Strategies of Persuasion in Herodotus Histories and Genesis-kings: Evoking Reality in Ancient Narratives of a Past 9004427961, 9789004427969

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Strategies of Persuasion in Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings

Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Editors René Bloch (Institut für Judaistik, Universität Bern) Karina Martin Hogan (Department of Theology, Fordham University) Associate Editors Hindy Najman (Theology & Religion Faculty, University of Oxford) Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven) Benjamin G. Wright, III (Department of Religion Studies, Lehigh University) Advisory Board A. M. Berlin – K. Berthelot – J. J. Collins – B. Eckhardt – Y. Furstenberg S. Kattan Gribetz – S. Mason – F. Mirguet – J. H. Newman A. K. Petersen – M. Popović – I. Rosen-Zvi – J. T. A. G. M. van Ruiten M. Segal – J. Sievers – W. Smelik – G. Stemberger – L. T. Stuckenbruck L. Teugels – J. C. de Vos

volume 195

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

Strategies of Persuasion in Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings Evoking Reality in Ancient Narratives of a Past By

Eva Tyrell

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2020005201

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1384-2161 ISBN 978-90-04-42796-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42797-6 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix

PART 1 Premises and Concepts 1 Persuasion and Comparison 3 1 A Comparative Approach 4 2 The Writers’ Awareness for Their Craft 7 3 Characteristics of the Sources 12 3.1 Tradition Literature versus Known Author 14 3.2 Points of Similarity in the Selected Sources 25 2 Method, Objectives, Theory 30 1 Do Historical Narratives Employ Specific Narrative Strategies? 30 2 Comparing Texts while Granting Them Different Criteria of Validity and Plausibility 33 2.1 Rüsen’s Theory: Universal Areas of Plausibility in Historical Thought 34 2.2 My Approach 40 3 Strategies of Persuasion as Accessibility Relations 41 4 Excursus: Ancient Greek Philosophy and Rhetorical Theory 45 5 Limitation to Narratorial Discourse 46 6 Additional Premises 47 7 The Constitutive Role of the Recipient 51 8 Usefulness of the Distinction between Narrator and Author 54

PART 2 Fundamentals of Narrative Structure in Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings 3 Highly Different Modes of Narration and Mediacy 59 1 Introduction 59 2 Mediacy in Gen–Kings and Herodotus 60 2.1 The Narrator Speaking in the First Person 60 2.2 A Term Designating the Work 70

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2.3 Narratorial References to ‘Himself’ as the Narrator 75 2.4 Insights into the Narrator’s Thought Processes and Method 78 Two Contrasting Modes of Mediation 86

4 Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 94 1 Indication of Temporal Distance between the Discourse-Now and the Past 94 2 The Proportion of Discursive Parts 101 2.1 Objects as Connectors of Story-World and Discourse-World 111 3 The Use of Direct and Indirect Speech 119 4 Characters Indirectly Addressing the Extradiegetic Audience 129 5 Narrative Mode and Source Criticism 132

PART 3 Varied Functions of Objects as Means of Persuasion Introduction 139 5 Material Remains as Authentication 142 1 Definition of Empirical Evidence 142 2 Overview on the Expressions of Continuity in Herodotus and Gen–Kings 145 3 Shared Characteristics of Empirical Evidence 147 4 Objects Used as Support for Established Knowledge about the Past 151 5 Objects Used as a Source of Information 155 6 The Importance of Material Remains in the Histories Is Relative 159 7 Identifying Function 162 8 Conclusion 165 6 Kinds of Presence—Do Objects Have to Be Accessible to Function as Authentication? 169 Border Cases: the Absence and Presence of Continuation into 1 the Present 169 2 The Rhetoric of Lost or Hidden Monuments 173 2.1 Uses of the Imperfect with Objects and Their Prospective Decay and Disappearance 181 3 Formal Criteria for Authentication Not Parsed as Evidence If Other Factors Predominate 183

Contents

4 Does Vivid Narration Suffice to Persuade of a Past Reality? 189 5 Relics as Witness in a Legal Context 193 6 Texts as Documents and Physical Relics 196 7 Conclusion 209 7 Combinations of Normative Persuasion and Authentication 211 1 Evidence for Supernatural Events as a Claim to Overall Significance 211 2 More Relics Invested with Both Empirical and Normative Plausibility 222 2.1 Commemoration of the Dead and of Great Achievements 222 2.2 Triumph Over the Enemy 232 2.3 Authentication of an Exemplum 235 3 Conclusion 239 8 Objects as Visuals and Capturing a Condensed Meaning 242 1 Objects as Visuals for Motivations and Concepts 242 2 Objects as Expression of Condensed Meaning 251 3 Conclusion 257 Conclusions 259 Appendix 271 1 Selected Material Remains in the Biblical Account of a Past 271 2 Selected Material Remains in Herodotus’ Histories 273 Bibliography 278 Index of Ancient Sources 295 Subject Index 297

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Acknowledgements This book was inspired by two lectures in ancient history, one by Professor Nadav Na’aman at Tel Aviv University and one by Professor Christian Meier at LMU Munich in the years 2001–03. Years later, it was the cooperation between the Universities of Bern and Tel Aviv that helped it into fruition. This study is a substantially revised version of my doctoral dissertation at these two universities. Valuable advice and, above all, insightful questions from my advisors René Bloch, Axel Knauf, and Jonathan Price helped me find my own way through the various universes of thought and scholarship on such prominent ancient literature as Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis through Kings in the Hebrew Bible. I am highly grateful for their support, expertise, and critical comments. This book has also benefitted from my very generous and out­spoken readers, Jonas Grethlein, Frank Polack, and one anonymous reader. At various stages of the project, I had the opportunity of presenting parts of it to audiences from different fields, whose questions and comments enriched my own thinking: PhD seminars and conferences in Basel, Darmstadt, Hannover, and Tel Aviv; a seminar taught by Sylvie Honigman at Tel Aviv University; the workshop on “The Role of Things in Herodotus’ Histories” in Heidelberg (2019); the tenth EAJS Congress in Paris (2014), the second INTH Conference in Ouro Preto (2016), the seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem (2017), and the annual AGAT conference in Hofgeismar/ Kassel (2017). Many colleagues have provided advice and support, especially Daniel Barbu, Anthony Ellis, and Janett Schröder. I am very grateful for the favorable working conditions at The Institute for Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Bern, and for grants I received from the foundation Adolf und Mary Mil-Stiftung and SwissUniversities for a “cotutelle de thèse”. My thanks also go to Karina Hogan for her generous advice during the process of refining the manuscript and for including it in the Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism series, and to all involved in the publishing process at Brill. Since English is not my first language, the comments and language editing by Merle Brett Kendall were very helpful in providing, as I hope, a fairly readable book. Heartfelt thanks to those of my family and friends who have supported me, at times, with a room, huge sticky note pads for structuring ideas, found my backpack with the computer and backup copy when it was lost, cheered me up or were simply there to be with me.

PART 1 Premises and Concepts

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Persuasion and Comparison Narrative accounts of a past are acts of communication. They transmit norms, values, and knowledge about the past for the purposes of education and edification. Addressing specific audiences, they are also shaped by their expectations. That is why accounts of certain events in the past are rewritten or corrected and supplemented as audiences, expectations, and the circumstances of everyday-life in their societies change over time. The events narrated in the books of Samuel and Kings, for instance, are retold in a different version already within the Hebrew Bible in Chronicles, and later once again by Josephus in his Antiquities. Ancient narrative histories are thus at least as much about the present as about the past. These kinds of texts seek to become relevant to recipients in a present in order to shape their intentions for the future. Narrators of ancient histories mention at times the reward that reading their texts yields. The narrator in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War mentions the profit that can be gained from his account because he assumes that historical events are comparable due to the stability of human nature, and Polybios’ narrator provides examples and insights for the benefit of people in leadership positions.1 The reference to the possibility of learning from history, from someone else’s experience, clearly reflects a belief that narrative histories have the potential to change their audiences. Any narrative about a past aiming to influence its reader features some means of persuasion, whether it is dominated more by intellectual, ideological, or entertaining pursuits. The account will attempt to make recipients absorb information and adopt certain views and values so that these might shape their decisions and actions accordingly. Research into the concept of intentional history and the “malleability of history” has shown that this communication between narrator and narratee is no one-way road, but reciprocal.2 On the one hand, the creators of a history 1  Thuc. 1.22,4; Polyb. 9.2.5–6; 3.4.7; 3.7.5; 12.25b,2–3; 18.28.1–5. 2  Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man intentionale Geschichte? Marathon und Troja als fundierende Mythen,” in Gründungsmythen, Genealogien, Memorialzeichen: Beiträge zur institutionellen Konstruktion von Kontinuität, ed. Gert Melville and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), 21–36; Lin Foxhall, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, and Nino Luraghi, “Introduction,” in Intentional History: Spinning Time in Ancient Greece, ed. eid., Alte Geschichte (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 9–13. The term ‘intentional history’ was coined by Gehrke (cf. id., “Was heißt … intentionale Geschichte?,” 21–36; Foxhall, Gehrke, Luraghi, “Introduction,” 9–13). Related approaches are Jan and Aleida Assmann’s communicative and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_002

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want the text to have a certain, often quite practical effect on the audience and shape the narrative accordingly. On the other hand, the community or society the writers live in determines whether the account is appropriate and useful for their purposes and often plays a part in forming, or at least interpreting, the facts.3 Especially in antiquity, where the production and dissemination of literary works was expensive and laborious, the text had to meet the audience’s expectations, for instance in terms of subject matter or ethical standards. This raises the question of which narrative strategies ancient authors employed to persuade and convince the addressees of the authenticity and relevance of their representation of past events.4 This study focuses on early ancient narrative prose accounts of a past. I am interested in means of persuasion in historical narratives at an early stage of history writing, at a point in time when writers aiming at reflection about the human experience of change no longer turned to subjects and characters of the remote past, like those in mythical traditions, but also those from more recent history. This will shed some light on the characteristics of early ancient historical thought, for instance on how the narrators in two ancient texts organize and present knowledge of and reflection about a past. I am interested in exploring hints in narratorial discourse indicating the audience whether a particular narrative places more emphasis on imparting general insights, or whether the narrators wish to assure the audience of the reality of the details. Writers use implicit and explicit means of persuasion for insights and knowledge they want to drive home for the audience, for new and as yet unestablished ideas and for principles that are at the core of the literary artifact. 1

A Comparative Approach

It seems reasonable to approach this topic through a comparative analysis of strategies of persuasion in texts from different literary traditions. Such a cultural memory, building on Maurice Halbwach’s mémoire collective. See also Ehud Ben Zvi, “Malleability and its limits: Sennaherib’s campaign against Judah as a case-study,” in “Like a bird in a cage”: The invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE, ed. Lester L. Grabbe. European seminar in historical methodology 4 (London, New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 73–105 and Bernd Steinbock, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ of Michigan Press, 2012). 3  Knut Backhaus, “Lukanische Geschichtsschreibung im Rahmen des antiken Wahrheitsdiskurses,” in Wahrheit und Geschichte: Exegetische und hermeneutische Studien zu einer dialektischen Konstellation, ed. Eva Ebel and Samuel Vollenweider, ATANT 102 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2012), 79–108; Ben Zvi, “Malleability”. 4  Expressed in such a general way, this in theory includes written, oral, or audio-visual media.

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comparison serves two purposes.5 First, as a contribution to the research on strategies of persuasion in ancient narrative histories, the comparative and contrastive approach helps to differentiate features that are common elements of such strategies across different cultures from those that are characteristics of a specific tradition. It encourages explicit and thorough theoretical reflection. Second, the comparison of material from different linguistic and cultural communities will illuminate diverse strategies of narrative persuasion. My analysis will describe the primary narrating voices and how they exploit material relics from the past to enhance the audience’s trust in the narrator and his account. Contrasting narratives with one another helps us to realize that there are various ways available to achieve one and the same rhetorical effect in the reader. This widens the scholar’s perspective so that the phenomenon can be appreciated in each of the sources in a richer way. This study aims at deeper understanding of narrative persuasion, rather than at a list of absolute similarities and differences between the ways the different sources narrate a past. It compares the texts with one another so that they illuminate each other—because of, or despite, their differences. As Susan Stanford Friedman has put it, comparison across cultures defamiliarizes what one takes as a matter of course in any given culture.6 Using texts from two distinct ancient cultures thus forestalls generalizing prematurely about means of persuasion from one literary tradition as the paradigm for all of early ancient narratives about a past. Until not too long ago, European scholars of the development of historiography often took Greco-Roman classical texts as the guiding reference for ancient narrative history as a whole. More recently, however, to reduce a Eurocentric bias, classical scholars have increasingly explored comparisons with, for instance, ancient Chinese histories.7 5  For the following, I have drawn on Thomas Welskopp, “Stolpersteine auf dem Königsweg: Methodenkritische Anmerkungen zum internationalen Vergleich in der Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” AfS 35 (1995): 339–67: 339–67. 6  Susan Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Ed. by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, Baltimore/London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 34–45: 38. 7  Cf. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, Leiden series in comparative historiography 1 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005); Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Peace in the ancient world: Concepts and theories. The Ancient World (Chichester, West Sussex 2016); Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, Oxford studies in early empires (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ute Schüren, Daniel M. Segesser, and Thomas Späth, eds., Globalized Antiquity: Uses and Perceptions of the Past in South Asia, Mesoamerica, and Europe (Berlin: Reimer, 2015).

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This comparative study aims neither at qualifying any existing theory of historical thought and representation nor at proposing a new one. It does not seek to distinguish historiographical strategies of persuasion from those of literary prose discourse in general; nor is it a contribution to the issue of genre(s) of ancient history writing.8 I do not directly address the large and much-discussed question of the nature of ancient history writing. The sources to be compared are Herodotus’ Histories and the Hebrew Bible narrative in Genesis through Kings, from the creation of heaven and earth up to the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Both accounts were written to constitute and preserve a certain version of the past. Creating such a narrative was meaningful for the authors of both accounts, but this concern cannot be taken for granted. After all, forgetting past events and denying their importance for the present is generally more common among human beings than is making a substantial effort to write them down in a literary narrative. In neither culture was narrative history writing “the primary medium of memory”.9 These two sources are among the first written narrative histories still extant, pioneering the enterprise of writing prose accounts of a past in their literary tradition. To prevent misunderstandings, let me specify what aims I do not pursue with this comparison. One is detecting influences of one source on the other or genealogical connections between them.10 It is not so much the question of which content and interpretation the ancient writers included in their narratives of the past that matters in this study, such as the choice of themes in 8  A number of comparative studies of Herodotus and the Hebrew Bible revolve around questions about the characteristics of historiography as a genre, whether in a universal perspective or a more specific one focussing on ancient history writing. Frequently, studies start from general assumptions or theoretical concepts that associate history writing with certain philosophical, anthropological or poetological views. 9  For the Greek tradition, see Jonas Grethlein, The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3; John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 20–21; for the Jewish tradition, see e.g., Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publ. Soc. of America, 1982), 14–15. 10  Some comparative studies have sought to demonstrate literary interdependence between the Hebrew Bible and Herodotus: Sara Mandell and David N. Freedman, The Relationship Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History, South Florida studies in the history of Judaism 60 (Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1993); Flemming A. J. Nielsen, The Tragedy in History: Herodotus and the Deuteronomistic History, Copenhagen International Seminar 4 (Sheffield, Eng: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Jan-Wim Wesselius, The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus’s Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible, JSOTSup 345 (London: Sheffield Acad. Press, 2002).

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the narratives or characteristic features of their protagonists. Nor do I explore historical or cultural-anthropological questions such as the circumstances of the production and circulation of the texts. It may become relevant to consider the shaping role of factors like social milieus or the level of literacy, but these questions are not the principal focus. Rather, I am interested in the narrator’s craft: How does the narrating voice present past events and convince the reader of their reality? How does this mediating voice bridge the abyss between present and past, enabling the audience to meaningfully connect with a certain past? 2

The Writers’ Awareness for Their Craft

Speaking of means of persuasion in narratorial discourse assumes authors who reflect on what they are doing and are at least partly aware of the rhetorical and literary devices they use. I view my two sources as intentionally shaped narrative discourse about a past—one as shaped by the author Herodotus, and one by the Tanakh’s final redactor or redaction team. Do we have any ancient material showing us that writers between the fifth and third centuries BCE actually were aware of and thought about strategies of persuasion? No theoretical reflections on the poetics of literature and orations in general or history writing in particular have come down to us from the time of Herodotus. There are, however, philosophical texts from the fifth century contemporary to Herodotus (i.e., earlier than about 424 BCE11) that deal with appropriate corroborations of arguments and epistemology.12 This interest is shared by Herodotus’ narrator, who more than once reflects on epistemology. Thus, techniques of persuasion had likely begun to become a topic for reflection during and even before Herodotus’ lifetime. In addition, general trends in the Greek intellectual milieu in Herodotus’ day reflect a growing awareness of the use of literary and rhetorical means as 11  By this year, all parts of the Histories had been published according to Klaus Meister, “Herodotos,” DNP 5:469–475, here 270. Jessica Priestley has recently summarized that this question remains unresolved; some scholars endorse an early date, some a late one: Jessica Priestley, Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture: Literary Studies in the Reception of the “Histories”, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 16 n. 60. 12  Democritus mentions sensory perceptions as pisteis in what seems to be a discussion about the value of empirical as opposed to cognitive insights, FR 125 DK. For remarks on Melissos, cf. Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 189, 196, 230, 239. In texts of the Hippocratical Corpus and in Euripides frg. 574 (N), we find the method of extrapolation from visible to invisible things.

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a craft. Margalit Finkelberg has substantiated this with the telling observation that, during the fifth century, the traditional terms designating the poem and the poet—‘song’ and ‘singer’ (ἀοιδή, ἀοιδός)—were replaced by ‘the thing made’ and ‘the maker’ (ποίημα, ποιητής).13 This change in linguistic designation is evidence of a new conception of poems as human products, as artifacts created by skilled artisans. Previously, poems were presented as an inspired gift from the muses. Another development is the growing importance of public orations in Greek poleis in the fifth century, in both the political sphere and the intellectual. It is well known that speeches were made at court and meetings of the popular assembly, as well as by private scholars who taught a group of listeners. Last but not least, some learned prose writers also spoke in public. They probably maintained concrete personal interests that also shaped their texts. In his recent study on early Greek ethnography, Joseph Skinner has shown that early prose writers were active in a highly competitive environment in which the individual writers had to outdo their rivals.14 Such an environment encourages a focus on deliberate rhetorical strategies. These terminological changes, known related interests, and formative environments indicate that, for the author Herodotus, we can assume a developed consciousness for the functions of rhetorics. A quick glance at examples will demonstrate that both sources reflect a rhetorical awareness and employ language deliberately. As far as Herodotus Histories is concerned, there is no need to restate the results of extensive research on this aspect.15 Instead, a few examples from the text itself will suffice to make this plausible. First of all, the numerous speeches characters give 13  Margalit Finkelberg, The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 176. 14  Joseph Skinner, The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus, Greeks overseas (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 235: “The environment in which they [the male individuals who spent their time with inquiry] operated was highly competitive so trumping one’s rivals was a desideratum, whether as a means of securing gainful employment or of establishing oneself as the preeminent authority on a given topic.” 15  E.g., Vasiliki Zali, The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus’ Histories with Special Attention to Books 5–9, International studies in the history of rhetoric volume 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Simon R. Slings, “Oral Strategies in the Language of Herodotus,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene de Jong and Hans van Wees, BCCS online (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 53–77, 53–77. Thomas, Herodotus in context, 197–98. In the first part of the fifth century, prose writing was a new kind of text in Greek literary history. It is seen as “directly stimulated by the art of rhetoric, the beginnings of which lie in this very period.” (Finkelberg, The Birth, 176). In fifth-century Greece, the goal of rhetoric was defined as persuasion. Thucydides distances himself polemically from techniques applied by epicdeictic orators (Thuc. 1.22.4); unlike Herodotus, he tends to

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are clearly and purposefully structured to advocate the speaking character’s agenda in a compelling way.16 If the author can create characters who apply language in an instrumental way, he is capable of doing so himself. Herodotus’ work is so original and varied that it is safe to assume that he has not simply followed preexisting patterns for the individual parts of his account. What is more, several times the Herodotean narrator reflects on people’s use of language. To name random examples, he gives reasons for characters saying one thing and not something else (Hdt. 1.117,2; 8.109–110). The narrator also criticizes a character for having given an accurate answer in a situation demanding a more diplomatic, evasive, or simply misleading answer in order to reach a certain aim (5.50). He knows at least one abstract ‘formula’ or type of argument by metalanguage—namely, arguing from the familiar to the unknown (2.33,2)—and he uses different technical terms for cognitive operations.17 Third, and even more to the point of explicit and obvious attempts of persuasion, a few strikingly polemical or apologetic passages in Herodotus come to mind.18 Rosalind Thomas has shown how Herodotus polemicizes against contemporary writers and thinkers, and in these agonistic passages, the goal to convince is obvious and rhetorically explicit. Thomas even attributes to Herodotus the drive to tell his audience what to believe and what to reject.19 Therefore, we can presuppose a good measure of awareness of what he is doing with language in his composition. In a more general vein, it is worthwhile to consider the rhetorical nature of ancient accounts of inquiry and knowledge (Ionian ἱστορίη), given the perceptible proximity of the Histories to epideictic spoken-word performances. In fact, for ancient literary criticism of history writing in Greco-Roman literature, cognitive and methodological considerations such as the quality of explanations or the use of evidence in actual accounts of a past was often a secondary issue.20 Considerable attention was instead devoted to stylistic matters and avoid the verb ἀποδείκνυμι for what he is doing in his work—see Thomas, Herodotus in context, 226. 16  An example from Genesis is the speech to Rebeccah’s family in Haran by Abraham’s steward (Gen 24:34–49). For a detailed interpretation of its rhetorical features, see Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, The Indiana Literary Biblical Series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 145–51. 17  See chapter 3 under the heading “insights into the narrator’s thought processes and method.” 18  For instance Hdt. 2.22; 2.45; 3.56; 4.79,3; 7.139; 8.77. 19  Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 218. 20  “Historians entered into ancient schools primarily as models of style”, Roberto Nicolai, “The Place of History in the Ancient World,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman

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the impartiality of the historian. John Marincola has aptly pointed out the role of conjecture on the basis of common sense, experience, and verisimilitude in ancient narratives of a past, which was a popular means of persuasion: “in a speech the orator’s aim before the jury was plausibility, not truth, and the historian, who had been trained in rhetoric, did not take a different approach when writing history, but rather here too tried to construct a plausible account of events.”21 As is well known, in fifth-century (BCE) Greece, the goal of rhetoric was to persuade an audience, and Aristotle considered historiography as one of its branches, a fact that underlines the rhetorical nature of Greek and Roman narrative representations of a past. In ancient Hebrew literature before Hellenism, there are no works of abstract literary and philosophical theory. And yet, the narrative of Israel’s history, too, is a carefully composed literary work, not a haphazard accretion of traditional lore. The fact that it falls into the category of tradition literature does not per se indicate that its composition happened automatically or unintentionally.22 Of course, additions, deletions, and commentaries changed the version of the text handed down. And while these changes stem from the multiple interests of different writers and redactors throughout centuries, they do not neutralize each other. They enrich the consciousness of the text, rather than negate it. The artful poetics of many biblical narratives reflects a high degree of literary craftsmanship. Narrative features in the Hebrew Bible indicate that there is an awareness for narrative consistency, such as in a character’s knowledge and his or her behavior. The story about Elisha’s role in the conflict between the kings of Aram and Israel reflects on, among other things, a character’s omniscience (2 Kgs 6:8–12). Longer character speeches are rhetorically well formed (e.g. Gen 24:34–49; Judg 11:15–27). Recent decades have seen much scholarly work on the Hebrew Bible’s literary qualities. I think of the scholarly scribes in the Persian period as professionals who shaped their texts consciously and Historiography, ed. John Marincola, BCAW (Malden (MA): Blackwell Pub., 2007), 13–26: 23. 21  John Marincola, “Introduction,” in Greek and Roman Historiography, ed. John Marincola, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–15: 9. 22  In nineteenth-century German scholarly discourse on myth and legend, unintentional creation of traditions was regarded as a universal ‘fact’ of folklore. See, e.g., Joh. Chr. Friedrich Tuch on “Sage und Mythus” in the introduction to his commentary on Genesis (Kommentar über die Genesis (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1838)), iv; Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebraern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung: Untersuchungen zur Mythologie und Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1876), 15, adopts a current view when he states that myth and legend are products of a specific and necessary stage in the developmental psychology of nations; creating a myth is not an activity that people do of their own accord and with a purpose.

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were able to choose literary means freely within the constraints of literary conventions and audience expectations. All this notwithstanding, the writers of what we now classify as biblical texts had to work within considerable constraints. In the setting of pre-Hellenistic Near Eastern scribal schools, innovations were possible, but familiar forms of expression had more prestige than originality.23 A case in point for stability is the fact that most biblical narratives stick to a single model of narration with a depersonalized narrator.24 The way the principle narrating voice is shaped does not change significantly throughout the narratives in Genesis through Kings. This is remarkable, given that this large portion includes texts from various centuries and different theological or geographical realms and uses the Hebrew language from different eras. A high level of artistry in any field is possible even without a metacognitive awareness. The professionals in Jerusalem may have mastered certain structures in their literary art intuitively, without the awareness in every instance of using a literary device. Many speakers use their first language in a very creative, effective, and accurate way without being able to name the strategies of persuasion involved in their speech.25 Neither for ancient writers of history nor for contemporary ones can we expect full reflexive awareness in the process of giving shape to their texts. Irene de Jong, for instance, has observed with regard to the Histories that Herodotus does not account for the omniscience of his narrator persona in passages where he presents history in the style of Greek epic. She reckons that Herodotus did not notice himself that his account makes the two spheres of epic and historiography meet.26 By and large, however, I assume that both Herodotus and the biblical writers knew what they were doing when writing their representations of a past. The Greek researcher 23  Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47: “Authenticity is subordinate to authority and relevant only inasmuch as it underpins textual authority; originality is subordinate to the cultivation of tradition; and intellectual property is subordinate to the common stock of cultural forms and values.” Hans M. Barstad, “Deuteronomists, Persians, Greeks, and the Dating of the Israelite Tradition,” in Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, European seminar in historical methodology 3 (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 47–77: 73. 24  Cf. Sternberg, Poetics, 73–75. 25  Cf. Fritz Stolz, “Der mythische Umgang mit der Rationalität und der rationale Umgang mit dem Mythos,” in Religion und Rekonstruktion: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, by Fritz Stolz, ed. Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati and et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 165–88: 171. 26  Irene de Jong, “Narratological aspects of the Histories of Herodotus,” trans. Jay Kardan in Herodotus and the Narrative of the Past, ed. Rosaria V. Munson, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 253–91.

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and the multiple anonymous authors and redactors of biblical narrative can both be addressed as learned men or literati.27 3

Characteristics of the Sources

There are several reasons that the choice of Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings for this comparative study is productive. One is a practical consideration: Few comprehensive prose narratives about a past and dating from pre-Hellenistic times have survived until today. This makes the number of texts to choose from quite limited. Early ancient extended written narrative histories that are still available come from the Ancient Middle East, China, and Greece. The corpus of Gen–Kings is a suitable choice from ancient Near Eastern histories because its narrative portions28 on the history of man and the Israelites is the longest extant historical narrative from this region. This narrative is influenced by Mesopotamian historical texts, such as Babylonian chronicles and Assyrian annals,29 but Mesopotamian texts about events in the past are written in different genres, epic or dedicatory inscriptions, for example, and their narrative historical accounts are short compared to those in Hebrew and cover only one or a few events, like the inscription of Entemena about his border conflict with Umma, Babylonian Entitlement narû, or preambles of vassal treaties. The narrative epic of Gilgamesh and the ‘historical’ legends of Sargon and Naramsin share elements with the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as with Herodotus’ Histories, but they are rarely associated with historiography.30 It is true that Hittite historical texts can be taken into account, but according to Jörg Klinger, there 27  Konrad Schmid, Literaturgeschichte des Alten Testaments: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges, 2008), 49; Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in context, 162–63, 284. 28  For the selection of texts for this study, I restrict myself to texts that are traditionally associated with narrativity, i.e., roughly, Genesis through Kings without Exod 20:22–23:33; 25:1–31:11; Lev 1–7 and 11–27; Num 5–6 and 8–9. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that narrativity is not restricted to stories, or even prose, but is also a feature of laws and poetic texts, for example Assnat Bartor, Reading Law as Narrative: A Study in the Casuistic Laws of the Pentateuch, AIL 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Stefan Fischer, Das Hohelied Salomos zwischen Poesie und Erzählung: Erzähltextanalyse eines poetischen Textes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). 29  Mario Liverani, “The Book of Kings and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography,” in The Books of Kings: Sources, Composition, Historiography and Reception, ed. André Lemaire, Baruch Halpern and Matthew J. Adams (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), 163–84. 30  Johannes Renger, “Vergangenes Geschehen in der Textüberlieferung des alten Mesopotamien,” in Vergangenheit und Lebenswelt: Soziale Kommunikation, Traditionsbildung und historisches Bewusstsein, ed. Hans-Joachim Gehrke and Astrid Möller, Script Oralia 90 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996), 9–60; Christopher Pelling, “Epilogue,” in The Limits

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is so little agreement among Hittitologists about fundamental questions concerning Hittite historiography that, for a novice in the field, there is little to build on.31 An interesting candidate for comparison from the far East would be ancient Chinese historiography like the Zuozhuan. Within Greek literature, the earliest prose narratives representing events in the past are available to us only in fragments. Therefore, Herodotus’ Histories is the first complete work of an extended narrative about past events in Greek still existing today. In fact, it seems to be the first work of such dimensions in Greek prose literature.32 Apart from this practical, external reason, a major point of similarity justifying this choice is the claims of the Histories and Gen–Kings to be valid and truthful accounts of important events in the past of the writers’ own cultural community or ethnic group. If we are to apply the distinction between ‘fictional’ and ‘factual,’ which is somewhat anachronistic before the invention or awareness of a fictional ‘as if’ in literary communication, then both accounts present themselves as factual narratives with a claim to represent past reality, or as other forms of reality narratives (Wirklichkeitserzählungen).33 A large number of examples in this study will demonstrate this. However, there is also a basic difference with several facets that might help explain why the first parts of the Hebrew Bible and Herodotus’ Histories have rarely been read together. The Hebrew narratives are part of tradition literature, whereas the Histories have a known author. Does this fact not speak against comparing their narrative means of persuasion?

of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. Christina S. Kraus, Mnemosyne Supplementum 191 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 325–60. 31  Jörg Klinger, “Historiographie als Paradigma: Die Quellen zur hethitischen Geschichte und ihre Deutung,” in Akten des IV. Internationalen Kongresses für Hethitologie, ed. Gernot Wilhelm (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 272–91: 274–75. For a comparison of Hittite and ancient Greek historical writings, see Karl Strobel, “Die Geschichtsschreibung der Hethiter und frühe griechische Historiographie: Wertungsfragen im Lichte der Anatolisch-Ägäischen Koinē,” in Hethitische Literatur: Überlieferungsprozesse, Textstrukturen, Ausdrucksformen und Nachwirken, ed. Manfred Hutter, AOAT Bd. 391 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011), 245–74. 32  As far as can be judged from references to other works and his Histories in ancient texts. However, as so many ancient works are lost, I am cautious about absolute assertions. 33  On reality narratives, see below p. 30, n. 4. The larger narrative as a whole does claim to represent reality, but such claim may not extend to each of its episodes. On Herodotus’ interest in facticity, cf. Hdt. 1.95,1: […] τὸν ἐόντα λέγειν λόγον, κατὰ ταῦτα γράφω […]; see also Thomas, Herodotus in context, 225: “Herodotus is keen to declare that he can show something to be the case.”

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3.1 Tradition Literature versus Known Author As is well known, biblical narratives about the Israelites’ past originated within the circumstances common for ancient Near Eastern text production, the anonymous transmission and adaptation of a literary heritage. In contrast, Herodotus wrote his Histories in an intellectual surrounding where individual authors had—not too long before—become the rule. Traditional literature and authorial literature are sometimes conceptualized as paradigms so categorically different that a comparison of Herodotus with biblical narratives is believed to make little sense.34 This is because strategies of persuasion in ancient accounts of a past seem to call for certain prerequisites: human control over the text that goes along with intentional production. The anonymity of the biblical writers is a smaller and only apparent difficulty. For the study of strategies of persuasion, knowing the author as the person who applied a certain strategy is not necessary, just as it is not essential in other arts such as music or painting to know the name of the composer and musician or the artist in order to appreciate the techniques of the work of art. The focus of this study is not on the person who uses certain rhetorical strategies, for instance on the person’s worldview and biography, but on the strategies themselves: their varieties and the effects on the reader. Writing in one’s own name can be seen as such a strategy of persuasion—as can not giving one’s identity and not referring to the literary text as a human product. Consider the decision of a contemporary author to publish her novels under a pseudonym, complete with a fictive biography. Here, too, the actual author is unknown, but this does not prevent literary critics from discussing her novels along with the works of known authors who give interviews and can be booked for readings. Although data on the writer provides valuable information about his geographical and intellectual neighbors, such biographical information does not substantially alter the core of my study, a literary analysis of the sources. Another general difference between tradition literature and authorial literature is the alleged absence and presence of the individual author’s responsibility for his text. Responsibility is associated with intentional production and full control over the text, which are somewhat vaguely assumed to be absent in 34  Erhard Blum, “Historiographie oder Dichtung? Zur Eigenart alttestamentlicher Geschichtsüberlieferung,” in Das Alte Testament—ein Geschichtsbuch?, ed. Erhard Blum, William Johnstone and Christoph Markschies, Altes Testament und Moderne 10 (Münster: Lit-Verl., 2005), 65–86: 70; Erhard Blum, “Die Stimme des Autors in den Geschichtsüberlieferungen des Alten Testaments,” in Historiographie in Der Antike, ed. Klaus-Peter Adam, BZAW 373 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 107–30: 117 and 119. See also the discussion below.

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tradition literature, at least as far as the individual writer is concerned.35 It is true that the biblical narrative itself makes no direct reference to the people in charge of its composition and redaction. And yet, historical-critical exegesis has ascribed more or less provisional dates and social milieus to a large number of biblical texts. Even if we cannot pin down a particular author known by name, it is not utterly impossible to name the bearer of responsibility. For the biblical narratives, the options usually considered are: (1) the clearly defined collective body of the Second Temple writing professionals in Jerusalem, (2) the more vague collective entities of all groups of the social and educational elite who refer to themselves as ‘Israel,’ or (3) divine endowment that made ancient writers express themselves in a certain way. When these options are addressed, the issue of responsibility may become less anonymous and vague. What is more, there are ways to hold someone accountable for the narrative of Genesis through Kings in the shape in which it has come down to us and to attribute to it an intentional organizing consciousness: During the process of canonization, it underwent a final redaction after which it was impossible to alter the text by deletion, expansion, or rewriting. The final redactor(s) approved of the text in this shape as a meaningful artifact, and although they are anonymous, they can be imagined as the ones accountable for its content and organization, even though, to a large extent, their contribution was not a composition of their own. This is true also for Herodotus’ Histories, albeit to a lesser extent. Here too, we have to reckon with additions and changes during the transmission process. The earliest complete manuscripts of both sources date from the early Middle Ages. For my analysis, knowing the identity of the historical authors of the biblical narratives is marginal, since the focus is the text itself. The emphasis on an authorial imprint in the text as a guarantee for the intentionality of a text and the source of its meaning, as is manifest in Erhard Blum’s work, for instance, is an idea that, seen in a historical perspective, is relatively modern.36 Today, 35  As essential for historiography, Blum (“Historiographie,” 70) postulates that its authors have to treat their subject from an evaluative distance and connect their claim of a truthful account with their personal authority and method, thus taking on responsibility for their history. This, in his view, requires a distinct author or narrating persona that explicitly articulates his or her views about the narrated events, which amounts to defining historiography as intrinsically incompatible with tradition literature. On the notion of authorship and responsibility for the text, see also Finkelberg, The birth, 20–21 and 30. 36  Cf. Barthes, Œvres complètes, Vol. 2 (Paris 1994), 494, quoted in Thomas A. Schmitz, Moderne Literaturtheorie und antike Texte: Eine Einführung, 2nd ed., WBG-Bibliothek (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 140. Cf. Carla Benedetti, The Empty Cage: Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005), 8–12, 74–78, and Foucault’s contested interpretation of the author as

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an artful literary text is nearly always conceived of as a product of an author. However, even in present-day European culture, this expectation does not extend to all kinds of texts; news reports, instruction manuals, and to a certain extent, also textbooks and reference works are not required to have the author’s name on them. A methodological observation by Hindy Najman is helpful in this context. She emphasizes that biblical writers had a different conception of a text than we today. They did not grasp a text as someone’s property and did not clearly separate transmission from interpretation.37 Therefore, the fact that biblical writers could not be held accountable as individuals for their writings is no reason to abstain from a comparison with Herodotus’ Histories. Another implication of the existence of someone known by name and responsible for a text is that the original audience has an address to which they can direct their response, be it acceptance or criticism. Peter Machinist has pointed out that this difference has an effect: knowing who can be held accountable for the text encourages controversial polemics in the Greek context, but discourages open opposition to a received tradition in the pre-Hellenistic Near East.38 The presence or absence of a known author to be blamed or praised certainly influenced the kind of rhetoric that developed in each tradition. In Herodotus, there are more explicitly agonistic passages than in Gen–Kings. However, this poses no problem, as my comparison does not require that the narrators make use of the very same strategies of persuasion. If no specific set of strategies of persuasion is postulated as a necessary ingredient for ancient narrative history, it does not matter whether the account contains an element X, Y, or Z as long as a basic function such as the expression of a dispute or complementary view is not entirely suppressed. For instance, scholars have drawn attention to the impossibility for Jewish writers to state bluntly that a certain item of their tradition is wrong. In the ancient Near Eastern context in general, this would have amounted to heresy.39 Ancient Near Eastern writers worked in ‘schools’, archives, or libraries; these three institutions were often combined in one place. They wrote from within a function of discourse in: Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Josué Harari in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–20. 37  Hindy Najman, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism, JSJSup v. 77 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003), 7–9. Najman points out that we cannot reasonably expect ‘biblical’ writers to associate themselves with a given text (14): “To take personal responsibility for a new interpretation would have been contrary to the Second Temple conception of authority, which always demanded roots in the pre-exilic past.” 38  Peter Machinist, “The Voice of the Historian in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World,” Interpretation 57.2 (2003): 117–37: 136. 39  Ibid. 136; Lester L. Grabbe, “Who Were the First Real Historians?,” in id., Did Moses Speak Attic?, 156–81: 178.

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an authoritative tradition with strong ties to the ruling authorities, such as the court, priests, and diviners.40 As mentioned above, this may well have had an influence on the ways in which aspects of the literary tradition could be altered or criticized. Even if some traditions stemmed from oppositional groups, their proponents were equally ‘aristocratic’. Herodotus as a private researcher, on the other hand, was more independent. However, this argument referring to the impossibility (in tradition literature) of open rejection of an element of traditional knowledge reveals the expectation that narrative history requires certain logical and rhetorical operations. To my knowledge, scholars of history have not yet compiled a hard and fast catalogue of necessary elements of historical thought or historical narratives. Scholars in the theory of history state that, in terms of the use of language, there is no difference between historical novels and historiography, or between history writing and myth.41 Even if operations of logical thinking find their expression in certain phrases—such as stating what is not the case or the principle of the excluded middle—we can still ask whether there are other, possibly implicit, ways of expression for the same logical operation. Although biblical narrative does not mention the names of individuals or groups as owners of one view or another, it still contains discursive dispute, as does ancient Near Eastern literature. This tradition knew other, often more implicit and covert, means for the expression of criticism or modification of an existing text. Piotr Michalowski, for example, has demonstrated that, for historical texts from Mesopotamia, “external textual relationships, as well as internal restructuring produced meaning in the same way that critical metadiscourse 40  Ehud Ben Zvi, “Observations on Prophetic Characters, Prophetic Texts, Priests of Old, Persian Period Priests and Literati,” in The Priests in the Prophets: The Portrayal of Priests, Prophets and Other Religious Specialists in the Latter Prophets, ed. Lester L. Grabbe, JSOTSup 408 (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 19–30: 24–27; Scott Noegel, “‘Literary’ Craft and Performative Power in the Ancient Near East: the Hebrew Bible in Context,” in Approaches to Literary Readings of Ancient Jewish Writings, ed. K. A. D. Smelik and Karolien Vermeulen, Studia Semitica Neerlandica volume 62 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2014) 19–38. 41  Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 58; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 30–31; Anthony J. Woodman, Rhetoric in classical historiography: Four studies (London: Croom Helm; Areopagitica Press, 1988), 28–29; Skinner, Invention, 131; but cf. Johannes Süßmann, Geschichtsschreibung oder Roman? Zur Konstitutionslogik von Geschichtserzählungen zwischen Schiller und Ranke (1780–1824), Frankfurter Historische Abhandlungen 41 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000), who argues that history writing and imaginative narratives about historical events can be distinguished on the basis of their narrative texture.

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would in other traditions”.42 Biblical scholarship has indeed identified much of the prophetic corpus as a polyphonic chorus of different theological schools and social groups. In the Torah, the presence of different voices can also be noticed, although it is less pronounced.43 This indicates that tradition literature is not incapable of debate. In addition, the claim of a watertight alliance in the ancient Near East between the ruling monarchs, their administration, and religious or intellectual allegiances needs to be qualified. In the sixth century BCE, the end of the political autonomy of Judahite vassal kings was also the end of the stable association of Israel’s god with a certain territory. In the view of the exiled elite, YHWH was a god with a people but without territory. During the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, substantial Jewish populations lived outside of the land of Israel. According to Erhard Gerstenberger, Judaism had turned into a religious community that was independent of a tribe, state, or territory—similar to Zoroastrianism.44 Therefore, ancient Jewish narrative tradition had no exclusive connection with any one social or political power. One may object to this that, whereas individuals in Herodotus’ audience were able to reject some of his claims or even the work as a whole, this was not a realistic option for the addressees of the biblical text. They might not have had the option to ignore the text. Here, the preservation and interpretation of 42  Piotr Michalowski, “Commemoration, Writing, and Genre in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. Christina S. Kraus. Mnemosyne Supplementum 191 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 69–90: 74. 43  Biblical scholarship understands the Torah as a common document concerning which different strands within early Second Temple Judaism found an agreement, cf. Ernst A. Knauf and Philippe Guillaume, A History of Biblical Israel: The Fate of the Tribes and Kingdoms from Merenptah to Bar Kochba, Worlds of the ancient near East and Mediterranean (Sheffield, UK, Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016), 182–84; Erich Zenger, “Der Prozess der Pentateuchredaktion,” in Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 7th ed., ed. Erich Zenger, Kohlhammer Studienbücher Theologie 1, 1 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008), 124–35. The priestly strand (P) and the so-called Deuteronomists (or non-P) are the most important, differing in, among other things, an ahistorical theocratical perspective versus an eschatological outlook, cf. Jan C. Gertz, “I. Tora und Vordere Propheten,” in Grundinformation Altes Testament: Eine Einführung in Literatur, Religion und Geschichte des Alten Testaments, ed. Jan C. Gertz, UTB 2745 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 193–311; Schmid, Literaturgeschichte des Alten Testaments: 146–61. Other (sub-)groups were the Samarians and so-called holyness school; see, e.g., Israel Knohl, “Post-Biblical Sectarianism and the Priestly Schools of the Pentateuch: The Issue of Popular Participation in the Temple Cult on Festivals,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21 March, 1991, ed. Julio Trebolle Barrera and Luis Vegas Montaner, 2 vols., STDJ vol. 11 (Leiden [etc.]: E. J. Brill, 1992), 601–09. 44  Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Israel in der Perserzeit, Biblische Enzyklopädie 8 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005), 355–358.

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traditional literature was a communal task. It was presumably inconceivable to replace part of that heritage by a longer stretch of new text written entirely by one individual. With regard to an ancient Near Eastern environment, it is thus appropriate to conceptualize means of persuasion in terms of an interaction with the constraints of social and literary conventions. Even when historical circumstances precluded a free competition of ideas and literary expression, I assume that ancient Near Eastern writers knew their literary tradition so well that they were able to find a slot for the expression of their present and potentially innovative concerns, while at the same time their texts had to take the necessary form.45 As literary artifacts, ancient narrative histories are often shaped by older texts in the same or neighboring literary traditions. Biblical scholarship especially has expended much effort to show how the representation of single events is formed and constrained by conventions for certain text types. There is widespread awareness of paradigms that were used to form biblical texts.46 Herodotean scholarship has seen some work in this field, too. Wolfgang Blösel, for instance, has demonstrated how Herodotus presents Themistocles as a hero who, in some points, acts like Odysseus.47 This reminds us that argumentative and even polemical engagement with competitors or previous texts is only one among several ways to increase the authority of a text. 3.1.1 Means of Persuasion Do Not Require a Unified Perspective A study of means of persuasion does not require the text to have only one intention or a single consciousness orchestrating and channeling different points of view into one coherent picture. Thus, the narrators of two different biblical narratives, such as the Joseph novella and the story about Hannah’s unexpected conception of Samuel and this boy’s childhood, do not have to share an 45  See David A. Teeter, Scribal Laws: Exegetical Variation in the Textual Transmission of Biblical Law in the Late Second Temple Period, FAT v. 92 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 2 and 264–71. 46  Genre criticism (Gattungskritik), a subdiscipline of biblical scholarship, addresses these issues. The phenomenon includes biblical narrative, but is not limited to it. Examples are parallels between the biblical depiction of the building of Solomon’s temple and other ancient Near Eastern texts; cf. Hans M. Barstad, History and the Hebrew Bible: Studies in Ancient Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography, FAT 61 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 19–20 and 58–59; and parallels between Moses’ rescue as a baby and that of Sargon, see Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 87–88. 47  Wolfgang Blösel, Themistokles bei Herodot: Spiegel Athens im fünften Jahrhundert: Studien zur Geschichte und historiographischen Konstruktion des griechischen Freiheitskampfes 480 v. Chr (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004); Katharina Wesselmann, Mythische Erzählstrukturen in Herodots ‘Historien’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011).

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identical mindset. My sources need not be fully consistent and unified literary ‘works’. Otherwise, Gen–Kings would be an impossible choice from the outset, since it has different narrative voices and is more an anthology than one book or ‘work’. And while today, most scholars of Herodotus agree on a unitarian reading of the Histories, earlier studies considered a model of different layers not unlike those for the genesis of Gen-Kgs.48 Consequently, my objective cannot be to trace and map the strategies of persuasion of the Hebrew Bible, but only of a significant part of its narratives in an exemplary way. Although it is a matter of course, it seems to be worthwhile to point out that multiple voices and intentions in literary representation can and do coexist with authors known by their names. To give random examples of modern works: they are found in Dostoevsky’s novels and in Kempowski’s representation of several different periods of World War II as a collage of diaries, letters, and images.49 Kempowski’s ten-volume collection is one of many possible forms of representing a past to an audience. With reference to the Histories, it has been noted that the Herodotean narrator does not assign to each tradition he recounts a fixed place and meaning and does not pass judgment on each of them. Therefore, he can be seen as an “author [who] orchestrates the dialogue, but at the same time participates in it in equal terms, as everyone else.”50 Vergil’s Aeneid is another ancient work that incorporates multiple voices and points of view. In addition, even if an individual author keeps up a unified and consistent author figuration throughout one literary product, his or her outlook is likely to change with time or circumstances. Thus, the lack of a unified perspective emerging from or imposed on multiple voices cannot be used as an argument setting tradition literature against authorial literature.

48  Cf. Adolf Bauer, Herodot’s Biographie: Eine Untersuchung. SKAW 89 (Vienna: Gerold, 1878) on the hypothesis of a number of largely independent logoi more combined than written by Herodotus; Hermann Diels, Herodot und Hekataios, Hermes 22 (1887): 411–444; Amédée Hauvette, Hérodote historien des guerres médiques (Paris: Hachette, 1894). 49  Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.” I found this citation in Zali, The shape, 304; Zali cites from Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics, ed. and transl. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Univ. Press, 1984), 6. Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot. 10 volumes (Munich: Knaus, 1993–2005). 50  Zali, The shape, 305.

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Traditional literature is sometimes associated with the concept of traditional narrative or traditional tale, respectively, that comprises genres such as myth, legend, and fairy tales.51 They are anonymous and do not belong to anybody—the person telling the story does not act on his or her own behalf, but in the service of tradition. According to Blum, a narrative in which the narratorial voice disappears behind its representation functions by nature along the paradigm of traditional narrative. This paradigm in turn enjoys an unquestioned validity so natural and unquestioned that it does not even need to be claimed. Stories that are part of folklore and cultural memory are already known and accepted, such that the oral performers of a narrative allegedly do not need to make any persuasive effort. As for their representations of recent history, everyone knew what had happened, so there was no need to corroborate facts.52 In short, Blum’s point is that biblical narratives play a home game. The communication between the narrator and narratee is characterized by an advance of trust and acceptance. Where the question of the validity of a given tradition does not arise, there is no need to promote it. In such a communicative situation, in his view, strategies of persuasion are by definition superfluous, which apparently explains the phenomenon of their scarcity in biblical narratives. For the sake of the argument, let us assume that the audience of tradition literature customarily reacts with identification and consent. Even then, we can ask by which narrative means the writers achieve this response. After all, in literary theory, the reader’s identification with a protagonist or with the narratorial point of view is seen as a function of narrative technique. We could then explore which techniques keep questions such as “How do you 51  For a definition of myth as traditional tale, see Walter Burkert, Homo necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1983), trans. Peter Bing, 31. 52  Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 56–57; Blum, “Historiographie,” 72–75. I am not really convinced, since writers can also use subtle ways (intertextual allusions, e.g.) to give commonly known texts a new or slightly twisted meaning. In addition, renowned old stories were told differently already in antiquity and received several distinct meanings depending on the context they were put into. The story of Medea, for instance, carried a meaning in Euripides’ tragedy different from that it had in the Hellenistic epic Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes. Hazony concentrates mainly on the strategy of mentioning witnesses and does not consider the broad range of potential strategies of persuasion, including implicit ones. In my view, precisely a certain fixity of the texts makes nuances of meaning possible, because the introduction of new variants is more noticeable when the tradition is well-known. Almost the same can, by the way, argued for Herodotus’ Histories, with the exception that the number of particular perspectives he incorporates (in terms of local traditions or political groups) is larger.

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know?” or “What is your authority for being able to say so?” from entering the audience’s mind. However, the view that the expected mode of reception for biblical narrative is identification and consent is far from obvious. It is well known that the comprehensive biblical prose composition, which spans hundreds of years of narrated time, was created and transmitted in an urban instructional setting of introducing the youngsters of a small elite group to the norms and traditions of their community and people. The period of time under Persian rule when Jerusalem again had an active temple with more than a local importance (450–332 BCE)53 seems to have offered ample opportunity for persuasion. We know that there were theological, legal, and economic disagreements between those returning from Babylonian exile and the Benjaminites.54 Important religious and social features of Second Temple Judaism were about to be widely enforced for the first time, such as monotheism and Jerusalem as the only legitimate place for the offering of animal sacrifice. Jerusalem’s theological milieu in Persian times was heterogeneous. The polyphonic nature of biblical narrative is, to a large degree, a literary reflection of discussions between various strands in early Second Temple Judaism.55 Such theological disputes are directly interrelated with the task of writing an account of Israel’s past because “the divine is bound to contingency through the medium of historical revelation. Therefore, […] history also became the place where religious claims of truth had to be proven”.56 This is why studying narrative strategies of persuasion in biblical accounts of Israel’s past is worthwhile. For the sake of the argument, briefly consider a scenario in which a literary text is indeed taken to be entirely of supernatural origin, with no human agent responsible for its creation. Would this communicative setting not preclude any talk about literary devices and techniques? Such a text may perhaps not need to make claims to truth. But unless this claim is made outside of the text by professionals of cult, the text still has to make an effort in manifesting its divinity.57 If this is accepted, the content and its recitation might in some 53  Cf. Knauf and Guillaume, History, 160; see also Diana Edelman, The Origins of the Second Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2014) 334–343. 54  Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 142–45; Knauf and Guillaume, History, 72.139–142.188–190. 55  See above n. 42. 56  Petra Bahr, “Religious Claims of Truth Versus Critical Method: Some Western Remarks on a Complex Relationship in Western Tradition,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen. 1–12: 10. 57  In addition, we may consider the observation of the unknown writer of the rhetoric Ad C. Herennium that the truthfulness of the facts does not at all render narrative technique

Persuasion and Comparison

23

cultures be meaningful as such, simply because it is a sacred text. In Jewish religious thought, however, the case is different. Characters such as Abraham and Moses dare to challenge God’s words and are successful in bringing about a divine change of mind. If God is represented as an interlocutor who does not demand blind obedience, but rather can be persuaded, a text of divine origin that commands a certain form of behavior from its adherents can be expected to be persuasive. Although a text believed to be God’s revelation is taken as true by definition, its divinity will be stated in a fashion that ancient writers considered consistent with a supernatural origin, and will thus have a certain rhetorical strategy. However, the claim to divine inspiration for all texts within the biblical canon applies to later stages in the reception history of the narratives analyzed here. For the Persian period, biblical scholars do not assume that there was yet a fixed canon of scripture, but several compositions and compilations of texts. What was to become the Torah was in the process of emergence and beginning to become authoritative. I follow, among others, Konrad Schmid, who dates the finalization of the Torah to about 400 BCE, locating it in circles of scholarly scribes in Jerusalem. The Former Prophets, using a name anachronistic for Persian times, were then texts with a lesser prestige compared to the Torah and not yet completed. Their final redaction can be dated to about 200 BCE.58 Therefore, for the narrative history from Genesis to Kings, I assume that its status in the Persian period was less authoritative and sacred than in later periods of time. In my opinion, the notion that the reception of traditional narrative is tuned to consent and identification underestimates the potential for reasoned thought and metahistorical interpretation in ancient anonymous sources. The notion superfluous: “si vera res erit, nihilominus haec omnia narrando conservanda sunt; nam saepe veritas, nisi haec servata sint, fidem not potest facere” (Her. 1,9,16). 58  There were different views in Hellenistic Judaism about the influence of divine wisdom or spirit on the formation of Jewish Scripture. Whereas for the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, Aristobulus, and Philo, ‘biblical’ texts are divinely inspired, especially those attributed to Moses, the author of the Book of Aristeas rejects the claim that Moses should be seen as a prophetic figure. Nevertheless, he also claims a divine origin for the Torah; see the summaries of articles by Leonhardt-Balzer and Scott, respectively, in the “Bibliography of Philonic Studies 2010” in: The Studia Philonica Annual 25 (2013) 186 and 199. The rough dates of 400 and 200 BCE for the completion of Torah and Prophets, respectively, are a broad consensus; Knauf and Guillaume (History, 184) e.g., give 398 BCE as the date for the promulgation of the finalized Torah, and Konrad Schmid (Literaturgeschichte, 198–99) states that the canon-part of the Prophets (‫ )נביאים‬was completed before the Hasmonean era. That is why the book of Daniel is part of the Writings (‫)כתובים‬. In Hasmonean times, the text of the Prophets still underwent slight changes in another redaction.

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of tradition reception as simple consent casts writers treating tradition not like an anthropologist or scholar of religious studies, but rather writing from within this very tradition—(allegedly) with no clear split between the knowing/ reflecting subject and the known/represented object—as intrinsically uncritical of tradition because they identify with it. But I would argue that one does not have to stand apart from a tradition in order to engage it critically.59 Intellectual engagement with a literary tradition does not require a personal distance that finds expression in the self-consciousness of an overt narrator. Otherwise, modern scientific conventions would be absolutized as the only possible way to conceptualize dispute and innovation. Sanjay Seth makes this point with reference to the scholarly engagement with the Vedas: while there had been a vital intellectual tradition of interpretation, dispute, and transmission, the scholars were no disinterested outside observers or commentators, but rather saw themselves existentially as heirs of that tradition.60 The same pertains to ancient Near Eastern traditional learning and literary transmission to future generations. With regard to biblical narratives about a past, André Heinrich, for example, has minutely traced the historical growth and interpreted additions and substitutions in the books of Samuel among others as implicit criticism of tradition.61 Ancient texts from the reservoirs of traditional types of knowledge are not by definition free from criticism and intellectual interpretation.62 This point seems obvious but sometimes is forgotten.

59  Blum, “Historiographie,” 73. This seems not sufficiently elaborated as criticism and a general consent can coexist. Cf. Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Politics, history, and culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 104. 60  Ibid., 103–04. “Western education [in the modern age (ET) …] posited a form of subjectivity, with a specific kind of a relation to knowledge. To gain knowledge was not to come into harmony with an existing order of meanings, which was now seen as a failure of knowledge […]. [W]e saw that educated Indians conceived the world they inhabited as one that came to them already organized into a meaningful order. This did not render them passive and supine, for it is a conceit of humanism-anthropology that to fail to be a subject is tantamount to being an object. The debated and interpreted, exercised agency and choice, and sought to live ethical lives—but all while inhabiting a world that came ordered in ways which the categories of human thought had not created but of which they had to take cognizance, and all the while without conceiving their gods as something they ‘believed’ in (104).” 61  André Heinrich, David und Klio: Historiographische Elemente in der Aufstiegsgeschichte Davids und im Alten Testament (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 374. 62  Cf., e.g., the new and revised edition of Jörn Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Humanities Online, 2012), 165, who argues that actualizing and adapting inherited traditions to challenges of a present that is experienced as new and unprecedented already entails features of critical narration.

Persuasion and Comparison

25

A final precaution worth mentioning is to avoid thinking about literary developments in teleological models. One could be tempted to regard tradition literature as an earlier, and therefore archaic and less sophisticated, developmental stage compared to Herodotus’ Histories. Because of the anonymity of the authors in the case of biblical narrative and the presence of an author known by his name in Herodotus, the two sources might seem not to belong to the same stage of literary development. However, we should not assume the same kind of development in Greek and Jewish literature, but two separate and different traditions that each followed its own path.63 In Hebrew literature in general, the convention of authorship of individuals became a rule only in the early Middle Ages, with a few earlier single cases like Ben Sira. However, in my view, the differences in the social settings in which the two sources emerged does not speak against studying them in comparison. Comparing these narratives about a past is not saying that the compositions are the same kind of text. As long as my classifications and concepts are not derived from only one of the elements of the comparison, but from considerations external to the two, there is no reason not to compare these sources. On the contrary, unexpected comparisons can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of categories and reset boundaries that seemed to be fixed and natural. 3.2 Points of Similarity in the Selected Sources The typological similarities between Herodotus’ Histories and the narrative of Gen–Kings seem to outweigh their differences. I have already mentioned their learned nature, relationship with reality, and literary quality. In the following, I would like to briefly address some more similarities in their representations of a past, of production and reception, of time and place, and of textual features. This study analyzes the ancient narratives in their written form, without recourse to hypothetical earlier stages or versions of a text. Even though individual stories within the larger narrative of Israel’s past are assumed to originate in oral tradition, what I work with are no ephemeral performances, where no two are completely alike, but a comprehensive prose account. True, even then the text was recited and not studied silently as we do today, so that the written words should be seen more as a memory aid and overview similar to a music score.64 Nevertheless, neither the biblical narrative nor that of 63  In Hellenism, Jewish tradition had no problem in ascribing biblical books to individual ‘authors,’ e.g., Kings to Jeremiah. Cf. Ernst A. Knauf, 1 Könige 1–14, HThKAT (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 45, explaining this innovation by a reinterpretation of the former genitivus obiectivus. 64  Cf. David Carr, “Torah on the Heart: Literary Jewish Textuality Within Its Ancient Near Eastern Context,” Oral Tradition 25.1 (2010): 17–40: 18–19.

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Herodotus is appropriately grasped by the notion of ‘storytelling.’ Both works are more than a collection of traditional tales that entertains and instructs: the individual narrative pieces are combined in such a way that the result is a composition the meaning of which exceeds the single parts.65 This is not to diminish the qualities of the narrators in both sources as excellent storytellers; however, both sources are learned discourse, with entertainment as a by-product. For my discussion of strategies of persuasion in Gen–Kings and Herodotus’ Histories, I picture small audiences with access to the written text, which they read out loud. Their reception is thus both visual and aural. With respect to the ancient Hebrew narratives before Hellenism, only very few people had access to a written text, which would have been the Torah, or portions of it. These were primarily the small circles of learned scribes in Jerusalem, and in second place the Levites. As far as I can see, for this period, there is no extrabiblical evidence for the presence and use of Torah scrolls outside Jerusalem, and, maybe, Mt. Gerizim.66 Even if we assumed public recitations of Torah portions in Persian-period Palestine on holidays or the Sabbath, we would still need to assume a reception of the Former Prophets by reading only. Over time, the education of priests and officials expected them to commit the traditional Jewish texts to memory through repeated reading out loud, so that their content could also be accessed without a written text. While Herodotus was still alive, more people had probably listened to him than read him; in Greek cities, however, books were available also to private individuals from the late fifth century onward. Little is known about Herodotus’ readership in the fourth century, but according to Jessica Priestley, knowledge of Herodotus’ Histories can be expected for educated Greek readers in the Hellenistic era.67 Moving from textual similarities to those of historical circumstance, we notice that, in the fifth century, both the Greek poleis and the region of 65  Thus, the binding of Isaak, e.g., is more than a story about loyalty to God whatever may be the price and more than an extreme experience of a father–son relationship. Within the book of Genesis, God’s command to sacrifice Isaak is also a reflection on the question of whether God forgets or ignores his promises. 66  In biblical studies, this is a debated issue. Knauf and Guillaume (History, 184) argue that the sanctuaries of Jerusalem and Mt. Gerizim possessed a Torah-scroll in the fourth century BCE. According to Reinhard Kratz, the available evidence suggests this conclusion with sufficient certainty only for the second century BCE: Reinhard G. Kratz, Historisches und biblisches Israel: Drei Überblicke zum Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 242–43. Given the scarcity of historical sources in antiquity, this late date might be somewhat too cautious. 67   Renate Johne, “Zur Entstehung einer ‘Buchkultur’ in der zweiten Hälfte des 5. Jahrhunderts,” Philologus 135.1 (1991): 45–54; Priestley, Herodotus and Hellenistic culture, 16.

Persuasion and Comparison

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relative Jewish cultural and legal autonomy were located (to different extents) within the sphere of influence of the Persian Empire. Persian expansion and the attitude of Greeks toward Persia shaped politics and public discourse in the first half of the fifth century. Also afterward, the Persian Empire was of great scholarly and literary interest to Greek writers. As pointed out by Dominique Lenfant, from the Persian Wars in the fifth century up to Alexander, almost every Greek generation had their own Persika.68 Herodotus’ subject is the so-called Persian Wars of the early fifth century, together with the events leading up to them. Major portions of the biblical narratives, too, originated in the period of Persian dominance in the Near East.69 Scholars agree that the large historical panorama from the creation of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem and the first temple was not composed before the Persian period, notwithstanding individual stories or story cycles being considerably older. According to Schmid, the priestly thread is the first text to establish a sequence from the primeval story, through the era of the patriarchs, to the exodus narrative.70 Therefore, the historical arc, the large narrative encompassing the beginning of life on earth until the destruction of the Judahite kingdom, is a literary product from the fifth century BCE. Yehud, with Jerusalem as its capital, was a Persian province at the fringes of the empire; this led to cultural exchanges with the ruling or neighboring power and to the need to define one’s own identity within a more global perspective. The so called “Persian period” is today perceived as one of the most productive, or at least most formative, times in the literary history of the Tanakh.71 As monotheism, the commitment to the Torah, the Sabbath and circumcision crystallized as identity markers for Jews in general, the Israelite literary tradition was reshaped and refined to endorse these concepts and practices. As a short aside, geographical and climatic similarities could be mentioned, as they show forth in the use of the same concept for the illustration of security and well being of the average Israelite, Judean, or Lydian:72 68  Lenfant, “Greek Historians of Persia,” in Marincola, A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography: 208. 69  Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 158–59; Gertz, “I. Tora und vordere Propheten,” 214–17. 70  Konrad Schmid, Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel’s Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible, Siphrut 3 (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2010), 237–38; Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 120–22 and 158–59: According to Schmid, the so called Deuteronomist History was joined with the exodus-conquest narrative during the exile, with the book of Judges still independent; this extended narrative was woven together with the primeval history and the stories of the fathers in the Persian period. 71  Gerstenberger, Perserzeit, 9 and 213. 72  See also the reference to forced labor of the non-Israelite population in 9:20–21.

