The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses

200 B.C.E.200 C.E.

Supplements

to the

Journal for the Studyof Judaism

Editor

Benjamin G. Wright, IIIDepartment of Religion Studies, Lehigh University

Associate Editors

Florentino Garca MartnezQumran Institute, University of Groningen

Hindy NajmanDepartment and Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Advisory Boardg. bohak j.j. collins j. duhaime p.w. van der horst

a.k. petersen m. popovi j.t.a.g.m. van ruiten j. sievers g. stemberger e.j.c. tigchelaar

j. magliano-tromp

VOLUME 152

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/jsjs

The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses

200 B.C.E.200 C.E.

By

Leslie Baynes

LEIDENBOSTON2012

Frontispiece: William Blake, The Recording Angel Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baynes, Leslie.The heavenly book motif in Judeo-Christian apocalypses, 200 B.C.E.200 C.E. / by Leslie Baynes.p. cm. (Journal for the study of Judaism ; v. 152)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-90-04-20726-4 (hardback : alk. paper)1.Apocalyptic literatureHistory and criticism.2.JudaismHistoryPost-exilic period, 586 B.C.210 A.D.3.BibleCriticism, interpretation, etc.4.Dead Sea scrolls.5.Eschatology.6.Eschatology, Jewish.7.Catastrophical, The.I. Title.

BS1705.B39 2011220.046dc23

2011038428

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CONTENTS

Preface ................................................................................................................. vii

One: Introduction ............................................................................................ 3 State of the Question ................................................................................. 8 Questions of Definition: The Heavenly Book as Metaphor and

Motif........................................................................................................... 13 Intertextuality .............................................................................................. 19 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 22

Two: But if Not, Blot Me Out of the Book: Earthly and Heavenly Books in the Hebrew Scriptures up to Daniel ................................... 27

The Vocabulary of Book in the Hebrew Scriptures ....................... 28 Functions of Books and Writing in the Hebrew Scriptures........... 30

Divine Writing: Authority and the Tablets of the Law .............. 30 Lists and the Book of Life.................................................................... 32

Exodus 32:3233 ................................................................................ 34 Remembrance ......................................................................................... 36 Witness, the Book of Fate, and the Tablet of Destinies ............. 42

The Tablet of Destiny in Mesopotamia ..................................... 46 Letters and the Heavenly Letter ........................................................ 52 Prophetic Speech-Acts and the Book of Action ........................... 54 Histories, Records, and the Book of Deeds .................................... 58

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 59

Three: Everyone Who Is Found Written in the Book: The Heavenly Book of Life in Daniel, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other Second Temple Literature .............................................. 65

The Emergence of Belief in Life after Death ...................................... 65 The Genre Apocalypse .............................................................................. 67 The Book of Life in Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls ...................... 70 The Book of Life in Jubilees ..................................................................... 74 The Book of Life in Joseph and Aseneth ............................................... 75 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 81

vi contents

Four: And Books Were Opened: The Heavenly Book of Deeds in Daniel and other Second Temple Literature ...................................... 85

The Book of Deeds in Daniel 7 ............................................................... 85 The Book of Deeds in 1 Enochs Animal Apocalypse ........................ 87 The Book of Deeds in Jubilees ................................................................. 92 Enoch as Scribe ........................................................................................... 93 The Book of Deeds in 2 Enoch ................................................................ 96

The Book of Deeds and Remembrance in the Testament of Abraham ................................................................................................... 98

Conclusion .................................................................................................... 104

Five: It Has Been Written and Ordained: Heavenly Tablets and the Book of Fate in Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other Second Temple Literature .................................................... 109

The Book of Fate in Other Second Temple Literature .................... 124 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 131

Six: Who Is Worthy to Open the Scroll? The Adaptation of the Motif in the New Testament ................................................................... 137

Luke 10:20 ...................................................................................................... 138 Philippians 4:3 .............................................................................................. 139 Hebrews 12:23 ............................................................................................... 140 Revelation ...................................................................................................... 143

Rev 3:5 ....................................................................................................... 145The of Revelation 5 and the of

Revelation 10....................................................................................... 149 Rev 13:8 and 17:8 ..................................................................................... 162 Rev 20:1215 and 21:27 ........................................................................... 164

Seven: But Not Like the Books of This World: The Heavenly Book in Christian Literature of the Second Century .................................. 171

The Shepherd of Hermas ........................................................................... 171 The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah .............................................. 180 The Odes of Solomon 23 ............................................................................. 185 Conclusion to Chapters 6 and 7 ............................................................. 197

Eight: Conclusion ............................................................................................. 203

Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 209Index of Modern Authors .............................................................................. 221Subject Index ..................................................................................................... 224Index of Primary Texts ................................................................................... 226

PREFACE

This book aims to fill a lacuna in apocalyptic studies: an accounting of the significance of the heavenly book motif in early Judaism and Christianity. Chapter 1 introduces one of its main themes: books and writing are always involved in questions of life and death. The assertion is Jacques Derridas, but even though his work is vital for mine, readers should understand from the outset that I do not engage in deconstruction of any text under consideration here.1 Rather, I borrow Derridas insights and put them into the service of my own. Surely Derrida, as tricksy an author himself as ever was with Platos texts, would not mind. Chapter 1 also defines the four sub-types of the motif: the book of life, the book of deeds, the book of fate, and the book of action. While the first three have been discussed previously under these or very similar names, the last is my own coinage. I believe that it offfers a convincing account the type of heavenly book it purports to explain. Chapter 2 analyzes examples of the motif from the ancient Near East and in the Hebrew Bible and compares and contrasts them to other, non-heavenly forms of writing so that the metaphorical connections between the two sorts of writing, heavenly and earthly, emerge. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 look at the motif as it is taken up (mainly but not solely) in the earliest Jewish apocalypses and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In these texts most heavenly books clearly have to do with everlasting life. Who holds, reads, or writes in heavenly books diversifies in this time period (200 B.C.E.200 C.E.); the books no longer belong strictly to God, but more often are in the charge of angels or exalted scribal figures, with Enoch as the most impor-tant example of the latter by far. Chapters 6 and 7 examine early Christian texts that employ the heavenly book motif. Here it continues to regulate entrance into eternal life, but, unsurprisingly, Christ gradually takes over as the one who has charge of the books. As the heavenly book moves through time, from the ancient Near East to Judaism and into Christianity, I pay particular attention to how it operates intertextually.

1For example, I am not doing here anything resembling what Derrida does to the Apoc-alypse of John in his essay On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy (ed. Peter Fenves; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 11771).

viii preface

Without the support of many people, I could not have completed this project, and it is my happy task to thank them. I am grateful to the Gradu-ate School and the Department of Theology of the University of Notre Dame for their generous financial support from 1998 to 2005, including a Graduate Teaching Fellowship for 20032004 and a Visiting Assistant Professor position for 20042005. The university made many resources available to their doctoral students, not least of which was an intellectual environment that was both nurturing and challenging in optimum pro-portions. Among those students, all now graduated, several contributed significantly to this project and made the process more enjoyable. I am grateful to Fr. Brad Milunski, OFM Conv., for his help in translating Ital-ian, and to Brant Pitre, Brian Gregg, and especially to Deborah Thompson Prince, for their conversation, friendship, and support. Furthermore, I am indebted to Anathea Portier-Young of Duke Divinity School, who gave almost the entire manuscript a thorough reading and helped improve it immensely in every way. For its abiding infelicities I have only myself to blame. Finally, I thank Mattie Kuiper, Camila Werner, and Wilma de Weert of Brill, who expertly shepherded the book through the publishing process, and my graduate assistant Matthew Hartman for his diligent help with proofreading and indexing.

No one could have been blessed with a better dissertation commit-tee than I was. Expatiating upon their formidable scholarly credentials would be superfluous, so I would like to acknowledge each one on a more personal level. My advisor, David Aune, deserves more thanks than I can articulate here. I can boil down his help to three representative quali-ties: his erudition, his wit and his patience. I am deeply grateful to Jim VanderKam for taking the time to tutor a group of us in Geez, and for his constant good cheer; to Greg Sterling for his unceasing generosity with his time, advice, and guidance, all the more impressive after his move to administration; and to Hindy Najman as an example of tireless dedication to scholarship, and especially for one pivotal conversation that turned the entire project around.

