Legal engagement
| , ,Law and self-perception
“Barbarians” judge the law
The rabbis on the uncivil law of Rome
Résumé
In the ancient and late antique world, various peoples engaged in competitive ethnic apologetics. In so doing, they drew on central tropes of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy, first formulated by the Greeks, which valorized law as the definitive mark of a civilized people and bulwark against barbarian savagery. Invoking familiar tropes of the “barbarian repertoire” (described by Kostas Vlassopoulos), ancient and late antique writers adopted a double strategy of apologetics and redirection, defending themselves against the charge of barbarism and redirecting it on to their accusers. Palestinian rabbis participated in this competitive ethnic apologetics in two ways. First, they defended themselves from the charge of barbarism by neutralizing violent elements of biblical death penalty law. Specifically, they “barbarized” the stubborn and rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21, and they imported substantive and conceptual elements from Roman law in order to conform biblical executions to the Roman standard of a dignified and aesthetically pleasing death. Second, they redirected the charge of barbarism onto Rome through ironic narratives focused on the savagery of Roman emperors.
Entrées d'index
Keywords :
Barbarian, apologetics, other, Rome, law, Roman law, Jewish law, Palestinian rabbis, stubborn and rebellious son, death penalty, executionTexte intégral
- 1 Berkowitz 2006, p. 154.
1In her study of the rabbinic laws of execution, Beth Berkowitz argues that the rabbis attempted to reverse the conditions of Roman power relative to Jewish powerlessness, and in so doing to “redefine who is a barbarian and who is civilized”.1 This study builds on that important insight and argues that Romans and Palestinian rabbis in the first centuries of the Common Era participated in a broad and competitive ethnic apologetics that drew upon central tropes of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy bequeathed by the Greeks. Foundational to this dichotomy was a valorization of law as the defining mark of civilization and bulwark against barbarian savagery. Indeed, as Michael LeFebvre notes,
- 2 LeFebvre 2006, p. 202.
With the conquest of the Greeks […] a new framework for ethnic apologetics was forced upon the Orient. At its core was the Greek “civilized vs. barbarian” worldview with the “rule of law” as a definitive mark of a civilized society. Ethnic self-explanation now needed to be expressed in terms of civic institutions (such as the “rule of law”) and cultural developments […].2
- 3 Levinson 2003, p. 358, describes this strategy as follows: “Not only did the rabbis adopt agonisti (...)
2Eager to see themselves as the pinnacle of civilized humanity, Romans and rabbis championed their law as uniquely distinguishing them from barbarous “others”. Yet, both Romans and rabbis were conscious of violent elements within their respective legal systems that made them vulnerable to the charge of barbarism. Focusing on the case of the stubborn and rebellious son and the concept of a “pleasant execution” (mitah yafah), I explore rabbinic attempts to neutralize the potential barbarism of Torah while casting Rome as the barbarian kingdom par excellence. Not only are Rome’s laws barbaric; so too are the emperors who claim to advance civilization through the brutal and bloody imposition of their regime and its laws, as an examination of the rabbinic barbarization of the emperors Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian will make plain. This double strategy of apologetics and redirection exemplifies a larger rabbinic pattern in which the rabbis adopt the categories and concepts of the hegemonic culture to denigrate that culture on the one hand and to defend their own culture on the other.3 Indeed, as we shall see, the rabbis may be compared with other groups who engaged in a similar if not identical strategy of apologetics and redirection on the Other’s terms.
3Part 1 identifies the emergence of a “barbarian repertoire” in antiquity and the use of barbarian tropes in intercultural polemics among various ancient and late ancient groups prior to and contemporaneous with the rabbis (Romans, writers of the Second Sophistic, and Christians). Part 2 traces the use of the barbarian repertoire in prerabbinic Jewish sources. Part 3 examines rabbinic sources from Roman Palestine and argues that Palestinian rabbis were familiar with the primary tropes of the barbarian repertoire; that they were aware that they and their law were subject to the charge of barbarism; and that they too adopted a double strategy of apologetics and redirection in response. On the one hand, they worked to eliminate or recast elements of their own legal tradition – particularly those involving capital punishment – that could be construed as barbaric. On the other hand, they redirected the charge of barbarism onto Rome, emphasizing the barbarism of both the Roman emperor and the Roman law.
Part I - Law, the barbarian repertoire, and intercultural polemics
- 4 Vlassopoulos 2013.
- 5 Vlassopoulos 2013, p. 164. He notes that the barbarian appears in the textual tradition as an ordi (...)
- 6 Vlassapoulos 2013, p. 191. He continues, “But in doing this the Greeks were merely unexceptional. (...)
4The term barbarian (barbaros) emerged in the archaic age of Greece as the neutral designation for a person of foreign tongue. According to Kostas Vlassopoulos,4 the classical period saw the creation of an extensive “barbarian repertoire” in which non-Greeks played a crucial but highly diversified role in Greek discourses on identity and morality, models and utopias, and alien wisdom.5 While the diverse barbarian repertoire included some positive assessments of non-Greeks and their cultures, “[o]ne major use of the Barbarian repertoire was the construction of polarized representations of non-Greeks as an incarnation of everything that was different and opposed to the values and customs that the Greeks held dear; these representations could often reach the point of being xenophobic and jingoistic, and even similar, in some ways, to modern racism”.6
5In much classical Greek thought, it was law that constituted the essential difference between a civilized and a barbarian people. The idea that barbarians (foreigners) lack true law or law of any kind is already found in Homer’s Odyssey (9, 114-115), where the brutish, cave-dwelling Cyclops are said to “have no shared laws (themistes), no meetings for counsels (boulēphoroi agorai)… each one sets the law for his own wives and children, and cares nothing about the others”.
- 7 Hall 1989, p. 6, asserts that it was the Persian wars which engendered the polarization of Greek a (...)
- 8 LeFebvre 2006, p. 186.
- 9 Herodotus contrasts Greek “freedom” and Asian “servitude”: the Greek polis consists of politically (...)
- 10 See Hall 1989, p. 13-17, regarding the polarization of the categories “Greek” and “barbarian” by G (...)
6By the mid-5th century BCE, Greek identity was formulated in opposition to the “barbarian” Other7 and as the writings of Herodotus illustrate, this dichotomy was political rather than racial:8 barbarians were those who live under despotic rule and as a consequence possess no political liberty.9 By contrast, Greeks lived under the rule of law (nomos basileus) and as a consequence were masterless and free. The rule of written, public law was viewed as the essential precondition of freedom, understood as the ability of male citizens to participate in the political and civic life of the polis.10
- 11 LeFebvre 2006, p. 183-184.
- 12 LeFebvre 2006, p. 190.
7By the Hellenistic period, the idea of prescriptive written law as a necessary mark of civilization was deeply entrenched and the civilized/barbarian dichotomy, in which the sovereignty of law rather than despots was one of the marks of the civilized, featured in intercultural polemics. Those who internalized Hellenistic conventions had to defend their native customs as prescriptive and public written law or be labeled “barbarian”.11 Many peoples learned to beat their own drum, but to the rhythm of the Greeks, boasting that their native laws and traditions met the ideals of Greek culture.12
- 13 Already in the 4th century BCE, Isocrates (Panegyricus 50) observed that the term “Greek” referred (...)
- 14 As we shall see below, Dionysius explicitly attributes the conversion of lawful kings into lawless (...)
- 15 As Antonova notes, “the proper command of Greek language is also associated closely with the posse (...)
8Despite its anchor in political discourse, the barbarian/Greek dichotomy soon acquired a broader moral signification. Just as enslavement to the will of a despot in the absence of a rational lawful order was the mark of a barbarian people, so enslavement to the passions in the absence of law-like reason was the mark of a barbarian individual. As barbarism migrated from political discourse into the realm of moral discourse, it came to be embodied in a set of moral characteristics detached from foreign origin. Greeks could behave like or even become barbarians while barbarians could be Hellenized.13 Thus, the lawlessness and irrationality at the heart of barbarism had both political and moral manifestations that often overlapped. In the political sphere, Greeks who lost their political autonomy through enslavement or who were subjected to the rule of despotic tyrants rather than the rule of law were viewed as barbarian, as were the despotic rulers who behaved like lawless and brutal tyrants.14 In the moral sphere, an individual who lacked the rational capacity for self-governance, as indicated by gross immorality or savagery, was deemed barbaric.15
- 16 For exemplars of these varied uses, see the primary sources listed in Antonova 2019, especially p. (...)
9Thus, Greek and Roman texts of the first centuries of the Roman Era associate barbarism not only with (a) foreign origin and language and (b) a despotic political structure, but also with (c) the absence of a law-like rationality (logos) and the intellectual and moral impairments that were perceived to follow from that absence: on the one hand, general intellectual inferiority, ignorance, incorrigibility, inability to govern, low social class and servility, effeminacy, instability, atheism, and treason; and on the other, an inability to control the passions resulting in a savage ferocity, animality, criminality, unbridled lust, sexual immorality, incest, bestiality, murder, human sacrifice, cannibalism, a warlike mentality, and a general proclivity for brutal atrocities.16
- 17 Antonova 2019, p. 24, 304-305, points to a contrary use of the term “barbarian” by some Christian (...)
10Uncoupled from ethnicity, the term “barbarian” became fluid in its application. The label and tropes of barbarism were widely deployed not only by Greeks but by various groups in late antiquity – by Romans, writers of the Second Sophistic, Christians, and Jews – to designate an “other” as foreign, as politically lawless, and as morally lawless; and, by inversion of the same tropes, to cast oneself as the height of political and moral civilization.17
Intercultural polemics: apologetics and redirection – Romans, the Second Sophistic, Christians
a) Romans
- 18 Girdvainyte 2014, p. 2.
- 19 Girdvainyte 2014, p. 9.
- 20 He writes: “for there are hardly any other men who have such authority over their children as we h (...)
- 21 Cicero, Pro Balbo 43, as cited in Antonova 2019, p. 77.
11The Romans internalized the ideals of Greek culture and participated in a competitive intercultural polemic touting their own law as the high-water mark of civilization and fending off charges of political and moral barbarism. Rome defined itself as a citizen community bound by the common civitas Romana and the observance of civil law rather than by geography or common language or culture.18 Roman pride in the civil law is attested by Cicero who, in his dialogue de Oratore (1, 44, 197), has Crassus assert the supremacy of the Roman ius civile: the formulators of Roman law surpassed all other legislators in practical wisdom, and all foreign law is “disordered” and “absurd” in comparison to Roman law. Pointedly, “the Greeks in particular,” originators of the rule-of-law distinction between barbarian and civilized, are singled out for special denigration. Juristic writings of the imperial period also praise the distinctive features of Roman law.19 In the Institutes (1, 55), Gaius expresses pride in what he sees as the unique aspects of Roman law, such as the patria potestas, the power of the male head of a Roman family over his children, some descendants in the male line, slaves, and freedmen.20 Exemplifying the conceptual opposition of law and barbarism and justifying Rome’s imposition of law on conquered people, Cicero writes that Gaius Caesar extirpated the ingrained barbarity of the Spanish by establishing codes of law.21 The barbarian was in need of subjugation and Rome was the civilizing power whose coercive imposition of law and order was justified by the very barbarism of the barbarian.
- 22 Peirano 2010, p. 33.
- 23 Ibid.
- 24 Peirano 2010, p. 53
- 25 Peirano 2010, p. 42. Thus, Dionysius uses the term “Greek” to signal not an ethnicity or language (...)
- 26 Ibid., p. 46f.
12Nevertheless, various features of Roman law and governance exposed the Romans to charges of political barbarism and already in the Augustan era, Dionysius of Halicarnassus sought to counter the Greek view of the Romans as a barbarous race. He presents the Romans as an ethnos hellēnikon, more Greek than the Greeks, while presenting all non-Romans, including ethnic Greeks, as the true barbarians (a combination of apologetics and redirection).22 Law and governance structures are intimately intertwined in Dionysius’s construction of the difference between civilized Romans and barbarized Greeks. According to Dionysius, the early Greeks were ruled by kings who governed “according to laws and inherited customs” in contrast to barbarian nations ruled despotically (δεσποτικῶς; Ant. Rom. 5, 74, 1). Greek kings, however, corrupted by “tyrannical presumption” (τυραννικῆς αὐθαδείας, ibid.) became barbarian despots. But while Dionysius praises Roman statesmen for surpassing the Greeks in the quintessentially Greek moral and political virtues, he evinces an awareness of the inherent instability of this achievement.23 His account of the Roman commander Decius warns that contemporaneous Roman leaders exhibit “signs of the same political tendency toward tyranny which eventually caused the decline (and barbarization) of the Greek world”.24 He sees evidence of the tyrannical presumption of despots in their inhuman treatment and lack of clementia toward vanquished peoples, a merging of the political and moral significations of the barbarian trope.25 Dionysius warns that the only safeguard against the tyrannical presumption of despots and the lawless barbarism and immorality they introduce is respect for the state and the rule of law (Ant. Rom. 5, 60, 2).26 For Dionysius, the political rule of law and the moral (humane and nonbarbaric) character of the ruler are mutually constituting.
- 27 For more on law’s paradoxical dependence on violence in order to punish violence, and the inevitab (...)
13If brutal and inhuman treatment of the weak signals political lawlessness and moral barbarism, then the greatest internal threat to any state’s claim of civitas and humanitas is the “legalized violence” of the law’s penalties, particularly capital punishment.27 And indeed, in the late Republican and imperial periods, increasingly brutal Roman penalties led to both internal and external critiques that aimed a charge of barbarism at the heart of Roman justice. Against such charges, writers like Dionysius adopted the double strategy of denial/apologetics on the one hand and, on the other, redirection of the charge of barbarism onto the accuser. But in this regard, Rome was simply one participant in a larger landscape of intercultural polemics that traded in barbarian tropes. We continue our review of this larger landscape before examining the participation of Jews within it.
b) Writers of the Second Sophistic
- 28 Antonova 2019, p. 96.