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‫וישב יהודה וישראל לבטח איש תחת גפנו ותחת תאנתו מדן ועד־באר שבע כל ימי‬ .‫שלמה‬

And Judah and Israel dwelt in safety, from Dan even to Beersheba, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, all the days of Solomon. 1 Kgs 5:5 RSV

From a Lydian perspective, too, drinking wine and eating figs is a sign of prosperity for the population at large. This can be inferred from a description of the Persians’ standard of living in contrast with the Lydians’ (Hdt. 1.71,3): πρὸς δὲ οὐκ οἴνῳ διαχρέωνται, ἀλλὰ ὑδροποτέουσι, οὐ σῦκα δὲ ἔχουσι τρώγειν, οὐκ ἄλλο ἀγαθὸν οὐδέν.73 The preceding discussion of both general differences and shared similarities has demonstrated the complexity of the double challenge involved in the comparison of these two sources. One consists of clearing the way for a fascinating intercultural dialogue between two outstanding ancient accounts of a past, dislodging the debris of outdated assumptions and supposed certitudes about their mutual incompatibility. The second challenge is the risk of missing basic similarities because of the wealth of scholarly work done on each of the narrative histories in even minute details. The intricacies of literary analyses as close-ups may at times cause us to forget that, when investigating a broad panorama, we should refocus our lens. The present study is not the first to compare ancient Hebrew and Greek narratives about a past. A comprehensive survey of all texts and studies in this field would make a separate research project.74 Comparative monographs originated in biblical or religious studies and theology. Here, some of the more recent comparative analyses were encouraged by John Van Seter’s In Search of History, an overview of the evolution of historical texts in different

73  They drink no wine, just water. They have no good things at all, not even figs (transl. Sélincourt modified). 74  I will mention in passing: Flavius Josephus (Contra Apionem 1.20–45), Joseph Scaliger (see: Antony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 616, 714), Friedrich August Wolff (Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft nach Begriff, Umfang, Zweck und Werth. Museum der AlterthumsWissenschaft vol. 1 (Berlin 1807)), Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Altertums I,1, 61953), Erich Auerbach (Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern 1946)) and Elias Bickermann (The historical foundations of postbiblical Judaism (New York 31961)).

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29

‘states’ of the Ancient Orient and Greece.75 He insightfully compares the compositional methods, textual features, and subjects of ancient Hebrew literature and Herodotus’ Histories. In Ancient History and Classics, Arnaldo Momigliano and Christian Meier published shorter thought-provoking contributions on comparative methodology for these sources, but to my knowledge, an actual comparison has not yet been attempted in these disciplines.76 75  John van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); this study inspired the monographs by Flemming Nielsen and Paul Niskanen; see the next chapter, n. 28. 76  Arnaldo Momigliano, “Biblical Studies and Classical Studies: Simple Reflections upon Historical Method,” ASNP 11.1 (1981): 25–32; Christian Meier, “Aktueller Bedarf an historischen Vergleichen: Überlegungen aus dem Fach der Alten Geschichte,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt a. M./New York, 1996), 239–70; Fehling notes a remarkable similarity of Samuel and Kings with Herodotus’ Histories: Detlev Fehling, Herodotus and His ‘Sources’: Citation, Invention, and Narrative Art, ARCA 21 (Leeds, 1989), transl. from the German by J. G. Howie, 11.

CHAPTER 2

Method, Objectives, Theory In the previous chapter, I explained the plausibility of an analysis of means of persuasion with a reference to the communication in the sources, their discourse, and their wish to influence an audience. With this in mind, I will now approach this topic from another angle, moving from the whitecaps, as it were, to the deeper tide. 1

Do Historical Narratives Employ Specific Narrative Strategies?

Jörn Rüsen’s definition of historical narrative is widely used. He defines it as expressing a connection between different times, systematically joining the interpretation of the past with an understanding of the present and expectations towards the future.1 Focusing on the primary narrator and tangible remains from the past, this study explores how exactly early ancient historical narratives do that. With such a broad objective, there is no need to limit the sources eligible for the comparison to texts we are accustomed to approach as ‘historiography’. The idea that historical thought can be found in more than one writing genre is not new. Hence, throughout this study, I will use the term ‘ancient accounts of a past’ and not ‘ancient historiography’ or ‘ancient history writing’. This decision is practical, as it spares me the trouble of defining ancient historiography and demonstrating why Gen–Kings and Herodotus’ Histories belong to this category of texts. In my view, these narratives can appropriately be called ‘ancient historiography’ once the rift separating pre-modern from modern history writing is clearly marked out. However, as this issue has caused confusion and misunderstanding,2 I will characterize my two sources very broadly as comprehensive ancient narrative prose accounts of a past. 1  Jörn Rüsen, Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), 76: “Historisch ist eine narrative Form dann, wenn sie den Zeitzusammenhang zum Ausdruck bringt, der die Deutung der Vergangenheit systematisch mit einem Verständnis der Gegenwart und den Erwartungen der Zukunft zusammenbringt.” 2  Modern definitions are taken as a critical standard for ancient accounts of a past, although some theorists and philosophists of history reserve the terms ‘history’ and ‘historiography’ to the modern habit of thought that in part emerged to replace traditional religious frameworks of orientation.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_003

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31

Do narratives about a past follow specific rules that are not binding for playful literary narratives or for factual prose on other subjects? Do they use particular strategies of persuasion? Answers to this question have come, as far as I can see, from the field of narratology and literary criticism, on the one hand, and from historical theorists, on the other. Let me briefly review results from what can be observed ‘in the field’, from a survey of the narrative surface of actual narratives. According to narratologist Irene de Jong, ancient narrative histories do not require a specialized narratology. This classicist has considered this issue briefly, but in an insightful way, suggesting that, although such a separation might be advisable for modern historiographical texts, ancient narratives are a different matter.3 In fact, in antiquity and up to the modern age, history was not considered a field of specific knowledge or branch of philosophy. Since it was not conceived as a separate discipline for specialists, people with other or more general interests, such as intellectuals or politicians, sometimes took to writing narrative histories. The intellectual pursuit of modern historians, by contrast, has its own theory, methodology, and habits of thought. As this was not yet the case in Herodotus’ time or for Jewish writers about Israel’s past, I agree with de Jong’s reluctance to separate ancient narratives about a past from prose narratives about other subjects. This seems appropriate especially with regard to Greek literatures before the fourth century and a distinction of genres in terms of different goals such as education and entertainment.4 3  Irene de Jong, “Introduction: Narratological Theory on Narrators, Narratees, and Narrative,” in Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, ed. ead., René Nünlist and Angus M. Bowie, Mnemosyne Supplementum 257 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 1–10: 8–9 with further bibliography. The difference in nature between historical narrative and narrative in general is one of the basic tenets of Rüsen’s theory of history. He worked it out as a reaction to postmodern doubts about the validity of the results of historical research and its self-concept as an academic discipline (Wissenschaft); cf. the introduction to Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn, 7–12. 4  Whether in the fifth century BCE there existed a clear distinction between fictional and factual texts is a matter of debate. See Backhaus, “Lukanische Geschichtsschreibung”, 85; Wolfgang Rösler, “Die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität in der Antike,” Poetica. Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 12 (1980): 283–319; Finkelberg, The birth, 26–27; Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics, Michigan monographs in classical antiquity (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993); Stephen Halliwell, “Fiction,” in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray, Blackwell companions to the ancient world (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 341–53: 341–53. As far as I can see, there is no historical research on this matter in ancient pre-Hellenistic Hebrew literature. Discussions of fictionality in biblical literature are fairly recent, at least in European contexts; see, e.g., Barbara Schmitz,

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CHAPTER 2

What are the typical claims of ancient narrative accounts of a past according to historical theory? The answer to this question should enable us to define which narrative strategies are to be given priority over others in this comparative study. Since this is a complex issue, it is not surprising that there is no straightforward answer. Hayden White’s analysis of nineteenth-century history writing posits four basic patterns for any historiographical narrative in that time, corresponding to the main interpretive avenues in the philosophy of history. While, according to White, each of these general patterns has its linguistic protocol, all of them use language in an ordinary way. Robert Berkhofer, among others, argues convincingly that the genres of history writing and novels share the principle of realistic representation and use essentially the same linguistic means.5 Historical theorists thus largely agree that narratives about a past do not use their own distinct narrative poetics. They feature means that enhance the reader’s impression of a realistic representation. How realism is defined depends on the conventions of the interpretive community in which the narrative about a past originates. Earlier researchers saw this differently. They often took for granted that ancient writers of histories wanted to convince and persuade audiences of the truth, specified as the correspondence of the events mentioned in the narrative with the facts of past reality. As a result, the primary, if not sole, criterion for the validity of narratives about a past was their factual veracity. However, more recent research into the history of historiography has helped us to become more and more aware of the otherness of ancient narratives depicting a past. The modern positivist definition of historical truth has proven less relevant for the understanding of ancient accounts of a past. Being sensitive to various “Die Bedeutung von Fiktionalität und Narratologie für die Schriftauslegung,” in “Der Leser begreife!”: Vom Umgang mit der Fiktionalität biblischer Texte, ed. Heinz-Günther Schöttler, Biblische Perspektiven für Verkündigung und Unterricht 1 (Berlin: Lit-Verl., 2006), 137–49. This contribution, however, focuses on modern and not ancient readers. Ehud Ben-Zvi has taken a more historical approach to this topic by tracing accounts of ‘biblical’ history through various stages of retelling and rewriting in order to understand which elements ancient audiences considered as fixed and which as changeable. As a productive complementary aspect, especially in view of biblical narratives, I would like to point to the superordinate notion of reality narratives (Wirklichkeitserzählungen), which not only includes the descriptive claim that the narrated events have actually taken place but also encompasses a normative claim (events should take place as narrated) or a prognostic claim (events will take place as narrated); see Christian Klein and Matías Martínez, “Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens,” in Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens, ed. eid. (Stuttgart, Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2009), 1–13: 6. For ancient Jewish readers, the exodus or Solomon’s rule may have aroused a feeling of factual (but not necessarily normative or emotional) distance. 5  Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 58–62.

Method, Objectives, Theory

33

definitions of historical truth, defined not by our contemporary understanding but by the interpretive community of a given source, results in fascinating discoveries of otherness. In early Chinese chronography, for instance, historicity was associated with a ritual performance where historical truth emerged from the correct encoding and decoding of language;6 and in most of Greco-Roman historiography, as mentioned earlier, the truthfulness of a history depended more on the impartiality and honesty of the historian than on the correct representation of a certain state of affairs.7 The historization of historical truth is a necessary precaution against universalizing a modern Western perspective. Although this is a modern, historicist notion and no ancient conception, it helps to better understand and value ancient representations of a past. This is to acknowledge that what a group of people perceives as reality is historically conditioned and contingent on their culture and tradition—the principles for the truth of historical narratives are not universal or unchanging and absolute.8 2

Comparing Texts while Granting Them Different Criteria of Validity and Plausibility

Instead of factual veracity in a positivist definition of history writing, it is more productive to apply the criteria of validity and plausibility found in the society in which the account of a past was written as a basis for an analysis of strategies of persuasion. In this way, the standard of ‘historical truth’ becomes relative to particular circumstances. This notwithstanding, I assume that all narratives about a past claim to be truthful representations of historical reality and/or relevant for the audience’s present reality. Each account of a past will therefore show in one way or another that it meets this essential requirement. In addition, writers of narratives about a past will use other narrative means of persuasion such as creating convincing characters and suspense. 6  Martin Kern, “Poetry and religion: The representation of ‘truth’ in early Chinese historiography,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen, 53–78: 72. 7  Torrey J. Luce, “Ancient Views of the Causes of Bias in Historical Writing,” CPH 84 (1989): 16–31; Reinhold Bichler, “Geschichte und Fiktion: Bemerkungen zur klassischen Historie der Griechen,” in Ästhetik der Geschichte, ed. Johann Holzner and Wolfgang Wiesmüller, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Germanistische Reihe 54 (Innsbruck, 1995), 17–38; Woodman, Rhetoric, 74: “If we can rid ourselves of the mistaken notion that the ancient’s view of historical truth was the same as ours, we will be able readily to appreciate why truth and falsehood were seen in terms of prejudice and bias.” 8  Berkhofer, Beyond, 73–75, 139; Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn, 11: multiple criteria of truth play a role in the processes of the creation of cultural meanings; Rüsen, Historik, 56.

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Berkhofer has reminded us in a lucid way how readers’ ethics, belief systems, or disciplinary paradigms determine what they will judge as a truthful account of a past. In addition to this formative and restricting role of social values and conventions, he points to the fact that the test criteria for a narrative’s validity differ according to the different modes of understanding, such as storytelling, analytical argument, or allegory.9 This awareness can caution and prepare us to adapt the analytical expectations to the prevailing mode and prevent us from looking for explicit rational criticism in an account that, for instance, represents the past in a story. 2.1 Rüsen’s Theory: Universal Areas of Plausibility in Historical Thought Jörn Rüsen is the only contemporary scholar of historical theory I know of to offer a general model of four areas in which historical thought strives for plausibility. These areas are empirical, explanatory, normative, and narrative plausibility.10 Although he originally developed these areas of plausibility for modern academic history writing and demonstrated their feasibility in this special case, Rüsen holds that the model can be applied universally to various kinds of narrative histories.11 Unfortunately, he neither explains the origin of these four areas nor mentions whether he considers this list to be complete and exhaustive.12 After adapting Rüsen’s four areas to ancient history, however, testing whether these categories can be applied to Herodotus’ Histories and 9  Berkhofer, Beyond, 73–75. 10  The most recent exposition is in Jörn Rüsen’s updated version of his theory of history (Historik, 57–63); see also id., Zeit und Sinn, 80–105, and chapter 2 in id., Zerbrechende Zeit: Über den Sinn der Geschichte (Köln: Böhlau, 2001). Other terms for areas of plausibility Rüsen has used in his research are ‘validity claim’ and ‘criteria for truth’ (Geltungsansprüche and Wahrheitskriterien; Historik, 58). The four categories listed here are Rüsen’s categories of fields of plausibility applied to scientific historical thought. His more general and allegedly universal headings are ‘experience,’ ‘explanation,’ ‘significance’ (Bedeutung), and ‘meaning’ (Sinn). 11  Rüsen and Robert Berkhofer are the only historians I am aware of who have treated strategies of persuasion in a theoretical context, with Rüsen’s contribution being the more ambitious. Robert Berkhofer’s criteria for the validity or truthfulness of a history, which can be used as references to areas in which accounts of past events want to persuade, are useful as well (Beyond, 73–75). In earlier versions, Rüsen referred to his areas of plausibility of historical thought as the truth-claims of historical thought. 12  Rüsen does not directly explain how he has found these four fields (of which there were three in his earlier versions). He ties them to the inherent logic of the production and reception of histories (Zeit und Sinn, 89). In the same publication, Rüsen refers to Habermas’ areas of rationality as an inspiration (85). In general, Rüsen’s interest in thinking about areas of plausibility of historical narration has been to reconcile its claim to validity and objectivity with the fact that values and norms play an important role in the epistemic process of historical thought (cf. Rüsen, Zeit und Sinn, 11–12).

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Gen–Kings, I did indeed find textual features corresponding to the four categories. In fact, I cannot think of a missing category or of a particular narrative strategy of persuasion that will not fit in any of these four areas, which I will present in the following. Empirical plausibility is achieved by convincing the addressees that the facts and events in the account are backed by someone’s actual experience. Herodotus and the biblical narratives use two main strategies to establish this empirical basis: They have their narrators refer to material remains, written documents, research, or their own experience, and they also make an effort for verisimilitude by creating the impression that the events are “true to life”.13 Equally conducive in a different vein is the narrative representation of experientiality.14 Claims to explanatory plausibility relate to the force of the narrator’s theories about the narrated events. These can be observations on patterns and universal principles in sequences of events, as well as causal connections between events. In Herodotus, one may think of the idea of an overall balance in nature or the importance of a person’s character when it comes to accounting for his or her actions. For Gen–Kings, one can point to, for example, the parameter of loyalty to the terms of the covenant with God that influences a person’s wellbeing—and above all, that of the Israelites—or to the idea of the formative primordial age of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Both histories affirm the shaping role of divine involvement. Normative plausibility is addressed by claims to the significance and meaning of the narrated past events. According to Rüsen, any representation of a past receives significance by being told from a certain interpretive perspective, which by definition involves norms. According to Rüsen, writers of scholarly works of history have to explicitly reflect on and justify their normative premises. This requirement, however, cannot be carried over to ancient accounts of a past. In antiquity, truth was not perspectival in the same way as it is today. The epistemological framework of representations of a past generally was objectivist in the sense that ancient narratives did not present the past as the 13  This expression is used by Mario J. Valdés, World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts, Theory/culture series 4 (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 24. It should be noted that the four plausibilities described here are to be judged according to the standards of the implicit ancient readers. On the ancient literary ideal to eliminate the difference between artful representations and reality, see Gregor Vogt-Spira, “Secundum verum fingere: Wirklichkeitsnachahmung, Imagination und Fiktionalität: Epistemo-logische Überlegungen zur hellenistisch-römischen Literaturkonzeption,” A&A LIII (2007): 21–38. 14  See Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 28.

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panorama seen from a specific observation point. Thus, the presentation and interpretation of certain events of the past are not presented as contingent on the processing by a particular consciousness. Rather, the past is conceived as understandable in the same way regardless of who is looking at it. The narrators in pre-modern accounts of a past should therefore not be expected to explicitly reflect on the basis for their claims to normative plausibility and its role in shaping the account.15 To my knowledge, people in the ancient Mediterranean world did not experience themselves as subjects who create meaning themselves rather than seeking it. It is therefore unnecessary and anachronistic to require ancient intellectuals as writers of accounts of a past to stand apart from the world in order to look at it from a certain perspective. Of course, the narrators of both Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings express views and values. They make moral judgments much more openly than modern histories. Both narrators, for instance, provide the listener with guidelines by presenting individual characters as examples worthy of imitation or rejection.16 Other explicit ways of expressing judgments are characterization using normative vocabulary and making characters in the narrative evaluate other characters. However, the sources do not lay open their premises and justify them. The narratives appeal to normative plausibility wherever they explicitly or implicitly express their relevance for the audience’s orientation and guidance in the present. A narrative history will be significant if its point of view answers the addressees’ need for orientation and if its values are shared by the audience.17 When Herodotus notices intercultural difference, as for example in different names and iconography of deities, he does not explain this discrepancy in terms of different worldviews. By contrast, he assumes that Egyptians and Greeks take notice of the same deities as they are manifest in the same reality, but call them by different names. To Herodotus, there can be different stories about the same event in much the same way as witnesses in court may disagree on certain points. However, this does not mean that there can be several stories

15  See chapter 3 for a brief discussion of Herodotus’ preface and methodological remarks, which offer some reflection on his own approach. 16  See e.g., the recurring evaluations of Israelite and Judahite kings in the books of Kings, among them 1 Kgs 22:43; 2 Kgs 21:2; in Herodotus, cf. the appreciation for Prexaspes (3.75) and for the Athenians (7.139). 17  Jörn Rüsen, “Geschichte und Norm—Wahrheitskriterien der historischen Erkenntnis,” in Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens, by Jörn Rüsen (Frankfurt am Main: Humanities Online, 2012), 80–105; here, Rüsen reflects the relationship between history and norms more extensively than in the newer version of his Historik.

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about a single event that are equally accurate: with Herodotus, there is only one correct version of the past.18 In Rüsen’s taxonomy, the fourth area is narrative plausibility, and by this he refers to two aspects, one being the truth of narrative representation. This refers to claims made, for instance, through the specifics of the plot, or through the choice of metric or prose expression. The second aspect is the history’s overall meaning (Sinngehalt) for the audience, differentiated from normative plausibility above by an emphasis on its practical application to people’s concrete actions. This includes a dynamic aspect, which is the extent to which it is adaptable, inviting recipients to adapt its principles and details to their own everyday circumstances. Although these two aspects do not appear separately in Rüsen’s explanation, I find working with them in this way easier. In certain respects, Rüsen’s model is useful also for pre-modern narratives about a past because it does not privilege more cognitive aspects of historical thought such as a critical, rational, and multiperspectival outlook over others, but mentions them together with aspects of ethics and aesthetics. This makes the model open for various forms of creation of meaning and of rationality.19 The fact that the model refers to historical thought—not historical narrative—does not provide an obstacle. Since, in important respects, historical thought is narrative, the two fields are intertwined and concepts of historical thought can be detected in and applied to narrative history. Likewise, it is important to note that Rüsen explicitly acknowledges that claims to plausibility in historical thought may come as amalgams of two or more of these four areas. In the formation of meaning, the field of empirical plausibility need therefore not be detached from, say, normative plausibility.20 With respect to Rüsen’s concept about how human beings grasp their being in the world, a possible objection is the doubt as to whether it is really compatible with pre-modern worldviews and other cultural contexts or literary traditions than the European tradition.21 I have already qualified Rüsen’s 18  Herodotus does not claim absolute truth value for his Histories, at least not directly. See also John Marincola, “ἀλήθεια,” in Lexicon historiographicum graecum et latinum (Pisa 2007), 7–29: 15. 19  Rüsen adopted ideas from Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality, in which what is true, and thus accepted by the addressee, can vary according to context and the ‘sphere of validity’; for Habermas in Rüsen, cf. Zerbrechende Zeit, 98. 20  Id., Historik, 57; id., Zerbrechende Zeit, 129 n. 34; id., Zeit und Sinn, 91. Heinrich (David und Klio) bases his study on the first edition of Rüsen’s Historik of 1983 and postulates an explicit separation of the areas (16, 372). He argues that the biblical narrator’s lack of distance impedes the differentiation of various strategies of validation (372). 21  Rüsen explicitly intends his work as a theoretical basis for the understanding of modes of historical narration in their intercultural variations.

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criterion of self-reflexiveness about the historian’s own normative premises to make it fit ancient sources. Although Rüsen is alert to the tension arising from positing anthropological universals in a theory that seeks to make room for particularity and variety, he still assumes that the human selfhood or subjectivity that we take for granted in modern Western research and life is a condition that applies to men and women of all times and places.22 However, people who populated the ancient Mediterranean world may not have experienced themselves as separate or autonomous from the world surrounding them such that they stand apart from it as spectators or critics. In antiquity, standing apart from the world to make it one’s own was not conceived as a necessary precondition for inquiry, criticism, interpretation, and exercising agency.23 In modern European thought, reality and truth are perspectival. However, the modern understanding that invests human beings with worldviews, for example, might not have been relevant to an ancient audience precisely because it is a product of epistemic conditions of later times that are at least in part different from those of antiquity. The problem is that we cannot go back behind this difference.24 Therefore, if we want to encounter the whole 22  E.g., Rüsen, Zerbrechende Zeit, 40. 23  In his Mythische und historische Wahrheit: Interpretationen zu Texten der hethitischen, biblischen und griechischen Historiographie, Stuttgarter Bibelstudien 48 (Stuttgart: Verl. Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1970), Hubert Cancik looks for narrative signs that reveal the narrator’s point of view (“Gebrochenheit des Berichtes,” 107) and explicit criticism (93, 105–08, 128), although he takes care not to project into antiquity the break that happened with the inset of modernity (129); Blum observes that the relationship between biblical authors and their texts cannot be described as autonomously making the world one’s own: “Gleichwohl ist auch dies noch traditionale Erzählung: Ihr Autor macht die Problematik selbstbestimmter Weltbemächtigung zu seinem Gegenstand (und bleibt darin in der Hebräischen Bibel ohne Parallele!), aber er überträgt diesen Zugang nicht auf das Verhältnis zu seinem eigenen Text,” in Erhard Blum, “Ein Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung? Anmerkungen zur sog. Thronfolgegeschichte und zum Umgang mit Geschichte im alten Israel,” in Die sogenannte Thronfolgegeschichte Davids: Neue Einsichten und Anfragen, ed. Albert d. Pury et al., OBO 176 (Freiburg, Schweiz, Göttingen: Universitätsverlag; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 4–37: 37; also in id., “Die Stimme des Autors,” 119, Blum mentions the lack of a split, i.e. of distance, between (a) the narrator and his object and (b) between the object and its representation as a necessary ingredient for historical criticism. 24  “With a certain effort and a certain vigilance we can try to desist from reading all other forms of selfhood as leading toward and culminating in this one […]. Doing so is our way of staying sensitive to the difference. But our notion of self or subject is not thereby rendered, as we imagine, into an empty form into which any content can be poured; it already has a certain content inscribed into its very form. When we ‘think’ difference we do so in the manner of Weber […]; we picture other humans who in turn picture the world in ways very different from our own. […] our categories, the grammar of our

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range of ancient narratives about a past unprejudiced, we should abandon the projection of a distanced observer creating the categories for perception on his own, as opposed to accepting something as given, as the ideal narrator of histories. Both cross-culturally speaking and also within the Greek literary tradition alone, historical thought is not restricted to the kind of inquiry that has led to modern academic history. At stake here is nothing less than the question of whether the basic mechanics of historical thought are human universals or not. If they are universal, all historical narratives would share a common grammar. This is one of the big questions in research that might not be answerable, but even exploring it yields intellectual rewards. Yet, if proceeding to investigate it, as they say, in for a penny, in for a pound: positing universals of historical thought means saying what they are. It seems productive not to derive from theory the types of rhetorical strategies that will be looked for in a particular source before actually closely engaging with this text. A bottom-up approach could derive a sound list of criteria of historical thought from close acquaintance with a broad selection of narrative histories—which is more than a book-length project. That is why I refer to Rüsen’s four areas of plausibility in historical narration as a helpful heuristic and descriptive tool but not as a map of the paths human historical thought must take by nature.25 As a consequence, Rüsen’s areas of plausibility will not serve as a constant guide to the unknown territory of strategies of persuasion.

thought, lead us always into teleology and normativity” (Seth, Subject lessons, 44). Seth refers to the following premise of Max Weber (in “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences: Max Weber, ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York 1949), 81): “The transcendental presupposition of every cultural science lies […] in the fact that we are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude towards the world and to lend it significance.” 25  Rüsen’s formula of ‘being human is to freely designate/define purposes’ (Zeit und Sinn, 152–53). See also 153–54: “Das Woraufhin der Sinnbildung […] ist bestimmt davon, daß sich die Menschen die durch ihr Handeln vollzogenen und bewirkten zeitlichen Veränderung ihrer Welt und ihrer selbst so vorstellen müssen, daß sie sie beabsichtigen können. Durch ihr Handeln wollen sich die Menschen als Subjekte einbringen in den Fluß der Zeit, und zwar so, daß sie sich in ihm nicht nur erhalten, d.h. in ihm nicht untergehen, sondern zur Geltung bringen, d.h. in ihm Vorstellungen davon verwirklichen, was sein soll, aber noch nicht oder nicht mehr ist. Hier kommt Zeit in der Form von Absichten ins Spiel, in denen der Wandel von Mensch und Welt nach Maßgabe frei gesetzter Zwecke gewollt und als freie Selbsthervorbringung der zwecksetzenden Subjekte vorgestellt wird.”

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2.2 My Approach For the present study, I therefore choose a different path. As shown before, I can neither posit a modern definition of historical truth as the aim of persuasion of ancient narratives about a past, nor take the implicit concept of historical truth in one of the two ancient sources as a measure for both. While I reject a universal definition of historical truth, I still need to define the characteristics of narratives about a past on a higher level. This will help with more effectively detecting the means of persuasion especially relevant to narratives about a past. In addition, the data, of course, needs to be collected and edited in a way that makes possible a comparison along the same lines without prescribing specific moves in logic or poetics. How can the abstract notion that historical narration connects different times, systematically joining the interpretation of the past with an understanding of the present and the expectations toward the future, be operationalized in a way that it concedes each narrative its own standards26 for a truthful historical narrative and, at the same time, allows a comparison of the results? Possible Worlds Theory (PWT), when combined with the concept of accessibility relations, goes a long way in solving this methodological problem. If we think of the real, physical world of a given time and place as a world of its own, and of the narrative world as one or more possible worlds, we can grant each of these worlds its own rules of existence. These worlds can be autonomous or related to each other and, for instance, even share inhabitants and inventory. Statements that are constitutive for each world have truth status, and can therefore be understood as truth claims, while these claims do not extend to other possible worlds. Each story-world thus constitutes the frame of reference in which the claims are valid. If these claims are to be valid also in the actual world, the narrator has to clearly relate the two worlds.

26  Nielsen, The Tragedy in History, uses Herodotus’ Histories as point of reference for the comparison, which is a methodological flaw, since none of the two partners of comparison should provide the measuring standard for the analysis. Christian Meier has explicitly recommended Herodotus as the yardstick for ancient history since, in Meier’s view, Herodotus’ work is the first narrative with distinctive characteristics of historical thought; see his “Aktueller Bedarf”. Taking one source as the model for the other may be justified if it can be shown that a certain narrative element clearly travelled from one text to the other. Paul Niskanen used the comparison between the Histories and Daniel to contextualize the view on history in Daniel within ancient Greek historiography. He has treated Herodotus’ Histories as the guiding reference because the Herodotean concept of a succession of empires provides one of the keys for Niskanen’s interpretation of Daniel; see Paul Niskanen, The Human and the Divine in History: Herodotus and the Book of Daniel, JSOTSup 396 (London, New York: T&T Clark, 2004).

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With reference to narratives about a past, the term ‘possible world’ may appear unusual. Whereas fictional writing is often compared to world making, we probably would not say that historians create their own narrative worlds. After all, they do not write what comes to their mind, but reconstruct past circumstances and events from evidence. Taking a closer look, however, we can see that also writers of narratives depicting a past create a story-world. This world is a possible world too, since different researchers produce overlapping but never identical narrative representations of the same historical events. We cannot observe and investigate past events directly as a physical entity; they exist only in the memories, stories, and documents that are still around. As the past is invisible because it has vanished, all histories are more or less well-founded interpretations of the material the writer studied beforehand. Giuliano Toraldo di Francia has therefore defined narrative history writing as all possible worlds compatible with the evidence, meaning the sources.27 This certainly applies to academic historiography, the methodology of which grants historical sources a “right to veto”.28 This is to say that historians must refrain from interpretations that are not justified by the sources, which are interpreted according to the state of the art. The historians’ hypotheses are thus tested against the information provided by the available evidence. Ancient narratives of a past, by contrast, are more loosely related to available sources. 3

Strategies of Persuasion as Accessibility Relations

If, by definition, narratives about a past meaningfully connect past events and the present so that this narrative becomes relevant to the present, I understand ‘means of persuasion’29 in terms of narrative strategies that enhance the audience’s access from their real world to the narrated world and, from a different angle, the relevance of the story-world for their actual world. The assumption is that, the better the story-world (i.e., the world of the past) can be accessed, 27  In the abstract of his article “Historical Truth,” in: Foundations of Science 1,3 (Sept. 1995): 407–16. 28  Reinhart Koselleck, “Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur historiographischen Erschließung der geschichtlichen Welt,” in Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Id., Wolfgang Mommsen and Jörn Rüsen (München: dtv, 1977), 17–46: 45–46. See also Stefan Jordan, “Vetorecht der Quellen,” online resource: , and the interview by Hasso Spode with Koselleck: “Ist Geschichte eine Fiktion?,” NZZFolio, 3/ 1995, 60–63. 29  Since the term ‘strategy of persuasion’ implies the writer’s conscious and deliberate creation of the effect, the term ‘means of persuasion’ will be used instead when we have no hints for the assumption that it was intentional.

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the more likely the audience is to accept an account as comprehensible, plausible, and above all, meaningful. Whenever the audience meaningfully relates the story-world to their own reality, relations of accessibility have been established between the two worlds. Consider this example: A narrative means to make the sheer uncountable wealth of a king sizeable for an audience is to demonstrate how a small negligible fraction of this wealth is a fortune to others, or at least a present as becomes a queen. We can find this strategy in Herodotus’ Histories and the Hebrew Bible. In both narratives, the reader learns that whoever is truly rich does not have to scrimp, since a talent of gold more or less in the treasury is of no importance. The anecdote of Alcmeon’s visit at Croesus’ palace manifests the king’s relaxed spending: Croesus lets the guest carry away as much gold dust on his body as he wishes and has a good laugh: Alcmeon fills his mouth and clothes with gold, which makes the Greek look very silly (Hdt. 6.125). On top of that, the Lydian king generously adds the same amount on his own accord, doubling the gold Alcmeon can take home. It is this rich reward for Kleisthenes’ grandfather that makes his family affluent and κάρτα λαμπροί (6.125,1): After this visit at Croesus’ palace, Alcmeon had the means to keep a carriage drawn by four horses and train with it, winning an Olympian victory.30 In Gen–Kings, the same motif of being granted unrestricted self-service from the riches of a king and being given even more on top appears in the famous story of the queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem. The king’s invitation to wish and take away anything implies that even rare and precious jewels or other objects are replaceable, such that Solomon does not care about which pieces the queen will take away: .‫והמלך שלמה נתן למלכת־שבא את־כל חפצה אשר שאלה‬ 1 Kgs 10:13

And King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all that she desired, whatever she asked […]. This unrestricted invitation to take home whatever it is can be interpreted as an indirect narrative strategy testifying to unlimited wealth. Whereas Alcmeon’s gratification is restricted by how much he can carry and suffer, the queen of Sheba can ask for anything—but this is only a difference in degree. Both narratives employ a similar literary strategy showing that whatever is merely 30  This real-life consequence of Alcmeon’s legendary visit to the Lydian king is a claim to the truthfulness of the anecdote, which in turn corroborates Croesus’ riches.

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peanuts to the king makes other people rich, or that what is usually used in small quantities for ornaments that accentuate something in its beauty and value is used by royalty as if it were a common resource that one does not need to measure in small units.31 This strategy of enacting a scene of a generous giving away of one’s riches without controlling how much or what exactly will be taken away relies on a pattern of interaction familiar from everyday life common to Mediterranean cultures. These scenes are therefore accessible to an average audience. For most members in the audience, though, the persuasion works due to the contrast with their own financial abilities: Would they themselves invite a guest to take as a gift whatever he or she wants? Do they at all own anything that is dispensable and having it pure luxury? An important characteristic of any narrative about past events is that it is concerned with present-day reality. Schematically speaking, this can take three different forms.32 First, the narrative might claim to represent a past reality, often narrating how it evolved to become the present world. In this way, the story-world, the narrated past, helps to understand the actual world of the present. This claim identifies the world of the past with that of the present, a certain difference granted because one is taken as representing an earlier stage of the other. A close similarity of the two worlds is important, since recipients of the account would not otherwise grasp the text-world as a forerunner of their own reality. As a second option, a narrative can make a normative claim in representing a corrected, enhanced past, the past as it should have been, according to the point of view of the narrating voice. Such a narrative provides ethical guidance for an audience, who make decisions in the present. The third option is a performative narrative, which claims, possibly counterfactually, that the past actually was just like the narrator tells us. The narrative seeks to create an alternative, often more glorious, past for reasons such as imperial propaganda or attaining a past that is easier to live with. In all three cases the narrating voice speaks with a view to the actual world. It depicts the narrated world either as a past reality or as ethically relevant for the audience’s reality. Since such narratives have an influence on how people understand the actual world and on their decision-making and actions, some scholars address them as reality narratives (Wirklichkeitserzählungen). In contrast to a positivist notion of historical truth that focuses exclusively on the correspondence of the facts in the narrative about past events with historical reality, a narrative history also deals with reality if the social norms 31  An even more blunt illustration of Solomon’s golden generosity is the report that the king had the floors of the holy of holiest and the room in front of it paved with gold (1 Kgs 6:30). 32  The following is based on Klein and Martínez, “Wirklichkeitserzählungen,” 6–7.

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inherent in the text relate to those of the society the audience is part of. In other words, the truth claims of the narrative extend to more than one area of validity or plausibility, as is also suggested by Berkhofer and Rüsen. This said, the aspect of factuality and of a realistic representation will always remain a central area of persuasion for narratives about events in the past. Their narrators will purport to present, or actually do so, a true story-world, a narrative world so realistic and meaningful that the audience can fruitfully relate it to the world they know. Not by coincidence, accessibility relations between alternative possible worlds and the actual world are essential in making a world possible in the first place. Marie-Laure Ryan and Basil Lourié have applied PWT to literary theory as a tool that can help describe the relationship between a text-world and the actual world we live in as a relation of accessibility.33 According to Ryan, a text-world is maximally epistemically accessible for an audience from the actual world if, while reading or listening, they can integrate everything they know about reality to complete their mental picture of the text-world. This mental picture of the text-world, in turn, is necessary for the audience’s formation of meaning, unless they read exclusively for entertainment or musical enjoyment. Narrative means enhancing an audience’s access to the representation of a past are thus defined as those strengthening the readers’ sense of reality when they indulge in the story-world. Which elements in the construction of the story-world make the reader grade the possible world of the past as authentic and relevant to the actual world? Does precise information such as geographical data do the trick, or vivid representation? How effective is a confirmation by authorities, or norms and values shared by the inhabitants of both worlds? How about physical objects that are part of both the narrative and the actual world? The analysis of narrative strategies of persuasion is worthwhile because it explores what it takes for an account of a past to have a chance to get incorporated into the audience’s interpretation of their reality, the present actual world.

33   Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction,” Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 553–76: 561 and 574; Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), see p. 32–33 for a list of accessibility relations. Ryan has proposed to expand this list by the items’ historical coherence, psychological credibility, and socio-economic compatibility (p. 45). Basil Lourié, “Possible Worlds of Different Narratives: Frank R. Ankersmit, Lubomir Dolezel, and Narratology of History,” Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a05_lourie.html; this is an English translation from Russian.

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Excursus: Ancient Greek Philosophy and Rhetorical Theory

Ancient Greek philosophers roughly contemporaneous to Herodotus also saw persuasion as a result of the interplay of various different factors. They were sceptical as to whether human beings are at all capable of knowing the truth. Before the pre-Socratics, Greek thought attributed permanent knowledge only to the divine sphere, whereas human understanding was considered preliminary.34 In the early fifth century BCE, Parmenides no longer saw divine revelation as a necessary condition for getting at the truth. Instead, he considered human beings capable of apprehending the real being of perceptible things. Deductive reasoning, instead of following conventions and suppositions, should take people on epistemologically safer ground.35 Conversely, persuasion (ἡ πειθώ, τὸ πιθανόν) could be of two types: genuine conviction achieved on the basis of real truth (actual being), or persuasion based on seeming truth or suppositions. At least since Plato, however, confidence as “a true belief of a relatively reliable kind”36 (πίστις) was grouped with opinion (γνώμη), and therefore in opposition to genuine knowledge.37 Aristotle (fourth century BCE) is the first Greek author still available to use an abstract, technical term for the technique of persuasion and the means it applies.38 In his Rhetoric, Aristotle mentions three means of persuasion according to the art (πίστις ἔντεχνος), which are persuasion through the speaker’s character, through the emotional state of the audience, and through a reasoned presentation of the subject matter.39 The last subsumes procedures ‘when we demonstrate truth or seeming (truth)’,40 while the first concerns persuasion 34  A  . H. Coxon and Richard D. McKirahan, Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing 2014): 12–13 and 20–22; cf. Homer (Il. B 485–486), then taken over from there by Xenophanes (fr. 34 Diels) and Alcmeon of Croton (fr. 1). 35  Coxon on Parm. fragm. 1,30 and John Palmer, “Parmenides,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Milena Bontempi, La fiducia secondo gli antichi: ‘pistis’ in Gorgia tra Parmenide e Platone, Pensiero giuridico e politico. Saggi nuova ser., 30 (Napoli: Editoriale scientifica, 2013), 9–46. 36  Ralph Wedgwood, “Plato’s Theory of Knowledge,” http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~wedgwood/ Plato_knowledge.pdf. 37  Republic 533e–534a: τὴν μὲν πρώτην μοῖραν ἐπιστήμην καλεῖν, δευτέραν δὲ διάνοιαν, τρίτηνδὲ πίστιν καὶ εἰκασίαν τετάρτην: καὶ συναμφότερα μὲν ταῦτα δόξαν, συναμφότερα δ᾽ ἐκεῖνα νόησιν. 38  Bontempi, Fiducia, 15. 39  I follow Christof Rapp’s 2-volume commentary (Aristoteles, Rhetorik, Aristoteles. Werke in deutscher Übersetzung 4 (Berlin: Akademie, 2009), Translated and explained by Christof Rapp), especially vol. 1, pp. 355–358 and vol. 2, 135–49. 40  Arist. Rhet. 1356 a 19–20: ἀληθὲς φαινόμενον δείξωμεν.

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through the speaker’s virtue and authority.41 Thus, according to Aristotle, stateof-the-art means of persuasion use as resources the speaker’s authority and reputation (ἔθος), the subject matter (λόγος), and the response of the audience, with special attention to their state of mind (πάθος). Regarding the third element, Aristotle takes varied audiences into account—what is convincing for one might not be convincing for another—and states that, apart from good arguments, elements that influence the listener’s emotions take a share in the art of persuasion (1356 b 27; 1356 b 14–17). In ancient Greek rhetorical theory, therefore, we also meet a range of means of persuasion broader than an exclusive emphasis on factual assertions and cognitive performance. Throughout this study, I understand the result of persuasion in a comprehensive way so that it can refer to a recipient who is both convinced by reasons and explanations and persuaded by a skilled narrator and presenter. 5

Limitation to Narratorial Discourse

Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis through Kings in the Hebrew Bible feature the voices of many speakers. Characters talk to each other or make a speech in front of a larger audience. They also tell each other stories about events in the past or summarize and judge past experiences. One voice that stands out, however, is that of the primary narrator of the account as a whole. At stake in this study are the means of persuasion used by this voice, which is shaped by the writer of the narrative. Unless the narrator is unreliable, PWT grants narratorial statements about the textual actual world truth conditions because the narrating voice constitutes the world in telling its story.42 For this reason and for the benefit of a clear methodology, I restrict my analysis to narratorial discourse. Apart from a few exceptions, strategies of persuasion in character speech are not considered in this study.43 This selection can also be explained in terms of standard literary theory: The textual function of the narrator is set apart from the characters in the 41  Ibid., 1356 a 5–14. 42   Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible Worlds,” Paragraph 7, in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg). URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/possible -worlds. What to the author may or may not be facts become the facts of the narrator unless he or she is unreliable—because the narrator constitutes the story-world by telling the story. 43  Random examples are: Gen 37:31–34; 38:25–26; Judg 11:14–27; 1 Sam 1:14–16; the formula ‫ עד היום‬in character discourse, e.g., Num 22:30; Deut 9:7–16; Josh 22:3. In Herodotus e.g., 5.49–51; 6.82.

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narrative because it tells the story in which characters feel, speak, and act. It is therefore on a higher level of communication than that of the characters: the audience comes to know the events within the story-world only inasmuch as the narrator chooses to relate them. The narrating voice is responsible for the presentation of a past to an audience as a mediating instance. An example from biblical narrative of the fact that the narrator determines the truths of the story-world is the story about the two prophets from the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, respectively, in which the former is slain by a lion (1 Kgs 13). Each prophet has allegedly received a message from God, but with differing instructions about how the Judahite prophet should act. One and the same verse relates both a statement by the prophet of Beth-El to his Judahite colleague and the narrator’s assertion that the prophet has lied (13:18): ‫אני נביא כמוך ומלאך דבר אלי בדבר יהוה לאמר )…( כחש לו׃‬-‫ויאמר לו גם‬

And he said to him, “I also am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of YHWH, saying, […].” But he lied to him. The reader does not hesitate to take the narrator’s discourse as the superior one, and therefore does not ascribe any truth value in the story-world to the utterance by the prophet from Beth-El, since the narrator’s voice, if reliable, is authoritative for the facts of the narrated world. Lubomir Dolezel has earlier referred to this function that decides about the facts of the text-world as “authoritative narration”.44 6

Additional Premises

In order to approach a more specific take on what can count as means of persuasion that enhance the story-world’s accessibility, I do not need to start all over. Although there is, to my knowledge, no comparative study of ancient representations of a past that examines strategies of persuasion in an understanding similar to that of the present study, it builds on ancient and modern scholarly thought on narrative strategies of persuasion and my own insights derived from the nature of the sources. 44  Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Parallax re-visions of culture and society (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), 149: “Entities introduced in the discourse of the anonymous third-person narrator are eo ipso authenticated as fictional facts, while those introduced in the discourse of the fictional persons are not.”

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A fundamental criterion for means of persuasion in my work has been to consider both explicit and implicit means of persuasion. Modern literary criticism has been important for realizing that this study would otherwise be one-sided. Narratives generally do not seek to convince their audience in a discursive, argumentative way, but invite them into their world. Here, style is an important means of persuasion, as is the choice and representation of characters. Showing is generally more effective than telling in creating a gripping narrative world. A wealth of circumstantial detail is thus a possible means of persuasion, or the involvement of the reader in discovering the meaning of a certain event. Narratives work on the reader in a different way than does a text that was written to expound a certain view.45 For an analysis of rhetorical strategies in narratives, we do well to tune our receivers to the frequency on which they send in order to receive their signals. The validation of an idea need not be overt and explicit; in fact, a more effective and sublime way of persuasion is to not let the addressee notice that the narrator is making an effort to convince him or her.46 With regard to the sources chosen here, I see no necessity to demarcate a priori strategies of persuasion operating in fictive story-worlds from those used in narratives controlled by the claim to represent a past reality—both narrative worlds are possible worlds, and they can be analyzed with the same tools. This said, I am especially interested in exploring elements of narrative structure that supposedly run strong in factual narratives. In addition, the fact that a text belongs to the factual realm does not turn off all features also found in fiction. Mario Valdés’ description of strategies of persuasion in literature has been very inspiring and helpful heuristically.47 Valdés differentiates five categories of truth claims in modern literature: the empirical, the verisimilar, the historical, the truth claim based on authority, and the truth claim of self.48 He 45  Cf. Wilhelm Köller, Narrative Formen der Sprachreflexion: Interpretationen zu Geschichten über Sprache von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Studia linguistica Germanica 79 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2006), 22–50; Berkhofer, Beyond, 73. 46  Cf. Aristoteles Rhet. 1404b4 διὸ δεῖ λανθάνειν ποιοῦντας, καὶ μὴ δοκεῖν λέγειν πεπλασμένως ἀλλὰ πεφυκότως (τοῦτο γὰρ πιθανόν, ἐκεῖνο δὲ τοὐναντίον: […] Wherefore those who practise this artifice must conceal it and avoid the appearance of speaking artificially instead of naturally; for that which is natural persuades, but the artificial does not. (Perseus, transl. Freese 1926). 47  Valdés, World Making, 29–30. I do not endorse his assumption, based on Aristotle, of a general difference between fictional literature and history writing, which can be debated both in principle and for the specifics in my two pre-Hellenistic sources. However, this does not call into question his general model of literary truth claims. 48  Ibid., 13–34. As Valdés’ categories serve to analyze (early) modern literature, not all of them are relevant for an analysis of early ancient literary texts.

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describes strategies of persuasion as “a system of signs to which the reader responds” during the reading process, which is a process of meaning formation and consistency building. While reading, we involve models of order we are familiar with from our concrete experiences in the actual world and relate them to the story-world.49 The notion that truth claims are literary means creating a sense of order, structure, or regularity in a text-world is a useful basis for intercultural comparisons, since it does not prescribe the categories in which this order has to be created. Likewise, it draws attention to the importance of the recipient in the reception process: If the reader does not accept the claims of the narrative as valid for the text-world, it does not fully come into being. Therefore, Valdés also paraphrases truth claims as “modes of givenness”.50 The textual feature of the narrating voice, shaped by the creator(s) of the narrative, is in charge of telling us what is given in a story-world. The narrator can evoke the story-world in simple statements without having to take a metanarrative perspective. All the same, previous studies have been restricted to explicit metanarrative statements by the narrator. In disciplines related to the study of antiquity, researchers have been interested in strategies of persuasion for two reasons. Some focused on the narrators’ evaluation of factual veracity and the use of investigative procedures in ancient accounts of a past, analyzing explicit argumentative reasoning such as expressions of doubt and judgments about the truthfulness of traditions. Others were interested in narrative as discourse, and therefore in rhetorical techniques. Most of these studies concentrate exclusively on explicit narratorial claims, which entails a structural bias toward argumentative devices common to Greek epideictic oratory, or to modern conventions of reasoning.51 To avoid this bias, considering 49  Ibid., 57 and 41, citation 57. 50  Ibid., 153. This intersects well with Ryan’s idea of accessibility relations between possible worlds: She points out that, whenever epistemic access to the facts of the textual actual world is denied to a reader, the textual world fails to solidify (in: “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations,” 566). 51  In my view, this bias informs Cancik’s Mythische und historische Wahrheit and his Grundzüge der hethitischen und alttestamentlichen Geschichtsschreibung, ADPV (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976), Blum’s three articles of 2000, 2005, 2008 (discussed above), and Heinrich’s David und Klio. Cancik, Mythische und historische Wahrheit, 7 and 9, notes that his restriction on some forms of explicit metacommentary is motivated merely by practical considerations and does not cover the whole range of strategies of persuasion. This fact seems to have been forgotten in the use of his study in further research. Fehling interpreted source citations as strategies of validation and authentication and in passing he commented on the use of objects as evidence (Herodotus and His ‘Sources’); for a summary of the implications of Fehling’s study for understanding the genre of Herodotus’ Histories and major reactions to Fehling, see Deborah Boedeker, “Herodotus’s

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both explicit argumentative and implicit strategies of persuasion in the analysis seems productive and reasonable. In fact, because of the self-effacing nature of the narrating voice in most of biblical narrative, it is imperative to consider also implicit narrative strategies. Narratorial comments can be made indirectly, for instance in the choice of sequence and juxtaposition, by allusions of one episode to another using the same keywords, or by parallel or contrasting characterization of protagonists.52 Relevant for both Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings, furthermore, is the narrative strategy of unfolding abstract insights by telling a story demonstrating, for example, the influence of divine providence in historical contingency. In a nutshell, characteristic features of both sources suggest that it is fitting to consider also narrative strategies for this analysis that may be foreign to modern academic historiography. The absence of metanarrative criticism is no reason to dismiss the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible as a source for this comparison.53 The approach taken here is not to limit the analysis of the sources to the search after predetermined strategies of persuasion, such as the negation of something being the case, or references to eyewitnesses. Instead, I will Genre(s),” in Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society, ed. Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 97–114, esp. 99–102. 52  E.g., Adam, “Erzählerwertung und Geschichtsverständnis in den Samuelbüchern (1 Samuel 31, 2 Samuel 1; 11; 18),” in Adam, Historiographie in der Antike), 131–80; the list of eight ways of direct and indirect narratorial evaluation in biblical narrative in: Menachem Perry and Meir Sternberg, “Caution: a Literary Text! Problems in the Interpretation and Poetics of Biblical Narrative” [Hebrew], Hasifrut 2, 3 (1970): 608–63: 624–25. See also Jacobus Marais, Representation in Old Testament Narrative Texts, BibInt v. 36 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 1998). 53  By contrast, Erhard Blum makes factual criticism a necessary element of history writing. His thesis that historiography requires a narrating persona with its own distinct attitudes and judgments builds on Hubert Cancik’s work on the concept of historical truth in ancient Near Eastern and European texts: Cancik, Mythische und historische Wahrheit; id., Grundzüge. However, what for Cancik were two separate lines of investigation—on the one hand, the discussion about criteria that characterize history writing and their manifestation in different literary traditions, and on the other hand, the presence of a specific concept of historical truth in the history of historiography—becomes fused in Blum’s work. Cancik’s definition of historiography accommodates various ancient conventions such as Hittite and Israelite historical narratives. Although he equates historical truth with facticity (see Mythische und Historische Wahrheit, 20, 23, 94–95), he does not postulate it mandatory for historiography; cf. Grundzüge, 15. In Grundzüge (16–17), Cancik leaves open whether an ‘objective, theoretical concept of historical truth’ should be made a precondition for historiography or not: “Hält man die rationale Kritik an anderen historiographischen Werken unter Berufung auf einen objektiven, theoretischen historischen Wahrheitsbegriff […] für die entscheidende Wende in der Geschichte der Historiographie, dann beginnt die Geschichtsschreibung im 6. Jh. v. Chr. in Ionien […]” (17).

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compare the specific phenotypes of a few very general elements of narrative structure as means of persuasion. This allows the discovery also of unexpected strategies of persuasion in a given source. Reading comparative studies from the last decades suggests that a comparison is most fruitful and interesting if centered on the primary sources and their textual features, not compiled insights from secondary sources.54 Therefore, I will first establish a broad basis of comparative analysis of concrete narrative portions before making an attempt to generalize about the nature of their representation of a past. Nearly all accounts of a past contain the general elements of narrative structure to be analyzed. The specific form they take in the variegated narratives of Herodotus’ Histories and the Torah and Former Prophets can be surveyed for their particular narrative function. 7

The Constitutive Role of the Recipient

It is obvious that the concept of strategies of persuasion involves both participants in communication, sender and decoder. In fact, the interpretive community of the text determines the standards of verification.55 On the other hand, the writer channels reader response by the way in which he presents his account. People in the audience determine which claims of a history they recognize at all, and then reject or accept them. If the assessment of accessibility relations is historically conditioned, the number and the kinds of statements a reader will identify and meaningfully relate to the world he or she experiences depend on historical circumstances as well. An example from the Solomon story will help explain this. Solomon’s wealth manifests most saliently in the influx of luxurious goods and treasures from 54  An example of this is Mandell and Freedman, Relationship. By contrast, Fahr allocates enough space to the ancient texts themselves: Heinz Fahr, Herodot und Altes Testament, Europäische Hochschulschriften 266 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985). Thomas Dozeman, “Geography and History in Herodotus and in Ezra-Nehemiah,” JBL 122.3 (2003): 449–66: This article about the creative interaction between geographic realism and ideological conceptions of space in the Histories and Ezra-Nehemia is thorough literary analysis. See also Halpern, “Biblical versus Greek Historiography,” in Blum, Johnstone and Markschies, Das Alte Testament—ein Geschichtsbuch?, 101–27; Michael Heltser, The Province Judah and Jews in Persian Times: Some Connected Questions of the Persian Empire (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publ., 2008), 219–221 detects two similar literary motifs in Ester and Herodotus. 55  Gordon Shrimpton, History and Memory in Ancient Greece, McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas 23 (Montreal, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 135, 172, 214; Ben Zvi, “Malleability,” 91.

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abroad. The narrative mentions exotic goods such as fine cedar and almugim wood, gold, incense, precious stones, ivory, monkeys and peacocks (1 Kgs 9:11– 10:22). The origins of these goods encompass a wide geographical range outside the territory of Israelite kings: the mountains of Lebanon, southern Arabia, the Horn of Africa, and possibly even India.56 In addition, visiting foreign rulers are said to have presented Solomon with gifts of silver and gold dishes, garments, weapons, incense, horses, and mules (1 Kgs 10:24–25). Such objects are associated with a royal palace. Whether the reference to rare luxury goods serves as a strategy of persuasion—that is, whether the audience understands it as staking a particular claim about Solomon—depends on the audience. There are two different scenarios, depending on whether the audience are, on the one hand, elite learned professionals conversant with the practices of the Achaemenid court57 and long distance trade or, on the other, peasants and manufacturers of everyday goods with an average education. The latter kind of audience will not decode the description of Solomon’s wealth as a particular claim. With no access to the world of a royal court, with its far-reaching international relations, they will see Solomon as a phantastic king, as if from a fairy tale. To such a broad, nonprofessional audience, the text-world is only partly accessible. Therefore, the recipients will not value it as information to be incorporated into their world. They will relate to it as a world where the attribution of truth value cannot and does not have to be decided.58 56  Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 167–69. Ophir is mentioned in Gen 10:29 right after Sheba and might have been located in southern Arabia; another suggestion is to identify it with Souphir near Mumbai in India (cf. Meir Bar-Ilan, “King Solomon’s Trade with India,” ARAM 27 (2015): 125–37). Bar-Ilan’s far reaching conclusions about a Phoenician-Judean joint sea venture to India seems, historically speaking, out of place for a king of Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. However, we know about long-distance trade with India and the Arabian peninsula in the time of e.g., Assurnasirpal II., where ivory and gold are mentioned among luxury goods payed as tribute; cf. Hannes Galter, “Militärgrenze und Euphrathandel: Der sozio-ökonomische Hintergrund der Trilinguen von Arslan Tash,” in Commerce and Monetary Systems in the Ancient World: Means of Transmission and Cultural Interaction, ed. Robert Rollinger and Christoph Ulf, Oriens et Occidens 6 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 444–60: 453. The peacock reached Greece via Babylonia and Persia; cf. Wiesehöfer, “Persien, der faszinierende Feind,” in Rollinger and Ulf, Commerce and Monetary Systems in the Ancient World, here 303. 57  Knauf, 1 Könige 1–14, 295 and 307–08. 58  Cf. Paul Veyne, Les Grecs, ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Essai sur l’imagination constituante (Paris: du Seuil, 1983), 31; Basil Lourié (“Possible Worlds”) points to the fact that, the more a narrative gets detached from our hands-on experience or the more it becomes

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In contrast, an audience of court officials in the kingdom of Judah of the seventh and early sixth centuries BCE is in a position to recognize the references to Solomon’s luxury as the specific claim that this king is among the leading powers of the ancient Near East. Because of their specialized knowledge and elite education, these members of royal administration are conversant with Assyrian inscriptions and have some knowledge of international political and trading relations, such that Assyrian royal practices are part of their experience in the actual world. Therefore, the narrative world of Solomon’s wealth is accessible to them; they can incorporate it into their existing knowledge of reality. Scribes employed by Judean kings in the seventh and early sixth centuries were able to interpret these elements of textual discourse as informational content, inviting them to “complete their representation of reality on the basis of the new information they gather from the text”.59 This second scenario of a small elite group as the original audience of this story about Solomon is historically more likely than the other option. It presents the king as a distinguished hegemon in the manner of a real contemporary ruler of an empire, which this audience is likely to decode as referring to a truth notion, or, in other words, their actual world, the discourse-world. Specifying Solomon’s exuberant wealth is a narrative strategy to persuade the original audience of a glorious beginning of the Davidic line of kings. In later ages when the Solomon story had a much larger audience, the same narrative claims were not understood as referring to the actual world. An indication for this is the growth of legendary traditions around Solomon in later periods, in which he played a role in Jewish magic and became an important legendary figure in Muslim tradition. When different audiences process one and the same text—be it in different generations or even in one and the same age— these readers will be aware of and accept a different number or even different sets of narrative claims. The fact that the evaluation of the extent to which a narrative about a past is accessible for an audience in the actual world is historically conditioned has methodological implications. The results of an analysis of strategies of persuasion will therefore depend to some extent on the scholar who interprets the sources. In other words, my analysis contains a not too small margin of error because I am not in a position to understand the ancient sources in their own

theoretical, the less we are able to apply truth conditions to it. Eventually, we lose criteria of truth and falsity with regard to this narrative. 59  Cf. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 33. Of course, such a completion of their knowledge about the world has political implications, but this is not the issue here.

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right, as if I was part of the original audience. My grasp of Herodotus’ Histories and the Tanakh will always be conditioned by a modern horizon of thought. Recognizing the involvement of sender and decoder in the communication of historical narrative is one thing; it is quite another to incorporate these aspects into the methodology of this analysis. How can it take account of the ideas and preferences of both discourse participants when sources such as diaries, personal letters, earlier drafts of the work, book reviews, and sales statistics are either nonexistent or scanty? This study can neither be authorcentered, explaining features of the text primarily through references to the author’s intention and goals, nor focus on a study of reception. A lack of documentation is not the only reason that an approach concentrating on either one of the two ends does not work. An author-centered approach assuming a passive audience with the sole task of receiving everything that is sent is problematic. There is no communication without losses, and audiences also incorporate and react to unintended messages. Mario Valdés has aptly called attention to the fact that recipients of works of art always associate with them a large number of features external to the work, whereby they construct “a view of the world that is neither his or hers nor the artist’s, but rather that of the dynamic system of figuration created by their interaction.”60 Against this background, a structuralist approach centering on the way in which a past is represented in the texts is reasonable, since it focuses on an analysis of the principles of its organization and its codes. Pursuing this study comparatively will enrich the data basis and therefore be particularly helpful. However, it is clear that this study must not evade the attempt to identify the audiences. Rhetoric is always directed at someone and acquires its features as a result of interaction with specific addressees. 8

Usefulness of the Distinction between Narrator and Author

For any literary or narratological analysis, the need for the distinction between author and narrator is obvious and a general practice. We know that a novelist may detest chocolate, while the narrator in her work loves it. However, there is some logic to the view that this distinction is irrelevant with regard to history writing. After all, is the narrator not identical with the researcher who assembles and interprets the data? And do we not attribute to the author certain views that the narrating voice may have introduced with the phrase “in my opinion”? If author and narrator were not identical, it would be inappropriate 60  Valdés, World-making, 150.

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to mention the writer’s name in a book review and to attribute to this person this or that research position. Do I not complicate matters unnecessarily when I write about “the Herodotean narrator” or “the narrator in the Histories”? Why not simply “Herodotus”? Well, Herodotus the author happens to have given the same name to his narrating persona. Speaking of the narrator avoids confusions about which of the two is meant. Even more to the point, the Histories features different manifestations of narrating voices, different narrative modes, as I will show in the following chapter. Do all of them speak in Herodotus’ (the author’s) name, or only some of them? To be sure, narratorial comments in ancient accounts of a past are likely to reflect the author’s point of view.61 Nevertheless, we need to take into account that the Herodotean narrator may be a narrative device that helps arrange the vast amount of material in the Histories. Speaking of his travels, the narrator can conveniently present the material belonging to different places around the Mediterranean Sea. This does not automatically mean that all activities the narrator claims for himself, such as travelling and seeing certain things, are biographical facts in the life of Herodotus the author.62 Some scholars take the identity of author and narrator as one of the characteristics that marks off factual discourse from fiction.63 Others insist on treating the two separately.64 I endorse the second view already because of the thought that any narrative has a narrator and this textual function is no physical person. Today’s historians may have their own unchanging style when they 61  In addition, an author may use utterances of one or the other character to express his or her own viewpoint. This has been convincingly argued for characters embodying the wise warner, and is highly probable for the characters of Moses and God. See also Vera Nünning, who identifies such mentor characters in British literature of the nineteenth century: Vera Nünning, “Wie überzeugt Literatur? Eine kleine Rhetorik des Erzählens,” in Überzeugungsstrategien, ed. Christine Steinhoff, Angelos Chaniotis, and Amina Kropp. Heidelberger Jahrbücher 52 (Berlin, Heidelberg 2009), 93–107. 62  For references, see Alan Lloyd, “Book II,” in A Commentary on Herodotus: Books I–IV, ed. David Asheri, Alan Lloyd and Aldo Corcella (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 219–378: 226 n. 10; see also Peter Froschauer, “Herodots Ägyptischer Logos. Die Glaubwürdigkeitsdiskussion in kritischer Sicht. Forschungsgeschichte, ausgewählte Argumentationen, archäologischer Befund,” (PhD diss., Innsbruck, 1991); Robert Rollinger, “Überlegungen zu Herodot, Xerxes und dessen angeblicher Zerstörung Babylons,” Altorientalische Forschungen 25 (1998): 339–73. 63  Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 109– 31; Gérard Genette, Fiction et Diction (Paris: du Seuil 1991), 65–93. 64  De Jong, “Introduction,” 9; see also Marco Dorati, “Considerazioni sulla focalizzazione e sul narratore omnisciente nel racconto storico,” SIFC (2009): 133–93: 136. Cf. also Axel Rüth, Erzählte Geschichte: Narrative Strukturen in der französischen AnnalesGeschichtsschreibung, Narratologia 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005) 35–36.

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write history because their audience of academic readers or even fellow historians remains the same. However, it is generally conceivable and even likely that the narrating voice in different accounts of a past written by the same author changes according to subject and audience. In order to avoid confusion, therefore, and because my analysis describes narrating voices of specific accounts of a past, it is useful to separate the two. At the end of the first part of this book, it is time for a quick look back and ahead. A comparison between the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible and Herodotus’ Histories is a venture that is not too common; hence the detailed explanations and contextualization. With means of persuasion as the comparative aspect, I have chosen a fundamental element of the deep structure of narratives about a past. A comparison of the techniques of narrative representation, rather than of its contents, will analyze and interpret elements that have in part long been noted but are hard to put your finger on exactly. Here, the tools of narratology and relations of accessibility between two worlds are helpful, as they provide a common language for talking about ancient texts central to several academic disciplines. My analysis of means of persuasion opens a door into a larger field and naturally does not exhaust the possibilities of this specific respect of comparison.