Leaving the University of Notre Dame, I took a position at Missouri State University, where I was the recipient of a 2008 Summer Faculty Research Fellowship that helped me turn the dissertation into a book. The faculty in the Religious Studies Department at Missouri State make it the best place to work that I can imagine. I would like to thank all of them, but especially my colleagues in biblical studies, Mark Given, John Strong, Jim Moyer, Charlie Hedrick, LaMoine DeVries, and Victor Matthews, for

preface ix

their constant support and encouragement. Victor Matthews, now Dean of the College of Humanities and Public Afffairs, and Jack Llewellyn, head of the Religious Studies Department, really know how to hold someones feet to the fireas they should.

My parents, Daniel and Nancy Ducatt, deserve all the gratitude I can muster for their whole-hearted, unconditional support of my academic goals. They have never failed to be there for me and my family, whatever and whenever we have asked.

The phrase last but not least never rang truer than here. Mere words can never do justice to how much I owe my husband, Tim Baynes, for what he did, and how graciously, while I researched, wrote, and revised, thus meriting a place for himself in the heavenly book of life. This book, in the meantime, is dedicated to him.

In books I find the dead as if they were alive.

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon1

1Richard de Bury, Philobiblon (trans. E. C. Thomas; Oxford: Shakespeare Head/Basil Blackwell, 1960), 17.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Writing is always involved in questions of life and death.2 Jacques Derrida makes this observation in his deconstruction of Platos Phaedrus, but it is also quite fitting as an overarching thesis about the function of heavenly books in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is somewhat paradoxical, for at the ancient heart of Western attitudes about writing is a fundamental contradiction. For Plato, writing is suspect; the living voice is superior to the written word. Therefore one may infer, as some have, that if the voice is living, its opposite, writing, must be dead. Derrida himself is the most well-known modern critic of this logocentrism, or bias in favor of the spoken over the written word.3

Ancient Near Eastern thought, however, would have none of this. In the ancient Near East, including ancient Israel, writing is authoritative; writing is permanent; writing is an almost unequivocal good. This is not to say that it considered writing the only good, or that it did not con-tinue to value oralityfar from it. Neither I am setting up a dichotomy between the Greek mind and the Hebrew mind here, an idea that has been rightly discredited.4 But this discrediting does not erase the reality that the two cultures sometimes conceived of books and writing quite diffferently.5 From this fact stems the paradox of using Derridas reflec-tions on Plato to introduce an analysis of Judeo-Christian heavenly books. Derridas ideas have a great deal to contribute to such an analysis, and so before entering into a discussion about the heavenly books themselves,

2Jacques Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, in Dissemination (trans. Barbara Johnson; Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1045.

3See especially Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

4James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); cf. Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960).

5Nonetheless, both civilizations continued to value both the written and oral modes of transmission simultaneously, as much evidence demonstrates. See David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2005.

4 chapter one

we will take a closer look at Derridas theories of writing. These theories help set up a framework that will support that discussion.

The classic locus for Platos critique of writing is his dialogue Pha-edrus, and, more specifically, the myth of Thoth that Socrates tells there.6 According to that myth, Thoth,7 the ancient Egyptian god often pictured as an ibis, invented numbers and astronomy, games of chance, and let-ters ().8 The order of the list is probably purposeful: first seri-ous inventions, then draughts and dice, then letters.9 That is, letters, like games of chance, are for amusement, a claim Socrates makes explicit later. Taking these inventions to Thamus the king, Thoth outlined their benefits for humanity. Writing, he averred, would make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. But Thamus categorically rejected this claim, noting that Thoth attributed to letters a power opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.10 On this, Derrida observes:

If writing, according to the king...produces the opposite efffect from what is expected...it is because...it doesnt come from around here. It comes from afar, it is external or alien: to the living, which is the right-here of the inside, to logos as the zoon it claims to assist or relieve...Knowing that he can

6Cf. the Seventh Letter (341b342a), the authorship of which is disputed. See Ludwig Edelstein (Platos Seventh Letter [Philosophia Antiqua 14; Leiden: Brill, 1966], 7685), who uses precisely the passage about writing to argue that the Seventh Letter is not Platos. Regarding the indisputably genuine works, my analysis will make no attempt to distin-guish between the Socrates of history and the philosopher of Platonic faith, as N. T. Wright so nicely phrases it in The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 3; Philadelphia: Fortress, 2003), 48.

7 is the form in which it appears in Phaedrus, but elsewhere Thoth is more common. See C. J. Bleeker, Hathor and Thoth: Two Key Figures of the Ancient Egyptian Reli-gion (Studies in the History of Religions [Supplements to Numen] 26; Leiden: Brill, 1973); Patrick Boylan, Thoth: The Hermes of Egypt: A Study of Some Aspects of Theological Thought in Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 1922); Jaroslav Cerny, Thoth as Creator of Languages, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 34 (1948): 12122; John Gwyn Grif-fiths, ed., Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride (University of Wales Press, 1970); George R. Hughes, A Demotic Letter to Thoth, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 17.1 (1958): 112; Gerard Mus-sies, The Interpretatio Judaica of Thot-Hermes, Studies in Egyptian Religion Dedicated to Professor Jan Zandee (ed. M. Heerma van Voss et al.; Studies in the History of Religion [Supplements to Numen] 43; Leiden: Brill, 1982), 89120; G. Nagel, Le dieu Thoth daprs les textes gyptiens, Eranos Yearbook 9 (1942): 10940.

8Phaedrus 274C-D. For more on the Greeks fertile thinking on these topics, see Debo-rah Levine Gera, Ancient Greek Ideas on Speech, Language, and Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

9C. J. Rowe, ed., Phaedrus (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986), 209.10Phaedrus 276D.

introduction 5

always leave his thoughts outside or check them with an external agency, with the physical, spatial, superficial marks that one lays flat on a tablet, he who has the tekhne of writing at his disposal will come to rely on it. He will know that he himself can leave without the tupois going away, that he can forget all about them without their leaving his service. They will represent him even if he forgets them; they will transmit his word even if he is not there to animate them. Even if he is dead, and only a pharmakon can be the wielder of such power, over death but also in cahoots with it. The pharma-kon and writing are thus always involved in questions of life and death.11

Derrida is not discussing heavenly books, but he may as well be. Heav-enly books do not come from around here, but come from afar, distant from the land of the living. Derridas use of the term pharmakon, too, is appropriate in theorizing heavenly writing. Socrates applies the word to the written discourse of Lysias that Phaedrus holds under his cloak at the beginning of the dialogue: You seem to have found the to bring me out [of the city]. For as people lead hungry animals by shaking in front of them a branch of leaves or some fruit, just so, I think, you, by holding before me discourses in books, will lead me all over Attica and wherever else you please.12 In the myth at the end of Phaedrus Thoth applies the same word to writing in general, calling his own invention of letters a of memory and wisdom.13 Derrida argues convincingly that the two uses of the term, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the dialogue, should be interpreted in tandem.14 To interpret it, however, one must know what the word means. From it we obviously derive our word pharmacy. But a can be either a poison or a cure. Harold North Fowler in his Loeb edition of the dialogue translates it alternately as charm and elixir.15 Derrida revels in the multiplicity of meanings of the word, and it is the pivot on which his argument turns.16 The juxtaposition of books, , and the , with its multiple, slippery meanings, he writes, is not accidental:

This association between writing and the pharmakon...seems external; it could be judged artificial or purely coincidental. But the intention and into-nation are recognizably the same: one and the same suspicion envelops in

11Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, 104.12Phaedrus 230DE.13Phaedrus 274E.14Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, 6575.15Harold North Fowler, Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Loeb Clas-

sical Library 36; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), 425; 563. 16Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, 712.

6 chapter one

a single embrace the book and the drug, writing and whatever works in an occult, ambiguous manner open to empiricism and chance, governed by the ways of magic and not the laws of necessity. Books, the dead and rigid knowledge shut up in biblia, piles of histories, nomenclatures, recipes and formulas learned by heart, all this is as foreign to living knowledge and dialectics as the pharmakon is to medical science.17

Books and writing, therefore, possess the same inherent ambiguity as the . They are a poison and a cure; they kill and they make alive; they mediate between the living and the dead. Taken to a higher plane, heavenly books do the same things. A name written in a heavenly book guarantees life; its absence, or its blotting out, dooms that person to death. Sometimes what is written in a heavenly book is rigid knowledge; it records what is, what was from the beginning, or what will certainly come in the future, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition it is authoritative because its authority derives from the heavenly Lord of all. But however heavenly books functionand they do function in a variety of waysat a fundamental level they deal with matters of life and death, presence and absence. This is true from their first appearances in ancient Mesopotamian texts; it holds true for the way both heavenly and earthly books function in the Hebrew scriptures, and it comes fully alive in Jewish apocalyptic writing and the Dead Sea Scrolls, concerned as they are with otherworldly existence.