14Roman imperialism was viewed negatively by many non-Romans, and Rome was, in its turn, on the receiving end of charges of barbarism. Antonova describes Greek writers of the Second Sophistic who critiqued the Roman assertion of imperial power by deploying the Greek-barbarian dichotomy.28 For example, in his Panathenaic Discourse, Aelius Aristides (2nd-3rd century CE) contrasts Rome’s dominance and expansion through militarism and brutal compulsion with the peaceful spread of the Athenian life style through education.
- 29 Antonova 2019, p. 128.
- 30 Antonova 2019, p. 121. Lucian slyly compares himself to the noble Scythian Anacharsis, saying “and (...)
15However, Greek writers were confronted with a tension between their perception of themselves as the opposite of the barbarian in cultural and moral terms, and their subordinate political status in the Roman empire, which was an occasion for self-identification as “barbarian”.29 Self-identification as a (political) barbarian became a satirical weapon in the hands of Lucian, a 2nd century sophist of Syrian (i.e., barbarian) origin. According to Antonova, Lucian applies the label “barbarian” to himself (qua foreigner), but also destabilizes it, mocking the received stereotype and undermining in his very person the Roman conception of the (moral) barbarian.30
c) Christians
- 31 Noting that there are no surviving texts from the critics of early Christianity that attest direct (...)
- 32 Antonova 2019, p. 206-211.
16Christians were also familiar with the central tropes of the barbarian repertoire. Antonova examines Greek and Latin Christian apologetic texts from the second to early fourth centuries in order to reconstruct the charges of barbarism leveled at Christians and to analyze the Christian responses.31 Concerning the work of the Greek Fathers Justin, Tatian, Clement, Origen, and Eusebius, she argues that the term “barbarian” was used in reference to Christians with several major significations. It was used to emphasize: the Christians’ foreign origin, especially Jewish or Syrian; the foreign (i.e., Jewish) origin of Christian Scripture; the foreign origin and inferior quality of Christian language, grammar, rhetoric and philosophy; the low-class, uneducated, and marginal standing of Christians; and their inhumanity, cruelty, and savagery.32
- 33 As noted by Nasrallah, Tatian argues “that Greek language, culture, and identity are not unitary a (...)
- 34 Nasrallah 2010, p. 216.
- 35 Nasrallah 2010, p. 239.
- 36 For a detailed exposition of the foregoing claims see Antonova 2019, chapter 4.
17The Greek fathers adopted a double strategy in responding to these charges. According to Antonova, sometimes the charge of barbarism was accepted but positively reinterpreted, and sometimes it was redirected to its source. For example, all of these writers accept the “barbarian” label as it applies to the foreign origins of Christianity but then declare the antiquity of the Jews and their literature as a virtue (and debunk Greek knowledge and culture as derivative).33 Similarly, hostile references to the mediocre quality of Jewish and Christian literature and the low social standing of the church’s members are accepted as true but positively reinterpreted by Origen. By contrast, however, charges that draw on the moral rather than the foreign or political tropes of the barbarian repertoire are rejected and redirected to their source, especially charges of inhumanity, savagery, and cruelty. Thus, Tatian, who “reclaims the term ‘barbarian’ as a badge of pride for Christians”34 famously mocks the Roman obsession with all things Greek, and rejection of non-Greek or barbarian “depravity”. Characterizing Greek culture as rife with savagery, sexual immorality, and even cannibalism (Address to the Greeks 22-25), he “slyly implicates the Romans,” who have bought into this paideia, as the real (i.e., moral) barbarians.35 Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 10, 8-9) points to the violence of Roman society as seen in enslavement, military activity, and various brutal practices as well as incest and sacrifice. It is (politically) “barbarian” Christianity, these writers maintain, that can purge the Greeks, Romans, and others of their (moral) “barbarism”.36
- 37 An exception is Tertullian’s response to the charge of treason and disloyalty arising from the Chr (...)
- 38 Antonova 2019, p. 300.
- 39 Antonova 2019, p. 220.
- 40 Antonova 2019, p. 226-228.
- 41 Antonova 2019, p. 229.
- 42 Antonova 2019, p. 230-236.
- 43 Antonova 2019, p. 261-267.
- 44 Antonova 2019, p. 288-293.
18By contrast, the Latin fathers Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactantius do not in general accept or attempt a positive reinterpretation of the charge of barbarism. For the most part, they adopt the double strategy of simple denial and redirection.37 This may well be a function of the fact that the charges parried by the Latin fathers were drawn primarily from the discourse of moral barbarism and were of the most extreme and fantastically hyperbolic nature. Christians were not only castigated “as quintessentially anti-Roman” and “denied the designation romanitas” but were also “ascribed to the realm of the animalistic and subhuman sphere that is unaffected by the forces of civilization”.38 Accused of human sacrifice and cannibalism; criminality, treason, and irreligiosity; incest, animality, and monstrosity; these writers mount a vigorous denial and go so far as to cast themselves as the epitome of romanitas and their detractors as the true barbarians. Against the charge of Christian illegality, Tertullian points to the contradictory and corrupt nature of the Roman system of law which he describes as little more than a “jungle of laws”.39 He denies and redirects charges of Christian human sacrifice, ritual infanticide, and cannibalism by pointing to the murderous activities of the theater and gladiatorial games undertaken in the name of the gods, the practice of infanticide in some Roman provinces, and the indirect cannibalism involved in eating animals from the arena who have consumed the flesh and blood of gladiators.40 Romans, he insists, and not Christians are guilty of incest because children who survive exposure may unknowingly be wed to kin.41 Citing Tacitus’s slander of the Jews – and by extension Christians – as worshipping the head of an ass (Apology 16, 1; Histories 4) and engaging in subhuman behavior that casts them as a (monstrous) “third race” (Ad Nationes 7-8), Tertullian counters by decrying the grotesque abnormalities of his accusers.42 Similarly, through redirection, Arnobius (Adversus Nationes 5)43 criticizes Roman religion as characterized by human sacrifice and sexual immorality, while Lactantius (Divine Institutes 5)44 underscores the “barbarian” brutality and inhumanity of the Roman judicial system.
- 45 The use of the barbarian repertoire for internal enemies has earlier precedents. In his descriptio (...)
19While Christian writers disowned the ludicrous and hyperbolic accusations of barbarism levelled at them, they did not disown barbarian rhetoric itself. They, in turn, wielded it in self-defense not only against their accusers (as we have seen) but also in polemical attacks on heretical opponents.45 Thus, Tertullian uses classic barbarian tropes in his Against Marcion, describing the region from which Marcion derives, and Marcion himself, as follows:
- 46 Scythians and Sarmatians are classic barbarians in Greco-Roman ethnography. See discussion and n. (...)
- 47 Translation by Peter Holmes, in Roberts and Donaldson 1885–1896.
As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilized waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation when life is passed in wagons. They have no fixed abode; their life has no germ of civilization; they indulge in libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked. Moreover, when they gratify their secret lust, they hang up their quivers on their car-yokes, to warn off the curious and rash observer. Thus, without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war. The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle axes, and prefer warfare to marriage. […] Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there, fouler than any Scythian, more roving than the wagon-life of the Sarmatian,46 more inhuman than the Massagete, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the cloud […] Marcion is more savage than even the beasts of that barbarous region. For what beaver was ever a greater emasculator than he who has abolished the nuptial bond? What Pontic mouse ever had such gnawing powers as he who has gnawed the Gospels to pieces? Verily, O Euxine, you have produced a monster more credible to philosophers than to Christians. (Against Marcion 1, 1)47
20This passage is reproduced at length because it is an instructive parallel to rabbinic materials to be discussed below. In this single passage, Tertullian has gathered nearly every charge laid at the door of Christians and flung it at his heretical – and thus barbaric – co-religionist. Those charges are: ferocious (“fiercest nations”), unstable (“no fixed abode”), uncivilized (“no germ of civilization”), lustful, unrestrained, naked (“libidinous desires without restraint,” “naked,” “secret lust”), parricidal and cannibalistic (“cut up dead parents… and devour”), sexually deviant and immodest (“women are not… softened to modesty”). Marcion himself is said to be foul, unstable, bold, dark, savage, bestial, emasculating, irreligious, and monstrous. Cast as the quintessential barbarian, the heretic is vulnerable to the most extreme and degrading treatment.
Part II - Second Temple Jewish use of the barbarian repertoire
- 48 For surveys and analyses of these themes, see De Lange 1991; Schäfer 1997; and Isaac 2004. Katell (...)
- 49 These charges are cited in Josephus, Against Apion.
- 50 Superstitio, understood as credulous and exaggerated servitude to deities conceived as tyrants, st (...)
21No less than the Christians, Jews were the target of barbarian tropes and targeted others in return. Hostile references to the Jews in Greek and Latin writings draw on barbarian tropes.48 Early writers such as Manetho (a 3rd-century BCE Egyptian priest of Heliopolis), Apollonius Molon (a 1st-century BCE Greek rhetorician), and Apion (a 1st-century CE Egyptian-born grammarian), variously describe the Jews as socially marginal (lepers expelled from Egypt), irreligious and impious (they refuse to erect images to the emperor and instead worship the head of an ass), servile (they are ruled but do not rule), uncivilized (they have no good laws or cultural accomplishments), and avowed enemies of civilization (they swear an oath of enmity to all others, especially Greeks).49 While somewhat more ambivalent, Roman writers also combine political and moral tropes from the barbarian repertoire in reference to the Jews. A student of the anti-Jewish writer Apollonius Molon, Cicero describes Judaism as a barbaric superstition (barbara superstitio) opposed to Roman pietas,50 and disparages the Jews as rebellious and of low social class (Pro Flacco). In De Provinciis Consularibus 5, 10, he refers to Jews as a race born to be slaves. Tacitus (Histories, book V) slanders the Jews as a race detested by the gods, whose religion is the antithesis of all that Romans hold dear, whose culture is a collection of foreign degradations, and whose lust is matched by their hatred of humanity.
- 51 LeFebvre 2006, p. 199.
22Jews were clearly aware of these tropes and engaged in an apologetic effort to defend their law and establish their claim to be “civilized” rather than barbaric. Internalizing Hellenistic conventions, various Jewish writers touted the Torah as the paradigmatic civilizing law that preceded and indeed inspired Greek law. While early Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Aristobulus (2nd century BCE), Artapanus (3rd–2nd century BCE), and Eupolemus (<1st century BCE) credit the Jews with inventing various elements of civilized life, Philo (1st century CE) accepts the Greek “rule-of-law” norm as the defining feature of a civilized people and presents the Torah as the perfect fulfillment of that norm and the source for Greek law and philosophy.51 Writing in the Roman period, Josephus also understood the high stakes of Israel’s claim to have innovated the rule of law:
- 52 LeFebvre’s translation in LeFebvre 2006, p. 200.
I would begin with the remark that persons who have espoused the cause of order and law – one law for all – and been the first to introduce them, may fairly be admitted to be more civilized and virtuously disposed than those who lead lawless (ἀνόμως) and disorderly lives. In fact, each nation endeavors to create the impression that, far from imitating others, it has been the one to set its neighbors an example of orderly life under law (Against Apion 2, 151-152).52
- 53 LeFebvre 2006, p. 201. Translation according to Barclay 2007, p. 254.
23Josephus knows that law is the name of the civilization game. Apion had declared the Jews “the most witless of all barbarians and… the only people who have contributed no useful invention to civilization”. In response, Josephus writes that the Jews introduced law before the word was even known in Greece and that the lawgivers so esteemed by the Greeks, were youngsters in comparison to Moses. He maintains “that our legislator exceeds in antiquity the legislators referred to anywhere else” (Ag. Ap. 2, 154) and credits Moses for securing the people’s observance of the law for all time (Ag. Ap. 2, 156). The Jews are the very foundation and cornerstone of civilization itself.53 Like Philo, Josephus wrote in the Roman period when the desire to identify one’s national customs and traditions as a Greek-style law code continued unabated, and in competition with similar claims made by Rome.
- 54 1 and 2 Maccabees emphasize at every turn the Jewish possession of and adherence to nomoi (1 Macc (...)
- 55 Thus, Antiochus Epiphanes’s forces are described as a barbarian horde in 2 Macc 2:21 while the Phr (...)
24Jews writing in the diaspora were not the only ones to confront the charge of barbarism and to engage in a vigorous defense of Torah. In Judea, works like 1 and 2 Maccabees employed the civilized/barbarian polemic introduced by the Greeks to assert the superiority of the Jews over their Seleucid overlords. Applying the term “law” (nomos) to themselves and never to the Seleucids, these writings intimate that only the Jewish nation has law.54 The Seleucids do not possess a nomos because their kings, governors, and generals are barbaroi – despotic tyrants who act lawlessly.55 LeFebvre concludes:
- 56 LeFebvre 2006, p. 224.
The Greeks are barbarian, ruled by a king without νόμοι; but the Jews are civilized, with νόμοι, and a νόμος-enforcing king (Yahweh). The [author of 2 Maccabees] has accepted the standards of the Greeks for measuring a society, even though he has turned those standards against the Greeks to vindicate his God and his people.56
- 57 See also Kimberley Fowler’s article in this volume.
25Christians would subsequently develop their own hostile rhetoric about the Jews, with the Sinaitic and later Jewish laws as a special target. According to several Christian writers, the ancient Israelites lost the covenant when they worshipped the golden calf. As punishment, God gave them not the Ten Commandments, but the mass of rules and cultic practices contained in the Hebrew Bible (Didascalia Apostolorum 20; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 4, 10).57 Although the Jews possess a law, it is not true law, but a burdensome and punitive yoke suited to the Israelites’ allegedly slavish and sinful character (The Epistle of Barnabas 4 and passim). These harsh laws, and especially the laws of capital punishment, are described as inconsistent with the Gospel, as in this passage from the 3rd-century church father Origen:
- 58 Translation by Frederick Crombie in Roberts and Donaldson 1885–1896.
it would be impossible for the Jews to preserve their civil economy unchanged, supposing that they should embrace the Gospel. For Christians could not slay their enemies, or condemn to be burned or stoned, as Moses commands, those who had broken the law, and were therefore condemned as deserving of these punishments (Against Celsus 7, 25).58
- 59 See, for example, Ambrose’s Letter XXVI, which describes the Pharisees who sought to stone the adu (...)