PART 2 Fundamentals of Narrative Structure in Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings

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Highly Different Modes of Narration and Mediacy 1 Introduction An essential element of narrative structure is the narrator. It is through the narrator’s presentation that we get to know the story-world, which in this study are the worlds of the past. Unless the audience is in a privileged position with respect to sources of information and knowledge, the narrator is their one and only source for the text-world. Therefore, the author’s skill in shaping the narrator’s presentation of the events of the past determines how accessible and connected these are going to be to the audience’s experiences and hopes for the future. Apart from the authenticating function of genre conventions, the facts of the narrative depend on the narrator’s credentials.1 That is why an analysis of how the design of the narrating voice contributes to persuasion is fundamental to this study. By which narrative techniques for successively building up the narrator’s persona does the represented text-world of each source gain in realism and validity? And what inferences is the audience to draw from a seeming absence of a mediating instance? In the following analysis, I will focus on mediacy. How present and perceptible is the narrating voice of each source in its role as presenter of this specific narrative construction of the past? And how does this affect the degree of immediacy the audience is allowed to the events of the past, or distance from them? The narrator’s own presence in the text as a mediator of the information, as commentator and evaluator, or even as a character in his own account, influences how accessible the narrated world of the past gets for the audience. As explained earlier, the pragmatics of purported previous stages of textual transmission, in my view, do not automatically set the parameters of the audience’s immediacy or distance to the narrated events. Aspects of the narrating voice’s point of view and its distance from or closeness to events, actions, and characters with their respective attitudes, are the result of the writers’ choices and do not ‘naturally’ follow from their intellectual and social environment. As a consequence, I will not analyze the narrator’s distance from or immediacy to the narration ‘as it is’ or ‘as it manifests itself in the account’ (an ontological 1  Doležel, Heterocosmica, 160. Doležel points out that narratives with an anonymous third-person narrator are authoritative by convention; he labels this kind of mediation ‘authoritative narrative’.

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premise assuming a fixed setting in the extradiegetic communication), but compare and contrast the ways in which the narrators or narrative voices go about presenting past events to their audiences (a presentational approach). 2

Mediacy in Gen–Kings and Herodotus

Mediacy is a feature common to all narratives. It can take on various shapes and even change within one and the same literary work. Herodotus’ Histories and the biblical narrative about past events are no exception.2 An analysis of a few exemplary features will show the extent to which the recipients are signaled that the historical narrative is evaluated and presented to them by a narrator. Whether a course of past events is mediated through the experience of a character who is actively involved in the events or through the evaluative mind of a teller external to the narrative world affects the audience’s distance or immediacy to the narrated world, and thus the accessibility of the story-world.3 The Narrator Speaking in the First Person 2.1 Herodotus’ narrating voice is dramatized: it appears as a persona with a number of characteristics, a name, and a hometown to begin with.4 From the narrative, the reader can additionally infer, for instance, that Herodotus’ language is Greek and that he “has a soft spot for the valiant Halicarnassian queen Artemisia”.5 The narrator refers to voyages made in the course of his research or investigation (ἱστορίη) and to people he spoke with; he mentions things he has seen himself and stories he has heard. In book 2 of the Histories, he even features as a character in the narrative. As a result, the audience is aware of the fact that much of what they learn about the story-world, the past events, comes to them filtered through this specific narrator’s consciousness. The ordering

2  Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation,” Paragraph 8, in the living handbook of narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg). URL = http://www.lhn.uni -hamburg.de/article/mediacy-and-narrative-mediation. 3  Fludernik, Towards, 36–37 and 129–31. 4  The term ‘dramatized narrator’ was coined by Wayne Booth and adopted for narratological analysis of ancient Greek literature by Irene de Jong (“Narratological aspects,” 263–264). The same holds for the term ‘self-conscious narrator’ below. On the possible wording ‘Herodotus of Thurii’ instead of ‘Herdotus of Halicarnassos’ in the work’s first sentence, see: Dewald, “‘I Didn’t Give My Own Genealogy’,” in Bakker, Jong and van Wees, Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, 267–289, here 267 n. 1. 5  Ibid., 267.

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and sense-making of the actual world through the representation of its past is largely done by this narrative persona.6 Nothing of that sort is the case with the biblical narrators.7 There are no explicit references to the narrating persona, who is anonymous and has no body. This impression arises from the lack of references to the narrator’s sensory perceptions and thoughts. From the language in which the history is told, Hebrew, and its main topic, the experiences of the people of Israel, we can infer merely that the narrative voice either belongs to this group or is an intimate observer of their history. The effect of the narrating persona’s effacement can work to the text’s advantage. It is worth considering that a dramatized narrating voice developed in minute detail may be very convincing in its own age but runs the risk of appearing contingent and outdated in another. When an author provides much specific information about the narrator, it becomes more likely that, decades or centuries later, due to details bound to particular historical circumstances, a text will not be fresh anymore, and therefore no longer speak to an audience directly. Remaining relevant and applicable in various circumstances is essential to authoritative literature. When there is no mediating body belonging in a certain time, the discourse-now8 of the narrative can, to a certain extent, move with the times, so that any audience will get the impression that the text addresses them immediately. A comparison of the sheer numbers of references by the narrator to himself or his own actions in each account is telling: Carolyn Dewald counts 1,086 first-person comments in Herodotus, while the Hebrew narratives contain not a single one. The emerging general picture is one of narratorial self-display versus self-effacement. Whereas the readers of the Histories know and are repeatedly reminded that the account they are following has been composed by a certain individual on the basis of that person’s projections, reasoning, and research, the audience of the biblical narratives are likely to miss that such a 6  To be sure, there are instances where the narrator explicitly leaves a decision to the recipients, not to mention the cases of merely implicit involvement of the narrator’s judgments, so generalizations such as this one are intended to emphasize the broad picture and do not preclude a mixed scenario. 7  On the question of referring to ‘a narrator’ or ‘narrators’, see Jean L. Ska, “Narrator or Narrators?,” in The Exegesis of the Pentateuch: Exegetical Studies and Basic Questions, by Jean L. Ska, FAT 66 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 221–31. 8  The terms ‘discourse-now’ and ‘story-now’ are widely used; I adopted them from Rutger Allan, “Towards a Typology of the Narrative Modes in Ancient Greek,” in Discourse Cohesion in Ancient Greek, ed. Stéphanie J. Bakker and G. C. Wakker, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology v. 16 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009), 171–204: 183, 187–88. The discourse-now is the narrator’s and his audience’s present, while the story-now is the present of the narrative characters.

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mediation is involved in bringing to them Israel’s history.9 Instead, they may unwittingly accept the illusion that the narrated events speak to them directly because they evolve as if by themselves. Within Greek literary history, such an extrovert and self-assured narrating persona as that of Herodotus’ Histories has been associated with the self-promotion of epideictic orators who were active as independent or semiindependent researchers and presented their work in public lectures. In Greek culture in the second half of the fifth century BCE, this was still a relatively recent innovation. In her study Herodotus in context, Rosalind Thomas sees this flashing of Herodotus’ own person as influenced by pre-Socratic philosophers, Hippocratic medical writers, and the performances of sophist orators.10 Unsurprisingly, character speeches in the Histories exhibit a similar rhetorical “focus on self-centredness and power”.11 Without going into detail, it should be noted that, as far as the ancient Greek texts have come down to us, the design of the Herodotean narrative voice was not imitated by many subsequent authors writing about a past. The narrator in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War is less extrovert and present, as is the narrating voice in Xenophon’s Anabasis, although its design is again a different one. In the telling of his account of the Persian wars and the politics and civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Herodotean narrator uses techniques that were, in his time, common to contemporary orators who drew attention to their competence in matters of knowledge. Another context for first person utterances Herodotus shares with the medical writers is the promulgation of a new theory in one’s own name, bringing into play the authority of personal knowledge and drawing attention to the author’s originality, which adds to the liveliness of a debate.12 Here, the use of the first person in the second half of the fifth century in Greece is due to a spirit of controversy and the awareness that knowledge needs to be qualified. Not surprisingly, Herodotus’ marked or salient use of statements in the first person often occurs in a polemical or controversial context, as the following well-known example illustrates:

9  As is well known, the books of Kings are different; here, the narrator gives bibliographical references for further reading and clearly structures the account according to an evaluative pattern. 10  Thomas, Herodotus in context, 244. 11  Vasiliki Zali, The Shape, 24; Zali traces this to sophistic influence. 12  Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 246–47; see below for a short discussion of Hdt. 2.18 that also fits with this discussion.

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… οὐ γάρ τινα ἔγωγε οἶδα ποταμὸν Ὠκεανὸν ἐόντα, Ὅμηρον δὲ ἤ τινα τῶν πρότερον γενομένων ποιητέων δοκέω τοὔνομα εὑρόντα ἐς ποίησιν ἐσενείκασθαι. εἰ δὲ δεῖ μεμψάμενον γνώμας τὰς προκειμένας αὐτὸν περὶ τῶν ἀφανέων γνώμην ἀποδέξασθαι, φράσω δι΄ ὅ τι μοι δοκέει πληθύεσθαι ὁ Νεῖλος τοῦ θέρεος. … since as for me, I do not know of the existence of any river by the name Okeanos—rather I think that Homer or someone of the earlier poets found/invented the name and brought it into the poem. If then— having found fault with the current opinions—I myself have to present an opinion about empirically inaccessible things, I say [the following] about what for me seems to be the reason why the Nile increases in the summer.13 These words are clearly addressed to an audience and heighten the suspense for an explanation by Herodotus himself, who has just dismantled three available theories for the floods of the Nile and now can be expected to deliver something in their stead. The narrator does so with pride, leaving no doubt that his own view is the best—even if it has to compete with Homer, Anaxagoras, Thales, and Hecataeus.14 His self-advertising is all the more effective because it comes slightly down-toned: his opinion, reasoned though it is, is only a hypothesis dealing with matters that do not lie in the open for examination. This is yet another instance of Herodotus pointing out his own epistemic limits. The implication of the narrator’s modesty seems to be part of a rhetoric that increases his reputation in the long run. Mentioning various competing explanations of the Nile floods demonstrates for the audience that interpretations of a phenomenon in the actual world are contested, perspectival, and preliminary. Although each speaker is credited with reliability and good intentions—making assertions ‘to the best of his knowledge’—open reporting of a debate implicitly invites the audience to come up with yet another interpretation, or in the terminology of Possible Worlds Theory (PWT), to think of an alternative textual actual world that is more appropriate than that of the narrator. If this happens, the narrator’s credibility is at issue.15 In other words, Herodotus must be very convinced of his 13  Hdt. 2.23–24 (my translation). If not indicated otherwise, I use Robin Waterfield’s translation for the Histories (Herodotus: The Histories, Oxford 1998) and the Revised Standard Version for the Tanakh. Other similarly well-known passages of first-person statements within a controversial context are 2.106,5; 7.139; 8.77. 14  For the attribution of the theories to these thinkers, see Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 136. 15  Cf. Robert Vogt, “Combining Possible Worlds Theory and Cognitive Theory: Towards an Explanatory Model for Ironic-Unreliable Narration, Ironic Unreliable Focalization,

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own explanation, because such a polemical self-display may otherwise easily boomerang to subvert his authority. However, one aspect of Herodotus’ narrating voice at first glance seems to counteract the goal of self-promotion, and that is its admission of limited knowledge. These are recurring expressions like “I cannot say with certainty whether he lied or spoke the truth, but this is what he said: …” (Hdt. 6.82,1), or “as far as I have come to know” (1.22,2).16 As Thomas points out, this is a feature specific to Herodotus and not common in the early medical treatises.17 This admission of the narrator’s own restrictedness may momentarily reduce his authority or qualities, but in the long run in fact works to enhance his competence and vouch for his capacity of sound judgment. This is because the audience infers from statements such as these that, generally speaking, accuracy and certainty (ἀτρεκείη) is Herodotus’ aspiration and guiding standard. Through the occasional reminder that, in one case or another, the narrator does not have information of such a quality to reach a firm conclusion or give a precise answer, Herodotus adds to the narrator’s credibility in a very clever way, which is possibly stronger than claiming ἀτρεκείη as his principle in a straightforward way.18 Statements like these imply a careful weighing of the sources as Herodotus’ default procedure.19 In fact, this indirect claim still convinces readers today, like Franz Haible, who holds that Herodotus classifies all unconfirmed stories he reports as uncertain information; in other words, all stories not labeled in such a way can be taken as reliable.20 In my opinion, especially with the background knowledge of self-promotion as a convention among Herodotus’ contemporaries and competitors, it is worth considering the possibility that Herodotus interspersed his work with these phrases as a rhetorical means to persuade his audience of his diligent accuracy. As a consequence, we need Ambiguous-Unreliable and Alternated-Unreliable Narration in Literary Fiction,” in Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Vera Nünning, Narratologia 44 (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2015), 131–53: 135–39. 16  These and very similar phrases are found in book 1: 57,1; 140,1–2 (twice); 160,2; 172,1; book 2: 103,2; 167,1; book 3: 115,1; 116,1; book 4: 81,1; 187,3; book 6: 14,1; book 7: 54,3; 152,1; book 8: 8,2; book 9: 18,2; 84 (twice); the qualifying adverb is often ἀτρεκέως, also σαφηνέως. 17  Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 245. 18  On ἀτρεκείη as one of Herodotus’ principles and aim for his own research, cf. Franz Haible, “Herodot und die Wahrheit: Untersuchungen zu Wahrheitsbegriff, Kritik und Argumentation bei Herodot,” (PhD diss., Tübingen, 1963), 52–62; he explains that this term relates more to the quality of the way of finding truth and less to ‘historical truth’ as a result. 19  Thomas groups this use of the first person in the category of ‘suspended judgment’. 20  Haible, “Herodot und die Wahrheit,” 52.

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to differentiate between what the narrator claims to do and what he actually does. Furthermore, he also records that one of his tasks is to retell stories told to him, without having to believe them all (7.152,3; 2.123,1; 4.195,2). This caveat does not reject from the outset the possibility that the standards Herodotus aimed at were confirmed knowledge and the highest possible level of accuracy.21 Because of Herodotus’ historical context, however, we can expect to find ingenious narrative strategies in his Histories that will only partly rely on reason and argument. Self-promotion goes a long way to explaining the use of the first person in Herodotus, and this also holds for contexts without any palpable debates with other learned voices. A case in point is Hdt. 8.77, where the narrator insists in person on the truth-value of an oracle by Bakis, using no less than five expressions referring to himself. Additionally, he sandwiches the direct citation of the divination within his own supportive comments, in which he uses the words ‘real’ (ἀληθής), ‘not to object’ (ἀντιλέγειν, used twice), and vivid (ἐναργήως). Rhetorically, the narrator leaves no doubt that this oracle is true and refers to the situation at hand. What is a bit odd however is that this prophecy is not woven into the narration, for instance by using it to demonstrate a point. Rather, it could just as well be deleted without leaving a gap. So why should the narrator bother to buttress the oracle with elaborate truth claims, when nothing seems to depend on it? Noteworthy, too, is that the narrator gives no reason why this divination is trustworthy. He affirms his view categorically by virtue of his authority. This means he assumes full responsibility for this view, purportedly sparing his audience the trouble of checking the data material, expecting them to trust in him as the expert.22 This is quite a different stance from the former, where we saw Herodotus’ narrator contributing to a learned debate. Here, it is the stance of the selfassured expert who does not evoke alternative possible worlds. The narrator does not establish the validity of this specific Bakis oracle by giving convincing reasons, but relies on trust in those who must know and in a tradition of oracles. An evaluation of whether this claim was well-founded or not is beyond the scope of this study. In principle and without further research, we are 21  Cf. Skinner’s thoughtful comment: “the disinterested study of cultural difference by naturally inquisitive and enlightened Greeks represents, at best, an idealized view of ethnographic inquiry” (Invention, 235). 22  In his edition and commentary of Hdt. 8, Angus Bowie excises this chapter as not originally Herodotean: Herodotus, Histories: Book VIII, ed. Angus M. Bowie, Cambridge Greek and Latin classics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 166–68. Cf. Paul Veyne’s remarks on Thuc. 1.20,2 in Les Grecs, 21: “Un historien ancien ne cite pas ses autorités parce qu’il se sent lui-même une autorité en puissance.” See also p. 22.

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equally justified to believe the narrator’s authority or to remain unpersuaded unless given some more convincing evidence. In fact, this example (Hdt. 8.77) is one of several that make me hypothesize that, in Herodotus, rhetorical truth claims and support by plausibility or rational arguments are inversely proportional: The more something is obvious, the less persuading rhetoric is needed, and vice versa.23 If we do not assume a priori that Herodotus’ narrator persona is modeled as a disinterested researcher of truth and knowledge for its own sake, his claims should be taken for what they are, including the possibility that they are part of Herodotus’ self-promotion and marketing strategies. In this case, persuasion does not rely first and foremost on the audience’s perusal of a wealth of different pieces of information and their interpretation, but on trust in the narrator’s authority because he sounds convincing. A particularly bold use and exploitation of his narratorial authority are the claims to autopsy of material remains of past events in faraway places.24 This claim seems to be a strategy of persuasion that the Herodotean narrator applies with care, and certainly not where it is redundant, where the audience would take it for granted. That is why Herodotus’ narrator hardly claims autopsy concerning places in the center of the ancient Greek world in the fifth century BCE.25 In fact, there are at least two cases where an implicit or explicit claim of autopsy seems something like a last resort of rhetoric. One is found in Darius’ campaign into Scythia, which can be divided in three parts. For various reasons comprehensively presented by Christopher Tuplin, scholars doubt the historicity of the second, trans-Danubian, part of the campaign.26 It is presented as an uncoordinated hide-and-seek game of Scythian and Persian warriors through the Scythian inland, today southern Ukraine, a “great chase […] after which everyone is back to where they started” (4.98–135,2).27 The only monument in this expedition that the narrator 23  Wolfgang Blösel suggests that the narrator uses this oracle as a mouthpiece for his own views (Themistokles, 157–58). 24  In the field of Classics, ‘autopsy’ is a well-established term meaning ‘seeing for oneself/ with one’s own eyes’. On autopsy in Herodotus, see Bichler’s recent article and its bibliography (“Zur Funktion der Autopsiebehauptungen bei Herodot”). An important point relevant for this discussion is that, next to the explicit claim to have seen something himself, Herodotus’ narrator elsewhere suggests autopsy implicitly, e.g., by stating that a monument is worth seeing (9.70,3) or by giving some ‘technical data’ such as height, material, or weight. 25   Ibid. 142–43; John Marincola, “Herodotean Narrative and the Narrator’s Presence,” Arethusa 20 (1987): 121–37, here 132 and 135. 26  Ibid. 283–284. 27  Christopher Tuplin, “Revisiting Dareios’ Scythian Expedition,” in Archaemenid impact in the Black Sea: Communication of powers, ed. Jens Nieling, Black Sea studies 11 (Aarhus: Aarhus Univ. Press, 2010), 281–312: 284.

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comments on, thus reinforcing it, is associated with this second phase. It is the remains of eight unfinished fortresses Darius allegedly had built in a desert in the Scythian inland (4.124). The narrator’s reference to them adds the claim that the ruins still exist in his time, implying—not stating—his visit to that place and his seeing the ruins himself: “τοῦτο δὲ ποιήσας ὀκτὼ τείχεα ἐτείχεε μεγάλα […] τῶν ἔτει ἐς ἐμὲ τὰ ἐπείπια σόα ἦν. Then he built eight large forts (…), the ruins of which were still there in my day.” This rhetorical reinforcement of these ruins as empirical evidence has proven highly effective: the ruins of the forts is one of two circumstantial details in the text that cause Tuplin and the scholars he surveys to hesitate calling that part Herodotus’ invention.28 Another more remote claim of autopsy refers to several of Pharaoh Sesostris’ stelae in Syria-Palestine (2.106,1). Despite its intensity (I have seen some being [around] myself; αὐτὸς ὥρων ἐούσας), however, this claim of autopsy remains vague because the number of monuments seen remains unspecified, and the location is too large to offer the audience a reasonable possibility of actual verification. Yet, the very fact that the Herodotean narrator refers to objects he saw or whose location he is able to specify shows at least these two things: that the issue of evidence is something he is aware of as a means of persuasion, and that he relies on his authority as a well-travelled investigator to vouch for the factuality of his account. The Herodotean narrator does not, as a rule, provide his audience with all the necessary pieces of information and knowledge so that they can make up their own mind. Rather, he presents himself as a knowledgeable and authoritative advisor and tutor for the journey into the past. To a large extent, the audience is expected to accept that this representation is the best, not the least because it has such a skilled and thoughtful presenter. The prevalent paradigm of the narrator persona in the Histories, therefore, is that of overt mediation. Even his self-conscious admissions of his own limits work to establish this narrator’s personal authority as a trustworthy expert. However, the Histories also contain passages where the narrator reviews current explanations of a problem in order to reject them and suggest a new explanation of his own. In these parts, he probably addresses learned colleagues who prefer exploring matters on their own and will accept strategies of persuasion more readily if they are ostensibly reasoned or argumentative. Claims relying on trust in the narrator as an authority could be directed to a broader audience of nonprofessionals. Successful narratives will likely be those that cater to more than one type of

28  Ibid. 287; nevertheless, Tuplin comes to the conclusion that what Darius does beyond the Danube river (the Istros in the Histories) is fantasy, however “a relatively limited one” (290).

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audience by a combination of different modes. Different kinds of audiences may explain the different stances of the Herodotean narrator. 2.1.1 Covert Mediation in the Biblical Narrative The Hebrew narratives are shaped by almost the opposite mode of mediation. The narrating voice is bound neither to a specific context in space and time nor to any personal, and therefore subjectively restricted, consciousness.29 We cannot identify it with any historical person. Hence, it shares some qualities that are usually associated with a nonhuman and possibly divine entity: it is invisible, not palpable but nevertheless present throughout, and responsible for the creation of the story-world. This can spur readers to hold the narrative voice highly reliable. The representation of the world as it is narrated is taken as authentic and authoritative because mediation seems “first-hand, objectified on the highest communicative authority”.30 For the audience, it is hard to imagine that the narrative voice got it all wrong. Thus, the effect of this covert narrative mode is similar to Herodotus’ narrator’s overt mediation: Inasmuch as both audiences trust and rely on the narrator’s authority to enable, from its elevated position, a truthful representation of past events, the facts of the story-world attain a status by which they can influence the audience’s thinking and decisions in the actual world. This objectifying oblique and covert mediation has a great potential for involving the audience in the process of meaning formation. Especially in passages representing events from an external point of view without introspections into the characters’ inner life, biblical narratives exhibit some features of camera-eye narration. Exceptions granted, events are often recorded as they would appear to an outward observer, seemingly without filtration or commentary. Given both the highly visual representation of past events in the books of Gen–Kings and its reticence about characters’ emotions and thoughts, which bible scholars have noted all along, it can be asked whether the biblical narrative mode has the effect narratologists attribute to neutral narrative: the observation that, when the center of consciousness stays empty, it is placed in the reader.31 After all, if the recording of events is done from an uninvolved and indifferent external perspective, it is left to the audience to make sense of the pictures or to come up with their own judgment. 29  According to Fludernik (Towards, 167–68), narratorial omniscience “affords the reader the comforting illusion of realibility, objectivity and absolute knowledge”. 30   Meir Sternberg, “Self-Consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers Vs. Informants in Generic Design,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, BCLC 33 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 232–52: 236. 31  Fludernik, Towards, 175–76.

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In fact, there are a number of shorter scenes where this is the case.32 The narrator also trusts his audience to do so for longer stretches of narrative time, such as by comparing the performance of Israelites, and especially their leaders after Joshua, to the standards and laws of the Torah. Since the condition for living in the promised land is faithfulness to the words of the Torah, the Torah of Deuteronomy is established as a metatext or foil through which the following chapters of Israel’s history should be read. If this can be assumed for the Former Prophets as a whole, the narrating voice need not comment on this aspect in every instance. It is true that the biblical narrating voice not only trusts the audience to actively follow the narrative but even requires it do so, by thinking along and beyond the explicit—but without throwing them entirely on their own resources.33 For, an important difference from pure camera-eye narration is the fact that the audience is provided with clear guidelines for their own conclusions and judgments. Different though they are, the narrators of Gen–Kings and Herodotus’ Histories have at least one detail of narrative mediacy in common: In terms of their social identity, both narrators, as a rule, do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain group of people in their accounts: they do not use first-person plural pronouns (we, us) but speak about ‘the Greeks’, ‘the Athenians’, ‘the Persians’, ‘the Israelites’ and use third-person pronouns (they, them).34 However, the Herodotean narrator also invokes the first-person plural in contexts where he relies on cultural memory, using the formula ‘as far as we know’ in an integrating move.35 This might be understood as a claim to have consulted all relevant data and to possess a full overview. Alternatively, it could be interpreted as a precaution, taking into account that this can change as soon as the data changes on which a specific assertion is built. In addition, both narrators either rarely or do not at all address their audience using a

32  E.g., the story of David und Bathsheba (2 Sam 11,1–27a) and of the rape of the woman at Gibeah (Judg 19), which represent abominable actions without a narratorial judgment or introspections into the characters’ inner life. In the story about Ahab and Jehoshaphat (1 Kgs 22), the narrator does not disambiguate the oracle of verse 6 as does the Herodotean narrator in Hdt. 1.71,1. 33  By his term ‘foolproof composition’, Meir Sternberg means that the moral standards and ‘ideological’ principles are always clear, cf. Poetics, 230–235. 34  There are exceptions: Josh 5,6 and 1 Kgs 8:65 (cf. Sternberg, Poetics, 123); Herodotus refers to himself using a first-person plural expression (e.g., 4.16,2). Cf. Benjamin Shimron, “Πρῶτος τῶν ἡμεις ἴδμεν,” Eranos 71 (1973) 45–51: 47. 35  Random examples from more than 30 attestations are: 1.6,2; 1.23; 1.193,2; 4.17,2; 8.124,3.

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second-person pronoun.36 Scholarship has associated this kind of “detached, austere, non-personal” voice with the stance of an expert, and somewhat anachronistically, with a historiographer.37 2.1.2 Effects on Accessibility What are the implications for accessibility of the two types of narrative mediation sketched so far? Although Herodotus’ Histories and the biblical narratives do not have much in common concerning the kind of mediacy they encode, they ultimately seem similar in their creation of trust in the reliability of the narrating voice. And in both, we nevertheless get a mixed picture. Herodotus invites his audience to trust and accept his narrator as the teller and, by and large, as the governing consciousness of the narrative representation of the past. On the one hand, this enhances the accessibility of the past world for the audience as it offers them a guided tour, sparing readers part of the effort of making up their own minds about issues of their past. On the other hand, the ‘teller-mode’ foregrounds the mediating instance and thereby draws the audience’s attention to the fact that it is the narrator who provides an access to the past, which reduces the story-world’s immediacy to the audience. The past events become the audience’s true past reality only inasmuch as the listeners and readers accept Herodotus’ way of seeing them. Therefore, the narrator gets in between the audience and the past, for better or for worse. The biblical mode of oblique mediation, in contrast, fosters the impression of the audience’s immediacy to the past events, making them highly accessible, and the reticence of the narrating voice gives readers a greater share in the production of meaning. As a result, accessibility partly depends on their ability and willingness to actively take part in this process, and is therefore put to a certain risk. Nevertheless, precisely this technique may prove effective if it succeeds in engaging each individual in the audience as active participants in the process of the creation of meaning. 2.2 A Term Designating the Work Perhaps the most elementary reference to mediacy is the attestation of a term referring to the text as a whole. Whereas Herodotus refers to his work and to 36  Herodotus addresses his audience using a verb in the second-person singular in 1.139, 1.199,4, and 2.29,5. In 8.73,3, the remark ‘if I may speak freely/frankly’ shows the awareness of an audience without addressing them directly. Cf. Donald Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus, Phoenix. Supplementary volume 23 (Toronto [Ont.]: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 30–31. 37  For the citation and the reference to the voice of an expert, see Dewald, “‘I didn’t give my own genealogy’,” 268; for the reference to historicity, see Sternberg, Poetics, 100, 123–25.

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parts of it by the term logos,38 there is no emic term referring to the historical narrative from Genesis to Kings. The reason for this is not the fundamental difference that Herodotus’ Histories is a literary work with an author whereas the biblical narratives are tradition literature. After all, the five books of Moses are referred to as “Torah” in Ezra-Nehemiah, the same term refers to most of Deuteronomy in the book by that name, and the putative lost royal annals are mentioned as “‫”ספר דברי הימים למלכי ישראל\יהודה‬.39 Had the final redactors wished to designate the narrative continuum of Genesis to Kings as a selfcontained literary artifact, they could have done so. It is indeed debated whether this comprehensive narrative was conceived of as an integral narrative unit at any time in the history of ancient Hebrew literature.40 However, the Torah and Former Prophets are thematically and linguistically so closely connected that bible scholars have labeled this literary unit the Enneateuch.41 But there is no Hebrew title within the narrative of Israel’s history by which the narrator refers to these nine books. This suggests that the biblical account of Israel’s past was seen as neither an end in itself nor 38  Herodotus refers to “the account,” meaning his own narrative, e.g. in: 1.5,3; 2.35,1; 6.19,2; and 7.152,3. He uses the noun with the possessive determiner ‘my’ in 7.171,1 and 7.239,1. 39  “The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah” (e.g., 1Ki 14:19 and elsewhere). Possible explanations could be that the historical narrative from the creation to the destruction of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah was seen as an account that is incomplete and written on as time passes, or it was not taken as a history at all. Maybe it is not referred to as a literary work in order to emphasize that this history is not a text, but a reality that is lived through, as it were, whenever it is read. 40  Konrad Schmid, “Une grande historiographie allant de Genèse à 2 rois a-t-elle un jour existé?,” in Les dernières rédactions du Pentateuque, de l’Hexateuque et de l’Ennéateuque, ed. Thomas Römer, BETL 203 (Leuven: Leuven Univ. Press, 2007), 35–45, 35–45; arguments for and against the Enneateuch Hypothesis are listed in Christoph Levin, “On the Cohesion and Separation of Books Within the Enneateuch,” in Pentateuch, Hexateuch, or Enneateuch? Identifying Literary Works in Genesis Through Kings, ed. Thomas B. Dozeman, Thomas Römer and Konrad Schmid, Ancient Israel and its literature v. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 127–54. See also the contributions by Thomas Römer and Konrad Schmid, Thomas Römer, Thomas Krüger, and Erhard Blum in Römer, Les dernières rédactions, and the contributions by Konrad Schmid, Thomas Römer, Erhard Blum, and David Carr in Dozeman et al., Pentateuch, Hexateuch, or Enneateuch?. The fact that Ezra-Nehemia and Maccabees are in a way continuations of the history leading up to the Babylonian exile might speak against the Enneateuch being a perceived as a unit in antiquity. 41  In this view, the long narrative from Genesis to Kings existed as a unit before the five books of Moses were singled out and published as the Torah; see Konrad Schmid, “Buchtechnische und sachliche Prolegomena zur Enneateuchfrage,” in Auf dem Weg zur Endgestalt von Genesis bis II Regum: Festschrift, Hans-Christoph Schmitt zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Martin Beck and Ulrike Schorn, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 370 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 1–14.

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a contribution to a specific, narrow domain of knowledge. Rather, its gaze is directed toward the audience’s present and future. Since events of the past are also told because of their ethical and social implications, their narrative can be referred to as teaching (‫ )תורה‬and prophets (‫)נביאים‬. However, this absence of a term for the whole narrative might be read as an indication of the biblical writers’ unawareness of composing a historical narrative, a literary representation of past events. This amounts to saying that biblical narratives are literature before literature: a poetically refined product that is unconscious of itself as a work of craft or art. In my opinion, the lack of a term referring to the narrative of Israel’s history as a textual unit does not justify this assumption. Without taking a stand on matters of in what shape (oral or written), when, and how texts entered the process of written transmission, I follow the model that conceives of the literary history of Gen–Kings in the Second Temple period as processes that occur in a setting of textual transmission among scholarly scribes.42 It seems unlikely that these scribes would not understand the text as a representation of a past reality, with the text and the past events as two separate entities. Is it possible that the creators of the narrative about Israel’s past did not conceive of it as a literary representation or as an ‘image’, a depiction of something no longer visible? What else should it be? Erhard Blum seems to suggest that the sages saw the narrative as the past itself. This thought seems familiar from post-modern historical theory stating that history is not somewhere ‘there,’ but exists only in the text that constructs it. However, Blum seems to mean something else. He writes that the biblical authors were not able to think of the historical events and their literary representation as two different things because the writers were allegedly not detached enough from the events in order to ponder them from a distance.43 Blum explains this with reference to the communicative situation of “traditional narrative” as a heritage from oral tradition. He sees the biblical narrator as so steeped in his tradition that he is virtually merged with the narrative representation, instead of being distinguished from it as its presenter and commentator. As a corollary, Blum assumes

42  According to the model presented among others by Th. Römer, K. Schmid and Kratz. This view does not speculate about early stages of certain texts in oral tradition, but explains the relatedness of the texts with each other by redactional processes happening with the support of writing. The large number of variegated texts found in the Judean desert close to the Dead Sea is an example of the storage and production of scrolls, albeit for the Hellenistic period of Second Temple Judaism, rather than the Persian Period. 43  Blum “Ein Anfang,” 11; id. “Die Stimme des Autors,” 119, 123.

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that the biblical writers were unable to think of the possibility of producing an account of Israel’s history that is different from the one they produced.44 Blum identifies the biblical writer’s role more or less with that of bards or priests in oral societies. He sees them as custodians of cultural memory who transmit a communal tradition and not their own insights. But, even if this depiction is accurate, there is still no reason to assume that, for these (priestly) bards, the events about which they sang and the epic poem as the form of that singing were one. After all, among oral performances of Homeric epics in ancient Greece, for example, there would never be two identical performances of a given episode, as each rhapsode would embellish different scenes according to the situation of a specific live performance. Thus, both the artists and their audience were aware of there being various representations (or performances) of a certain story. What is more, the books of Chronicles manifest a different account of Israel’s history. While they were not written by the same authors and redactors as Gen–Kings, their inclusion in the same collection of authoritative Jewish scripture is evidence that the ancient sages embraced a plurality of perspectives and intentions within their literary tradition. As I understand Blum’s depiction of the scenario, a scholarly scribe in the ancient Near East inadvertently assumes that the text read on clay or a scroll is authentic information about matters of the past because it is a written text. In this sense, he does not differentiate between a past reality and the text talking about this reality. According to Paul Veyne, this is how Eusebius treated his sources, and with him, many ancient writers: Knowledge about the past meant knowing what the sources, the literary tradition, said about the past.45 44  In fact, Christopher Ligota has argued that this also holds for the standard approach in the reception of ancient writers of history up to the seventeenth and eighteenth century: It had long been unthinkable to write about ancient Greek or Roman history in a way that did not closely follow the ancient sources. See his essay “From Philology to History: Ancient Historiography Between Humanism and Enlightenment,” in Ancient History and the Antiquarian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Michael H. Crawford and C. R. Ligota, Warburg Institute colloquia 2 (London: Warburg Institute, Univ, 1995), 105–15: 109–10: “A historical text is […] a product of language in so massive and so articulate a way that other perspectives—relationship to textual tradition, relationship to outside reality—are either internalized or blocked out. Internalization abolishes the temporal distance between the text and the referent. The presence of the former entails the presence of the latter, and the latter integrates the former: a historiographical text surviving from Antiquity […] is so eminently part of Antiquity that its specific function which is that of interpretation, with all that this implies of apartness and partial obscurity, is lost to view.” 45  Veyne, Les Grecs, 119–21. Cf. Polybios’ criticism of Timaeus of Tauromenium, who wrote his account of the past based entirely on other books (12.25dff). Ligota observes that: “Herodotus does not look for the facts behind the traditions about them. He allows for

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The written word as such is treated as worth knowing. This is not too far from first-year university students who do not treat an encyclopedia entry as one author’s view on a matter, but as a definite and authentic representation of the matter itself. Of course the students know that this is a text about a phenomenon existing separately from the text. Yet, they usually do not take the text as perspectival because it is included in a reference work, and therefore taken as objective. Framed this way, I think the question is not whether biblical writers were at all aware of composing an account, but whether the metahistorical thought occurred to them that their narrative is perspectival and that it is possible to represent the events differently. The answer to this question has important implications for the kind of historical thought at work in the narrative. How critical and self-reflexive were Herodotus and his biblical counterparts in our imagination? If ancient authors consult books of previous authors to write a history, they may not be aware of the selective and perspectival nature of these secondary sources or be familiar with the thought that the past reality could have been quite different from what they find in the text. Erhard Blum holds that Herodotus, in contrast to the biblical writers, was familiar with this notion. Christopher Ligota arrives at a different conclusion: in his view, the positivist notion of historical reality as an entity of its own and separate from narratives about it was unknown in Greco-Roman antiquity. Herodotus’ narrator representing historical questions in terms of true and false is polemical rhetoric, according to Ligota, not an epistemic remark with reference to his search for historical reality. In his opinion, Herodotus considered an existence in its own right for traditions about the past, but not for the past itself. Ancient Jewish and Christian accounts of a past, he says, came closer to the concept of an objective historical reality because of their notion of one transcendent, omniscient, and omnipresent consciousness, the point of view of God.46 This juxtaposition of scholarship illustrates how the same sources give rise to almost opposite interpretations, depending to a large extent on premises about the general nature of the sources.

the variety of traditions and makes his choice. To us this sounds like a literary problem. In Antiquity it was a historical one”; see C. R. Ligota, “‘This Story Is Not True.’: Fact and Fiction in Antiquity,” JWI 45 (1982): 1–13: 9. 46  Ibid., 3–12.

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2.3 Narratorial References to ‘Himself’ as the Narrator At this point, the issue is simpler: Is there any evidence in the two sources for the narrator’s awareness of being a mediating function, being in the shoes of someone who presents a story to his audience? According to Monika Fludernik, following Franz Stanzel, such a self-consciousness of being a narrator is a characteristic of the teller-mode of mediation.47 Herodotus’ narrator openly displays such a self-consciousness about ‘his’ mediating function.48 In the Histories, he repeatedly draws attention to himself in the role of the organizer of the text. This serves two ends, one of which is helping the audience to navigate in the narrative and not to lose the main lines of both the plot and Herodotus’ reasoning. These references include, for instance, verbs in the first-person singular that announce the next topic or the intention to treat it later in the work. Common expressions are ἔρχομαι (‘I go on/set out’) followed by a participle of a verb of saying or showing, and the phrase ‘I will mention’ ([μνήμην] ποιήσομαι).49 At times, the narrator also refers to his own activities in the impersonal passive. He makes explicit that, during the account, things are told, enumerated, and presented.50 Here, mediation is made explicit. In 7.171,1, the narrator explains his jumping forward and back again in time by stating that he has taken the license to insert a “considerably later” event (χρόνῳ ὕστερον πολλῷ, 7.170,3) into his treatment of early Cretan history.51 This heightens the accessibility of the narrative for the audience: The comments providing orientation to the reader offer a handrail to keep on track so that they are less likely to drop out of the reading process before a closure. In addition, readers are once more invited to follow the narrator’s presentational logic with the confidence that this arrangement makes sense because it was not produced at random. 47  Fludernik, Towards, 37. 48  See also Carolyn Dewald, “Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus’ Histories,” Arethusa 20 (1987): 147–70: 164–67; Jong, “Herodotus,” in Jong, Nünlist and Bowie, Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: 103, with references. On Herodotus as a self-conscious narrator, see de Jong, “Narratological aspects,” 260. I marked the pronouns ‘himself’ (in the heading) and ‘his’ in this sentence in inverted commas because the textual function of the narrator is of course not an actual person. 49  For the first expression, see: 1.5,3.194,1; 2.11,3.35,1.40,1.99,1; 3.6,1; 4.99,2, for the second cf. 1.15,1.184.193,4; 2.102,1.155,1; 6.55. Other metanarrative references are, e.g., προβήσομαι, μνησθήσομαι, ἐπεμνήσθην. 50  The forms εἴρηται and εἰρήσεται are most common; examples of other passives to this effect are: 7.185,1; 1.16,2; and 8.8,3. 51  The insertion is about warfare between Cretan colonies in Sicily and soldiers from Tarent and Rhegion in the 470s; the main narrative tells about the remote past (Minos, the Trojan War).

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The other purpose of narratorial self references to his role in organizing the narrative, which is probably more in the foreground, is to give the reader an idea of the laborious process of arranging the multiple logoi and the thoughts connected to them in a reasonable order—that is, making sense of them.52 With backward- or forward-pointing references across his own work and by identifying one part as an excursus or another as main narrative, the narrator not only provides orientation. He also conveys the impression that his account is carefully thought through and that the smaller narratives each fall into place to form a comprehensive history that is ordered and meaningful. However, this explicitness about the structure of the account is far from implying that there are many more equally valid possibilities for the same subject. In my opinion, it does not necessarily encourage the audience to think of alternative narratives, fostering the audience’s autonomy as critical subjects. Rather, the listener or reader is to entrust oneself to the guidance of an expert. After all, the narrator mentions several times that he is compelled to follow the flow of the logos,53 which leaves little room for alternative paths. The overall effect of these organizational comments is giving the readers a sense of meaning, order, structure, and purpose. There are several ways of making this claim. A more unobtrusive way is a purposeful design,54 which expresses order and significance implicitly. A case in point is Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian Wars. The author intrudes into the narrative only six times; the reader encounters his emplotment only in the form of the completed product, the text, never witnessing how the narrator works things out or selects certain sources and events and discards others. This narrative style creates the illusion that the recipient has direct access to history without a mediator, which is a powerful strategy of persuasion and invests the narrative with an “organic, mimetic quality”.55 In this respect, the biblical narratives are closer to Thucydides than Herodotus, making the same claim in a 52  See Dewald “Narrative surface,” 164–67; Dewald counts 84 references to the narrative structure of the Histories (e.g., beginning and ending of a narrative segment) and 135 comments on its content (e.g., reasons why certain logoi were included or excluded or expression of disbelief for a story). 53  For instance Hdt. 1.95,1; 2.3,2. 54  Dewald reads the great number of intrusions not so much as adding up to a sense of purpose and meaning, but rather argues “that extensive first-person interjection rather deprives us of the unquestioned authority of the third-person narrative essential to narrative history writing”: “Narrative Surface,” 150 n. 11. 55   See ibid. 148–50 (citation on p. 148); Darbo-Peschanski, “The Origin of Greek Historiography,” in Marincola, A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 27–38: 32–34; Nicole Loraux, “Thucydide n’est pas un collègue,” Quaderni di storia 12 (1980): 55–81.

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very successful way. Their narrator avoids leaving behind any evidence of his activity as the organizer and presenter of Israel’s history.56 To be sure, the Hebrew narratives do not generally lack expressions that structure their parts. Stories or story cycles sometimes have headings like the toldot-formulas or conclusions, such as ‫כל אלה שבטי ישראל … וזאת אשר‬ ‫( דבר להם אביהם ויברך אותם איש אשר כברכתו ברך אתם‬Gen 49:28),57 and often, genealogies or lists of peoples, places, or regal ministers are introduced by a presentational formula,58 but they are never introduced by a verb in the first person. Therefore, even when material is explicitly presented because it cannot be enacted within a story, the presenter does not draw attention to himself as the one who is doing the presenting. The general contrast between the two sources with regard to the narrating voice is manifest in the following juxtaposition of examples showing how the narrators present a piece of information, in this case names of people in the past: Hdt. 7.224,1: “[other Spartans besides Leonidas], whose names I was told as men who proved their worth—in fact, I learnt the names of all the three hundred.”59 Num 27:1: “[…] and these are the names of his daughters: …” Although the biblical narrator presents information as an enumeration instead of transmitting it narratively, he does not draw attention to himself as the one who presents something, but tersely states, “these are”.60 In this way, he creates the impression of being disinterested and not involved in inquiring about and selecting this item of knowledge, as if he simply copied it. The Herodotean narrator, in contrast, affirms twice that he in person knows the names of all Spartan soldiers who fell at Thermopylai, and he adds a word of praise, thus situating himself in a nonneutral relation to these men. In addition, in Genesis through Kings, the narrating voice does not mention the writing of this text in any meta-commentary; whoever writes is a character. In contrast, the Herodotean narrator explicitly notes a few times that he 56  Cf. Sternberg, Poetics, 124. 57  All these are the tribes of Israel […] and this is what their father said to them as he blessed them, blessing each with the blessing suitable to him. 58  E.g., … ‫וזה הדבר אשר‬, Num 27:1; Josh 5:4; Judg 3:1; 2 Sam 5:14; 1 Kgs 4:2. 59  My translation of: “καὶ Λεωνίδης […] καὶ ἕτεροι μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ ὀνομαστοὶ Σπαρτιητέων, τῶν ἐγὼ ὡς ἀνδρῶν ἀξίων γενομένων ἐπυθόμην τὰ οὐνόματα, ἐπυθόμην δὲ καὶ ἁπάντων τῶν τριηκοσίων,” and ‫ואלה שמות בנתיו‬. 60  Further examples: Gen 36:1; Num 1:5; Judg 3:1; 1 Kgs 4:2.

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is committing this text to writing, using the verb γράφω and cognates in the first person.61 2.4 Insights into the Narrator’s Thought Processes and Method Instances where the narrator thinks aloud, as it were, are another element deepening the audience’s awareness that everything in Herodotus’ Histories has passed through the narrator’s mind. As is to be expected, this analytic focus yields many more examples from Herodotus’ Histories than from the Torah and Former Prophets, which avoid all references to a concrete narrating persona. The Herodotean narrator shares with his audience thoughts and mental processes leading to a certain conclusion: he informs the reader about preliminary working stages between one of his observations and its explanation; he uses autopsy as an evidentiary strategy; and seeing unfamiliar things is often presented as the starting point for deliberations and the search for an answer.62 This undercurrent is so strong that it has rightly been described as a second strand in Herodotus’ account, next to the narration of past events.63 Herodotus’ narrative voice constantly reminds its audience that the account is a product of a human person. The use of the first person enables the narrator to exploit his own experiences as empirical data for authentication. The presentation of Herodotus’ narrator as someone who asks questions, a central ingredient of inquiry, is a pertinent example. Sometimes, he records the research questions he asks himself, such as when Herodotus sails to Tyre in order to learn as much as possible about the Egyptian god Heracles (2.44,1). In addition, Herodotus mentions open questions that remain unanswered (e.g.: 3.116,1; 4.187,3; 7.153,3; 9.18,2); these questions arise as Herodotus processes his collected material, sometimes expressing points of doubt or incompleteness of the sources. Finally, in book 2, we get to know some of the questions posed to his interlocutors (2.44,2; 91,5; 113,1; 118,1; 150,2), among which is that of whether the Greek story about the war at Troy is silly, or whether all this really happened (2.118,1). In this way, the narrator is characterized as a curious 61  See 6.53; 4.195,2; and 2.123: these instances interestingly are all in an apologetic context in which Herodotus has doubts about a tradition; he conveys the impression that his ideal would be to write down only checked and approved matter. Different cases are 1.95,1 and 3.103. 62  Marincola, “Herodotean narrative,” gives a list of the narrator’s autopsies; a claim to autopsy refers only in one case to the relics I discuss in this study (2.143); there are, however, a few cases of implied autopsy due to the object’s description or judgments such as “worth seeing” (cf. the table in the appendix). 63  Marincola, “Herodotean narrative,” 121; Dewald, “Narrative Surface,” 148–49 and 168; de Jong, “Herodotus,” 103–05 on the narrator speaking as historian.

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person, eager to learn new things, and as someone who is prudent enough to check his sources, but at the same time open to be convinced by them. This builds up the reader’s confidence that the narrator is a competent researcher. However, it is conspicuous that this last kind of questions, those Herodotus purports to have asked informants during his research, often precede conflicting traditions. Consider the following examples: The old age of the Heracles temple in Tyre, which the local priests give as twenty-three hundred years (Hdt. 2.44), clashes with the Greek tradition that locates Heracles in the same generation with Polyneices, Eurystheus, and Pelops, which Herodotus dates to only nine hundred years before his own lifetime. Regarding Perseus’ place of birth, there is the fifth-century tradition of Egyptian Chemmis, an attempt to strengthen existing ties to Egypt and Africa in Greek cultural heritage or to invent new ones.64 This runs counter to the popular birth myth in which the hero was conceived by Danaë from Zeus in the form of a shower of gold and born in a dungeon on the island of Argos (2.91). How does Herodotus solve these difficulties? He has his narrator persona associate controversial knowledge with his interviewees—be they imaginary or real—and in this way gains two things. He can designate the stories as more or less authentic information because he hears them from locals who supposedly know their tradition (the priests of Heracles in Tyre and the inhabitants of Chemmis). This makes both versions appear reliable, and he does not have to commit himself to either one. At the same time, he does not incorporate a contradiction into his own discourse. Matters can thus be left floating in the air. This strategy lets Herodotus avoid a decision, which will inevitably annoy those who adhere to one of the two versions.65 Thus, the recording of his own purported interview questions may well be more of a narrative device than part of a real oral-history situation.66 Next to the narrator’s questions, readers of the Histories learn about several other activities of inquiry and judgment. The recurring phrase “as I have learned by asking” (ὡς ἐγὼ πυνθάνομαι, e.g., 1.92,2) points to the narrator’s research activities; sometimes he even specifically claims to have heard a 64  Daniel Ogden, Perseus, Gods and heroes of the ancient world (New York, London: Routledge, 2008), 113: “By the time Herodotus published, ca. 425 BC, the Gorgon episode was already established in Libya, whereas the Andromeda episode had been located in some kind of Ethiopia at least since Sophocles’ Andromeda of ca. 450 BC.” 65  In the case of Heracles, he presents his conclusion somewhere else (2.44). 66  Marincola (“Herodotean narrative,” 131 and 136) suggests that the narrator’s use of autopsy or mentioning a personal encounter with a specific informant follows strategic (i.e. rhetorical) considerations as strategies of persuasion. On the next point, cf. Dewald “Narrative Surface,” 157; an exception is 2.150,2 where Herodotus checks a story by asking where the spoil has gone if the lake indeed has an underground drain.

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story from the mouth of people who were directly involved in the event (e.g., 6.117,2–3). In addition, the narrator uses various verbs to describe his own mental operations: Most common is δοκέω (expect, think) and related forms (μοι δοκέει, ἔμοιγε δοκέει); other verbs are κρίνω (decide, judge), συμβάλλομαι (bring together, conclude), εὑρίσκω (find), μοι … τόδε τεκμήριον γίνεται (2.104,4; “has become clear to me from the following clue”), σταθμώσασθαι (conclude), ἐπιφράζω (5.9; imagine). Occasionally he even mentions the assumptions his conclusions rest and depend on.67 In this way, Herodotus not only emphasizes that, in order to write such a work as the Histories, one has to do a lot of work and make a lot of decisions; he also lays claim to his lucid powers of thought, innovative ideas, and compelling arguments. This is manifested in his discussion of the question of which territory belongs to Egypt and which does not. The narrator points out that, although his conclusion agrees with an oracle by the god Ammon (2.18,1), he has arrived at it through his own reasoning. This certainly is a self-assured posture. However, I do not take it as an expression that asserts his own freedom of thought as one dissociated from the authorities. Although he insists on the credit due to him and is probably also interested in self-marketing, Herodotus does not set himself up as a competitor aspiring to replace traditional authorities. Rather, this strategy lets him have a share of their renown. It seems important to Herodotus to label his own ideas with his name; in this specific example, this implies the powerful claim that he is capable of using his own mind to find out things that others learned from a god. The constant overtone of references to thought, processing evidence, argumentation, and research seems to me to be more than a claim to the narrator’s personal qualifications as a philo-sophos. It is also evidence for Herodotus’ genuine interest in epistemology, especially the question of how truth can be found out or revealed—given the fact that people say all kinds of things.68 Herodotus prefers to deal with this problem by telling stories rather than writing a philosophical essay. Thus, in the Histories, there are also characters who engage in some of the narrator’s mental activities, such as Prexaspes and Artabanos, and the activity of inquiry is presented as one that belongs to a

67  E.g., 2.56,1; 6.123,2. 68  Cf. Matthew Christ, “Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry,” ClAnt 13 (1994): 167–202; see also Jonas Grethlein, “How Not to Do History: Xerxes in Herodotus’ Histories,” AJPh 130 (2009): 195–218. Herodotus is interested not only in getting at the truth because of his goal of accurate knowledge but also in exploring what motivates people to tell the truth or to deviate from it. He is aware that power and personal or communal interests often make people conceal or ignore the matters as they really are. See e.g.: 1.27,3; 1.95; 1.116; 2.116 and 117; 2.174; 3.2; 3.16,7; 3.34–36; 3.72,3–4; 4.43,6; 5.50; 7.6,4; 9.89.

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king’s office.69 Answers to this question of course have direct implications for Herodotus’ historical method, since his aim is τὸν ἐόντα λέγειν λόγον (1.95), telling the true story, things that happened. Thus, Artabanos, for example, advises his nephew Xerxes to weigh an opinion against another on the same subject in order to judge the quality of a certain view (7.10a). By telling a story about Cyrus’ grandfather, the narrator demonstrates that truth can also be established by force or through a second witness (1.116–117).70 Since Prexaspes’ method of precise questioning is described by the verb ἐξετάζειν (to examine or question a person well; 3.62,4), which is also used for testing gold, I take Artabanos’ advice also as an indirect narratorial statement on the narrator’s own methodology, which is often comparative. Walter R. Connor has a point when he argues that Herodotus models his narrator according to the social institution of the histor, who could be approached as an arbiter of conflicting claims. The histor did not have to solve each conflict, but served both to collect and edit available information and evidence and to discern the level of difficulty of a case in order to forward the more complex issues to the council of elders.71 What is the role of inquiry and epistemology in the Hebrew narratives? In Genesis through Kings, epistemology is certainly important with reference to the knowledge of God and the deity’s will. However, with regard to the process of the creation of the account, including the reasoning involved and how the narrator learned about the events he represents, the biblical narrating voice is silent. The investigation of and reflection about the traditions about the past are not dramatized. Since the narrator does not appear as a persona at all, he also is not presented as a researcher. Therefore, it is worthwhile to ask whether characters indulge in thought and research comparable to Herodotus’ kings 69  Astyages is determined to find out how his grandson Cyrus survived despite his order to kill the baby (Hdt. 1.115–117); see also the following articles: Christ, “Herodotean Kings”; Paul Demont, “Figures de l’enquete dans les Enquetes d’Herodote,” ASNP 7.2 (2002): 261–86; Irene de Jong, “The Helen Logos and Herodotus’ Fingerprint,” in Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus, ed. Emily Baragwanath and Mathieu d. Bakker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127–42: 136. Demont builds on Christ’s review of the material on inquiring kings and expands it by discussing the Spartans’ inquiry into the questions of which of the twin sons of Aristodemos and Argeia is the first-born (6.52) and whether Ariston is Demaratos’ father or not (6.63–69) and the different tests Cleisthenes of Sicyon devises to find a worthy husband for his daughter (6.126–130). 70  Another culprit who is convicted by witnesses is Paris (2.115,3); a tragic hero of truth is Prexaspes (3.34–35.61–75), whom the narrator honors as aner dokimos (3.75,3); the encounters and conversations between Demaratos and Xerxes (books 6 and 7) also enact the topic of insight and coming to know truth. 71  Walter Connor, “The Histor in History,” in Nomodeiktes: Greek studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 3–15.

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inquiring about who tells the truth and who is lying. Quite a few stories enact a process of learning and maturing in which characters gradually gain insight into (God’s) truth. Conversely, the reader is guided through a similar process. One of the themes in the Joseph narrative, for instance, is the recognition of God’s involvement and guidance in historical circumstances that seem to bespeak the opposite (Gen 37–50). It also contains the topics of outward appearance, pretending, and proof. As Meir Sternberg puts it, in many biblical stories, the participants “undergo a process of discovery that brings home to them God’s management of the world”.72 Some characters are said to have a better faculty for recognizing God’s messengers than others: compare, for instance, Balaam and his ass (Num 22:21–31), or Manoah and his wife (Judg 13:2–24). Also, the issue whether words are truthful or not plays a role in biblical narratives: God’s words versus those of the snake (Gen 2–3) and the reports of the spies (Num 13), for example. The messenger report in 2 Sam 1:6–10 shows that even an eyewitness account can be faked and unreliable, even though King David takes it at face value. Therefore, research into the topic of how issues of epistemology are dramatized in Biblical narrative has to go beyond scanning the corpus for certain key words. There may not be the exact word that translates as ‘doubt’,73 but there are certainly characters who have their doubts: Abraham when he hears he will become father of a baby at the age of one hundred, his wife then being ninety (Gen 17:17), and Gideon, who doubts that Israel’s God is with his people, given the recurring raids by the Midianites (Judg 6:13), just to name a couple. In addition, the idea of proofs to establish facts beyond doubt is certainly present, such as in the case of Judah’s staff given to Tamar and in the need for two witnesses with agreeing testimonies to condemn someone for an offense. Thus, the knowledge that mere words cannot always be trusted is certainly present in biblical narratives, as is the interest in processes of gaining knowledge and insight. This short overview, not intended to be complete, shows that conclusions 72  Sternberg, Poetics, 152, also 137 and elsewhere. See also Barbara Schmitz’s study of the narratives in 1 Kgs 13 and 1 Kgs 22, from which she concludes: “Das Wort YHWHs selbst entzieht sich dem unmittelbaren Zugriff, indem es nicht einfach ‚objektiv‘ vorliegt, sondern in seinen vielfältigen Formen erforscht und auch erstritten werden will. Und vielleicht ist es genau dieser Prozess der Auseinandersetzung, in dem sich das Wort YHWHs ereignet.” (Barbara Schmitz, Prophetie und Königtum: Eine narratologisch-historische Methodologie entwickelt an den Königsbüchern (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012) 398). 73  In the 1970s, Cancik considered as indicative that there is no word for ‘doubt’ in biblical narrative (Cancik, Mythische und historische Wahrheit, 94). Cf. Peter Altmann, “There will be doubt, but when is doubt ‘good’? Reflections from an Old Testament perspective,” in Hermeneutische Blätter 2011 (1/2): 65–79, here 65.

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about the narrating voice and its interests can be complemented by what is enacted in narrative scenes. Herodotus investing his narrating persona with the authority of someone who attempts to get to the bottom of things also includes passing judgments about the degree to which a tradition or a piece of information is convincing (πιθανός). Important contributions to the study of this aspect in Herodotus have been made by Franz Haible, Carolyn Dewald, and John Marincola.74 Herodotus’ narrator leaves the impression of being in a competition for authority and truth. Unlike Thucydides or the biblical writers, he goes a long way to substantiate his account by reports of his own techniques of inquiry, such as questions and observations, giving reasons for his judgments about the reliability of sources, and tracing the development of some of his insights. To use a metaphor by Paul Veyne, in some parts of his account, Herodotus cooks the dish in front of his audience.75 In this way, he presents himself as an author of learned literature, a literatus, and as an expert who is above the audience due to his mastery in his field. Programmatic statements about the writer’s, or narrator’s, principles are a prominent and obvious element that highlights the narrator’s role in conceptualizing the account. They are a stock ingredient of post-Herodotean classical historiography. Although Herodotus has no concise chapter about his methods, comments to this effect are spread in the narrative, and we can infer that Herodotus claims ἀτρεκείη (reliability and accuracy of information) for his work.76 As shown above, the recurring admission of not being able to say something with certainty serves to enhance his general trustworthiness and authority. Another variant of this indirect claim to truth where denying something works to the effect of implying something else is found in 2.106,5, the discussion of stone stelae that Herodotus associates with the Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris. This attribution competes with another interpretation identifying the figure in the reliefs as Memnon. The narrator evaluates this view by saying that its adherents are far from the truth or, thinking of the search for truth in terms of a race, fall short of truth. Here, Herodotus’ narrator indirectly claims to be closer to truth with his own explanation. This is another clever rhetorical gambit: For all who are easily persuaded, this can mean as much as “Herodotus knows the truth,” and for the more skeptic or more scientifically

74  Haible, “Herodot und die Wahrheit,” 108 and 136–37. 75  Veyne, Les Grecs, 22. 76  The assertation that he can or, more often, cannot say something with necessary precision occurs many times, e.g.: 1.57,1; 1.140,1–2; 1.172,1; 2.167,1; 3.116,1; 4.16,2; 6.14,1; 7.54,3.

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inclined people in the audience, Herodotus does not presume to know the absolute truth, only to be in a more advanced position in the race after truth. Last but not least, it is worth considering the difference made by the presence and absence of a preface introducing the work. The proem to the Histories introduces the narrator’s name, sets forth both the program for his account (to tell about great and/or stupendous human achievements of Greeks and Non-Greeks; to expose the reason for their war against each other) and its purpose (preserve the memory and glory of those deeds). The Hebrew narrative does not open with a declarative preface presenting the narrator and his objectives, but starts, as is well known, with the narrative proper. It is introduced by a subordinate clause sketching the primeval state of the world and goes on to recount the creation of heaven and earth. Though this opening can be taken as a metanarrative statement—namely, a claim to universal relevance of the particular story that follows from Gen 12 onwards—that aspect remains between the lines. Herodotus’ preface presents the Histories as the product of an individual who offers it to an unspecified Greek-speaking audience. He claims authorship for a literary work and sets himself up as the person to receive the praise or blame for it. Such a stance is absent in Gen–Kings, which is very much in keeping with what has been said about its narrator so far. This obvious difference has been interpreted as an expression of the newfound self-confidence of the author who invokes his own hard work, not the Muses, to gain authority. But maybe it is simply due to the different circumstances of circulation: The written publication of Herodotus’ Histories happens at a time when we see the beginnings of a private book market in Greece. The product therefore has to be labeled, to allow people a quick orientation about the work and to advertise it. In contrast, the product of scribes at the temple in Jerusalem is not meant for circulation.77 Another aspect to consider is the socio-cultural difference. Greek public life at the time of Herodotus was competitive. The experience of democratic organization of public offices and the process of political decision making granted a small group of free and economically independent male individuals considerable room to maneuver in public life. These sociological aspects deserve future attention. As long as we stay with textual criticism, it seems plausible that in the Hebrew Bible, the absence of a preface directly addressing an audience indeed supports the aim of avoiding any 77  To be precise, of possible scenarios for the location of the production of what later came to be biblical literature, this is the one most commonly assumed. The information we have is scanty. Cf.: Teeter, Scribal Laws, 229–232; Kratz, Historisches und biblisches Israel, 47, 183–85. Cf. Knauf’s more determined affirmation (1 Könige 1–14, 43 and 51).

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reference to a mediating body. Otherwise, Genesis could have opened like the Mesopotamian Anzu-epic—“The son of the king of inhabited places […] I will ever praise”—or the Gilgamesh-epic: “I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh”.78 Herodotus’ preface configures a matrix with the components of narrator, subject matter or characters in the story-world, and the audience. It sets up relationships of closeness or distance between these components: The narrator keeps great deeds and monuments of the past at a cognitive distance as he defines them as a subject for inquiry. The fact that they are referred to the realm of memory and knowledge implies that some effort is necessary both to acquire information about them and to retrieve them from memory. This metaperspective works to reduce accessibility and establishes the text as learned discourse. The preface announces to present something that cannot be experienced and grasped by anyone without further ado. Consequently, the narrator is not on a par with the audience.79 However, because he is considerably closer to past events than his audience, he offers his expertise to guide and enlighten the audience, gradually reducing the abyss that lies between them and the past. In this way, Herodotus’ preface is also a means to reduce the distance between narrator and audience. He starts from a person, himself, which is a clear and concrete starting point capable of generating an audience’s interest in the account. This opening also implies the narrator’s presence with the narratee, which gains him communicative credit. The description of the self-positioning of the biblical narrating voice, in contrast, can only be hypothetically inferred because it is silent on matters of its own epistemology. However, precisely this silence can be interpreted by the audience to mean that the narrator is aloof of competition. The lack of any advertising and demonstration of the claim that the narrating voice is authentic and represents the past truthfully and accurately implies confidence in the narrator: the audience is not invited to have any doubts. In other words, I would like to suggest that we consider the lack of such a demonstration—sometimes interpreted as the absence of the very idea of validation—as rather a deliberate strategy of persuasion. As a thought experiment, the biblical writers might 78  For Grayson’s English translation of “The Myth of Zu (Anzu),” see James B. Pritchard and Daniel E. Fleming, eds., The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2011), 92–99; Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (London: Allen Lane, 1999), translated and with an introduction by Andrew George. 79  This is different for knowledge about the gods; here, Herodotus’ narrator believes that human beings are all equally equipped for understanding: νομίζων πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἴσον περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπίστασθαι (2.3,2).

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have deemed proving the integrity and trustworthiness through explicit strategies less effective than a different kind of mediacy, implicitly assuring the audience that these qualities are so much taken for granted that nothing needs to be said on that matter. 3

Two Contrasting Modes of Mediation

Herodotus’ Histories and the Hebrew narratives differ widely in their form of narrative mediation. The biblical narrators rarely leave behind any evidence in the text that allows us to infer with certainty who is at work and how they go about it. The primary narrative voice of Genesis to Kings is covert and selfeffacing. This results in a relatively smooth flow of the narrative with by far fewer, shorter, and less noticeable intrusions than in Herodotus’ Histories. Although the biblical writers must have consulted the temple archives, and their work certainly involved a lot of thought about God’s role in history and countless decisions about structure and narrative technique, the narratives are shaped in such a way that much of this work is not brought to the reader’s attention. Similarly, the fact that there is somebody who presents and narrates the finished product to the audience is also not explicitly brought to the recipients’ attention. We will never be in a position to know for sure if biblical writers were aware of multiple possibilities for telling their story or not. The evidence of variations of certain narratives within the biblical corpus at least suggests that more than one version could be tolerated. My point is that the mere fact of them not producing texts with a narrative voice that is explicitly self-conscious of being a narrator does not in itself allow cogent inferences on that matter. Next to mere convention, this kind of narrative mediation could be the result of theological or rhetorical reasons.80 It might be that the biblical writers wished to conceal their authorship and their role as those who transmit the account in order not to interfere between the audience and the past. A narrative that unfolds as if by itself creates a powerful effect of objectivity and authority since it allegedly does not depend on a human and potentially erring mind.81 This suggestion is admittedly speculative, but an alternative contention to which we next turn seems no less so. It may be moot to ponder on what kind of thinking and which

80  See Sternberg, Poetics, 118, 123–24, for a theological explanation. 81  See also Dorati, “Considerazioni,” 137 n. 14, on the systematic cancellation of the enunciator as a persona as a narrative strategy.