When they employ the heavenly book motif, the vast majority of Christian texts base their conceptualization of it on that of their Jewish forebears. Although the second-century Christian Papias, like Socrates, prefers the living voice to written texts, the authors of Luke, Hebrews, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah, Odes of Solomon 23, and most especially John the apocalyptic seer, cede heavenly authority over life and death in part to the written word.18 The motif of the heavenly

17Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, 723.18Loveday Alexander writes about a certain preference for the spoken word expressed

in second-century Christian texts, but she notes that respect was given to the written word as well, particularly as Christians began to develop their own canon. The focus of Alexan-ders article is examining Greco-Roman attitudes to oral and written forms of communica-tion. While she compares these to emerging rabbinic attitudes about the same, she does not address how ancient Hebrew attitudes toward books and writing may have influenced Christian ones. See Alexander, The Living Voice: Scepticism towards the Written Word in Early Christian and in Graeco-Roman Texts, in The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Shefffield (eds. David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter; JSOTSS 87; Shefffield: Shefffield Academic Press, 1990), 22047.

introduction 7

book, wherever it appears in the earliest Judeo-Christian literature, medi-ates between life and death.

The ubiquity of heavenly books throughout such a wide variety of texts and across the centuries elicits an important question: do their functions shift and change from text to text, from time to time, from Jewish to Chris-tian? The answer to that question is yes: they do demonstrate a significant pattern of development from their earliest use in the Hebrew scriptures to their later appearances in apocalyptic and other literature through the end of the second century C.E. In earlier sections of the Hebrew scrip-tures, being written in a heavenly book almost always guarantees the con-tinuation of the earthly lives of the people of Israel.19 As for the one who handles the book, before the exilic prophets, it is invariably God, who apparently does not deign to share it with angelic figures, much less with humans. But this begins to shift with the apocalyptic visions of Ezekiel, who receives an edible heavenly letter from the hand of the Lord. As the concept of an eternal afterlife develops in Judaism in apocalypses such as 1 Enoch, Daniel 712, and others, the motif becomes vitally important in managing the who, the why, and the wherefore of an earthly individuals heavenly existence, and the book moves into the hands of apocalyptic seers, scribes, and angels.

Since the heavenly book has multiple functions, it should come as no surprise that it has several distinct variations. I identify four:

1. In the Hebrew scriptures and New Testament, by far the most common is the book of life. Registration of individuals names there is a binary operation: one is either in or out, and while a persons actions certainly afffect that registration, the book of life does not record those actions.

In Isaiah and Daniel, however, and especially in the Pseudepigrapha, two other types of heavenly books predominate:20

19Cf. F. Ntscher, Himmlische Bcher und Schicksalsglaube in Qumran, RQ 1 (195859): 4067.

20Pseudepigrapha is a notoriously imprecise term fraught with many diffficulties and a problematic history. In spite of much recent critique of it, however, a more acceptable word has yet to emerge. For this reason I am obliged to stick with it since at present it is the term most commonly recognized, if not accepted, by the scholarly community. When possible I substitute the phrase Second Temple literature. For more on the term, see Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Modern Invention of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, JTS 60 (2009): 40336, and Loren Stuckenbruck, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, The Eerd-mans Dictionary of Early Judaism (ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 14362.

8 chapter one

2. In the book of deeds, heavenly accounting of peoples works, good or evil, and not just the inscription of their names, regulates entrance into eternal happiness.

3. The book of fate appears only rarely in the Hebrew scriptures but much more frequently in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple lit-erature, and especially in Jubilees. The book of fate, as its name sug-gests, records what will happen in advance, either to an individual or to a larger community, and in Second Temple texts, it is strongly deterministic.

These three designations, the books of life, deeds, and fate, have been common in scholarly usage for a long time. In addition to them, however, I propose a new category:

4. The book of action, to put it simply, acts: that is, its content is subor-dinate to its physical efffects (always violent) on its target population. It appears at least once in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and in other early Christian texts, respectively, but not at all in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature.

Finally, it is necessary to note that Christian writers, like their Jewish predecessors, engaged in intertextual readings of the Hebrew scriptures and other literature, and this is certainly true in their employment of the heavenly book motif, which they adapt to their own purposes. Heavenly books continue to mediate life and death in early Christian literature, but for Christians, unsurprisingly, they function to express the possibility and rewards of life with Christ. Consistent with theologies of the primacy of Christ, control of the heavenly book moves out of the hands of God the Father and into the hands of Christ the Son, and in the last text examined in this book, Odes of Solomon 23, it goes so far as to become embodied as Christ himself, representing the fullness of his authority through his life, death, and resurrection.

State of the Question

Heavenly books in Judeo-Christian literature function to articulate theo-logical concepts central to Jewish thought and Christian doctrine: life and death, both earthly and eternal, the authority of God, and for Christians, the authority of Christ. Despite its importance, however, only one mono-graph has been devoted to the motif: Leo Koeps Das himmlische Buch in

introduction 9

Antike und Christendom (1952).21 While Koep does trace the background of the heavenly book, both ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman, and explore its usage in early Judeo-Christian literature, his ultimate purpose is to examine its significance in medieval liturgical texts. Anyone who is interested in the concept of heavenly books is indebted to Koep, and his book has been the standard treatment of the subject for over half a cen-tury. But he leaves much work still to do, particularly in terms of how the motif functions in apocalypses, the genre in which heavenly books eventually find their natural home.

Only a few scholars have addressed at any length the function of heav-enly books in apocalyptic literature. Certainly there has been no mono-graph that does so. Furthermore, when the motif arises within a larger scholarly discussion of apocalypses, with a few notable exceptions it almost invariably receives a perfunctory treatment, generally consisting of a list of references to several heavenly books in the Judeo-Christian canon and other texts.

A heavenly book is a notable constituent part of many apocalypses. One need only read the influential 1979 article by John J. Collins, Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre, for initial confirmation of this. In his master paradigm of elements that occur in many apocalypses, Collins lists as a manner of revelation Writing, when the revelation is contained in a written document, usually a heavenly book (1.4).22 In another article in the same issue of Semeia, Adela Yarbro Collins takes special note of several Christian apocalypses that contain the notion of a heavenly book.23 While there has been no lack of studies of apocalyptic literature in the 20th century, the essentially successful attempt of John Collins and others to define the genre has catalyzed even more projects, particularly in the exploration of how constituent elements of apocalypses function within the genre.24 The present volume contributes to that efffort.

21Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur altchristlichen Bildersprache (Theophaneia: Beitrge zur Religions- und Kirchengeschichte des Alterums 8; Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlag, 1952). Wolfram Hermann has an idiosyncratic essay on the topic, Das Buch des LebensEin israelitisch-jdisches Theologumenon in Jdische Glaubensfundamente (BEATAJ 36; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 93117.

22John J. Collins, Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (1979): 6.

23Adela Yarbro Collins, The Early Christian Apocalypses, Semeia 14 (1979): 61121.24Most notably David E. Aune, The Apocalypse of John and the Problem of Genre,

Semeia 36 (1986): 6596, and David Hellholm, The Problem of Apocalyptic Genre and the Apocalypse of John, op. cit., 1364.

10 chapter one

The most sustained treatment of the role of heavenly books or writing in apocalyptic literature to date is that of D. S. Russell in The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic. Russell places his comments in a section labeled Some General Marks of Apocalyptic. These marks are similar to items in J. J. Collins master paradigm. Russell devotes ten pages to the role of heavenly books as they occur in apocalyptic revelation, a section that appears under the subtitle Esoteric in Character. Russell empha-sizes that

divine revelationsdisclosed in direct visions, by angelic mediation or on the heavenly tabletswere written down by the ancient seers and pre-served in their sacred books. Like the heavenly tablets themselves these books revealed not only what had been, but also what would be and related the whole purpose of God for the universe from the creation to the End-time. They had been hidden away for many generations and handed down in a long line of secret tradition, faithfully preserved until the last days. These hidden books were now being revealed to the people of God! The fact that they were now at last being made known was a sure sign that the End was near.25

Russell continues with a survey of how Enoch, Noah, and Ezra (in 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and 4 Ezra) record their revelations, which were then promul-gated as secret books. But he barely mentions other varieties of heavenly books (i.e., the book of life, the book of deeds, or the book of fate) whose contents are not synonymous with the seers purported revelations, and which remain in the heavenly sphere largely undivulged to the average reader.

