Aphrodite and the Rabbis

by Burton L. Visotzky

  The recipe for a successful symposium starts, of course, with wine. At least three cups, preferably more, and ideally you would need between three and five famous guests. Macrobius describes a symposium at which he imagined all the guests drinking together, even though some were already long dead. They eat hors d’oeuvres, which they dip into a briny sauce. Their appetite is whetted by sharp vegetables, radishes, or romaine lettuce. The Greek word for these veggies is karpos. Each food is used as a prompt to dig through one’s memory to find apposite bookish quotes about it. The writer Athenaeus (who was actually born in Egypt and lived in Rome, his name notwithstanding) cites two hundred works of literature, many long lost to us except by his mention of their having been quoted during his long cocktail party. Above all, guests at a symposium love to quote Homer, the divine Homer. Quoting his work was, to them, like a Baptist preacher quoting the Bible or an English major spouting Shakespeare. It showed you were well schooled.

  As the main course was brought in on platters, more wine was mixed with water. Civilized Romans considered it uncouth to drink their wine neat. Instead, they added a good splash of water, warm if the wine needed a little help in bringing out its bouquet. If you were fancy, you served the wine over ice or snow, not an easy thing to have on hand in Late Antiquity. Think of the snow cone as the epitome of classiness. If the wine was wretched, well, they added sugar (now think of Manischewitz). Alcohol in antiquity was limited to wine or beer—no one figured out how to distill hard alcohol until the high Middle Ages. To kick off a symposium, a libation was poured to Bacchus. Then the dinner guests took their places reclining on pillows, leaning on their left arms, and using their right hands to eat. Of course, they washed their fingers before eating their Mediterranean flatbreads, scooping up meats and poultry—no forks back then.

  Athenaeus records a debate about dessert, a sweet paste of fruit, wine, and spices. Many think it a nice digestive, but Athenaeus quotes Heracleides of Tarentum, who argues that such a lovely dish ought to be the appetizer, eaten at the outset of the meal. After the sumptuous meal and the endless quotation of texts (recalled by mnemonic devices), the symposium diners sang their hymns of thanksgiving to the gods. Then, the burlesque show began. Scantily clad women called “flute girls” did what they did best (hint: it did not actually involve wind instruments), while vaudevillians worked the room for vulgar laughs. The signal for the descent into debauchery was intoned in Greek: api komias—to the comedians!

  All of this should seem suspiciously familiar to anyone who has ever attended a Passover Seder. The traditional Seder begins with a cup of wine, and blessings to God are intoned. Then hands are washed in preparation for eating the dipped vegetables, called karpos, the Greek word faithfully transliterated into Hebrew in the Passover Haggadah. Like the symposiasts, Jews dip in brine. The traditional Haggadah recalls who was there at the earliest Seders: Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Aqiba, and Rabbi Tarphon (a Hebraized version of the Greek name Tryphon). The conversation is prompted by noting the foods that are served and by asking questions whose answers quote sacred Scripture.

  There is more. Traditionally the Passover banquet is eaten leaning on the left side, on pillows. Appetites are whetted by bitter herbs and then sweetened by the pastelike Haroset (following the opinion of Heracleides of Tarentum?). Seder participants even scoop up food in flatbread. Following the Passover meal there are hymns to God.

  But the rabbis drew the line at vaudeville: no flute girls, no comedians. Indeed, the Mishnah instructs, “We do not end the meal after eating the paschal lamb by departing api komias.” That final phrase, thanks to the Talmud of Jewish Babylonia, where they did not know Greek, has come to be Hebraized as “afi-komen,” the hidden piece of matzo eaten for dessert. But in Roman Palestinian they define the term quite accurately: “Api komias refers to comedians.” As long ago as 1957, Siegfried Stein wrote the authoritative “The Influence of Symposia Literature on the Literary Form of the Pesah Haggadah.” It seems that the reason this night is different from all other nights is that the rabbis adopted the structure of the Greco-Roman symposium banquet for the Jewish feast of freedom, perhaps at the end of the first century CE.

  This quoting of texts and placing books at the center of the rabbinic enterprise is a reflection of the Greco-Roman culture in which the rabbis lived. In the Passover Seder, the rabbis frequently quoted from the Bible. Furthermore, the ways in which they selectively quoted and interpreted set the course for their readings of Scripture for centuries to come. The elucidations that the rabbis offered for Scripture employ the same methods of interpretation that the Alexandrian Greeks did when they read Homer and, later, as the Sophists did in construing Greco-Roman law using those rules of understanding. I have already quoted from Libanius’s textbook teaching his students how to be effective lawyers and orators by using a chreia. The rabbis employed the same skill set to advocate for Jewish law and sway the hearts and minds of the Jews toward their interpretations of the Torah and Judaism.

  My teacher Professor Saul Lieberman wrote back in the 1940s and ’50s about the rabbis’ regular use of Greco-Roman interpretive strategies in their Midrash (Scriptural interpretation). He lists a broad range of Greek terms and styles that the rabbis shared. In some instances Professor Lieberman even suggests that the rabbis adopted these methods directly from the Greeks and Romans. When the Alexandrians read Homer and were stumped by a difficult term, they often used another verse of the Iliad or Odyssey to unlock the opaque first verse. Lieberman calls this interpreting Scripture by Scripture. There is a lovely example in the Passover Haggadah that aptly illustrates the method.

