and explained my ideas in my own article: I am arguing in favor of prof. Roald Skarsten's thesis that De Aeterniate Mundi cannot be Philonic. In one way my title is misleading, since I mention Philo's Aet. One should perhaps write "Aet. - often claimed to belong to Philo", but that is too long for a metonymic title. Here are all the titles:




Contents: David Brakke/Jörg Ulrich/Anders-Christian Jacobsen: Introduction to Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (ECCA) - David Brakke/Jörg Ulrich/Anders-Christian Jacobsen: Preface to Beyond Reception (ECCA 1) - Christoph Markschies: Antiquity and Christianity or: The Unavoidability of False Problems - Maren R. Niehoff: Philo's Contribution to Contemporary Alexandrian Metaphysics - Kåre Fuglseth: The Reception of Aristotelian Features in Philo and the Authorship Problem of Philo's De Aeternitate Mundi - Troels Engberg-Pedersen: Paul's Necessity: A Bourdieuesque Reading of the Pauline Project - Niels Willert: The Reception of Biblical and Greco-Roman Ethics in the Apologetics of the Early Church - Martin Vahrenhorst: Greek Religious and Cultic Terminology in the LXX Pentateuch - Einar Thomassen: The Reception of Greco-Roman Religious and Cultic Terminology in Judaism and Christianity, with Special Reference to Sacrificial Terminology - Gary B. Ferngren: The Early Christian Reception of Greek Medicine - David Brakke: Origins and Authenticity: Studying the Reception of Greek and Roman Spiritual Traditions in Early Christian Monasticism - Samuel Rubenson: Antony and Pythagoras: A Reappraisal of the Appropriation of Classical Biography in Athanasius' Vita Antonii - Aage Pilgaard: The Classical Biography as Model for the Gospels - Marie Verdoner: Cultural Negotiations in the Psychomachia of Prudentius.

Rambi!

At the SBL international meeting last summer I met one of the scholars that are working with Rambi, a bibliographic index of articles on Jewish studies. I promised him to take a closer look. I see that it was mentioned by Torrey in April, 2005, but I haven't had time to use it before now. This autumn I have been struggling with a lot of teaching affairs on subjects far away from Philo or Biblical studies, and haven't had time to do any research (alas), not to mention help Torrey to blog. Now things are more calm, so here you are:

Rambi is a very promising project, we realy need topic-based lists like this. Nothing can be compared to such databases if they become more or less complete.

A little bit confusing perhaps to know where to start, but you have to click on the "Rambi web" to find the search window, it will take you to the the main research window.

A search on "Philo of Alexandria" returns 584 posts. A more limited search on a specific topic or name is also possible, t.d. a search on "Torrey Seland" gave me 7 posts :-)

Philo at SBL Annual Meeting IV

S20-75

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Philo of Alexandria
11/20/2006
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: 305 - CC

Theme: Philo's Legum Allegoriae

Gregory Sterling, University of Notre Dame, Presiding
Thomas H. Tobin, S.J., Loyola University of Chicago
Philo's Legum Allegoriae I–III: The Thread of the Argument (40 min)
Annewies van den Hoek, Harvard University, Respondent (20 min)
Steven Di Mattei, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Moses Allegorizes phusikôs: Reevaluating the Notion of Physical Allegory in Philo of Alexandria's Legum allegoriae (30 min)
General discussion
Business meeting
Editorial Board meeting for Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series

This session has been organized in collaboration with the Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series published by Brill and SBL Publications. Papers will not be pre-circulated.

Two more reviews of books

A couple of fine new reviews are offered at the SBL Book review site at www. bookreviews.org: the adresses are given below:

Steven Fine
Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5001
Reviewed by Hayim Lapin

Ruth Langer and Steven Fine, eds.
Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue: Studies in the History of Jewish Prayer
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5070
Reviewed by Gregory Glazov
Reviewed by Viktor Petrovich Roudkovski

Philo on Magic

This week I received the Festschrift published this summer in honor of David E. Aune; hence I am now able to provide the excact reference to my own contribution in this volume:'Philo, Magic and Balaam. Neglected Aspects of Philo's Exposition of the Balaam Story,' in John Fotopoulos (ed.), The New Testament and Early Christian Literature in Greco-Roman Context. Studies in Honor of David E. Aune (Supplements to Novum Testamentum 122; Leiden, Brill, 2006), pp. 333-346.
My summarizing conclusions of this article are:

"Given Philo’s high view of prophecy, it comes to no surprise to discover his great focus on the issue of magical divination. One the one hand, genuine prophecy is to Philo due to "the divine spirit which plays upon the vocal organism and dictates words, which clearly express its prophetic message"; no pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own, "he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances" (Spec. 4,49; cf. 1,65). On the other hand, magical divination is mere fantasies of human beings, it is 'guessing', 'surmises and conjectures' (Spec. 1,61; 4,50).