James C. VanderKam emphasizes another vital function of the appeal to heavenly books or tablets in apocalyptic literature, namely to rein-force the idea that the revelations [here, of Enoch] were of heavenly ori-gin and thus absolutely trustworthy.26 VanderKam diffferentiates between several varieties of heavenly books, and he traces the origin of the meta-phor to Mesopotamian literature, while noting that one cannot specify that literature as an immediate source, so widely attested is the thinking behind it.27

25D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic: 200 BCAD 100 (Philadel-phia: Westminster Press, 1964), 1089.

26James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 151.

27VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, 153.

introduction 11

An obvious place to discover information on heavenly books in apoc-alyptic literature is in major commentaries on those apocalypses, but many commentaries offfer little more than an incomplete list of other places where one can find the phrase under consideration (usually book of life).28 There are several exceptions to this, however. These include R. H. Charles commentaries on Revelation29 and 1 Enoch;30 George W. E. Nickelsburgs 1 Enoch 1,31 and the commentaries on Revelation by W. Bous-set32 and D. E. Aune.33 Of these, Aune and Nickelsburgs expositions of the heavenly books are the most extensive and detailed, but even they, like the others, do not address the topic of heavenly books in apocalyptic literature in general.

Lastly, there are numerous dictionary or encyclopedia articles on the subject of the book of life or heavenly books. To the best of my knowl-edge only two, the TDNT and the International Standard Bible Encyclo-pedia, allude specifically to the role heavenly books play in apocalyptic literature.34 Schrenk in his article , devotes a subsection to The Apocalyptic Use and other NT Passages concerning the Book of Life, and writes that book acquires a special sense in the Apocalypse as an image for the divine secret which is declared and developed as a firmly sketched entity, and also as an expression for the impregnable foundation of the divine counsel.35 The revised edition of the ISBE notes simply that A further development is the conception of a book or books upon which

28One may take as an example comments on the initial appearance of the book of life in Rev 3:5. See H. B. Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John (London/New York: Macmillan, 1906), 51; G. B. Caird, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 2nd ed. (London: A & C Black, 1984), 4950; Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, rev. ed. (NICNT; Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1998), 967.

29R. H. Charles, The Revelation of St. John (2 vols.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1920), 84. 30R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), 912.31George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 47880.32Wilhelm Bousset, Die Offfenbarung Johannis (Gttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht,

1906), 22425. 33David E. Aune, Revelation (Word Biblical Commentary 52; 3 vols.; Dallas: Word Books,

19971998), 52a, 22325.34Craig Koesters brief entry Life, Book of (p. 661 in the New Interpreters Dictionary

of the Bible vol. 3; ed. Katherine Doob Sakenfeld; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), while it does not refer explicitly to the role heavenly books play in apocalyptic literature, does suggest cross references to articles on Apocalypticism, Eschatology in Early Judaism, Eschatology of the NT, and Eschatology of the OT.

35G. Schrenk, , , trans. G. W. Bromiley (TDNT vol. 1; ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 618.

12 chapter one

the final judgment is to be based, in the apocalyptic writings.36 Neither of the above articles elaborates the function of heavenly books in apocalyp-tic literature at any further length.37

In summary, while there is general acknowledgement that heavenly books play a significant role in apocalyptic literature, to date there has been no sustained study of their function in it.38 Although the motif certainly occurs outside the genre, it finds itself very much at home in apocalypses, and, in fact, it is the rare Jewish or Christian apocalypse that contains no reference at all to a heavenly book of some sort or another.39 This book explores the function of the heavenly book and its develop-ment in general, with special attention to how it operates in apocalypses. In this task, too, the insights of Derrida are relevant. If writing is always involved in questions of life and death, it is only natural that it would almost always be a vital part of apocalypses, concerned as many of them are with questions of eternal life and everlasting punishment.

36Edgar W. Smith, Book of Life (International Standard Bible Encyclopedia vol. 1; ed. G. E. Bromiley, rev. ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 534.

37Additional articles on the book of life include the following: Leslie C. Allen, Book of Life, of Remembrance, of Truth, New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theol-ogy and Exegesis vol. 4 (ed. Willem A. VanGemeren, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997), 44647; Anonymous, Libro de vida, Diccionario de la Biblia (ed. R. P. Serafn, Barcelona: Herder, 1987), 110405; William A. Graham, Scripture, The Encyclopedia of Religion vol. 13 (ed. Mircea Eliade, New York: Macmillan, 1987), 13345; A. Jeremias, Book of Life, Ency-clopedia of Religion and Ethics (ed. James Hastings, NY: Scribners, 1967), 79295; Leo Koep, Buch IV (Himmlisch), RAC vol. 2 (ed. Theodor Klauser, Stuttgart: Hierseman, 1954), 72531; C. Kopp, Buch des Lebens, Lexikon fr Theologie und Kirche vol. 2 (eds. Josef Hoefer and Karl Rahner, 2nd ed.; Freiburg: Herder, 1958), 73839; J. Khlewein, Sepher Book, trans. Mark E. Biddle, Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament vol. 2 (eds. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 80613; Paul S. Minear, Book of Life, Oxford Companion to the Bible (eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 93; Eleonore Reuter, Buch II. Metaphorisch-symbolisch, Lexikon fr Theologie und Kirche vol. 2 (ed. Walter Kaspar et al., 3rd ed.; Freiburg: Herder, 1994), 74344; M. Rist, Life, Book of, The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible vol. 3 (ed. G. A. Buttrick, Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 130; Jrgen Rolofff, Buch des Lebens, Reclams Bibellexikon (ed. Koch et al., 2nd ed., Stuttgart: Reclams, 1987), 94. The Anchor Bible Diction-ary has no entry on the heavenly books. It does have an entry for Writing and Writing Materials, but heavenly books are not treated in it.

38It is worth mentioning, however, that there has been a study of the apocalyptic scribe (David E. Orton, The Understanding Scribe: Matthew and the Apocalyptic Ideal [JSNTSS 25. Shefffield: Shefffield Academic Press, 1989]. The Vorstellung of the scribe will be of no minor importance here, as it relates to the Babylonian Nabu, the Egyptian Thoth/Hermes, Ezra in 4 Ezra, and the apocalyptic seer Enoch in particular.

39The most striking examples of Jewish apocalypses that contain no reference to a heavenly book are the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 136, which does, however, highlight Enochs writing) and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Others are the Testament of Levi 25 and 3 Baruch (but see 3 Baruch 6:78, especially in the Slavonic version).

introduction 13

Questions of Definition: The Heavenly Book as Metaphor and Motif

Before we can delve further into the functions of the heavenly book, it is necessary to define terms. When scholars refer to the concept of a heav-enly book, they employ various labels to describe it, such as metaphor,40 motif and metaphor,41 or even fixed metaphor.42 But none of them fully explains his or her rationale for the descriptive terminology used. This silence is pervasive throughout the literature concerned with heavenly books.

Koep comes closest to articulating a rationale for his term of choice to describe heavenly books, metaphor. He writes,

Diesem Symbol liegt ein Anthropomorphismus zugrunde, der irdische Ein-richtungen und Gebruche auf Gott und sein himmlisches Reich bertrgt: man stellt sich Gottes Herrschaft ber Himmel und Erde so vor, da er wie ein irdischer Herrscher seines Amtes walte. Bei jeder Regierungsttigkeit aber spielt Buchfhrung mannigfacher Art eine Rolle. Nimmt man den Vergleich zwischen irdischem und gttlichen Reich auch in den Einzel-heiten an, so werden derartige Metaphern dem menschlichen Denken leicht nahegelegt.43

Thus Koep implies that he calls the heavenly book a metaphor because of its implicit comparison of books on earth to books in heaven.44 Chapter 2 of this project will explore the implications of the heavenly book operat-ing as such a metaphor, which are considerable.