  There is a difficult phrase in Deuteronomy 26:5, which is the beginning of the story of the Exodus in the Passover ritual. In English we tend to translate the verse so that it makes sense: “We went down to Egypt . . . few in number.” But the Hebrew text, b’metai m’at, is obscure and difficult. The word for “few” is: m’at. The other Hebrew word in the phrase, b’metai, assuredly does not mean “in number,” no matter how well it works in English. I lean toward translating the entire phrase more accurately, as “mortals few,” guessing the word b’metai shares the Hebrew root met, which means “corpse.” My translation of Deuteronomy 26:5 would read, “We went down to Egypt . . . mortals few.”

  So how does the Haggadah interpret Scripture by Scripture? It pairs Deuteronomy 26:5 with Deuteronomy 10:22, “with seventy persons (nefesh) did your ancestors descend to Egypt.” The explanation of the difficult term comes in the juxtaposition itself. The word “few” in Deuteronomy 26:5 is presumed to be equivalent to “seventy” of the other verse. The latter verse’s word “persons” then defines the difficult term b’metai, which is why I translated it as “mortals.”

  For the Greeks, another way of “solving” difficult passages of Homer was to use that most Alexandrian of interpretive techniques: allegory. In allegory, the interpreter is essentially saying, “this means that.” When my high school teacher explained Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, she pointed out that the old fisherman Santiago is allegorically understood as a Christ figure. His hands bleed, he carries the mast as Jesus carried his cross, and so on. We are able to understand Hemingway’s old fisherman as Jesus, “fisher of men,” so long as we can say “this means that.”

  We also can see the method at work in the Passover Haggadah, where verses from Deuteronomy 26:7 are read with this lens. The method of interpretation is pure Greek allegory: “This means that.”

  “God saw our affliction” this means that God saw the separation of husbands from their wives. . . .

  . . . “and our burden” this means the sons who were thrown into the Nile. . . .

  . . . “and our pressure” this means the Egyptians’ oppression of us.

  These methods of interpretation persist throughout rabbinic midrashic readings of the Bible. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, rabb
inic interpretation of Scripture became urgent; the absence of the sacrificial cult that figures so prominently throughout the Five Books of Moses required that these biblical passages be reinterpreted. Other passages needed explication so that observance of Torah law might continue. The rabbis established a virtual cottage industry of interpreting the Bible. Midrash—rabbinic interpretation of the Bible—was the calling card of their movement. Masters and disciples studied the sacred text and reread it with a keen eye toward proving its eternal relevance.

  The earliest rabbis compiled lists of rules for interpretation. Their debt to Roman modes of interpretation is palpable. One famous list begins with two rules that were patently taken from the world of Roman rhetoric. The first of those is reasoning from minor premise to major premise. Let me give you two examples of how it works, one from the Passover Haggadah and a second relating to Passover observance.

  In the Haggadah we count and recount the many marvels God wrought during the Exodus from Egypt. We list each miracle individually, and we sing “Dayyenu,” which means “it would have been enough.” The point is sweet: any one of those miracles would have been awesome and amazing, how much the more so all of the many miracles of the Exodus and the miracles during the years of wandering in the wilderness. The key to understanding this passage comes in the phrase “how much the more so.” We have gone from the minor/weaker—one single miracle—to the major/stronger—a whole heap of miracles. If we are grateful for one, a fortiori, we are grateful to God for the many, many miracles God bestowed upon the Jewish people. Did you catch my use of Latin there? A fortiori means “to the major/stronger.” You can see it relates to the rule of interpretation from minor to major, or from weak to strong, by looking at the Latin root “fort” (think: fortitude). A fortiori reasoning was a principle of Roman rhetoric.

  Here is another example, this one about observing the detailed rules of Passover. Let us reason from minor to major. If on the Passover holiday it is permitted to cook, still, an observant Jew is not permitted to write on the holiday. How much the more so on Shabbat, when it is not permitted to cook, it is not permitted to write! A fortiori; q.e.d. (quod erat demonstrandum = thus it has been demonstrated).

  We move on to the second rule borrowed from Greco-Roman rhetoric, called in Hebrew gezera shavah, “an equation of equals.” You can take my word that this phrase is awkward Hebrew. It is a rather literal translation of the Greek term taught by our friend Libanius: syngkrisis pros ison, which means an “equation of equals.” As a rule for interpretation, it is pretty sensible. If you don’t know what a given word means in one context, find it elsewhere and infer from the second context what it means in the first place. The earliest rabbis are somewhat restrained in their uses of this interpretive method. Here’s an example of how they interpreted the Deuteronomy 26 passage we’ve been quoting from the Passover Haggadah:

  “And the Egyptians oppressed us” (Deut. 26:6). As it is said, “So they put task masters over them in order to oppress them with their burdens, that they build garrison cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses.” (Ex. 1:11)

  How do we know what it meant when Deuteronomy said that Egypt oppressed the Israelites? We look to a passage in Exodus that uses the same term for “oppression” and provides some details for interpretation. The “oppression” is understood as building garrison cities for Egypt. This is a way of interpreting Scripture with Scripture, but also specifically zeroing in on a common word the two verses share. That’s the comparison of equals.