26The biblical penalties, he argues, are an ancient dispensation abolished, along with the state and Temple worship, by the gospel of Jesus. Origen holds that the destruction of the Jewish state was divinely intended to end these harsh punishments. Similar representations of biblical penal law as excessive or of Jews as the embodiment of judicial brutality are found in the writings of other church fathers.59
27It is against this background that we consider the rabbinic defense of Torah. The rabbis, like Romans, Christians, and philosophers of the Second Sophistic, accept Greek standards for distinguishing the civilized from the barbarian and engage in an intercultural polemic that deploys the standard political and moral tropes of the barbarian repertoire. Their engagement will take a familiar double form: denial of the charge of barbarism coupled with apologetics on the one hand, and redirection of the charge on the other.
Part III - The barbarian repertoire in Palestinian rabbinic sources
- 60 y. Sukkah 5:1, 55b; y. Bava Metzi‘a 2:5, 8c; Genesis Rabbah 10:60; Leviticus Rabbah 11; 22; Lament (...)
- 61 Βαρβαρία; Barbaría, the Somalian northern coast in Africa (Huß 2006). Romans and Berbers joined in (...)
- 62 Sifre Deuteronomy 320; y. Sheqalim 6:2, 50a; Genesis Rabbah 23; Song of Songs Rabbah 2:8; Exodus R (...)
- 63 A neutral geographic usage is found in the late work Exodus Rabbah 18:6, where Barbaria refers to (...)
28The terms ברבר (barbar), ברברי (barbari), ברברים (barbarim), ברברין (barbarin), and ברברון (barbaron), all referring to barbarian(s), appear in the Palestinian Talmud and in various Palestinian midrashic works.60 The terms ברבריא ,ברבריה ,ברברייא, and ברבריאה (variant spellings of barbaria) also appear and refer to Barbaria (north Africa),61 or regions inhabited by barbarians.62 But Palestinian rabbinic sources evince a knowledge not merely of the lexical term “barbarian” (as indicated by various forms based on the Hebrew letters brbr); they evince a knowledge of the full “barbarian repertoire” as signifying foreign origin,63 a despotic political constitution, or a vicious moral character.
- 64 The midrashic author may simply be inspired by the opportunity for word play, describing the flood (...)
29A geographic usage appears in y. Sheqalim 6:2, 50a and its parallel in Genesis Rabbah 23:7 in reference to the flood in the “generation of the dispersion,” a flood which is said to have reached the rocks of Barbaria (northern Africa). Whether a negative connotation is intended by this association of Barbaria (brbr) with the generation of the sinful builders of the Tower of Babel (bbl) whose language was confused (bll) is uncertain.64
30The association of barbarians with enslavement surfaces in Genesis Rabbah 60:2, when Eliezer the servant of Abraham reasons that if he must be a servant it is better to be the servant of Abraham than to be the servant of a barbar or Cushi (Ethiopian). The pairing with Cushi implies that barbar here refers to a north African (Berber). Even more explicitly negative tropes emerge in other texts. Commenting on God’s dire warning in Deut 32:21-22 that he will incense the Israelites with a “nonpeople,” the third-century midrashic work Sifre Deuteronomy (§320) describes this nonpeople as either foreigners who come to expel Israel from their homes, or as people
- 65 Mauretania is the Latin term for an area in North Africa (modern Morocco and part of Algeria) inha (...)
who come from Barbaria and Mauretania65 [also in Africa] and who go about naked in the market place, for there is no one more despised and contemptible (bazuy ufagum) than one who goes about naked in the market place.
31This passage conjoins tropes associated with the political and the moral barbarian. First, these foreigners are so politically disordered as to be a nonpeople or nonnation. Morally, they are warlike, displacing others from their homes, or debauched, engaging in degrading public nudity.
- 66 The Sarmatians were an Indo-European people originating in the Eurasian Steppe who migrated westwa (...)
32Song of Songs Rabbah 2:8 exhibits awareness of the fact that natives of Barbaria and Sarmatia sometimes served in the Roman army:66
- 67 Cuthi may be an error for Cushi (paired in Genesis Rabbah 60:2). Alternatively, since Cuthean is o (...)
If one of you is carried away to Barbaria and one to Sarmatia, it is as if all of you had been carried off there. And again, this state [Rome] levies troops from all the world, from every nation, and so if one Cuthean67 or Barbarian comes and rules over you, it is as if all of his nation had ruled over you and as if you had served the whole seventy nations”.
33Underscoring the “barbarian” nature of Rome’s army may also be an oblique dig at the empire. At the same time, the rabbis were aware of Roman fear in the face of the barbarian threat, as seen in this interpretation of Psalm 140:9, understood as Jacob/Israel’s plea for protection from wicked Esau/Rome:
What is the meaning of Further not his evil device (zemamo) (Ps 140:9)? He [Jacob] entreated: “Sovereign of the Universe! Make a bit (zemam) for the wicked Esau [= Rome], so that he may not enjoy complete tranquility”.
What bit [restraint] did the Holy One, blessed be He, make for Esau? Said R. Ḥama b. R. Ḥanina: The Barbarians and the Germans [Goths, Huns], of whom the Edomites [Romans] are afraid. (Genesis Rabbah 75:9)
34Jacob gives voice to the rabbis’ own assessment of the imperial situation: barbarian resistance contains Rome’s expansionist ambitions and strikes fear in the heart of the empire.
35Genesis Rabbah 42:3 (// Lamentations Rabbah 11:7 and Esther Rabbah proem 11) also views barbarians from the Roman perspective but this time in a manner that signals some degree of sympathy with Rome.
And it came to pass in the days of Amrafel that they made war (Gen 14:1) […] This may be compared to a king’s friend who dwelt in a province, and on his account the king used to visit the province and showed it favor. But when barbarians came to attack him [this friend] they lamented, “Woe to us, for the king will no longer visit this province [if his friend is killed] as was his custom”. Thus it is written, And they turned back and came to Eyn-Mishpat (Gen 14:7). R. Aḥa said: They came only in order to attack the eye of the world [Abraham]; they desired to blind the eye (eyn) which executed judgment (mishpat) in the world.
- 68 For the designation of Abraham as “friend of God” see Hayes 1999, p. 22, 24-25; Sharp 1997.
- 69 It is possible to read the king as the Roman emperor and the provincial friend as a typical Judean (...)
36This midrashic reading of the war of the kings in Genesis 14 employs classic barbarian tropes to analogize the Canaanite king Amrafel to barbarians – warlike peoples prone to rebellion. The king in the parable would appear to be God, and the friend who dwells in the king’s province is Abraham. The midrash decodes Eyn-Mishpat as a reference to Abraham by playfully construing “spring of judgment” as “eye of judgement”.68 The king’s friend, Abraham, is attacked by barbarians (Amrafel) who despise law and justice and who seek to blot out the civilized proponent of justice (Abraham, the eye of justice). Representing Abraham as the symbol of a lawful and just civilization targeted by rebellious barbarians, this midrash distances Jews from the barbarian label, and comes uncannily close to aligning Jewish self-perception with the self-perception of Rome – the emblem of law and justice.69
37This Rome–Israel alignment recurs in Genesis Rabbah 63:7, a midrash on Gen 25:23 “two nations are in your womb,” from the prophecy concerning Jacob and Esau. The midrash depicts Jacob and Esau – i.e., Israel and Rome – as twins in several respects. Both are proud, both produce great rulers, and both are hated by foreign nations.
Two nations are in your womb (Gen 25:23). There are two proud nations in your womb, each taking pride in his world, and each in his kingdom. There are two rulers of nations in your womb, Hadrian of the Gentiles and Solomon of Israel. Another interpretation: two [peoples] hated by the nations are in your womb: all nations hate Esau, and all nations hate Israel.
38On the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Rome and Israel find common ground as targets of the irrational hatred of barbarians. And yet, in Genesis Rabbah 67:8, Rome joins with the foreign nations in its profound hatred of Israel.
And Esau hated Jacob (Gen 27:41). R. Leazar b. R. Yosi said: he became as one who hates (Heb. SoN’e), avenges (Noqem), and is vindictive (NoTeR) toward him [Jacob] so that to this very day one speaks of the SeNaToRs of Rome.
39In a clever bit of word play that links the Latin word “Senator” with various Hebrew words connoting hatred, vengefulness, and vindictiveness, this midrash depicts Rome as just one more irrational barbarian nation filled with hatred for the civilized Other.
40While these sources distinguish Israel from the barbarians and stake a unique Jewish claim to humanitas, other rabbinic sources acknowledge that Jews were viewed by others as barbarians. Thus, in Esther Rabbah 6:13, the rabbis describe Mordechai being contemptuously dismissed as a “barbarian” by members of the Persian court. But insofar as the barbarian label signaled an immoral or impious character, the rabbis were eager to disown it, as we see in y. Bava Metzi‘a 2:5, 8c:
Shimon ben Shetaḥ worked in flax. His students said to him: let us ease your burden. We will buy you a donkey and you will not have to labor as hard. They went and bought him a donkey from a desert nomad and a pearl was suspended on it. They came before him and said: rabbi, henceforth you will not have to labor much. He said to them: why? They said: we bought you a donkey from a desert nomad and a pearl was suspended from it. He said: did its owner know about it? They said: no. He said to them: return it. They said: […] even one who forbids deriving benefit from property stolen from a Gentile [acknowledges] the universal opinion that a Gentile’s lost property may be used. He said to them: what do you think? Is Shimon ben Shetaḥ a barbarian? Shimon ben Shetaḥ wants him to say, “Blessed is the God of the Jews”.
41Shimon ben Shetaḥ is urged by his disciples to retain, rather than return, a valuable pearl that came into his possession unbeknownst to its non-Jewish owner. Although there is no legal obligation to return a lost item to a non-Jew (an asymmetrical law that would offend a foreigner), Shimon ben Shetaḥ rejects his disciples’ proposal with a rhetorical question, “Is Shimon ben Shetaḥ a barbarian” [who would embrace an unjust law]? Of course not! Rather, Shimon ben Shetaḥ wants the non-Jew in question to bless, not curse, the God of the Jews. By retaining the pearl, Shimon understands that he will be complicit in the non-Jew’s subsequent cursing of the God of the Jews. Only a barbarian would wish such desecration, and Shimon is no barbarian.
- 70 As we have seen, Antonova has argued in regard to Christians that they employed “the same charge r (...)
42Palestinian rabbinic sources, then, like Second Temple period Jewish sources in both Judea and the diaspora, evince a clear awareness of the central elements of the barbarian repertoire, as well as an understanding that laws perceived to be unfair or excessively harsh made them vulnerable to the charge of barbarism. This awareness led to an apologetic effort to both deny the charge and to redirect it – explicitly or implicitly. On the one hand, the rabbis worked to eliminate or recast elements of their legal tradition that might be construed as barbaric according to well-known tropes of the barbarian repertoire; on the other hand, they depicted Rome as the quintessentially barbarous nation, the polar opposite of the civilized and humane Jewish nation.70
Rabbinic apologetics I: barbarizing the stubborn and rebellious son
- 71 Mirković argues that although in Cicero’s time it was generally believed that the father had the r (...)
- 72 For more on Philo, Josephus, and other ancient Jewish interpretations of biblical passages condoni (...)
43Several Torah laws sanction violence in the administration of justice, exposing Jews to charges of cruelty (as noted above in the case of Origen), if not barbarism. One particularly problematic law for Jews who wished to champion the Torah as the humane and civilizing law par excellence was the law of the stubborn and rebellious son (Deut 21:18-21). This law allows the community to execute a son accused by parents of disobedience, gluttony, and drunkenness. Although Roman law enshrined the patria potestas, putting a son to death could not be undertaken without just cause and some Latin sources express disapproval of the law and praise fathers who forego their right.71 Already Philo had interpreted the law as referring to a child so wicked as to be classed as an enemy, rather than kin, while Josephus emphasized both the utter lawlessness of the son as well as the importance of parental compassion and restraint in the exercise of the law.72
- 73 Reeder allows that the rabbis “may have been influenced by Roman social expectations including the (...)
44As is well-known, the rabbis all but disable the law of the stubborn and rebellious son.73 We consider first the law as it appears in Deuteronomy 21:18-21:
18. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, 19. his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. 20. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard”. Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him to death. Thus you shall sweep out evil from your midst. All Israel will hear and be afraid.
- 74 Even R. Yonatan who objects that there has been one application of the law in Israel’s history app (...)
- 75 Similarly, Cicero transfers the characteristics of the barbarian (especially savagery and ferocity (...)
45The law is relatively straightforward but through a strategy of hyper-literal interpretation beginning already in the Mishnah, the rabbis will render it a dead letter. Indeed, the Babylonian Talmud makes it quite clear that the purpose of the rabbis’ many qualifications and limitations is to ensure that no child is ever executed under this law (b. Sanhedrin 71a).74 For example, they interpret various textual details as restricting liability under the law to a period of mere months in the life of a male child, and as requiring that both parents be free of certain physical blemishes. Moreover, they construe the accusation of gluttony and drunkenness as exhaustive rather than merely exemplary of the charge of disobedience and condition it on rare and narrow circumstances. What has received too little scholarly attention, however, is the invocation of the barbarian repertoire in the rabbis’ explication of these gustatory acts. Commentators and scholars have focused so much on the child who cannot be charged that they have not always noticed the hypothetical child who can be charged. In the interpretive imagination of the rabbis, the son who can be executed as a stubborn and rebellious son is guilty of no ordinary excessive indulgence. He is an internal barbarian, and thus Deut 21:18-21 is entirely just and necessary insofar as it takes aim at the ultimate enemy within.75
46The following passages from the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi) draw on classic tropes to barbarize the stubborn and rebellious son:
Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:2
When is he liable [for prosecution under this law]? After he has eaten a tartemar [about 6 oz] of meat and drunk a half-log [about ½ cup] of Italian wine. R. Yosi says, 1 maneh [20 oz] of flesh and 1 log [1 cup] of wine.