The word metaphor describes the concept heavenly book, for a meta-phor it certainly is. In using that term, we emphasize a comparison of earthly and heavenly books. However, the term motif is also an appropri-ate label with which to categorize these books. But motif, even more than metaphor, is subject to casual use by most biblical scholars who employ it. Whether they use it simply as a tag in an article title or even as a central concept in the bulk of their work, they rarely define exactly

40Koep, Das himmlische Buch, passim.41Aune, Revelation, 52a, 22325.42William L. Lane, Hebrews 18 (Word Biblical Commentary 47a; Dallas: Word, 1991),

466.43Koep, Das himmlische Buch, 1.44The literature on metaphor theory is enormous; for bibliography on the topic up to

1971, see Warren A. Shibles, Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History (Whitewater, WI: Language Press, 1971). For a later bibliography see J. P. van Noppen and Edith Hols, Metaphor II : A Classified Bibliography of Publications 1985 to 1990 (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 5; Library and Information Sources in Linguis-tics 20; Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1990).

14 chapter one

what they mean by it.45 In order to explain why motif is a helpful term for labeling references to heavenly books in the ancient world, it is first necessary to look more carefully at the word itself and theoretical discus-sions of it. While this will initially appear to take us far afield from the study of the heavenly book, such an investigation will in fact provide a central semantic framework for this project.

Motif is an important term in folklore research, and it is there that we find the vast majority of the analysis of the term. Even, or especially, there, its exact meaning has been subject to continual debate. Stith Thompson, whose Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is indispensable in the discipline, defined a motif as

the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power it must have something unusual and striking about it. Most motifs fall into three classes. First are the actors in a talegods, or unusual animals, or marvelous creatures...Second come certain items in the background of the actionmagic objects, unusual customs...In the third place there are single incidentsand these comprise the great major-ity of motifs.46

Applying this definition to the heavenly book, we see that it is certainly an unusual and striking magic object, or more exactly in this case, a supernatural object.

Thompsons definition was subject to intense scrutiny, and the word motif itself was not immune from multifarious usage. In 1980, folklor-ist Dan Ben-Amos could write that in spite of the deep impression that the term has made on our discipline, the concept that it represents has remained vague and varied, subject to abuse and rebuke....47 To begin to allay this confusion, Ben-Amos traces the various uses and the critiques of the uses of the term motif inside and outside folklore studies from the 18th century to the present in order to shed light on its use in contem-porary folklore studies. One of the most striking results of his work is his development of the idea of a rhetorical motif, which he sets in sharp relief to the notion of the wandering motif commonly accepted in the so-called

45A notable exception is Shemaryahu Talmon [Literary Motifs and Speculative Thought in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 16 (1988): 15168], whose work will be discussed below.

46Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York: Dryden, 1946), 41516.47Dan Ben-Amos, The Concept of Motif in Folklore, in Folklore Studies in the Twentieth

Century, ed. Venetia J. Newall (London: Rowman-Littlefield, 1980), 16.

introduction 15

historic-geographic or Finnish school of folklore.48 Ben-Amos juxtaposes the notion of a free-floating minimal unit of folklore that moves from one time and place to another with no constraints at all (the wandering motif) with a rhetorical motif, which is completely dependent upon its primary and subsequent contexts, and...derives its rhetorical efffect from its inherent inter-textuality.49 As this book will demonstrate, Ben-Amos concept of a rhetorical motif, dependent on its contextual frameworks and making its impact upon the reader not least from intertextual echoes, describes the movement of the heavenly book motif throughout Judeo-Christian literature to perfection.

An intertextual analysis of the heavenly book motif is only a part of what this book will do, however. It is also concerned with how the motif functions within each narrative in which it occurs; that is, what it does to the plot and/or how it afffects the characters with which it is concerned. Since we rely heavily upon the folklore term motif here, it is impor-tant to distinguish our use of the word function from the way folklorists define it in order to avoid confusion. Therefore, after a brief exposition of what function means in folklore studies, we will use its definition there as a point of comparison and contrast with our own definition here.

In folklore studies, the foundational theorization of function appears in Vladimir Propps seminal Morphology of the Folktale.50 Analyzing 100 Russian fairy tales, Propp wanted to

identify component parts of each tale and then compare tales according to their component parts...Propp did not believe...that either themes or motifs, however they might be defined, could be considered primary com-ponent parts of a tale, because both may be broken down into smaller units. Themes decompose into motifs and motifs decompose into yet smaller com-ponents which, until Propps time, had not been identified.51

In the course of his analysis of these smaller components, Propp found that diffferent characters in a fairy tale often performed identical actions

48The historic-geographic or Finnish method was developed in the second half of the 19th century by Julius and Kaarle Krohn, and its goal was to discover the origin, or Ur-form, of particular folktales as they migrated through time and space. For a summary of the school, see Stith Thompson, Historic-Geographic Method, Standard Dictionary of Folk-lore, Mythology, and Legend, ed. Maria Leach (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), 1.498.

49Ben-Amos, The Concept of Motif in Folklore, 29.50Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (trans. Laurence Scott; American Folklore

Society Bibliographical and Special Series 9; Austin: University of Texas, 1968).51Pamela J. Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure in Hebrew Biblical Narrative

(Bible and Literature Series 13; Decatur, GA: Almond Press, 1988), 72.

16 chapter one

(for instance, a diffficult task), and he chose the name function for those elements of the tale that are constant and that were important to the development of the tale as a whole.52 For Propp, therefore, functions are the product of...abstraction of a logical structure from thousands of cases.53

Propps definition of function as an abstract task that holds constant over a large number of discrete narratives is quite diffferent from the way we use the word here. But others have expanded and refined Propps work in ways that are relevant for the concept of function in this project. Folk-lorist Alan Dundes is the most important of those. Dundes has synthesized the work of Propp and linguist Kenneth Pike to critique the definition of motif and to ask how it actually operates in a folktale.54 Reading Propps work in light of Pikes distinction between etic and emic approaches, Dundes argues that an etic approach is nonstructural but classificatory in that the analyst devises logical categories of systems, classes and units without attempting to make them reflect actual structure in particular data. For Pike, etic units are created by the analyst as constructs for the handling of comparative cross-cultural data.55 In other words, an etic unit is an abstract category which the analyst creates to conceptualize his or her work. An emic structure, on the other hand, is part of the pattern of objective reality and is not merely the construct of the analyst and must be studied in its native context.56 Dundes merges the theories of Propp and Pike to construct a new theory of his own when he identifies Pikes emic motif, or motifeme, with Propps function. Therefore motifemes are abstract units of actions or states.57

The consequences of such an emic approach are considerable, Dundes argues. Offfering an example from Propps own work, Dundes applies his analysis to Propps twelfth function, the testing of a hero in preparation for his reception of magical aid, and his twenty-fifth function, the assign-ment of a diffficult task, usually by an opponent of the protagonist. The same motif, a diffficult task, Dundes writes, may be used in these two dif-

52Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 72.53Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 73, quoting Propp, Structure and

History in the Study of the Fairy Tale, Semeia 10 (1978): 70.54Alan Dundes, From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales, Journal

of American Folklore 75 (1962): 95105.55Dundes, From Etic to Emic Units, 101.56Dundes, From Etic to Emic Units, 101.57Satu Apo, Motifeme, in Folklore (ed. Thomas A. Green; 2 vols.; Santa Barbara, CA:

ABC-CLIO, 1997), 2.565.

introduction 17

ferent motifemes, or series of actions: in the first, the hero performs a dif-ficult task and receives magical aid, and in the second the hero is forced to perform a diffficult task at the behest of a villain. But, Dundes asks, If one observes a specific motif, how can one ascertain which motifeme it sub-serves?...Again, it is the notion of a function or motifeme in the frame of sequential context, i.e., in situ.58 Like Ben-Amos, then, Dundes believes that understanding the context of a given motif or motifeme is impera-tive, and this study will demonstrate the truth of their belief.