  Later rabbis, bless their hearts, got absolutely slap-happy finding the same Hebrew verbal root all over the Bible and then inferring all kinds of stuff from one context to the next. So long as two verses shared a word in common, those rabbis asserted that they were actually about the same thing. You can appreciate how radical a means of interpretation this could be when the rabbis blithely say that verse A has the word “to” in it, and verse B has the word “to” in it, hence they must be talking about the same thing. Wow, using this method you can make anything mean anything you want it to. Cool, but perhaps a bit scary when we realize that the rabbis are making restrictive rulings about what Jews can and cannot do—Jewish law. By the fourth century, the rabbis themselves decided to call a halt to this type of radical interpretation; it was too slippery a slope.

  The rabbis were more comfortable invoking Greek rules for interpreting Scripture when the material was nonlegal (aggadic), and so the stakes didn’t seem quite so high. They were sufficiently relaxed that they called these interpretive techniques by their original Greek names. We will briefly review two: geometria (related to the term geometry) and notarikon (like a notary public).

  In geometria, and this is equally true in Greek or Hebrew, each letter has a numerical value. If this worked in English, we’d say that a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4, e=5, and so on. So the word “cab” would have a value of 6 (3+1+2), while “dad” would have a value of 9 and so be “equivalent to “Ed” (you can do the math). In Greek α=1, β=2, γ=3, et cetera. In Hebrew a=1, b=2, g=3, so that in Hebrew the word for father, Abba (aba), adds up to 4 (1+2+1). How does it work in Scriptural interpretation? An example from the fifth-century Genesis Rabbah (42:2) comments on the curious fact that in Genesis 14:14, Abraham hears that his nephew has been taken captive and rides out to his rescue with 318 warriors. And so, you really have to ask: where did they all come from?

  Rabbi Shim’on ben Laqish says, “It was Abraham’s servant Eliezer, all by himself; for the numerical value of the name Eliezer equals 318 (a=1; l=30; y= 10; c=70; z=7; d=200)!”

  Thanks to geometria we can now imagine Abraham and his servant Eliezer riding off to do battle, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

  And what about that other Greek method, notarikon? It presumes that each word is, in fact, shorthand, a series of acronyms forming a new amalgam, like “scuba” (=Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) or “CentCom” (=Central Command). The notarius was the Greek shorthand writer who served as court reporter and recorded verbatim an ad-lib speech. If one assumes that words of Scripture can be read as such, then through notarikon we might assume that the first word of the Torah, beresheet (“In the beginning”), is a form of shorthand and may be divided into two constituent words: bara sheet. If we translate these Hebrew and Aramaic words, as did the rabbis, we may conclude that God created (bara) six (sheet) things before God created anything else.

  Earlier, when I was describing the Passover Seder and the symposium, I mentioned that at some point during the symposium, before it descended into debauchery, the narrator summarized the evening’s discussions and quotations using mnemonic or memory devices. In the Passover Haggadah, when the ten plagues are enumerated, Rabbi Yehudah recalls them by means of such a memory device. It says in Hebrew that he used simanim. The singular is siman, which is simply a transliteration of the Greek word seimeion, a sign or mnemonic. We use the word in English, too. English majors will recognize the word semiotic. Sailors will wave the flag in semaphore. The code succinctly delivers the longer message.

  The symposium, of course, frequently quoted from what the Greeks called “the divine Homer.” Indeed, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were central to the entire Greco-Roman canon. Greeks did not, perhaps, afford the esteem to Homer that Jews show to the Torah scroll. However, Homer’s poems were the texts that were used in teaching Greek reading, grammar, and spelling. Homer was memorized by students, and the myths of Homer pervaded the culture. Interpreting Homer was what gave the Alexandrian commentators something to do each day at their famous library.

  The very methods the Alexandrians used for understanding Homer’s works became the methods the rabbis themselves used to interpret the Bible. Yes, the rabbis adapted the reading strategies of the Greeks to read and interpret their own Hebrew canon. To say this another way: the rabbis read the Bible through the lenses of their own time. Furthermore, the division of Homer’s epics the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books
each was the inspiration for the rabbis’ creatively enumerating the Hebrew Bible as twenty-four books.

  Homer and his books were the premier example that rabbis used when referring to works of Greek literature. Indeed, the rabbis grappled with Homer’s status in their own community. The Mishnah refers to him explicitly in a debate they imagined taking place between the ancient Sadducees and Pharisees on the canonical status of Scripture. The Mishnah teaches:

  The Saducees say: We complain against you Pharisees, for you say that sacred Scripture renders one’s hands unfit, yet the books of Homer do not! . . . Rabbi Yohanan explained that as they are revered, so is their ability to render unfit. The Bible, which is revered, renders the hands unfit; while the works of Homer are not revered, so they do not render hands unfit. (Yadayim 4:6)