But if he consumed it at a gathering that was a religious duty, or at the intercalation of the month, or if he consumed it as Second Tithe in Jerusalem, or if he ate carrion or flesh that was terefah or forbidden beasts or creeping things [all four being prohibited for consumption by the laws of kashrut], [in other words] if by consuming it he had fulfilled a command or had committed a transgression, if he ate any [general] foodstuffs but did not eat flesh, or drank any liquid but did not drink wine, he cannot be condemned as a stubborn and rebellious son; but only if he eats flesh and drinks wine for it is written: he is a glutton and a drunkard (Deut 21:18). Even if there is no Scriptural proof, there is a support for this, as it is said, Do not be among those who drink wine to excess nor with those who gorge themselves on meat (Prov 23:20).
- 76 Guggenheimer – Guggenheimer 1977, p. 235. Metathesis is common in the case of lamed, resh, and waw(...)
- 77 Guggenheimer 2011, p. 286-287.
- 78 The barbarization of Esau involved the same charge. Genesis Rabbah 63:12 depicts a ravenous Esau i (...)
47The Mishnah understands the charge of gluttony and drunkenness to exhaust the disobedience of the son in Deut 21 and goes on to detail the specific quantities of meat and wine that must be consumed under certain conditions in order to incur liability. Guggenheimer understands tartemar basar (טרטימר בשר) as a corruption by metathesis of the Greek τετρᾰ-μοιρία or “fourfold portion”.76 In the Palestinian gemara, R. Yosi states that a tartemar is half of a litra, or 6 ounces (the Roman litra, pound, being 12 ounces). If half a Roman pound, or 6 ounces, is a tartemar, or fourfold portion, then a single portion is 1.5 ounces. Since 6 ounces does not seem to be an excessive quantity to consume in one sitting, Guggenheimer proposes that the problem lies not in the total amount consumed in a meal but the total amount consumed in an individual bite or mouthful. If a single portion of 1.5 ounces is a standard mouthful then by consuming a tartemar, the stubborn and rebellious son may be guilty of attempting to gulp four (or, according to R. Yosi, eight) times the amount of food normally taken in a single mouthful. Guggenheimer finds support for this hypothesis in a baraita that decries gulping wine in too large a quantity. According to the baraita (b. Pesahim 86b; b. Betzah 25b): “A man who drinks his cup in one gulp is greedy, in two is well-mannered, in three is arrogant”.77 It is possible, then, that m. Sanhedrin 8:2 refers to the hasty gulping of meat and wine in large mouthfuls like an animal.78
- 79 For more on the consumption of raw meat as the stigma of barbarism, see Shaw 1982/1983, p. 24, and (...)
- 80 According to rabbinic law, a person cannot be prosecuted without a clear prior warning that the ac (...)
48The Palestinian gemara (y. Sanhedrin 8:2, 26a-b) continues this theme of animalistic eating: “He is not liable until he eats [the meat] rare. If he eats it raw he is a dog; if he eats it cooked he is a human”. The gemara introduces a distinction between human eating and animal eating in order to dehumanize the stubborn and rebellious son. Animals eat raw flesh while humans eat cooked meat. The stubborn and rebellious son eats rare meat which is not the behavior of a human and veers dangerously close to the behavior of an animal.79 The animalizing of the stubborn and rebellious son’s eating behavior is even more pronounced in the tannaitic commentary on Leviticus 19:26 “you shall not eat with (literally, ‘on’) the blood”. The Sifra explains that this verse is a prohibition against eating an animal that is still alive (שלא תצא נפשה) or whose blood still flows in its veins (והדם קיים במזרק), and one tradent claims that this verse is the very prohibition violated by the stubborn and rebellious son.80 The latter consumes raw, blood-infused flesh from a living animal, like the classic barbarian.
49Following the differentiation of human and animal consumption, the gemara draws two further distinctions.
But if he consumed it at a gathering that was a religious duty, or at the intercalation of the month, or if he consumed it as Second Tithe in Jerusalem: and they disciplined him but he does not listen to their voice (Deut 21:18) – this excludes [from liability] one who listens to the voice of his Father in heaven.
Or if he ate carrion or flesh that was terefah or forbidden beasts or creeping things: and they disciplined him but he does not listen to their voice (Deut 21:18) – this excludes [from liability] even one who does not listen to the voice of his Father in heaven.
- 81 Though, in line with the biblical text and against Roman law, parental authority here includes bot (...)
50The gemara distinguishes ordinary excessive consumption carried out in disobedience to one’s parents from religious feasting (in obedience to one’s Father in heaven) on the one hand, and from religiously transgressive feasting (in disobedience to one’s Father in heaven) on the other. One who obeys a divine command by feasting is pious and cannot be charged as a stubborn and rebellious son. One who disobeys a divine command by consuming forbidden foods, is disobeying God and must be dealt with by God (rather than the parent). With these careful exclusions, the Mishnah has produced a law that aligns with Roman sensibilities: the target of the law in Deuteronomy 21 is clearly and only the son who defies parental authority (patria potestas).81
51Having initially narrowed the son’s liability to the twin acts of gluttony and drunkenness, the rabbis now expand the son’s crimes by importing into those two acts a variety of other crimes associated with the barbarian. The process begins in the Mishnah and is dramatically developed in other Palestinian rabbinic sources.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:3 – If he stole from his father and ate in his father’s domain, or from others and ate in the others’ domain, or from others and ate in his father’s domain, he is not liable [to be charged] as a stubborn and rebellious son unless he stole from his father and ate in the domain of others. R. Yosi b. Rabbi Yehuda says, unless he stole from both his mother and his father.
52The Mishnah has added a further condition of liability: the foodstuffs must be stolen from the father or, according to a minority view, both parents. Theft is reprehensible enough, but theft from one’s own father/parents violates the natural bond between parent and child. Notice that the Mishnah has not added a distinct third crime for which a son is liable under this law. He is still liable only for the twin acts of eating and drinking, and yet the barbarity of these already animalized actions has been increased by adding the condition that the foodstuff be stolen from the father/parents.
- 82 Sifre Deuteronomy 218 reads: “Another interpretation: simply because this one consumes his father’ (...)
53Recognizing that execution is an inordinately severe response to the consumption of stolen comestibles, the Mishnah (m. Sanhedrin 8:5) goes on to explain that the stubborn and rebellious son is judged and executed not because he is guilty now but because he is on an inevitable road to utter ruin (cf. Sifre Deuteronomy 218 where this reasoning is explicit).82 His incorrigibility is certain and far more barbaric deeds lie in his future, as the Palestinian gemara explains:
The Holy One, Blessed be He, foresaw that in the end this one would use up all of his father’s and mother’s property, settle himself at the crossroads, rob people, and kill people and in the end forget all his studies. Scripture says that “it is better that he should die while yet innocent and not die while culpable because the death of the wicked is a benefit to them and to the world while that of the righteous is bad for them and for the world. (y. Sanhedrin 8:2, 26b)
- 83 For a brilliant discussion of this claim, see Wasserman 2016.
54In short, our hypothetical stubborn and rebellious son is on a path to becoming a full-blown barbarian. He will become utterly lawless: he will impoverish his parents and then, taking up the life of a highwayman at the crossroads, he will rob, he will kill, and he will forget his studies. While forgetting one’s studies may seem anticlimactic in this list of heinous crimes, it is not. For the rabbis, Torah is the civilizing law that polices the boundary between Jew and barbarian gentile.83 Its loss represents the final step of the stubborn and rebellious son’s slide into barbarism.
55What began as rebellion against parents will lead inexorably to rebellion against God’s law (Torah) and the instruments of his law (prophets and judges). In Sifre Deuteronomy 218 we read:
He is stubborn regarding the words of his father, he rebels against the words of his mother; he is stubborn regarding the words of the Torah, he rebels against the words of the prophets; he is stubborn regarding the words of the witnesses, he rebels against the words of the judges.
56The rabbinic denigration of the stubborn and rebellious son continues in an anonymous passage in Sifre Deuteronomy that draws inferences from the law’s precise location amid the laws of Deuteronomy. The chapter of Deuteronomy in which the law of the stubborn and rebellious son appears (21) contains laws addressing the following cases of marital and familial dysfunction: v. 10-14 deal with the beautiful foreign woman who is seized in wartime and forcibly made a wife (v. 11) or raped and dismissed (v. 14); v. 15-17 deal with the case of a man who has two wives, one loved and one hated, who must apportion first-born rights according to birth sequence rather than his feelings for the mothers; v. 18-21 deal with the case of the stubborn and rebellious son; v. 22-23, which close the chapter, appear to require that the man guilty of a capital crime be put to death by hanging on a tree, a singular execution distinct from the standard biblical modes of execution. The rabbis infer from these juxtapositions a certain narrative logic that connects and explains the cases, as may be seen in Sifre Deuteronomy 218:
The father of this one [the stubborn and rebellious son] desired a certain beautiful [foreign] captive woman [the case in Deut 21:10-14] and [in so doing] caused satan [probably a spirit of discord between the old and new wife] to enter into his home, making his son stubborn and rebellious, leading in the end to an unusual execution [as the passage immediately after the law of the stubborn and rebellious son says]: When a man commits a sin worthy of death, he shall be put to death [by hanging on a tree] (Deut 21:22).
- 84 The fact that the union has a path to legalization does not erase its coercive nature. The woman i (...)
- 85 For Jewish interpretation of Deuteronomy 21:22-23 as a reference to crucifixion see O’Brien 2006, (...)
57According to this midrash, these laws are recorded in sequence in Deuteronomy because the first – the forced cohabitation with a foreign female taken in wartime – creates a discord that leads to the second – the advent of a stubborn and rebellious son – which leads to the third – the son’s inevitable prosecution and execution for a capital crime. Our hypothetical stubborn and rebellious son has thus acquired even more unsavory qualities – he is the product of a nonconsensual union84 with a foreign captive woman and his inevitable fate is to commit a capital crime. But not just any capital crime; this mixed race offspring of rape is guilty of a crime so heinous that it earns the distinctive punishment of execution by hanging, understood elsewhere in rabbinic literature as crucifixion.85
58It is perhaps no coincidence that the rabbis identify death by crucifixion as the method of punishment for the hypothetical stubborn and rebellious son who, having escaped prosecution under Deut 21:18-21, becomes a full-blown barbarian in the rabbinic imaginaire and suffers an execution worse than the stoning he would have suffered had he been prosecuted under the Torah’s law. In the Roman penal system, crucifixion was among the most degrading forms of execution, reserved for those of the very lowest social standing, a fact that was not lost on the rabbis. Having excluded himself from the regime of Torah, this utterly barbarian son meets a cruel fate at the hands of barbarian – in every sense of the word – justice.
Rabbinic apologetics II: a pleasant death – Roman and rabbinic death penalty discourses
- 86 Important dissenting views are found in Dohrmann 2002; Berkowitz 2006. I will refer repeatedly to (...)
59As with the law of the stubborn and rebellious son, the rabbis refashion biblical death penalty law in order to neutralize its “barbaric” features. The internalization of broader cultural norms had a greater influence on rabbinic death penalty discourse than has been acknowledged by scholars, many of whom resist the evidence and argue that the radical changes introduced by the rabbis are driven by principled exegesis of Scripture.86 These scholars take at face value the rabbinic claim that the principles of human dignity and the sanctity of human life originate in Scripture (based on the creation of humankind in the image of God in Genesis 1 and the universal blood prohibition in Genesis 9, respectively).
- 87 Berkowitz 2006 is one of the few scholars to point to Roman influence on rabbinic laws of executio (...)
60The assertion that these principles were derived from Scripture and served as the sole shaping influence on rabbinic death penalty discourse must be questioned in view of the ready availability in Roman death penalty discourse, of strategies for neutralizing the barbarism inherent in execution. In their effort to neutralize the violence in their own death penalty law, the rabbis replicate the civilizing strategies found in Roman death penalty discourse.87
- 88 Berkowitz 2006, p. 174-177.
- 89 m. Sanhedrin 7:3 and t. Sanhedrin 9:11 record a dispute between R. Judah and the sages over which (...)
61We begin with a brief review of the three main pillars of the rabbis’ death penalty innovations. First, the Bible licenses human courts to execute by burning and stoning only. The Bible does not mention decapitation or strangulation as court-ordered modes of execution and yet the rabbis declare that all four modes of capital punishment are permitted by the court according to biblical law. Indeed, according to R. Judah (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Neziqin 5, to Exod 21:15)) every execution in the Torah that is not specified is to be carried out by strangulation, a form of execution that actually appears nowhere in the Bible. Second, the Bible makes no principled distinction between its two modes of capital punishment (burning and stoning) in terms of severity. Neither is said to be more severe than the other and both are designated for what are represented as heinous crimes. But as Berkowitz notes, the rabbis arrange the (now) four death penalties according to degrees of severity.88 Mishnah Sanhedrin 7 contains two lists running from most to least severe. The sequence maintained by the majority is stoning, burning, decapitation, and strangulation while the sequence maintained by R. Shimon is burning, stoning, strangulation, and decapitation. Third, the Bible does not describe death penalties in aesthetic terms but the rabbis do. The terms nivul (repulsive) and yafah or na’ah (beautiful or pleasing) are used to describe various modes of execution.89
62The most likely source of these innovations is Roman law. In Roman law, modes of execution are arranged according to degrees of severity. In Roman discourse about the law, the criterion for classifying penalties as more or less severe (light or heavy) is aesthetic. And finally, in Roman law, decapitation and strangulation – being the most aesthetically pleasing modes of execution – are reserved for high status individuals. Expanding on each of these elements will illuminate the rabbinic appropriation and adaptation of each.
a) Roman death penalty law: degrees of severity and the aesthetics of execution
- 90 I am indebted to David Kimmel for contributing research and writing to this section on the aesthet (...)