The social life of Alexandria probably surfaces when Philo cautions and says: "Moses demands that one who is registered in the commonwealth of the laws ­should be perfect not in the lore, in which many are schooled, of divination and voices and plausible conjectures, but in his duties towards God . . ." (Spec. 1,63; cf. 1,319). He seems to have been well acquainted with various forms of magical divination, as both divination by dreams (oneiromanteia), watching the flight and behavior of birds (ornitomancy), watching sacrifical animals, and various other omens are mentioned by him. I have argued elsewhere that his exposition of Deutr 13 in Spec. 1,315-318 should be read as an actualization of this very law, possibly triggered by local experiences in Alexandria. Apostasy was an option, and ‘seduction’ one of the means. Hence magical divination was no ‘adiaphoron’ to Philo; on the contrary, it could lead to impiety.

I suggest that his struggles with the figure of Balaam, resulting in his emphasizing of his magic only vaguely presented in the Pentateuch, should also be understood as part of Philo’s struggle against magical divination of his own times.
When reading the works of Philo, there should be no doubt that he considered magic as incompatible with ‘true religion’, i.e. his Judaism: it paved the way for impiety (Spec. 1,61).

Whether he considered it an inherent part of the other ‘religions’ of his Alexandrian social world is probable, but hard to say as he provides no direct statements in this regard. To him, magical divination is a transgression of both the first and the ninth commandment of the Decalogue (Spec. 1,59-63; 4,48), and as such a "corruption of art, a counterfeit of the divine and prophetic possession" (Spec. 4,48). Hence when it comes to his own form of religion, magic is forbidden in the Torah; i.e., in the constitution of his Judaism. To those wanting to be Torah-observing Jews, magic should be no option. Accordingly, his expositions can be read as demonstrating that magic was not only a feature of the opponents of Moses in Egypt and of the non-Jewish Balaam, but also of the non-Jewish surroundings of the Jews in Alexandria. Whether it in reality also was a part of the daily life in the Jewish sectors of the Alexandria of his time, is quite another question. But in light of our other sources of magical activities in Jewish circles, and Philo’s stern warnings against magic in so many of his writings, we might suggest that it was a feature more known to his readers than he ever liked."

Constructions of Masculinity

Thanks to Holger Szesnat, I am able to present a link to a recent dissertation that also contains a chapter on Philo's work De Josepho: Jessica Lyn Tinklenberg De Vega,
"A Man who Fears God," Constructions of Masculinity in Hellenistic Jewish Interpretations of the Story of Joseph.
(A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy; Florida University, 2006).
The dissertation is available in .pdf format here.

The author's own summary of her work runs like this:Hellenistic Jewish interpreters of the Bible often restructured and modified biblical texts in an effort to further their own ideological perspectives. Among the many adaptations they made, these exegetes often sought to transform the familiar stories to better fit or express their own constructs of gender identity. This study attempts to uncover the ideologies of masculinity in three first-century Hellenistic Jewish texts: The Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, Philo’s De Somniis, and the anonymous Joseph and Aseneth. The texts were studied by means of a close reading for the rhetorical structures of each author, particularly noting the ways terminology and literary structures describing maleness are held in opposition to femaleness, and assuming that gender was a culturally constructed (rather than innate or essential) category. In the course of the study, a variety of constructions are confirmed: masculinity as dominance over the self (Josephus), as sexual propriety and non-violence (Joseph and Aseneth), and as avoidance of eunuchism, feminine company, and violating establish hierarchies (Philo). As these three exegetes represent only a small number of those writing at the time, this variety suggests that there may be many more constructions of maleness present in Hellenistic Jewish literature of the era.