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level of self-reflective creativity the biblical writers were capable of. But if we do so, considering alternative scenarios can stimulate a fruitful discussion. Blum considers the immediacy of the representation to the narrated events inevitable because the situation of ‘traditional narrative’ did not leave any other choice, but I see room to argue that this unobtrusive mode of mediation is a narrative means of persuasion that creates authenticity. The fact that, still today, scholars maintain that biblical writers considered the representation of an event and the event itself to be one and the same thing shows only how excellently the biblical writers accomplished their task. The representation of Israel’s history creates the illusion of making the audience direct spectators of the unfolding of past events. Seeing the past ‘as it is’ and apparently not through the narrator’s eyes gives the audience the impression of an immediate encounter with the past world, as if no mediating body or consciousness intrudes between the represented events of the past and themselves as recipients. I interpret this as a very ambitious implicit claim, as the text appears to be not just a text, but to reveal historical reality, to make it visible.82 If the past itself is visible and not just its textual representation, it is no longer past and vanished once and for all, but brought back up into the present. This form of mediacy creates a seeming simultaneity of the narrated events with the audience, which makes an encounter between the two possible. The addressees do not need any interpreter or mediator because they can ‘read’ and understand the past directly and on their own. When reading or listening to the narratives, as it were, members of the audience become immediate eyewitnesses. The effacement of any form of overt narrator amounts to a narrative strategy conveying the message that this is the history of the people of Israel with their God. Narrating the events in this specific way pretends that access to the past is first-hand and that it is more real than a mere alignment of symbols. Instead of a landscape painting, it purports to be a window opening to the actual landscape; the glass of the pane is so transparent that it is hardly noticed. If the text is the past, as it were, and not just its representation, the fact of the text being an artifact is naturally not given any attention.83 Leaving no traces hinting to human composition, the biblical narratives come with an implicit claim to represent the past in its natural state, which also implies objective validity. For, as soon as an account is presented as the work and point of view of a single author, doubts may arise as to whether this person is capable of telling the 82  The thoughts in this paragraph are inspired by Berkhofer’s Beyond the Great Story. 83  This might be a bit off, but it reminds me of the biblical claim that the foreign gods are artefacts from carvers and silversmiths, handmade products, whereas Israel’s God can be experienced, his deeds/actions can be seen.

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past events as is appropriate. Because the biblical writers leave no evidence of their ‘making of’ within their work, they offer their audience the possibility of interpreting this as a sign pointing to a transcendental origin. Whether the audience understands the events in the account of Israel’s past as speaking for themselves or they take them to be of divine origin, the narrative’s oblique mediacy enhances credibility in more than one way. This kind of narrative presentation can be called the ‘viewing-mode.’ In the ancient Near East, the words of a king, even if they reached the addressee only as a report, such as in a letter or the words spoken by a messenger, were dealt with as if the king himself had spoken in person—they were more than merely a text. In the same way, a written account of a past can become the actual past in a performative way. In fact, Scott Noegel has pointed out that, since the production of ancient Hebrew literary texts was set amidst powerful empires with longstanding traditions of producing performative texts, we are likely to miss a level of meaning if we do not take into account that these texts could have been written to literally enact events, to make things happen.84 This function is not specific to anonymous texts from the ancient Near East, but can be thought of in terms of an invented or imagined tradition in general.85 My point here is not to say that accounts of a past in general or the biblical narratives in particular are mere invention; the point is that human beings are capable of intersubjectively creating a reality through narratives.86 Herodotus shaped his narrator differently, as a dramatized narrator with a personality. His pronounced presence in the narratives of the Histories stands in stark contrast to the effaced narrator of the biblical narrative. This is mainly because a strand demonstrating his research and thought processes is interwoven into the telling of past events and often interrupts the stories. The narrative does not conceal the fact that it is an account, a written exposition, but rather highlights it.87 As mentioned, Herodotus calls his work a logos, a rational account, and introduces his goals in a metanarrative preface. References to activities of inquiry and judgment characterize him as curious and thoughtful, with a keen interest in epistemology. The narrator openly states that he also presents material that does not pass his judgment of reliability. This means he does not suppress variants of a certain tradition, as Thucydides, for example, 84  Carr, “Torah on the heart,” 18; Noegel, “‘Literary’ Craft and performative power,” 25–27. 85  Cf. the works by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson. 86  Cf. Yuval Noah Harari, A brief history of mankind (Hebrew, revised ed.; Or Yehuda 2013), 33 and 36–37. 87  Dewald, “Narrative Surface,” 148: “It appears man-made rather than natural; […] a construction that gives every sign of having been laboriously assembled.”

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tends to do. He functions as an overt and palpable intermediary who presents, explains, and comments on his narrative history in an especially outgoing way, like someone who transmits some news. In fact, there are few Greek historians who use the first person pronoun ἐγώ as often as he does. In the Histories, the narrator advertises the narrative’s credibility, making his own voice heard because it is significant and authoritative. Demonstrating his abilities of reasoning involves presenting his own person as a trademark; interspersed with a display of modesty and the occasional admission of limits to his knowledge, all of this enhances the reliability of the narrative. The Herodotean narrator presents himself both as a serious competitor for fellow literati and as a knowledgeable guide for the uninitiated who introduces everyone prepared to take his hand and follow him into the multifaceted world of human culture and society in the past and present.88 Letting his audience track his efforts to produce as accurate an account as possible of the Persian Wars and their prehistory, Herodotus’ narrator presents the narrative as the work of a curious human being. This means he also deselects two powerful claims to authority: the appeal to superhuman authorities and to the illusion of the self-evidence of a natural state of affairs that is seemingly objective because it is not overtly perspectival. In addition, the Herodotean narrator explicitly presents himself as the narrator, the mediating person between the material and the audience, who plans and arranges the narrative: he labels passages as insertions or digressions and makes references pointing backward or forward to other parts of his work. Therefore, he can also be called a self-conscious narrator—one who makes his own mediation and presentation explicit. Characteristic of discourse in the Histories is a mix of narrative, description, and argumentative passages. Although the work also contains scenic passages in which the narrator disappears into the background, it is appropriate to describe Herodotus’ narrating voice as in the teller-mode. To be sure, the biblical narrating voice also makes itself heard as a commentator on events or agents of the past. But this does not impinge on the reader’s illusion of viewing the past independently: the comments react to whatever the audience ‘sees’ before their eyes. This does not imply that the consciousness belonging to the evaluating voice has control over the narrative. It can be conceptualized as a voice from an observer looking at the events of the past together with the audience.89 And yet, the preceding description of biblical mediation as viewing is admittedly simplified. It certainly captures the surface 88  Ibid., 149. 89  Dewald has made this point with reference to Herodotus’ narrator as a commentator (ibid., 155). It also holds for the biblical narrative.

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level of ancient Hebrew narratives where the view is clear and unobstructed. Here, the understanding of only a few principles—one of them the loyalty and obedience to the God of Israel, together with a ban on foreign religious cults—helps to make sense of incisive historical events such as the destruction of Jerusalem marking the end of the kingdom of Judah. This is what Meir Sternberg memorably but not too fortunately refers to as the Bible’s ‘foolproof’ composition: the fact that it is possible to read biblical stories without recognizing their gaps and ambiguities. According to Sternberg, biblical narrative is unequivocal about “the world order, the laws governing reality as a whole,” so that moral judgments and the narrator’s reality model are coherent no matter who is the reader.90 However, mediation in the viewing-mode also encompasses a much more challenging reading experience. Two prominent features illustrating this are narrative gaps and ambivalence, as Meir Sternberg has demonstrated in his seminal work. A narrating voice recording what an external observer can see while withholding the characters’ inner motivations or judgments does not provide the reader with a full range of information but leaves gaps. A well-known example is the case of the different extrapolations about Uriah’s personality readers are likely to construct depending on how they fill the information gap with regard to Uriah’s reason for not entering his home when invited to do so by David (2 Sam 11:7–13). If the recipient decides that Uriah does not suspect David of adultery, the dutiful and simple-hearted soldier serves as a mere contrast to David. If the reader decides that Uriah was suspicious, his refusal to spend the nights with his wife during his short vacation can be read as a silent protest against the wrong done to him by David, resulting in a more complex character.91 Gaps and ambivalence spur the audience to make up their own mind about how the narrative needs to be completed in order to transmit a clear picture. This means that a committed and attentive audience becomes maximally involved in the reading, as the narrative calls for a reader’s formation of hypotheses about, for instance, missing pieces of action, the temporal sequence of events, whether two consecutive events are to be read as one following from the other or not, or the assessment of the agents’ character traits.92 Gaps in biblical narrative can be prospective, retrospective, and irresolvable; that is, 90  Sternberg, Poetics, 230–235, quote on p. 233. 91  Ibid. 201–209; on gaps, see pp. 235–240; cf. Johannes Klein, “1 Sam 18—Spiel mit den Leerstellen,” in Die Samuelbücher und die Deuteronomisten, ed. Christa SchäferLichtenberger, BWA(N)T 188 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010), 108–15. 92  Sternberg, Poetics, 233.

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they can be temporary and permanent. A biblical narrative revolving around the theme of ambiguity and the necessity of correct interpretation of divine messages is the story of Ahab and Jehoshaphat going to war against the king of Aram (1 Kgs 22).93 These few examples, which can be multiplied, illustrate that, although biblical narratives seem quite clear in the first encounter and on their textual surface, a close reading raises questions that recipients will answer in different ways, thus gaining different meanings or shades of meanings from the same narrative. The narratives in Gen–Kings, therefore, address not only one clearly defined implied audience. To say the least, they offer a worthwhile reading experience both to a beginner and to an expert audience. By default, many of us probably conceptualize the past, or history, as one and something still there, somewhere, waiting to be uncovered by researchers, like a well-hidden dead body that can be found intact once the spurious evidence leading to it is put together. It is true that historical research often involves investigative work. However, there is no dead body. All narratives about what actually happened rely on the remaining evidence and witnesses. This makes any account of the past necessarily somewhat arbitrary.94 The narrative poetics of the Torah and Former Prophets conceal that the dead body has vanished, as well as the nonnaturalness between the subject of the account and its form. Biblical writers achieve this by deflecting the readers’ attention from the mediating narrating voice and its possibly contingent perspective. Thus, the more the narrator intervenes and makes his reasoning explicit, the more his own influence in creating the account is foregrounded. As soon as the audience is aware of the impact of the author’s individual perspective on the narrative of a past, the writer also lets himself in for potential suspicion on the audience’s part, suspicion that he or she possibly errs or deludes them because of personal interests. The more the narrator is explicitly concerned with bridging the gap between the present and the past through his attempt to get at it via research and thinking through possible scenarios in order to find the most plausible, the more the addressees are reminded of the existence of such a gap. The narrator of the biblical account of a past and 93  See Schmitz’s detailed analysis of this story (Prophetie und Königtum, 227–342). Schmitz shows that all three prophecies in this story are ambiguous, therefore leaving it to the intradiegetic characters and to the recipients to interpret them (250): “Die sprachlich komplexe Mehrdeutigkeit wird als eine sich in der Lektüre zu dekodierende Polyvalenz inszeniert. Auch hier eröffnet die Erzählstimme wieder breiten semantischen, bewusst nicht monosemierten Raum, den die Lesenden—je nach ihrer Hörbereitschaft und Dekodierfähigkeit—unterschiedlich füllen können.” 94  Berkhofer, Beyond, 56: all historical interpretations are underdetermined by the evidence.

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that of Thucydides seem, in this respect, to be closer to the mainstream of historiographic practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the Herodotean narrator: “The function of normal historical principles is to conceal the true extent of the historian’s intervention”.95 As sort of a coda to this, let me emphasize once more that the biblical narrating voice described in this chapter is that of Genesis through Kings. Although a narrator of this kind also appears in other biblical narratives, the narrators in other parts of the Hebrew Bible can be shaped differently, and in this way, apply other strategies of persuasion. The primary narrating voice that presents a narrative starting in the remote past of the first human beings on earth and then continues telling about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, his sons, and the people of Israel, however, is remarkably homogeneous. Of course, it is not the sole voice in Genesis to Kings that narrates a past— there are also character narrators—Jephthah, for instance (Judg 11:16–22). In the fifth book of the Torah, the extradiegetic narrator is silent during much of its narrative time because characters speak: God, but also and most especially Moses.96 In his speech, Moses refers to events in the Israelites’ past. Here, it is not an anonymous and effaced narrator who represents the past, but a dramatized narrator who speaks of himself in the first person and who has played an active role in the events he mentions, for example, in Deut 5:28 or 9:15–21. However, Moses’ narration of a past does not outdo the narrator’s. Moses refers to events that the biblical narrator has presented previously, and thus Moses does not really take over the primary narrator’s job. Rather, as a character, Moses demonstrates how the memory of the past can help to face the challenges of the present, thus emphasizing the importance of remembrance. What the narrator enacts in having Moses speak about the past is the activity of history telling and of using it to persuade one’s audience.97 The intradiegetic characters are not on the same communicative level with the extradiegetic narrating voice.

95  Berkhofer, Beyond, 229. 96  Narratorial discourse in Deuteronomy: 1:1–5; 4:41–5:1a; 28:69–29:1a; 31:1.7a.9–10a.14b– 16a.22–23a.24–25.30; 32:44–46a.48; 33:1; 34:1–4a, 5–12. 97  See Johannes Taschner, Die Mosereden im Deuteronomium: Eine kanonorientierte Untersuchung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 149, 221 and 338: “Die bewusste Inszenierung der Wiederholung aus der besonderen Perspektive der Mosereden macht deutlich, wie Erinnerung und Darstellung von Geschichte der Zukunft dienen kann. […] Zugleich wird die Bedeutung des Erzählens von Geschichte hier selbst zum Gegenstand des Erzählens: Es wird erzählt, weshalb das Erzählen von Geschichte in dieser besonderen Situation des Übergangs unerlässlich ist.”

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It is interesting to note that Moses’ representation of the past differs from that of the primary narrator, who by and large enacts a past in a perceivedly unmediated, immediate, way. Moses invokes the past to make a general point about the relationship between God and his people, such as when he subsumes several incidents of the time in the wilderness under the verdict of Israel’s disloyalty toward their god (Deut 9). Johannes Taschner has argued that, next to the temporal distance of retrospect, Moses’ perspective as someone who spent his youth in a non-Israelite context and does not enter the promised land with the Israelites is mediated and in a way external.98 Moses does not re-enact the events of the past he mentions in his speech in the same way as the primary narrator. For instance, he refers to incidents of the Israelites’ unhappiness with their situation in the wilderness following the exodus from Egypt and their complaints in a shorthand way, establishing something like a hyperlink: “Again at Taberah and at Massah and at Kibroth-hattaavah you provoked YHWH to wrath” (Deut 9:22 NAS). These place names are a shorthand for the incidents connected to them, narrated in Numb 11:1–3 (Taberah), Exod 17:1–7 (Massah), and Numb 11:4–34 (Kibroth-hattaavah). According to Christof Hardmeier, this transforms such events to exemplary model cases that are used for the formation of abstract concepts in a narrative way. Moses refers to the past events in an argumentative, or discursive, context of interpretation and teaching. In Moses’ long speech in Deuteronomy, history is not enacted or performed narratively but presented in the form of torah, of teaching.99 Therefore, my conclusions about the narrative representation of Israel’s past do not include all different kinds of representations in the Hebrew Bible, but characterize the discourse of the primary narrator in texts some scholars refer to as the Enneateuch. 98  Taschner, Mosereden, 63: “Der Modus der Erzählsituation verschiebt sich von der Unmittelbarkeit, aus der der Leser in den drei vorangegangenen Büchern das Geschehen miterleben konnte, hin zur Mittelbarkeit.” See also p. 115, 338. 99  In view here are primarily the short allusions to episodes in the past. Other examples are the references Kadesch-Barnea (Deut 9:23) or to Peor (Deut 4:3). In his speech, Moses evokes other events by narrating them at greater length, e.g., the incident of the golden calf (Deut 9:9–21) or of the spies (Deut 1:19–29). Such renarrations have been studied by Taschner. See also Christof Hardmeier, “‘Geschichten’ und ‘Geschichte’ in der hebräischen Bibel,” in Blum, Johnstone and Markschies, Das Alte Testament—ein Geschichtsbuch?, 1–25, esp. 12–19.

CHAPTER 4

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World In the previous chapter, we saw how the mode in which the narrating voice relates past events influences the kind of access to a past offered to the audience. Somewhat schematically, I have characterized the overt mediation by the Herodotean narrator as compatible with the ‘teller-mode,’ whereas the covert mediation by the biblical narrator can be described as providing access to Israel’s in the ‘viewing-mode.’ I will now explore how four other aspects connected to the narrating voice add to or modify these preliminary results: first, the degree to which the narrator establishes a temporal distance between his own present and the represented story-world of the past; second, the proportion of the discursive and diegetic modes of discourse in the narratives; third, the use of direct and indirect speech; and finally, instances in which intradiegetic characters address the extradiegetic audience. 1

Indication of Temporal Distance between the Discourse-Now and the Past

As mentioned in the theoretical outline of this study, readers’ access to the story-world will be all the more easier the more knowledge of their present actual world they can use to understand and complement it. But what if the past world to be narratively constructed is quite different from our present actual world, as is, say, the life of women cellists in seventeenth to eighteenth-century Italy? If I were to write a history about these cellists, should my narrator be my contemporary or that of the musicians? Will my account be more convincing with a narrating voice that clearly marks its own posterity to the events it narrates, or is a narrator with an unspecified discourse-now more effective? In the previous chapter, we have seen that, in the biblical narratives, references to any specific person’s involvement in the presentation of the account of a past are kept to a minimum. Without a biography, the biblical narrator does not belong in a certain age and time. What is more, the narrating voice often seems to be on the audience’s side as eyewitnesses of the narrated events, thus creating an impression of immediacy with the past. However, this general tendency needs to be qualified. In the accounts of Israel’s history, especially in Genesis and Deuteronomy through Kings, there © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_005

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 95

are various formulaic and other kinds of expressions that mark the temporal distance between the story-now and the discourse-now. Words and phrases such as ‘at that time’, ‘formerly’, ‘in that day’, and ‘then’ (,‫ לפנים‬,‫(בעת ההיא\ההוא‬ ‫ אז‬,‫ ביום ההוא‬express that the time of Moses or Joshua, or a certain king of Israel or Judah belongs to the past, in a time other than the narrator’s and the audience’s present. Instead of creating immediacy, then, these expressions of temporal deixis point into a quite distant past. Often, they reflect a point of view of postexilic Jewish scribes who live under Persian rule in the province of Yehud. Thus, the expressions indicate that the story-now, the narrated time, is far away from the time of the telling. This has a distancing effect working against the illusion of an immediate experience of the past. Well-known instances of expressions marking otherness and change of one period of time relative to another are the cases when the biblical narrator gives both an old and an up-to-date name for a place or a ‘profession’: 1) Judg 1:23 .‫ויתירו בית יוסף בבית־אל ושם העיר לפנים לוז‬ And the house of Joseph sent to spy out Bethel. Now the name of the city was formerly Luz. RSV; cf. Gen 28:19

2) 1 Sam 9:9 ‫לפנים בישראל כה־אמר האיש בלכתו לדרוש אלהים לכו ונלכה‬ .‫עד־הראה כי לנביא היום יקרא לפנים הראה‬ Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer. In both examples, the temporal distance between the story-now and the discourse-now is signaled by a change in names. Commentaries like these implicitly evoke the idea of things changing with time, even conventions that are usually stable and taken for granted such as names. In both verses, the adverbial ‫‘( לפנים‬formerly’) indicates a change. Interestingly, these observations bear the mark of ‘historical trivia’ and ‘general knowledge’ and are mostly nonpartisan in character. The time that the adverbial ‫ לפנים‬refers to in these and other instances1 is relatively undefined—it is a distant time in the past. However, some of the references can be matched to a more specific era in the distant past; thus, the events of Deut 2:9–12 and 20–23 are situated somewhere 1  Other attestations within Genesis through Kings are: Deut 2:10.12.20; 11:10; Josh 14:15; 15:15; Judg 1:10.11; 3:2.

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before Moses’ lifetime, which, from the point of view of the postexilic scribes, is clearly in the distant past. Other passages refer to a state of affairs and events in Joshua’s day (Deut 11:10; Judg 3:2). Other expressions of change are narratorial comments that point out a difference in circumstances. Gen 13:10b, for instance, rushes to explain that the southern Jordan valley was a fertile region before YHWH destroyed the area around Sodom and Gomorrah. Three verses earlier, the narrator contextualizes the quarrel between Abraham’s and Lot’s shepherds by relating geo-political circumstances that differ from those in his own time: ‘At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites dwelt in the land.’ (Gen 13:7). In addition, the formula ‘at that time’ (‫ )בעת ההיא\ההוא‬has been identified as a means to mark the temporal distance between the speaker’s present and earlier periods in Israel’s history,2 and it also implies the past-ness of the former period in the sense of closure. Interestingly, this usage of the phrase occurs in speeches of characters in the narrative, Moses and Jephthah.3 When it is used in the narrator’s discourse, it often serves the simple purpose of an introductory or connecting formula. However, in initial position followed by a verb in qatal, the phrase has been associated with a style otherwise found in annals, such as 2 Kgs 18:16: … ‫בעת ההיא קצץ חזקיה את דלתות היכל יהוה‬.4 Does the formula in this case also serve to strengthen a sense of times past, ‘back then’? In my opinion, the implication of such an annalistic use is not so much the transience or difference of events in the past as it is the notion of a sequence of events each having its own date: the occurrences are lined up in chronological order like the beads of a necklace, with the phrase ‘at that time’ referring to the date or year given in the same line. This usage of the phrase is historical on a less complex level of reflection than the thought of distinctive characteristics of different periods of time in the past or of the different nature of the present compared to the past. Let me now return to instances of the phrase ‫ בעת ההוא‬in character speeches that actually also reflect the narrator’s perspective. As in the following example, they can sometimes be attributed to both Moses and the postexilic scribes: 2  On this expression, see T. Kronholm, “‫”עת‬, ThWAT 6:463–482, here col. 469. The article “The formula baꜤēt hahî in the introductory speeches in Deuteronomy,” by Samuel Loewenstamm, Tarbitz 38 (1968/69), 99–104, focuses on textual criticism and is therefore not relevant to this discussion. The Torah prefers the male pronoun in its consonant text (‫)בעת ההוא‬, whereas the Former Prophets use ‫בעת ההיא‬. In Genesis to Kings, this phrase occurs thirty-six times. See also Eckart Otto, Deuteronomium 1,1–4,43, HThKAT, (Freiburg: Herder, 2012), 433 and 467. 3  Deut. 1:9 16, 18; 2:34; 3:4, 8, 12, 18, 21, 23; 4:14; 5:5; 9:20; Judg 11:26. 4  Kronholm, “‫”עת‬, 469. 2 Ki 18:16: At that time Hezekiah stripped the gold from the doors of the temple of YHWH.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 97

‫ונקח בעת ההוא את הארץ מיד שני מלכי האמרי אשר בעבר הירדן מנחל ארנן עד הר‬ ‫חרמון‬.5 Here, Moses speaks to the Israelites of the second generation after the

exodus from Egypt. According to the chronology in Deuteronomy, the victory over the kings Sihon and Og, which Moses refers to in retrospect, happened recently (from Moses’ vantage point), one or two years ago at the most.6 Therefore, the phrase ‫בעת ההוא‬, which implies pointing to something far, rather than near or recent, is a bit odd for Moses. It rather fits the perspective of postexilic authors, who have left clear evidence of their work in the added comment ‘who [were] beyond the Jordan’ (‫)אשר בעבר הירדן‬. The two Amorite kingdoms are on the other side of the Jordan only when the speaker is located west of the river, that is, in Jerusalem. Moses’ location at that place and time in the narrative, however, is east of the Jordan. Thus, I follow Eckart Otto in attributing these expressions to reflections and intentions of scribes in the exile or the Persian period, a perspective otherwise found in comments by the narrating voice.7 Yet, Otto makes an important point when he writes that although the phrase “at that time” clearly marks the difference of the story-now from the now of the telling, it is not used to historicize the events connected to Moses’ generation as something that is past and merely of interest for specialists. Rather, by bringing the two periods of time into a relationship, it presents the events that happened long ago as a foundation narrative still relevant for the present.8 Therefore, this formula is not necessarily an unequivocal distancing technique, although it discerns between periods of time. Nonimmediacy because of a different vantage point is also implicit in foreshadowings. Here, the narrator mentions much later periods at an early point in the account of past events. These passages show a narrator with an overview on several eras in the history of the Israelites that he presents in retrospect, and is therefore not immersed in any one of them, rather observing them from the outside, from a so-called Olympian point of view. The narrator is able to move freely from one era to another because he is knowledgeable. A case in point is the heading that introduces a list of Edomite kings purportedly ruling in Edom in the time before the Israelites had monarchs: ‫ואלה המלכים אשר מלכו בארץ‬ ‫מלך לבני ישראל‬-‫אדום לפני מלך‬.9 This introduction shows a different kind of narrator, whose primary goal at this point is not achieving immediacy, but seeing 5  Deut. 3:8: So we took the land at that time out of the hand of the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, from the valley of the Arnon to Mount Hermon. 6  Cf. Deut 2:14–16, 24; 3:1–3. 7  Otto, Deuteronomium 1,1–4,43, 467. 8  Ibid. 433–434. 9  These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites (Gen 36:31).

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things in a more international perspective, making the point that, among the smaller Canaanite kingdoms, Israel was last in line to have monarchs.10 This allusion to Israelite kings is a political state of affairs that, according to biblical chronology, lies more than five hundred years ahead of the story-now.11 The list of Edomite kings is part of a genealogical chapter on Esau’s descendants; in Genesis it is set between Isaac’s death and the Joseph narrative, with the era of kingship in Israel still far off. This foreshadowing is a clear indication that the narrator looks back to the narrated events from a distance, thus telling the history from retrospect.12 Finally, in Exodus through Kings (with more examples in the Prophets and Chronicles), we can find ten statements characterizing an event or a state of affairs with respect to a long time span. These brief characterizations in retrospect, not longer than a verse, are made from a vantage point remote or even aloof enough to afford the speaker a panoramic overview on a longue durée.13 Each time, the speaker asserts that a certain event is either unique in a certain period, has always occurred during that time, or has never happened within it. Most of the time, they relate to God’s relationship with the people of Israel and start with YHWH leading the Israelites out of Egypt, such as in Judg 19:30: ‘Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day (…)’.14 The time span in consideration is explicitly demarcated in these overviews by giving its beginning and ending. The beginning points vary, but the terminal point of the overview is always the speaker’s present.15 Who then is the speaker of these summarized characterizations of a certain period starting in the past and leading up to the present? It is plausible to expect the narrative voice to present such panoramic 10  Ernst Axel Knauf points out that this is a standpoint of Deuteronomist theology; historically, Edom was last in line starting with Aram-Damascus and Israel, followed by Ammon, Moab and Judah; see his article “Genesis 36,1–43,” in Jacob: Commentaire à plusieurs voix de Gen. 25–36, ed. Jean-Daniel Macchi and Thomas Römer, Le monde de la Bible 44 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2001), mélanges offerts à Albert de Pury, 291–300: 299–300. 11  Cf. 1 Kgs 6:1. 12  Another remarkable flash-forward is the prediction of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt in Gen 15:13–14.16. However, this is part of a prophetic speech by God to Abraham. 13  Numb 14:19 only refers to some forty years in Moses’ lifetime. The ten attestations considered here are Exod 9:18, 24; 10:6; Numb 14:19; Deut 4:32; Deut 9:7b; Judg 19:30; 1 Sam 8:8; 2 Sam 7:6; 2 Kgs 21:15. 14  ‫לא נהיתה ולא נראתה כזאת למיום עלות בני ישראל מארץ מצרים עד היום הזה‬. 15  Which, of course, is no fixed point in time. Apart from the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the retrospects start with the creation of man (Deut 4:32), the beginnings of the Egyptian ‘state’ (Exod 9:18), people (9:24), and the very beginning of the Egyptians’ (or their kings’) existence on earth (10:6).

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 99

interpretations. For the characters within the narrative are bound to their individual spots in time, except for God. However, the narrator is the speaker of only one of the ten retrospective views.16 The narrating voice thus rarely leaves its habit of immediacy and avoiding retrospects. But even in Exod 9:24, the narrator’s simultaneity with the narrated world is kept intact because the speaker looks back on the past from the story-now, rather than from the discourse-now. If most of the retrospective summaries are made by intradiegetic characters, does such a long historical perspective not appear unnatural? Do these characters metaleptically cross over to a different narrative level? Actually no, since they are uttered by characters capable of a panoramic perception: five by God and three by Moses, a prophet particularly close to God. Thus, although the statements bring the speaker’s present into a relationship with several past centuries, such a superhuman perspective, which is reserved for God or those who speak on his behalf, does not necessarily make them metaleptic. This is different from the overview in Judg 19:30, the reaction of an anonymous group of eyewitnesses, a collective character.17 The narrative does not account for their knowledge. The external viewpoint brought about by a comparison of the character’s present with a different era validates the judgment of the singularity or frequency of the event in question. Owing to their implied complete overview of omniscience, the speakers can make a definite and resolute assertion. Presenting important affirmations as God’s or a prophet’s words is a narrative strategy of persuasion; the writers invest their interpretation of history with divine authority and knowledge. To sum up, the references to a change over time from the story-world of the past to the actual world of the present attest that the narrator of Israel’s history is not always contemporary with the events he narrates. The illusion of immediacy is therefore occasionally broken by retrospect. The historical overviews reflect a strong interest in making generalizing historical claims. However, the designations of the past as a different era often do not emphasize the difference between the past and the present in the way of the well-known statement ‘the past is a foreign country’. The primary goal of indications of change is not historicizing the past. Rather, the traditions about the past are

16  Exod 9:24: ‫;ויהי ברד […] כבד מאד אשר לא היה כמהו בכל ארץ מצרים מאז היתה לגוי‬ there was hail, (…) very heavy hail, such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it had become a nation (RSV, slightly modified). Although the statements are similar in speaking from a broad overview, I have not taken into account assertions that an event or a person is unique, with no match ever before or after (cf. Exod 10:14 and 2 Kgs 18:5). 17  The speakers in Judg 19:30 are a group described as ‘everyone who has seen this’. The anonymous speakers function as witnesses that this atrocity really occurred.

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commented on and explained so that they remain accessible and relevant to a present audience. With regard to Herodotus’ Histories, the temporal distance, and thus separation, between the discourse-now and the story-now is taken for granted. This is largely due to the stability of the discourse-now, on the one hand, and on the other, the availability of some biographical data for Herodotus the author and chronological clues within the narrative that allow us to roughly date the composition of the Histories. For Herodotus, the set of discourse-nows contains one element: roughly speaking, the third quarter of the fifth century. It seems linguistically tied to Herodotus’ lifetime in expressions like ‘up to my time’ (ἐς ἐμὲ; μέχρι ἐμεῦ) and through his frequent use of references to himself in the first person. A few allusions to historical events in the discourse-now can be dated.18 In this respect, Karen Bassi aptly speaks of Herodotus’, or the narrator’s, “‘me’ that establishes a contemporary baseline.”19 With such a fixed point of reference as the narrator’s discourse-now, speaking about a certain point in the past as gradually receding and disappearing in the course of time is reasonable. This perspective on the past is an important characteristic of Herodotus’ thoughts about history.20 There is no such specified temporal baseline within the corpus of Gen–Kings. Individual stories often lack concrete information about the discourse-now, which can be explained by the self-effacing mediation of the biblical narrator and the effort for immediacy with the story-now. In addition, at points in the narrative that either make a direct reference to the discourse-now or allow the reader to infer it, the discourse-now is not always the same period of time in absolute chronology.21 In other words, the discourse-now of the biblical 18  See Justus Cobet, “The Organization of Time in the Histories,” in Bakker, Jong and van Wees, Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, 387–412. He refers to 7.137, where “[t]he interval between his topic, the Persian Wars, and his own lifetime, is most clearly expressed” (p. 397). The event mentioned is the ‘reparation’ for the Spartan killing of Persian envoys in 490 BCE by the act of two Spartans offering their lives in exchange. Cobet dates this event with the help of Thucydides to the year 430 BCE (p. 398). Further chronological points of reference are 9.73,3 (an allusion to the Peloponnesian War) and 2.13: καὶ Μοίρι οὔκω ἦν ἔτεα εἰνακόσια τετελευτηκότι, ὅτε τῶν ἱρέων ταῦτα ἐγω ἤκουον (Now, Moeris had not yet been dead for nine hundred years when I heard this from the priests). 19  Karen Bassi, Traces of the Past: Classics Between History and Archaeology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 116. The following thought has been prompted by Bassi’s study. 20  Cf. Hdt. 1.0 so that the past actions … may not fade with time (μήτε τὰ γενόμενα … τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται); Hdt. 1.5,3–6.1; 4.87. 21  The uses of the deictic expression ‫ היום‬or ‫ היום הזה‬do not all refer to the same time; in the narrative, there is no sense that the final redaction adjusted chronological allusions throughout to one period of time.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 101

narrative history either is suppressed or consists in a number of discoursenows, which makes the narrative appear fresh, immediate, and timeless. The narrator in Herodotus’ Histories occasionally also avoids references to the discourse-now in dramatized, scenic passages, but there is no doubt that the discourse-now—the time when the communication between the narrator and the implied first audience takes place—is known with more or less precision and is different from the story-now. The idea of knowledge and memories disappearing over time if they are not passed on to the next generation is not alien to biblical narrative, but its poetics does not reiterate the concept. The narratives in Gen–Kings do not convey the idea that the possibility of seeing and knowing the past diminishes in the course of time; generally speaking, the great flood is as close to the narrator as the exodus or King Hesekiah. In other words, and with exceptions such as the ones reviewed above granted, biblical narrative’s mediacy tends to close the gap between events in the past and the language that represents them.22 2

The Proportion of Discursive Parts

When people need to discuss something with each other, this bears the prospect of becoming an issue, possibly an enervating one. Many of us will probably prefer listening to a story instead. In fact, the talk in a panel of an academic conference most memorable to me was the one telling the story about the Roman invention of the mail shirt. This was not so much because of the information on this part of the armour but because of an enjoyable way of presenting this kind of knowledge. Listening to a story promises more pleasure to the listener than responding to a point in a discussion, developing or defending our own position by giving reasons, or evaluating an argument. In much the same way, scholars have associated the genre or narrative mode of a text with how its audience attunes to its reception. The following section compares and contrasts the possible effects of different narrative modes in narratorial discourse on the reader, asking which mode(s) effectively connect present and past so that the events of the past are brought home to the audience in a meaningful way. In comparison with Herodotus’ Histories, the biblical narrative of past events is rarely interrupted. The interruptions, if any, are fewer, shorter, and 22  Cf. Bassi, Traces of the Past, 132 and 138, who refers to Hayden White’s foreword to The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts by Reinhart Koselleck (Stanford 2002), xiii. The gap between the form of historiographical texts and their subjects was also addressed earlier by Berkhofer, Beyond, 58.

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less noticeable than in Herodotus’ Histories. This allows a fairly smooth flow of one event or narrative episode after the other. The biblical narrator rarely interjects his own comments or judgments into the story, which contains far fewer metanarrative text portions. Such a narrative mode has been designated as diegetic.23 The tense associated with this mode is a past tense typically found in stories: the Aorist for Greek literature and Wayyiqtol and x-Qatal forms for the Hebrew texts. In the immediate diegetic mode, the narrator pretends to have little control over the events, since they happen on their own accord, as it were, with the narrator witnessing them as a bystander. It permits the audience to become immersed in the imagined experience of the narrated events as the communicative setting in the discourse-now takes a backseat and does not seem to simultaneously command the audience’s attention. In contrast, whenever the course of past events is brought to a temporary hold because the narrator addresses his extradiegetic audience—whether this is to comment on an aspect in the story-world, to make a more general, perhaps philosophical, remark, or to comment on his way of narrating—the narrative mode is discursive. In such cases, the narrator’s role as an intermediary in the narrative and the one in charge of its management is particularly manifest.24 The narrative freezes and, instead, progress is made with respect to issues anchored in the narrator’s present.25 The discursive mode is associated with verb forms in the perfect and present tenses in Greek and with present participles and Yiqtol forms in biblical Hebrew. Herodotus’ narrating voice, especially in the first five books, often alternates between the diegetic and discursive mode. One of numerous examples of this back and forth movement is the following from Hdt. 1.51:

23  Allan, “Towards a Typology,” table 4 p. 186. 24  Ibid., 184. The terminology used here is according to Allan. Allan’s typology largely rests on the observation that certain tenses go with certain narrative modes. This is related to Harald Weinrich’s distinction between ‘discussed world’ and ‘narrated world’, in Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 31977); cf. also the terms discours descriptif and délibératif, on the one hand, and discours narratif, on the other, in Eddy Roulet et al., Un modèle et un instrument d’analyse de l’organisation du discours, Sciences pour la communication 62 (Bern: Lang, 2001). A similar distinction is made by James Britton, “Learning to Use Language in Two Modes,” in Symbolic Functioning in Childhood, ed. Nancy R. Smith, Child psychology (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1979), 185–97: 191–92), whose terms are ‘language of the participant’ and ‘language of the observer’. 25  Allan, “Towards,” table 4, p. 186.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 103

diegetic ἐπιτελέσας δὲ ὁ Κροῖσος ταῦτα When [the gifts] were ready, Croesus ἀπέπεμπε ἐς Δελφούς, καὶ τάδε ἄλλα sent them to Delphi, and together ἅμα τοῖσι, κρητῆρας δύο μεγάθεϊ with those these other [gifts]: two μεγάλους, χρύσεον καὶ ἀργύρεον, τῶν ὁ basins of enormous size, one gold and μὲν χρύσεος ἔκειτο ἐπὶ δεξιὰ ἐσιόντι ἐς one silver. Of these, the golden basin τὸν νηόν, ὁ δὲ ἀργύρεος ἐπ᾽ ἀριστερά. [2] was placed on the right of the person μετεκινήθησαν δὲ καὶ οὗτοι ὑπὸ τὸν νηὸν entering the temple, and the silver to the left. [2] These too were reposiκατακαέντα tioned when the temple was burned down, discursive καὶ ὁ μὲν χρύσεος κεῖται ἐν τῷ and the golden [basin] is now in the Κλαζομενίων θησαυρῷ, ἕλκων σταθμὸν treasury of the Clazomenians, weighεἴνατον ἡμιτάλαντον καὶ ἔτι δυώδεκα ing a weight of eight talents and a μνέας, ὁ δὲ ἀργύρεος ἐπὶ τοῦ προνηίου half and twelve minae, and the silτῆς γωνίης, χωρέων ἀμφορέας ver [basin] is at the corner of the ἑξακοσίους: ἐπικίρναται γὰρ ὑπὸ forecourt of the temple, holding six Δελφῶν Θεοφανίοισι. [3] φασὶ δὲ μιν hundred amphorae: [in it, wine] is Δελφοὶ Θεοδώρου τοῦ Σαμίου ἔργον freshly mixed by the Delphians at the εἶναι, καὶ ἐγὼ δοκέω: οὐ γὰρ τὸ συντυχὸν feast of the Divine Appearance. [3] The Delphians say it is the work of φαίνεταί μοι ἔργον εἶναι. Theodorus of Samos, and I hold the same view: for it seems to me to be an extraordinary work. diegetic Καὶ πίθους τε ἀργυρέους τέσσερας In addition, he [Croesus] sent four ἀπέπεμψε, large silver wine jars, discursive οἳ ἐν τῷ Κορινθίων θησαυρῷ ἑστᾶσι, which stand in the treasury of the Corinthians, diegetic καὶ περιρραντήρια δύο ἀνέθηκε, τε καὶ and dedicated two sprinkling-vessels, ἀργύρεον, one of gold, one of silver.

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discursive τῶν τῷ χρυσέῳ ἐπιγέγραπται Of these, the golden vessel bears an Λακεδαιμονίων φαμένων εἶναι ἀνάθημα, inscription saying it is an offering by οὐκ ὀρθῶς λέγοντες: [4] ἔστι γὰρ καὶ the Lacedaemonians, but they are τοῦτο Κροίσου, ἐπέγραψε δὲ τῶν τις wrong: [4] for this, too, is Croesus’ Δελφῶν Λακεδαιμονίοισι βουλόμενος [offering]. However, someone from χαρίζεσθαι, τοῦ ἐπιστάμενος τὸ οὔνομα the Delphians wrote it as a favor οὐκ ἐπιμνήσομαι. ἀλλ᾽ ὁ μὲν παῖς, δι᾽ οὗ to the Lacedaemonians—although I τῆς χειρὸς ῥέει τὸ ὕδωρ, Λακεδαιμονίων know his name I will not mention it. ἐστί, οὐ μέντοι τῶν γε περιρραντηρίων Rather, the [figure of a] boy, through whose hand the water runs, is from οὐδέτερον. the Lacedaemonians, but certainly neither of the sprinkling-vessels. diegetic [5] ἄλλα τε ἀναθήματα οὐκ ἐπίσημα [5] Along with these Croesus sent πολλὰ ἀπέπεμψε ἅμα τούτοισι ὁ Κροῖσος, many other offerings of no great disκαὶ χεύματα ἀργύρεα κυκλοτερέα, καὶ δὴ tinction, and rounded cast bowls of καὶ γυναικὸς εἴδωλον χρύσεον τρίπηχυ, silver, and of course a golden statue of a woman, three cubits long, discursive τὸ Δελφοὶ τῆς ἀρτοκόπου τῆς Κροίσου which the Delphians say to be εἰκόνα λέγουσι εἶναι. the statue of the woman who was Croesus’ baker. diegetic πρὸς δὲ καὶ τῆς ἑωυτοῦ γυναικὸς τὰ ἀπὸ In addition, Croesus also dedicated τῆς δειρῆς ἀνέθηκε ὁ Κροῖσος καὶ τὰς his wife’s necklaces and girdles. ζώνας. If we read only the diegetic portions, we get a rather simple narrative enumerating Croesus’ offerings to the Delphic oracle. This story is time and again interrupted by explanations and annotations reacting to objections that might be voiced by the audience: How come the Clazomenians received a gift from Croesus? Wasn’t the golden vessel the narrator describes dedicated by the Spartans? Examples like this can easily be multiplied; they show that the discourse in Herodotus’ Histories is mixed and varied.26 26  Naturally, this has been noticed before; cf. e.g., Marincola, “Herodotean narrative,” who called the marked differences in the narrative modes in different parts of the Histories

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 105

Discursive elements within a story, and sometimes intruding into it, are certainly much more common in Herodotus’ Histories than in biblical narrative. Nevertheless, there are only a few paragraphs in which Herodotus’ narrator makes a point by reasoning through an elaborate argument in an extended stretch written exclusively in the discursive mode. Although Herodotus’ narrator frequently voices his own thoughts and judgments or generously gives explanations and information, the discursive mode is not the prevalent one. Herodotus does not as a rule prefer talking about an event, state, or philosophical question, to indirectly demonstrating it within a story.27 The more scenic parts of Xerxes’ campaign to Greece, for instance, present events with a narrator who keeps himself more in the background. Such diegetic passages enact the past, the events seem to evolve in front of the audience and the narrator’s presence is unobtrusive. Herodotus’ discursive passages, by contrast, often establish a cognitive distance between the audience and past events in the sense that it becomes an object for discussion, interaction, and instruction in the present. Although he does not explicitly address a specific audience using second-person pronouns in the previous example,28 in this passage Herodotus is nevertheless in dialogue with his contemporaries about material remains from the past. In this way, the narrator relates the past to the present. Readers are encouraged to treat the subject as a field of knowledge. However, the discursive mode is often not coupled with emotional indifference, since an interest in details of the past and the wish to really know things shows that the past deserves study and debate. In fact, when the narrator says, for example, that the inscription designating the golden vessel as a gift from the Lacedaemonians is wrong, he engages his discourse partners with the past. On the other hand, the above example makes apparent that, when more discursive parts intervene in the narrative, the reading experience becomes less enjoyable for a recipient who focuses on the storyline.29 In chapter 1.51, one can even ask the question whether Croesus is only the nail on which to hang ‘autobiographic’ and ‘mimetic’ narration (122, 132, 135). Mathieu d. Bakker, Speech and Authority in Herodotus’ Histories (Amsterdam, 2007), 165–180, opposes the label ‘narrator as researcher’ to ‘epic narrator’. These are a bit misleading, since they seem to imply that the first stance is more committed to solving a certain problem or question than the latter. Yet, the narrator in both parts makes an effort in understanding the past world. 27  Neither do the narrated and discussed worlds, or the diegetic and discursive modes for that matter, always interchange in a pronounced black-and-white fashion. Rather, interruptions of the narrative flow can be graded: passive or impersonal expressions are less noticeable than first person comments or the use of normative adjectives. Cf. Allan, “Towards a Typology,” 185: “narrative modes are gradual notions.” 28  Hdt. 2.29,5 is an exception. 29  See also Dewald, “Narrative Surface.”

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the exhibit, which is a presentation and discussion of treasures given to the Delphic oracle in appreciation of its services. Against this background, it is legitimate to ask whether Herodotus’ mixed discourse can be considered a successful strategy of persuasion—does it sometimes not have the opposite effect? Would Herodotus’ account not have served the same purpose and been easier on the reader had he written in a narrative style much closer to the one of biblical narrative, letting his audience contemplate the past without too many disturbances? An example showing that Herodotus could have done so is 1.56–58. Here, an invisible narrator refrains from commenting on the events or his sources in an explicit way. These chapters are the beginning of a lengthy digression from the Croesus narrative, a discussion of early Athenian and Spartan history.30 In the beginning, the narrator makes an effort to embed this digression seamlessly into the plot of the main narrative by presenting his account of early Spartan and Athenian history as a summary of Croesus’ research about the Greeks. The oracles at Delphi and Thebes had advised the Lydian king to form an alliance with the most powerful Greeks (1.53,3), which prompts Croesus to do some research to find out who to turn to. The early history of Sparta and Athens is accordingly introduced with the phrase ‘As a result of his enquiries, he discovered’ (ἱστορέων δὲ εὕρισκε, 56,2), and makes sense at this point in the plot as an introduction of these states as prospective historical agents.31 With Croesus replacing Herodotus as the narrator, this part is logically rendered as a third-person narrative with an intangible narrating voice. As narrative history, it is much closer to the biblical style. In the following argumentative passage (1.57–58), the Herodotean narrator discusses a hypothesis, inserting both impersonal and first-person statements. This part clearly interrupts the account of Croesus’ research results, which is taken up with a new topic only in 1.59. Herodotus’ narrator subverts his own rhetorical trick that could have fitted the digression very elegantly into the main narrative because, as it seems, he feels urged to get involved.32 30  Croesus is referred back to once in a while in between so as not to make the audience forget that the main narrative is actually about him: 56,1; 59,1; 65,1. The digression ends in 69,1 with the summarizing statement Ταῦτα δὴ ὦν πάντα πυνθανόμενος [ὁ Κροῖσος]. 31  Lacedaemonians are mentioned in 1.6 and again in 1.51; Athenians in 1.29 (because of Solon), 1.30 (the explanation of why Tellus of Athens is the happiest person), and again in 1.56. 32  In the first ninety-two chapters of Herodotus’ Histories, the only continuous stretch of ‘pure’ narrative is 1.36–48 from the Croesus story. In this part, there are more passages like the one to be cited where the discursive and diegetic modes closely intertwine. In other parts, the narrative is shot through with comments to a lesser extent, but there hardly are longer stretches where the story is free from annotations from the narrator’s present.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 107

Had Herodotus wished to write his history in the detached style used in 1.56– 58, he could have done so, but he obviously chose a different narrative strategy. In a visual reception, meaning reading a written text, frequent and explicit narratorial manipulation indeed detracts from the story in order to highlight the process of its composition. Depending on the extent to which the original communicative setting was oral or written, however, describing Herodotus’ poetics in these terms might be anachronistic. In aural reception, narratorial intrusions promote the account’s effective transmission.33 Herodotus’ extrovert, dramatized, and self-conscious narrator persona seems to be borrowed from oral literary discourse, where this is a narrative strategy for the opening and closing of episodes, for instance, and for their arrangement within the larger narrative.34 In a setting of oral performance, such overt strategies meet the needs of an audience who has to assemble the story-world without the possibility of going back to a certain point in the narrative and repeating it. Previously, I have argued that keeping narratorial intrusions to a minimum helps to bridge the gap between present and past because it creates the impression of an authentic view on the past, unobstructed and unchanneled by an intermediary. The more the audience realizes that the narrating persona exerts a high degree of control over the structure and content of the account, the more they might realize that the history they are offered depends on their contemporary writer’s perspective and interpretation, which may seem inferior and less authentic due to constraints in insight and temporal distance from the events in question. This bears a potential disadvantage for accessibility: The discursive mode, going hand in hand with the teller-mode of mediation, loses its persuasive force once a reader mistrusts the narrator. This said, the discursive mode also has important advantages, as it effectively connects the past with the present. The narrator relates the past affairs to the discourse-now, bringing them into the present—not as a re-enactment, but as a piece of information or knowledge. What is more, narratologically speaking, the discursive mode has the strongest potential for interaction between the narrator and the recipients. It is the preferred mode not only

33  Cf. Fludernik, Towards, 109. 34  Cf. Dietram Müller, Satzbau, Satzgliederung und Satzverbindung in der Prosa Herodots, Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 116 (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1980), 107, who designates e.g., connective sentences as a typical characteristic of oral style. Dewald’s concise description of how Herodotus’ narrator presents himself seems to match the activity of an oral narrator as well: “he must wrest them [the logoi] into an order that will allow us to follow without too much effort along the path that they make when they are strung together” (“Narrative surface,” 166).

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for the transmission of information but also for influencing the addressees.35 Whereas the diegetic mode, with its mimetic and vivid representation, allows readers to lean back in a comfortable position in order to let the narrative unfold in their imagination, the discursive mode is more meddlesome for the reader, as it tends to advance arguments, implicitly asking for judgments on such matters such as ‘How plausible is this?’ or ‘Can I follow?’ This interaction between narrator and narratee often starts as early as in the preface, which explains the point of the account and thus claims relevance for the audience. Discourse in the biblical narratives is more homogeneous. There are narratorial intrusions in the discursive mode, but they are rare.36 A comparison of how the narrators introduce different positions on a certain question clearly demonstrates this. In the book of Joshua, we are told that the Israelites take possession of all the territory God had promised to them and that YHWH helps them defeat all their enemies—meaning that all his earlier promises come true (Josh 21:43–45).37 This provides the ground for the assumption that all Canaanites have been killed, which in turn means that there should be only Israelites in Canaan. However, the reality of subsequent Israelite generations was different: There indeed were members of different peoples among the Israelites. Interspersed in the narrative, we find different explanations solving this discrepancy without diminishing God’s sovereignty over the course of events. Here is how the narrating voice presents the four views: 1) And YHWH was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country. Indeed, he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.

‫ויהי יהוה את־יהודה וירש את־ההר כי‬ ‫לא להוריש את־ישבי העמק כי־רכב‬ ‫ברזל להם׃‬

Judg 1:19 RSV, slightly modified

35  Allan, “Towards a Typology,” 184. 36  Random examples are Deut 3:11, some subordinate clauses introduced by ‫( אשר‬e.g., Josh 22:10; 2 Sam 18:8), and the formula “until today” ‫)הזה( עד היום‬, e.g., Judg 6:24. For research about various explicit and implicit means to express a narratorial judgment, see n. 55 of chapter 2. Biblical scholars have long noted that there are more discursive elements in the primary narrating voice in Kings than in the Pentateuch. 37  In Joshua alone, there are already two versions, according to which Joshua captured the whole country (11:23) and/or there was a lot of territory left that the Israelites had not yet taken when he died (13:1).

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 109

2) So YHWH’s anger was kindled against Israel; and he said, “Because this people have transgressed my covenant which I had commanded their fathers, and have not obeyed my voice, I will not henceforth drive out before them even a single person, of the populace that Joshua left, and then he died,

‫ויחר־אף יהוה בישראל ויאמר יען אשר‬ ‫עברו הגוי הזה את־בריתי אשר צויתי‬ ‫את־אבותם ולא שמעו לקולי׃ גם־אני‬ ‫לא אוסיף להוריש איש מפניהם מן־‬ ‫הגוים אשר־עזב יהושע וימת׃‬

3) that by them I may test Israel, whether they will take care to walk in YHWH’s way as their fathers did, or not.” So YHWH left those nations, not driving them out at once, and he had not given them into the power of Joshua.

‫ישראל השמרים הם‬-‫למען נסות בם את‬ ‫את־דרך יהוה ללכת בם כאשר שמרו‬ ‫אבותם אם־לא׃ וינח יהוה את־הגוים‬ ‫האלה לבלתי הורישם מהר ולא נתנם‬ ‫ביד־יהושע׃‬

4) YHWH your God will clear away these nations before you little by little; you may not make an end of them at once, lest the wild beasts grow too numerous for you.

‫ונשל יהוה אלהיך את־הגוים האל‬ ‫מפניך מעט מעט לא תוכל כלתם מהר‬ ‫פן־תרבה עליך חית השדה׃‬

Judg 2:20–21 RSV, modified

Judg 2:22–23 RSV, slightly modified

Deut 7:22 RSV

These different voices are neither introduced as different views nor judged or evaluated by narratorial comments. This is left to the audience. Rather, the four different views are interrelated through keywords, and in one case, juxtaposition. The first explanation narrows down the geographical dimensions of successful conquest, with the Israelites taking only the hill country (Judg 1:19). Another explanation affirms that God did not consider himself bound by his earlier promises, since the Israelites had broken the terms of the covenant (Judg 2:21). A third view has God test Israel through the existence of other peoples in Canaan (2:22–23): The aim of such a challenge is seen in the need either to train one’s own men for battle (3:1–2) or to put the Israelites’ adherence to God’s commandments to a test (2:22; 3:4). The fourth explanation finds a gradual and not sudden conquest of foreign peoples in Canaan more reasonable: otherwise, wild animals could have multiplied in an unrestrained way (Deut 7:22). This discussion with multiple views is dispersed in several parts of Gen–Kings. It gets on without argumentative, metanarrative elements and will

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not be noticed by someone who looks for debates starting from expressions typical of the discursive mode. The presentation of multiple accounts happens differently in Herodotus. Here, we can find narratorial annotations pointing out different traditions of the same event, for instance: “There are two alternative accounts of her death […]. The Greek version is […]. It was because of this reply of hers, according to the Greeks, that she was killed by Cambyses. The Egyptian version is […].” (Hdt. 3.32). Commentaries by the Herodotean narrator at times also evaluate the reliability of information: “With this story the more plausible of the versions has been mentioned; however, also the less plausible version must be pronounced because people in fact tell it.”38 Scholars have argued that metanarrative comments such as these are constitutive for historical thought.39 If this is correct, Herodotus’ Histories could not be rewritten with the goal of eliminating most of its narratorial intrusions without any loss to its content. Put differently, the question is whether the different narrative modes of Herodotus and Gen–Kings fulfill the same function with different means, or whether they are different in essence? A purely diegetic mode of presentation cannot incorporate all functions of the discursive mode, and vice versa. It is therefore productive to understand the two modes not only as two different ways for achieving the same end but also as two distinct kinds of thought.40 It is precisely because the two modes are not fully interchangeable that we cannot expect cognitive distance from a narrative that is purely diegetic. Needless to say, reflection about events in the past that is presented in the discursive mode is not in itself more potent or advanced than reflection in pure narrative.41 As we know from myths, parables, and anecdotes, for instance, stories can put a finger on important questions 38  Hdt. 3.9,2: Οὗτος μὲν ὁ πιθανώτερος τῶν λόγων εἴρηται, δεῖ δὲ καὶ τὸν ἧσσον πιθανόν, ἐπεί γε δὴ λέγεται, ῥηθῆναι. 39  Cf. chapter 1, 13–16, and note 54 in chapter 2 (Method, Objectives, Theory). See also Felix Jacoby, “Herodotos,” RE Suppl. 2 (1913), 205–520: 247–76. 40  Vgl. Köller, Narrative Formen, 45–50; the cognitive narratologist Jerome S. Bruner (Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 11) speaks about two different modes of thought. With reference to Herodotus and Thucydides, Dorati points out that the two forms of narrative mediation are not just a question of style, but affect the audience’s mental processes and their representation of the narrated world insofar as they direct the audience’s metarepresentation into certain channels (Marco Dorati, “Indicazioni di fonti (‘Quellenangaben’) e narrazione storica: Alcune considerazioni narratologiche,” in Herodots Quellen—Die Quellen Herodots, 1st ed., ed. Boris Dunsch and Kai Ruffing, Classica et Orientalia 6 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 223–40: 226–27). 41  Various theorists of history take narrativity as the elementary form of historical knowledge; cf. Johannes Süßmann, “Erzählung,” in Lexikon Geschichtswissenschaft: Hundert Grundbegriffe, ed. Stefan Jordan (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 85–88.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 111

or problems and explore them in a narrative way. It goes without saying that stories also have the potential to affect a person’s behavior. It is important to desist from teleological patterns that portray the anonymous biblical scribes who produced tradition literature as belonging to a developmental stage that is earlier (and therefore allegedly more archaic and less sophisticated) than literary production in Greece by individual authors. The two modes are not an either–or question. They are compatible with one another, such that one and the same author can use both of them. Argumentative and polemical reasoning was part of the competitive culture in fifth-century Greece and still is in today’s academia. This, however, is no reason to privilege it over other conventions. On the assumption of an absolute truth, the truth, argumentative reasoning is a means suited to approaching truth in a process of elimination and refinement. As an alternative way for thinking, the juxtaposition of diverse or even incompatible perspectives can be an appropriate way to explore and represent a complex state of affairs. Both the diegetic and the discursive mode connect present and past. The distance from or immediacy to the narrated past events as perceived by the audience is not a function of one or two single elements such as the pronounced presence of a mediating voice or of metanarrative commentary. Rather, the effect of closeness or detachedness is a result of multiple nuts and bolts. Where the diegetic mode creates the immediacy of impression and, in this respect, is closer to the object of study than the discursive mode, the latter bears the potential for more interaction of narrator and audience and less distance in this respect than the diegetic mode. Thus, the two modes differ in the receptive roles they imply for the audience. It can be argued that, due to the rare discursive involvement of the biblical narrator, his style of discourse grants the addressees more free space. This is because the audience is rarely directly or implicitly addressed by the narrator and because a narrative intrinsically leaves readers more ways to respond, and the possibility to do so from multiple perspectives, than an argumentative text.42 2.1 Objects as Connectors of Story-World and Discourse-World Turning back a few pages to Herodotus’ passage about Croesus’ offerings to Delphi (Hdt. 1.51) and comparing the tenses in the diegetic and discursive paragraphs, we notice the narrator’s use of present-tense verb forms carrying over the objects Croesus dedicated into the present, into the discourse-now. 42  See the paragraph “Geschichten als hermeneutische Herausforderungen” in Köller, Narrative Formen der Sprachreflexion, 50–60. Of course, there can hardly be generalizations, because such a judgment depends on the characteristics of smaller narrative units, which both in Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings exhibit a wide range of features.

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This underlines the objects’ continued existence up to the narrator’s lifetime. A closer look at how the two narrators express the continuity of objects that already existed in the past and are claimed to be still visible in their own time will give an exemplar of how the narrators connect the past with the present. The narrators in the Histories and Gen–Kings often explicitly point out a material relic from the past as a tangible reality in their lifetime using phrases like “up to my time” or “to this day”.43 This phrase is often used with people’s habits, but also for remains from the past, as examples in the following chapters will show. Other more unobtrusive linguistic markers claiming the existence of an object from the story-world also in the actual world are the following implicit and explicit kinds of references: A claim to autopsy by the narrating voice (including implied autopsy), verbal deixis, the use of tenses, demonstratives bridging between story-world and discourse-world, and the familiarizing use of determinators on the level of discourse.44 For instance, the Herodotean narrator sometimes explicitly confirms the continued existence of objects using the verb ‘to be’, either alone or together with the adjective ‘living’ (σῶς, e.g.: 1.66,4; 2.181,5; 4.124), the participle ‘existing/being around’ (περιών, e.g.: 1.92; 5.77,3), and others. As examples, Table 1 shows how six different descriptions of monuments in Herodotus employ one or more of six different means to state or imply continuity from the past into the present. The following two passages from Herodotus will exemplify the presence and absence of linguistic markers of continuity. Γύγης δὲ τυραννεύσας ἀπέπεμψε ἀναθήματα ἐς Δελφοὺς οὐκ ὀλίγα, ἀλλ’ὅσα μὲν ἀργύρου ἀναθήματα, ἔστι οἱ πλεῖστα ἐν Δελφοῖσι, πάρεξ δὲ τοῦ ἀργύρου χρυσὸν ἄπλετον ἀνέθηκε ἄλλον τε καὶ τοῦ μάλιστα μνήμην ἄξιον ἔχειν ἐστί, κρητῆρές οἱ ἀριθμὸν ἓξ χρύσεοι ἀνακέαται. ἑστᾶσι δὲ οὗτοι ἐν τῷ Κορινθίων θησαυρῷ σταθμὸν ἔχοντες τριήκοντα τάλαντα […]. ὁ δὲ χρυσός οὗτος καὶ ὁ ἄργυρος, τὸν ὁ Γύγης ἀνέθηκε, ὑπὸ Δελφῶν καλέεται Γυγάδας ἐπὶ τοῦ ἀναθέντος ἐπωνυμίην. 43  I.e., statements by the narrator where he attests to the duration and factuality of a state of affairs (objects being, hanging, lying, standing in a certain place) in his own time using the phrases ἐς ἐμὲ, κατ᾽ ἐμὲ, μέχρι ἐμεῦ, ἐπ’ἐμεῦ, τὸ νῦν, καὶ τότε καὶ νῦν, ετι δε και νῦν, and words to this effect. As these statements do not refer to material remains, but to customs and names, my list naturally includes only the physical objects. 44  Cf. also Egbert J. Bakker, “The Syntax of Historiē: How Herodotus Writes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 92–102: 100: “The richness of the Greek language with its multiple sets of deictic pronouns enables Herodotus to mark the grammatical coding of a complex narrative structure.”

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 113 Table 1

Different linguistic expressions for the continuity to the present of selected monuments in Herodotus’ Histories

Object, monument Explicit Claim of Indirect claim: autopsy suggestion of autopsy still there

Through narrator’s seeing experience

Demonstratives, Verbal deixis of determinators, present or spatial deixis perfect

Gyges’ six golden craters (1.14) walls of Phocaea (1.163) 345 wooden statues in Egypt (2.143) the Samian sanctuaries in Kydonia (3.59,2) sanctuary of Aeacus in Athens (5.89,3) rocks in Delphi (8.39,2)

–

–

x

–

x

x

–

–

–

–

x

x

–

–

x

x

–

x

x

–

–

–

–

–

x

–

–

–

x

x

x

–

x

–

–

–

Gyges, as soon as he had made himself supreme, sent a fair number of votive offerings to Delphi; indeed, most of the silver there is from him, and apart from the silver, he dedicated a huge amount of gold there. The six golden bowls dedicated by him are particularly worth mentioning. They weigh thirty talents and stand in the Corinthian treasury […]. The Delphians call all this silver and gold which Gyges dedicated the Gygean Treasure, after the name of the donor.45 Here, Herodotus’ narrator does not use a formulaic expression to explicitly state that the six golden craters Gyges allegedly dedicated to the Delphic oracle still exist at that place in his time. Nevertheless, the language typical of the discursive mode leaves no doubt that this is to be understood from the way the objects are presented. The narrator interrupts the ongoing events in the storyworld in order to refer to Gyges’ dedications in verbs in the present or perfect 45   Hdt. 1.14,1–3 (translation by Robin Waterfield, modified by parts from Aubrey de Sélincourt).