- 91 Bauman 2002, p. 6-19; Cantarella 1991, p. 242; Garnsey 1970.
63Roman law is explicit in its classification of penalties as more and less severe in accordance with social class, and Roman discourse accentuating “aesthetic” differences between various forms of execution tended to reflect elite privilege during the first and second centuries CE.90 For example, in the period of the principate, high-status honestiores convicted of desertion would usually be subject to decapitation, strangulation, or being thrown from the Tarpeian rock – the least disfiguring and thus the most aesthetically pleasing modes of execution; by contrast, for low-status humiliores, the most serious penalty or summum supplicium covered several aggravated forms of the death penalty including exposure to wild beasts (bestiis dari), crucifixion (crux), and burning alive (vivus uri, crematio). Condemnation to live and fight as a gladiator was usually fatal at some point.91 Only low status individuals were subjected to corporal punishment and torture was originally reserved for slaves.
- 92 Coleman 1990, p. 46.
- 93 Ibid.
- 94 Coleman 1990, p. 47.
64Kathleen Coleman notes that according to Seneca, retribution and revenge were the chief factors motivating emperors in their punishment of crimes (Clem. 1, 20, 1).92 The idea that the offender, having harmed and suffered, should in turn suffer, led to an emphasis on cruel treatments that inflict maximum pain. Thus, hard labor in the mines was motivated less by economics than by the desire to cause great pain. This reasoning extended to the death penalty which should be done as painfully as possible, in direct contrast to the modern idea that execution should be carried out as quickly, as painlessly, as discretely, and with as much dignity as possible.93 A second punitive aim was the mental and emotional suffering of humiliation. Noncitizens who were deemed turpes (lit. ugly) were subjected to the most degrading penalties, and the very public (indeed the spectacular) nature of Roman execution intensified the humiliation. Displaying the naked and disfigured corpses of those who had been horribly tortured to death was an additional outrage.94
65In short, the severity of a penalty was determined by the degree of disfigurement (rendering the body ugly), suffering, and humiliation it entailed, with the most disfiguring, painful, and humiliating modes of execution reserved for the lowest status individuals. Coleman writes:
- 95 Coleman 1990, p. 57.
The distinction between honestiores and humiliores betrays the opinion that long-drawn-out agony culminating in death was suitable for slaves and other persons without dignitas; hence to humiliate and degrade them physically did not offend against any notions of propriety and was, indeed, part of the punishment (corresponding to the disgrace which compounded the physical discomfort of exile for honestiores).95
- 96 The punishment for parricides is described in Digest 48, 9, 9 as follows: “A parricide is flogged (...)
- 97 Pauly – Wissowa 1914–1972, s.v. “crux”.
- 98 Mathisen (2006, p. 1015) notes that the extension of Roman citizenship to nearly all remaining fre (...)
66From an early period, the Valerian laws exempted citizens of Rome from the more humiliating forms of punishment. Crucifixion (in crucem actio) was for slaves and treacherous foreigners and hurling into a river (proiectio in profluentem) was for parricides.96 Eventually, however, provincial freedmen of humble station were crucified for such crimes as piracy, highway robbery, assassination, forgery, false testimony, mutiny, high treason, and rebellion,97 and Roman penalties became progressively harsher from the late Republic to the empire. Indeed, the concept of the inviolability of a Roman citizen’s body was progressively eroded over the course of Roman history: first by the special penalties inflicted on parricides and traitors in early Roman history; then by an increasing willingness in the late Republic to flout the letter of the law and outright murder freeborn rivals of all classes through the courts; then by a tendency in the Principate to inflict formerly “slave” punishments on the freeborn poor and to brutally execute senatorial rivals for treason; and finally, by a trend in the Christian empire to create blanket penalties for certain forms of heresy affecting even the aristocracy.98
67Inflicting “slave penalties” on citizens – even those of low social standing – may have been an exercise of political power but it was decried as the act of a moral barbarian. In Against Verres (Book 1, 4), Cicero is outraged by Verres’ execution of Roman citizens in a manner befitting slaves (“he destroyed Roman citizens by execution, by torture, by the cross”) and proceeds to vilify Verres using barbarian tropes, describing him as thief, robber, adulterer, rapist, enemy to religion, murderer, and criminal, worthy of execution himself. Especially cruel and capricious emperors who used “lower class” or “servile” forms of execution even against upper class rivals, were likewise described in terms drawn from the barbarian repertoire (see Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum 2, 30; Pliny, Epistulae 2, 11). Caligula’s willingness to disfigure, torture, and dismember Roman citizens of all classes was taken as proof of his brutality and insanity by Suetonius (Gaius 27-28). Cassius Dio likewise portrays the emperor Claudius as a moral barbarian for his excessive brutality, his love for the arena, his brutal execution of enemies of all ranks, and his degrading treatment of his victims’ bodies (Roman History, book 60).
b) Excising the Torah’s inner barbarian
- 99 Most scholars deny the connection, but as demonstrated by Berkowitz (2006), the hand of Rome hangs (...)
68It could not have escaped the notice of the rabbis that one of the two methods of execution enshrined in their biblical patrimony – burning – was a decidedly severe penalty in the Roman legal system, reserved for low-status persons. Burning involved the three elements of an aesthetically repulsive and low-status death: severe disfigurement, extreme pain and suffering, and the humiliation afforded by a public spectacle. The imperial infliction of this punishment on higher status persons inspired critics to accuse the offending emperor of barbaric brutality. The second biblical method of execution – public stoning – while finding no parallel in Roman penalties is also highly disfiguring, painfully slow, and spectacularly humiliating. Motivated to excise elements that leave the Torah vulnerable to charges of barbarism, the rabbis reshaped these two biblical methods of execution to align with a Roman aesthetics of death. The biblical execution by burning was carried out by ingesting a burning wick, leaving the external body intact; the biblical execution of stoning became a less disfiguring and more rapid affair, modeled on the high-status Roman penalty of being cast from a tall height like the Tarpeian Rock.99
- 100 Speaking of course hypothetically. The rabbis do not carry out these executions, but their discurs (...)
69Having converted the biblical penalties of burning and stoning into executions that meet Roman standards of a “beautiful” death (nondisfiguring, minimally painful or humiliating), the rabbis proceed to introduce into their system the two most dignified methods of execution according to Roman law: decapitation and strangulation. They adopt the Roman aesthetic classification of these executions as the most “beautiful” (yafah) or “pleasing” (na’ah) deaths and go so far as to insist that any execution not specified in the Torah is to be understood as strangulation (the least disfiguring and quickest of all deaths). While Roman law would have denied these higher-status methods of executions to noncitizen provincials like the rabbis, and while many a Judean was, as a matter of historical fact subjected to the more brutal fate of crucifixion or condemnation to the mines, the rabbis ensured that within the imaginary world of Jewish death penalty law, no citizen would suffer disfiguration, pain, or humiliation.100
- 101 For details see Berkowitz 2006, chapter 6.
- 102 For this insight see Dohrmann 2002 and Berkowitz 2006.
70In this respect the rabbis were acting on a principle expressed by R. Akiva in m. Bava Qamma 8:6. Responding to the idea that damages may be calibrated to the dignity of the victim, R. Akiva objects that all Israelites are considered free-born (bene ḥorin), for all Israelites are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The same principle applies in the case of capital punishment. All Jews are deemed to have the dignity of free-born citizens, precluding methods of execution that fail the Roman aesthetic by disfiguring, and by causing suffering and humiliation. Rabbinic death penalty discourse thus adopts a Roman standard while going the Romans one better. Eschewing techniques that maim and disfigure, minimizing suffering, limiting the humiliations of nudity and display,101 the rabbis see to it that all of the Torah’s methods of execution uphold the aesthetic standards that Roman law sets for only some of its methods of execution. Providing all Jews with the dignified death of a high-status Roman (honestiores),102 the rabbis know precisely whose law embodies humanitas and whose law embodies utter barbaria.
- 103 Dohrmann 2002, p. 277.
71The rabbis had some difficulty assimilating these elements of Roman law into the law of Israel, a symptom of the fact that they are not native. For example, in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Neziqin 4 (to Exod 21:12) and in m. Sanhedrin 9:3, an attempt is made to determine the most and least severe penalties through a method of analogical reasoning based on the crimes to which these penalties are attached. But as Natalie Dohrmann notes, the proposed analogies are “interchangeable and functionally arbitrary” and basically “cancel one another”.103 The Palestinian gemara connected to m. Sanhedrin 9:3 observes:
R. Shimon says, burning is heavier than stoning but the rabbis teach that stoning is heavier than burning. R. Shimon says, strangulation is heavier than decapitation but the rabbis teach that decapitation is heavier than strangulation. (y. Sanhedrin 9:4, 27b)
72This stalemate arises because there is no definitive principled way to determine which of two equally heinous crimes is more severe and, by extension, which punishment is more severe. For our purposes, the inconclusiveness of the debate and the lack of a clear principle by which the various capital crimes can be sorted into universally accepted degrees of severity indicate that the very idea of lighter and heavier penalties is a foreign importation that operates according to a different logic. That logic, based on social class and an aesthetic standard, is not easily applied to the biblical methods of execution.
- 104 See Berkowitz 2006, p. 161-162, 284, n. 52 for a brief reference to scholars with different degree (...)
- 105 Dohrmann’s felicitous turn of phrase comes to mind here: finding biblical precedent for decapitati (...)
73It is clear that the three rabbinic innovations regarding the death penalty find their source, in part or in whole, in specific details of Roman capital punishment law and discourse. First, the rabbis add the Roman modes of decapitation and strangulation to the existing biblical penalties of burning and stoning;104 second, they classify the modes of execution according to their degree of severity; and third, they introduce an aesthetic criterion as the basis for this classification. Whatever transformations these ideas may have undergone at the hands of the rabbis (and they did), they were all three Roman in origin. Certainly, the rabbis make somewhat inconsistent attempts to nativize them,105 but the difficulty and dissonance they experience in the process is further evidence that the ideas are foreign importations adapted to the rabbis’ apologetic purpose.
74The reason for the appropriation of these elements is the intercultural polemic traced throughout this paper, in which law polices the civilized/barbaric distinction. To serve as the badge of the civilized, law must be purged of its potentially barbarous elements.
Rabbinic redirection
75Like the writers of the Second Sophistic and the Greek and Latin church fathers surveyed above, the rabbis were not content to simply reject the barbarian label and to neutralize barbarian elements in their own law. On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, they also redirected the charge of barbarism onto the Romans by depicting Esau, the ancestor and archetype of Rome, and various Roman emperors, as political and moral barbarians.
a) Esau the barbarian
- 106 Rather than sodomizing others, he voluntarily allows himself to be sodomized, rendering him sexual (...)
76Throughout Genesis Rabbah 63, Esau, the ancestor of Rome, is vilified in terms redolent of barbarian discourse. In the biblical story, Esau is a simple and sympathetic character, the dutiful favorite of his aging father, who even manages to overcome his anger and reconcile with the scheming younger brother who deceitfully deprived him of both birthright and blessing. Yet, deploying every trope in the classic barbarian repertoire, various units within Genesis Rabbah 63 transform Esau into an ignorant and uncultivated hunter, a wild man of the open fields (63:10), an animalistic glutton devouring food like a camel (63:12), an avowed atheist and blasphemer (63:10, 13, 14), an idolator and failed fratricide already in utero (63:6) drawn to acts of impiety, theft, sodomization,106 rape, and murder (63:10-14). Through creative verbal associations, the rabbis read the banal biblical verse “And Esau came in from the fields and he was faint” (Gen 25:29) as darkly hinting at the most heinous sins (Genesis Rabbah 63:12):
Esau raped a betrothed virgin and committed murder. Thus it says, And Esau came in from the field… which means that he raped a betrothed virgin, as it is said: But if the man finds the betrothed maiden in the field and seizes her and lies with her (Deut 22:25); … and he was faint which means that he committed murder as in the verse For my soul faints before the murderers (Jer 4:31).
77Throwing in idolatry for good measure, the midrashic author goes on to explain that God took Abraham’s life when he did so that he would not have to see his grandson Esau engage in idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder – the three sins that bring exile from the land and from the presence of God. Finally, and directly contradicting the filial piety exhibited by Esau in the biblical narrative, the rabbis impute to Esau a plan to commit the most heinous and barbaric of crimes in the Roman moral economy – patricide (Genesis Rabbah 67:8). With this, the midrashic barbarization of Esau/Rome is complete. No wonder Israel is said to cry out, “Sovereign of the Universe! Is it not enough that we have been subjected to the seventy nations, but must we be subjected to this one too…?” (Genesis Rabbah 63:10).
78Depicting Esau/Rome as a moral barbarian facilitates the rabbis’ critique of Roman law as lawless savagery:
And when Esau was forty years old, he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath the daughter of Elon (Gen 26:34). It is written, The swine out of the wood ravages it, that which moves in the field feeds on it (Ps 80:14). R. Pinhas and R. Ḥelkiah in R. Simon’s name said: Of all the prophets, only two – Moses and Asaph – exposed it [i.e., Rome’s pretense]. Asaph: The swine out of the wood ravages it. And Moses said, And the swine, because he parts the hoof (Deut 14:8). Why does he compare [Rome] to a swine? For this reason: when the swine is lying down it puts out its hoofs, as if to say, “I am pure”; so does this wicked state [Rome] rob and oppress, yet pretend to be executing justice. So for forty years Esau used to ensnare married women and violate them, yet when he attained forty years he compared himself to his father, saying, “As my father was forty years old when he married, so I will marry at the age of forty”. Hence it is written, And when Esau was forty years old, he took to wife (Gen 26:34). (Genesis Rabbah 65:1)
- 107 This symbolic connection seems to inform Genesis Rabbah 63:8 which claims the emperor Diocletian b (...)
