The Book of Daniel and Sibylline Oracles

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rgprice
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The Book of Daniel and Sibylline Oracles

Post by rgprice »

The book of Daniel today is fairly well understood. We know that the work was composed in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. We also know that the work was originally written in the second century BCE, with the intention of deceiving readers into believing that it was written during the Babylonian era, around three hundred years prior to its actual date of authorship. We also know that this ruse in fact worked and that readers did believe it was much older than it really was. Most famously, Josephus talks about the prophecies of Daniel and also recounts a story about how the book was shown to Alexander the great, some one or two hundred years before it was actually composed.

Then we have the Jewish Sibylline Oracles. We also know that these were produced around the second century BCE with the intention of deceiving people into thinking that they were much, much older. And again, there is strong evidence to indicate that people were actually taken in by these works and thought that they were actual ancient Sibylline prophecies. Many scholars conclude that Virgil's 4th Eclogue was likely based on a Jewish Sibylline Oracle. Several scholars also find it likely that when the Sibylline library was re-built after it was destroyed in the first century BCE, that Jewish Sibylline Oracles were integrated into the Roman collection.

Given these observations, we have to consider the likelihood that the Pentateuch itself was produced in this same manner with similar motivations. It is now widely accepted that the book of Daniel and the Sibylline Oracles were essentially fraudulent works. The writers made conscious efforts to deceive readers into misunderstanding the provenance of the works. The writers wanted readers to think that the writings were written by people other than who actually wrote them and they wanted readers to think that the works were older than they really were.

Undoubtedly the writers of the other Jewish we all also doing the same thing. And I must stress that this would not be unique to Jewish works. The same was the case with essentially all ancient religious writings. The same was true of Orphic works, Homeric works, and of course Sibylline works. It was all fraud all the time.

So, it seems to be that so much of the analysis of the Pentateuch fails to take into account the possibility that certain features of the text were intentionally created in order to deceive the reader.
Russell Gmirkin
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Re: The Book of Daniel and Sibylline Oracles

Post by Russell Gmirkin »

Of course my Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible discusses at length Plato's strategy by which the citizens of a new nation must be persuaded by any means possible that their laws were of ancient, divine origin, unchanged since distant times, like the highly successful constitutions of Sparta and other nations. This involved inventing a foundation story in distant times, in line with the "noble lie" in Republic whereby rulers could tell lies about events in distant times for the benefit of the state, such as his Athenian mythology of the four metals. The Pentateuch is a prime example of the "noble lie" (or noble fiction) in action.

I discuss the "Oracles Against the Nations" as influenced by the Sibylline Oracles in my article “Jeremiah, Plato and Socrates: Greek Antecedents to the Book of Jeremiah” in Jim West and Niels Peter Lemche (eds.), Jeremiah in History and Tradition (Copenhagen International Seminar; London: Routledge, 2020), 21-48. For your convenience, but with footnotes omitted:

Jeremiah and the Oracles Against the Nations

The well-known biblical genre conventionally called the Oracles Against the Nations (OAN) appear prominently in the later chapters of Jeremiah and are poorly integrated with narrative passages. The OAN of Jeremiah appeared in different order and were located in different chapters in the MT (Jer. 27, 46-51) and Septuagint (Jer. 25-32), showing the loose connection of the OAN with that prophetic text.

Oracles Against the Nations consisted of collections of prophecies directed against a variety of foreign nations, cities and peoples that included both Judah’s immediate neighbors and distant empires with whom Judah historically had interactions. The OAN, which appear in most of the Prophets, once circulated independently as a distinct genre of Jewish literature. Some OAN appear in more than one of the Prophets, often in altered form. Many of the OAN are substantially free from Pentateuchal content, including virtually the entirety of the minor prophets Nahum, Habakkuk and Obadiah, as well as substantial portions of Isa. 13-23; Jer. 46-51 and Ezek. 25-31. It is thus likely that the OAN as a genre, including some of those found in Jeremiah, pre-date the Pentateuch of ca. 270 BCE.

Greek books of prophecy containing loose collections of prophecies against foreign nations were written down in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE and attributed to Bakis or to the Sibyls, legendary figures of the distant past. Many scholars have noted the striking resemblance of the Sibylline Oracles to the OAN, but a direct influence between the OAN and the Sibylline Oracles—in either direction—has universally been ruled out due to the presumed antiquity of the OAN. The same is true for the oracles of Bakis. With Alexander’s conquests, it is certain that Sibylline oracles became known in the east. It is entirely possible that the Jews were also exposed to the genre of Sibylline literature in the period ca. 325–270 BCE and began to produce examples of the same type in the form of the earliest OAN directed against their immediate neighbors.

Nothing in any of the OAN indicates a date before the conquests of Alexander. This is consistent with an understanding of this genre as having originated in the period 325-270 BCE, prior to the composition of the Pentateuch. The broad character of the OAN directed against Moab, Ammon, Edom and other neighboring territories does not appear to indicate a specific date of composition. In one instance, namely the predictions against Tyre at Ezek. 26, the failure of the prophecy appears to positively indicate a date of 332 BCE, at the outset of the Hellenistic Era in the midst of the siege of Tyre. Other OAN in Jeremiah and Ezekiel appear to have been written—or perhaps reapplied—in such a way as to suggest literary dependence on Berossus’ Babyloniaca, indicating a date after 278 BCE and probably after ca. 270 BCE. Several OAN contained allusions taken from the Primary History that suggest authorship or revision after ca. 270 BCE. These include several OAN found in Jeremiah. In summary, the OAN of Jeremiah represents an authoritative older pre-Pentateuchal literary genre influenced by the Sibylline Oracles that the authors of Jeremiah drew upon and lightly reworked. Despite dating to the Hellenistic Era, they represent some of Jeremiah’s oldest source material.

The attribution of ancient authorship to recent works was a common literary strategy in the Greek world, of which the Sibylline Oracles is but one example. This is also seen in the pseudepigrapha (unless you believe Enoch wrote the books of Enoch) and in the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible (where virtually all of the Prophets are dated to the Hellenistic Era, with some minor exceptions).
rgprice
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Re: The Book of Daniel and Sibylline Oracles

Post by rgprice »

My point is that we know that Jewish writers, in the creation of various works, employed a variety of techniques, including the use of older languages and switching back and fourth between what appears to be different styles or perspectives, along with the inclusion of references to official documents, either fabricated or authentic. All of this was done to make works appear to have an older provenance than was actually the case. Efforts were made to intentionally obscure the true authors. We know for a fact that writers of religious and prophetic literature, Jews and non-Jews alike, made significant efforts to obscure the true authorship and make works appear older than they really were. So, this has to be take into account when we look at the Pentateuch as well. It cannot be assumed that all of these various features of the work are simply naïve editorial features that are products of innocent authorial practices. Some of these feature surely are the product of intentional obfuscation.
Last edited by rgprice on Mon Dec 05, 2022 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
Russell Gmirkin
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Re: The Book of Daniel and Sibylline Oracles

Post by Russell Gmirkin »

I agree.
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