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tense, thereby expressing a timeless or present state, not a state in the past. The fact that the narrator refers to the gold and silver dedicated by Gyges in the story-world as an object that exists in the discourse-world (‘is called’; καλέεται) connects past and present, with the demonstrative ‘this’ (οὗτος) and the relative clause ‘which Gyges dedicated’ (τὸν ὁ Γύγης ἀνέθηκε) reinforcing this connection. Linguistically speaking, some objects exist only in the story-world, such as the shields dedicated by the Phocians (8.27), Xerxes’ throne near Abydus (7.44), and the vessel filled with manna (Exod 16:32). In a few instances, the decision of whether the existence of an object in the discourse-now is implied can be difficult, as is the case with the bronze horse manger from the tent of Mardonios, the commander of the Persian infantry. According to the narrator, men from Tegea captured this manger in the assault on the Persian camp at Plataea (Hdt. 9.70,3): πρῶτοι δὲ ἐσῆλθον Τεγεῆται ἐς τὸ τεῖχος, καὶ τὴν σκηνὴν τὴν Μαρδονίου οὗτοι ἦσαν οἱ διαρπάσαντες, τά τε ἄλλα ἐξ αὐτῆς καὶ τὴν φάτνην τῶν ἵππων ἐοῦσαν χαλκέην πᾶσαν καὶ θέης ἀξίην. τὴν μέν νυν φάτνην ταύτην τὴν Μαρδονίου ἀνέθεσαν ἐς τὸν νηὸν τῆς Ἀλέης Ἀθηναίης Τεγεῆται. The first to enter the stronghold were the Tegeans, and it was they who plundered Mardonius’ pavilion, from which they took various objects including the horse manger—a remarkable piece of work, all in bronze. The Tegeans placed this manger as an offering in the temple of Athene Alea.46 Here, the main action is expressed only in past-tense verbs in the indicative, and no narratorial comment intrudes into the narrative. The brief and rough description of the manger is introduced with the participle ‘being’ (ἐοῦσαν), which does not indicate a specific tense. Since such participles are used in the Histories within episodes that are clearly situated in the story-world, and also in those with a connection to the present,47 we cannot treat such a participle as a clear pointer to the discourse-now. In addition, the use of the definite article here is not familiarizing, which would imply the presence of its referent 46  English translation by Robin Waterfield, modified by me and with a part from Sélincourt’s translation. 47  Examples of objects present only in the story-world are the bronze helmet in 2.151,2, the country in 4.8, and the island of Delos in 6.98,3. Examples of sights with a connection the present are the sea of Pontos in 4.85 (also ‘worth seeing’) and the timeless ethnographic information about Babylonian boats in 1.194,1.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 115

in the discourse-world,48 but rather called for by Greek grammar. So there is no unequivocal linguistic marker suggesting the existence of the manger in the discourse-now. It is true that the narrator claims that another relic from the past—chains or bonds used to tie prisoners of war—have hung in the same temple in Tegea to this day (1.66). However, this cannot be taken as a claim that automatically extends to other objects from that place, as if the claim ‘up to my day’ necessarily presumed Herodotus’ visit at this sanctuary.49 And yet, a consciousness with a distinct voice can be felt in the timeless description of the manger as ‘worth seeing’. This judgment implies that Herodotus or someone else has seen the object, which can be interpreted as an implicit claim to the existence of the object in the discourse-world. After all, it would be odd to describe an object as ‘worth seeing’—which is a hinted recommendation to have a look at it—to an audience with no access to the relic. It seems that dedications are Herodotus’ source for details of a battle, because he rarely tells details of combat without mentioning a votive object. Within the narrative, this dedication is used as implicit proof of the ‘fact’ that it was the Tegeans who first got to the tent of the Persian commander in chief. Thus, it seems that the narrator makes the claim “the first to enter the stronghold were the Tegeans” on account of the manger in the temple in Tegea. If it is correct that this detail of the battle narrative was spun from the object, we might infer that the extraordinary bronze manger existed in Herodotus’ lifetime, although to my knowledge, no other extant ancient source refers to it.50 Nevertheless, in the absence of unequivocal data, internal (linguistic) and external, the question of whether the existence of such a bronze manger of Persian origin is taken for granted in the text has to remain open. In biblical narrative history, the explicit or implicit claim of continuity of an object or a monument into the present of the discourse-world is typically expressed by the phrase ‘to this day’ (‫ עד היום הזה‬,‫)עד היום‬. Sometimes, this phrase is extended, such as in “‫ ”עד עצם היום הזה‬and “‫”ויהיו שם עד היום הזה‬.51 48  When the definite article is used as though it takes the presence of an object for granted that had not been mentioned previously; cf. Fludernik, Towards, 193–194; she uses the term coined by Wilhelmus Bronzwaer in 1970 (Tense in the Novel, 90). 49  Cf. Reginald Macan’s commentary on Hdt. 9.70.3. 50  Hdt. 3.59 is a similar case: The prows of ships with their typically Samian form (cf. David Asheri’s commentary, Oxford 2007) in the temple of Athena on Aegina may have provided the skeleton for Herodotus’ story about this episode, since they must have been earned as spoils in a sea battle in which Aegina won to be dedicated there. 51  Other variations of the wording of this formula appear only in character speech, where the phrase is fairly frequent. For a list, see Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, The Time, Place, and Purpose of the Deuteronomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day”, BJS 347 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 2006), 42–43 n. 3.

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In two cases, the continuity expressed by this formula is further reinforced in identifying the monument erected in the story-world with a monument in the discourse-world by a pronoun (Gen 35:20: ‫ויצב יעקב מצבה על קברתה ִהוא מצבת‬ ‫ )קברת רחל עד היום‬or the addition of explicitly vouching for the existence of the object at a specific place (Judg 6:24: ‫)עד היום הזה עודנו בעפרת אבי העזרי‬.52 The formula “to this day” typically points not only to the continuity of material remains but also to that of names, customs, or areas of settlement, and more often appears in character speech than in narratorial comments. In addition to this formulaic expression, a narratorial intrusion referring to the object in the discourse-now can connect the two worlds. These metanarrative comments give information on the object’s location or on its name in a linguistic form that is equivalent to the present or perfect tense in European languages (Gen 31:48; a subordinate clause introduced by ‫ אשר‬followed by a noun-phrase [2 Sam 18:18]),53 and indirectly through a close spatial relation to another object whose continuity into the present is expressed in one of these ways (Josh 24:26). This said, taking linguistic hints as the basis for assuming the existence of an object in the discourse-now seems well grounded. With regard to the use of the present tense in Herodotus, however, Marco Dorati’s view challenges me to take another, even closer look. He has convincingly pointed out that the present tense in ethnographic parts of Herodotus’ Histories is often used in a gnomic way, saying that it does not automatically mean contemporality with the discourse partners, the narrator and the audience.54 This ethnographical use of the present, indicating no specific time at all, questions the viability of interpreting present tense verbs as pointers to a deictic center in the discourseworld. Dorati emphasizes that the different ways of rhetorically presenting objects in the Histories are “not an immediate reflex of particular historical circumstances,” but may be virtual constructions.55 Does this dictate against using linguistic criteria to justify the assumption of a relic’s continuity into the present also in cases when this is not explicitly stated? 52  Gen 35:20: and Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave; it is the pillar of Rachel’s tomb, which is there to this day; Judg 6:24: To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites. 53  ‫ על כן קרא שמו גל עד‬This formula is used frequently in Gen–Kgs, especially in Gen. 54  Marco Dorati, “Travel Writing, Ethnographical Writing, and Representation of the Edges of the World in Herodotus,” in Herodot und das Persische Weltreich, ed. Robert Rollinger, B. Truschnegg and Reinhold Bichler, CLeO 3 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011), Herodotus and the Persian Empire, 273–312: 281 (see also p. 288 for ‘mixed situations’). 55  Ibid. 291 (quote) and 286; see also 289: the removed observer in an impersonal, timeless description need not be Herodotus, but the perspective may be that of a virtual consciousness, integrating various viewpoints, observations, and intellectual operations.

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In my view, there is no rule that fits all present-tense verb forms. For the more historically minded chapters, however, there is evidence that Herodotus’ narrator uses such verbs, and especially forms of the verb ‘to be’, to make a claim regarding the existence of objects in the actual world. Scholars of Herodotus have pointed out that his narrator uses verb forms in the present tense with care.56 In fact, Franz Haible has shown that the Herodotean narrator stakes an existential claim when he uses forms of ‘to be’ (εἶναι): In Haible’s opinion, the narrator’s definition of truth is what is real, what actually exists.57 Thus, the phrase λέγειν ἀληθέα in Herodotus refers to the reality of what was said and not to the characteristics of the spoken words. This becomes clear in a scene with tyrant Periander of Corinth, who hopes to get some information from his deceased wife Melissa about lost valuables by way of an oracle of the dead (Hdt. 5.92 η 2). Her ghost indeed appears and speaks, but refuses to disclose the requested information to Periander. To disperse any doubt in Periander, who might be tempted to believe that someone is playing a trick on him, the oracle includes authentication of the fact that the speaking apparition has really been his deceased wife Melissa: μαρτύριον δέ οἱ εἶναι ὡς ἀληθέα ταῦτα λέγει, ὅτι ἐπὶ ψυχρὸν τὸν ἰπνὸν Περίανδρος τοὺς ἄρτους ἐπέβαλε; which Robin Waterfield best translates as: “As proof of the fact that she really was who she said she was …”. However, many translations render the same words as “the proof that she spoke the truth” or words to this effect.58 Haible would consider this an imprecise translation: Because the ghost’s cryptic statement about pushing the bread into a cold oven is an allusion to something known only to the couple in question, Periander takes it as a guarantee that the message from the realm of the dead was indeed a message from his wife and no one else.59 Whether Melissa was lying or not is not the issue. 56  This may even be extended from objects to other forms of existence: Walter Burkert has observed that Herodotus’ narrator never refers to the gods as ‘being’ when he speaks in his own voice; see Walter Burkert, “Herodot als Historiker fremder Religionen,” in Hérodote et les peuples non Grecs, ed. Olivier Reverdin and Bernard Grange, Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 35 (Genève: Fondation Hardt, 1990), 1–39: 25. 57  Haible (“Herodot und die Wahrheit,” 65) points out that this definition matches the idea of truth found in the corpus of Hippocratic writings. He discusses Herodotus’ use of ἀληθείη and cognate words and shows that its meaning is not the philosophical and abstract characteristic of truthfulness, but reality (e.g., p. 55, 66, 75, 79, 84). 58  Thus David Grene in his English translation of Herodotus (Herodotus, The history (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), translated by David Grene) and Josef Feix in his German translation (Herodot: Historien (München: Heimeran, 1963)). 59  Haible, “Herodot und die Wahrheit,” 205: “An dieser Stelle zeigt das Kennwort logisch nur, daß Melissa es ist, die spricht, bezeugt aber nicht die Wahrheit des Behaupteten. Aber wenn die Person beglaubigt ist, so mag das auch auf ihre Worte sich auswirken (…).”

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Thus, the use of ἀληθής combined with the verb ‘to say’ claims that a statement expresses something which is the case. Accordingly, the opposite of λέγειν ἀληθέα (‘saying real/actual things’) is λέγειν οὐδέν (‘saying what is not’).60 For instance, the third scholarly explanation for the Nile flood that Herodotus’ narrator takes on in his discussion of the subject is incorrect because it does not match what is known about the African climate: ἡ δὲ τρίτη […] μάλιστα ἔψευσται. λέγει γὰρ δὴ οὐδ’αὕτη οὐδέν.61 When the Herodotean narrator or characters in the narrative assert that words are not true, they simply say that the words do not express anything real in the sense of being verifiable empirically. It fits in this picture that the Herodotean narrator or even narrative characters record whether what people tell each other about the present and the past corresponds to real states and events or not. Haible points to the following instructive example. In his account of the battle of Plataea, Herodotus’ narrator reports irresolution in the Greek camp concerning who is to face the Persian soldiers in Mardonius’ army and who is to face the Persian vassals. When the Spartans and the Athenians switch their positions, the Persians mirror this movement so that they come to be opposite the Spartans again. After this has happened twice, Mardonios sends a messenger to the Spartans mocking them by saying that what he had heard about their valor and bravery has not turned out to be the case (ἦν οὐδὲν ἀληθές, 9.48,2). What Mardonios complains about here is not a lie—although he says ‘we have been badly deceived in your case’62—but that the alleged virtues of the Spartans are not manifested in what he observes as an eyewitness. The Persians, taking the Spartans’ fame as assertions about what is the case in real life, do not see in the things that happened the equivalent events to match their expectations. Thus, Herodotus narratively reflects about congruence and incongruence between people’s assertions and stories about the present and the past, on the one hand, and the actual state of affairs, on the other. On this basis, I assume that, whenever the narrator makes an assertion about an object using expressions with reference to their existence, such as “(there) are” or “stands/is put up” (εἰσι; ἕστηκε), this assertion is to be understood as a claim to the reality and palpability of the object in Herodotus’ present. Further 60  Ibid. 75–76. 61  Hdt. 2.22: The third is […] most false. It says nothing [in its claim that …] (transl. Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 184); Haible (“Herodot und die Wahrheit”) mentions the example on p. 101. Other instructive examples are 8.110,1 and 7.234,1. 62  πλεῖστον δὴ ἐν ὑμῖν ἐψεύσθημεν (9.48,3). See Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in context, 229–35, for more details on how Herodotus’ narrator is concerned with finding correct linguistic expressions for the things represented in his work.

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support for this is the narrator’s careful choice of words in the passage about empty display tombs of Greek cities at Plataea next to real tombs where fallen soldiers were indeed buried. The narrator qualifies the existential assertion of the tombs as fact by saying ‘there is even a so-called grave of the Aeginetans there’ (καὶ Αἰγινητέων ἐστὶ αὐτόθι καλεόμενος τάφος (Hdt. 9.85,3)), and not simply, ‘there is a grave’ (ἐστὶ τάφος). Since the grave does not cover any human remains, it seems actually not to be rightly called by that term. The narrator’s caution not to assert on his own authority anything that is not the case corroborates my interpretation that, in the Histories, uses of finite verbs in the present and perfect tenses in assertions by the narrator or an impersonal voice are to be read as references to facts of the discourse-world.63 The narrators’ efforts to establish an object in both worlds is more noticeable in Herodotus than in the Hebrew narrative. Herodotus is alive to the question of what is real and empirically verifiable and what is not. His use of verb forms of εἶναι reflects this awareness, as does implied or stated autopsy and statements about things he has not seen. A possible explanation for his frequent discursive intrusions into the flow of the narrative in a narrative past tense is that these remind the reader of his subject’s reality. Since stories told exclusively in narrative tenses can also represent entirely fictive events, Herodotus’ narrator time and again connects the narrated events with the actual world. 3

The Use of Direct and Indirect Speech

In Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes?, Paul Veyne observes that, in antiquity, truth is anonymous.64 He asserts that ancient writers of history saw no 63  The narrator’s double assertion of something being the case in the past (past tense) and the present (present tense) in one and the same sentence in 2.113,2 and 5.67,1 is additional corroboration. 64  Veyne, Les Grecs, 23, but also 61 and 68 (on the ambivalent attitude of ancient intellectuals towards the myths of their society), as well as 106–07; however, see also the following discussion in this chapter. Cf. Shrimpton, History and Memory, 245: “when Herodotus feels that the item is reliable knowledge, no source citation is required.” In his view, items are presented as knowledge if Herodotus trusts them, otherwise they are presented as a source. I doubt that this applies for the Histories in such a general way. De Bakker’s suggestion that the narrator’s introduction of traditional material by λέγουσι or λέγεται in some places authenticates the story by a reference to common knowledge, Greek cultural memory, as it were, deserves consideration (see the more detailed discussion below; de Bakker, Speech and Authority, 173–74). In addition, Robert Fowler has pointed out, that the phrase ‘the Persians/Egyptians say …’ had already been in the Greek source that Herodotus used.

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purpose in referencing their sources because the literary tradition on a given topic was considered reliable. In narratological terms, this can be rephrased as saying that truth is what the omniscient, or at least knowledgeable, narrator says. Yet, we know that, in Herodotus’ Histories, the narrator also reports information or attitudes and arguments as utterances by other speakers. Does such a reporting of what others say per se confer on the content a truth status that is different from narratorial assertions? Scholars often mention indirect speech as a device the narrator applies to distance himself from words and attitudes he merely transmits without sharing the ideas.65 This line of thought assumes that acknowledging external sources somehow expresses reservations. Since in Herodotus, indirect speech is frequent, an understanding of it in this author is essential. After all, it influences the way in which readers then and today construe and complete the narrative world, with direct implications for its accessibility. Narratological analysis commonly uses the five categories for speech proposed by Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short. Their taxonomy consists of the following gradation, from the apparently most direct and immediate to the least direct and most mediated way of reporting speech: Free direct speech (without quotation marks and a reporting clause), direct speech, free indirect speech (without a reporting clause), indirect speech, and a narrative report of a speech act (NRSA).66 The decision to present discourse as direct speech, Therefore, in these cases at least, it does not express doubt or a distance of reflection; cf. Robert L. Fowler, “Herodotus and His Contemporaries,” JHS 56 (1996), 62–87: 85. 65  Cf. e.g., Cancik, Mythische und Historische Wahrheit, 107; Shrimpton, History and Memory, 230–31; Suzanne Said (in her article “Herodotus and the ‘Myth’ of the Trojan War”, in: Baragwanath, Myth, truth, and narrative, 87–106: 89–90) understands oratio obliqua as a sign indicating the lack of accurate knowledge. In her view, Herodotus uses indirect speech to mark material current in social memory, ‘what people say’, expressing his own distance. In the same volume, Irene de Jong (“The Helen Logos,” 131) takes the indirect speech in 2.113,1 to imply that Herodotus takes a distance from what is told, or at least cannot vouch for its truth. De Jong mentions de Bakker’s study and agrees with his general result that stories presented in indirect speech need not automatically imply disbelief in them. 66  Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael Short, Style in fiction: A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose, English language series 13 (London: Longman, 1981), 318–336. A random example of NRSA is Hdt. 8.137,3: ‘she told this to her husband’. The narrator merely mentions the fact that a speech act happened, i.e., that one character communicated with another, without specifying the content of the message. De Bakker, Speech and authority, has listed and classified all character speech in Herodotus’ Histories according to the three categories: direct speech, indirect speech, and ‘narrative report of speech act (NRSA)’. He follows Andrew Laird in modifying the term NRSA into “Record of Speech Act” (RSA), see p. 27 n. 2.

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indirect speech, or NRSA can be influenced by a number of rhetorical considerations, such as the creation of empathy for a character, making a character’s diction more distinct from that of the narrator, presenting speech with fewer or more specific details, speeding up narrative pace, or rendering the narrative in which speech is represented more realistic.67 Keeping material at a distance, therefore, is but one of several rhetorical functions of indirect speech in ancient narratives. Generally speaking, we have to keep in mind that there are no one-to-one matches between different forms of reporting speech and their rhetorical effect. Thus, the same rhetorical end can potentially be achieved by different forms of speech representation, and conversely, a certain form, such as indirect speech, can fulfill various functions. None of these functions corresponds in a fixed way to the five available forms of speech representation. That is to say that, for example, using a lot of direct speech in dialogues is neither the only nor necessarily the best way to make a narrative more realistic. With regard to the function of creating empathy, Meir Sternberg has convincingly shown that a brief summary of a statement or thought, which is quite distant from the original utterance or cognition, can produce affective closeness in the audience, just as direct speech or a direct introspection into a character’s mind may generate a rejection by the reader.68 This means that the formal categories of direct or indirect speech do not automatically indicate either a lesser or higher degree of authenticity or the narrator’s agreement with the reported content.69 As a rule, therefore, indirect speech in literature cannot be taken by default as an indicator of the narrator’s doubt, detachment, or criticism, nor is it unvariably evidence for a nonmimetic, argumentative, or scholarly mode of discourse. In Herodotus’ Histories, the entertaining story of the rich Egyptian king Rhampsinitos and the shrewd thieves is told in indirect speech.70 Indirect speech is thus not naturally and straightforwardly linked to a narrator with a rationalist or research-like approach, but needs to be analyzed in each author or work individually. This differentiation is all the more necessary when the sources are governed by different linguistic and cultural conventions. We cannot assume that classical Hebrew and classical Greek share the same system of speech 67   Meir Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse,” Poetics Today 3 (1982): 107–56: 111. 68  Ibid. 117–19. 69  Brian McHale, Speech Representation, Section 9, in: The Living Handbook of Narratology, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/speech-representation. 70  With the qualification that there is no introductory verb, or if it is ἔλεγον, it does not immediately precede the narration in indirect speech (2.121).

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representation, where indirect speech can be expected to have the same distribution and functions.71 In the Histories, indirect speech is a common phenomenon. Roughly 42% of all character utterances are presented in indirect speech, which amounts to 12% of the overall work. In Genesis through Kings, by contrast, direct speech is the rule. Here, instances of indirect speech and NRSA only amount to 162 words.72 These numbers indicate how rare indirect reports of speech are in biblical narrative, although we should keep in mind that such statistics are not too informative anyway, since the two sources do not follow a similar grammar or similar linguistic conventions. Hebrew narrative often uses direct speech in contexts where Herodotus uses indirect speech, since, in biblical Hebrew, direct speech is the prevalent mode of represented discourse. Primarily building on published research, I will now examine the functions of the narrator’s use of indirect speech in both sources to determine whether it can be taken as a sign of his reservations about a tradition or a piece of information.73 In his comprehensive study Speech and Authority in Herodotus’ Histories, Mathieu de Bakker has convincingly demonstrated two important points. First, as far as usage is concerned, indirect speech and direct speech do not fall into two sharply defined separate camps: Herodotus uses these modes of speech representation alternately in similar literary contexts, and there are many cases where one mode changes into the other as the narrative goes on. The decisive factor for choosing either mode is narrative pace, and less importantly, variation and convention can also have an impact, but the expression of distance or doubted authenticity is generally not one of the deciding factors. Direct speech is used when a character or their words are in the spotlight or 71  C  ynthia L. Miller, The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: a Linguistic Analysis, 2nd ed., Harvard Semitic Museum Publications 55 (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 48 and 45–47, with n. 11 on p. 45; Miller points out that direct speech is the unmarked category of speech representation that is shared by all languages, whereas in some languages indirect speech is absent or marginal. 72  Numbers with reference to Herodotus according to de Bakker, Speech and Authority, 28. Numbers for Gen–Kings are my count based on the forty undisputed instances of indirect speech according to Miller, The Representation, of which these are in narratorial utterances: Gen 24:9; 26:7; 29:12 (twice); 42:25; 45:15; 50:2; Exod 6:9; 19:9; Num 14:10; 30:1; Judg 4:12; 2 Sam 11:22; 17:14;21:16; 1 Kgs 11:21; 22:20; 2 Kgs 8:19; 12:9. 73  The question of whether indirect speech is a targeted narrative strategy of persuasion is more comprehensive. If the assumption underlying this question is that there is one specific claim serially built into indirect speech, the answer is no. De Bakker has shown that the Herodotean narrator sometimes uses indirect speech to increase his own authority; see Speech and Authority, 165–67, 169, 177. On pages 8 and 179, he deals with the adoption of the persona of epic storyteller as a claim to authority.

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when the narrator employs scenic representation to create an impression of live observation. Indirect speech and the mere report of a speech act are used to present information briefly and in a condensed form.74 In a nutshell, the use of indirect speech in Herodotus, as a rule, is chosen for rhetorical and poetic reasons and does not express a stable, recurring narratorial judgment on the reported content. Herodotus’ narrator absorbs some of the traditions he heard of in his inquiries in narratorial discourse and reports others in indirect speech.75 De Bakker calls the latter “informant-speeches.” In Herodotus’ Histories, informantspeeches constitute almost three quarters of the total of indirect speech.76 De Bakker has systematically analyzed indirect speech in this context, where the narrator is apparently most likely to convey doubt and skepticism.77 He concludes—and this is the second relevant finding for this study—that Herodotus’ default attitude about things others tell him is impartial or noncommittal, unless he explicitly comments on or compares sources. According to de Bakker, there may nevertheless be some room for claiming a systematic usage of indirect speech to express a dismissive attitude, but only when the subject matter is the remote past. He suggests that, when stories about the remote past are presented in indirect speech, the narrator remains noncommittal and at times does not ascribe much historiographical value to a tradition in an implicit way. As soon as Herodotus vouches for the reliability of a story 74  Ibid., 36–48. Cf. also Irene de Jong, “Herodotus,” (109): “In itself, the use of reported narrators does not automatically mean that he [Herodotus’ narrator] is distancing himself from these stories.” 75  As mentioned in the beginning of this section, Gordon Shrimpton interprets the strategy of mentioning a source and giving the content in indirect speech as a means for the narrator to distance himself from the material (History and Memory, 230–31, 245). In light of de Bakker’s study, I am not entirely convinced. This aspect needs further attention in the future. It seems that Shrimpton would be right if Herodotus’ mediacy functioned along the lines of Thucydides and Gen–Kings and of much of ancient history writing. If, however, Herodotus sets his own poetical standards, he may not cite implausible traditions as a means to advertise his own authority, credibility, and capacity for judgment (by rejecting them), but in order to demonstrate that even doubtful traditions are valuable data because they can be used as a window allowing some insight into the speaker’s motivations and intentions. 76  An informant-speech is information told to the narrator by a contemporary. Of 22,512 words in indirect speech, 16,304 are part of informant-speeches, according to the tables in de Bakker (Speech and Authority, 28 and 7); I subtracted the five words that are part of an RSA from this number. 77  Informants can be individuals such as Dicaeus in Hdt. 8.65, people of a certain town or nation (e.g., the Greeks in Hdt. 7.189,1, the Egyptians in Hdt. 2.156,2, or even an impersonal group, often referred to by mere λέγουσι(ν) or λέγεται).

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in the remote past, he stops rendering the information in indirect speech.78 In the recent past, in contrast, indirect speech often serves to aggrandize and elevate a story because it is collectively validated as part of social memory, which in de Bakker’s view is a stronger claim to truth than investing it solely with the narrator’s authority.79 The suggestion that informant-speeches express different narratorial judgments on the reliability of the source, depending on which eras of history they refer to, is intriguing. The very least we can learn from his nuanced observations is that Herodotus’ use of indirect speech is a varied matter for close and attentive reading. Indirect speech does not in itself indicate the narrator’s reservations about a certain tradition, and an explanation of the different modes of speech presentation should principally be sought in literary or rhetoric requirements. In fact, de Bakker’s point that the narrator is not the highest authority in the Histories throughout is noteworthy. Collective memory is given a place of honor. Is there any overlap with the Hebrew Bible? Indirect speech in the narrative portions from Genesis to Kings, rare as it is, is a linguistic phenomenon that has varied syntactical expressions.80 A short review of this phenomenon will be useful.81 Cynthia Miller has identified and listed the attestations of indirect speech and NRSA within this corpus. Counting only the unambiguous cases, there are forty cases of indirect speech and NRSA.82 Of these, eighteen are instances of indirect speech and NRSA embedded in a character’s direct speech and need not concern us here, since this study focuses on utterances by the narrator. Of the twenty-two uses in such narrator utterances, twelve are indirect speech and ten are NRSA. Distribution of indirect narratorial reports of speech across Genesis to Kings is not even: there are none in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, whereas Genesis leads 78  De Bakker, Speech and Authority, 167–73; one of his examples is the alleged difference in the quality of information of a (sometimes interrupted) informant-speech in 2.99–141 when compared to information that Herodotus considers as confirmed by non-Egyptians, and therefore does not render it in indirect speech in 2.147–2.154. This example is further discussed in the following paragraph. 79  De Bakker, Speech and Authority, 174. 80  Miller, The Representation, esp. chapter 3: “Syntactic Varieties of Indirect Speech”, 93–141. 81  Cancik (Mythische und historische Wahrheit, 107) has claimed that Biblical Hebrew does not know indirect speech and interpreted this as evidence for the narrator’s or historian’s lack of distance from the object/subject matter of his account. This could be a residue of nineteenth-century scholarship; I. F. L. George stated in his Mythus und Sage. Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Entwickelung dieser Begriffe und ihres Verhältnisses zum christlichen Glauben (Berlin 1837, 42) that there is no indirect speech in the language of oriental people. 82  Ambiguous attestations to my mind are e.g., Gen 31:22 (cf. Exod 14:5) and 1 Kgs 2:29.41, which could also be read as direct speech.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 125

the count, with eight instances in that book alone. However, the majority of these expressions are usually not mentioned in grammars as indirect speech,83 since they either are syntactically realized as an infinitival complement (e.g., Num 9:4 ‫בני ישראל לעשת הפסח‬-‫ )וידבר משה אל‬or are instances of a NRSA in which the original utterance is condensed to a short summary that something was said, as for instance in Exod 19:9: ‫ויגד משה את דברי העם ליהוה‬. Despite the difference between the Greek and Hebrew language families, narrative usage of indirect speech in the two sources is similar. The most prominent function of indirect speech and NRSA in Hebrew narratives is to refer back to previous direct speech. Often, the content of the speech is known to the audience, but not to the character; thus, repeating previous utterances summarily is a way of narrative economy in order to keep up the pace of the story. In a few instances, both the speakers and the content of their speech is so marginal that the plot does not call for a more elaborate representation, but can do with a mere report of a speech act (Gen 26:7; 50:2). There are only two cases where a protagonist’s utterance is reported in indirect speech and the utterance is not repetition of earlier direct speech. In the first, the use of indirect speech curiously abridges Jacob’s introduction of himself to Rachel within scenic narration (Gen 29:12). The second matches the brevity of a summarylike report about one of David’s legendary fighters (2 Sam 21:16). One case of character speech reported as NRSA in which the narrator chooses not to tell the audience everything, and thereby keeps the moment private and intimate, is in the middle of the emotional recognition scene between Joseph and his brothers (Gen 45:15). The curtain drops on the characters, as it were, with a mere report of a speech act: “and afterwards his brothers talked with him.” This reticence is a meaningful gap, since the audience does not learn whether the brothers were happy about their reunion after so many years or had a bone to pick with each other. In this general picture of similarities between the use of indirect speech in Gen–Kings and Herodotus’ Histories, there is also a striking difference concerning the treatment of sources: In biblical narratives of the past, there are no informant-speeches, to use de Bakker’s terminology. The narrator does not label traditions of external origin as such. There are no formulas such as “it is said that …” or “the Benjaminites say that….” This can be explained by the 83  Paul Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols., Subsidia biblica (Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1991), have no paragraph on indirect speech, neither have Christo van der Merwe, Jackie Naudé, and Jan Kroeze, A biblical Hebrew reference grammar (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Miller (The representation, 4) has mentioned the lack of treatment as a phenomenon in its own right in grammars and given an overview on grammatical and literary studies.

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general difference in mediacy and narratorial presentation between the two sources. In addition to the narration of past events, the Histories also give the readers an idea of how Herodotus went about collecting, ordering, evaluating, and making sense of them. The narrating voice in the biblical narrative, on the other hand, does not willingly tell about the account’s composition. So far, the discussion shows that, for the questions of this comparative study, it is not enough to compare indirect speech as an isolated syntactic phenomenon without taking into account the different conventions of the two literary traditions. Indirect speech in Herodotus cannot be interpreted as an indicator for the narrator’s doubts or reservations, nor does it per se imply a scholarly or detached treatment of information gained from a third party. Its use does not parallel that of modern researchers (in some languages at least84), but is rather governed by considerations closer to those of a director of a play or movie. In order to test this result for Herodotus, I would like to discuss a chapter from the Histories (Hdt. 8.65) where it seems unclear whether the narrator commits himself to an eyewitness report he heard from someone else, or rather distances himself from the story, possibly through subtle irony. It is the story about a supernatural sign—an enormous cloud of dust in the deserted plain of Thriasion, accompanied by clamor and shouting—and its interpretation as a divine omen of a Greek victory over the Persians by a bystander, Dicaeus. In the context of the Histories, two Greeks in Persian ranks, Dicaeus and Demaratos, witness this spectacle and talk about it (8.65,2–5) when the Greeks are at a low point: Athens is already taken and burned by the Persians, and there is no hope for victory in the imminent sea battle at Salamis. Only previous oracles and divine portents let a reader with sympathies for the Greeks keep up hope that the situation might somehow turn. Now, it is obvious that the story about the divine sign suits the narrator as a foreshadowing of the Greek victory and as a way to elevate the sea battle. But does Herodotus want his readers to understand the text literally, or does he exploit it for the rhetorical effect while at the same time he mistrusts it as authentic information? The gist of this episode is that the gods are on the side of the Greeks and support them in the war against the Persians. This fits well with the overall interpretation by the narrator of the roles of gods and human beings in the 84  Some confusion about indirect speech, especially with German speaking scholars, is probably due to conventions in modern historiography: Here, direct speech is used for verbatim quotes, whereas indirect speech is used for summarizing quotes transmitting the content of another person’s statement, not the wording. In German, a characteristic feature of indirect speech is the subjunctive, which in scholarly literature is also used for summaries of positions about which the author has herself reservations.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 127

Persian wars.85 Thomas Harrison is right when he sees the apparition of the Eleusinian procession as one element in the “pattern of divine opposition to the Persians, and divine favor towards the Greeks”.86 What is more, the tale of this strange event is corroborated twice, in the beginning and ending, by naming the source, ‘Dicaeus, son of Theokydes’, and in the end additionally by the statement that the informant gave the names of further witnesses. Also, the names of the observers themselves can be interpreted as strategies of persuasion. In the Histories, Demaratos functions as a reliable and honest counselor for Xerxes. Dicaeus may well be a telling name, ‘the righteous’—especially since Herodotus rarely gives people’s names when he retells stories someone purportedly told him.87 Besides, this is the only appearance of this character, which suggests that he owes his appearance in the textual actual world to his authenticating function of an eyewitness. Rather than as a narrative strategy to disclaim responsibility for a tradition, I prefer reading the proper name as a narrative strategy to confirm the tale. On the other hand, some factors suggest that Herodotus treats this episode from a safe distance. The story of Dicaeus and Demaratos witnessing a strange Eleusinian procession and Dicaeus’ prompt insight that this forebodes the Persian defeat at Salamis seems somewhat artificial. The scene is not constitutive of the larger narrative in a way that it is interrelated with other chapters. In fact, it could have been inserted as a narrative strategy aggrandizing the war of the Greeks against Persia and elevating it to a heroic and significant event that even moves the gods. Second, the way in which the narrator invests the episode with claims to enhance its reliability is conspicuous. Mentioning the eyewitnesses by name does not make the situation in itself more plausible. Many Greeks fight on the Persian side. Why should Dicaeus happen to witness the spectacle together with Demaratos, of all people?88 In addition, Herodotus’ 85  More precisely, about the interpretation of Themistocles’ claim in 8.109,3 that it was the gods and not the Athenians who saved the Greeks from being defeated by the Persians. This view coincides with the narrator’s in 7.139,5; cf. also the speeches by Themistocles in 8.60 γ and Artabanos in 7.10 δ2. 86  Thomas Harrison, “The Persian invasions,” in Brill’s companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert Bakker, Irene de Jong, Hans van Wees (Leiden 2002), 551–578: 561. Other signs in line with this one are the storms that strongly reduce the Persian fleet (8.13), the miraculous resistance against the Persians who intend to sack Delphi (8.35–39) and the flood at Potidaea (8.129). 87  Other instances where Herodotus’ narrator gives names are 2.55,3; 3.55,2; 4.76,6; and 9.16,1. 88  Fehling (Quellenangaben, 135) has drawn attention to this point; he explains the choice of Demaratos as interlocutor with narrative economy that avoids introducing a new character to a story if another one can do the job.

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narrator does not claim to have heard the story directly from Dicaeus. These observations can, in my view, be interpreted best by the fact that Herodotus’ narrator caters to at least two audiences: One of the average Greek listener who expects to hear certain stories current in their communicative memory, be it for entertainment, elevation, or regional identity, and a smaller and more critical audience of Herodotus’ colleagues who probably take supernatural influences on a course of events into account but may or may not believe in the stories about deities. The Herodotean narrator’s general attitude toward divine omens and incredible stories is ambivalent. Apart from expectations of the audience and its narrative function as foreshadowing, his (purported) reverence for divine matters89 could also have motivated the inclusion of this story into his work. Since it can be verified only by talking to Dicaeus or Demaratos—which, at the time of Herodotus’ inquiries, is nearly impossible, due to distance in time and space—Herodotus’ narrator does not seem to heed his own criticism: ἐς ἀφανὲς τὸν μῦθον ἀνενείκας οὐκ ἔχει ἔλεγχον.90 To conclude, the mere fact that Herodotus’ narrator relates this scene in indirect speech does not help us decide whether the narrator’s attitude toward it is serious or playful. In de Bakker’s terminology, this story is an informantspeech, and therefore indirect speech is the usual way of presenting it, according to Herodotus’ own conventions. If it indicated the narrator’s reservations, it would be at odds with several explicit reliability claims. If the anecdote was well known in the general public, this use of indirect speech could be explained as an expression of the validity and authentication that comes with the place of a content in intersubjective cultural memory. Therefore, the narrative texture is such that it invites a general audience to take the claims of this scene seriously. Nevertheless, to a small, more critical audience, the strategies of persuasion may appear exaggerated. When a text strongly draws the reader’s attention to its form, it may be a hint to the reader not to understand it as a reference to the actual world, but to look for its meaning beneath the narrative surface. In these cases, the narrating voice does not commit itself to the factuality of the event, but agrees with the overall narrative message. This discussion of whether indirect speech is a distancing technique supports the general picture that the use of indirect speech in the Histories cannot be taken as an indicator of the narrator’s reservations, since it can likewise be used in a context where his attitude is noncommittal or even supportive of one or the other story. Often, the use of direct or indirect speech is governed 89  See: 2.65; 9.65. 90  Hdt. 2.23: having referred the tale to the [realm of the] uncertain and cannot therefore be disproved by argument (translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt, modified).

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 129

by stylistic and aesthetic considerations. Therefore, we should not use the mode of speech representation as an indicator of the narrator’s detachment or proximity to the narrated content. It makes no essential contribution to accessibility or the experience of immediacy or distance on the part of the audience. 4

Characters Indirectly Addressing the Extradiegetic Audience

Readers of the Bible are familiar with Solomon’s depiction as an exceptionally rich king. Equally exceptional are some of the biblical narrator’s means of persuasion. To convince its audience, the narrating voice uses bold and fairly explicit techniques that stand out against the usual biblical indirectness. Since the biblical narrator is hardly noticeable, his assertions testifying to Solomon’s wealth may not be understood as a full-grown witness. Therefore, characters can perform this function more effectively. The queen of Sheba on the Arabian Peninsula, whose kingdom in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE was one of the most wealthy ‘states’ in the Middle East, owing to the monopoly on the export of incense, has her scene as a witness to Solomon’s fame, wisdom, and wealth. Being herself a reasonable candidate for the position the narrative boldly claims for Solomon, she makes for a key witness in this issue.91 The whole episode of her visit can be read as a narrative strategy of persuasion, since her purpose in visiting Solomon is to verify whether the news she has heard about the Israelite king is true. To be sure, the initial emphasis is on the verification of Solomon’s wisdom, not his wealth. However, it is the king’s wealth and grandeur, things that can be seen, that trigger her testimony (1 Kgs 10:6–8): The report was true which I heard in my own land of your affairs and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came (here) so that my eyes could see it; and, behold, the half was not told me; your wisdom and prosperity surpass the report which I heard. Happy are your men! Happy are these your servants, who continually stand before you and hear your wisdom!

‫אמת היה הדבר אשר שמעתי בארצי‬ ‫על־דבריך ועל־חכמתך׃ ולא־האמנתי‬ ‫לדברים עד אשר־באתי ותראינה עיני‬ ‫והנה לא־הגד־לי החצי הוספת חכמה‬ ‫וטוב אל־השמועה אשר שמעתי׃ אשרי‬ ‫אנשיך אשרי עבדיך אלה העמדים‬ ‫לפניך תמיד השמעים את־חכמתך׃‬

RSV, slightly adapted

91  In antiquity, favorable statements from witnesses belonging to the competing party were considered especially strong. Compare, e.g., the importance Christian scholars assigned to statements about Jesus in Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War.

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The queen’s words are a perfect testimony to Solomon’s wisdom. The rumors she heard about the king of Israel seem so unbelievable that she first was sceptical. Having seen Solomon and his court in person, however, she not only confirms the initial information, but adds to the king’s glory by saying the rumors were true but incomplete. However, in the immediate context in the story-world, nobody needs such an elaborate affirmation, because the people present in the scene are all eyewitnesses to the king’s stature. The queen’s confirmation would make sense as part of dialogue upon her return. In the present scene, she addresses Solomon and her words express her surprise and awe to her host. Since the queen speaks about her thoughts, this assertion reminds me of an aside in drama—words spoken to the extradiegetic audience and not to a fellow character on the scene, as if the queen and the external audience belonged to the same communicative frame. The chronological abyss between two different points in time, between Solomon’s present and the present of the discourse-now, seems to be absent for a moment. The queen of Sheba confirms to the narratees the hearsay about Solomon’s wisdom and wealth as authentic information. Although her address beyond narrative levels is implicit, it can be read as metaleptic: a character addresses an extradiegetic listener.92 Its effect is to authenticate the events presented in the narrative and to draw the narrator’s audience in the discourse-world closer to the Israelites’ glorious past. In this case, it is a verbal testimony that time-travels, bridging between past and present. The biblical account also features an object intended as evidence for later generations. Israel’s wonderful preservation by God in their long sojourn in the wilderness, without subsistence, is authenticated by a jar full of sixth-day manna—that is, manna not affected by decay. The heavenly food is safeguarded in the story-world with the purpose of a reminder to future generations. Moses commands his brother Aaron to preserve some manna for posterity:93 ‫ויאמר משה זה הדבר אשר צוה יהוה מלא העמר ממנו למשמרת לדרתיכם למען יראו‬ ‫ ויאמר משה‬:‫את־הלחם אשר האכלתי אתכם במדבר בהוציאי אתכם מארץ מצרים‬ ‫אל־אהרן קח צנצנת אחת ותן־שמה מלא־העמר מן והנח אתו לפני יהוה למשמרת‬ :‫לדרתיכם‬ 92  Implicit because the queen does not explicitly address the reader or listener. 93  Exod 16:32–33 “And Moses said, ‘This is what YHWH has commanded: “Let an omer of it be kept throughout your generations, that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.”’ And Moses said to Aaron, ‘Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before YHWH, to be kept throughout your generations.’”

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Here the reader gets the impression of Moses as a far-sighted leader who knows a historical moment when he is still living it. Keenly aware of the human desire to see material proof for extraordinary stories, as it were, Moses sees to it that future Israelites will be able to see the celestial food with their own eyes (‫)למען יראו‬. Although the jar filled with manna is without a narratorial claim that this relic is still around, it is a strategy of persuasion directed at an audience external to the account, to Jews in the exilic and postexilic periods.94 Moses and Aaron’s contemporaries do not need this jug with manna as evidence, since they see the celestial food every day except for the Sabbath. The mere talk about memorialization of the manna within the narrative already has an effect on the audience’s memory: it brings to their attention the noteworthiness of the event and encourages its remembrance.95 The narrative strategy of Exod 16:32 creates a bond between the past (the story-world) and the present (the discourse-world) similar to that made by the formula ‘to this day,’ insofar as a character acts within the story-world to affect a future extradiegetic audience. Later Jewish texts show that this claim was not lost. The Letter to the Hebrews has a description of the tent sanctuary and lists the (now golden) jug with manna as a content of the ark, along with Aaron’s rod,96 and the tablets of the covenant (Heb 9:4). In Herodotus’ Histories, we can also find utterances of characters that could be read as directed to the account’s extradiegetic audience. Consider for instance speeches by wise advisor characters such as Solon or Artabanos. In contrast to the examples above, they are even better embedded in the story-world. Thus, their metaleptic quality is a possible but not obtrusive interpretation. In addition, the wise speakers do not implicitly testify to something in the past being the case. However—and this is what concerns us here— representing these characters’ advice in such a universal way that it can easily be adopted by the reader for his own time makes Herodotus’ narrative of the past more relevant and accessible. 94  ‫ למשמרת לדרתיכם‬is mentioned twice and thus highlighted. 95  Also, the ‘fact’ that, within the story-world, the mere thought of preserving a portion of sixth-day manna makes perfect sense is a strategy of persuasion: it highlights the marvel of the contradictory nature of one and the same substance, the manna, in correspondence to the days of the week as a divine order. Whereas on five days of the week the manna is highly short-lived and perishable, it is permanent on the sixth day in view of the Sabbath. Moses’ command, following God’s, to set a portion of manna apart for posterity also buttresses the consistency of a story-world with separate regularities for profane and holy days. 96  Num 17:25; with Exod 16:32, it shares the vocabulary of ‫למשמרת‬. Both objects are to be placed before God or the ‫עדות‬, respectively.

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Narrative Mode and Source Criticism

By way of their narrative techniques, both representations of a past lay claim to authority and reliability. Herodotus’ Histories and biblical narratives both use scenic presentation as enactment, with its mimetic illusion of making the audience an eyewitness. This common ground has not been highlighted here, since it has received enough attention in both biblical and Herodotean studies. The audience gets the impression of being direct observers of past events without the help and work of the narrator as an intermediary. In addition to this shared way of narrative presentation, Herodotus’ narrator additionally applies discursive comments and argumentative strategies of persuasion that rely on various cognitive and rational operations such as enumerating reasons, evaluating individual pieces of information, or presenting his line of thought. This raises the question of whether one of these two Herodotean modes of presentation—the diegetic or even immediate diegetic mode and the mixed mode that creates a texture in which the diegetic and discursive modes are woven into each other—determines the audience’s reception of the Histories as a whole. Do nonmimetic elements, such as the frequent discursive intrusions and the narrative strand informing us about the thought processes in the creation of the account, reduce the illusion of direct observation of the past in the more or less purely diegetic paragraphs that claim to depict the past as it really happened? Foregrounding the narrator’s influence on the shape and content of Herodotus’ Histories has in fact been interpreted as a narrative strategy to signal the account’s constructed, and thus antiillusionist, nature. This is a central point in Carolyn Dewald’s rich and seminal essay about Herodotus’ authorial voice. She interprets the narrative surface of the Histories as a demonstration of Herodotus’ personal research experience that attaining accurate knowledge about the world is difficult and complex. The particular rhetorical shape of his account means to keep the audience from relating to the logoi as straightforward and complete records of past events.97 Rather, the recipients are invited to grasp the difficulty of appropriately depicting the past: coming to terms with this task requires experts. Therefore, still according to Dewald, the intrusive narrator serves to present the Histories as Herodotus’ own reconstruction, thereby representing the past as refracted by his reasoning and arrangement. The past is thus presented as not directly available. This, however, should not make us forget that Herodotus’ narrator transmits without further qualification whatever he deems incontrovertible and the ‘actual logos’ (τὰ γενόμενα; τὸν ἐόντα λόγον). Therefore, he too does not always 97  Ibid., especially 163 and 167, but also 160–62 and 153.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 133

manifest his own inferences and conclusions as his perspective, but presents them as facts.98 For the effect this has on authority, consider the difference between ‘it is a fact that X’ and ‘Herodotus says that X’. In cognitive science, the concept of meta-representation explains the ability of human beings to discern statements that are factually true about the actual world from those that reflect somebody’s representation of the world. The same mental processes happen when we read a literary text that we regard as reliable: Here, a reader assimilates narratorial utterances as true in the sense that they have the power to build up the narrative world. Statements by a reliable narrator create the story-world. World-making statements of this kind are stored in human memory without a source tag, whereas assertions by characters about the story-world receive such a tag.99 As soon as such a piece of information has proven itself as factually true in line with the rules of the story-world, the tags preserving its source or speaker will be classified as irrelevant information and forgotten. Now, Robert Fowler has credited Herodotus with the discovery of the problem of sources in history writing, meaning that he was aware that the absence of sources or the contradiction of two or more sources is a general methodological problem requiring critical tools of thought.100 That is why, in Fowler’s view, Herodotus constantly mentions sources and discusses the basis of his knowledge. Endorsing this view, Maro Dorati has added that Herodotus’ insight into the nature of sources made him preserve the source-tags as valuable information for historical discourse.101 Much earlier, Carolyn Dewald had described this special characteristic of Herodotus’ way of representation, which was not copied by subsequent historians, as one that reflects an interest in the traditions as they are told, regardless of whether Herodotus accepts them as true or not: “He is interested in untrue logoi and their capacity to inspire belief. […] Malevolent and mythic logoi sometimes receive his attention because he

98  See also Shrimpton, History and Memory, 230–31 and 245. Therefore, Dewald’s insight holds for certain parts of the Histories, but not for the entire work: “He is not so much interested in our adopting his conclusions as he is in showing us the extent to which the narrative he recounts is a tissue of data that has been critically evaluated” (“Narrative surface,” 162). 99  Cf. Robert Vogt, “Combining Possible Worlds Theory and Cognitive Theory,” 144–45. 100  Fowler, “Herodotus and His Contemporaries,” 62, 79, and 86: “Herodotos’ constant discussion of sources is the unique element in his voiceprint, so far as our evidence goes; we see now that it is an integral part of his self-perception as an historian. […] He did not invent his sources; he discovered the problem of sources.” 101  Dorati, “Indicazioni di fonti,” 227.

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wants to present belief in them as a significant fact—one that can explain subsequent actions undertaken by the individuals who believe the logos.”102 These scholars all have important points. However, I am not sure how critical Herodotus’ awareness of different sources actually was. The issue certainly crops up, and further on we will see two Herodotean criteria of source criticism, but it need not have been with the author throughout the entire composition. In addition, the discussion of Herodotus’ use of material remains in the following chapters will further illuminate this problem. In Herodotus’ Histories, many traditions are incorporated in narratorial discourse without a sourcetag. The difference between my two sources concerning mediacy, described in this chapter as affecting the audience’s awareness of the fact that the narrative is a constructed artifact, leads to the question of whether it also becomes manifest in the writers’ handling of sources. Herodotus’ narrative at times appreciates and preserves the informative value of where a tradition comes from—if we are to take his statements at face value and not as strategies of persuasion he invented for their rhetorical benefit. The biblical narrative—as well as Thucydides’ account, for that matter—is presented as the valid and definite memory of the past precisely by not mentioning the sources. Its point of view ceases to be one of several perspectives, but becomes the authoritative version.103 In order to have an effect on the audience, strategies of persuasion do not have to be noticed by the recipients. On the contrary, effective narrative means rarely come to our attention. An account of a past has convinced its audience if reactions such as “How does he know?” or “That’s impossible!” do not come up. This seems to be the path of the biblical authors, as if they were aware of the double-edged nature of cooking in front of the audience by exposing one’s sources of information and one’s path of reasoning. At any rate, the intrusions of the Herodotean narrator may well have more than one function. It is productive to consider that the purpose of narratorial comments need not be to give information about Herodotus’ actual procedure in all places. The Herodotean narrator is also a skilled rhetorician whose aim is to convince his audience, and this entails advertising his own reasoning. As seen before, an example of this ambivalence of some statements between a 102  Dewald, “Narrative surface,” 166. 103  Cf. Veyne (Les Grecs, 19–20): “S’ils [Dionysios and Titus-Livius] avaient appris comment s’était formée cette tradition première chez les premiers historiens de Rome, quelles sources, quelles legendes et quels souvenirs s’étaient fondus en leur creuset, ils y auraient vu seulement la préhistoire de la tradition: ils ne l’auraient pas considéree comme un texte plus authentique; les matériaux d’une tradition ne sont pas cette tradition ellemême. Celle-ce se présente toujours comme un texte, un récit faisant autorité: l’histoire naît comme tradition et ne s’élabore pas à partir de sources”.

Connecting and Disconnecting Story-World and Discourse-World 135

piece of information and a strategy of persuasion is Herodotus’ claim to accuracy and certainty (ἀτρεκείη) and reality (ἀληθείη) in the rather indirect way of denying it now and then for some of his own results or those of other thinkers. Similarly, much of the ‘autobiographical’ material may be due to presentational decisions. Presenting some of his source material as information gathered during his travels makes it more accessible to the audience because it is told as a personal experience. Accepting these two qualifications does not principally question the general character of Herodotus’ account as a rhetorically shaped discourse of research, knowledge, and the quest for truth. In this chapter, I have discussed four ways by which the narrating voice expresses either the connection or disconnection of story-world and discourseworld: highlighting or concealing the otherness of and the distance between the two worlds, the number and obtrusiveness of discursive intrusions in the primarily diegetic narrative, characters addressing the extradiegetic audience, and the extent to which the narrator presents the account as a composition, a product of his or her own work and consciousness, exemplified here by the reference to sources. As shown, these narrative parameters can be set in various ways, and Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis–Kings differ in the way their narrating voice puts them into narrative practice. Thereby, different settings may at times lead to the impression of immediacy or distance, or they can create a similar effect on the audience, for instance a close connection of the narrative world of the past and the present, although they achieve this through quite different narrative means. The role of objects in this respect is certainly worth a more detailed examination.

PART 3 Varied Functions of Objects as Means of Persuasion

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Introduction As the events of times gone by are invisible unless they were happening just now, and thus ephemeral, material relics from distant times are sometimes the only remains from the life of earlier generations. They become important witnesses to the past. From a slightly different angle, every generation inhab­ its a world full of objects large and small that, to a great extent, they have not created themselves. Especially in antiquity, disposable products were not widely used, average households had fewer objects, and the objects them­ selves persisted for a longer time span. Thus, it is not surprising that some objects, especially valuable or symbolic ones, had a story attached to them. Telling something about the object’s origin, its creator, earlier owner, or donor, answers questions about the physical world people inhabit. Sometimes, the stories reach back into the past for only a few generations, sometimes for a very long time span. Due to this double nature of some remains—having been part of the inventory of a past world and being part of the physical actual world— narrators of accounts of a past are likely to use such objects as a means of persuasion in some way or another. Of course, it is primarily public objects such as large stones, buildings, tombs, votive offerings, and commemorative monuments or inscriptions that are relevant for narratives of a past. We can find plenty of them in both Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis to Kings. Accordingly, I will analyze the narrator’s use of only those objects that establish a connection between the past and the present. Often, these relics are monuments or other commemorative ‘buildings’ that characters in the narrative put up intentionally for themselves and future generations, or that the narrator uses as a visualization of a point. In contrast to modern archae­ ologists, who also read objects not intentionally left to posterity as a source of knowledge about the past, the narrators in both Herodotus and the bib­ lical narrative largely refer to memorials—that is, objects either specifically made or set aside in memory of a certain event—or to objects secondarily invested with a commemorative purpose already in the past. Most of these rel­ ics are made from materials known for their relative durability, such as stone or copper.1 This is not to say that the narrators are not innovative in their use 1  Herodotus also mentions bones as relics from a war (3.12 of fallen Persians and Egyptians, 9.83 of fallen Greeks and Persians at Plataeae), but here, Herodotus is either shown the bones or has heard about them and has not noticed and interpreted them in a spontaneous experi­ ence of autopsy. Examples such as the property or contents of intestines of cows in Scythia (4.58) or the snake skeletons in Arabia (2.75) belong to the present.

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of relics from the past.2 Generally speaking, however, they do not refer to non­ descript or everyday objects. The aim of the following analysis is to determine how the narrators of Genesis to Kings and Herodotus’ Histories use physical remains from the past as means of persuasion. Guiding questions are: – Are there different kinds of strategies connected to material remains? – How central is the object for the memory of a specific event? – What factors account for the persuasive force of the relic? This emphasis on the analysis of narrative strategy means that I will not explore questions related to the historical genesis of the text, including the writers’ reasons for the selection of these specific monuments as means of persuasion (and not others) and explanations for the need of authentication and persua­ sion in their discourse-now. In order to analyze the use and function of these strategies, it is not necessary to demonstrate that a specific assertion was new or in doubt, or that a certain question had been answered differently before. Historical or even archaeological questions will therefore not be addressed unless this helps to clear up the comprehension of the mechanics in the text. I proceeded by first determining a corpus of material remains in both sources, and then analyzing their use for persuasion in a second step. This resulted in a very interesting and diverse compilation. For practical reasons of manageability, I restricted my analysis of the Histories to the more ‘histori­ cal’ episodes, meaning stories about past states or events—which leaves aside clearly ethnographical chapters with descriptions of human behavior in other parts of the world. A second filter was applied to select the chapters with a connection to the main narrative: the main agents in the Persian wars, which are various Greek cities and barbarian rulers with their retinues.3 This unfor­ tunately excludes the Egyptian logos. Since I am interested in objects with a narrative purpose in the history beyond being mentioned ‘for the record’, I excluded objects that seem to be mentioned only for the sake of encyclopedic

2  For instance, Herodotus exploits votive offerings to sanctuaries to support his account, going beyond the particulars of the individual act of dedication. An example is his use of a victory trophy as an object symbolizing the defeat of the losing party instead of the victory of the combatants. 3  To give two examples of an object left aside: the building carved out of one monolith at the entrance to the sanctuary at Sais (2.175,3–5), a house that Herodotus admires and gives its measurements; the tomb of Hyperborean women buried on the island of Delos, which is more ethnographical but has a historical component, as it establishes a link between the Hyperboreans and those present on this island (4.34,2). Most episodes in Egyptian history were also passed over.

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knowledge.4 Helpful references for my compilation of relics in Herodotus’ Histories were Wilhelm Schmid’s list of phrases like ‘up to my time’, Alfred von Gutschmid’s “Index fontium Herodoti,” and Neel Smith’s online table “Herodotus and material culture”.5 The material remains from Genesis to Kings is a compilation of objects accompanied by the annotation ‘to this day’ (‫ )עד היום‬or similar phrases, as well as objects selected by reading biblical narratives or by a search for cer­ tain keywords such as ‘stone’ or ‘stele/standing stone’ (‫אבן‬, ‫)מצבה‬. For both sources, my choice of objects and material remains used for persuasion is rep­ resentative but not exhaustive. It comprises of enough data to allow drawing exemplary conclusions. Most of the material remains compiled here and rel­ evant as potential strategies of persuasion have one or more of the following characteristics: they are relics, dedications, or monuments (a) accompanied by a commentary of the narrator, (b) set up by characters in the narrative, (c) claimed by the narrator to be part of the actual world too, or (d) they are buildings erected by or for the general public.6 Last but not least, I would like to reiterate the point that my reading and identification of strategies of persuasion can only approximate the way in which an ancient audience understood the same texts. Therefore, there will necessarily be a certain anachronistic element in the following observations, as I am naturally steeped in a different period of time, which affects social, literary, and linguistic conventions, as well as epistemology and more. The fol­ lowing comparative analysis of the relics is structured according to the objects’ narrative functions. Since these functions of objects do not wholly overlap in the biblical narratives and Herodotus, and since a given function will be more frequent in one source than in the other, there naturally will be more examples from one source here and from the other there.

4  E.g., Croesus’ dedications to Boeotian Thebes, Ephesus, and Delphi that are mentioned with­ out a story giving a motivation or explanation (1.92). 5  Wilhelm Schmid, Die griechische Literatur in der Zeit der attischen Hegemonie vor dem Eingreifen der Sophistik, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur Vol. 2 (München: Beck, 1934). His list of the phrase “up to my time” is the latter part of note 9 on p. 591. Alfred von Gutschmid, “Index fontium Herodoti”, in: id., Kleine Schriften IV, ed. Franz Rühl, (Leipzig: Teubner 1893), 145–87; Neel Smith, Herodotus and material culture, fusiontable that used to be accessible; online the catalogue of Herodotus’ source citations compiled by Gordon Shrimpton and Kathryn Gillis concentrates on stories Herodotus heard but does not list objects as sources (“Appendix I” in: Shrimpton, History and memory, 229–65). 6  In Herodotus’ Histories, buildings are read as monuments, frequently referred to and looked for as evidence.

CHAPTER 5

Material Remains as Authentication 1

Definition of Empirical Evidence

Scholars of Herodotus’ Histories have long noted the importance of material remains. One trajectory in research has been to point out Herodotus’ interest in inquiry, reaching out to find new material and answers. Material remains, however, have received less attention than oral and written sources. The function of tangible relics from the past in the Histories has been interpreted in different, if not opposing ways. Whereas some see them as Herodotus’ preferred sources and as more reliable than information transmitted orally,1 others have emphasized that the use of monuments in Herodotus’ account is sometimes a rhetorical strategy devoid of factual content.2 A closer look at a number of material remains from the past and a comparison with those in the Hebrew Bible will help to define the role of these objects in a more nuanced way. The notion that the default function of objects in the Histories is proof certainly needs qualification.3

1  Dietram Müller, “Herodot—Vater des Empirismus?,” in Gnomosyne: Menschliches Denken und Handeln in der frühgriechischen Literatur: Festschrift für Walter Marg zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Gebhard Kurz (München: Beck, 1981), 299–318. According to Lateiner (Historical Method), Herodotus “overrated the significance of autopsy for determining the facts of history” (58) in his “devotion to the visible, to monuments that justify credence in long-last people and events” (260 n. 51). 2  Stephanie West, “Herodotus’ Epigraphical Interests,” CQ 35.2 (1985): 278–305; Dewald, “Reading the World,” in Rosen and Farrell, Nomodeiktes, 55–70; Bichler, “Zur Funktion der Autopsiebehauptungen,” 135–51. 3  Müller, “Herodot—Vater des Empirismus?,” 306; Charles Hedrick, “The Meaning of Material Culture,” in Rosen and Farrell, Nomodeiktes, 17–37: 23 and 25–26. To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive study of the role of objects in Herodotus’ Histories. Fehling (Herodotus and His ‘Sources’) has studied a range of objects in Herodotus, but no dedications in temples, and Donald Lateiner, “Nonverbal Communication in the Histories of Herodotus,” Arethusa 20 (1987): 83–119: 116, gives a partial list of memorials including trophies, booty, tombs, objects, statues, and buildings. Hollmann looks at omens, portents, and symbols, rather than material remains: Alexander Hollmann, The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus’ Histories, Hellenic studies 48 (Washington, DC: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011). Of course, the comparison between the way monuments are presented and used in Herodotus and what is known about them from archaeological and historical research has been used as a control for the facticity of Herodotus’ account, but this does not concern this study.

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As for Gen–Kings, few scholars have studied the narrative function of material remains from the past. Objects within the text-world have been related to archaeological finds or have served as a starting point for the imagination of visual artists throughout the centuries. There has been considerable work on etiological narratives in the Bible, but since the focus of that work is most often on questions of genres or textual genesis, it is less relevant for the present study. Helpful references have been Geoghegan’s monograph on the formula “until this day,” Egbert Ballhorn’s study with useful insights on the monuments in Joshua, and Eckart Otto’s interpretation of ‘antiquarian’ comments in Deuteronomy.4 Offering material evidence is a strategy of persuasion. Narratives about a past represent a world that is for the most part lost and inaccessible to both the writers and their audiences. In this framework, material relics from former times naturally play an important role. They are tangible traces of what is no longer visible, and therefore cannot be investigated directly. The claim that certain objects known in the discourse-world are actual remains from the past achieves a “physical and permanent link to the transitory world of the past”.5 Unless we are talking about contemporary history, the people who populated the past are no longer alive. Certain objects originating in former times, however, have a longer “life span,” and so are still visible in the discourse-now. They can be used to authenticate past events, as they evoke a sense of the physicality of the past, and thus its reality. I start from the assumption that an audience will process such objects with which they are familiar from their own experience as evidence for a certain narrative about a past. This could be an object that they or an acquaintance have seen themselves, or that already has a place in the communicative memory of their time, or that is located in a familiar place such as an important temple. In other words, there has to be a tacit understanding between narrator and narratee that the object is part of their shared world of discourse. And of course, such an object then has to play a role also in the narrative about a past. Thus, objects that function as material evidence have to be present in both the story-world and the actual world or discourse-world. If the object is only part of the inventory of the narrative world, it can easily be dismissed as an invention, as just a story, and when it is present only in the discourse-world, it

4  Geoghegan, The Time, Place, and Purpose; Egbert Ballhorn, Israel am Jordan: Narrative Topographie im Buch Josua, BBB 162 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); Otto, Deuteronomium 1,1–4,43. 5  Hedrick, “The Meaning of Material Culture,” 21.