79This complex midrash trades in the symbolic association of Rome with swine.107 Two biblical verses about swine – Ps 80:14 attributed to Asaph and Deut 14:8 attributed to Moses – are decoded as references to Rome. In Ps 80, the swine/Rome is a wild and ravaging beast. In Deut 14, the swine, despite possessing cloven hooves that generally signal ritual purity, is declared impure. Together the two paint a portrait of Rome as a savage oppressor (Ps 80) that pretends to be just (Deut 14). This false self-presentation is then tied to Esau, the ancestor and symbol of Rome. The biblical notification of Esau’s marriage at the age of forty is reframed by the midrashist as a hypocritical pretense following years of illicit sexual connections! And just as the impure swine stretches out his cloven hoofs and pretends to be pure, just as Esau announces a late-stage marriage in what the rabbis describe as a false show of sexual and social propriety, so Rome robs and oppresses lawlessly while declaring itself a paragon of law and justice. But Rome’s justice is no justice, its courts are no courts, and its law is no law. Like Esau, their swinelike ancestor, the Romans are a lawless barbarian people illegitimately claiming the mantle of humanitas.
- 108 The term “fatal charades” is borrowed from Coleman 1990. For Jewish attitudes to theaters and circ (...)
- 109 Elmslie 1911, p. 12. See also, Hayes 1995.
80The gruesome “fatal charades” of the theater and arena, were condemned by many ancient writers, including Jews, as places of barbaric violence, not lawful executions according to principles of justice.108 And because the rabbis refused to recognize Roman justice as justice, basilicas, tribunals and other structures associated with Roman judgment and execution were deemed sites of murder,109 prohibited to Jews because of the impurity arising from illicitly spilled blood (m. Avodah Zarah 1:7).
b) Barbarized emperors
81Rabbinic sources level a charge of barbarism at Rome not merely through the proxy of Esau, but through direct narratives about 1st through 3rd century Roman emperors. Already, Dionysius of Halicarnassus cited the brutal treatment of vanquished peoples as the mark of the barbarian despot and Aelius Aristides contrasted brutal Roman imperialism with the peaceful spread of Greek civilization (see above). Echoing this perspective, rabbinic narratives highlight the Roman emperors’ savage cruelty toward the vanquished Jews, exposing the emperors as lawless and cruel despots, which is to say, political and moral barbarians. That these narratives draw on the barbarian repertoire is supported by the explicit and ironic use of the term “barbarian”: in these stories, Roman figures excoriate the Jews as “barbarians” all the while demonstrating through their actions that the label more readily applies to themselves.
- 110 For fascinating analyses of the full story, see Levinson 2003; Hasan-Rokem 1993.
The wicked Titus entered the sanctum of the Holy of Holies, and with his sword brandished in his hand he slashed the two curtains, and taking two whores he spread out a scroll of the Law beneath them and raped them on top of the altar, and his sword came out full of blood. (According to some authorities it was from the blood of the sacrifices, and according to others it was from the blood of the goat of the Day of Atonement.) He began to revile and blaspheme saying, “He who wages battle with a king in the desert and triumphs is different from him who wages battle in the king’s own palace and vanquishes him”.
What did he do? He gathered all of the Temple vessels and put them in a sack and descended to a ship. As soon as he had embarked a tempest struck the sea. He said, “It would appear that this nation’s god has power only on water. He punished the generation of Enosh with water, likewise he could only punish the generation of the flood with water, the generation of the Dispersal and Pharaoh and his army were likewise only punished with water. So I, when I was in His house and domain he had no power to stand against me, and now he opposes me here!” The Holy One said, “By your life, I will punish you with the most insignificant of my creatures” [i.e., a mosquito which causes Titus’s death in the second part of the story omitted here]. Immediately God beckoned to the sea and it stayed its anger.
When he arrived in Rome, all of the citizens came out and acclaimed him: “Conqueror of the barbarians” [nikita barbaria]. (Leviticus Rabbah 22:3)110
- 111 The parallel in Ecclesiastes Rabbah 4:4 identifies the blood as the blood of the sacrifices, or of (...)
- 112 Levinson 2003, p. 369, points to the use of gladius as a sexual term and refers to Adams 1982, p. (...)
- 113 In rabbinic sources, blood following sexual intercourse with a non-virgin (as we may suppose is th (...)
- 114 In Lamentations Rabbah proem 23, Nebuchadnezzar is likewise hailed as “Conqueror of the barbarians (...)
82Elaborating a tradition that appears already in a tannaitic source (Sifre Deuteronomy 328), the story in Leviticus Rabbah 22:3 (partially cited here), details Titus’s heinous acts in the Holy of Holies and does so by drawing on stock themes of the barbarian repertoire as attested in the rich literary tradition encompassing classical Greek, Latin, Second Sophistic, and early Christian writings. Titus brazenly and impiously enters a sacred site; he thrusts his sword into the sacred curtain as if to “murder” the god of Israel; he gives vent to bestial lust by having sex with not one but two prostitutes, and in demonstration of his profound lawlessness, he does so on top of a scroll of the law laid out on the altar. Following this double penetration of the holy curtain on the one hand and the prostitutes on the other, “his sword came out full of blood”. Levinson is correct to note that this statement collapses the two penetrations into one, but there is more to it than that. The ambiguous equation of his literal sword and his metaphorical sword seals Titus’s identity as the most depraved kind of barbarian. The blood on his literal sword (from the sacrificial blood that stained the curtain perhaps?111) indicts him as a shedder of blood; the blood on his metaphorical sword (his penis)112 indicts him as either a rapist or a man guilty of sexual relations with a menstruant.113 Both possibilities intensify the portrayal of Titus’s actions as barbaric. Finally, Titus is said to plunder the sacred vessels, completing his portrayal as impious atheist, shedder of blood, bestial rapist, and thief – a collocation of the most savage traits conventionally associated with the barbarian. In a brilliant and satirical flourish that highlights the depravity of Roman society and its utter inversion of humanitas and barbaria, the perpetrator of these heinous crimes is acclaimed upon his return to Rome as “Conqueror of the barbarians!!” This narrative detail is a sly wink to the narrator’s rabbinic audience: those Romans think that we are barbarians? We know who the real barbarian is! None other than Titus, that impious and savage murderer, rapist, and thief. Those who acclaim him are as monstrous as he.114
83The same ironic subversion appears in a story concerning the emperor Trajan in the Palestinian Talmud (y. Sukkah 5:1, 55b). Here too, a brutal emperor is quick to label the Jews as (foreign and political) barbarians, only to be exposed as the true moral barbarian by his own brutal actions.
- 115 The more developed versions in Lamentations Rabbah I, 16 #45, 4:20 and Esther Rabbah, proem 3, dif (...)
A son was born to him [the wicked Trajan] on the 9th of Av when the Jews were fasting [and thus appeared to be mourning the birth]. His daughter died during Hanukkah and they [the Jews] lit lamps [and thus appeared to be celebrating her death]. His [Trajan’s] wife sent to him, saying, “Before you conquer the barbarians [or: Instead of conquering the barbarians], come and conquer the Jews [of Alexandria] who are rebelling against you”. He thought he would arrive in ten days but he arrived in five days. He found them studying the Torah verse, The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth [as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you do not understand (Deut 28:49)]. He said to them, “With what are you occupied?” “With this [verse],” they said to him. He said to them, “I am the man [brought against you from afar, and swiftly]! I thought it would take me ten days to arrive but I arrived in five!” The legions surrounded them and slaughtered them. He said to the women, “If you obey the legions I will not kill you”. They said to him, “What you did to those on the ground floor [of the synagogue, i.e., the men] do to those in the gallery [i.e., the women]. He mixed their blood with their blood, and the blood flowed into the sea as far as Cyprus…115
- 116 Similarly, we may infer from Tertullian’s writing that Christians were charged with treason and di (...)
- 117 Though their “pious” obligations are perhaps less innocent than one might suppose at first glance. (...)
- 118 The rabbinic narrator does not shrink from the tragic irony of depicting Trajan as relying on a bi (...)
84The story describes the Jews’ failure to celebrate the birth of Trajan’s son or to mourn the death of Trajan’s daughter, failures that enrage the emperor.116 Although the Jews’ failure to show proper respect to the imperial family was an unintended consequence of their pious observance of their own religious obligations,117 Trajan’s wife brings their alleged disloyalty to the attention of her husband: you care so much about conquering barbarians? Then come conquer these rebellious Jews! Trajan travels quickly – more quickly than expected – to Alexandria where he finds Jews studying Deut 28:49. The verse describes the conquerors of the Jews as foreign, speaking an incomprehensible language, and moving like a predatory bird – classic characteristics of the barbarian. Identifying himself as the conqueror in Deut 28:49, Trajan unwittingly embraces the mantle of the barbarian himself, the aptness of which he immediately proves by filling the sea with the blood of innocent Jewish men and Jewish women who choose death over abuse by Roman soldiers.118 Our rabbinic storyteller is having a gruesome bit of fun at Trajan’s expense. In conquering the “barbarian” Jews, he asserts, the Roman emperor reveals by his own admission and through his lawless savagery that he is the true “barbarian”.
- 119 The story echoes the biblical book of Lamentations (Lam 4:10), where conquest and starvation force (...)
85The story’s description of Roman legions surrounding and slaughtering Jews until blood runs into the sea, appears almost verbatim in an adjacent story that recounts the carnage of the Hadrianic wars (Lamentations Rabbah I, 16 #45). In this story, Hadrian uses deception to round up many Jews, after which “the legions surrounded them and slaughtered them so that their blood flowed into the sea as far as Cyprus”. In the continuation of the story, we learn that the Jews who had escaped by hiding in caves, began, in their starvation, to consume the corpses of the slain. When one man realizes that despite his precautions he has eaten his own father, he exclaims “Woe to me! I have eaten the flesh of my father!” Cannibalism is, of course, a behavior attributed to barbarians, a savagery made worse when the victim is one’s own family. But the text is clear: the cannibalism of the Jews is not their natural state; it is the result of Roman brutality.119 Indeed, the juxtaposition of the barbaric deeds of Hadrian (his brutal acts of slaughter) and the barbaric deeds of his starving Jewish victims (their cannibalism) only serves to underscore this difference – the “barbarism” of the latter is forced while the barbarism of the former is natural. This is not the proud acceptance and transvaluation of the barbarian title; it is instead a bitter protest against the self-proclaimed agents of “civilization” whose conquests do not civilize, but rather barbarize all who resist their savagery.
Conclusion
86According to the classical Greek worldview, civilized peoples were distinguished from barbarians by the rule of law. The Romans, denigrated by the Greeks as barbarians, took up this very distinction but proclaimed themselves the agents of civilization, extirpating barbarity through the spread of Roman law. Various peoples subjugated to Rome (and therefore “barbarians” in the eyes of the Romans) in turn appropriated the “barbarian repertoire” to convey their own meaning and message. Invoking familiar tropes of the barbarian discourse, they engaged in a double strategy of apologetics and redirection. They defended themselves against the charge of barbarism and redirected it to Rome. The violence of Rome’s law and the despotism of Rome’s emperors exposed, the “civilized” empire was denounced as the quintessence of barbarism.
87Second Temple period Jews and Palestinian rabbis of the first few centuries participated in this competitive apologetics. The rabbis decried the barbarism of Rome’s law while deflecting the barbarian label from themselves by minimizing the barbarous elements in their own law. Through hyperliteral interpretation, the rabbis simultaneously justified and disabled the biblical law permitting the execution of a stubborn and rebellious son. Representing the son as an utter barbarian, they justified his execution. At the same time, because no child of the covenant would ever “qualify” as an utter barbarian, they prevented the law from ever being put into practice. And finally, the rabbis imported substantive and conceptual elements from Roman law in order to conform biblical executions to the Roman standard of a dignified or aesthetically “pleasing” death. Ironically, in the very act of constructing themselves as utterly distinct from and superior to Rome the rabbis appropriated Roman legal concepts and categories. They may have been keen to beat the Romans at their own game, but it was still the Romans’ game.
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Mathisen 2006 = R.W. Mathisen, Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and the Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman empire, in American Historical Review, 111-4, 2006, p. 1011-1040.
Mirković 2015 = M. Mirković, Patria Potestas or Murder in the Family, in Annals FLB – Belgrade Law Review, 18-3, 2015, p. 5-17.
Mordvintseva 2013 = V. Mordvintseva, The Sarmatians: The Creation of Archaeological Evidence, in Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 32-2, 2013, p. 203-219.
Nasrallah 2010 = L. Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of empire, Cambridge, 2010.
O’Brien 2006 = K.S. O’Brien, The Curse of the Law (Galatians 3.13): Crucifixion, Persecution, and Deuteronomy 21.22-23, in Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 29-1, 2006, p. 55-76.
Pauly – Wissowa 1914–1972 = A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, K. Witte (ed.), Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft: zweite Reihe, Stuttgart, 1914-1972.
Peirano 2010 = I. Peirano, Hellenized Romans and Barbarized Greeks: Reading the End of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae, in Journal of Roman Studies, 100, 2010, p. 32-53.
Reeder 2012 = C.A. Reeder, The Enemy in the Household: Family Violence in Deuteronomy and Beyond, Grand Rapids, 2012.
Roberts – Donaldson 1885–1896 = A. Roberts, J. Donaldson (ed.), The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, revised and arranged with notes by A. Cleveland Coxe, Buffalo, 1885-1896.
Rosenberg 2018 = M. Rosenberg, Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity, New York, 2018.
Sarat 2001a = A. Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition, Princeton, 2001.
Sarat 2001b = A. Sarat (ed.), Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice, Princeton, 2001.
Schäfer 1997 = P. Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 1997.
Sharp 1997 = C. Sharp, Phinehan Zeal and Rhetorical Strategy in 4QMMT, in Revue de Qumrân, 70, 1997, p. 207-222.
Shaw 1982/1983 = B. Shaw, ‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk’: The Ancient Mediterranean Ideology of the Pastoral Nomad, in Ancient Society, 13/14, 1982/1983, p. 5-30.
Stroumsa 1999 = G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Christianity, Tübingen, 1999.
Vlassopoulos 2013 = K. Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians, Cambridge, 2013.
