ReViews
The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho: Geological, Climatological, and Archaeological Background
David Neev and K. O. Emery
(New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 175 pp., $35
The Bible’s spectacular accounts of the annihilation of Jericho and of Sodom and Gomorrah have encouraged much speculation over the years. Is it possible that natural catastrophes were responsible for the destruction of these cities? The Bible tells us only that “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire … and he overthrew those cities” (Genesis 19:24–25); at Jericho, “The people shouted, and the trumpets were blown … and the wall fell down flat” (Joshua 6:20).
In this curious book, two geologists claim to have solved the riddle of the destruction of all three cities. Their solution is straightforward. They have noticed that the Dead Sea lies smack in the middle of a geological rift that extends from Turkey to the Red Sea, and that earthquakes occur along this rift (or strike-slip fault as the geologists call it). Thus, they brilliantly conclude that earthquakes destroyed Sodom, Gomorrah and Jericho.
Among their jargon-filled discussions of hydrogeology and bathythermograph measurements and relative Bouguer gravity anomalies and gamma-ray logs, the authors suggest that the earthquake that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah occured toward the end of the Early Bronze Age III (c. 2350 B.C.E.) and measured more than 7.0 on the Richter scale. They admit, however, that they don’t really know where Sodom and Gomorrah were. Moreover, they don’t have actual evidence for a major earthquake at this time. Nevertheless, the authors trudge on with their speculations. The rain of sulfur and fire was a “product of light fractions of hydrocarbons escaping from underground reservoirs and igniting upon reaching the surface.” Jericho was no doubt destroyed in the same earthquake, which also dammed up the Jordan River for several days. All of these events were misremembered in the Biblical traditions, which naively attributed these ancient geological events to acts of God.
What is wrong with this analysis? First, the authors have no historical or scientific data to link the tectonic theory with the Biblical texts. Second, they hold a very crude understanding of Biblical narrative as primitive science, which they translate into scientific terms as rather dull geology. Third, they don’t have control of the archaeological data or scholarly literature, and they make numerous errors in discussing archaeological sites and theories.
Are the Biblical narratives of Sodom, Gomorrah and Jericho primitive memories of geological events, made by people who had no “scientific appreciation of cause and effect”? Maybe, but maybe not. This book has little of substance to say on this issue, and it says it in execrable prose.
Hypatia of Alexandria
Maria Dzielska, trans. by F. Lyra
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995) 159 pp., $29.95.
Hypatia was a philosopher and scientist, of great note in her own time, who was murdered in 415 C.E. at the instigation of the bishop of her city, Cyril of Alexandria. She lived and worked in that cosmopolitan center and succeeded to the university chair that her father, Theon, had held at the famed ancient library.
Hypatia has been the subject of an enormous literature, almost without exception celebrating her in elegiac expressions of praise and idealization. Maria Dzielska has finally brought us definitive and sober research into who that grand historic figure really was, the circumstances of her life and scholarship, and the dynamics that led to her death. We shall be permanently indebted to Dzielska for her thorough research and for her highly readable book. The idolization of Hypatia may now be put to rest.
Dzielska gives a detailed account of the philosophical and scientific community that formed around Hypatia by 390 C.E. She was well loved, wise, virtuous, intellectually and spiritually vigorous and attractive. An effective scholar and professor, Hypatia represented an obstacle to Cyril’s dogmatic power to spread Orthodox Christianity.
Hypatia stood solidly in the tradition of Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry, both in her philosophy and in her piety and virtuous spirituality. She wrote numerous texts in mathematics, philosophy, physics and metaphysics. She edited and prepared for publication her father’s scientific writings and coauthored a number of them. She designed an astrolabe and a hydroscope.
For Hypatia and her colleagues, evil was merely the function of the distance from the divine ideal, but moral dysfunction was an issue of volition and a breach of integrity. The soul, as for Plato, was considered immortal; it is destined to be transformed into the divine image and united with the divine Absolute. The purpose of existence and experience, therefore, was aesthetic: the achievement of the good, true and beautiful.