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has no past as it comes without a story. The claim to the continuity of objects from the past into the discourse-now therefore seems a necessary criterion for proof as a means of persuasion. As set forth in the previous chapter, I use linguistic markers to determine whether an object is stated or implied to exist in both worlds. Skeptics may object that the decision of whether an object was part of Herodotus’ reality in Greek states or colonies, or part of the biblical writers’ physical environment, must involve a historical and archaeological study of each relic on its own. However, not only would this be another project, but such a procedure would allow only partial answers: it would map the state of knowledge about objects available after a temporal distance of almost twenty-five hundred years but not the state of knowledge contemporary to the biblical writers or Herodotus. Defining the presence of objects in the narrative world and/or the discourse-world in a linguistic way is productive because it provides a feasible criterion for classifying objects narratologically. In this way, I state only whether the narrator claims an object to be around in his time, and not whether the object was, historically speaking, around in Herodotus’ or the Jewish discourse-world in the Persian period. The appendix to this study contains information on all relics discussed with regard to whether continuity with the present is absent, implicit, or explicit. My classification allows for one exception. If the ancient audience’s familiarity with a specific monument can be taken for granted because the object is very well-known in the discourse-world, I do not expect the narrator to make this existence in the discourse-world explicit. This applies, for example, to the Panhellenic statues of Greek gods dedicated at Delphi after the battle of Salamis (Hdt. 8.121), and at Olympia and the Isthmos after the battle of Plataea (9.81). In Gen–Kings, examples are the familiarity of Shechem, Bethel, and Hebron as places of religious cults. The obvious, it seems, needs no additional rhetorical corroboration.6 This observation reveals that evaluation of the accessibility of a textual actual world is relative to cultural and communicative memory and 6  This is, for instance, the case with the treasury of the Siphnians, which will be discussed below. Cf. Bichler’s observation that the narrator makes no claim to autopsy for well-known objects within Greek territory (Bichler, “Autopsiebehauptungen,” 136). Another possible but less convincing explanation for the absence of explicit or implicit markers that the statues still exist in the present is Herodotus’ criticism of an anthropomorphic way of veneration of the gods; see ibid. 143–49. That theses statues were well known can be assumed from their location at Panhellenic sanctuaries, and from the regular festivals commemorating the victories in decisive battles of the Persian wars, see e.g., Steinbock, Social Memory, 68–69, and Michael Jung, Marathon und Plataiai: Zwei Perserschlachten als “lieux de mémoire” im antiken Griechenland, Hypomnemata 164 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 241–57. Cf. also the bibliography on these statues in William C. West, Greek public monuments of the Persian wars (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. Microfilms Internat., 1965); the work is conveniently available online at http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/5569. For the Apollo, see

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to the actual reality shared by an author and his or her audience. As modern readers, we are part of a different context, and therefore might miss a claim to the identity of the text-world with the actual world because we lack a certain piece of information that back then could have been assumed as known. 2

Overview on the Expressions of Continuity in Herodotus and Gen–Kings

Herodotus’ narrator has three basic ways to situate a relic from the past also in the present of the discourse-world. One is the explicit reference to his own time, whether this is by using a formulaic phrase (ἐς ἐμὲ, κατ’ ἐμὲ, μέχρι ἐμεῦ, ἐς ἡμέας) or the temporal adverbial νῦν. These two elements are mostly, but not always, found in combination with a verb form in the present or perfect tense. Another slightly less obtrusive way has only the use of a verb form in the present or perfect tense referring to a relic (ἵδρυται, ἑστᾶσι, ἔστι, κεῖται), at times coupled with the adverbial ἔτι. A subcategory of this way, still weaker in its claim to a physical existence in the narrator’s present, is when the narrating voice makes no existential statement about the object in the discourse-now with verb forms such as those just mentioned, but does use verb forms in the present or perfect tense to describe an object. Examples are Colaeus’ bronze mixing bowl (4.152,4) and the epitaphs for the fallen warriors and the divinor Megistias at Thermopylae (7.228). Note that the act of the dedication or installation is told in a narrative tense and the present or perfect tense appears only in the object’s description. οἱ δὲ Σάμιοι τὴν δεκάτην τῶν ἐπικερδίων ἐξελόντες ἓξ τάλαντα ἐποιήσαντο χαλκήιον κρητῆρος Ἀργολικοῦ τρόπον • πέριξ δὲ αὐτὸ γρυπῶν κεφαλαὶ πρόκροσσοί εἰσι• καὶ ἀνέθηκαν ἐς τὸ Ἥραιον •

A tenth part of their profits, amounting to six talents, they spent on the manufacture of a bronze vessel, shaped like an Argive wine-bowl, with a continuous row of griffins’ heads round the rim; they placed this bowl as an offering in the temple of Hera (transl. Sélincourt).

θαφθεῖσι δέ σφι … καὶ τοῖσι οἴχεσθαι, ἐπιγέγραπται γράμματα λέγοντα τάδε

They were buried (…). The inscription on the memorial in their honor reads

chapter IV, “Panhellenic Monuments of Salamis”, no. 29; for the Zeus and the Poseidon, see chapter III., “Panhellenic Monuments of the Persian Wars in General”, no. 26 and 27.

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In Herodotus, a third and rare way of suggesting that a material relic is part of the discourse-world without directly saying so is having the narrator tell us about his visit at a site. A case in point is the temple of Amon in Egyptian Thebes (2.143,1–3). Here, the action stays in the diegetic mode, with the verbs in narrative tenses. What relates the priests’ actions (showing guests around and explaining them what they see) to the present is the information of to whom they show the statues: ἐποίησαν οἱ ἱρέες … οἷόν τι καὶ ἐμοὶ; οἱ ἱρέες ἐμοὶ ἀπεδείκνυσαν. The narrator’s claim that the priests gave him a guided tour in the sanctuary is the only connection of this scene with the reality of the discourse-now. The narrator neither states having seen the hundreds of statues nor confirms their existence in his and the audience’s present. Given the self-effacing covert mode of narratorial mediacy in Gen–Kings, we will not be surprised that this last option is not at the biblical narrator’s disposal. He uses the other two ways, however, quite similarly, pointing out continuity using the formula ‫ עד היום‬and its variants, or giving information about the present state of the object in a narratorial intrusion. Thus, in Gen– Kings, stating that a relic from the past is physically part of both worlds can take a similar shape, as the following examples show: τοῖσι θεοῖσι ἐξεῖλον ἀκροθίνια ἄλλα τε καὶ τριήρας τρεῖς Φοινίσσας, τὴν μὲν ἐς Ἰσθμὸν ἀναθεῖναι ἥ περ ἔτι καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ ἦν

‫ויבן שם גדעון מזבח ליהוה ויקרא־לו יהוה‬ ‫שלום עד היום הזה עודנו שם בעפרת‬ ‫אבי העזרי‬

First they set aside victory-offerings for the gods, including three Phoenician triremes, one of which they dedicated at the Isthmus (where it remained till my day), (…).

Then Gideon built an altar there to YHWH, and called it ‘YHWH is peace’. To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites (RSV, adapted).

Hdt. 8.121,1

Judg 6:24

Sorting narratorial references to relics from the past analyzed in this study in two groups—(1) those claimed to exist in both the story-world and the world of discourse and (2) those that are only part of the story-world—leaves us with a ratio of 30 (in 1) to 15 (in 2) in total for Herodotus’s Histories and of 25:8 for the Hebrew Bible. Without attaching too much weight to these numbers because of my preselection of objects before the analysis, we can see that a majority of the material relics in each source fulfill the criterion of being part of both worlds. My analyses in this and the following chapters will, among other interests, clarify whether these objects are used at all as material evidence, whether they serve other purposes, and whether the function of proof and authentication is

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reserved to these objects existing in both worlds. The results will allow conclusions about the extent to which the materiality of the past matters, literally, to the historical thought reflected in the two ancient sources. 3

Shared Characteristics of Empirical Evidence

From Herodotus’ Histories we learn that the statue of Apollo in this deity’s temple in Thornax (Peloponnese) was decorated with gold, probably on its face. The gold on this statue is said to have been a generous present to the Spartans by King Croesus. This attribution to a certain person or event in the past, in this case the Lydian king, is one of three basic elements that objects with an authenticating function have in common in both sources. By his reference to the Apollo statue in Thornax, the narrator authenticates early ties between Sparta and Lydia. This early economic-political relationship induces the Spartans to agree to Croesus’ later proposal of a military alliance, because they are flattered and feel an obligation to return the favor.7 The statue therefore also provides a concrete footing for the rather general surmise that the Spartans felt indebted to the Lydians. As a second essential element for objects adduced as proof, the statue’s continuation into the discourse-now, ‘Greece’ in the last third of the fifth century, is expressed both in the temporal adverbial τὸ νῦν and in the perfect tense form of the verb “is set up” (ἵδρυται).8 The third element is the location of the material relic. This information (here, Thornax in Laconia) exploits the persuasive force of precision, specific detail, and familiarity: Mentioning a place well-known to his audience because it is part of their larger actual environment connects the narrative with their present-day reality, which makes the story-world both more interesting (a regional tradition from ‘home’ in a broader sense) and more accessible. Through a statue familiar to his audience, the narrator brings the past to bear on the present and uses an object from the present to illuminate the past. In addition, it strengthens the

7  1.69,4. Thornax, situated at the eastern bank of the Eurotas, had a sanctuary of Apollon Pythaieus. The statue can also be read as a tangible object standing for the invisible motivation of feeling an obligation. See below (“Objects as visuals for motivations and concepts”) for more examples. 8  Hdt. 1.69,4; the accomplishment of the action (captured in the dynamic verb ‘to set up’) leads to a state in the present which is still going on (‘is set up’ implies ‘is standing’ = perfective present).

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confidence in the narrator’s knowledge and accuracy in those members of the audience who are familiar with this statue.9 Apart from giving the statue’s location, Herodotus’ narrator additionally convinces through other details: he knows not only for which purpose the Spartans needed some gold—namely, for a work of art to be dedicated in a temple in a place known to his audience—but also for which specific statue they need it. These three elements (continuation of the object into the present, a connection between the object and an event or person of the past, and the location of the object in the discourse-now) establish it as evidence substantiating the account of early relations between Lydia and Sparta. It goes without saying that the examples grouped in this category of empirical authentication are not homogeneous and that not all would pass as material sources by the standards of academic history in the twenty-first century. What is more, the argumentative particle γὰρ, used twice (1.69.3–4), indicates that the Spartan–Lydian alliance is not an unconfirmed story, but a fact that can be visibly demonstrated with the help of the statue. Or, expressing the same connection from a different angle, the artwork has experienced, as it were, the contact between Lydia and Sparta in Croesus’ time and would be a prime witness if it had the human abilities of memory and speech. The same three elements are also features of the evidentiary quality of material relics in Gen–Kings. In fact, with respect to the location of the object, many relics in the biblical narrative exceed the average example in Herodotus’ Histories. In Herodotus, the location of the object in the discourse-world usually has no direct connection to the geographical setting of the event the relic is associated with. For instance, votive offerings as a gesture of thanksgiving after a victory are all grouped in one central temple and do not mark the place where the battle was fought—not to mention that this is impossible in the case of a sea battle. In contrast, material remains in biblical narratives are often markers of the very place where the narrative locates the event. Take for instance the large rock in the field belonging to one Joshua from Beth Shemesh. We learn about this natural landmark in the story cycle in which the ark is a protagonist. Toward the end of the cycle, the ark returns from its captivity in Philistine territory. Having delivered itself in a fantastic sequence of events and then been solemnly transported back by a cow-carriage, the ark arrives in Beth Shemesh and stops at the rock. The Israelites from Beth Shemesh subsequently use it as an altar to sacrifice the draft animals. Toward the end of 9  The average person in Herodotus’ audience was potentially able to verify only a few of the many details offered to them. However, those objects they recognized and found accurately presented certainly went a long way in enhancing Herodotus’ reliability in their eyes.

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the story, the narrator affirms that the large rock is still there, although he now foregrounds its role as a pedestal for the holy object:10 ‫ועכברי הזהב מספר כל־ערי פלשתים לחמשת הסרנים מעיר מבצר ועד כפר הפרזי‬ ‫ועד אבל (אבן) הגדולה אשר הניחו עליה את ארון יהוה עד היום הזה בשדה יהושע‬ .‫בית־השמשי‬ 1 Sam 6:18

(…) and the golden mice, in numbers corresponding with all cities of the Philistines (…), from fortified city (down) to village of the open country, and up to the large stone on which they set down the ark of YHWH, which is to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth-Shemesh. my transl.

The claim that the large rock in the field of Joshua of Beth Shemesh is the very same that was used as a natural altar in the distant past on the occasion of the ark’s return authenticates this ‘tall tale’. As the only intersection of the story-world with the discourse-world, the rock makes the fantastic story more trustworthy.11 Of course, the whole narrative of the ark in Philistine territory is, among other purposes like entertainment, a normative claim to the supremacy of the god of Israel. But this normative claim with a perspective toward the present and future is not connected to the large rock. The narrative, which is empirically implausible on the surface because it transcends what can be perceived as natural, receives an additional firm connection with the world as known to the audience of the text because of its inherent claim to 10  The emendation of ‫ אבל‬into ‫ אבן‬in 1 Sam 6:18 is reasonable and also attested by lxx. Besides, the large stone is also mentioned in four verses earlier. Wellhausen’s suggestion to change ‫ועד‬ ַ into ‫ועד‬ ֵ is not necessary to make sense of the text. Cf. Walter Dietrich, Samuel Vol. 1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn 2010), 258. The story of 1 Sam 6:1–7:1 features other intriguing elements relevant to the topic of biblical historiography, which I can merely point out here. In 6:6, the Philistine priests and diviners refer to the circumstances of the exodus from Egypt as a historical precedence and use it as an argument for their advice on what to do in the present. They conduct an experiment to discern whether the hardships coming upon them are caused by the ark or by coincidence (6:9). Finally, verses 17–18 are reminiscent of Herodotus in that they give a list of dedications by foreign people to the ‘national’ deity. 11  This judgment derives of course from a modern outlook on the world. As Ballhorn and others have pointed out, supernatural events in Near Eastern narratives may have been understood by ancient contemporaries not as actual events in the actual world of the past, but as markers signaling the involvement of divine forces in the event; see Ballhorn, Israel am Jordan, 61–62.

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the continuity of the landscape. The setting of the past event is said to be the very location that the audience knows by that name in the present. The fact that the location of a biblical memorial for an event in the past often coincides with the location where this event purportedly happened implies that a reader of biblical history can see the exact setting of the past event when he or she visits that place. This makes it much easier for one’s imagination to supply the rest, such as the historical persons and their actions. Anyone who has travelled to a place previously known only from stories, the press, or books will be able to recall the surprising effect of how much mere autopsy of a geographical setting adds to produce a much more vivid and concrete mental picture. In addition, this spatial overlap is likely to further the audience’s personal involvement with the past event and its agents, as it helps them to identify with characters of the textual actual world in a specific scene. Familiarity with the place mentioned, or at least the prospect of being able to visit it, is an important factor when it comes to convincing an audience using material relics. Readers who recognize a location mentioned in a narrative as part of their world, too, will be more likely to process the text-world as relevant information for their own reality. A few general observations about the objects’ geographical range will be appropriate. With regard to the corpus of the Torah and Former Prophets, the majority of the material relics and monuments accompanied by the formula “until this day” are within a territory that can roughly be defined by the borders of the Persian Provinces Yehud and Samaria, or, because of the inclusion of Shechem and Samaria, by those of the territory controlled by John Hyrcanus in the late second century BCE.12 The geographical range of the monuments in Herodotus’ Histories reflects my selection—with ethnographical material left aside, most of the remains (with the exception of buildings, of course) are stored in Greek temples. There is no sanctuary in Sparta on my list, and a great majority of objects are located at Delphi. Next to this place, only Samos, Athens, and Thracia (a very general location indeed) are referred to with more than two material remains.13 Because some relics Herodotus refers to are far away from the Greek main cities, his audience cannot without further ado see them all for themselves. This is easier for the audience of the biblical narrative.

12  Most places mentioned with the formula “until today” are in the hill country west of the Jordan between Samaria in the North and Beth-Shemesh in the South. Makkedah and Ofra are the most remote places and lie outside the ‘agglomeration’ of the other places mentioned with this formula. 13  Cf. appendix.

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151

Objects Used as Support for Established Knowledge about the Past

The connection of a particular material relic with a certain event in the past is often not self-evident. To an inquisitive audience, the golden parts of the Apollo statue mentioned before may not necessarily point to Croesus as the source for the gold, and a large rock lying in a field can be incorporated in many stories. The objects the two narrators mention to authenticate the past events are thus far from self-explanatory. Rather, their persuasive force depends on a mediating persona or voice explaining and establishing the connections between the object and an event in the past. The narrating voice has to be believed when it identifies a specific object as the dedication of person X or the remnant of event Z, because it usually gives no reasons for an attribution. Because the Herodotean narrator affirms that the two enormous craters at Delphi, one golden and one silver, are dedications made by Croesus more than a century ago (1.51), these craters and other objects become a means to authenticate the transactions between the Greek oracle and the foreign king, and by implication, the whole story about Croesus’ oracle test and his obsessive trust in his wishful interpretation of the prophecy he received there. The rhetorical effect of this object as a means of persuasion relies more on plausibility and trust than it does on a meticulous examination and explanation of material remains. In many other cases where the narrators use an object to authenticate a person or an event in the past, its effectiveness as evidence depends on the audience’s readiness to accept the narrator’s attribution of the relic to a person or an event as a given that goes unquestioned and does not require any corroboration. A case in point is that of the precious gifts from Gyges to the Delphic oracle. According to Herodotus’ narrator, Gyges is the first barbarian king who dedicated votive offerings in this foreign sanctuary.14 The six golden craters ascribed to him function as evidence first of all for his kingship, and in the second place for his transactions with the Delphic oracle. Thanks to their materiality, these craters and other silver objects, the so-called Gygades, establish the Lydian ruler as a historical person.15 However, if one asks how exactly the gold and 14  Cf. 1.14,2 and 1.25; the peculiar qualification of Gyges as the first barbarian king to make dedications in Delphi through mentioning Midas as the very first can be settled if one understands Gyges as the second barbarian king to dedicate gifts at Delphi at all, and the first in the dynasty of the Mermnadae. 15  1.14,2: οὗτος δὲ ὁ Γύγης πρῶτος βαρβάρων τῶν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν ἐς Δελφοὺς ἀνέθηκε ἀναθήματα μετὰ Μίδην τὸν Γορδίεω Φρυγίης βασιλέα. 1.25: Ἀλυάττης […] ἀνέθηκε δὲ ἐκφυγὼν τὴν νοῦσον δεύτερος οὗτος τῆς οἰκίης ταύτης ἐς Δελφοὺς…. The Gygades, according to Herodotus, are the first secure attestation of dedications from foreign kings to Delphi, and in this way,

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silver objects known by this name are proof, it becomes clear that this function relies essentially on the name, on the tradition that the precious treasures were indeed dedicated by Gyges. The narrative does not mention an inscription on the items themselves.16 Therefore, the objects work as proof only if one accepts as reliable the tradition ascribing them to Gyges as the donor. Uninscribed dedications can be attributed to many donors. Herodotus seems to be aware for a moment of this insufficiency when he has his narrating persona state that Croesus sent many unmarked votive offerings to Delphi (ἀναθήματα οὐκ ἐπίσημα, 1.51,5). At the same time, the narrator cautions his audience twice that inscriptions do not necessarily provide reliable information either. This can be understood as a move to disarm the possible objection that uninscribed monuments are less reliable evidence than inscribed objects. By pointing to the alleged unreliability of inscriptions in two cases,17 Herodotus plays down the advantage of a clear mark on an object explaining its origin and purpose. This is a clever argumentative strategy to reduce the potential doubtfulness of his use of uninscribed objects to authenticate events in the past. However, based on the uncontested matter-of-fact way in which the narrator uses dedications and buildings as empirical remains, I assume that, for the most part, Herodotus neither doubted such attributions himself in the first place nor suspected such doubts in his audience.18 Some readers may insist that material remains with huge dimensions such as these last ones are unique, and therefore Herodotus’ reliance on the traditions about them is not too surprising. They might add that an object employed as a means of persuasion needs no inscription or any other mark rendering it unique unless it has a standardized shape, is portable, or very common. While this sounds reasonable, let me point out Herodotus’ use also of uninscribed and quite unspecific objects as authentication. The narrator identifies the bonds purportedly hanging from the walls on the outside of the temple of Athene Alea in Tegea in the center of Peloponnese as the bonds with which the Spartans were bound when they fell into the hands of the people of Tegea before Croesus ruled Lydia (1.66). These bonds are not very specific or unique, they are analogous to the first attestation of ‘unjust deeds’ by Croesus four generations later; cf. Pelling, “Epilogue,” 333. 16  For further information on the ‘Gygades’, see Christoph Michels, “Königliche Geschenke aus Lydien,” in Tryphe und Kultritual im archaischen Kleinasien—ex oriente luxuria?, ed. Linda-Marie Günther (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 74–95. 17  See Hdt. 1.51,3–4 and 9.85,3 (although the latter mentions no inscription, there must be some kind of identification of the grave—otherwise, it is questionable whether it fulfills its purpose). 18  He also follows Delphic traditions about the connection of a relic to an event in a more recent case from the Persian Wars (8.39,2), which will be discussed further on.

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and they are not intrinsically connected to a certain battle and defeat. On the contrary, their service to Herodotus’ purpose depends on his attribution. This becomes evident in the fact that the narrator uses other bonds, this time hanging from the walls of the Acropolis in Athens, to authenticate a different surprising battle result (5.77,3). The close parallel—even in the wording19—of using bonds hanging from walls as empirical evidence and a memory anchor for battle victories exemplifies Herodotus’ frequent practice of authenticating past events by objects that conveniently lend themselves to this purpose, and he seems to think of them only after the event itself is outlined clearly. In other words, the objects are frequently not examined to generate any specific knowledge about the event in the first place, but are a means to confirm a piece of traditional knowledge by reference to the reality that is accessible to everyone.20 While we do see the narrator’s awareness of the importance of palpable traces of the past as a principal strategy of persuasion, we may doubt that Müller’s epithet “father of empiricism” is appropriate.21 The narrator in Gen–Kings likewise connects relics of the same kind in different locations with different events. I do not mention them here, though, because this section includes physical remains mentioned in a sober matterof-fact way. Referring to their existence seems to be all that is needed, and therefore their role is to provide an anchor for a story in the discourse-world, or, in other words, a point of access within the discourse-world that leads to the world of the past. They fulfill the single function of net authentication. In the narrative of the books of Genesis through Kings, there are very few material remains with only this function. In fact, I am aware of only two objects used by the biblical narrating voice as this kind of empirical evidence that could be termed historical trivia or, as some scholars have called these kinds of references, antiquarian information.22 Information of this kind is not directly relevant for the audience’s present or future. One is the rock in Joshua’s field discussed above, and the other is a larger-than-life iron bedstead. Expressed in modern units, the bed is about 4 meters long and 1.8 meters broad. It supports the claim that King Og was one of the last giants, also referred 19  Compare τὰς δὲ πέδας αὐτῶν, ἐν τῇσι ἐδεδέατο, ἀνεκρέμασαν ἐς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν, αἵ περ ἔτι καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ περιεοῦσαι (5.77,3) with αἱ δὲ πέδαι αὗται ἐν τῇσι ἐδεδέατο ἔτι καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ ἦσαν σόαι ἐν Τεγέῃ (1.66,4); for Croesus’ bonds in Delphi, see Hdt. 1.90,4–91. 20  On this aspect, see, e.g.: Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC, 2nd ed., Routledge history of the ancient world (London, New York: Routledge, 2009) 13 n. 34; Marincola, Authority and Tradition, 103–04. 21  See p. 142, n. 1. 22  To mention only a few among others, see p. 263, n. 2; Otto, Deuteronomium, 43; Diana Edelman, “Clio’s Dilemma: The Changing Face of History-Writing,” in Congress Volume Oslo 1998, ed. André Lemaire and M. Sæbø (Leiden, 2000) 247–55: 250.

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to as ‫( רפאים‬Deut 3:11). The extra-large bed, as it were, points to the everyday life of the last Canaanite king who was larger than normal men, which places Moses and the younger generation of the exodus as his contemporaries in a distant and qualitatively different era in the past.23 It is also a rare example of a more elaborate statement than ‘to this day’ as attestation of continuity: ‫כי רק־עוג מלך הבשן נשאר מיתר הרפאים הנה ערשו ערש ברזל הלה הוא ברבת בני‬ :‫עמון תשע אמות ארכה וארבע אמות רחבה באמת־איש‬

For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits is its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit. Deut 3:11 RSV, slightly modified

Giving the bed’s dimensions and the material it consists of, this reference to a material relic is very much in the style of Herodotus’ Histories (cf. Hdt. 1.50,3; 9.81). The object’s attribution to Og as a giant is plausible because of the sheer size of the bed, which makes ‘evident’ that the person to use it must have been taller than contemporary people. Though it remains open as to whether the speaker of the narratorial addition, not to speak of his audience, has seen such a bedstead himself or not, he clearly refers to it as a fact of his world.24 In addition to its authenticating function, the reference to the bedstead is to instill in the audience awe and pride about this exceptional victory, looking back on God’s former deeds, as well as confidence in view of the future. But, as in the ark narrative, this is achieved mainly by telling the whole episode of the defeat of King Og, of which the reference to the iron bed is only a footnote. To sum up first results: in both sources, objects used as physical evidence primarily serve to confirm received knowledge. The narrators do not derive from them information that no one has yet recovered, but refer to them to enhance the reality of the information and knowledge they impart in their narratives. In modern terms, this also improves the account’s reliability. Often, the connection between an object and the event in the past is neither intrinsic to the relic nor self-evident, but provided by the narrator. Thus, the story fits the object it goes with; however, the object by itself often seems capable of 23  In Herodotus’ Histories as well, we can sometimes find the idea that heroes from the past were far taller than average human beings, which is illustrated by reference to material remains and measures of length: Hdt. 1.68,3; 2.91.3; 4.82. 24  This is the only object outside the territory of biblical Israel. The reference to the huge iron bed is a narratorial comment—i.e., its speaker is not Moses, as in the immediate context, but the exilic or second-temple scribal scholars. Cf. Otto, Deuteronomium, 468–69.

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accommodating more stories than the one told. Unless the relic is inscribed, it is mostly not specific enough to be connected to precisely this person or event and no other. It is additionally noteworthy that the Herodotean narrator, much more than do the Hebrew narratives, uses material relics from the past as evidence in such a way that other purposes such as the actualization of norms are marginal or absent. Some of these objects are associated with foreigners—Gyges, Croesus, Darius, Og. This possibly explains why the use of these relics seems to us today to be more sober and less emotional or judgmental than, say, use as victory monuments of one’s own people. If this tentative hypothesis holds any water, the larger number of relics in Herodotus’ Histories used without additional layers of meaning for the society that the narrative addresses need not be a result of a more rational or objective way of inquiry and presentation, but rather of his subject matter: to record great achievements of Greeks and non-Greeks. 5

Objects Used as a Source of Information

In the Histories, the narrator exploits very few objects for concrete information, rarely using material remains as a historical source in the usual sense of the term. A first example in which he does so is a stele on the market of Samos commemorating the battles against the Persians and their allies during the Ionian revolt (6.14). The narrator takes the inscription on the stele as evidence of the fact that there indeed were a few Samian commanders of ships who, unlike most of the others, did not shun combat with the Persians when they supported the insurgents. In this example, the inscription provides the essential link; therefore, it is enough that the object, a stone stele, is merely a lasting medium to carry and preserve the information, but bears no intrinsic affinity to the event itself. When Herodotus’ narrator uses objects as a source of information,25 the issue usually is measuring and quantifying a past state of affairs: The objects’ qualities help to determine the dimensions of an entrepreneur’s profit, of wealth, and of friendship. Thus, from all Greeks ‘about whom we know something with certainty’ (τῶν ἡμεῖς ἀτρεκείην ἴδμεν), the Samians are said to be the ones who profited most from a shipload of cargo.26 Proof of this first rank is a bronze 25  Such assertions are valid for the corpus of the objects I studied, not necessarily for all of the Histories. 26  This is one of three instances I can think of where Herodotus claims first rank for an achievement mentioning a competitor in the same breath; in 7.139,5, it is the Athenians (after the gods), and in 1.14,2–4, Gyges (after Midas).

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crater that Colaeus of Samos, the owner of the ship, and his crew dedicated to the temple of Hera in Samos (4.152,2–5). It seems to be thanks to the crater that the narrator deems this piece of information about the Samians’ trade relations with Tartessos, situated on the Atlantic coast of Spain, reliable. After all, the specific detail of the weight of the bronze dedicated as tithe is given as six talents, which makes the total profit yielded by the voyage sixty talents. If the three larger-than-life bronze statues are to be added to the crater to make the tithe offered to the gods (4.152,4), the profit becomes even more spectacular. Giving the weight of the crater of Colaeus of Samos and thus a means of quantification answers the question of how profitable the sea adventure really was.27 The specifics of the object allow Herodotus to place the success on a measuring scale, which makes comparison possible. Without a concrete (and at best pan-Hellenic) measuring unit to state the value of the dedication, knowledge expressed in terms of superlatives and firsts28 is relatively nondescript and contestable. Therefore, while the object does not prove or generate the story of the Samian adventure beyond the pillars of Heracles and the connected claim to holding a record as a whole, it does affirm and illustrate this tradition and enhances the precision (ἀτρεκείη) of the information passed on by tradition. Similarly, the city walls of Phocaea on the Ionian coast are used to prove and ‘measure’ the extent of the friendship between this city and the far-away Tartessos (1.163), and not to authenticate the information of the friendship as such. In other words, Herodotus takes for granted the tradition of the friendship with a foreign king who sponsored the city walls and uses the quality of the fortifications to extrapolate additional information about the nature of the gift, which in turn is taken as an indicator of the quality of the friendship. Thus, the city walls of Phocaea are part of Herodotus’ efforts for vividness because they visualize and help to quantify states of affairs that are not easily accessible to someone inquiring about the past. As another superlative, Herodotus’ narrative claims that, during Polycrates’ days, the Siphnians were the richest of all insular cities. To prove and 27  This interpretation supports but qualifies Osborne’s interpretation of Colaeus’ crater and other examples (Osborne, “Archaic Greek History,” in Bakker, Jong and van Wees, Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, 497–520: 512): “Just as in all these cases the uninscribed object falls short of proving Herodotus’ story correct, so too with inscribed objects, it is sufficient for Herodotus that they have been cited to prove a case, he does not consider whether or not the proof is good.” Osborne continues that Herodotus uses evidence when it fits his purposes but does not start from the evidence, which is parallel to the use of evidence in the Hippocratic writings. 28  Cf. Shrimpton and Gillis, “Appendix I, List 3”: Confident Assertions of firsts and superlatives (p. 257–59).

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authenticate their wealth, he refers to the treasury they built at that time. Since the splendid building was only one tenth of their assets, the narrator argues, the Siphnians must have been very rich (3.57,2): […] νησιωτέων μάλιστα ἐπλούτεον, ἅτε ἐόντων αὐτοῖσι ἐν τῇ νήσῳ χρυσέων καὶ ἀργυρέων μετάλλων, οὕτω ὥστε ἀπὸ τῆς δεκάτης τῶν γινομένων αὐτόθεν χρημάτων θησαυρὸς ἐν Δελφοῖσι ἀνάκειται ὅμοια τοῖσι πλουσιωτάτοισι [the Siphnians] were richer than any other of the island peoples, having gold and silver mines so productive that from a tenth part of their output there is set up a treasury at Delphi not inferior in value to the most splendid to be found there. transl. Sélincourt, modified

Herodotus’ narrator uses this building at Delphi as a source in that he derives knowledge from it about the dimensions of the Siphnians’ wealth; that is, he argues from the visible to the invisible.29 In sum, these four examples are attestations of Herodotus’ rare use of relics as sources of historical information. However, this is not to say that the narrator derives new events from these objects by reasoning. What they have in common is the researcher’s effort to sound the dimensions of a quantifiable unit in order to get a more detailed understanding of what are, in his eyes, established facts. A few times, Herodotus’ narrator refers to empirical qualities of the material relics such as their refinement or measurements as the basis for statements about the dimensions of business profit, wealth, and friendship. When he does so, he builds on the link between the relic and an event in the past preestablished by tradition or cultural memory. In Gen–Kings, uses of physical remains as a basis for the narrator’s own inferences about the past are harder, if not impossible, to pinpoint. I am not aware of any instances where the narrator reasons and extrapolates from a concrete observation to a phenomenon in the past. This, however, matches the design of the narrating voice. Since, generally speaking, the audience does 29  The same argument that a dedication can be used as a source for the donator’s socioeconomic capacities is applied again in an even more explicit form in 2.135,3–4, where the narrator uses a famous Greek prostitute’s gift of enormous iron skewers to dismiss the view that the pyramid Herodotus ascribes to Mykerinos was in fact ordered and paid for by the hetaera Rhodopis. This passage is additionally interesting because the narrator uses the skewers for a different purpose than Rhodopis had allegedly intended herself— not as a monument or memorial for her as a person, but as a source. Another example of happiness and prosperity resulting in buildings is a happy period of time in Crete enjoyed by expelled Samians (Hdt. 3.59,2).

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not catch a glimpse into the narrator’s consciousness, it is much harder than in Herodotus’ Histories to trace thought processes. As the present study analyzes the textual surface of the primary sources and does not seek to illuminate the authors’ working stages before and during the production of their texts, I do not address questions such as the role of research. At this point, I will merely point to an interesting and singular statement from Kings showing that the biblical narrator here does record measurements and quantities or their absence. It refers to the great number of copper utensils and artwork for Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 7:47): .‫וינח שלמה את־כל־הכלים מרב מאד מאד לא נחקר משקל הנחשת‬ This is an assertion that the temple equipment—copper tools and basins for sacrifices—was so lavish that the weight of the precious material cannot be given or estimated, i.e. that it is virtually impossible to have an overview on all the items. But this is not all. The second part of the verse is remarkable as it states what should be done but cannot: The weight of the copper was not found out. This remark seems to indicate a preference for numbers over statements like ‘very, very many’. It almost sounds like a modern scientific footnote. The information gap—how much copper?—is neither filled by a fictive number nor concealed. Rather, the text draws attention to the absence of a number. This implies a systematic approach: The person who wrote this remark obviously had an interest to indicate that a measure for the copper used in the temple was not simply forgotten or ignored. I have shown three elements—attribution, continuity with the present, and a specific location—as the common ground of objects used in Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings to authenticate events in the past as a former reality. There is a broad range of ways, some more and some less intrusive, in which the narrating voice in each corpus provides these pieces of information. At times, the action in the story-world is clearly interrupted by a metanarrative commentary addressed to the audience in the discourse-now, as for instance in the reference to King Og’s large iron bed (Deut 3:11) or the bonds hanging from the scorched walls of the Athenean Acropolis (Hdt. 5.77,3). The most frequent elements of information in these metanarrative commentaries are details of the object’s location and the affirmation that it still exists in the discourseworld.30 Other objects such as the crater of Colaeus of Samos and the treasury 30  Sometimes, the commentary also illuminates additional aspects such as an explanation of the circumstances of the event, a description of the object, additional information such as weight, the name of the artist, etc., or a narratorial judgment.

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of the Siphnians serve the function of material evidence with unobtrusive narratorial intrusions in the discursive-mode. The narrator imparts the location of Colaeus’ crater without interrupting the narrative. A change to the present tense occurs only in the description of this crater (‘there are protruding griffin heads around it’31), thereby implying its existence in the discourse-now. Yet, the statement in the discursive mode is made by an impersonal voice, not in that of the dramatized narratorial persona referring to himself in the first person singular. This also holds for the treasury of the Siphnians: The verb in the perfect passive (‘is set up at Delphi’, ἐν Δελφοῖσι ἀνάκειται (3.57,2)) refers to the present state of affairs, the discourse-now, but it is quite unobtrusive. This is to demonstrate that the Histories also know impersonal and hardly noticeable intrusions of the discourse-now into the narrative world of the past. This account’s frequency of metanarrative commentaries accompanying material relics can in part be explained by the characteristic of Herodotus’ narrator persona being communicative and not reticent, self-promoting and not selfeffacing. Yet, as phrases like “up to my time” or “until today” are found in both narratives, such a metanarrative commentary seems to be a common way to connect the narrative world of the past with the actual world of the present. 6

The Importance of Material Remains in the Histories Is Relative

Is there a connection between the narrator’s use of a material relic as authentication and the relative importance of the event within the narrative about a past as a whole? In the following chapters, I will discuss this aspect from various angles. At this point, let me examine a striking example of a superficial narrative exploitation of a relic in Herodotus that starkly contrasts with the weight the narrative gives to the corresponding event. In the Histories, the fear that the Greeks might destroy the pontoon bridge connecting Europe and Asia before the return of Xerxes’ army to Asia is a recurrent topic. Already during the planning stage for a military expedition against the Greeks, Artabanus tries to dissuade Xerxes from this campaign, referring to this scenario as ‘something terrible’ and judging the analogous event that nearly happened to Xerxes’ father Darius as utter defeat and as something decisive on which the king’s

31  Hdt. 4.152,4: οἱ δὲ Σάμιοι (…) ἐποιήσαντο χαλκήιον κρητῆρος (…) καὶ ἀνέθηκαν ἐς τὸ Ἥραιον— the Samians (…) made a bronze crater (…) and dedicated it in the temple of Hera. The Greek description quoted above reads as follows: πέριξ δὲ αὐτοῦ γρυπῶν κεφαλαὶ πρόκροσσοί εἰσι (transl. Waterfield, modified).

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fate may depend.32 In fact, the argument that this scenario is a concrete risk in Xerxes’ strategy is Artabanus’ first point in his well-thought-out speech. Considerably later, after the Greek victory in the sea battle at Salamis, the narrator allows us an introspection into Xerxes’ thoughts, where we learn that the possibility of the Greeks’ destroying the temporary bridge has become a real threat to Xerxes’ life (8.97,1). The fear of this scenario is portrayed as Xerxes’ motivation to retreat. Although the event remains counterfactual throughout Herodotus’ narrative, it is charged with significance in both Darius’ expedition into Scythia and Xerxes’ campaign against the Greeks. Paradoxically, the episode eventually narrating the Greeks’ sea voyage to the Bosphorus plays no essential role in the narrative. Themistocles’ suggestion to do exactly what Xerxes is afraid of is endorsed only by the Athenians, not the other Greeks, and is not put into action immediately (8.108,2–109; 8.111,1). A few chapters later, Herodotus’ narrator briefly tells us that Xerxes’ troops found the pontoon bridges destroyed by a storm when they arrived at the Hellespont, but ironically this leads to no catastrophe, since they could simply cross the strait with ships. With audience expectations raised as indicated above, the Histories can hardly end without a narrative about a Greek expedition to the Hellespont. However, their campaign is not presented in a unified narrative but dispersed through the concluding chapters. In very brief statements, the narrator mentions the Greeks’ departure for the Hellespont with the goal of destroying the bridges (9.106,4–107,1). Whereas the Peloponnesians return home on discovering the destruction of the bridges, the Athenians take to a siege of Sestos and secure the cables, a remnant from the pontoon bridge33 (114). The second to last chapter of the Histories informs us that the Greeks sail home with captured spoils, among them the cables of the bridges, which they allegedly dedicated in the temples (9.121). The way the narrator mentions the events does not suggest that the primary reason for the siege on Sestos was to carry off the ropes of the bridges;34 these relics are mentioned only briefly and do not seem to have triggered the account as a whole. What is more, the narrator neither evokes a mental picture of them nor mentions their continuity into the present or the names and locations of the sanctuaries where they were dedicated. Nor does 32  ἀλλ᾽ ἢν τῇσι νηυσὶ ἐμβάλωσι καὶ νικήσαντες ναυμαχίῃ πλέωσι ἐς τὸν Ἑλλήσποντον καὶ ἔπειτα λύσωσι τὴν γέφυραν, τοῦτο δὴ βασιλεῦ γίνεται δεινόν (7.10.b,2); 7.10.c,2. 33  I follow Anne Jacquemin, Offrandes monumentales à Delphes, BEFAR 304 (Athens, Paris: Ecole française d’Athènes; De Boccard édition-diffusion, 1999), who takes the word ὅπλα as cables/ropes. In 7.36, Herodotus describes the bridge in some detail, and there, this term indeed refers to the ropes of Xerxes’ pontoon bridges. 34  Macan understands from Herodotus that the cables had actually been brought to Kardia (Reginald W. Macan, Herodotus: Books VII–IX (London: Macmillan, 1908), ad Hdt. 9.115).

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he dwell longer on the ropes than necessary, nor focus the reader’s attention on the relics. It seems that Herodotus’ narrator does not exploit this object as a strategy of persuasion at all, which is surprising, given his recurrent narrative use of other war spoils. Provided that the cables meant to the Greeks a symbol of overestimated power and hybris at all, Herodotus could have conveniently used them as a symbol of victory over the Persians. Classical archaeologists may raise the possibility that the cables are not a prominent feature in the narrative because they are a very familiar part of the present actual world’s inventory. Amandry suggests that the stoa of the Athenians was erected in 478 BCE close to the temple of Apollo at Delphi in order to house and present these cables. If he is correct, the cables were displayed at a very central and sacred place in Delphi, which would have emphasized the weight of the Athenians’ role and contribution in the Persian Wars.35 It would be untypical for Herodotus not to mention this prominent form of display for a relic. Public opinion may have been anti-Athenian at his time, but concerning the Athenians’ role in the Persian wars, Herodotus does not shy away from praising them.36 If the Athenians really used their dedication of the stoa to house the trophy of the cables, the discrepancy in the Histories between the purported strategic role of the pontoon bridge and the unobtrusiveness of both the event of the voyage to the Hellespont and the related relic is even more pronounced. Amandry’s suggestion, however, is not universally accepted.37 As far as I can see, data external to Herodotus’ narrative, therefore, is not conclusive enough to clarify whether, in Herodotus’ time, the cables of Xerxes’ pontoon bridges were displayed in a widely known place. Yet, this example illuminates various aspects of Herodotus’ use of monuments: First, he is selective, not only with regard to which relics he mentions and which not, but also with regard to the monument’s intention. He does not seem to reiterate the monument’s message of praise in every case. Second, exploiting material evidence is obviously not his consistent priority either in his work as a researcher or as a strategy of persuasion for him as a presenter of a history. The connection between an 35  Cf. Jacquemin, Offrandes, 152 and 251. 36  Both aspects appear in the well-known passage of Hdt. 7.139. 37  See the summaries by West, Greek public monuments (chapter 9, no. 43) and Jacquemin, Offrandes, p. 84 n. 29 and p. 119 n. 68; both West and Jacquemin follow Amandry, whereas J. Walsh and O. Hansen suggest a later date. See Jacquemin, Offrandes, 315 no. 082 for a bibliography. Russell Meiggs and David M. Lewis, eds., A selection of Greek historical inscriptions: to the end of the fifth century BC (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 54 (no. 25 (18)) point out that epigraphical dating based on the letter-forms of the dedication inscription is not decisive, but would match an earlier date better than a later one.

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event and a relic is not always stated clearly, and the events do not receive equal treatment and attention. Third, Herodotus’ narrative does not always mirror the significance potentially awarded to a particular event in the public sphere. If the cables were indeed exhibited in the Athenian stoa in the immediate vicinity of the central temple of Apollo at Delphi from 478 onward, they receive no corresponding attention in Herodotus’ history. This implicit reappraisal by Herodotus of the significance of an individual event would then be an implicit normative political statement, emphasizing the merits of individual Greek poleis for a pan-Hellenic common good, but deemphasizing the Athenian attempt to claim authority for itself on account of an inflated victory. This conscious selection and unequal weighing of events would be a further indication that Herodotus’ intention is not documentarian in the first place, but philosophical, exploring the connections between people’s motivations and the course of history, as well as ethical implications of their actions and the significance of individual decisions in a chain of events. One of the most important events in biblical narrative history is Israel’s foundational experience of deliverance from Egyptian slavery. It is noteworthy that we do not read about any monument for this act of rescue brought about by the God of Israel and Moses. Instead, the event is perpetuated in Jewish ritual and, of course, in the biblical narrative about it. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has put it, priests and prophets were those who created the most important historical concepts of the Hebrew Bible, not historians, and neither finding a meaning in history nor the memory of the Jewish people depends on history writing.38 On the other hand, we know from studies starting with Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora on the concept of places of memory that a concrete ‘location’ and something to ‘see’ are essential for social memory, even if this place has only a virtual existence. This oscillation between the narrators’ dependence on real traces of the past, on the one hand, and their generosity in inventing such objects or neglecting them, on the other, will be a challenge also in other parts of this study. 7

Identifying Function

To enhance the accessibility of the story-world in both accounts, some objects are simply used to familiarize a person, place, or object to the audience. The purpose of such references is often didactic, making it easier for the audience 38  Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 12 and 15.

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to relate to the story-world. Twice, for example, Herodotus’ narrator identifies and familiarizes marginal characters to the audience through a reference to the gifts they made to Panhellenic sanctuaries (4.162,3; 7.170,4). This connection with objects some people may know helps the audience integrate these characters, their names, or their actions as manageable information. Such a connection makes the simultaneous claim that the person in question is not an unknown figure, but someone who left traces that are still visible in the discourse-world. This makes a narrative detail more familiar and hence brings it closer to the audience. Another aid for the addressees in processing the account more easily is the narrator’s effort to help them evoke a mental picture that is as concrete and ‘realistic’ as possible. Consider for example the stone lion, a monument in honor of Leonidas put up at Thermopylae. It serves to identify the place where the Greek soldiers awaited the Persian attack, so that addressees familiar with the landscape, including the monument, can picture the situation in their imagination (7.225,2): ἔς τε γὰρ τὸ στεινὸν τῆς ὁδοῦ ἀνεχώρεον ὀπίσω, καὶ παραμειψάμενοι τὸ τεῖχος ἐλθόντες ἵζοντο ἐπὶ τὸν κολωνὸν πάντες ἁλέες οἱ ἄλλοι […]. ὁ δὲ κολωνὸς ἐστὶ ἐν τῇ ἐσόδῳ, ὅκου νῦν ὁ λίθινος λέων ἕστηκε ἐπὶ Λεωνίδῃ. [The Greeks] withdrew again into the narrow neck of the pass, behind the wall, and took up position in a single compact body […] on the little hill at the entrance to the pass, where the stone lion in memory of Leonidas stands today. Locating an event in real geography is making a claim to realism. Herodotus’ description, however, does not primarily rely on the stone lion to set the scene. The monument is only an additional marker of the exact place where the event happened. An important factor here is the narrator’s rhetorical effort for vividness (ἐνάργεια), which lays claim to the event’s significance: It is important enough to deserve an accurate and detailed depiction. The reason for this allocation of much narrative time and space within the Histories need not necessarily stem from Herodotus’ attempt to represent the battle with as many accurate facts as possible. It could just as well be the intention of leaving a monument to bravery and determination even in the face of the impossible. Providing an aid for the audience’s mental visualization of the scene at Thermopylae at any rate brings the event in the past closer to their reality and helps them to identify with those active in the past.

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A similar example from the book of Judges is a narratorial comment situating the declaration of Abimelech as king at a distinctive tree, here the terebinth tree in Shechem where a standing-stone stands (Judg 9:6): ‫בעלי שכם (…) וילכו וימליכו את־אבימלך למלך עם־אלון מצב אשר‬-‫ויאספו כל‬ ‫בשכם׃‬

And all the citizens of Shechem came together […] and they went and made Abimelech king, by the oak of the pillar at Shechem. Presumably, this is the same place where Joshua is said to have put up a large stone as a witness at an open-air sanctuary for YHWH in Josh 24:26. If this is correct, the localization of Abimelech’s promotion as king is not just a matter of setting the scene in a familiar landscape, but also of passing a tacit judgment on Gideon’s son. After all, this is the place where, in Joshua 24, the Israelites pledge to serve YHWH. His proclamation as king probably involves the people’s pledge to serve him as the new king, which Abimelech tolerates or even elicits. Narratorial hints helping the audience identify a familiar spot in their landscape as the setting of a certain event in the past are more common in Gen–Kings than in Herodotus. One reason for this is that material relics are, to a large extent, located in important ‘collections’, in sanctuaries, and rarely outside in the open. In addition, whereas the Herodotean narrator as a rule refers to particular landmarks and larger landscapes only by their name, the biblical narrators sometimes refer to smaller details like a pit in a forest, particular trees such as the pomegranate in Migron (1 Sam 14:2), a large rock in a field, and accumulations of stones in open space. The reason for this might be that the Histories are written in an attempt at a pan-Hellenic, and therefore supralocal, perspective. It is true that the Hebrew narratives cater to more than one audience at least within the Torah—to Judeans and Samaritans—and among Judeans, to various social groups, but geographically speaking, most of the narrated events happen within a relatively small radius, such that the narrator can assume a close familiarity of the readers or listeners with the area. Natural or cultural landmarks are also used as means to identify locations: The altar of the tribes of Reuven, Gad, and half Manasseh is situated near the ‫( גלילות הירדן‬Josh 22:10), interpreted in different translations as stone circles, the borders or the region of the Jordan, or the places named Gilgal or Geliloth, if the information is not omitted altogether. The place where King Saul asks for the whereabouts of David and Samuel is given as the large cistern in Sekhu

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(1 Sam 19:22). The scale of this ‘mapping’ through relics or landmarks is very small and local, tuned to an audience from nearby. Another example of Herodotus’ emphasis on visual support for his account is Pausanias’ bronze crater at the Bosphorus,39 obviously taken to be well known. It is mentioned not for its own sake, but in order to convey the enormous dimensions of another crater in Scythia (4.81,3). Evoking Pausanias’ crater, with its already quite impressive alleged capacity of one hundred amphorae, Herodotus makes it easier to envisage an analogous object six times bigger. The narrator mentions a familiar, comparable object so that the audience’s mental picture of the Scythian vessel is as concrete and adequate as possible. In addition, he also gives its measurements, the width of the walls of the basin and its volume. Since the Scythian crater, made from arrow heads, is important for the narrative as an icon of the sheer numbers, and hence military strength, of the Scythians,40 the way the object is described has to be effective—otherwise, the narrator’s point that Darius’ campaign into Scythia was noteworthy is considerably weakened. Because of its dimensions, the gigantic bronze vessel, familiarized to the Greek audience with the didactic aid of Pausanias’ crater, is also a means by which to implicitly herald that Darius’ campaign against the Scythians might fail.41 Another device for carefully directing reader response for didactic purposes is a stele attributed to Croesus but purposefully mentioned only in the narrative of Xerxes’ campaign to Greece (7.30,2). Xerxes’ presence in the same place where Croesus has left traces earlier in history encourages the audience to see one event in terms of the other, or in other words, to consider the possibility of an exaggerated opinion of oneself and failure. 8 Conclusion This chapter has focussed on objects in their narrative function of plain authentication without direct normative, ethical, or social implications for the discourse-now. Through repeated references to material remains, both accounts indicate their authors’ awareness for the persuasive potential inherent in physical traces as evidence or witnesses of events in the past. Thus, the 39  The debate started already in antiquity as to whether the crater is really Pausanias’ dedication or he only had it inscribed to his benefit. 40  Bichler, Herodots Welt, 103 n. 160. 41  Ibid., 104.

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narratives certainly share the notion that material relics can be valuable tangible and visual anchors or access points to the past. In their authenticating function, objects imply the reality of past events and agents. However, most of the relics illustrate and authenticate existent traditions: they lend additional support the narrator’s presentation of past events and circumstances. The Herodotean narrator exploits only very few monuments as a direct source of information, and even here, he does not derive entirely new facts from the relic, but uses it to gain more precision for known facts. As a rule, the objects used as evidence are not self-explanatory—they need the mediation of a knowledgeable person to connect them to the event in the past they corroborate. Such explanations are often drawn from traditional knowledge, such as the name of the donor of a precious dedication or the information that the city walls of Phocaea were sponsored by King Arganthonios of remote Tartessos. Generally speaking, the common denominator of the objects discussed so far as means of authentication consists of three criteria: first, the principal claim of the object’s continuity from the past into the present; second, the claim to a connection between this object and a certain person or event in the past; and third, very importantly, naming the place where the object can be seen. Mentioning a place the audience is familiar with, such as Beth Shemesh or the Athenian acropolis, invariantly evokes mental images and memories from the reader’s own experience of or knowledge about that place. This makes it more likely that the recipients will find the account more memorable and pertinent, and that as a result they will better incorporate it into their thoughts and actions. In fact, names of actual people and places or detailed descriptions are often a strong factor in inducing readers to take a narrative literally or to receive its claims as claims about their own world. That is why some novelists let their readers know that any similarity with living persons is a coincidence. In factual literature, or reality narratives for that matter, the reference to a location such as “in the market square,” “in the temple of Hera,” or “in Rabbah of the Ammonites” is a factual claim. The designations of places for the relics discussed up to now is precise enough to give the impression that the relic can be found in case of inquiry. Later, we will also see much more vague localizations. This criterion of stated or implied existence of an object in both the storyworld and the discourse-world indeed captures most of the relics the Hero­dotean and the biblical narrators use as reality anchors and authentication. However, the discussion below will show that there are a few objects used as proof even though continuity into the discourse-world is neither claimed nor assumed. In these nonstandard cases, access is provided by other means. The Herodotean narrator seems to miss an opportunity for adducing material remains as authentication for the Athenians’ campaign to the Bosphorus when he fails to exploit the cables of Xerxes’ pontoon bridge to Europe. This is a

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first example showing that his priority is not documenting past events with the help of objects that have survived. Narrative traditions about past events seem to have their own value independent of the presence of corresponding material remains. And yet, both narrators appreciate physical relics as additional authentication of these traditions, especially when the events in question are in the remote past. Whereas the idea that certain objects authenticate past events is implicit in the narrative, neither source’s narrator makes explicit how the objects are proof. The readers have to arrive at the exact connections themselves. Furthermore, neither narrative uses a descriptive methodological term for material evidence. Herodotus’ narrator uses technical terms such as ‘sure sign, token’ (τεκμήριον) and ‘testimony, proof’ (μαρτύριον) in the context of his reasoning, but not for objects as support for his narrative.42 This has implications for Herodotus’ epistemology. Most of the time, material remains serve auxiliary purposes, such as the argument or the inquiry largely does not start from them. Herodotus’ narrator uses tangible relics for authentication and vividness because of their (alleged) direct connection with events in the past, but there are hardly any instances suggesting his awareness that this order can be reversed, that knowledge about past events or circumstances can be extrapolated from such objects. Therefore, Herodotus does not systematically exploit relics as historical sources as practiced in modern history. Next to their authenticating function, visible objects in both narratives also serve as didactic aids familiarizing a narrative detail for the audience so that it is easier for them to access it and to take it in. The ways in which both the biblical and the Herodotean narrators refer to material remains are varied, but their descriptions are rarely detailed enough to invoke a visual representation in the audience’s mind. To be sure, Gen–Kings features minutely detailed descriptions of the portable sanctuary in the wilderness and of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. But, these notwithstanding, many objects mentioned in both sources as authentication are not described at all; some are briefly sketched, and only few relics are described in more detail.43 Herodotus is not an author who is famous for his use of 42  See also Thomas, Herodotus in context, 169–73, 191–93. 43  A natural reason that the narrator does not give the object’s description would be that it is widely known; some examples are the stones or boulders from the Parnassus (8.39,2), a Phoenician trireme (8.121), and temples built by people from Samos in Cydonia, Crete (3.59,2). Examples of the narrator sketching at least a few lines of an object are a male statue (8.121), the dedication from Aegina (8.122), Darius’ stone stelae at the Bosphorus (4.87), and the famous tripod on the snake column (9.81). More detailed descriptions are: Croesus’ golden ingots (1.50,2), Amasis’ linnen breastshield (3.47,2), and Mandrocles’ image showing the bridge across the Bosphorus (4.88).

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ekphrasis.44 His representations of remains from the past do not create a picture in the reader’s mind, but are a kind of shorthand or an anchor for a person and events in the past, or, as I will argue later, for a state of affairs that is no longer visible. The manner in which both narrators refer to objects is to call attention to relics that can often be assumed to be well known; mentioning them is closer to reminding their audience of them than to introducing them for the first time. If we ask what this means for a characterization of the implied audiences, it is clear that both narratives are meant for educated listeners and readers who are familiar with Greek and Jewish Second Temple culture and its foundational texts. After all, the narrative feels no need to explain aspects that can be taken as common knowledge. In addition, Herodotus’ audience is probably also familiar with different procedures for argumentation and proof.45 The question of whether Herodotus’ or the biblical writers’ audiences were expected to check out the narrator’s claims in order to corroborate them cannot be answered on the basis of a literary analysis. Judging from a general-research background and the Histories’ reception in antiquity, this is unlikely.

44  Glanville Downey, “Ekphrasis,” in RAC 4: 921–944, here 924. 45  Cf. Fowler, “Herodotus and His Contemporaries,” 79.

CHAPTER 6

Kinds of Presence—Do Objects Have to Be Accessible to Function as Authentication? Narrative histories have to find ways to connect the text-world—the past— with the present reality of their audiences in some way or another so that the past will become accessible. One possibility among others to achieve this connection is, as shown in the previous chapter, referring to objects in a way that establishes their existence in both worlds. However, the narrative purpose of objects is not restricted to establishing this connection, since, in both sources, almost half of the analyzed objects are not invested with this claim to continuity from the past into the discourse-now. While many of these objects that exist only in the text-world clearly fulfill functions other than authentication, and thus belong in a different category, very few of these objects challenge the importance I have attached so far to the criterion of continuity for the function of authentication. Just like the objects with a stated continuation into the present, they also perform an authenticating function. Comparing these similar cases of representations with and without the element of continuity into the present will help to further explore the background and effect of stating continuity, with far-reaching implications for the world-making power attached to the respective narrative of a past. 1

Border Cases: the Absence and Presence of Continuation into the Present

In biblical narrative, altars mark places connected to encounters with the divine and to the reception of divine promises. Like the patriarchs Abraham and Jacob after their encounters with God, the young Gideon builds an altar after he has spoken face to face with God’s messenger (Judg 6:22). Like Jacob and Moses, he gives his altar a name. But Gideon’s altar is the only one in Genesis to Kings that comes with a narratorial claim to exist in the discourse-now: ‫ויבן שם גדעון מזבח ליהוה ויקרא־לו יהוה שלום עד היום הזה עודנו שם בעפרת‬ .‫אבי העזרי‬

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_008

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Then Gideon built an altar there to YHWH, and called it ‘YHWH is peace’. To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites. Judg 6:24 RSV, slightly modified

Building the altar, Gideon acknowledges the encounter as a theophany. For the intradiegetic character, this action is a gesture of thanksgiving and reverence toward the divine; building a memorial for posterity may not be his intention at all. For the narrator and the audience, however, the altar authenticates the encounter and the phenomenon that Gideon survived it unharmed— expressed in the name ‫יהוה שלום‬.1 The object testifies to Gideon’s encounter with the divine: A face to face dialogue between a man of flesh and blood and God (or God’s representatives) is possible even in later generations of Moses’ and Joshua’s descendants. The fact that only this altar comes with a claim to continuity raises the question of the nature of this claim. The phrase ‫ עד היום‬or similar words do not accompany the narrative when the more famous and important altars such as the ones in Bethel, Shechem, and Hebron are built or mentioned for the first time.2 Is this difference meaningful, or fortuitous and negligible? In my opinion, it indicates that the narrating voice assumes the audience to be familiar with the tradition of these three altars as a fixed element in cultural memory. Bethel, connected to Jacob as its founding father, had been a center of cult and culture under the kings of Israel and remained active as such after the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE. After the return of those exiled to Babylonia, it served as the shared sanctuary of both Samarians and returning Judeans until the temple was destroyed in 484 BCE by the rulers of the Persian province Yehud (biblical narrative has it destroyed by Josiah: 2 Kgs 23:15). With regard to an altar in Shechem, I think of the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerizim built presumably in the Persian period. Hebron, and Mamre close by, are connected to the fathers and mothers in Genesis. Already in the Persian period, visitors came to the cave of Makhpelah. Even if there is no active altar or cultic site at that time, it is a revered place. A certain sacrality is thus attached to Bethel, Shechem, and Hebron because of their significance for different groups in the discourse-now. Therefore, the narrating voice does not include 1  This could be an intertextual comment to Exod 33:11 and Deut 34:10. 2  Of the relics related to Jacob’s journey, the narrator attaches the comment of “to this day” only to Rachel’s burial place. In view of the large number of stone monuments in Genesis (especially ‫)מצבות‬, this is surprising—after all, the formula is not absent in general, but used to express the continuity of names and customs. On Hebron as a place of cult, see Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims, T&T Clark library of biblical studies 473 (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 46–48.

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empirical authentication in the stories about divine encounters that were experienced at these places, or divine messages issued there. There certainly are events engraved in tradition in such a central way that additional rhetorical persuasion of a different kind is simply not needed. If the object cannot be expected to be part of the audience’s general knowledge, in turn, the formula is used to replace the audience’s autopsy of the object at that place: The reliable and authoritative narrating voice vouches for its reality. The assertion that Gideon’s altar still exists may indicate that the cult performed there is either unknown to the audience or, despite the altar’s continued existence, no longer practiced—otherwise, this would be stating the obvious. Gideon’s altar is in fact quite far from Jerusalem if one follows Kalai’s suggestion to locate Ofra in the region of today’s Afula.3 This explanation makes ‘remoteness’ from Jerusalem the criterion calling for the claim to the altar’s continued existence, and not the actual status and use of the altar in the discourse-now.4 In Herodotus as well, we can occasionally find a connection of an altar or site of cult and a divine message. In the following, I would like to compare the narrative representations of the beginnings of two religious places with respect to the claim of continuity into the present. One is the precinct for the hero Aeacus in the market (ἀγορά) in Athens (5.89,3). The other is the altar to the winds in the village of Thyia, close to Delphi (7.178), erected as the reaction to a prophecy given in the wake of the sea battle against the Persian invaders at Artemision. The two passages are structured similarly. In each case, the prophecy is given just before a planned or imminent battle: the Atheneans against the Euboeans, Boeotians, and Peloponnesians at the end of the sixth century BCE and the Greek coalition against the Persians in the sea battle at Artemision. The oracle advises concerning from which divinity it will be worthwhile to seek help, and the addressees of the prophecy act accordingly. Just like the holy precinct for Aeacus, the altar in Thyia, too, expresses the idea 3  Zekharyah Kalai, “Ophrah,” (Hebrew), Entsiqlopedia Miqra’it 6: 324–25; reasons to locate Ophrah further north are the killing of Gideon’s brothers at Mount Tabor and Gideon’s actions in this region; the region of Afula can still be included in the territory of Menashe, bordering on Issachar, and Eusebius’ Onomasticon has a place called Αφραια six miles north of Legio. Cf. also the overview of Walter Groß, Richter, HThKAT (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2009), 398–399, who is not convinced by any of the suggested localizations; Klaus Koenen, “Ofra in Manasse,” wibilex 2013, . However, the evidence of the Samaria ostraca, which features the name of the clan of Abiëzer (to which Gideon belongs), suggests the region west of Shechem as their territory. 4  If this was the case, it would be peculiar that a sacrificial cult would be allowed to continue in Ofra but be stopped at the other places, according to the provision in Deut that Jerusalem is to be the only place for sacrifices to the god of Israel.

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that history is cofashioned by divine forces. The sites of worship are built in thanks for divine protection and a good outcome. The altar and the Aiakon differ insofar as, for the altar, there is no claim to its continued existence in the discourse-now. The ‘relic’ of the precinct of Aeacus, which the narrative invests with more persuasive force, therefore enjoys a greater degree of reality. However, we can also observe that the narrator seeks to ‘make up’, as it were, for this lack, as he mentions two facts pertaining to the discourse-world in the immediate context of the reference to the altar for Thyia. In the village of Thyia, the narrating voice asserts with reference to the discourse-now, there is a holy precinct for the nymph Thyia, daughter of Kephisos, and the people of Delphi still sacrifice to the winds. Since there is a holy precinct for the same divinity in the same place, Thyia, it seems of little import to narrator and audience whether the very same altar still exists. For the purposes of accessibility, this physical anchor of continued veneration seems to be sufficient. In addition, within the broader context of the Histories, the narrator’s explanation of the current practice of sacrificing to the winds at Delphi is a claim with a large scope. Asserting that this cult goes back to a historical situation of distress during the Persian Wars, in which the Delphians secured the winds’ favor for the good of all Greeks, is more than a validation of a prophecy with the help of a material relic. Beyond providing a cult etiology for Thyia, claiming a connection between the Delphic cult for the winds and the massive reduction of the number of ships in the Persian fleet to half5 is an “attempt to give pan-Hellenic significance or at least Delphic sanction” to local cult practices at or around Delphi, as Macan has pointed out.6 Thus, one and the same strategy of persuasion may take on additional layers of meaning when it is connected to the events at large.7 These two examples from each of the sources of seeming exceptions to the rule that material remains used for authentication require the move of stated or implied continuity into the discourse-now have emerged as following the 5  Herodotus gives the number of 1,207 Persian triremes (7.89; this number is bigger than the number of ships Agamemnon led against Troy, see Blösel, Themistocles, 206). At least 400, we are told, were destroyed in the storm at Magnesia (7.190), 200 in the storm during the circumnavigation of Euboea (8.7 and 8.14). Herodotus’ assertion that the losses were filled in by later arrivals is another topic (8.66). 6  Reginald Macan, Herodotus: The Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Books (New York: Arno, 1973; reprint), commentary on Hdt. 7.178. 7  It is the narrator who emphasizes and establishes this connection; see 7.178, with the last bit polished as a hexameter: ὑπὲρ ἑωυτῶν καὶ τῆς Ἑλλάδος καταρρωδηκότες … τῇ Ἑλλάδι συμμάχους … Δελφοὶ … Ἑλλήνων … ἐξήγγειλαν τὰ χρησθέντα αὐτοῖσι, καί σφι … ἐξαγγείλαντες χάριν ἀθάνατον κατέθεντο.