Wasserman 2016 = M.B. Wasserman, Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities, Princeton, 2016.
Weiss 2014 = Z. Weiss, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine, Cambridge, 2014.
Westbrook 1999 = R. Westbrook, Vitae Necisque Potestas, in Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 49-2, 1999, p. 203-223.
Winton 2000 = R. Winton, Herodotus, Thucydides and the Sophists, in C. Rowe, M. Schofield (ed.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2000, p. 89-121.
Woolf 2011 = G. Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and empire in the Roman West, Chichester, 2011.
Woolf 2012 = G. Woolf, Saving the Barbarian, in E. Gruen (ed.), Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 266-282.
Notes
1 Berkowitz 2006, p. 154.
2 LeFebvre 2006, p. 202.
3 Levinson 2003, p. 358, describes this strategy as follows: “Not only did the rabbis adopt agonistic themes and plots from the hegemonic culture in order to denigrate that culture. When they came to represent their own reality they did so with the literary models provided by that culture”.
4 Vlassopoulos 2013.
5 Vlassopoulos 2013, p. 164. He notes that the barbarian appears in the textual tradition as an ordinary foreigner; as linguistic other; as the possessor of an alien wisdom that was the original source of Greek wisdom; or as the denizen of a utopian community that could serve as a political, legal, economic, military, moral, or religious model (p. 31). Thus, the historian Ephorus of Cyme (4th century BCE) countered the stereotypical representation of Scythians as cruel and barbarous, claiming that they lived lives of justice, pacifism, and common possession – virtues that made them invincible to their enemies (p. 206). For more on the image of the barbarian, see Heather 1999; Woolf 2012.
6 Vlassapoulos 2013, p. 191. He continues, “But in doing this the Greeks were merely unexceptional. An examination of Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature and art reveals almost identical representations of the Other in the polarity mode” (ibid.).
7 Hall 1989, p. 6, asserts that it was the Persian wars which engendered the polarization of Greek and barbarian.
8 LeFebvre 2006, p. 186.
9 Herodotus contrasts Greek “freedom” and Asian “servitude”: the Greek polis consists of politically equal citizens living “free” under the rule of law while the Persian empire is ruled by a single arbitrary and despotic king for which reason, he says, the Greeks referred to the Persians as barbarians; see Winton 2000, p. 103.
10 See Hall 1989, p. 13-17, regarding the polarization of the categories “Greek” and “barbarian” by Greek authors along political lines, with Athenian democracy and freedom standing in opposition to the despotism of barbarians.
11 LeFebvre 2006, p. 183-184.
12 LeFebvre 2006, p. 190.
13 Already in the 4th century BCE, Isocrates (Panegyricus 50) observed that the term “Greek” referred not to a race (genos) or nature (physis) but to an intelligence (dianoia) that could be acquired through education (paideusis); see Kramer 1984. Later, Seneca would abstract the perceived qualities of the barbarian, such as cruelty and brutality, and rendered them universally applicable (Antonova 2019, p. 64).
14 As we shall see below, Dionysius explicitly attributes the conversion of lawful kings into lawless barbarian despots to the “tyrannical presumption,” attested by brutal and inhuman treatment of the vanquished.
15 As Antonova notes, “the proper command of Greek language is also associated closely with the possession of λόγος, understood both as reason and as speech. As a result, the barbarian is someone who does not speak Greek and is distinguished not only by incomprehensible speech but also by irrational drives and chaotic thought-processes” (Antonova 2019, p. 23). Johnston 2018, p. 83, notes that the difference between the Gallic other and the Greek or Roman self was that between emotionality and rationality.
16 For exemplars of these varied uses, see the primary sources listed in Antonova 2019, especially p. 25, 63-66, 74-75, 81-85, 88-92. For examples of the use of barbarian stereotypes in imperial and late antique ethnographic writings, see Woolf 2011, chapter 2, and Woolf 2012.
17 Antonova 2019, p. 24, 304-305, points to a contrary use of the term “barbarian” by some Christian apologists. Specifically, some Greek Christian apologists willingly chose to define themselves as barbarian based on a positive redefinition of the term as denoting the virtuous polar opposite of decadent and debauched Greekness and Romanness. See also Laura Nasrallah’s discussion of Tatian’s acceptance of the label “barbarian” (Nasrallah 2010). However, the Latin Christian apologetic tradition tended to align Christianity with the preferred notion of romanitas.
18 Girdvainyte 2014, p. 2.
19 Girdvainyte 2014, p. 9.
20 He writes: “for there are hardly any other men who have such authority over their children as we have”. Similarly, Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that the institution, which gave virtually full and lifelong power to the father over his son (including the right to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, to keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death), was unique to the Romans (Ant. Rom. 2, 26, 4).
21 Cicero, Pro Balbo 43, as cited in Antonova 2019, p. 77.
22 Peirano 2010, p. 33.
23 Ibid.
24 Peirano 2010, p. 53
25 Peirano 2010, p. 42. Thus, Dionysius uses the term “Greek” to signal not an ethnicity or language but the possession of certain virtues: intelligence, a predilection for good behavior, and the abstention from inhuman behavior. He writes: “All in whose nature these qualities prevail I believe ought to be called Greeks, but those of whom the opposite is true, barbarians” (Ant. Rom. 14, 6, 5).
26 Ibid., p. 46f.
27 For more on law’s paradoxical dependence on violence in order to punish violence, and the inevitable but unstable relationship of law to violence, see Sarat 2001a and the essays in Sarat 2001b.
28 Antonova 2019, p. 96.
29 Antonova 2019, p. 128.
30 Antonova 2019, p. 121. Lucian slyly compares himself to the noble Scythian Anacharsis, saying “and please do not resent my likening myself to a man of regal statue, for he too was a barbarian, and no one could say that we Syrians are inferior to Scythians. It is not on grounds of royalty that I compare my situation with him, but rather because we are both barbarians” (Scythian 9; in Antonova 2019, p. 123). Here Lucian plays with the foreign/political and moral significations of the term “barbarian”.
31 Noting that there are no surviving texts from the critics of early Christianity that attest directly to a charge of barbarism, Antonova reconstructs the meaning and function of the charge from the Christian apologetic texts (Antonova 2019, p. 304). Similarly, apologetic Jewish and rabbinic texts will allow us to reconstruct their authors’ understanding of the meaning and function of the charge of barbarism, and the diversity of their responses.
32 Antonova 2019, p. 206-211.
33 As noted by Nasrallah, Tatian argues “that Greek language, culture, and identity are not unitary and superior but are constituted by pillaging from other ethnicities… Tatian accuses the Greeks of verbal pillaging and even linguistic connoisseurship or collecting” (Nasrallah 2010, p. 238). For more on the labeling of Christianity as a barbarosa philosophia, see Stroumsa 1999, chapter 4.
34 Nasrallah 2010, p. 216.
35 Nasrallah 2010, p. 239.
36 For a detailed exposition of the foregoing claims see Antonova 2019, chapter 4.
37 An exception is Tertullian’s response to the charge of treason and disloyalty arising from the Christians’ refusal to celebrate the holidays of the Caesar or to offer sacrifices for his health. Tertullian denies that Christians are public enemies, but even as he denies the threat he affirms it by underscoring the great number and diffusion of Christians in the empire, their potential to endanger the state if angered, and their allegiance to the citizenship of the universe rather than the empire (Apology 37, 1; 38, 3; 38, 6-7; see Antonova 2019, p. 239-243).
38 Antonova 2019, p. 300.
39 Antonova 2019, p. 220.
40 Antonova 2019, p. 226-228.
41 Antonova 2019, p. 229.
42 Antonova 2019, p. 230-236.
43 Antonova 2019, p. 261-267.
44 Antonova 2019, p. 288-293.
45 The use of the barbarian repertoire for internal enemies has earlier precedents. In his descriptions of the civil war, Julius Caesar “others” the Pompeians by subtly assimilating them to the barbari while the Numidian king Juba is cast as the triumphant Roman general, dictating terms to the broken Varus (Johnston 2018, p. 91).
46 Scythians and Sarmatians are classic barbarians in Greco-Roman ethnography. See discussion and n. 66 below.
47 Translation by Peter Holmes, in Roberts and Donaldson 1885–1896.
48 For surveys and analyses of these themes, see De Lange 1991; Schäfer 1997; and Isaac 2004. Katell Berthelot has argued that Greek writings of the Hellenistic period viewed the Jews and their “peculiar” customs and rituals as misanthropic and exceptional but not barbaric (Berthelot 2003, p. 80-94), but see Cicero in Pro Flacco 67 who refers to Judaism as a barbaric superstition. How frequently and explicitly Jews were classified as barbarians by Greeks or later Romans is a matter of some debate and will not be adjudicated here. Here, I am less interested in the explicit use of the label “barbarian” than in the deployment of barbarian tropes in connection with the Jews and Jewish law.
49 These charges are cited in Josephus, Against Apion.
50 Superstitio, understood as credulous and exaggerated servitude to deities conceived as tyrants, stood in opposition to the civic ideal of piety in which one honored the gods as a free person with dignity and constraint. Roman writers applied the term superstitio to barbarians because of their perceived slavish obedience to monstrous and immoral gods. Here, too, political and moral concepts are deeply intertwined.
51 LeFebvre 2006, p. 199.
52 LeFebvre’s translation in LeFebvre 2006, p. 200.
53 LeFebvre 2006, p. 201. Translation according to Barclay 2007, p. 254.
54 1 and 2 Maccabees emphasize at every turn the Jewish possession of and adherence to nomoi (1 Macc 1:49, 52, 56, 57; 2:21, 26, 27, 42, 48, 50, 58, 64, 67, 68; 4:42, 10:37, 13:3, 48; 14:29; 2 Macc 1:4; 2:2, 3, 18, 22; 3:1, 15; etc.) while describing the outrages and destruction of the barbarous enemy and their Jewish collaborators as lawless. Forms of anomos and paranomos appear in connection with the enemy and their Jewish collaborators in 1 Macc 1:34; 3:5, 6, 20; 9:23, 58; 10:61; 11:21, 25; 2 Macc 4:11; 8:4, 17.
55 Thus, Antiochus Epiphanes’s forces are described as a barbarian horde in 2 Macc 2:21 while the Phrygian governor Philip is declared a greater barbarian than Antiochus Epiphanes in 2 Macc 5:22. The equation of cruel tyrants with savage beasts (a barbarian trope) appears in 2 Macc 4:25, though in reference to the evil Menelaus appointed by Antiochus Epiphanus. In 2 Macc 15:2, Jews plead with the Seleucid general Nicanor not to be so cruel and “barbarous” as to attack on the Sabbath. See further LeFebvre 2006, p. 210.
56 LeFebvre 2006, p. 224.
57 See also Kimberley Fowler’s article in this volume.
58 Translation by Frederick Crombie in Roberts and Donaldson 1885–1896.
59 See, for example, Ambrose’s Letter XXVI, which describes the Pharisees who sought to stone the adulteress in bloodthirsty terms.
60 y. Sukkah 5:1, 55b; y. Bava Metzi‘a 2:5, 8c; Genesis Rabbah 10:60; Leviticus Rabbah 11; 22; Lamentations Rabbah 83:5, 152:20; Esther Rabbah 2:21; Exodus Rabbah 20. See also y. Mo‘ed Qatan 3:1, 81d for ברברית. By contrast, the only attestation of a brbr term in the Babylonian Talmud (barbaria in b. Yevamot 63b), is from a Palestinian source, Sifre Deuteronomy 320. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of rabbinic sources are my own.
61 Βαρβαρία; Barbaría, the Somalian northern coast in Africa (Huß 2006). Romans and Berbers joined in the defeat of Carthage in the 2nd century BCE. See further note 65 below.
62 Sifre Deuteronomy 320; y. Sheqalim 6:2, 50a; Genesis Rabbah 23; Song of Songs Rabbah 2:8; Exodus Rabbah 18; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2:7, Midrash Psalms 109.
63 A neutral geographic usage is found in the late work Exodus Rabbah 18:6, where Barbaria refers to a generic foreign land with no specific negative connotation: “To what may it be compared? To a king whose son went to a foreign land (barbaria) and the foreigners (ha-barbarim) rose and accepted him and made him king over them”. In Exodus Rabbah 20:14, however, a king’s son is captured by foreigners (barbarim) and enslaved by them.
64 The midrashic author may simply be inspired by the opportunity for word play, describing the flood that followed the dispersion of the babbling builders of the Tower of Babel as having reached Barbaria!
65 Mauretania is the Latin term for an area in North Africa (modern Morocco and part of Algeria) inhabited by the seminomadic Berbers (hence, barbarians), as was neighboring Numidia. In 33 BCE, Mauretania became a client state of Rome, and in 44 CE a full Roman province. Ancient Berber-inhabited Numidia was alternately a Roman province and a client state.
66 The Sarmatians were an Indo-European people originating in the Eurasian Steppe who migrated westward in the 4th–3rd centuries BCE and inhabited what is today parts of Ukraine and southern Russia, dominating the warlike Scythians. They allied with Germanic tribes against Rome in the 1st century CE but lost control over the Pontic Steppe (northern Turkey) to the Germanic Goths in the 3rd century CE. They suffered some defeats in the time of Constantine, after which Sarmatian fighters served in the Roman army in the provinces. However, in 374 CE, the Sarmatians enjoyed a decisive victory over Roman forces and along with the Goths and Vandals, settled the Western Roman empire in the 4th century invasions. Conquered by the Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries, they joined in battles against Roman and Germanic troops. Herodotus traces their origin to warlike Amazon women who escaped capture by Greeks, married Scythian men, and settled beyond the Tanais River. Various Greco-Roman ethnographers pair (or identify) the Sarmatians and the Scythians. Strabo also indicates a connection with Celts of Germanic origin. He describes the Sarmatians as nomadic, wagon-dwelling, milk-eaters (some of these elements are reflected in Tertullian’s description cited infra). See Istvánovits – Kulcsár 2017; Mordvintseva 2013.