These various theories of motif and motifeme are adaptable, with some necessary changes, to a study of the function of the heavenly book in Judeo-Christian literature.59 First, they help define the main terms. The term heavenly book is etic; it is an abstraction that the analyst devises for his or her convenience when dealing with numerous examples of the concept, and it never appears in the ancient literature itself. However, the broad motif heavenly book may be broken down into more specific sub-types, each of which acts in a particular way in situ, and which could therefore be described as an emic category. We cannot call these sub-types motifemes, because they are not abstract units of action or state, but rather objects (metaphorical objects, at least). Nevertheless, these sub-types are smaller components of a larger motif, which is how Propp defines a function. Recalling my own definition of function as what a motif does to the plot and/or how it afffects characters, I note also that what heavenly books do holds steady in many diffferent narratives over time. I have already identified the sub-types of the heavenly book motif: the book of life, the book of deeds, the book of fate, and the book of action. With the exception of the last, these are in fact the major categories of the motif that Leo Koep distinguishes.60

More recently Aune has afffirmed these general categories, with some variation in the designation of the third, in terms of their functions. He notes that there is a small library of heavenly books in the Hebrew scriptures

58Dundes, From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales, 101102.59It is necessary to note that I am not entering the Bible as folklore discussion. The

application of folklore studies in this project extends only to the theorizing of the term motif. A large amount of fruitful work has been done analyzing certain aspects of the Bible using folklore methods, but similar effforts are not my aim here. Some of that fruitful work, in addition to Pamela Milne (op. cit.) includes Susan Niditch, ed., Text and Tradi-tion: The Hebrew Bible and Folklore (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) and Folklore and the Hebrew Bible (Guides to Biblical Scholarship: Old Testament Series; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

60Koep, Das himmlische Buch, passim.

18 chapter one

and early Jewish and Christian literature: the book of life, which func-tioned as a heavenly record of those who were considered righteous or worthy; the book of deeds, which serves as a record of the good and bad deeds a person had performed, and the book of destiny, or the heavenly tablets, which records the history of the world...and/or the destinies of people before they are born.61

My fourth sub-type, the book of action, identifies another sort of heav-enly book that fits in none of the categories previously recognized by Koep, Aune, and others. These heavenly books do not record names, or deeds, or what will occur in the future. Instead, their main function is to perform or instigate action. In other words, the defining characteristic of these books is not their written content, but rather the fact that they act as autonomous agents. Only three examples of these books appear in the corpora examined here: the flying scroll ( ) of Zech 5:14, the scroll () of Rev 5:1 fff., and the letter (egart) of Odes of Solomon 23. Notably, none of these books is an instrument of goodness or blessing. On the contrary, in each instance they punish malefactors, and their mal-feasance is a constitutive feature of the type. In keeping with the formula book of (life, works, fate), I have proposed the title book of action for this sub-type of the heavenly book.

At this point one may ask if these various sub-types are in fact diffferent motifs. To begin to address this question, we must first define the term heavenly book itself. I define a heavenly book simply as a form of writing stored in heaven that is restricted almost entirely to heavenly use. If such a book comes down to earth to be read there, as it sometimes does, it is only a copy (in writing or through an oral rendition) of the original in the heavenly realm. The motif heavenly book remains a constant in a given text, but the functions of that book difffer in situ, according to the needs of the literary context. That is, one narrative context might require a heav-enly book in the form of the book of life, which indicates one function of the motif (i.e., a heavenly citizenship list); another text may require a heavenly book in the form of a book of good or wicked deeds, which serves an entirely diffferent function (i.e., a basis for the judgment of a person or persons). The presence of a heavenly book is a constant, but depending on the demands of the narrative, the function of that book varies. Thus, to reiterate the words of Ben-Amos, the heavenly book is also a rhetorical motif that is completely dependent upon its primary and

61Aune, Revelation, 52a, 224.

introduction 19

subsequent contexts, and...derives its rhetorical efffect from its inherent inter-textuality.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality is an important concept for this project, which examines the variations and development of a motif over many centuries and in many texts, but the concept of intertextuality, like that of motif, is a com-plex thing that defies easy definition. Its origins are clear, but its workings out much less so. The term intertextualit was coined by Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s, and it quickly took on a life of its own.62 As Richard Hays observes, The diffficulty...is that the term intertextuality is used in such diverse and imprecise ways that it becomes diffficult to know what is meant by it and whether it points to anything like a method that can be applied reliably to the analysis of texts to facilitate coherent critical conversation.63 Hays eventually concludes that intertextuality

is not a specific methodology. It is rather a phenomenon to be explored. It is the condition for the writing and reading of all texts. Perhaps it is also a property or attribute that particularly characterizes some texts more than others: the intertextual weavings are in some cases denser, more complex, more semantically fraught than in others.64

I posit that apocalypses are among those texts particularly amenable to intertextual readings because in many cases their intertextual weavings are massively dense, complex, and semantically fraught. Few would deny, for example, that the Apocalypse of John is the book of the New Testa-ment most heavily dependent upon references to the Hebrew Bible, even though it never explicitly quotes from it. One way to describe such inter-textual mechanisms is echo, a term I must investigate here to begin to explain the use of the concept intertextuality in this project.

Shemaryahu Talmon, in his excellent study of the barren wife motif in the Hebrew Bible, writes that motifs are efffective only as they evoke

62See Julia Kristeva, Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue, et le roman, Critique 239 (1967): 43865, and Semeiotik: recherches pour une smanalyse (Paris: Points, 1969). For a helpful evaluation of the concept in literary studies, see Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2003).

63Richard B. Hays, Intertextuality: A Catchall Category or a Specific Methodology? (paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, San Antonio, Texas; November 21, 2004), 2.

64Hays, Intertextuality, 7.

20 chapter one

a clear echo in the listeners or readers minds...An author must feel assured that his audience will react to the conventions he uses with a dj lu sensation, to use Roland Barthes felicitous term, and will thus be able to share his own train of thought.65 The heavenly book motif appears over and over again in early Judeo-Christian literature, and often it is clear that an author is alluding to prior instances of it and intends his readers to bear those allusions in mind even while they contemplate his own fresh use of it. For instance, within the Hebrew Bible, the first and paradigmatic example of the heavenly book appears in Exodus 32:3233 in the form of the book of life, and in the context of a conversation between the Lord and Moses. What is at first not identified as a heavenly book, the stone tablets Moses receives from God in Exodus 24, eventually (and unsurpris-ingly) begin to serve as a basis for articulating the motif. References to heavenly books that appear much later than the Hebrew scriptures, i.e., in the 23rd Ode of Solomon (probably from the early second century C.E.), are greatly elucidated by recognizing the intertextual connections between the primary contexts of Exodus 24 and 32 and subsequent contexts up to and including the context of Ode 23 itself. The same process holds true for other sub-types of the motif. Readers not only understand the function of the book of good or evil deeds in Christian texts better by referring to its earlier appearances in Daniel 7 or 1 Enoch; they also grasp the points that the author is making in a Christian (con)text much more clearly by recognizing how, why, and to what purpose the author has modified what had become a stock scene in Judaism.

At the same time, one must acknowledge that intertextuality is not necessarily synonymous with conscious allusion.66 Although some ancient authors obviously do work with an immediately identifiable base text (as in the case of Jubilees rewriting Genesis and Exodus), others do not. The process is usually not such a definitively either/or proposition, however. Quite often it may be possible that an author had a specific text in mind, but because the concept he was writing about was so ubiquitous, later readers are unable to determine with any certainty whether his use of it derives from one particular text, from an unidentifiable or lost com-mon source, or simply out of the air, from the cultural milieu that sur-rounded the author. Certainly the use of the heavenly book motif, which

65Shemaryahu Talmon, Literary Motifs and Speculative Thought in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 16 (1988): 153.

66Thomas R. Hatina, Intertextuality and Historical Criticism in New Testament Stud-ies: Is There a Relationship? Biblical Interpretation 7.1 (1999): 42.

introduction 21

was in the air of the ancient Mediterranean basin from Mesopotamia to Rome, falls into that last category in some texts. By claiming intertex-tuality, then, I am not necessarily claiming a uni-directional influence (though sometimes I am!). The point is not that one text uses another that predates it. Rather, we are able to compare and contrast a series of texts in a hermeneutical spiral, and through this come to a clearer understanding of how the motif functions from text to text.

For these reasons I suggest that intertextuality can work both forwards and backwards. We understand a later work better by comparison with an earlier work, but at the same time, our perceptions of an earlier work are often transformed by insights we have gained from later ones. Neither relative chronology nor identifiable influence must be determinate opera-tive factors when one interprets texts in this way (though again, often they are).67 Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it,

what happens when a new work of art is created is something that hap-pens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea...will not find it preposter-ous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.68

As with a new work of art, so with the rhetorical motif of the heavenly book. Each time a fresh instance of the motif appears, we readjust our perceptions of its predecessors. That, I propose, is one of the tasks of inter-textual reading.