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same regularity. The requirement does not have to be met if either a clear connection to the discourse-world can be taken for granted or this function is taken over by other tangible and visible objects at their place. The latter obtains, as we have just seen, in the continued veneration of Thyia (τὸ τέμενός ἐστι; 7.178,2) in the place of the former altar, which can count as enough of a continuation even when not stated for the altar itself, and in Josh 24:26–27, mentioned earlier, the continuity that is implied for the terebinth tree spreads onto the large stone as well. In the foregoing, I have argued that the extratextual reality of the discoursenow can explain why, for a few relics, the narrating voice does not establish within the narrative a connection of the two worlds, despite the object’s authenticating function. For these objects, the missing stated or implied continuation into the discourse-now is balanced by the audience’s presumed knowledge about and familiarity with a given part of the actual world. This means assuming that the narrator tailors the means of persuasion to the narratees. In other words, the actual extradiegetic circumstances sometimes complement and fully bring to its own the reality of objects mentioned in the text-world. In the following, I will present a different scenario: objects invested with such a good measure of reality that they can serve as authentication even though their existence in the present reality is denied, or the narrator explicitly states that they cannot be visited and seen. 2

The Rhetoric of Lost or Hidden Monuments

The narrators undoubtedly also acknowledge the persuasive power of tangible relics when they operate with material proof that is explicitly absent in the discourse-world. This occurs when they claim that material remains once existed but have disappeared. In Herodotus’ narrative about Darius’ expedition to Scythia, the Persian king sets up two marble stelae at the Bosphorus to commemorate and list all ethnic groups in his army when crossing over to Europe. The inscription on one of the pillars is said to have been in the ‘Assyrian’ language (Aramaic), the text on the other stele in Greek (4.87).8 Note that this circumstantial detail already lets the object become more concrete and real. 8  Fehling held that the inscription was Herodotus’ invention (Fehling, Quellenangaben, p. 100, 102, 136, 145), although in this case, he has no detailed or specific arguments. His observation of several parallels and shared motives between Xerxes’ campaign to Greece and Darius’ war against the Scythians (with the possible creation of the latter narrative in the image of Xerxes’ campaign) should certainly be kept in mind.

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In order to affirm that the monuments actually exist in the discourse-now, even though there are no longer visible and accessible at the Bosphorus, the narrator points to their reuse and relocation to two different sanctuaries in Byzantium.9 He does not claim to have seen the inscribed stelae himself, however. It seems that the Herodotean narrator implicitly deplores the absence and inaccessibility of the stelae for two reasons: they would have helped to locate the place where Darius bridged the Bosphorus, and they would have indicated which ethnicities were assembled in the Persian army. Thus, instead of being able to cite the inscription or to name the different people fighting for Darius, the narrator has to settle for the general assertion that Darius took with him soldiers from all ethnic groups that were part of his empire (4.87,1). Although he is not in a position to provide any concrete information based on the stelae, mentioning the pillars reflects the awareness that material relics can be valuable sources for knowledge about the lost past. How convincing is a rhetoric that appeals to lost or hidden monuments no longer there where one would expect to find them as material evidence for an event? As convincing as an excuse of, say, a high-school student who tells you that she did the assignment but forgot it at home, or as the assertion of a family member who takes us to a site now built-over and points out that this is where in the past, his grandmother had a garden plot? Whether the claim is convincing depends very much on how the addressees evaluate the speaker’s reliability, at least as long as none of the recipients is able to decipher the ‘Assyrian letters’. In Herodotus’ Histories, therefore, the reliability of the narrator confirms the existence of the inaccessible relics, which in turn vouch for the reality of Darius’ campaign into Europe and the narrator’s expert knowledge and diligent research. This is as circular as it sounds: the narrator makes a claim that cannot be verified but is potentially very effective. In addition, the motif of material evidence that has disappeared, even without explicit reference to autopsy, has a renowned precedent in Greek epic literature. In the Iliad (12,3–35), we find an explanation as to why there are no remnants of walls or anything of the Greek encampment outside of Troy: obedient to the wills of Zeus and Poseidon, rain and the sea washed the ruins 9  I do not verify in every case what research says about these monuments and the probability of their existence, but rather concentrate on what, according to Herodotus’ Histories, can or cannot be seen. On various points of agreement in Herodotus’ narration between Darius’ actions and those of Xerxes upon their arrival at the edge of their empire and Assyrian customs, see Robert Rollinger, “Dareios und Xerxes an den Rändern der Welt,” in Herodot und das Persische Weltreich, ed. Robert Rollinger, B. Truschnegg, and Reinhold Bichler, 95–116, for the two stelae esp. 97–102; on sources for Darius’ campaign into Scythia, see Christopher Tuplin, “Revisiting Dareios’ Scythian Expedition.”

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away and the earth swallowed any traces. Such a claim is not made to conceal the absence of source material with a fabricated excuse, but to emphasize the reality of a time now gone and lost, were it not for the poet to keep its memory alive. After all, the Homeric epics elsewhere make reference to objects and monuments as memory aids.10 For those who do not agree that the two stelae are a means of persuasion guiding the audience toward acknowledging Herodotus’ narrator as an authority on the past, the alternative is not to understand the narrative reference to Darius’ setting up the two stelae at the Bosphorus as rhetorical support of the account at all, but simply as part of the past action, as a historical fact worthy of being told and remembered. In this case, the inclusion of this symbolic action can, for instance, be explained by its prominence and significance in neo-Assyrian practice and texts, such as those from Salmanassar’s reign, and their incorporation in Greek cultural memory: Darius simply acts as is conventionally expected of a ruler from the ancient Near East who lays claim to a world-encompassing empire and who reaches its boundaries.11 While this is not my preferred option, I admit that, in order to speak of the reference to objects that are no longer visible as an intentional rhetorical strategy in Herodotus’ Histories, we need more examples. At the end of the Croesus narrative, the narrator mentions votive offerings dedicated by Croesus that no longer exist: “These offerings of his were still surviving in my day, although others have perished.” (1.92,1). It is debatable whether he says so, on the one hand, to magnify Croesus’ wealth and generosity or, on the other, because of the urge to give us as complete an overview of this king’s dedications as possible, which would have the same effect and enhance Herodotus’ authority as a knowledgeable person. The stelae that, according to Herodotus, pharaoh Sesostris left in the invaded countries compare better to Darius’ stelae that disappeared. The comment by the narrator that the majority of Sesostris’ stelae have not survived the ages (2.106,1) sounds somewhat apologetic, as if he had expected to find more relics than he can actually point out—or as if he feels the need to support his assertions about Sesostris with evidence. It is no surprise, therefore, that he claims in the next sentence to have seen several of Sesostris’ stelae in Syria-Palestine. Whether Herodotus himself felt the need for authentication and verification 10  The Iliad knows the idea of leaving traces to posterity that bear witness to former times and events: In 7.81–90, a grave will ensure that later generations will remember the hero buried there and his opponent who killed him; in addition it mentions spoils that are displayed in a temple. In the Odyssey, we can find similar examples of a tomb visible from far away, triggering memory or keeping from forgetting (Od. 11,74–78 and 24,80–84). 11  See Rollinger, “Dareios und Xerxes an den Rändern der Welt,” 95–116.

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of his views on Sesostris’ campaign with the help of material relics or he was expected to do so by his audience—or both—the phenomenon at least attests to the notion that, after a not too small event such as a king moving numerous troops long distances, one would expect to find tangible traces in the landscape. Not unlike the two inscribed marble stelae Darius is said to have put up at the Bosphorus recycled for other purposes, and therefore invisible to the audience, the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments are a very famous lost relic in biblical narrative—although their absence in the actual world is not made explicit. They represent nothing less than the covenant between God and the people of Israel—if not the covenant, then certainly one of the founding principles of the account from Genesis to Kings as a whole. The narrative asserts their existence for the time of Moses and Solomon (1 Kgs 8:9), and it can be taken as implicit in the ark narratives in Joshua and Samuel. One of their names is ‫העדת‬ ֻ ‫ ֻלחֹת‬.12 Regardless of the difficulties of determining the exact historical meaning of the priestly term ‫עדות‬, a plain reading suggests that the tablets are seen as a witness of this covenant.13 The narrative has God announce he will give the testimony (‫ )עדות‬to Moses (Exod 24:12; 25:16.21), and Exod 31:18 mentions the completion of this action with reference to the two stone tablets. The narrative showcases this object more than others and does so in at least four ways. First, the narrative presents it as God’s autograph, emphasizing that it was not Moses who wrote the words on stone, but YHWH.14 Being actually written by a deity is the highest status a text can possibly have in the world of scribes from the ancient Near East, and so receiving the tablets certainly competes with oral revelation, the central event in the narrative around Mount Sinai. What is more, Karel van der Toorn emphasizes that the claim to divine origin from remote times relates not only to the source and origin of the text in the past; it extends to scribal instruction in the present of the Persian period. When God writes a central text, he at least becomes the patron, if not a colleague, of the scribes. This amounts to the claim that revelation is encoded 12  Exod. 31:18; 32:15; 34:29: ‫ ;לחת העדת‬other names are ‫ לחות הברית‬and ‫לחות (ה)אבנים‬. 13  Horacio Simian-Yofre, “‫”עוד‬, ThWAT 5: 1107–1128, esp. ‫ עדות‬1125–27. It seems that the other construct compounds with ‫ עדות‬such as ‫ארון עדות‬, ‫ משכן עדות‬and ‫ אהל עדות‬have got their names from the tablets of ‫עדות‬. 14  Exod 34:1 has God announce he will write on the second pair of tablets himself (in Exod 24:12, God asserts that the stone tablets he has written on are ready to be taken to the Israelites); Exod 34:27 has Moses write down God’s words; in Deut 10:2, Moses cites the announcement of Exod 34:1 in retrospect and, in verse 4, asserts that God himself wrote on the tablets (cf. Deut 4:13). Exod 31:18 even mentions that the tablets have been inscribed by God’s finger.

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in a text—it is the business of the scribes and no longer that of the prophets. If revelation takes the form of a written text, the instruction of a future scribe closely resembles a heavenly revelation.15 Claiming God as the source of a text is therefore first and foremost a claim to authority for this particular text, and by extension probably even for other texts that relate to it. As a corollary, it also enhances the authority of the professionals who work with these texts. Thus in my view, the addressees of this claim to authority are primarily the scribes themselves, seeing themselves in a chain of tradition starting with Moses as the lawgiver.16 For the relationship of the text-world and actual world, this means that there is no question about the text’s authentically representing the past. Otherwise, anchoring their professional ethos in the past with Moses would be of no use. Conversely, the existing tradition about the past has a status of unquestioned authority, such that claiming that a text at hand is part of this tradition, and thereby expanding it, is an effective strategy of persuasion. Second, in the narrative about what originally was to be the culminating and final meeting of God with Moses on Sinai (had Moses not broken the stone slabs), references to the tablets frame God’s long speech containing instructions for the ‘portable’ sanctuary, and thus take a prominent place in the Hebrew text. The tablets are first mentioned in Exod 24:12, then referred to several times during the speech (25:16, 21–22; 30:6), and finally handed over to Moses in Exod 31:18:17 ‫ויאמר יהוה אל־משה עלה אלי ההרה והיה־שם ואתנה לך את־לחת האבן והתורה‬ ‫והמצוה אשר כתבתי להורתם׃‬

YHWH said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and be there; and I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.” Exod 24:12 RSV, slightly modified

‫משה ככלתו לדבר אתו בהר סיני שני לחת העדת לחת אבן כתבים באצבע‬-‫ויתן אל‬ ‫אלהים׃‬

And he gave to Moses, when he had made an end of speaking with him upon Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, inscribed by the finger of God. Exod 31:18 RSV, slightly modified

15  Toorn, Scribal Culture, 107–08. 16  Ibid. 166–70; Otto, Deuteronomium 1,1–4,43, 591. 17  The first quote is Exod 24:12; the second Exod 31:18.

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In this way, the tablets of the covenant are also spotlighted through their position within the literary text. A third way in which the tablets receive further attention is their role in the following dramatic events. The Israelites do not get to see them, since Moses shatters them at the foot of Sinai before he returns to their camp (Exod 32:19). God’s insistence on replacing them makes them gain once more in importance. The narrative implies that the events at Sinai are incomplete without the tablets; obviously, they are essential for the Israelites’ future. Not just their materiality matters, but also the inscription, the text itself. It is as if the twelve stones and the altar erected at Mount Sinai at the first making of the covenant (Exod 24:4) are no longer of any value because of the Israelites’ veneration of the golden calf. They cannot simply be reactivated as a permanent witness through a renewed dedication or sacrifice at the same place. This shows that the stone tablets, for the authors of these passages, are more than a memory anchor. Finally, the holiness of the place where they are kept for the next few hundred years of narrated time demonstrates their value and significance. Far from being an object that people can use for one purpose or the other, they are removed and treated as a sacred object. Kept in a precious box or shrine in the interior of the lavishly decorated tent of the meeting (Exod 40:20–21; Deut 10:1–5), the location of God’s presence, and in the holy of holies in Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:9), they are treasured most highly. In sum, the two stone tablets are certainly a central object in the events at Mount Sinai and revered also after the Israelites inhabit the promise land. Because they receive a lot of narrative attention, their disappearance from the narrative is likely to be noticed. A brief glimpse into reception history confirms that later audiences understood the stone tablets as a physical relic from the time of Moses, so the object accrued the status of a lost relic. Not to mention Indiana Jones, Jer 3:16 expresses that the absence of the ark, presumably with the tablets inside, is painfully noted, but he also rejects their sacred indispensability in a radical way: ‫(…) לא־יאמרו עוד ארון ברית־יהוה ולא יעלה על־לב ולא יזכרו־בו ולא יפקדו ולא‬ ‫יעשה עוד׃‬

[…] they shall no more say, “The ark of YHWH’s covenant.” It shall not come to mind, or be remembered, or missed; it shall not be made again. Jer 3:16

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Later Jewish literature interpreted this as Jeremiah having hidden the ark in a cave (2 Macc 2:5), with it later being placed in the heavenly sanctuary (Rev 11:19) or swallowed up by the earth (2 Bar 6:1–9). Therefore, the object is in a position to function as material evidence despite its absence in the discourse-world. According to the narrative, the stone tablets are the record of the exact words God spoke to Moses and the Israelites on Mount Sinai (Deut 5:22). For their function as a material relic despite their absence in the discourse-world, what is important is the implicit claim in the narrative that the text of the commandments existed outside of and prior to its attestation in the literary text, which the reader is holding in his hands. In this way, the text on the scroll the reader sees and reads is presented as a citation, and not as the only document where the text appears. It is claimed to be a copy from the inscription on stone, which becomes the mastercopy. Thus, the absent relic of the stone tablets in this case authenticates a text, not an event in the past. The motif of a prophet receiving tablets or a scroll with divine legislation in an encounter with God is a common form to express the revelation of a written text in the scribal cultures of the ancient Near East.18 In this way, the professional scribes arrogate authority for the normative text of the Ten Commandments. Their claim that portions of their texts were revealed to Moses by God probably first addressed their fellow scholars, and only later a wider audience.19 It both asserts the authority of the written tradition and claims the epistemological advantage of extraordinary knowledge. That the inscribed tablets are presented as a relic from the time of Moses further enhances the authority of the text because of its antiquity. A newly written text is not much more than signs written on paper, papyrus, or parchment. It can claim to be anything, but its audience does not need to take it as what it claims to be. Inscription of the same text on stone or any other robust and permanent material enhances the authenticity of a text. Not incidentally, the Assyrian and Babylonian practice of law knew a double documentation of certain legal acts, for which the king or an official institution of his administration issued a public document written on a durable tablet.20 This practice aimed at ensuring a long-lasting binding nature of these agreements. 18  Wolfgang Speyer, Bücherfunde in der Glaubenswerbung der Antike: mit einem Ausblick auf Mittelalter und Neuzeit, Hypomnemata 24 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 15–17. 19  The following is based on Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 206–10. 20  Christoph Dohmen, Exodus 1–18, HThKAT (Freiburg: Herder, 2015), 213.

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In fact, the ancient historian Andreas Hartmann has argued that the mere fact of a double attestation of a text, one in ancient literature and the other as an epigraphic source, makes a text more authoritative and less suspect as a fiction. He gives the following example. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek city of Thera presented to the much more influential city of Cyrene on the African coast a written document granting rights and privileges in Cyrene to some families of Thera and their descendants.21 The people from Thera claimed that the document they had invented contained the words of an agreement from the seventh century BCE, already three centuries in the past. The Cyreneans accepted the claims of Therans to rights in Cyrene, had the text of the document inscribed on marble and publically displayed in their temple of Pythian Apollo. What interests me here is the fact that, simply because the inscription was transmitted also on a more permanent writing material, modern scholars tended to believe that the epigraphic attestation indeed dates from the seventh century and documents a contemporary agreement. As Hartmann concludes, the tangible and three-dimensional quality of the inscribed material instinctively creates an assumption of authenticity with regard to the recorded text.22 When the biblical narrative claims that the text of the Ten Commandments written on papyrus or parchment and stored in the temple library is actually a copy of a text inscribed on stone and dating from the very time when its words were first spoken, it claims authenticity, authority, and a binding nature for the text. Unlike the modern scholars mentioned by Hartmann, who had access to the literary and epigraphic version of the document produced by the Therans, the addressees of the account of Israel’s history in early Second Temple times had only the literary version on a scroll and could not examine the stone tablets. Nevertheless, the prominent existence of the tablets as tangible objects in the narrative world has proven to be effective in a similar way. This observation suggests that the objects in a narrative do not necessarily 21  Cf. Osborne, Greece in the Making, 13; Claude Calame, Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece: Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space, Hellenic studies 18 (Washington, DC, Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies; Harvard Univ. Press, 2009), transl. Harlan Patton, 153. 22  Andreas Hartmann, Zwischen Relikt und Reliquie: Objektbezogene Erinnerungspraktiken in antiken Gesellschaften, Studien zur alten Geschichte Bd. 11 (Berlin: Verlag Antike, 2010), 428–30; citation 429: “Die Überrestqualität des Schriftträgers suggeriert unwillkürlich eine Authentizitätsvermutung bezüglich des aufgezeichneten Textes.” On the fact that concrete descriptions of or references to material remains in narrative elicit archaelogical positivism because they seem to promise a material reality, see Bassi, Traces of the Past, 121–22, and ead., Karen Bassi, “Zeus’ Stone: Objects and Time in the Delphic Landscape,” in Apolline Politics and Poetics, ed. Lukia Athanasakē (Athens: European Cultural Centre of Delphi, 2009), 109–25, 109–125: 118–19.

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have to be accessible or visible in the world of the discourse-partners in order to make an effective claim for authenticity. The foregoing argument has shown that Darius’ stelae in 4.87 and the tablets of the covenant, which are both relocated within each narrative so that they are no longer accessible in the discourse-now, may be interpreted as proof despite their hiddenness for Herodotus’ and the scholarly scribes’ audiences. This strategy is applied only very sporadically. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the narrative reference to a physical relic, preferredly with some description of the object, is in itself a viable strategy of persuasion, regardless of whether the object mentioned is visible to the audience or not. In other words, in factual narratives whose narrator is believed to be reliable, the mere speaking about a relic already invests it with reality. Every recipient will understand that traces of the past can get lost or disintegrate. A narrative event with a reference to a lost relic is therefore more tangible than one that has allegedly left no physical trace at all. Uses of the Imperfect with Objects and Their Prospective Decay and Disappearance In both Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings, we have encountered objects that are added to the story-world through the narration of their creation and that are recorded as being no longer in their place or visible later on. This brings up the question of whether the two representations of a past also conceive in a more general way of the thought that not only human beings but also inanimate things are perishable, and if this impinges on their worth as points of access to the past. Herodotus’ general awareness of change and the capriciousness of fate is well known (cf. 1.5,4; 1.32). The possibility of valuable dedications and war spoils being relocated or taken away is not a vague or theoretical scenario in the Histories, but a concrete imminent danger or even accomplished reality.23 In addition, the narrator strikingly uses a verb in the past tense (imperfect) when he refers to a relic using the expression ἐς ἐμὲ or κατ’ ἐμὲ (‘until my [time]’). By contrast, when he asserts the continuity of an object from the past to his present and the adverbial νῦν is involved, the verb is naturally in the present, such as ἔστι or ἵδρυται. Can the objects the existence of which is expressed in the imperfect tense be counted as material remains that are potentially lost? 2.1

23  Cf.: the fire in the temple at Delphi causing damage and relocation of objects (1.50, 3.51); the Persian army being on its way to Delphi to ransack the treasures (8.35,2–8.39); and Xerxes’ governor Artayktes, who took away the offerings in the sanctuary of Protesilaos (9.116).

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Are we to understand these uses of the imperfect as narratorial hints that the narrator, while affirming that the objects existed not too long ago, does not commit himself to the position that they are still around in the discourse-now? For instance, when the narrator talks about bonds the Athenians used for their prisoners, he says “and they were still being there in my day” (5.77,3).24 Fred Naiden interprets this use of the “prospective imperfect” as signaling the narrator’s expectation of the objects’ vulnerability, implying a hypothetical future in which the objects he saw in his lifetime are no longer in their place.25 In addition, if the narrator expects that his account will outlast certain objects, he reveals an aspiration to writing for posterity. If Herodotus really hypothesizes future readers with a material reality different from his own, he clearly takes into account its transience. This awareness of eventual decay both affirms and, paradoxically, at the same time, subtracts from the value Herodotus’ narrator sees in objects and material relics as a strategy of persuasion.26 On the one hand, presenting the relics affirms their value as material evidence and visual anchors—the narrator obviously finds them worth mentioning. The implied possibility of their evanescence, on the other, also subverts this move. Receipts printed on thermal paper are good as proof of purchase only as long as the printed text is visible. In case the relics no longer are a tangible reality for his audience, the narrator’s assertion that they existed in his time either is pointless or has an appeal to future generations to trust in his eyewitness confirmation. If Herodotus was aware of the temporary validity and potential expiration of material remains—and I assume he was—this is another reason to conclude that the importance the narrator generally attaches to these objects is limited—precisely because they are subject to change. Karen Bassi’s analysis of the temporal dimensions of objects in ancient Greek narratives about a past, however, has pointed out that exactly this vulnerability even of stone structures, for example, invites reflection about the presence and loss of the past. With reference to Herodotus’ Histories, she shows how the narrator’s use of and reference to tangible traces of the past indirectly expresses meta-historical concepts since they draw attention to the tense and 24  ἔτι καὶ ἐς ἐμὲ ἦσαν περιεοῦσαι, translation R. Waterfield. See also, e.g.: 1.52; 1.66; 1.93,3; 2.154,5; 4.124; 4.204; 5.77,3; 5.88,3; 7.170,1; 8.39,2; 8.121,1. Cf. Marincola, “Herodotean narrative,” 127. Examples for uses of the present or perfect are: 1.50,3; 1.69,4; 3.59,2; 4.15,4; 7.115,3; 7.225,2. 25  F red S. Naiden, “The Prospective Imperfect in Herodotus,” HSCPh 99 (1999): 135–49, here 135–38. 26  Cf. Bassi, Traces of the Past, 115; Bassi interprets this as a protoarchaeological trait of Herodotus’ narrative.

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not straight-forward relationship between what happened in the past and what is visible in the discourse-now. She insists that the role of the narrator’s, and, by implication, the audience’s visual perception is essential in conceptualizing the past.27 However, there is another, simpler explanation for the use of the imperfect tense in connection with some material remains. As suggested by Marco Dorati, the imperfect in these cases does not signify pastness for the objects’ existence, but can be explained as an autobiographical reflection of Herodotus’ visit at the place he later recollects when he writes down the account, remembering the experience of seeing the object as an event in the past.28 Herodotus’ audience—and among them, modern readers—should therefore not assume that objects for which he claims existence using an existential statement in the imperfect tense are absent in the discourse-now. In this way, whether consciously or not, the narrator also makes the implicit claim of being a direct eyewitness of some of the relics. I tend to agree with Dorati’s reading. To me, the expression conveys the quality of a personal recollection—the questions of whether or not this visit historically happened and, if so, the identity of the visitor, do not concern me here. This is not to negate the thought in Herodotus’ Histories that the material world as we know it is susceptible to change. Nevertheless, the status of material evidence is not questioned as such. 3

Formal Criteria for Authentication Not Parsed as Evidence If Other Factors Predominate

Earlier in this chapter I have shown that in Gen–Kings and Herodotus’ Histories, material relics from the past with missing or even denied continuation into the present can nevertheless serve an authenticating function. Now, I will look at almost inverse examples. Here, such a continuity is expressed or can be reasonably assumed, and we also find the two remaining features of material evidence (attribution to a person or event in the past; location given), but the reference to the objects is nevertheless not parsed as material evidence.

27  Bassi, Traces of the Past, 8 and 119; cf. 2, 7, 15. Bassi’s interpretation of material remains places a greater emphasis than I do here on exploring meanings of objects beyond that which can be seen. We share the notion that the narrative meaning of objects surviving from the past is not exhausted by their verifying function as evidence. Sometimes, their evidentiary quality is not an issue at all. 28  Dorati, “Travel Writing,” 289 with n. 78. Naiden also considers this possibility in passing, “Prospective Imperfect,” 141–42.

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In certain narrative contexts, authentication is relegated because of, among other factors, vivid narration. In the following, I argue that the more one or a combination of the following factors is present in a story, the less acute is the need for corroborating material evidence: narrative time (which the narrating voice dedicates to an event in the past); specific details such as descriptions, names, or locations; one or more characters serving as experiencers; content also represented elsewhere in the audience’s communicative or cultural memory. Whether an audience processes a reference to a relic from the past as material evidence or not is impacted by several factors, one of which is the object’s narrative context. If the audience is offered accessibility with a low threshold, such as in the form of a detailed narration of events they can visualize and experience by listening or reading,29 they will be less responsive to ways of access with a higher threshold, such as more abstract reasoning.30 This can lead to a situation where the reader may not relate to a physical overlap of objects in the story-world with those in the discourse-world as a means of authentication because the past action has already been shown to her as real through other narrative means just mentioned or extratextual cultural features. My hypothesis that narratives with these characteristics outdo material evidence in persuasive effectiveness is based on the following observation with reference to a subgroup of votive offerings in Herodotus’ Histories: Dedications said to have been placed in temples or on the battle field after the decisive Greek victories in the battles of Salamis and Plataea appear to have a different effect on the reader than other dedications mentioned elsewhere in the same way. The four objects in question are: in Delphi, a statue of a man, probably an Apollo, twelve cubits high, dedicated after the battle of Salamis (8.121) and the bronze snake column with the golden tripod on top, dedicated after the battle of Plataea (9.81); in Olympia, a bronze statue of Zeus ten cubits high, also offered after the victory at Plataea (9.81); and a statue of Poseidon seven cubits high at the Isthmos, also offered after the victory at Platea (9.81). The way these objects are mentioned does not essentially differ from dedications discussed above as material evidence, such as Colaeus’ crater or the Apollo 29  Basil Lourié, “Possible Worlds” (online resource). 30  Ibid. As narrative, Lourié also takes into account texts by scientists. What I mentioned as high and low threshold, Lourié expresses in terms of remoteness between the story-world and the actual world: “Theoretical affirmations refer to FK-worlds [ET: fuzzy Kripke; for my purposes it suffices to call this simply a possible world] that are most remote from us (remoteness refers here to accessibility level, that is, the least density of diffusive zone [ET: i.e., the intersections or overlap between possible worlds] between the respective FK-world and our own), whereas empirical affirmations refer to the least remote ones.”

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statue in Thornax.31 In both of these groups, the dedications are mentioned in a brief statement. Nevertheless, reading the battle accounts to which they belong, the dedications to be discussed in the following do not seem to serve the function of material evidence for the battle. In contrast to other dedications discussed above, the existence of these objects in the discourse-now does not significantly contribute to the sense of reality of the event. What is different from other battle episodes such that, this time, the reference to the relics is processed differently by the reader? The battles of Salamis and Plataea, including the events directly leading to them, are a substantial part of Herodotus’ Histories. In terms of the narrative time they take up relative to other events, they are the focus of the account.32 The battles are represented in scenic and vivid narratives; their events appear authentic due to specific details like the names of protagonists, and even of one or the other more marginal figure, and due to the narrative density of a ‘thick description’. In addition, the events find support in congruent stories alive in the social memory of contemporary Greek societies with ceremonies of ritualized remembrance for these wars and their dead. In other words, these events enjoy a rich representation both within the narrative and outside of it.33 Against this background, the dedications mentioned briefly at the end of such a rich narrative do not appear to make a significant contribution in terms of its facts or reliability. The reference to the dedications after the battle of Plataea, for instance, runs as follows: συμφορήσαντες δὲ τὰ χρήματα καὶ δεκάτην ἐξελόντες τῷ ἐν Δελφοῖσι θεῷ, ἀπ᾽ ἧς ὁ τρίπους ὁ χρύσεος ἀνετέθη ὁ ἐπὶ τοῦ τρικαρήνου ὄφιος τοῦ χαλκέου ἐπεστεὼς ἄγχιστα τοῦ βωμοῦ, καὶ τῷ ἐν Ὀλυμπίῃ θεῷ ἐξελόντες, ἀπ᾽ ἧς δεκάπηχυν χάλκεον Δία ἀνέθηκαν, καὶ τῷ ἐν Ἰσθμῷ θεῷ, ἀπ᾽ ἧς ἑπτάπηχυς χάλκεος Ποσειδέων ἐξεγένετο … (9.81,1)

31  Two of these four objects are linguistically claimed to exist in both the story-world and the actual world; no explicit claim to continuity into the present is made for the Olympian statue of Zeus and the statue of Poseidon at the Isthmos. For the larger-than-life statues of deities, it can be reasonably assumed that the audience had seen them or had heard of them, since they are located at important pan-Hellenic cultic sites and, if they existed as described by Herodotus, represent remarkable achievements in terms of art and engineering. 32  The battle of Salamis and the preceding decision-making process take up chapters 8.40– 96; the battle of Plataea occupies 9.19–86. 33  Authentication through social memory and ceremonies of course does not hold for me as a non-Greek twenty-first-century reader.

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When all the treasure had been collected, they reserved a tenth of it for the god of Delphi, a tenth for the god of Olympia, and a tenth for the god of the Isthmus. From the first tenth was dedicated the golden tripod which sits on the bronze three-headed serpent very close to the altar; from the second tenth was dedicated the bronze statue of Zeus, ten cubits tall; and from the third tenth was dedicated the seven-cubit bronze statue of Poseidon. transl. Waterfield

The narrative, which takes up fifty-seven chapters, does not substantially gain from this terse and summarizing reference to dedications. Its credibility does not depend on it, and the objects are no starting point for further insights. The narrative asserts the dedication of the larger-than-life statues of deities, but the narrator does not direct much attention to the objects. They are not needed as proof for the facticity of the battle of Plataea, an event whose reality Herodotus’ audience takes for granted. All of this suggests once more that physical remains do not appear to be the narrator’s preferred and leading means of persuasion. Therefore, a reader’s reception of a material relic as empirical evidence is affected by its narrative context. The shorter the battle account is, the fewer pieces of information the narrator provides, and the less familiar the event is in the audience’s social memory, the more inclined we are to take a reference to a material relic as proof. The following comparison of two battle accounts, the Phocian defeat of the Thessalians, on the one hand, and the battles at Salamis and Plataea, on the other, substantiates this hypothesis. Relics mentioned in a short battle account are the statues the Phocians dedicated to Delphi and Abae after their unexpected victory over Thessaly (8.27). The four thousand slain enemies and the several large statues that were allegedly placed in Herodotus’ time in a prominent place around the tripod in Delphi convey the message that the victory was considerable. However, this story of a major victory of a small force, the Phocians, against a large one that is superior due to their cavalry, involving a very exceptional stratagem, runs counter to average expectations. The exceptionality of the event is a risk to its successful incorporation into the audience’s knowledge about the past of the actual world. Therefore, in addition to celebrating the great event and adding glamour to it, the dedications also serve as evidence that this story is true, that it really happened and brought this unexpected result. Another obstacle potentially impeding the acceptance of this story as relevent to the audience’s life in the discourse-world is its experientiality being only partial. Tellias from Elis is the only concrete agent in this

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episode: the fighting Phocians and those from Thessaly are everybodies—the narrating voice mentions no particular personalities. In terms of the plot, we can find the same basic set-up in the narratives about the Greek victory at Salamis and Plataea: a victory of a smaller army against a very large one that was not foreseeable. However, an important difference between the two accounts (the success of the Phocians and the battles at Salamis and Plataea) is the latter’s density and specificity of information. If Herodotus had only scanty information and material about the wars of the Greek coalition against Xerxes, the Greek dedications would have been more meaningful as information and would have carried more weight. In this hypothetical scenario, Herodotus would have been more likely to exploit the few pieces of information for his narrative. With a wealth of memories from eyewitnesses and the repeated evocation of these events in Greek arts and cult, Herodotus was simply not reliant on the larger-than-life statues as empirical evidence.34 This hypothesis is supported by the observation that Herodotus’ use of objects as an empirical strategy of persuasion is more frequent in the first five books than in the rest. As is well known, books 6–9 primarily deal with the end of the Ionian revolt and the first and second Persian War in 490 and 480/79— that is, events from the fifth century. Within my sample of twenty-three relics that function as material evidence, seventeen are situated by Herodotus’ narrative in the sixth century BCE or earlier, and only five in the fifth century.35 Narrativization is therefore such an effective means of persuasion that it causes other more cognitive means of persuasion to lose importance. Monika Fludernik’s definition of narrativity as experientiality embodied in a human consciousness helps to explain this observation. When the reader undergoes an experience herself, or at least observes someone else’s experience while reading or listening, she is able to invoke a vivid mental picture in her imagination, which has an authenticating and persuading effect. Therefore it is justified to speak of the world-making power of narrativization.

34  Cf. West, “Herodotus’ Epigraphical Interests,” 302, where she points to Herodotus’ surprising superficiality (judged by modern standards) in his exploitation of the inscribed serpent-column at Delphi. In this case, almost passing over the monument can not be explained by Herodotus’ possible aversion to anthropomorphic statues of deities; see Bichler, “Autopsiebehauptungen,” 143. 35  Sixth century (first half) or earlier: 1.14; 1.50; 1.51; 1.52; 1.66; 1.69; 1.163; 4.11; 4.152. Sixth century (second half): 3.57; 3.59; 4.124; 5.62; 5.63; 5.77; 8.27. Fifth century: 5.88; 5.89; 6.14; 8.39. The wooden statues of priests in Egypt belong to all of these times, since the practice of putting them up is claimed to be very ancient but still in use in Herodotus’ lifetime.

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The Herodotean narrator’s insistence on mentioning the dedications all the same could be explained by Herodotus’ awareness that narrative prose has the potential to represent also fictive events, even if in his time it was reserved for learned, factual discourse. Pointing to the dedications could be understood as an additional marker that the narrative stakes a claim to factuality. However, with veteran fighters in these battles still alive in the grandfather generation, the necessity of such a claim is hardly likely. Another suggestion is the idea that they might simply be a stock element of battle accounts. A reference to a dedication would then conclude the narrative, neither obsolete nor an essential part in it. However, a survey of battle accounts with a Greek victory in the Histories shows that not all end with a dedication, not even the battle of Marathon.36 This makes it unlikely that Herodotus followed a fixed convention that a war episode had to be ended by a donation to a temple. A more cogent version of this alternative explanation is the idea that the narrator mentions the religious act of the dedications not as a means to the end of persuasion, but as a noteworthy event of the past. This is certainly possible, but it also raises a new question: If dedications are themselves important events that deserve to be recorded, why does the narrator not include, for instance, the thank-offering for the victory near Marathon, also dedicated at Delphi?37 Let me therefore suggest reading these dedications as means of persuasion in the realm of religious and social norms, and defer the discussion to the next chapter. The discussion above has shown, at any rate, that authenticity and realism as qualities of the narrative representation of a past can be evoked by various means, including the more abstract and cognitive assertion that an object from a certain event in the past still exists, and the more experiential quality of being able to enter, as it were, an event because it is told as a human experience including expectations and feelings. 36  Herodotus explicitly writes about the tenth part of battle spoils with reference to only three campaigns: the Atheneans’ victory in the battle with the Boeotians and warriors from Chalkidike (5.77); the unexpected victory of the Phocians over the Thessalians (8.27); and the Greeks’ triumph over the Persians at Plataea (9.81). There are a number of wars or battles recorded in Herodotus’ Histories without a note on dedications at sanctuaries, e.g.: Polycrates’ victory over the Spartans (3.56); the Peisistratides vanquishing the Spartans in their first attempt to free Athens from tyranny (5.63,4); Cleomenes’ success in his campaign against the Peisistratides in Athens (5.65); the Ionians’ victory over Byzantium (5.103); and the victory of Aigina over Athens (6.93). Neither is there mention of a donation of spoils after the battle of Mykale, even though Herodotus mentions spoils (9.106). 37  West, Greek Public Monuments (II. Monuments of Marathon, no. 8): “Thank offering dedicated at Delphi, resting upon an inscribed base abutting against the terrace of the Athenian Treasury”.

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189

Does Vivid Narration Suffice to Persuade of a Past Reality?

As has been shown, material traces of the past are important to Herodotus’ narrator as a means of authentication. But are they important enough to influence his choice of content, which traditions to include in his narrative and which not to include? Does he take it as a criterion for the reliability of a piece of tradition? A test case is that of the wooden cult images of the agrarian deities of Damia and Auxesia. The historical matter the narrator connects to these statues is no less than the old enmity between Athens and Aegina. And yet, he does not affirm that the wooden statues are part of the discourse-world. Are we to read this as a signal about the status of the legendary story for the narrator? Herodotus’ narrator treats the issue in a fairly long narrative (5.82–89,1) in which these cult objects play a prominent role. Since the Aeginetians stole the images of Damia and Auxesia from Epidauros, he tells us, Epidauros no longer paid Athens their dues for having the statues, a yearly tribute to the temple of Erekhtheus and Athena Polias. When the Athenians then demand the tribute from the new owners, the Aeginetians, unless they return the statues to Athens, the Aeginetans refuse. Finally, the Athenians attempt to get the statues back by force, which ends in disaster. The role of these statues in the narrative reflects a curiously noncommittal but nevertheless serious approach by the narrator. On the one hand, the narrator leaves no doubt that the issues in the past were real problems and highly relevant. Sculpting and dedicating the statues ends a sustained crop failure in Epidauros, and an attempt to take the statues back from Aegina using force causes the death of several Athenians. This memory is allegedly relevant even in subsequent politics. Yet, he does not claim that the idols at the focus of the narrative can still be seen on the island of Aegina.38 The wooden idols do not have a clear status in the discourse-now. This lack of a clear reference to the statues in the discourse-world is surprising; after all, Herodotus allocates quite a lot of space to this story in his account. Not the statues themselves but only 38  Herodotus’ account presents a few pieces of information, all a bit indirect or implicit. There is a hint to Oie as location of the sanctuary, at a distance of twenty stadiums to the polis (5.83,2). If this is no interpolation, it is the most concrete information the narrator gives on the place of the statues. Changes in dedication practices mentioned in 5.88,2 presuppose an active cult of Damia and Auxesia (ἐς το ἱρὸν τῶν θεῶν τούτων πέρονας … ἀνατιθέναι …). The etiology for the question of why the statues are kneeling implies that the goddesses were sculpted in this position (5.86,3). The only reference Heroduts’ narrator makes to objects associated with Aegina that he confirms to exist are the mobile objects of long clothespins (5.88,3). The dedication of prows from Samian ships taken as spoils is mentioned without such a commentary (3.59,3).

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cultural memories attached to them are directly connected with the present (cf. Hdt. 5.89,1). For the story-world, the reality of the statues becomes palpable through their role as ‘characters’ in the story. Taking on agency, the wooden statues exert effects in the story-world, and thus appear as real in this environment. But does this narrative dramatization of the relic make any explicit confirmation of their existence in the discourse-now redundant? Or do the numerous etiological elements imply the existence of the statues in the present, since there would otherwise be no need to tell such a story? All of this remains speculative. It seems to me that the story was rooted so well in Athenian and Aeginetan cultural memory39 that there was simply no need for its authentication through a reference to the statues, regardless of what Herodotus personally thought about the legends.40 Prominence in living cultural memory would then amount to a reality status of a kind that either did not require further authentication or did not tolerate being challenged. There seems to be an interesting change in the relationship between the physical objects, that is, the two statues of cult, and the legends attached to them. Because the legends are object-centered, they presumably would initially not have been told if statues such as these had not existed at one point in time. In the course of time, this interdependency is loosened so that the narrative memories in Herodotus of how the contested ownership of the statues affected the animosity between Athens and Aegina do not depend on the tangible accessibility of the statues in the actual world. Otherwise, I would expect Herodotus’ narrator to make a clear statement to their existence and precise location. The partly legendary events of the past involving the statues gain their own independent existence thanks to their central role in the stories. This observation matches results mentioned earlier: if in general, the use of relics in Herodotus is confined to additional corroboration for existing accounts, we can expect that his own personal acquaintance with relics matching the story is obviously no precondition for Herodotus’ decision to include the legends in his account. 39   For sources and epic connotations of Herodotus’ account, see Thomas Figueira, “Herodotus on the early hostilities between Aegina and Athens,” AJPh 106.1 (1985): 49–74, 49–74, and Johannes Haubold, “Athens and Aegina (5.82–89),” in Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories, ed. Elizabeth K. Irwin and Emily Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 226–44. Not consulted for this paragraph is Miriam Valdés Guía, “La guerra de Atenas con Egina y el culto de Damia y Auxesia,” in: Arys 11 (2013): 145–61. 40  The narrator states his disbelief in one of the legend’s details, the claim that the two statues had fallen on their knees before the Athenians (Hdt. 5.86,3).

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Narrative expansion and dramatization in the story-world certainly establish a connection between the extradiegetic narratee and the story-world. It is obvious that the narrativization of an event in a way enables an audience to form a vivid mental image of this event or even to take part in someone’s experience of it. As seen before, if a writer unfolds an event in the past in a way that the audience can imagine it visually, this is welcomed by the reader as a complementary, or at times even alternative, accessibility relation enhancing the account’s realism. The more concretely an event is narrated, and the more clearly related to people’s own experiences and realistic it is (compared to what an audience defines as such), the more accessible it is to an audience. This holds especially when an event is represented as someone else’s experience. Therefore, a mere summarizing report of an event in the past, as we have it, for example, in 2 Sam 23:11–12 and Hdt. 8.121, is naturally less accessible than a scenic narration, such as in Hdt. 1.108,3–119 and 1 Kgs 8. In fact, Monika Fludernik considers past-tense reports that summarize an event as nonnarrative because she takes experientiality as constitutive of narrativity. In her view, a narrative must have a human or anthropomorphic experiencer and must imply the experiencer’s consciousness.41 Accordingly, the extent to which a representation of events allows insights into the past agents’ mind and emotions, or at least narrates the protagonists’ emotional and physical reactions to their circumstances, can be addressed as a strategy of persuasion: it makes the narrative world more accessible to the audience. With regard to the Herodotean story about the statues of Damia and Auxesia, this leads to the question how these two strategies of persuasion, material relics versus narrativization in its more narrow sense, relate to each other in their effect of evoking reality, convincing the audience of the authenticity and relevance of the narrated past. Are they interchangeable such that a lack of physical remains from the past would not matter much as long as the narrator relates the events in a vivid way so that they can be experienced in the ‘as if-mode’? This is one of the more intriguing questions at the core of this study. There is probably no general answer that holds for all of Herodotus’ Histories, or Gen–Kings, respectively. The references to material remains and the narration of events in both sources are too diverse for wholesale statements. Vivid narration certainly is a very effective means of persuasion, since it creates broad accessibility relations. Above, I have elaborated on examples where, in my opinion, extensive narrativization of the battles of Salamis and Plataea makes references to dedications in thanks for the Greek victories redundant as persuasive tools, at least in their authenticating function. 41  Fludernik, Towards, 12–13 and 28–30.

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Nevertheless, I doubt that, for Herodotus, narrativization of a past including experiencers is a full substitute for a connection of the story-world with the material reality of the discourse-world as a route of access to the past. Narrativization enhances the reader’s access, but it does not establish the story-world as a past reality with the same quality of realism as obtains to the discourse-now. Otherwise, the Herodotean narrator would not need to make a sustained effort to create this connection through narratorial intrusions with information relating to his and the audience’s present. As mentioned in the second part of this study, a narrative purely in the diegetic mode would not be capable of incorporating and expressing much, but not all of the content elsewhere expressed in the discursive mode. For the claim of factuality, tangible objects from the past that still exist in the present lend themselves especially well. It seems to be no coincidence that both Gen–Kgs and Herodotus’ Histories repeatedly note in discursive intrusions that a relic is still around in the discourse-now. Therefore, offering the reader the means to emotionally relate to the characters in a given narrated event does not automatically establish an event in the past as a reality, even if the setting and the agents’ descendants are known in the present. Most of my observations prompting these deliberations have been based on Herodotus’ narrative of a past. This text seems to invite these questions more than the biblical narratives. The following, however partial, is an attempt to account for this phenomenon. In the Histories, there is a broader range of different ways of embedding and representing object in the narrative. Therefore, references to objects and their existence in the discourse-now seem to be more differentiated than in Gen–Kgs. Second, the Herodotean narrator himself discusses at times the question of whether a given traditional story is just a tale or the narrated events are real. Generally speaking, I see Herodotus as a writer who tried to establish which events represented in stories actually happened and he can therefore claim to be real, and which events remain in the possible world of the story. In a short polemic against the Greeks’ thoughtless belief in traditions about Hercules (2.45), for instance, the Herodotean narrator demonstrates the idea that a tale should not be taken at face value without testing its plausibility. Here, he advocates a cautious handling of tradition, an idea that may be operative also in other parts of the account (cf. 7.152,3). However, and if we can at all assume a unitary or homogeneous treatment of tradition throughout the Histories, the Herodotean criteria for the reliability of a story are plausibility (οἰκός) and reasoning (γνώμη)—not a discussion of material evidence.42 Compared to these cognitive categories, physical 42  Cf. Fowler, “Herodotus and His Contemporaries,” 80.

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remains curiously play a minor role when it comes to examining whether a certain story represents real events in the past or not. In Genesis through Kings, there is less variation in the narrative representation of objects. This could be a reason why the way this is done does not equally attract the recipients’ attention. Possibly, this difference reflects a higher degree of reflection and circumspection in Herodotus’ Histories with regard to the ontological status of narrative content than in the biblical narrative. This, however, is quite speculative. If from the outset, the biblical narrative of Israel’s past followed a performative rationale, for instance, the shading of different degrees of reality of an event or an object could be counterproductive and would hence be avoided. Whatever the case may be, I consider the following observation interesting and thought provoking in itself: on the one hand, the existence of material remains in the discourse-now seems to matter to the narrator and is therefore recorded—whence I infer that a purely diegetic depiction would not establish them as an ontological reality in Herodotus’ eyes—but on the other hand, there are several variations of the combination and interplay between story-world and discourse-world with the exceptions and border cases discussed above that this distinction of presence in only one or both of the two worlds is at times muddled. 5

Relics as Witness in a Legal Context

Material relics are represented as witnesses to the validity of legal obligations in Gen–Kings, but not in Herodotus. A prominent example is a large stone Joshua takes as a witness of his gathering of the Israelites at Shechem, where they renew the covenant with God (Josh 24). The way in which this event is narrated clearly alludes to the gathering at Mount Sinai. While Targum Jonathan later makes this parallel with the gathering at Mount Sinai explicit,43 the biblical narrative merely invites the audience to draw this connection themselves. In both events, all Israelite tribes are present, in the awareness that they are standing before God. They enter a covenant, receive laws and agree to abandon foreign gods (Exod 20:23; Josh 24:23). They assert their willingness to obey God’s commandments (Exod 19:8; 24:7; Josh 24:18, 21, 24). In Exodus, the two 43  Tg. Ps.-J. 24:27 ‫הא אבנא הדא תהי לנא כתרין לוחי אבן קיימא ארי יתה עבדנא לשהדו ארי‬ ‫פתגמיא דכתיבין עלה מעין כל פתגמיא די מליל עמנא״‬, ‘Behold this stone will be for us like the two stone tablets of the covenant, for we have made it for a witness, for the words that are written upon it are a reflection of all the words of the Lord that he spoke with us’ (translation by Daniel Harrington and Anthony Saldarini, Targum Jonathan of the Former Prophets: Introduction, Translation and Notes (Wilmington 1987)).

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stone tablets on which God inscribes his commandments are called ‘the tablets of testimony’ (‫ ;לוחות העדות‬Exod 31:18), and Joshua invokes the stone he puts up in Shechem as a witness (‫ ;עדה‬Josh 24:26–27). This was a well-known practice in the ancient Near East.44 The rock almost appears animated: Joshua proclaims that the stone, which becomes a monument in the course of the event, “has heard all the words of YHWH which he spoke to us”.45 Although the episode does not report any such words in direct speech, it claims for itself the weight of an encounter with the divine. In Shechem, there is no divine revelation to Joshua or the Israelites like at Mount Sinai, no overwhelming sensory experience. Instead, the convention is all about entering a legal relationship—with the god of Israel, to be sure, but through Joshua as a mediator. The material permanence of a large stone that will be in this place for generations to come implies that the words spoken on this special occasion are taken to be relevant and binding on a long-term basis. What is therefore expected from both Joshua’s and the narrator’s audience is that they act according to this agreement, to its laws and stipulations,46 and do not fall short of the obligations taken on willingly at this gathering in Shechem. As an authenticating and normative strategy of persuasion, this relic addresses the audience in the discourse-now: Although all eye witnesses of the gathering have long passed away, the covenant entered back then is still in force; the witnessing rock is still there. It is as if the stone is expected to have the effect of controlling people’s actions, admonishing them to loyalty to the Torah.47 The stone monument is therefore not limited to its authenticating function as a physical trace of the gathering before Joshua’s death; it is also claimed as a witness that may ‘speak up’ against anybody among those present at the event and their descendants if they transgress the laws written down on that occasion. In light of Judges following Joshua, an additional layer of interpretation comes to mind that depends on the stone as an eternal memorial with normative overtones, but at the same time subverts and neutralizes it. If the audience 44  E.g., Eckart Otto, “Die Ursprünge der Bundestheologie im Alten Testament und im Alten Orient,” ZAR 4 (1998): 1–84: 56 mentions the ‘tablets of the treaty/allegiance of the god Assur’ und Kathryn Slanski, “Classification, Historiography, and Monumental Authority: The Babylonian Entitlement Narûs (Kudurrus)”, JCS 52 (2000): 95–114: 97. 45  Josh 24:27: ‫היא שמעה את כל אמרי ה׳ אשר דבר עמנו‬. 46  Next to the stone, writing in a book is another medium with which Joshua makes sure to preserve “these words,” or “these things” respectively. 47  The reference to this tree and stone in Judges either does not take notice of this etiology or takes it for granted (Judg 9:6 ‫)אלון מצב אשר בשכם‬. Archaeological data attest to a temple for YHWH at Shechem since the fifth century BCE; see Kratz, Historisches und biblisches Israel, 232.

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reads or hears Josh 24 with the narrative of Judges in their mind, they can compare the intention of Joshua’s stone and its effect in the subsequent period of time.48 When a reader evaluates the effect of the large stone intended as a monument and witness within the narrative in Judges, he or she realizes that Joshua’s legacy soon loses its authority and that its meaning as a witness to Israel’s covenant with YHWH is forgotten as soon as the last of Joshua’s contemporaries dies, although it had been supposed to last and continue to be headed for times to come (Josh 24:31; Judg 2:7). This adds a self-critical and thoughtful chord to the narrative as it emphasizes the fast change of goals and values among the Israelites and questions the reasonableness of large gestures and public monuments.49 As mentioned before, Abimelech, a biblical antihero who is evaluated negatively, lets himself be acclaimed king there. Thus, although the large stone does not physically disappear, its meaning is soon forgotten. It seems that, in contrast to Herodotus’ Histories, biblical narrative emphasizes cultural loss, as opposed to physical decay. Joshua writes the terms of the contract with God on a scroll, not on the stone itself (Josh 24:26). Bearing in mind that the medium through which King Josiah is reminded of his duties toward God is a scroll and not a stone monument, this detail could be read as advocating scribal archives as they were kept in priestly and administrative circles as preferable to practices of powerful emperors. Cultural transmission through the instruction of the following generation by their fathers is then trusted with a greater stability and reliability than a large stone. In the following example from Genesis, however, trust in the durability of stone is unbroken. As already indicated by its name, witnessing and guaranteeing an agreement is also the most prominent function of the stone heap known by the name ‫גל עד‬, “heap of witness” (Gen 31:44–52). What is to be remembered and respected is not so much the historical circumstances and details of the event itself, such as how Jacob and Laban reached a peace treaty, but its result, which is relevant for the present and future: the new reality of clearly defined borders and interests between ethnic groups. The narrating voice employs Laban’s and Jacob’s stone heap to look ahead, rather than to the past, since it advocates peaceful relations between the two clans. Setting the agreement in the distant past invests it with authority, but without tangible evidence of the agreement serving as a ‘document’, the two parties might not feel obliged at all. 48  In case one reads Judges as following Joshua and not replacing Joshua, cf. Marais, Representation. 49   Cf. the peace agreement engraved on stone stelae and in copper in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, where the intention that it is to last for one hundred years is sharply contrasted by the following events turning it into maculation (Thuc. 5.47). Jonathan Price shared this observation about Thucydides in a seminar at Tel Aviv University, 2013.

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The physical monument is therefore very important as a toehold of the past in the discourse-now. Its continuity into the present is implied by the narratorial commentary with a verb in the present tense (‫)קרא‬: ‫א־ׁש ֹ֖מו ּגַ ְל ֵ ֽעד׃‬ ְ ‫ל־ּכן ָק ָ ֽר‬ ֥ ֵ ‫ַע‬ (Gen 31:48). The subject of the verb is ‘his name’; the meaning of the Qal form is as if in the passive voice.50 In addition, the phrase ‫ על כן‬introduces a narratorial commentary that refers to the discourse-world also elsewhere, such as: Gen 2:24; 10:9; 26:33; 32:33. Finally, Josh 14:14 is another attestation of the same phenomenon with a different verb, with the Qatal expressing a present state and referring to the subsequent noun. In my opinion, this relic expresses concerns of a reality narrative, but more in a normative sense than in a historical one. 6

Texts as Documents and Physical Relics

Next to stone or metal objects, biblical narrative also refers to texts written on papyrus or leather as physical relics from the past.51 Thinking about fields in which the transmission of exact words matters, one might think of legal documents, poetry, and utterances by speakers of an elevated standing. Therefore it is not all too surprising that, as a common denominator of these texts as objects, they are all presented as words of God revealed to Moses, and most of them deal with the (legal) relationship between God and his people, Israel.52 One could ask, “Well, is this not true for most of the Pentateuch?” My answer is no, since only a few texts are represented in their materiality as an object. They clearly have a documenting and witnessing function, preserving words and agreements for a longer period of time. As far as I can see, designating certain words as a physical object occurs in two ways: Either God refers to the scrolls and inscriptions as a physical reminder, witness, or testimony (‫ עדות‬,‫ עד‬,‫)זכרון‬, or this function of a written text called a ‘scroll’ or ‘document’ (‫ )ספר‬is enacted within the narrative, inasmuch as they

50  The verb does not refer to a character doing the action of naming, because the verb does not adapt in gender or number to varying subjects. Therefore, it is incongruent to actors of the preceding verse (e.g., Gen 29:3–4; 50:11). If the verb expresses an action of one of the characters, it adapts or is in Wayyiqtol (Gen 26:33; 29:35; 30:6). 51  The two stone tablets Moses receives on Sinai are not discussed in this section because their existence in the discourse-now is neither claimed nor implied. 52  It is remarkable that, in a situation quite similar to that of Moses, Joshua also writes words of a renewed covenant on a scroll, but this scroll does not receive any further attention (Josh 24:26).

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are created by writing, carried around, and stored in a particular place in the story-world. Such texts fulfill the function of documentary evidence recording and confirming the words spoken in interactions between God and the Israelites. Since the speaker naming a text a ‘witness’ or ‘reminder’ is often God, I here allow for an exception from my general methodological decision to restrict the analysis to objects that are part of narratorial discourse. This exception is justified because God’s discourse in biblical history is not restricted to the immediate addressees within the intradiegetic interaction of characters. YHWH’s words, especially when addressed to the Israelites, are meant for Jewish audiences in the Persian and subsequent periods.53 Therefore, it seems appropriate to take these texts-as-objects into account as strategies of persuasion addressing Jewish recipients who are external to the text in the sense that they are not literary characters, notwithstanding the possibility that they view themselves as participants in the same history. There is no direct parallel for texts appearing as objects and used for persuasion in the Herodotean narrative. Two obvious reasons are the orality of Greek culture in his time and the absence of a concept of a legal relationship across generations between a deity and the Greeks. A somewhat less direct Herodotean parallel for such texts as objects would be oracles. However, as much as the use of oracles is a constitutive feature of Herodotus’ account,54 the narrator does not refer to the very texts of oracles as physical objects, which is what interests me here: texts represented as objects existing in space rather than as temporal experiences of communication. Herodotus’ narrator uses and even cites verbatim various kinds of texts such as poetry, oracles, and inscriptions on stone and votive objects, citing for instance Homer or Pindar. In these cases, however, the focus is on the words as a vehicle of a meaning, an idea, and not on the text as a tangible object.55 This manifests, for instance, in the way Herodotus uses and refers to Themistocles’ inscriptions as a 53  Unlike Nielsen (The Tragedy in History), I do not see a case for God as a deceptive deity. In biblical narrative, God is presented as an exceptional character who is just and can be trusted. Therefore, the biblical writers would not have made God say anything they did not consider to be true and meaningful. In fact, divine utterances enjoy considerably greater authority than narratorial statements. Putting key passages of reflection on and interpretation of history in the ‘mouths’ of God and prophets, the scholarly scribes use the device of a narratorial alter ego. This is not unlike Herodotus, who sometimes gives his own reflections as words of wise advisors such as Solon, Artabanos, or Demaratos. 54  See, e.g., Jon Mikalson, “Religion in Herodotus,” in: Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene de Jong, and Hans van Wees, 187–98, here 194–96. 55  In 4.29 for example, Herodotus’ narrator refers to Homer’s Odyssey to buttress an idea and treats the text as a witness (μαρτυρέει). However, this does not evoke the text as an artefact. Cf. also West’s research, next note.

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message for the Ionians (8.22). The Herodotean narrator does not seem to treat Themistocles’ “letter” any differently from speeches he puts into characters’ mouths. Therefore, he probably does not expect individuals in his audience to look for these inscriptions in Euboea and read them. As Stephanie West has observed, “this use of oratio recta seems to betray a curious failure to appreciate the peculiar qualities of epigraphic evidence.”56 In Herodotus’ Histories, the role of texts as commemorative and publically relevant objects is marginal. Within the corpus selected for this study, two inscribed memorials are referred to as μνῆμα and μνημόσυνον, one of them by the narrator (4.88,2) and both by the inscription itself (7.228,3). They are the memorials for the Spartan seer Megistias and for the Samian engineer Mandrocles, more precisely his achievement of bridging the Bosphorus for Darius. However, these two inscriptions point to the objects on which they appear as the memorial; the words do not refer to themselves as an object of testimony. Intriguingly, Herodotus’ narrator refers to spoken words as a monument or piece of evidence as often as to written words.57 I take all of this as a clue that in the Persian period, the Hebrew narratives that later formed the Tanakh belong in a context of a written tradition, and Herodotus’ Histories in a culture that is more oral than written. Returning to biblical narrative, more precisely to the wandering Israelites after their flight from Egypt: God has smitten the Egyptian troops at the Israelites’ heels, but the saved people encounter a new danger in form of Amalekites prepared for war. In a day-long battle against them, Joshua as commander in chief and Moses, busy keeping up the connection with God, manage to achieve a victory (Exod 17:8–13). After this battle episode, the narrator records God’s command “to write this as a memorial on the scroll” in order to preserve it for oral and written transmission. In the biblical narrative, this is the first time that God gives a command to write a text. The written document (‫ )ספר‬is referred to as a memorial or memory anchor (‫)זכרון‬. This is noteworthy,

56  West, “Herodotus’ Epigraphical Interests,” 286; West confirmed her judgment in a more recent publication (“‘Every picture tells a story’: a note on Herodotus 4.88”, in: Herodots Quellen—Die Quellen Herodots, ed. Boris Dunsch and Kai Ruffing, 117–128, here 122: “Herodotus is not alert to the value of epigraphy as a historical source”). 57  Other monuments with an inscription outside my selected text portion are the relief Herodotus attributes to Sesostris (2.106,2–5) and the pyramid of pharaoh Asychis 2.136,3– 4. In Herodotus, a witty statement is at times referred to as a monument for the speaker (as are actions), but this is merely meant metaphorically; cf. 4.144; 5.92 η 2; 7.226.

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since the word ‫ זכרון‬in biblical narrative, when it denotes a physical object, mostly refers to uninscribed relics.58 Here, the same term is used for a ‫ספר‬.59 ‫ויאמר יהוה אל־משה כתב זאת זכרון בספר ושים באזני יהושע כי־מחה אמחה את־‬ .‫זכר עמלק מתחת השמים‬

And YHWH said to Moses: Write this as a reminder/memorial on a scroll and recite it to Joshua: Verily, I will completely wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Exod 17:14

Now, which words exactly is Moses to write down on the scroll, on papyrus or leather? The answer is the referent of the demonstrative ‫זאת‬. Through the ages, the interpretations have roughly fallen in two groups, depending on whether one reads ‫ זאת‬with a cataphoric or anaphoric reference.60 Going first with the anaphoric option, the demonstrative refers to the short battle account preceding God’s words. God’s utterance then would refer to the battle account as a physical reminder (‫)זכרון‬, which can be understood as a reference of the narrative to itself as a medium and means for keeping alive a memory (‫כתב זאת זכרון‬ ‫)בספר‬. This would be an equivalent to a narratorial statement in Herodotus indicating the author’s purpose in telling a certain story. When Amalek is wiped out, nobody will know this ethnic group once existed unless their memory is passed on in an effective way. The written text keeps the memory of Amalek

58  Cf. the precious stones inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes on the shoulders of the garment of the high priest (Exod 28:12; 39:7), similar stones on the breastplate (Exod 28:29), and gold, silver, and copper as dedications (Numb 31:54; Exod 30:16; Numb 17:4). Michael Avi Yonah interprets the twelve stone stelae in Exod 24:4, which stand for the twelve Israelite tribes, as a reminder of the god of the Israelites, analogous to the stone stelae excavated in Gezer (see: Id., “Memorial stones (Hebrew),” Entsiqlopedia Miqra’it 1:50–56, here 54–55). The text itself does not mention God as the addressee of the memory anchor. The rainbow (Gen 9:16), in its function as a reminder, is probably better called a sign than an object. Barat Ellman argues that although only the precious stones on the shoulder pieces are called a ‘reminder’ (‫)זכרון‬, this is the function of the whole cult; see Barat Ellman, Memory and Covenant: The Role of Israel’s and God’s Memory in Sustaining the Deuteronomic and Priestly Covenants (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 107–113. 59  The law of kingship Samuel proclaims and writes down does not mention the aspect of memorial or reminder using the root ‫זכר‬, but likewise has the scroll put before YHWH (1 Sam 10:25). 60  See, e.g.: Dohmen, Exodus 1–18, 417; Benno Jacob, Das Buch Exodus, trans. Shlomo Mayer (Stuttgart: Calwer Verl., 1997)497.