67 Cuthi may be an error for Cushi (paired in Genesis Rabbah 60:2). Alternatively, since Cuthean is often substituted for Samaritan, it is possible that it appears here because a tradent or scribe confused Sarmatia with Samaria. For a third attempt to explain the unexpected appearance of Cuthean, see Lehnardt 2018.
68 For the designation of Abraham as “friend of God” see Hayes 1999, p. 22, 24-25; Sharp 1997.
69 It is possible to read the king as the Roman emperor and the provincial friend as a typical Judean client king or later rabbinic patriarch who enjoyed stable relations with Rome, but the common designation of Abraham as friend of God suggests that the king stands for God. Of course, the midrash may hint at both interpretations, a possibility that should not be dismissed since midrashic parables often construct multivalent analogies.
70 As we have seen, Antonova has argued in regard to Christians that they employed “the same charge raised against them not only as a counter-charge against their opponents, but also for the purpose of their own self-definition and self-articulation” (Antonova 2019, p. 306).
71 Mirković argues that although in Cicero’s time it was generally believed that the father had the right to put his son to death, the application of the father’s right to kill the family members under his authority cannot be proven in the historical period. He maintains that most of the commonly cited examples were not “the consequence of the strict application of the patria potestas. In putting their sons to death the fathers-magistrates did not use the vitae necisque potestas of the father, but the authority of supreme state officers. The crimes of which they were accused belonged not to family affairs, but to offences against the State interests” (Mirković 2015, p. 15). Mirković holds that the only provable cases are those concerning moral delict, such as adultery or stuprum, but even in such cases, the patria potestas was not unlimited (just cause is required) and the action was censured (he cites a case in which the father went into exile afterwards). See further, Westbrook 1999, who notes that the power of life and death over slaves came to be seen as tyrannical and as the mark of a barbarian (p. 203-204), but traces of the right of summary execution by private citizens persisted in certain narrow circumstances including serious crimes against parents (p. 221). In De Clementia (1, 15), describing the reign of Augustus, Seneca discusses an example of a harsh father who flogs his freeborn son to death and is almost lynched as a result of his brutality, as well as a counter-example of a father who chooses to exile his son rather than condemn him to the sack. The growing disapproval of fathers killing their children would eventually be enshrined in laws protecting the rights of sons and daughters and limiting parental power.
72 For more on Philo, Josephus, and other ancient Jewish interpretations of biblical passages condoning family violence, see Reeder 2012.
73 Reeder allows that the rabbis “may have been influenced by Roman social expectations including the customs and laws of patria potestas” (Reeder 2012, p. 96).
74 Even R. Yonatan who objects that there has been one application of the law in Israel’s history appears to be motivated by the theological problem of a nonapplied law in the Torah and not by an enthusiasm to keep the law operational.
75 Similarly, Cicero transfers the characteristics of the barbarian (especially savagery and ferocity) to groups and individuals within Roman society who threaten the political and social order.
76 Guggenheimer – Guggenheimer 1977, p. 235. Metathesis is common in the case of lamed, resh, and waw (Guggenheimer 1974). Thus, Guggenheimer disagrees with the identification of the word with τριτημόριον (see the Arukh as well as Jastrow’s lexicon) which means “one-third” and likely signals a third of a Roman pound, or 4 oz. The term τετρᾰ-μοιρία or “four-fold portion” is used by Xenophon (Anabasis 7, 2, 36; 7, 6, 1 and Hellenica 6, 1, 6) to describe the extra allotment given as a reward to generals.
77 Guggenheimer 2011, p. 286-287.
78 The barbarization of Esau involved the same charge. Genesis Rabbah 63:12 depicts a ravenous Esau instructing Jacob to open Esau’s mouth and pour in the food, as one would feed a camel. For הלעטה as a term specific to the feeding of animals, see m. Shabbat 24:3.
79 For more on the consumption of raw meat as the stigma of barbarism, see Shaw 1982/1983, p. 24, and on Herodotus’s association of the consumption of unmixed wine with barbarians, see Shaw 1982/1983, p. 12.
80 According to rabbinic law, a person cannot be prosecuted without a clear prior warning that the act he is about to commit is prohibited. Thus, R. Yosi b. Ḥanina is concerned to show that the Torah contains a clear prohibition of the crime for which the stubborn and rebellious son is condemned – a prohibition of eating raw, blood-infused flesh. He locates that warning in Lev 19:26. “R. Yosi b. Ḥanina says: Where is the warning for the stubborn and rebellious son? Scripture teaches: You shall not eat with the blood” (Sifra, Qedoshim 3.6). Midrash Tannaim 21:21 contains a similar comment on Lev 19:26, You shall not eat with the blood: “you shall not eat an eating that leads to bloodshed, and this is the eating of the stubborn and rebellious son”. These passages are in keeping with interpretations of Gen 9:4 according to which the consumption of animal meat without proper slaughter and disposal of the blood incurs liability for murder.
81 Though, in line with the biblical text and against Roman law, parental authority here includes both mother and father.
82 Sifre Deuteronomy 218 reads: “Another interpretation: simply because this one consumes his father’s wealth, you say that the stubborn and rebellious son must be put to death? [No!] Rather, he is condemned because of what he will become. Better he should die innocent than as one guilty”.
83 For a brilliant discussion of this claim, see Wasserman 2016.
84 The fact that the union has a path to legalization does not erase its coercive nature. The woman is taken and made a wife with no consent required, and can be dismissed if the husband takes a dislike to her after “afflicting” (i.e., raping) her.
85 For Jewish interpretation of Deuteronomy 21:22-23 as a reference to crucifixion see O’Brien 2006, p. 65-66. Normally, the crucifixion interpretation is rejected by the rabbis (see Baumgarten 1972, as cited in Berkowitz 2006, p. 284, n. 45, who says in regard to Sifre Deuteronomy 221’s rejection of the interpretation of Deut 21:22 as a reference to crucifixion: “The object of this midrash is to exclude any possible exegetical basis for crucifixion which is unmistakably identified as a Roman practice”). However, the crucifixion interpretation of Deut 21:22 (“an unusual death”) seems to be accepted here in the case of the stubborn and rebellious son. A parallel in Midrash Tannaim identifies marriage to two women, one loved and one unloved (v. 15-20 of the same biblical chapter and the case immediately preceding the stubborn and rebellious son law), as the “original sin” that leads to the formation of a stubborn and rebellious son. A passage in the Tanhuma (Parshat Ki Tetse) combines these traditions: having two wives in the house creates strife (hence the reference to satan) and one who takes a beautiful captive as wife will have a stubborn and rebellious son. Absalom is cited as the paradigm example of this claim. David lusted after a foreign captive woman, Maacah the daughter of Talmai the king of Geshur, and produced Absalom whose crimes read like a checklist for the barbarian. Absalom rebelled against father and king and committed treason by usurping his father’s throne and sleeping with his father’s concubines. He was a failed patricide (the consummate barbarian) whose own death (hanging by his hair from a tree!), though lamented by David, was deserved.
86 Important dissenting views are found in Dohrmann 2002; Berkowitz 2006. I will refer repeatedly to both of these excellent studies.
87 Berkowitz 2006 is one of the few scholars to point to Roman influence on rabbinic laws of execution. She focuses, however, on the rabbinic construction of power and authority while I focus on the attempt to “civilize” the law by eliminating its characteristically barbarian elements.
88 Berkowitz 2006, p. 174-177.
89 m. Sanhedrin 7:3 and t. Sanhedrin 9:11 record a dispute between R. Judah and the sages over which method of decapitation is more repulsive and which more “beautiful” or pleasing. The terms nivul (ניוול) and yafah (יפה) are employed. For an excellent discussion of these passages and the term nivul as an aesthetic term applied to ugly or disfigured bodies, see Berkowitz 2006, chapter 6. In y. Sanhedrin 6:3, 23c, a “pleasant” execution is understood as one that minimizes humiliation. Specifically, a woman is not stoned naked because, following the midrashic interpretation of Lev 19:18, one should choose for one’s fellow an execution that is yafah. On the other hand, in Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Neziqin 5, to Exod 21:15, a “pleasant” execution is understood as a “lighter” (qalah) execution.
90 I am indebted to David Kimmel for contributing research and writing to this section on the aesthetics of Roman capital punishment.
91 Bauman 2002, p. 6-19; Cantarella 1991, p. 242; Garnsey 1970.
92 Coleman 1990, p. 46.
93 Ibid.
94 Coleman 1990, p. 47.
95 Coleman 1990, p. 57.
96 The punishment for parricides is described in Digest 48, 9, 9 as follows: “A parricide is flogged with blood-colored rods, then sewn up in a sack with a dog, a dunghill cock, a viper, and a monkey; then the sack is thrown into the depths of the sea”.
97 Pauly – Wissowa 1914–1972, s.v. “crux”.
98 Mathisen (2006, p. 1015) notes that the extension of Roman citizenship to nearly all remaining free foreigners in the empire via the Antonine Constitution (212 CE) did not put an end to distinctions in capital punishment. The “differential treatments in criminal law that once had favored Roman citizens now were based on the distinction between honestiores (more distinguished people) and humiliores (more humble people), which was determined empirically on the basis of social and official position”.
99 Most scholars deny the connection, but as demonstrated by Berkowitz (2006), the hand of Rome hangs heavily over rabbinic death penalty discourse here and everywhere. Cohn 1970, p. 56 is one scholar who notes the possibility that the rabbis may have adopted or imitated a mode of execution known to them from Roman law – the throwing down from the Tarpeian rock.
100 Speaking of course hypothetically. The rabbis do not carry out these executions, but their discursive power and their importance in the intercultural polemic traced here are undeniable.
101 For details see Berkowitz 2006, chapter 6.
102 For this insight see Dohrmann 2002 and Berkowitz 2006.
103 Dohrmann 2002, p. 277.
104 See Berkowitz 2006, p. 161-162, 284, n. 52 for a brief reference to scholars with different degrees of resistance to the idea that the rabbis derived execution by decapitation with a sword from Roman legal culture.
105 Dohrmann’s felicitous turn of phrase comes to mind here: finding biblical precedent for decapitation by the sword lays “a scrim of autonomy over the fact of acquiescence” (Dohrmann 2002, p. 297). In this way “[t]he law assimilates and accommodates Rome and denies her at once” (ibid.).
106 Rather than sodomizing others, he voluntarily allows himself to be sodomized, rendering him sexually effeminate – another common (if contradictory) characteristic of the barbarian.
107 This symbolic connection seems to inform Genesis Rabbah 63:8 which claims the emperor Diocletian began life as a swineherd, a legend that may have been inspired by the low status of Diocletian’s family (he was the son of a freed slave).
108 The term “fatal charades” is borrowed from Coleman 1990. For Jewish attitudes to theaters and circuses see Elmslie 1911, Excursus 3; Weiss 2014, chapter 5; Levinson 2003.
109 Elmslie 1911, p. 12. See also, Hayes 1995.
110 For fascinating analyses of the full story, see Levinson 2003; Hasan-Rokem 1993.
111 The parallel in Ecclesiastes Rabbah 4:4 identifies the blood as the blood of the sacrifices, or of the goat used on Yom Kippur; the parallel in b. Gittin 56b, identifies the blood simply as the blood on the curtain, presumably from sacrifices; either way, the improper spilling of even animal blood smacks of murder in biblical and rabbinic tradition.
112 Levinson 2003, p. 369, points to the use of gladius as a sexual term and refers to Adams 1982, p. 20-21.
113 In rabbinic sources, blood following sexual intercourse with a non-virgin (as we may suppose is the case with prostitutes) is a sign of either tearing as a result of aggressive or violent intercourse, or menstruation. See for example, b. Niddah 45a, or b. Ketubbot 10b where blood after intercourse with a virgin is either the blood from tearing or from menstruation. See further, Rosenberg 2018, chapter 7 for the Bavli’s attempt to divorce virginity from violence.
114 In Lamentations Rabbah proem 23, Nebuchadnezzar is likewise hailed as “Conqueror of the barbarians” following his bloody destruction of Jerusalem. In this case, however, the bitter irony of the acclamation is explicit. The Judeans deported to Babylon in 597 greet Nebuchadnezzar upon his return to Babylon with the second group of Judean deportees in 586. By acclaiming Nebuchadnezzar as “Conqueror of the barbarians” these Judeans appear to denigrate themselves and their fellow Judeans as barbarians. But the slur is insincere, as indicated both by their duplicitous garb (the white outer layer, ostensibly to celebrate the triumph of Nebuchadnezzar, both hides and is cancelled by the hidden black layer of clothing signaling mourning) and by their immediate expression of concern for kith and kin. Here too, then, the defeated and subjugated Jews are maligned as barbarian and even apply the term perforce to themselves, but the reader (like the Jews in the story) is not fooled as to the identity of the “true” barbarian.
115 The more developed versions in Lamentations Rabbah I, 16 #45, 4:20 and Esther Rabbah, proem 3, differ in some details. Specifically, a single child is born on the 9th of Av and dies on Hanukkah; the Jews are aware that their act of lighting candles may be misinterpreted; and they are denounced to Trajan’s wife by malicious informers.
116 Similarly, we may infer from Tertullian’s writing that Christians were charged with treason and disloyalty for refusing to celebrate the holidays of the Caesar or to offer sacrifices for his health.
117 Though their “pious” obligations are perhaps less innocent than one might suppose at first glance. After all, the religious acts that occupy them commemorate conflicts with other agents of Temple destruction and desecration and are thus expressions of national identity.
118 The rabbinic narrator does not shrink from the tragic irony of depicting Trajan as relying on a biblical verse to license his slaughter.
119 The story echoes the biblical book of Lamentations (Lam 4:10), where conquest and starvation force the Jews to acts of apparent barbarism to survive. In her discussion of Lamentations, Julia Watts Belser stresses “the brutal moral transformation that starvation brings in its wake. Through images of cannibalism and brutality, the writer castigates the ethical reduction of Zion’s people. Destruction does not simply level the city; it devastates its moral capacity” (Belser 2017, p. 83-84).
© Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2021