Dzielska successfully examines the ancient sources and the manner in which they have subsequently been used in medieval and modern literature and identifies romantic exaggerations where they appear. For example, she cogently argues that the notion that Hypatia, at the time of her death, was a model young female in the prime of her beauty is hardly true, and conclusively demonstrates that she was born in 355 C.E. and not in 370, as Edward Gibbon claimed, or 390, as others have suggested. She was murdered at the age of 60. It is also clear from Dzielska’s research that Hypatia’s death was not the end of pagan culture or of neoplatonism or Hellenistic philosophy. They continued apace for another 300 years, reached their greatest success at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries, became Christianized and have insinuated themselves in many ways into the Western tradition.
Dzielska’s reconstruction of the circumstances of Hypatia’s death are persuasive and satisfying. In October 412, a new bishop for Alexandria was named. Cyril’s harsh authoritarianism provoked resentment among the city’s pagans as well as among the Jews, who feared his partisan dogmatism, and among the more liberal-minded Christian party, which had wanted another candidate, Timothy, for bishop. The supporters of Timothy had the backing of the military. War broke out between the two sides. Cyril incited his followers to mob violence and he won the day, as he so often would throughout his ecclesiastical life.
Next he turned against the Jews. He called their leaders together and threatened them. They resisted and even carried out ambushes against Christians. The conflict resulted in plunder and destruction of Jewish property and the expulsion of Jews from the city. The governor of Alexandria, Orestes, a baptized Christian and friend of Hypatia, resisted Cyril and reported him to the emperor. Cyril enlisted the mobs, led by his employees and assisted by fanatic monks, who accosted Orestes in public and wounded him.
Cyril’s party feared Hypatia’s influence, which extended beyond Alexandria as far as Athens, Antioch and Constantinople, both inside and outside the ranks of the highest leadership of the church and the empire. Because of her transcendental spirituality and interest in astronomy and astrology, Hypatia was accused of being a witch. One of Cyril’s followers, named Peter, raised a mob in the streets of Alexandria, at the core of which, apparently, was a group of Cyril’s “enforcers,” called the Parabolans. Dzielska writes: “Led by Peter, a mob executed the deed on a day in March 415 … during Lent. Hypatia was returning home, through a street whose name is unknown to us, from her customary ride in the city. She was pulled out of the chariot and dragged to the church Caesarion, a former temple of the emperor cult. There they tore off her clothes and killed her with broken bits of pottery. They then hauled her body outside the city to a place called Kinaron, to burn it on a pyre of sticks … the killing of a witch was but the fulfillment of the common will of the Christians and of God himself.” For Cyril this was murder for a higher political purpose.
Dzielska concludes that Cyril must be held accountable for much: “For there is no doubt that he was a chief instigator of the campaign of defamation against Hypatia, fomenting prejudice and animosity against the woman philosopher.”
If you are a historian, Greco-Roman scholar, Egyptologist, anthropologist, psychologist, theologian or a thoughtful person in any field who likes a good read, sell your bed and buy this book!
Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Vol. XIV, Qumran Cave 4—IX: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings
Eugene Ulrich, Frank Cross, et al.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 [published May 1996]) 188 pp., 37 plates in black and white. $105.00
Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Vol. XIX, Qumran Cave 4—XIV: Parabiblical Texts, Part 2
Various authors, in consultation with James VanderKam
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 [published May 1996]) 267 pp., 29 plates in black and white. $125.00
As volume after volume of Dead Sea Scrolls keeps coming off the Clarendon Press in what seems like increasingly rapid succession, one gets the feeling that we are nearing the end—or at least the beginning of the end. Which leads me to what may be regarded as an obtuse thought: When are new scrolls going to surface? They are assuredly out there. Just how many exist is unclear. While the number of intact scrolls is probably small, the number of fragments probably reaches to the hundreds, if not the thousands.