Some other implications of the importance of intertextuality in the study of motifs bear noting. If a motif is dependent on its contexts, and if it derives a primary rhetorical efffect from its intertextuality, what do

67Cf. William Kurz, Bread of Life in John 6: Intertextuality and the Unity of Scripture, in The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (eds. Luke Timo-thy Johnson and William S. Kurz, S.J.; Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK, 2002), 204.

68T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in The Sacred Wood (London: Meth-uen, 1920; repr. The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays; Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 28. Christological readings of the Hebrew scriptures may be the example par excellence of the truth of this statement. For an application of Eliots theory to the realm of fiction, see Charles Williams novel Descent into Hell (repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965).

22 chapter one

theories of motif have to say to theories of genre? Ben-Amos writes that motifs appear in particular positions in a narrative, or are associated with distinct genres.69 While the heavenly book first appears in Jewish texts in Exodus and is then taken up in the Psalms and the prophets, and later in Christianity in the Gospel of Luke and Pauls letter to the Philippians, the genre in which it finds its natural home is the apocalypse. From the dawn of the apocalypse, to paraphrase Paul Hanson, the heavenly book appears repeatedly in that genre.70 It plays an important role throughout much of 1 Enoch and in several pivotal points in Daniel, parts of which are the first full-bodied Jewish apocalypses, as well as in almost every apocalypse that follows them.

One may ask further why this motif has an afffinity for apocalypses, and apocalypses for it. One obvious reason is the fact that the usual storage place of a heavenly book is, by definition, heaven. As concepts of heaven and hell and a post-earthly existence in general gradually developed in early Jewish thought, so did references to heavenly books increase and multiply. For instance, while there are scattered references to the motif throughout the earlier sections of the Hebrew Bible, in Daniel 712 alone there are three, with the third acting in tandem with the first unambig-uous mention of life after death in the Hebrew scriptures. If we accept Christopher Rowlands disclosure definition of an apocalypse (that is, that the basic purpose of an apocalypse is to disclose heavenly secrets),71 the multiplication of such books in apocalypses is not surprising: it is a matter of genre running its course.

Conclusion

Jacques Derridas deconstruction of Platos Thoth myth in the Phaedrus, and especially his contention that writing is inextricably connected to questions of life and death, provide an instructive point of comparison and contrast to the way books are portrayed in Judeo-Christian literature. There writing, of both the heavenly and earthly varieties, does indeed function as a pharmakon: it regulates life and death and presence and absence, first of the physical, and eventually of the heavenly sort. As we

69Ben-Amos, The Concept of Motif in Folklore, 29.70Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).71Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early

Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 914, passim.

introduction 23

trace this progression from the ancient Near East to the early Christian world, we will observe how the motif functions intertextually in its four constituent sub-types: the book of life, the book of fate, the book of deeds, and the book of action. While the heavenly book is certainly a metaphor, a term whose relationship to heavenly books chapter 2 explores in more depth, it is also a motif, and our analysis of the heavenly book is clari-fied by being in conversation with motif theory as articulated in folklore studies.

The heavenly book motif in all of its sub-types appears throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures, but it truly comes into its own in apocalypses, where it is ubiquitous. Before we enter into the apocalyptic world, how-ever, we must first determine how the heavenly book functions in the Hebrew scriptures.

The poets eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poets penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

A Midsummer Nights Dream, v.i.1116

Quiz la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonacin de algunas metforas.

It may be that universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a handful of metaphors.

Jorge Luis Borges, Pascals Fearful Sphere1

1Roberto Gonzlez-Echevarra, Borges and Derrida, in Jorge Luis Borges (ed. Harold Bloom; Modern Critical Views; Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986), 229.

CHAPTER TWO

BUT IF NOT, BLOT ME OUT OF THE BOOK EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY BOOKS IN THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES

UP TO DANIEL

Chapter 1 has established that the heavenly book is both a metaphor and a motif, and that the most efffective way to trace it is through its inherent intertextuality. Within the many literary contexts in which it appears and in real world theological analysis, the heavenly book is probably best described as a construct of the religious imagination. When we read about heavenly books, needless to say we are reading not about physical rolls of papyrus or parchment, but of idealized perceptions of them projected into the heavenly realm. Earthly books, on the other hand, and the Jew-ish peoples interactions with them, are historical realities in time and space, and the heavenly book, as well as being a motif, is also a metaphor based on them.2 Since it is true, as Koep argues, that heavenly books are metaphors based on earthly ones, it is important to ask how earthly books functioned in the ancient Jewish world and how they were perceived. Such a study will help ground heavenly books in their historical setting. By comparing and contrasting the heavenly books of the Hebrew scrip-tures with perceptions of earthly books there, our understanding of both is enhanced, especially through intertextual echoes that begin to emerge from juxtapositions of the two types of books.

This chapter examines the vocabulary and function of both earthly and heavenly books and writing in the Hebrew scriptures up to but not includ-ing Daniel in order to come to a richer understanding of the heavenly book motif. Such an examination is important not only for the study of heavenly books in Jewish literature, but also because it appears that Chris-tian writers for the most part inherited attitudes about both their holy and heavenly books from Jewish tradition. While pagan Greco-Roman authors also used the heavenly book motif, and Jews and Christians certainly may

2William A. Graham, on the other hand, hypothesizes that it was the authority of heav-enly books that at least in part gave rise to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic notions of a scriptural book. See Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50.

28 chapter two

have been influenced by that usage, I see little reason in most cases to posit Christian dependence on Greco-Roman rather than on Jewish influ-ences.3 We know that Christians used the Hebrew scriptures (usually in Greek translation) and other early Jewish writings, but evidence for their use of Greco-Roman literature regarding the motif is usually much less clear. That said, I will not hesitate to cite relevant examples of the latter when they illuminate the analysis.

Christian authors, after adopting the motif in their sometimes dense intertextual readings of Jewish literature, adapt it to speak to their new audiences and literary contexts. They do not appear in most cases to mold it in accordance with conceptions of their own contemporary material culture of books and writing. Rather they take over the motif more or less wholesale from Jewish literature, relying on intertextual echoes, immedi-ate literary context, and their own purposes and creativity for variations of the motifs meaning and function. Ancient Jewish literature, for its part, seems to have been influenced by the way Mesopotamian texts por-tray the heavenly tablet(s), depictions of which probably played an impor-tant role in the development of the heavenly book motif in the Hebrew scriptures, most especially regarding the book of fate. Therefore we will examine several important examples of Mesopotamian heavenly books at some length here as well.

The Vocabulary of Book in the Hebrew Scriptures

There are four primary terms that designate concepts in the lexical domain books and writing in the Hebrew scriptures: , , , . These terms can be rendered in various ways in English translations, depending on context. The first, , indicates writing in general. Used as a verb, it is ubiquitous, but as a noun it is relatively rare (29 times, and only late).4 The second, , has the most stable and specific meaning of any of the terms, and it is invariably translated tablet when it appears in

3For a fine theoretical analysis of the use of writing in the Roman world, see Mary Beard, Writing and Religion: Ancient Literacy and the Function of the Written Word in Roman Religion, in Literacy in the Roman World (ed. J. H. Humphrey; Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 3; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1991), 3558. Beard discusses not only how pagan supplicants used writing, but also the implications of Roman gods themselves as writers.

4According to Francis I. Anderson and A. Dean Forbes, The Vocabulary of the Old Testa-ment (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1992), 133, in the form of a noun it appears only in Ezekiel (once), Esther, Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah, and 12 Chronicles.

earthly and heavenly books in hebrew scriptures 29

the context of writing. Outside that context, it means plank of wood or plate of metal (i.e., Exod 27:8; 1 Kings 7:36). Therefore it implies writing that is inscribed and thus relatively permanent, and its most significant usage in the Hebrew scriptures for our purposes is to name the stone tab-lets of the law/testimony written by God (Exod 24:12 fff.). The third, , typically translated scroll, comes from the root , roll, and is attested only 22 times. It appears late, and only in Jeremiah 36, Ezek 2:93:3, Zech 5:12, Ps 40:8, and Ezra 6:2. Interestingly, each of the occurrences of in Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Psalm 40 denotes heavenly books. The fourth, , is the noun most often used to indicate writing, designating the idea of book about 190 times in the Hebrew Bible.5 In its various contexts, it has a wide variety of possible meanings, including letter, deed, writ (i.e., of divorce, in Isa 50:1), and document, as well as book.