As I watch the dedicated scholars who have meticulously prepared the little pieces that comprise the two volumes under review, struggling to fill gaps and complete lines, I cannot help but wonder what answers are easily available elsewhere that might provide just the needed fit—fragments that are in private hands, unknown to the scholarly world. How to bring them to light? How to induce the private collectors who secretly admire them to allow everyone else to look at them?
A second somewhat obtuse thought: Isn’t there some easier way to study the paleography of these scripts? More than 35 years ago, Harvard professor Frank Cross wrote the seminal article—a mere 48-pages, plus seven script charts and notes—on how to date these scripts by examining the shape, form and stance of the letters.1 This is still the paleographical bible. Indeed, there is not even a major supplement or update. With few exceptions, every author of these volumes acknowledges indebtedness to this article—and only this article—for his or her paleographical analysis.
Yet after 35 years and the flowering of the computer age, scholars are still doing their paleographical analysis by hand, spending untold hours analyzing what I suspect could be done almost as accurately with a computer. Or am I wrong? Is it worth trying to devise a system and test it?
Volume XIV publishes fragmentary Biblical texts in the hope that they will provide more secure readings of the Bible and help to trace the complex history of the Biblical text. Preparing these publications is detailed work. I suspect that the authors, like the reader, are looking forward to the time when more implications can be drawn from the basic evidence presented here. But this work must first be done to provide a firm basis for later analysis.
Volume XIX is the second of four projected volumes of what the editors call parabiblical texts, works that are closely related to texts or themes of the Bible. Some are previously known (like Tobit, of which five exemplars were found at Qumran); others were previously unknown (for example, a list of false prophets, an apocryphon of Moses, part of a collection describing the life of the prophet Jeremiah and an autobigraphical narrative attributed to the prophet Ezekiel).
The volume concludes with a helpful concordance that will enable scholars to locate any word in a particular fragment.
Ohel Hayim Vol. Two: Biblical Manuscripts
(New York: Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation, 1990) 440 pp. Available from Manfred R. Lehmann, 250 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
The title of this volume of biblical manuscripts from the Manfred and Anne Lehmann collection is a play on words. It means both the tent of life and the tent of Hayim. The book is dedicated to the memory of their son Hayim, who died in 1982 at the age of 32. Thus the Hayim in the title refers both to their son and to life.
Manfred Lehmann learned about buying Torah scrolls (the Five Books of Moses) from his father. As early as 1934, the elder Lehmann was offered 300 Torah scrolls that had been confiscated from Jewish communities during the Russian revolution. The Soviet government was strapped for cash and was willing to sell. Lehmann bought the whole collection and distributed them to Jewish communities, both in the United States and in what would later be Israel.
Four years later, shortly after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis went on a rampage and destroyed synagogues and Jewish stores, the elder Lehmann was contacted by the rabbi of a small synagogue in Hamburg that had somehow miraculously escaped destruction. The rabbi asked Lehmann to take the synagogue’s Torah scrolls to save them from the Nazis. Lehmann took to Sweden not only the Torahs but also the rest of the synagogue furninshings and “reconstituted” them in a new synagogue in Stockholm.
His son Manfred has been collecting Hebrew manuscripts for over 20 years, the result, he says in his introduction, of his father’s influence. The volume under review comprises the Biblical manuscripts in his very large and impressive collection. They include Yemenite, Spanish, German, Italian, Babylonian, Tiberian and North African exemplars, almost all fragmentary. Two other volumes cover Kabbalistic manuscripts and early printed Hebrew books.
Eventually, these manuscripts are likely to go to a museum. But even now the photographs and transcriptions in this volume make them available to scholars and the interested public.
One can almost feel Lehmann’s love for these manuscripts exuding from the pages of this finely produced volume. For some scholars and archaeologists, every collector is a pariah, someone who encourages looting and the illegal antiquities market. Instead of vilifying collectors, the profession would do better to encourage collectors to catalog their treasures and make them available to the public, as Manfred Lehmann has so elegantly done.