But we need to be careful when translating any of the above terms, not only , as book, for our own modern experience of that thing often interferes with accurate perceptions of the ancient meaning of the term. In fact, one could argue that there was no such thing as a book in the Israel-ite period and early Judaism, if by that word one means a codex, a bound volume full of pages written on both sides. Codices, made of papyrus or parchment, not paper, began to appear in the Greco-Roman world only around the second century of the Christian era.6 Writing materials prior to that time were papyrus or parchment scrolls, or stone, wood, or other hard surfaces (tablets) for inscriptions, or ostraca, pieces of broken pot-tery that made for cheap, convenient writing material.7 The English word book is arguably anachronistic as a translation for Hebrew terms deal-ing with written materials.8 Nevertheless, since the term has been used so often in scholarly and other conversation on the topic, it is almost impos-sible to avoid it. I will use it here, but in reading it, one should always bear in mind the caveat noted above.

5Anderson and Forbes, The Vocabulary of the Old Testament, 180. They also note one occurrence of in addition to .

6Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 4966.7Leslie Baynes, Papyrus, in The Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early

Christian Literature (ed. David E. Aune; Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003), 328; Mena-hem Haran, Book-Scrolls at the Beginning of the Second Temple Period: The Transition from Papyrus to Skins, HUCA 54 (1983): 111122; idem, Bible Scrolls in Eastern and West-ern Jewish Communities from Qumran to the High Middle Ages, HUCA 56 (1985): 2162; Andr Lemaire, Ostraca, Semitic, ABD.

8Edgar W. Conrad, Heard But Not Seen: The Representation of Books in the Old Tes-tament, JSOT 54 (1992): 50, 54.

30 chapter two

Functions of Books and Writing in the Hebrew Scriptures

In the Hebrew scriptures books and writing function in many diffferent ways, not all of which will be examined here.9 The parameters of this study dictate limiting analysis specifically to those functions that inform the study of the heavenly book, and they include the following: as an authority, as lists, for remembrance, as witness, as letters, as histories and administrative records, and as prophetic speech acts. Many of these cat-egories are not entirely self-contained, and it is sometimes more than a lit-tle diffficult to seal offf one from the other. But in spite of these challenges, categorizing them in this way yields useful insights not only about the functions of real books as portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures, but also about the functions of the heavenly ones there. The sub-type book of life corresponds to the function of lists, the book of fate to the function of witness, the book of deeds to histories and administrative record-keeping, and the book of action to books theorized as prophetic speech acts. The functions of authority and remembrance are important to each of the sub-types of the motif. The following sections are organized by function, and they will examine earthly examples of a particular function and then the corresponding heavenly books and/or significance for heavenly books.

Divine Writing: Authority and the Tablets of the Law

The paradigmatic example of divine writing in the Hebrew Bible is the tablets of the law or testimony.10 The narratives that relate the creation of these tablets vary, and one of the most important variations is the identity of their writer. Exod 34:2728 claims that Moses wrote them, while Exod 24:12, 31:18, 32:1516, and 34:1 identify their writer as God.11 In an analysis of Jubilees below we will see the influence of the claim that the tablets

9For a treatment of the function of books and writing in the Hebrew scriptures shaped by quite diffferent concerns than this one, see Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word. For a listing of 42 ways in which writing functioned in the ancient world, see William Har-ris, Ancient Literacy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1989), 267.

10In Exod 24:12, these are the tablets of stone and the law and the commandment; in Exod 31:18 two tablets of testimony, tablets of stone, and in Exod 32:15 two tablets of testimony.

11Alan Dundes [Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 101] writes that From these diverse versions, we can conclude that either God Himself or Moses at Gods request wrote down the Ten Commandments. What may be something of a problem for historians or theologians is not a problem for folklorists. Here we have another fine example of multiple existence and variation, the hallmarks of authentic folklore.

earthly and heavenly books in hebrew scriptures 31

writer was Moses. The attribution of authorship to God, however, has also profoundly impacted the development and interpretation of the heavenly book motif.

The tablets in Exod 31:18 are described as written with the finger of God ( ), but technically they are not heavenly books as I defined them in chapter 1. Nowhere does the text mention that they were stored in Gods realm prior to their promulgation to Moses, or that a copy of them remains there for divine or angelic perusal. What is significant about the tablets in 31:18 for this study is that they are intimately, even physically, associated with the Lord, written with the very finger of God, a phrase that later writers echo in their descriptions of heavenly books (i.e., Joseph and Aseneth 15:4, 12; Luke 10:20).12

Exod 31:18 is the only text that claims Gods finger as the instrument of writing the tablets of the law, but 32:16 does assert that the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God. This writing is further described as being on the front and on the back of the tab-lets (Exod 32:15), a description several later authors apply to heavenly books (i.e., Ezek 2:93:3, Zech 5:14, Rev 5:1). In making the claim that God wrote the tablets, which are the source of authoritative law for the ancient Israelites, Exodus asserts the absolutely unimpeachable author-ity of their torah. The fact that the tablets come from God and form the basis for Israels covenant with him makes them natural models for later heavenly books.

In Exod 34:27, on the other hand, the Lord directs Moses to put words to stone, and 34:28 confirms that Moses did so. Of the several texts that describe the tablets inscription, 34:2728 is the only one that portrays Moses as writer. That fact is surprising particularly in light of 34:1, wherein God says that he will inscribe the second set of tablets as he did the first set. This transfer of the stylus to Moses may have been at least partially responsible for later imaginative reassessments of his character, where he

12This intimate physical connection between the Lord and the heavenly tablets via the finger of God is operative only within the worldview of what one might call divine anthropomorphology. Notably, the Septuagint retains the image of written with the finger of God ( ). The LXXs attitude toward the anthropomorphisms it encountered in its Hebrew Vorlage has been debated, with some arguing that the LXX tended to eliminate them due to anti-anthropomorphism, and others disputing that point. See Karen H. Jobes and Moiss Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000), 9495, and Leonard Greenspoon, Hebrew into Greek: Interpretation In, By, and Of the Septuagint in A History of Biblical Interpretation (eds. Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson; Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2003), 967.

32 chapter two

is transformed into almost a Thoth-like scribal figure. For example, by the second century B.C.E., Eupolemus envisioned Moses as the giver of the alphabet.13 Artapanus, an Egyptian Jew of the first century B.C.E., claimed that Moses developed hieroglyphs, and that the Egyptians called him Hermes because of his facility in interpreting them.14 The most important thing concerning Moses ancient identity as writer and lawgiver for the purposes of this study, however, is what happens to him in other Second Temple Jewish texts. In the book of Jubilees he takes dictation from the Angel of the Presence, who is himself reading from the heavenly tablets.15 In the first century of the common era, the apocalyptic scribe and seer Ezra in 4 Ezra 14 is portrayed as a new Moses when he transcribes not only the law, but a large corpus of Hebrew literature (94 books, 24 for pub-lic consumption and 70 for the wise), instructed by the spirit of God and inspired by a stifff drink. Thus Moses gradually joins the ranks of exalted scribal figures with deep connections to heavenly books.

Lists and the Book of Life

The first appearance of any term in the lexical domain books and writing in a sequential reading of the Hebrew scriptures is in Gen 5:1, the or list (NRSV) of the descendents of Adam.16 The keeping of lists of people, whether they be genealogies, citizenship lists, or military lists, is wide-spread throughout the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world in general,17 and in the guise of the book of life, it is the primary sub-type of the heav-enly book motif. For that reason it is important to look more closely at how lists function in the Hebrew Bible.

Genealogies are an important type of list in the Hebrew scriptures. Although oral genealogies no doubt were widespread in Israelite cul-ture, from their first appearance in Gen 5:1 as a , they are

13Eupolemus, Fragment 1 (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.23.153.4 and Eusebius Prep. ev. 9.25.426.1) in Fragments from Hellenistic Greek Authors: Volume 1: Historians, ed. Carl R. Holladay (SBL Texts and Translations 20 [Pseudepigrapha 10]; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 11213.

14Artapanus, Fragment 3.4, 6, in Holladay, Fragments from Hellenistic Greek Authors, 1: 21011.

15Jubilees 1:29; 2:1. See James C. VanderKam, The Angel of the Presence in the Book of Jubilees, DSD 7.3 (2000): 37893; James C. VanderKam, The Puta