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as special knowledge.61 Even after people with a living memory of Amalekites will have died out in the future, the experts of Israel’s written tradition will still be able to teach others about Amalek because the memory of them is preserved in their documents. If this is the intended interpretation, it implies the professional scribes’ awareness of the evanescence of memory and their own importance as those who keep alive memories about past eras in their written documents. After all, the historical account sheds light on the meaning of God’s promise by explaining who the Amalekites were and what they did so that God announced their damnatio memoriae (Exod 17:8–13; Deut 25:17). It serves as a kind of historical commentary to God’s words in Exod 17:14.62 I prefer the cataphoric option,63 understanding ‫ זאת‬in Exod 17:14 as referring to God’s pledge in the second part of this verse. God ensures that his ensuing promise to delete the memory of Amalek on earth is handed down in a chain of oral and written transmission, beginning with Moses. This understanding turns into a memo the written record of the promise given to Moses after a battle not successful enough to deter Amalek from future attacks on the Israelites. From a perspective of writing professionals, God emphasizes his commitment to his promise when he orders it to be preserved in a written document. In fact, Benno Jacob holds that the addressee of the text as a physical reminder is none other than God.64 Whereas Exod 17:16 projects God as the agent who will wipe out Amalek’s memory, Deuteronomy assigns this task to the Israelites: When they are settled down in the promised land and not troubled any more by attacks from neighboring enemies, it will be time for Israel to make this prophecy come true (Deut 25:19).65 Thus, both God and the Israelites become addressees of the written reminder. 61  The biblical text expresses this oxymoron of wiping out and remembrance in Exod 17:14 and Deut 25:19. 62  Seeing in Exod 17:8–16 two parts, text and commentary, is no new notion (See Dohmen, Exodus 1–18, p. 417). The new aspect of my suggestion is to distribute the labels the other way round, seeing verses 8–13 as commentary of 14–16. 63  In addition to the reasons mentioned so far, the parallel of Deut 31:19, 22, 30 points in the same direction: Here, too, God orders that a text be written down to be preserved and passed on. The song is mentioned with a demonstrative with cataphoric reference (‫)את השירה הזאת‬. 64  Jacob, Exodus, 497–98. Although the text in Exod 17:14 does not specify the addressee of the text as memorial, parallels in Mal 3:16 and Est 6:1 containing the combination of the words of ‫ ספר‬and ‫ זכרון‬suggest that the written text is for the future reference on the part of the authority who commissions the writing of the text in the first place, i.e., God. 65  Benno Jacob reminds us that this is the reason why Samuel directs Saul to act accordingly not long after he is anointed King of Israel (1 Sam 15:1–3); cf. Jacob, Exodus, 504–05. However, Saul is said to have failed in his mission, which leaves the merit to David (1 Sam 30:9–20). But even here, complete destruction is no issue in the episode about

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Moses as a literate prophetic mediator of God’s words to the Israelites is more in line with biblical narrative as a whole than Moses as a chronicler of important events and experiences that happen to the Israelites66—a forerunner of the professional scribes who produced an account of Israel’s past in exilic and early postexilic times. An explicit divine command to write down a ‘memory’ or ‘report’ of an event, even if it is remarkable because of, for instance, divine involvement, does not occur elsewhere in the biblical narratives from Genesis to Kings.67 Whenever God orders Moses to write something, these are God’s own words. Besides, it is conceivable that the reference to the definite defeat of the Amalekites serves a practical purpose in the present and future of the audience in the discourse-now: the mere thought that even powerful enemies can be overcome opens up more room for the addressee’s actions than when they behave as people who are hamstrung by their apprehensions and fear. Depending on whether this prophecy is viewed as fulfilled through Saul and David, it could still be seen as a pending issue in the Persian period, or otherwise as an example showing that God’s promises come true even if this sometimes takes a few generations. As a strategy of persuasion, this written documentation of God’s promise encourages the audience to look ahead with confidence because they can depend on their god. If the demonstrative ‫זאת‬ is not purposefully ambiguous, it seems more likely that it is used relating to God’s promise. Prophecies about future events are, among other things, a literary device structuring the accounts of both the Histories and the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible.68 Recounting an oracle and its fulfillment is a way to represent events as part of a divine plan. The explicit reference to God’s prediction concerning Amalek as a written text called a ‘reminder’ emphasizes its authenticity and warranty for all those in doubt about the relevance of ancient prophecies. In addition, it enhances the authority of the professional scribes in charge of Israelite and Jewish literary tradition. Part of their work, the recording of God’s messages about the future, is presented as an action ordained by God and is David’s battle against Amalek. Nevertheless, the name Amalek is not mentioned anymore as an autonomous ethnic group in subsequent biblical narrative. 66  Exegetes have noticed a peculiarity of this scenario: Moses making Joshua learn by heart a narrative about an event in which Joshua was present; cf. Dohmen, Exodus, 417. 67  The closest the narrative gets to this is Num 33:2, where Moses writes down ‘historical’ information ‫על פי יהוה‬. 68  For the Hebrew Bible, see, e.g., Christoph Rösel, “Verheißung und Erfüllung” in wibilex 2006 (https://www.bibelwissenschaft.de/stichwort/14477); Herodotus records oracles and their fulfillment, e.g., in: 4.151 and 153; 5.72,3; 5.89; 6.18; 6.82.

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given weight because of the claim that every prophecy will at some point in time become reality. Instead of working in a king’s administration, the scribes are implied by the text to be in God’s service. Their writing is relevant not only because prophecies contain the future but also because these records are likely to influence the divine sovereign in future decisions—provided that the documents will be retrieved from the archives. Together with the biblical view of God overseeing history, this is an indirect claim of the professionals in charge of the written tradition to have an influence on the course of history—by reminding God of his promises and legal affiliations. In an auxiliary role, of course, they are God’s cooperators in shaping the course of Israel’s history. I understand this as an idea whereby members of the same elite group assure themselves of their role. As much as the prophecy about Amalek emphasizes God’s obligation, the following text-as-object focuses on those of the Israelites as they follow from their covenant with God. The central text referred to as a physical object is the scroll with Moses’ instruction (‫ )תורה‬in the books of Deuteronomy and 2 Kings. His teaching through spoken words precedes his writing down the terms of the covenant agreed to at the end of his life69 (Deut 31:9, 24); it makes up a large part of Deuteronomy (Deut 1:5; 32:45–46). Immediately after the scroll’s completion as a written text, Moses sees to it that his instruction, his tora, receives a place of honor beside the ark, where it is to function as a ‘witness against you’ (Deut 31:24–26). Within Deuteronomy, there are several references to this written scroll, especially in the chapters about the blessings and curses that come with keeping or breaching the covenant.70 Moses presents the laws and regulations of the Torah as essential for the Israelites’ wellbeing. Its words are said to have the power to grant the Israelites life and the possession of the land in which they are about to live: ‫כי לא־דבר רק הוא מכם כי־הוא חייכם ובדבר הזה תאריכו ימים על־האדמה אשר‬ .‫אתם עברים את־הירדן שמה לרשתה‬

For it is not an idle word for you; indeed it is your life. And by this word you shall prolong your days in the land, which you are about to cross the Jordan to possess. Deut 32:47 NAS

69  In an almost parallel scene, again after a renewal of the covenant, a scroll written by Joshua not long before his death is mentioned together with a large stone, which is assigned the function of a witness (Josh 24:26–27). Whether this function is also assumed for Joshua’s scroll, or whether it is not called a witness here in order not to compete with Moses’ scroll, or whether a stone was deemed to be more durable, can remain undecided. 70  Deut 28:58.61; 29:20; 30:10; 31:9. Further references to ‫( התורה הזאת‬without reference to it as a scroll or writing) are plenty: Deut 1:5; 4:8; 17:18.19; 27:3.8.26; 29:28; 31:11.12.

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Because of this immediate and practical importance to the Israelites, they are to learn it by heart and to pass it on from generation to generation (Deut 32:46; 31:12–13). This statement is implicitly metaleptic. In exilic and postexilic times, Moses and his contemporaries are long gone—the injunction is addressed to current and future audiences in the discourse-now. Since the ancient Jewish— or for that matter, Judean—audience in the Persian period saw themselves as continuation of that history, Moses’ teaching is directed and passed on to them too.71 Moses’ affirmation of his teaching as a practical guide for a blessed life makes the text authoritative and immediately relevant to all those who live or are about to live in Yehud and Samaria. This invitation to identify with Moses’ contemporaries who receive his teaching directly from this prophetic leader is a means to persuade those who read and study the Torah in Persian times. Moses’ prediction that the scroll of tora he has written will become a witness against the Israelites72 is demonstrated in action in 2 Kgs 22. The text as a physical object is rediscovered in the reign of King Josiah and confronts the king with God’s commandments. Josiah acknowledges the document as an authoritative text instructing the king about God’s will and as binding for Judeans (2 Kgs 22:13). The narrative about the finding of the book that was apparently lost and forgotten73 claims that it is the extent to which the kings of Israel live and act according to Moses’ tora that decides the course of history. Since ignoring the terms of the covenant with God activates the curses of Deut 27–28, Huldah, the female prophet in Josiah’s time, announces a bleak future for the kingdom of Judah—along the terms stipulated in the Torah (‫את כל דברי הספר‬, 2 Kgs 22:16). Realizing that it would be appropriate to act according to this lost and found document, Josiah does everything in his power to reverse the verdict for the better. King Josiah stands for a king of Judah acting according to God’s terms. Presenting a positive example for emulation, the narrator tells us about Josiah’s reform, in which this king has cult symbols of other deities destroyed and centralizes the cult of Israel’s only god in one exclusive place, Jerusalem (2 Kgs 22:3–23:25). Within the narrative, the Torah scroll found in Jerusalem’s temple proves to be powerful in shaping history in Josiah’s reign. Because of his 71  Cf. Ilse Müllner’s observations on the cross-fade between intradiegetic characters and the implied readers in Exod 12:1–13:16: “Pessach als Ereignis und Ritual: Die narrative Einbindung kommender Generationen in Ex 12,1–13,16,” in Über die Grenze: Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums, ed. Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff. Narratologia 39 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 59–94: 68–70, 74. 72  Deut 31:26 has ‫ בך‬and not ‫ בכם‬such as in Micah 1:2 for example. 73  See Thomas Römer for pros and cons of the implied idea that it was lost: “Transformations in Deuteronomistic and Biblical Historiography On »Book-Finding« and other Literary Strategies,” ZAW 109,1 (1997) 1–11: 6–7.

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reform, this king is evaluated very positively (2 Kgs 22:2). The view that God’s benchmarks count, and no other standards, is present throughout the account of Israel’s first-temple history.74 The narratives about Judean kings of the past, and especially about Josiah, provide the audience—the present and future decision makers in Yehud—with religio-political role models and deterrent examples. This enhances accessibility, as ideals are not argued for theoretically, but demonstrated in terms of concrete actions. To the logic of this narrative, the availability of the Torah as a physical text is central. The law for Israel’s kings provides that the king is to have his own copy to read and learn from it and to act accordingly (Deut 17:18–19). If the Torah gets lost, the kings lose their way; if it can be consulted by the Jewish elite, it helps shape their actions in a way God will approve of. For the discussion of the narrative function of material remains in this chapter, it is pertinent that the reform is triggered by a book and not a prophet, as Karel van der Toorn has pointed out.75 An object takes on the function otherwise fulfilled by a human agent: it is claimed to ensure the potential presence of God’s word independent of prophetic figures. The scroll with Moses’ tora and the written record of God’s promise to extinguish the memory of Amalek are texts-as-objects showing that the written word is held in high esteem. It is the default medium when it comes to preserving the exact wording of a text for posterity. As this is not a common practice in all ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures of the fifth and fourth centuries, this phenomenon deserves to be pointed out. The view that whatever is not written is likely to be forgotten—for better or for worse—may seem familiar to us today, but it is not to be taken for granted in antiquity. After all, ancient societies were much more educated and accustomed to preserving and passing on knowledge from generation to generation without committing it to writing. Written documents as proof of certain transactions and agreements are more common in the administration of a large empire than in a 74  It is not fortuitous that two kings, Ahab of Israel and Manasseh of Judah, who were internationally successful according to common political standards of the ancient Near East and modern historians, are portrayed as belonging to the worst kings according to God’s judgment. In the ninth century, Ahab’s troops formed a substantial part of the coalition led by Israel, Damascus, and Hamath against the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III to halt his advance at Qarqar. Manasseh’s reign was long and presumably successful. For both, see Knauf and Guillaume, History, 89 and 119–24. For the biblical judgment about Ahab and Manasseh, see 1 Kgs 16:29–30.33; 2 Kgs 21:1–7.9.11–12.16. 75  Toorn, Scribal culture, 222. Jonathan Ben-Dov has argued that the original predeuteronomist story of the book finding conceived of the book not as a collection of laws, but as divine instruction in form of an oracle; see “Writing as Oracle and as Law: New Contexts for the Book-Find of King Josiah,” in JBL 127/2 (2008): 223–39: 231 and 234.

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smaller face-to-face society. In my view, the examples discussed above suggest that the practice of the Achaemenid royal administration is presumed when written texts are referred to as ‫ זכרון‬or as a witness.76 As we have seen, texts as reminders and external memory locations independent of living human beings preserve agreements and define responsibilities. A third text referred to in its physicality is the Song of Moses. It is a document that vindicates God, standing as testimony to Israel’s relationship with God. Moses is said to have left this poem to the Israelites as a legacy shortly before his death. It is the certificate, as it were, that the Israelites had been warned beforehand of the political consequences of venerating other gods instead of the god of Israel. This is because the song projects the Israelites’ historical experience into the future. It predicts their unfaithfulness toward God (Deut 32:15–17) and God’s subsequent severe punishment, followed by their ultimate salvation. The poem’s content suggests that it reflects the conquest and end of the kingdom of Judah in the sixth century BCE. Placing the following words (representing God’s thoughts) in Moses’ mouth enables the exilic and postexilic priestly elite to view the catastrophe for the kingdom of Judah as a result not of God’s weakness, but of God’s will: .‫אספה עלימו רעות חצי אכלה־בם‬ And I will heap evils upon them; I will spend my arrows upon them. Deut 32:23, RSV

‫אמרתי אפאיהם אשביתה מאנוש זכרם׃ לולי כעס אויב אגור פן־ינכרו צרימו פן־יאמרו‬ ‫ידנו רמה ולא יהוה פעל כל־זאת׃‬

I thought: “I will scatter them afar, I will make the remembrance of them cease from among men,” yet I was apprehensive of the provocation by the

76  See the instructive summary on heavenly book-keeping and the term ‫ ספר זכרון‬in Rainer Kessler, Maleachi, HThKAT (Freiburg: Herder, 2011), 281. Eckart Otto has emphasized the importance of written documents in the Judahite adaptation and subversion of Assyrian imperial strategies: “Die neuassyrischen Orakel und Loyalitätseide wurden verschriftet, um die in ihnen enthaltenen Ansprüche und Zusagen für die Zukunft zu dokumentieren. Wollte man judäisch den schriftlich dokumentierten Ansprüchen der Assyrer entgegentreten, so konnte auch dieses nur in schriftlicher Form geschehen” (in: “Die Ursprünge der Bundestheologie,” 62). The Achaemenid Empire continued and expanded earlier Assyrian administration.

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enemy; their adversaries would have judged amiss and said, “Our hand is triumphant”, and not “YHWH has wrought all this.” Deut 32: 26–27 RSV, adapted

According to the biblical narrative, the Israelites have possessed this text as a written document since their entry into the promised land. Being therefore not ignorant about the disastrous consequences of idolatry and apostasy, they can be held accountable for their actions. The Song of Moses serves as material evidence for the validity of a legal relationship between Israel and their god, and for God’s justification as a fair judge and ruler. The document vindicates the breakdown Israel suffered in the end of the kingdom of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem with the temple, and the deportation of the administrative, religious, and manufacturing elite to Babylonia. It gives the past events a meaning and coherence, while it enables the audience to retain their faith in God: YHWH is not capricious and forgetful of his promises, but complies with the terms and conditions of a treaty known to both parties.77 Since there is much at stake, knowledge of these words from the very start of the Israelites’ existence as a people in their allocated land matters. The continued transmission of the terms of the covenant with God, together with the concluding song, is emphasized in a number of ways. First, it is explicitly arranged for and confirmed by God, who is an omniscient character (Deut 31:19, 21). Second, the narrator states twice that Moses wrote the song down and affirms that Moses has taught it to the Israelites (31:22, 24). Third, this double confirmation is completed with a literary means that identifies the text mentioned in both God’s and the narrator’s discourse with the physical copy of the same text in the here and now of the discourse-world: The song of Moses written on a scroll of papyrus or leather is lying right in front of the reader.78 77  Additionally, the song is to speak as a witness before God; cf. Deut 31:21 ‫וענתה השירה‬ ‫הזאת לפניו לעד‬. Although the preposition ‫ לפניו‬can be taken to refer to the object (‫)אותו‬ in the same verse (Israel), I understand it as referring to God because of the parallels in 1 Sam 10:25 and Mal 3:16. The concept is that of God as a judge, one of the functions of ancient Near Eastern kings. Before he condemns the culprit and issues a punishment, he consults his royal archives about their legal relationship and whether there is anything in the records that might speak for or against the defendant. According to Rainer Kessler, this concept dates from the Persian period and is attested in narratives from this period such as the story of Esther and the book of Ezra (Maleachi, 281). Kessler points to: Est 2:23; 4:15; 6:1; Ezra 4:15.19; 5:17; 6:1. 78  This is because anyone who reads ‘biblical’ texts in the Persian period reads them from an authorized manuscript, if not from the only mastercopy of the text (cf. Toorn, Scribal Culture, 148, 171; Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 45). Even in the Hellenistic period, readers

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In antiquity, whenever a person reads the very prominent demonstratives, pointing to “this song” (‫השירה הזאת‬, Deut 31:19[2×], 21, 22), this person is holding an original manuscript or is standing right in front of it and can see its very words. Because the text is physically present, it takes on the role of a document used as a witness and authentication (cf. Deut 31:21). The poem is invested with several claims to authority. One of them is its divine origin: Moses and Joshua receive it in an encounter with God, who appears in the tent of meeting in a pillar of clouds (Deut 31:14–16). Further, the fact that the poem is cited verbatim in chapter 32 in Deuteronomy implies direct access to the document, faithfully transmitted as a complete text from one generation to the other.79 The Song of Moses is even closely associated with the Torah, Moses’ teaching.80 These claims augmenting the authority of the text help it fulfill its function of a certificate that Israel had been warned. In order to eliminate any doubts and to make this inherent meaning even clearer, God additionally informs Moses and Joshua about the poem’s purpose in Deut 31:16–21. The view that God has not been unfair to Israel even in the catastrophe of the sixth century BCE is highly relevant for the biblical interpretation of history. The Israelites had to struggle with the phenomenon that their god must have allowed or even commissioned the Neo-Babylonians to end the Judahite kingdom and destroy Jerusalem, including the temple.81 Rejecting the thought that Israel’s god had proven powerless and inferior to Marduk, the narrative in Joshua and Kings emphasizes the interdependence of a faithful observance of God’s commandments and the amount of pressure experienced from foreign assumed stability at least for the text of the Torah (cf. Josephus, Contra Apionem, 1.42) because of the ideal of an accurate and reliable transmission through the generations of priestly descent. If this is correct, this claim presumes that it is read and not heard, or at least that the audience can see the scroll from which the text is being read. Matters are different with an exclusively aural reception. 79  Through the inclusion of the poem proper in the narrative and the explicit claims to this effect just before and after the citation (Deut 31:30; 32:44). This claim (“all the words of this song”, 32:44) implies a faithful and unaltered transmission. 80  In Deut 31, the Song of Moses and the Torah become intertwined and are connected through the action of writing (vv. 19, 22, 24), their function as a witness (vv. 21.26), the use of demonstratives (vv. 19, 22, 24, 26, 30), and the assertion that both the torah and the song were written and said in their entirety (vv. 24.30: ‫)עד ֻתמם‬. Since the writing of the Torah of Moses comes to an end at the end of Moses’ life and of the book of Deuteronomy, identifying the song with a teaching (torah) may be a misunderstanding, but one that the text almost implies. 81  Cf., e.g.: 2 Kgs 21:10–15; Jer 7:14. The function of the Torah as witness against you (‫בך לעד‬, Deut 31:26) implies that the authority making use of it is in fact God, either as a judge or as prosecutor.

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troops and raiders. At least within the Deuteronomistic school of thought, the quality of Israel’s relationship to their God has direct consequences for their political situation. God’s vindication is neither a matter of the past nor an end in itself; it is oriented toward the audience’s present and future. Where there is a diagnosis, there is hope for healing and a better future. If Israel is willing to accept and fulfill the terms of the covenant, according to this message, God will be loyal too. God’s vindication relies on a text that purportedly Moses has written down himself at God’s dictation. It seeks to place the present Jewish audience in the Persian period under the age-old obligation of Moses’ contemporaries. If it is correct that referring to written texts as a reminder or witness presumes the practice of the Achaemenid royal administration, the textsas-documents in biblical history were likely thought of as proof or official transcripts in a legal sense, as documents that may be involved to make a case in the framework of royal jurisdiction. Accordingly, the scribes in God’s royal administration guarantee that the heavenly king is in a position to pass a right judgment without being manipulated by the rhetorical impact of one or the other party in a conflict. In Persian-era Yehud and Samaria, there is no longer a king as the one who represents Israel and is accountable for their faithfulness to Moses’ teaching. It seems that the priestly and administrative elite who is fully literate now sees itself as the guardian of the welfare of the Jews. The notion of God keeping and caring about records—at least of the legal agreements entered into with him and potentially also about the performance of exposed individuals—involves a strong ethical suasion. The audience are supposed to act in such a way that the written records will speak in their favor and not against them when their case is dealt with in God’s court. The examples address Israel as a people, a collective body, and not as individuals.82 The corresponding concept of the deity represents YHWH as a god of justice who is demanding but dependable, and not arbitrary or despotic. This idea, or knowledge, strengthens the audience’s feeling of security and enables them to imagine their future: if God can be trusted to keep to the terms of their agreement, divine actions are not an entirely unknown variable in a formula for the course of future events.

82  This goes along with a process sometimes referred to as a certain democratization: as there is no longer a king as mediator between a deity and a people, every Jew and not the king is responsible for the fate of Israel as a whole. See: Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 120–21; Otto, “Die Ursprünge der Bundestheologie,” 60.

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7 Conclusion In the first part of this chapter, I have explored whether physical traces from the past really have to be present in both the story-world and the actual world in order to serve as pieces of evidence. Some of the exceptions further support this rule, because the missing information is part of the audience’s knowledge of the world or because another object continuing into the present is its equivalent. Other exceptions such as objects that cannot be accessed in the discourse-world suggest that, due to the narrator’s authority and the worldmaking power of narration, they acquire enough concrete­ness and reality to function as authentication. It seems that the narrator’s move of stating the repurposing or disappearance of objects, which acknowledges accountability for the facts of the story-world, is almost as persuasive as a statement that and where the object still exists in the discourse-world. While these examples first of all indicate an awareness of the expedience, or maybe even necessity, of some kind of material evidence that attests the tangibility and reality of the narrated events of a past, they also reveal that the level of trust in the narrating voice probably outweighs the level of critical doubt in both audiences. Addressing a more general result, this chapter has discussed the persuasive effect of physical relics in relation to other narrative means and the rootedness of an event in the past in cultural memory. The last two seem to be at least as effective as references to material evidence. This shows that physical remains do not enjoy a prominent status in the historical thought of either Herodotus or Genesis to Kings. Biblical specialties not found in Herodotus are the reference to uninscribed stone monuments as witnesses of legal obligations and the reference to written texts as documents of mutual commitments in the relationship between the god of Israel and his people. Some of the narrative means of persuasion in this context point to the educational and religious elite of priestly scribes as the origin of the narrative of Israel’s past. The writers understand themselves in God’s service, responsible for the faithful transmission and interpretation of God’s words and will, which is also a claim to their own authority and significance. Keeping the memory of God’s promises alive and vindicating him as a god of justice is a means of helping the audience develop a positive outlook into the future. In the use of the biblical narrating voice of texts as physical relics, we encounter yet another form of metalepsis, a narrative device that seems to be intrinsic to biblical narrative. The ancient reader of Deuteronomy holds the scroll with the Song of Moses, for example, dictated to Moses by God, in his own hands.

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As the scroll with Moses’ tora appears in his day and much later in Josiah’s reign, so it stands the test of time and is accessible to the professional learned scribes in Second Temple Jerusalem from about the fourth century BCE onward. The text becomes a physical trace from the past preserved until the present so that its readers will be in a position to learn which actions God approves of and lead to their own wellbeing. This metalepsis is not of a phantastic kind, as would be Moses’ physical appearance and speaking in the discourse-now; it is not altogether implausible. Instead, it conveys the feeling for the addressees of becoming immersed in God’s history with his people, or at least the impression that this text is of concern to them, that it matters how they relate to it and whether they heed it or not.

CHAPTER 7

Combinations of Normative Persuasion and Authentication Relics from the past often transmit also normative messages and expectations, as we have seen in passing in the previous chapter. In this section, this characteristic will take center stage. 1

Evidence for Supernatural Events as a Claim to Overall Significance

The narrator tells us that after Xerxes’ army has split in two, the smaller part heads for Delphi with the aim of pillaging the sanctuary of its treasures (8.35). Whereas the Delphians are in great fear, Apollo pledges to personally protect what belongs to him (36). This assertion already heightens the reader’s expectations. Accordingly, a portent heralds unusual future events even before the Persians get to the scene: the holy weapons are lying in front of the temple without anyone having touched them (37,1). Calling this it a wonder (τέρας) and something astonishing (θῶμα), the narrator uses the word for a supernatural sign (τέρας) another two times to herald the even greater following event (τέρεα ἔτι μέζονα; φάσμα 37,2). The stage being set in this way, the reader cannot help but interpret the rockslide, accompanied by strokes of lightning and war cries from within Athene’s temple at Delphi, as a direct involvement of the gods in chasing away the Persian troops. This connection is only implied and not directly stated by the narrator. Nevertheless, the rocks the Herodotean narrator has seen lying in the holy precinct of Athene Pronoia in Delphi (8.39,2), together with their implicit supernatural interpretation, in the end come to elevate the greatness of the event beyond the confines of human measure and to emphasize divine support for the Greeks in their predicament. The rocks manifest, as it were, the miraculous involvement of the gods in the defense of the oracle and its treasures during Xerxes’ campaign.1 True, these objects in Athene’s sanctuary may 1  The immediate function of the stones as empirical evidence for the story of the gods precipitating the top of the Parnassus mountains just in time to deter the Persians is of course no end in itself. For the aggrandizing function of explaining the stones by divine involvement in the Persian War, see below.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_009

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well have simply rolled down from the Parnassus Mountains, which are known for their rockfalls. The narrator is not so anthropomorphically explicit as to say they were hurled down by a god. Nevertheless, the narrative context presents the rockfall as a divine act of effective self-defense. If the Persian Wars were a conflict in which also supernatural forces participated, the events and Herodotus’ account of them gain in significance. In order to decide whether this reading was originally intended, it is worthwhile taking into account also the preceding events. In the past, scholars have deemphasized passages like this one in Herodotus as a ‘concession’ to conventions of that time, speculating that Herodotus did not really commit to them. As outlined earlier, my approach here is to refer to what we can observe in the text and not to what we putatively know about Herodotus as a historical person and writer. ‘Mythical’ portions of the Histories should thus receive the same attention as ‘historical’ ones in order to appreciate the character of the account, while acknowledging at the same time that Herodotus’ narrator is known for his reservations about anthropomorphisms in human language about the gods. For both biblical and Herodotean narrative history, it is helpful to think of supernatural elements as a narrative expression of the belief in divine intervention. If this conviction is to be shown, rather than stated, the narrators have to tell about an event involving some kind of divine action. Rather than making a claim to a literal occurrence of these specific supernatural events and no others, such episodes signal that the writers expect their audience to understand the whole sequence of events as an occurrence with human and divine agents, much in the way of accidental signs signaling the tonality of the whole melody.2 In Greek literary tradition, great events of the past certainly had to be represented partly in mythical terms and language to signal that the audience deals with extraordinary events. This is also a strategy of persuasion for the literary work itself that receives legitimization because its subject is a ‘great event’. Although, with regard to the biblical narrative, no monument reminds of God’s and Moses’ foundational deed of leading Israel out of Egyptian slavery, an offspring event of the parting of the Sea of Reeds during the exodus from Egypt clearly receives a memorial. Twelve large stones set up at the place of the first camp in Canaan3 authenticate the parting of the waters of the Jordan 2   Cf. Othmar Keel, Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 51996), 47; Yairah Amit, “Dual Causality: an Additional Aspect,” (in Hebrew), Bet Mikrah 38.1 (1992/93): 41–55. 3  The text seems to mention two sets of twelve large stones: the twelve stones set up at the place of the first camp in Canaan (Josh 4:8) and the twelve stones Joshua placed in the Jordan. I take the claim of continuity in 4:9b as still referring to the stones at the western river bank

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213

and the Israelites’ crossing them from East to West during their entry to the promised land. This stone memorial is put up to perpetuate the memory of a supernatural event that is interpreted as an experience of the divine. It is to remind future Israelites of the event in which the flow of the river waters was stopped and held back such that the stream appeared to be cut in two (with the southern part continuing its way south, so that more and more soil on the river bed became exposed). Because of these clear intertextual references to the exodus, the parting of the waters at the Jordan has to be read with this earlier foundational event in mind. Reading a later historical event against the background of an earlier mythical event lends grandeur and significance to the more recent event. When those returning from Babylonia liken their return to the exodus from Egypt, they also present themselves as chosen by God, and those who remained in Yehud as Canaanites. As the true Israel, they have the chance to start Israel’s history in the promised land all over. Therefore, the parallel to the exodus makes the present circumstances in the early fifth century BCE appear in a primordial light, making things seem larger than life. Both the rocks that Herodotus’ narrator implies were brought down into the holy precinct by the gods and the large stones that the biblical narrator claims were brought to the bank of the Jordan by Israelite priests use the empirical strategy of persuasion through material remains in order to make a statement in the realm of significance, meaning, and authority. The documentary stance is not an end in itself but a means to shine a certain light on the events that sets the tone in which the narrators wish an event or a series of events to be understood. In addition to the explanation of the rocks in the Athena temple in Delphi, also the dedications in thanksgiving for the victory in the battles of Salamis and Plataea recognize the role of non-human forces in these events. By mentioning the dedications, the narrator relates the text-world to the actual world, affirming that agents in the text-world recognize the same norms as apply to the discourse-world.4 The narrating voice reminds the audience that the victory was made possible by the gods and that the Greeks justly show them

(a chain of Wayyiqtol-forms), interrupted by the explanation that Joshua himself had previously placed the same stones in the river as pedestals for the priests (the x-Qatal expressing temporal anteriority, cf. my translation on p. 219). The monument of large stones beside the river is assigned a more precise location (4:20) and a commemorative content in 4:21–24. The parallel with the crossing of the Red Sea is made explicit in Joshua’s speech (4:23). 4  This formulation reflects a modern perspective; ancients would possibly refer to this simply as ‘what one does,’ since their world was not divided in compartments in the way suggested by the term ‘religious norm.’

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their gratitude.5 Time and again, the Histories either imply or state openly that it is the gods who eventually determine the outcome of a battle.6 The episode of the Delphic oracle demanding its dues from the Aeginetans for their bravery in the battle of Salamis (8.122) clearly reminds the audience that military success is to be attributed to divine support as much as to human strength and cunning.7 The Greeks of the early fifth century set an example that military prowess is not to be enjoyed self-indulgently, and that any powerful and victorious people or city should reckon with the possibility of being deprived of divine favor. The dedicated statues also are a public tribute paid to divine agents believed to direct history. Evoking the awe-inspiring images of deities potentially reinforces religious values in Herodotus’ audience and is relevant for their orientation in the present, for their decision making. It is right and appropriate—so the audience can infer from the narrative—to approach the gods with the gratitude and veneration due to them.8 In addition, a monument honors and elevates not only the one to whom it is dedicated but also the donor.9 A statue in a sanctuary as thanksgiving for a victory brings political history closer to the divine realm, and in this way, the victory becomes even grander and more meaningful. After all, such a statue claims divine interest in the event and, more specifically, a divine will for mak5  Other possible reasons, which are to do with the nature of the gifts, do not strike me as more convincing, e.g., that the offerings are especially rich or exceptional, or that Herodotus favors Panhellenic or democratic offerings. 6  1.67 reports the story that the Tegeans’ repeated defeats in battle were due to a discontented deity; Miltiades’ speech in 6.109 mentions that the Athenians have a chance to repel the Persians if the gods keep out of the fight (cf. 6.11,3); the Greek alliance persuades the Locrians and Phocians to join the battle at Thermopylae with the argument that the Persian king is only a man and no god (7.203,2). ‘Classical’ passages are 7.139 and 8.109,3. Most of these utterances are character discourse and not the narrator’s words. Nevertheless, these views are confirmed by the narrative of the Histories and not subverted by the narrator. 7  Maybe this is not the situation as it was, but as the author wants it to be. Herodotus may insinuate that, in his day, Athens relied too much on its power to suppress the other allied poleis, rather than acknowledging a divine power that may turn the tables one day. 8  In my view, this interpretation is consistent with the Histories as a whole; whether Herodotus includes merits to gods merely for reasons of piety called for by conventions of the society, on the one hand, or this was his own conviction, on the other, cannot be answered and is irrelevant to this study of narrative means. There is a possibility that Herodotus was not pleased by this veneration of gods in dedications of anthropomorphic pictures: Cf. 1.131,1, where Herodotus’ narrator possibly mirrors Greek criticism of this by attributing it to the Persians. See Reinhold Bichler, “Zur Funktion der Autopsiebehauptung,” 143. See also Burkert, “Herodot als Historiker fremder Religionen,” esp. 20–28. 9  Especially when the dedication was exceptional or outstanding. This goes with Herodotus’ declared goal of recording great achievements, including buildings and works of art (cf. preface). In this view, the reference to the dedications as thank-offerings for victories would be for the record of great achievements.

Combinations of Normative Persuasion and Authentication

215

ing this victory possible. The images of deities cast from war spoils are then both proud reminders of Greek victories and self-assured displays of having merited, or at least received, divine favor. In these examples of dedications after a successful battle, therefore, one of the operative accessibility relations between the story-world and the actual world is accepting the involvement of supernatural agents as a law that makes the world go round. On top of that, these references to dedications made from war spoils transmit an implicit claim to the history’s overall significance and meaning: If the events are indeed linked to the divine sphere, they deserve to be the subject of a comprehensive literary account—a thought that elevates both the account as such and its author. However, scholars of Herodotus might object to this, arguing that, if the purpose of those short statements about dedications is to pay homage to the gods, and in this way also aggrandize the event, we should find such a reference also with respect to the victories at Marathon and at Mycale. William C. West states that the trophy on the plain of Marathon “was famous and evoked in the Athenian mind a memory of forceful, vigorous action. For such an action mention of the trophy of Marathon had the force of a proverb.”10 If Herodotus’ intention was to heighten the significance of the Persian Wars for Greek history, the battle of Marathon would have provided another excellent opportunity11—after all, he did not refrain from paying extensive tribute to the fallen soldiers at Thermopylae by citing the memorials inscribed and erected in their honor (7.228). This surely is a reasonable point. The fact that Herodotus mentions dedications for only a selection of battles means that he does not exploit every chance to enhance the empirical and normative plausibility of his account. 10  West, Greek public monuments (II. Monuments of Marathon, paragraph 4 titled “Trophy on the plain of Marathon”). Actually, we need not go far from Athens for further manifestations of the significance of this battle for the Athenians: Gehrke rightly points to the four pictures of the stoa poikile (showing the battle against the Amazones, a scene from the Trojan War, the battle of Marathon, and the battle of Oinoe) as expressions of the Atheneans’ (intentional) view of history, in which history is elevated in monuments to become a huge event; see Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Die Bedeutung der (antiken) Historiographie für die Entwicklung des Geschichtsbewußtseins,” in Die antike Historiographie und die Anfänge der christlichen Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Eve-Marie Becker, BZNW 129 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 29–51:45. 11  Although the account of the battle of Marathon contains a fairly detailed report of the phases of the battle and mentions the numbers of fallen soldiers on each side, there is no reference to their burial or to dedications. At least in the eyes of the Athenians, ‘Marathon’ is a shorthand formula for an achievement worthy of praise like the erga of past epic heroes, as is attested in 9.27,5 where the Athenians use it as support for their claim to command one of the wings in the battle of Plataea.

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Herodotus need not be as systematic as we would have him. Besides, to my knowledge, the present study is the first to raise issues of the exact connections between story-world and discourse-world and the function of certain elements of narrative structure as means of persuasion. There remains more to explore than can be addressed in this book. 1.1 A Closer Comparative Look at the Texts We may now take a closer look at how exactly each narrator mentions the rocks discussed above, connects them to an event in the past, and provides them with meaning. At the beginning of both episodes, the narrators report divine words, of Apollo and the god of Israel. Herodotus’ narrator relates in indirect speech that Apollo will protect his property himself, whereas the biblical narrator reports YHWH’s announcement in direct speech that he will start to act so that the Israelites understand that he is with Joshua as he was with Moses. Both announcements prepare their audiences for extraordinary events: οἱ Δελφοὶ δὲ […] ἐς πᾶσαν ἀῤῥωδίην ἀπίκατο, ἐν δείματι δὲ μεγάλῳ κατεστεῶτες ἐμαντεύοντο περὶ τῶν ἱρῶν χρημάτων, εἴτε σφέα κατὰ γῆς κατορύξωσι εἴτε ἐκκομίσωσι ἐς ἄλλ ην χώρην. ὁ δὲ θεός σφεας οὐκ ἔα κινέειν, φὰς αὐτὸς ἱκανὸς εἶναι τῶν ἑωυτοῦ προκατῆσθαι. (…)

‫העם התקדשו כי‬-‫ויאמר יהושע אל‬ )…( :‫מחר יעשה יהוה בקרבכם נפלאות‬ ‫ויאמר יהוה אל־יהושע היום הזה אחל‬ ‫ישראל אשר ידעון כי‬-‫גדלך בעיני כל‬ : ‫כאשר הייתי עם־משה אהיה עמך‬

The inhabitants of Delphi became absolutely terrified. They were in such a state of panic that they asked the oracle whether they should bury the sacred property in the ground or take it away somewhere else. The god said that they should not disturb it, and assured them that he was perfectly capable of protecting his property by himself. (…)

And Joshua said to the people, “Sanctify yourselves; for tomorrow YHWH will do wonders among you.” (…) And YHWH said to Joshua, “This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with you (…).”

Josh 3:5, 7

Hdt. 8,36,1

Expectations are further raised in each source by a voice that comments and interprets what is to follow as a divine sign. In the Histories, this voice is the narrator, whereas in the book of Joshua, it is a character in the narrative, Joshua, who explains the meaning of the following events as evidence that the living God sides with the Israelites.

Combinations of Normative Persuasion and Authentication

οἱ δὲ βάρβαροι ἐπειδὴ ἐγίνοντο ἐπειγόμενοι κατὰ τὸ ἱρὸν τῆς Προναίης Ἀθηναίης, ἐπιγίνεταί σφι τέρεα ἔτι μέζονα τοῦ πρὶν γενομένου τέρεος. θῶμα μὲν γὰρ καὶ τοῦτο κάρτα ἐστί, ὅπλα ἀρήια αὐτόματα φανῆναι ἔξω προκείμενα τοῦ νηοῦ· τὰ δὲ δὴ ἐπὶ τούτῳ δεύτερα ἐπιγενόμενα καὶ διὰ πάντων φασμάτων ἄξια θωμάσαι μάλιστα. Hdt. 8.37,2

217

‫ויאמר יהושע אל־בני ישראל (…) בזאת‬ ‫תדעון כי אל חי בקרבכם והורש יוריש‬ ‫מפניכם את־הכנעני ואת־החתי ואת־החוי‬ :‫ואת־הפרזי ואת־הגרגשי והאמרי והיבוסי‬ ‫הנה ארון הברית אדון כל־הארץ עבר לפניכם‬ ‫ ועתה קחו לכם שני עשר איש משבטי‬:‫בירדן‬ ‫והיה‬: ‫ישראל איש־אחד איש־אחד לשבט‬ )…( ‫כנוח כפות רגלי הכהנים נשאי ארון יהוה‬ ‫במי הירדן מי הירדן יכרתון המים הירדים‬ ‫מלמעלה ויעמדו נד אחד׃‬ Josh. 3:9–13

Meanwhile, the Persians pressed on and came to the sanctuary of Athena Before the Temple—only to be greeted by miracles even more remarkable that the one that had already occurred. It is truly amazing that weapons of war should of their own accord appear on the ground outside the temple, but what happened next was quite astonishing, even given all the marvellous things that have happened in the world.

And Joshua said to the people of Israel, (…) “Hereby you shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites. Behold, the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is to pass over before you into the Jordan. Now therefore take twelve men from the tribes of Israel, from each tribe a man. And when the soles of the feet of the priests who bear YHWH’s ark (…) shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be stopped from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap.”

Whereas the Herodotean narrator then proceeds to tell what happened, the biblical narrator steps up the implicit message that God is firmly in control of the events by having the prophet Joshua announce what is going to happen in a speech to the Israelites: Once the feet of the priests carrying the ark touch the waters of the Jordan, the waters will part. Then the biblical narrator also narrates the supernatural event, emphasizing its greatness by a metacommentary with reference to the discourse-world: At the time of harvest, the Jordan river’s water level is at the peak (‫ והירדן מלא על־כל־גדותיו כל ימי קציר‬Josh 3:15b).

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Thus, the audience is to infer, crossing the Jordan on dry land at that time really is marvelous. Herodotus’ narrator anticipates the same reader response explicitly by evaluating the event as “one of the most amazing things” (see above, Hdt. 8.37,2; transl. Sélincourt). So far, the elements of the two representations have been similar, granted that some of the biblical narrator’s prerogative of interpretation is conveyed to a character. Toward the end of the biblical episode, the narrator takes up the memorial’s explanation once more and intensifies it, which makes a difference for the audience’s understanding of the meaning of the overall event and renders it more dissimilar to Herodotus in the end than in the beginning. While Herodotus’ narrator simply records the existence of the very rocks that deterred the Persians in his own time and their location (Hdt. 8.39,2), the biblical narrating voice tells us about Joshua’s initiative to leave an everlasting memorial so that future generations will learn about this wonder wrought by divine presence in the ark of the covenant: The twelve rocks put up at the western bank of the Jordan will prompt children to ask their fathers, the eyewitnesses and experiencers of the event, about their meaning, whereupon the fathers are expected to answer as Joshua commands. (…) Then Joshua called the twelve men from the people of Israel, (…) and Joshua said to them, “Pass on before the ark of YHWH your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you, when your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ Then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial for ever.” And the men of Israel did as Joshua commanded. (…) And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan, in the place

‫שנים העשר איש‬-‫[…] ויקרא יהושע אל‬ ‫(…) ויאמר להם יהושע עברו לפני ארון‬ ‫יהוה אלהיכם אל־תוך הירדן והרימו לכם‬ ‫איש אבן אחת על־שכמו למספר שבטי‬ ‫ למען תהיה זאת אות בקרבכם‬:‫בני־ישראל‬ ‫כי־ישאלון בניכם מחר לאמר מה האבנים‬ ‫ ואמרתם להם אשר נכרתו מימי‬:‫האלה לכם‬ ‫הירדן מפני ארון ברית־יהוה בעברו בירדן‬ ‫נכרתו מי הירדן והיו האבנים האלה לזכרון‬ ‫ויעשו־כן בני־ישראל‬: ‫לבני ישראל עד־עולם‬ ‫כאשר צוה יהושע (…) ושתים עשרה אבנים‬ ‫הקים יהושע בתוך הירדן תחת מצב רגלי‬ ‫הכהנים נשאי ארון הברית ויהיו שם עד היום‬ )…( :‫הזה‬ ‫ואת שתים עשרה האבנים האלה אשר לקחו‬ ‫ ויאמר אל־בני‬:‫מן־הירדן הקים יהושע בגלגל‬ ‫ישראל לאמר אשר ישאלון בניכם מחר את־‬ ‫ והודעתם‬:‫אבותם לאמר מה האבנים האלה‬ ‫את־בניכם לאמר ביבשה עבר ישראל את־‬ ‫ אשר־הוביש יהוה אלהיכם‬:‫הירדן הזה‬ ‫את־מי הירדן מפניכם עד־‬

Combinations of Normative Persuasion and Authentication

where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day. (…) And those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal. And he said to the people of Israel, “When your children ask their fathers in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For YHWH your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as YHWH your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that YHWH’s hand is mighty; that you may fear YHWH your God for ever.”

219

‫עברכם כאשר עשה יהוה אלהיכם לים־סוף‬ ‫ למען דעת‬:‫אשר־הוביש מפנינו עד־עברנו‬ ‫כל־עמי הארץ את־יד יהוה כי חזקה היא‬ :‫למען יראתם את־יהוה אלהיכם כל־הימים‬ Josh 4:4–9; 20–24

This dedication of the rocks is repeated at the end, where it exceeds the aim of mere remembrance: Keeping alive this memory of God’s active involvement for the Israelites is to ensure their faithfulness toward God for good. Because Joshua’s view into the future is unlimited—unless ‫( כל הימים‬forever, lit: all days) is taken to refer only to the lifetime of the Israelites he addresses directly— Joshua’s command to pass on the memory to the next generation with the aim of fearing God is metaleptic, as it also extends to the narratees in the discoursenow. The contrast with Herodotus makes this difference stand out more clearly. The passage in the Histories does not combine or merge narrative levels. When the Herodotean narrator encourages his audience to marvel at the event, leaving practical religious implications to the reader, the two discourse partners are extradiegetic. By contrast, Joshua is an intradiegetic character and technically confined to the story-world, Israel’s past. However, his speech attaches to the wonder a religious duty, transcending narrative levels, as it is addressed to an extradiegetic audience. Joshua is presented as someone who knows that the passing on of cultural memory does not happen on its own accord, but requires teaching. He envisages a future in which youngsters are not familiar with the meaning of this monument because they are too young to have experienced it. To secure the

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transfer of knowledge, he tells the Israelites what to tell their children about these apparently uninscribed rocks at the Jordan. In this way, Joshua attaches a specific meaning to them. Simultaneously, the instruction to transmit knowledge about the purpose of these stones to the next generation is a means to enhance the importance and significance of the events they stand for. Joshua’s injunction to pass the memory on is a narrative means by which the writers tell their readers that remembering this event is important. This ultimately amounts to committing the narrative about it to memory so that one is able to pass the memory on to the next generation. The narrative memorializes itself, as it does by narrating God’s, and Moses’, instruction to keep a portion of manna, discussed above. This passage is one of several in Genesis to Kings that reflects a keen awareness of the fading out of historical memory with time unless it is kept alive and passed on as part of a people’s cultural heritage. In comparison with the stone memorial at the Jordan, the narrative itself has the advantage of making the past accessible wherever it is told.12 To contextualize the various facets around the twelve rocks,13 which are an especially elaborate means of persuasion pointing to the special significance of the event it commemorates, we may consider this event’s position within Israel’s history: The Israelites enter the land promised to them in former times; the entry marks the end of four hundred years of servitude in Egypt (Gen 15:13) and forty years of nomadic life in the desert. The relic of the twelve stones is a means to authenticate this liminal event to those members of an audience who know this landmark and identify themselves as descendants of Joshua and his generation. The rocks in the landscape are used as a physical link to the narrative in Joshua, which in turn is presented as a window to Israel’s past. Or, in other words, the rocks lend their materiality and tangibility to the narrative. Egbert Ballhorn has suggested that the story of the parting of the Jordan moves the location of the miracle from the Sea of Reeds into Israelite territory,14 making it more accessible. Ballhorn certainly has a point here, since the material relics to which biblical narratives refer are mostly located within not too large a circumference around the province of Yehud. Nevertheless, the narrative 12  Cf. Ballhorn, Israel am Jordan, 204, 217, 479, 484. 13  Not to mention historical dimensions that are beyond the scope of this study, such as why such an elaboration was apparently necessary. Knauf suggests this was because it was a reinterpretation of a Canaanite place of worship, see Ernst A. Knauf, Josua, ZBK 6 (Zürich: TVZ, 2008), 56, 60. 14  An important complementary aspect of the additional function of the second eisodus into the land of Israel is providing a meaningful interpretation of the return from Babylonian exile.

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221

also transcends this geographical territory and physical landscape, as the stone memorial is merely a trigger for telling the story about the extraordinary event that happened in its vicinity. For those who are not familiar with the physical memorial, the narrative becomes an expedient substitute. It is especially in the book of Genesis, narrating the beginnings of Israelite presence in Canaan, that several altars are associated with God’s promises to Israel.15 In antiquity, recourse to divine oracles was a way to buttress one’s claims. And in both narratives, altars and oracles or prophecies seem to mutually authenticate and validate each other. The cult for deities associated with the winds at Thyia and the altar built there become tangible proof, as it were, that the oracle the narrator briefly paraphrases was actually given and received at that time. There is therefore a reciprocal relationship between the prophecy and the object mentioned in its context. This also applies to the precinct of Aeacus. Likewise, the claim of Abraham’s descendants to the land of Canaan is connected to God’s revelation to Abram at Shechem (Gen 12:7), the first place in Canaan mentioned on Abram’s itinerary from Ur to Hebron, where Abram builds an altar.16 This is not too remote from archaic Spartan genealogies, where a sanctuary of a certain deity marks a city or region as belonging to the realm of that group of people who are closely connected to the god or goddess in question.17 Likewise for Israel, the founding of religious centers and designating of certain places as holy happens at an early stage in the chronology of the narrative of their past. Many altars are built by the fathers in Genesis, and many stone memorials are put up in Joshua. Both books deal with the arrival in Canaan and the beginning 15  Other examples are: Gen 13:18; 26:25; 35:1–7; Exod 24:4. In addition to being associated with divine messages, altars are also memorials or relics of a more scenic experience with God acting within the story-world, e.g., the altar in the land of Morijah, on which Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac (Gen 22:9), and the altar Moses built at Refidim after the victory over the Amalekites (Exod 17:15). 16  The promise of the land is repeated and also connected to Bethel (13:14–15) and Jerusalem (15:7). The last location is not given in the narrative; see Schmid, Genesis, 164. For the discussion of the altar in Thyia and the sanctuary of Aeacus, see pp. 171–73. 17  Claude Calame, “Spartan Genealogies: The Mythological Representation of a Spatial Organisation,” in Interpretations of Greek Mythology, ed. Jan Bremmer (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 153–86. Among the many examples adduced by Calame, two are especially instructive here: In early phases of genealogy, space is marked by a center with a sanctuary to the god or hero who has given his name to the land, e.g., Lakedaimon (p. 159); in a later stage, the temple dedicated to Hera Argeia, the protective divinity of Argos, which stood in the center of Sparta, expressed a territorial and political connection with Argos (p. 165).

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of making a home there. In other words, physical relics, and especially those connected to religious practices, are associated with foundational times when the world was still being furnished and gradually differentiated so that, in the course of time, it has more and more resembled the present. Especially with regard to Israel’s foundational early period, traditions about the sacredness of places of a religious cult are absorbed into the larger narrative of its past, lending it an aura of a time in which the human protagonists were especially close to God. As discussed earlier, in Herodotus’ Histories, a similar effect is created by associating the altar at Thyia with the claim of the winds’ assistance during the wars against Persia. Although this event is not in the remote past, the clear cultic references invest the political events with a metaphysical significance that transcends the limits of human experience in everyday life. 2

More Relics Invested with Both Empirical and Normative Plausibility

Burial sites and tombstones are classical locations and objects for the commemoration of deceased people. Anniversaries of somebody’s death regularly trigger the memory of their qualities, character, and achievements. In Genesis through Kings and Herodotus’ Histories, we see similar phenomena. During my analysis, I found that a number of physical remains in both sources serve as reality anchors with a clear interest in getting across a judgment involving values. Interestingly, these objects do more than contain burial sites, and they serve the commemoration not only of individuals but also of past events. Most of these events, however, are admittedly connected to matters of life and death in one way or the other. Is their authenticating function pointing to a real event or actual person subordinated to the ethical or theological aspect, or is it the other way round? And why does a narrator choose to attach ethical messages to monuments of stone in the first place? This connection to something tangible seems to be essential, since the great majority of the objects are parts of the inventories of both the story-world and actual world. 2.1 Commemoration of the Dead and of Great Achievements In Genesis to Kings, two individuals receive a monument to their memory that is claimed to exist in the discourse-now. They are a man and a woman who have died a violent or sudden death as fairly young people. Deviating from the usual burial practice in first- and second-temple Israel, Rachel and Absalom are said to be buried right where they died. Rachel, Josef and Benjamin’s

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223

mother, dies in childbirth at a time when the large family is on the way and does not live in a permanent place. The stele (‫ )מצבה‬her husband Jacob puts up for her remembrance and to mark the burial spot creates a place to remember the dead woman (Gen 35:20).18 It clearly expresses feelings of honor for her. The narratorial judgment on Absalom’s burial and memory, in contrast, is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the description of his burial (2 Sam 18:17) alludes to the treatment of the transgressor Achan and the Amorite kings in Joshua, enemies, as it were, from within and without, whose deaths are remembered to admonish the audience and to magnify the Israelites’ own victory.19 The narrative preserves the knowledge of Absalom’s grave in the woods of Ephraim and, through the use of the familiarizing article, implies that the place is known.20 On the other hand, the following verse adopts a more neutral tone when mentioning another commemorative place linked to Absalom in Jerusalem’s Qidron valley (‫)יד אבשלם‬. The location of this monument is close to the burial site of Judahite kings and is explicitly dedicated to Absalom’s memory21 (2 Sam 18:18): ‫ויקחו את־אבשלום וישלכו אתו ביער אל־הפחת הגדול ויצבו עליו גל־אבנים גדול‬ ‫מאד(…) ׃ ואבשלם לקח ויצב־לו בחיו את־מצבת אשר בעמק־המלך כי אמר אין־לי‬ ‫בן בעבור הזכיר שמי ויקרא למצבת על־שמו ויקרא לה יד אבשלום עד היום הזה׃‬

18  The localization of Rachel’s burial place has been debated due to the following difficulty in the biblical text: 1 Sam 10:2 states the place as being within the boundaries of Benjamin, which seems to be at odds with the indication that the place is close to Efrat(a), Bethlehem (Gen 35:19; 48:7)—which is commonly associated with Bethlehem in Judah, south of Jerusalem, whereas the territory of the tribe of Benjamin is in Jerusalem’s Northeast and Northwest. I follow Noga Hareuveni, who argued convincingly that the biblical localization speaks of a Bethlehem in Benjamin and that Ephrath is to be identified with Parah (Josh 18:23) at the spring of Parah. See Nogah Hare’uveni, New Light on the Book of Jeremiah: The Landscape of His Homeland as a Basis for Research on His Ways (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1955), 143–51. 19  The forceful ‫ וישליכו‬is also used for the Amorite kings in Josh 8:29 and 10:27; the phrase ‫ ויצבו עליו גל אבנים גדול מאוד‬is almost identical with Josh 7:26 and 8:29. 2 Sam 17:14 interprets an event as the result of God’s decision to bring disaster upon Absalom, which of course is a harsh judgment on Absalom. 20  Which may explain the absence of the formula ‘to this day’ (2 Sam 18:1 ‫וישליכו אתו ביער‬ ‫)אל־הפחת הגדול‬. 21  The continued existence of this memorial is implied in a double way: It has a well-known name in the discourse-now (‫)יד אבשלם‬, and the narrator gives its location in a metanarrative comment (‫)אשר בעמק המלך‬. In contrast to the translators of the Zürcher Bibel, I take the asher clause as referring to the discourse-now and not to the story-now.

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And they took Absalom, and threw him into a great pit in the forest, and raised over him a very great heap of stones […]. Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and set up for himself the pillar which is in the King’s Valley, for he said, “I have no son to keep my name in remembrance”; he called the pillar after his own name, and it is called Absalom’s monument to this day. 2 Sam 18:17–18 RSV

The reference to Absalom’s memorial in Jerusalem somewhat neutralizes the tone of triumph and glee in the face of his dishonorable death, silently honoring the dead whom the narrative portrays as dear to David (2 Sam 14:1; 18:12; 19:1), albeit without making an explicit judgment. Through the immediate juxtaposition of the two monuments, one in the woods and one in Jerusalem, the writers seem to rehabilitate Absalom.22 That Rachel and Absalom really lived goes unquestioned, in my view, as with Gyges in Herodotus. The relics do not come to substantiate this. They mark the place where they died and were buried, which in these cases is not the usual, expectable place. In addition, Rachel’ and Absalom’s burial sites and the memorials of course serve the purpose of commemoration. The stones heaped upon the two deceased function as memorials while also expressing a documentary stance valuing authenticity. The narrating voice’s reference to Moses’ burial site also reveals an interest in the concrete whereabouts of the past: “no man knows the place of his burial to this day” (Deut 34:6b, RSV). This explicit negation of knowledge indicates to the audience that information about the precise place where Moses was buried is neither simply omitted nor deemed unimportant. On the contrary, this missing knowledge was obviously felt as a gap: not to know Moses’ place of burial mattered. If Rachel’s and Absalom’s graves are mentioned because they died ‘somewhere outside’, should this honor not be given to Moses all the more? The use of the phrase ‘to this day’ is peculiar here because it is otherwise used to express the unbroken continuity of material relics or of a tradition. Here, it is used for something absent, for the continuity of not knowing.23 The refer22  This is in line with the fact that Absalom’s rebellion against his father is portrayed as God’s answer to David’s immoral behavior. Although the son is not granted to rule Israel as David’s successor, at least some of his actions are seen as in agreement with God’s plan in history. Cf. Jonathan Grossmann, “The Design of the ‘Dual Causality’ Principle in the Narrative of Absalom’s Rebellion,” Biblica 88 (2007): 558–66. 23  Cf. Siegfried Schwertner who called it a “negative tomb tradition” in “Erwägungen zu Moses Tod und Grab in Deut 34,5.6,” ZAW 84 (1972), 25–46: 27. A different, but entirely speculative interpretation is possible: ‘to this day’ could be hidden polemics against recent claims of knowing Moses’ tomb in the discourse-now. I doubt that ‘to this day’

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225

ence to this blank certainly reflects an interest in concrete, physical aspects of the past. If the reference to this knowledge gap was omitted, reticence could give rise to speculations and possibly even to concrete claims of having found Moses’ grave in one place or the other. The reference to this permanent information gap prevents such pretensions. Reasonable as this suggestion is, I feel there is another possible reading. Moses is said to have died in the land of Moab and to have been buried there by a masculine singular agent: “and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Bethpeor” (Deut 34:6a, RSV).24 According to the Jewish exegetical tradition, this agent was God. The assertion that no human being knows the place of Moses’ burial can be understood as evidence that there were no human witnesses and undertakers present, which implies more strongly that the masculine singular verb form ‫ ויקבר‬indeed refers to God. This interpretation deemphasizes the aspect of location, focusing rather on the gap between human knowledge and divine knowledge. I will leave this matter undecided. In my view, both interpretations are viable. Whether one endorses the first or the second, in either case, the narratorial comment of Deut 34:6b transmits yet another level of meaning: it also implies that its speaker presumes to have an exhaustive overview of people’s knowledge concerning the question of Moses’ grave. This stance claims either having the omniscience of a superhuman conscience or, at least, being the authority for this question. It is one of only two instances where the consciousness present in the textual function of the narrating voice admits missing knowledge.25 This admission, however, conveys not so much a weakness as a highly authoritative control and prescription of what is and can be known.26 in combination with knowledge is meant to express the preliminarity of the situation implying a meaning of ‘until further notice’. Rather, the statement can be translated as “no man has ever known his burial place”, which implies the notion that this is unlikely to change, since it has been like that from the start. Maybe it even implies the negation that tradition lost this piece of information. The Septuagint additionally notes the absence of the foreign gods Jacob buries under the terebinth tree in Shechem (Gen 35:4). 24  ‫קברתו עד היום הזה‬-‫ידע איש את‬-‫ויקבר אתו בגי בארץ מואב מול בית פעור ולא‬. 25  The other is in 1 Kgs 7:47. 26  Which does not prevent the invention of complementary traditions later on: Josephus (Ant. 4.326) reads in the notice of Moses’ death and burial Moses’ own care to forestall rumors about his apotheosis. See Feldman’s commentary (Flavius Josephus, Judean Antiquities 1–4, translation and commentary by L. H. Feldman, vol. 3 of Flavius Josephus. Translation and Commentary, ed. Steve Mason (Leiden: Brill, 2000)) on this passage for further references to traditions about Moses’ death and comparison with founding heroes in Greek and Roman literature. Moses’ tomb was shown to the pilgrim group Egeria was part of (Peregr. Eger. 12,1–2) on Mount Nebo. On the Jewish reception of Deuteronomy on Moses’ death, see the references in Christian Frevel, “Ein vielsagender Abschied:

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As a fourth and last aspect, the scribes seem to be able to turn this absence of a physical monument of Moses’ grave, this negative tomb tradition, into an elevation and boosting of the Torah as Moses’ legacy, monument, and realm of memory. In his short commentary on Deuteronomy, Georg Braulik observes that, instead of on a tomb, the epitaph for Moses in Deut 34:10–12 is written on the monument of the Pentateuch.27 In consequence, it is those who copy, transmit, teach, recite, and interpret the Torah, meaning the scribes, who keep the memory of Moses and thus eternalize him.28 The existence of other competing ‘relics’ related to Moses, next to the Torah, could possibly deflect attention from the temple in Jerusalem as a religious center and bear the risk of cultivating Moses’ person more than his teaching. As outlined above, the idea that the Torah scroll is a physical relic is present in the biblical narrative itself. The reference to a permanent information gap thus certainly reflects the professional scribes’ interest in authentication. At the same time, however, it is noteworthy that burial places of biblical protagonists are not pointed out as a rule; we cannot assume a general interest of the writers in collecting as much ‘biographical data’ as possible. This is in line with the fact that funerary cults generally played only a minor role in first- and early second-temple Israel. Presenting this specific absence of knowledge as permanent is also a way to control and channel the Moses tradition, a way to shape the Jewish cultural memory. The negation of material relics connected to Moses boosts the authority of the literary tradition about him, first and foremost the Torah.29 In the same way, the Herodotean narrator refers to places of burial not for the sake of genealogical trivia, but often to show respect and honor for the deceased and guide the reader’s feelings in the same direction. But as in the examples from the Tanakh, the physical aspect of the concrete trace of the past also plays a role. The grave of Anchimolios, commander of the first Spartan attempt to free Athens from the tyrannis of the Pisistratides (5.63,4), certainly Exegetische Blicke auf den Tod des Mose in Dtn 34,1–12,” BZ 45.2 (2001): 209–34: 211; ancient Christian interpretations are given by, e.g., Jerome (In Amos 9.6) and Augustin (In Johannis evangelium 124,2). 27  Georg Braulik, Deuteronomium II (16,18–34,12), Die neue Echter Bibel: Kommentar zum Alten Testament mit der Einheitsübersetzung (Würzburg: Echter, 1992), 246. 28  See Stavrakopoulou, Land of our Fathers, 79. 29  Interestingly, Moses’ bronze snake is also got rid of in 2 Kgs 18:4, though the problem with it need not be that it purportedly was a relic from the remote past of Moses, but that it was venerated with incense like a divine image. That it could not simply be kept and treated as a museum exhibit might point to the religious worldview of the writers. Such a demystification is also not found in Herodotus’ Histories; here, at least the shape of the metal object has to be altered in order to bring about a change in people’s relationship to the object (Hdt. 2.172,3–4).

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authenticates the Spartan military expedition by way of a pars pro toto. Simultaneously, it is a memorial for Anchimolios: Herodotus’ narrator mentions his name and patronym, going on to both judge and praise him as an esteemed man (ἀνήρ δόκιμος, 5.63,2). He has an equally flattering verdict for the eleven commanders of ships whose names are inscribed onto a commemorative stele on the market place in Samos (6.14,3), mentioned before. He honors them as brave men (ἄνδρες ἄγαθοι) because they did not retreat from the sea battle of Lade against Persian ships, as most Samian naval commanders did. It seems that Herodotus’ narrative values the readiness of human beings to risk their lives for a collective cause.30 All of these graves or stelae in memory of deceased people known by their names are accompanied by the formula ‘until today’, or a narratorial statement pertaining to the discourse-world. Is this assertation of continued existence up to the present really necessary? Would not the remembrance and honor bestowed on the dead be the same without the confirmation that the grave or memorial can be accessed by the audience? In search for an answer, it is helpful to compare these tombs or memorials with Herodotus’ representation of a mere literary burial. According to Herodotus, Artachaies was one of Xerxes’ leading construction managers of the canal across the Athos peninsula (7.117). The narrator tells his audience about the special, almost heroic qualities of the deceased (his height and his strong voice), Xerxes’ grief and mourning for the dead, and his larger-than-life burial: the whole army worked together to create the barrow on his grave. Since the narrator mentions the sheer numbers of Xerxes’ army several times,31 this claim makes the reader invariably imagine a huge tumulus. It is noteworthy, however, that the action happens exclusively within the story world. Artachaies’ grave is never mentioned with a noun denoting it as an object or a site. The reader does not learn of the completed tumulus as a landmark; we are told only about the process of its creation. The narrative focuses on the burial, not on the grave as its permanent outcome. In addition, there is no clear reference to the place in the discourse-world where this grave

30  Cf. also his praise for Prexaspes in 3.75,3 and, of course, the commemorative inscriptions for those who fell at Thermopylae (7.228), which Herodotus cites in full, creating a solemn, obituary-like moment. In addition, he mentions twice in the immediate context that the dead fighters were honored (οἴχεσθαι (228,1) οἱ ἐπικοσμήσαντες (228,4)), which indirectly sets a norm for the audience’s feelings toward them. 31  E.g.: the rivers which the army empties by drinking; hosts of the army who become poor when they provide a meal (7.118–19); the plain full of people when Xerxes inspects his army.

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is supposed to be situated. Accordingly, the narrator does not confirm its existence in the actual world. From the text of Herodotus’ Histories alone, there is no reason to treat this tumulus grave any differently from the cairn at the river Artescus mentioned below as a relic without a claim to factuality (4.92; see below). However, from Müller’s visual commentary on the Histories, we learn that there is indeed at least one impressive tumulus close to the southern end of the canal across the narrow western part of the Athos peninsula.32 Are we to understand from the lacking reference to the monument’s existence in the discourseworld that this could be taken for granted? Although this question cannot be answered with certainty, I doubt this as a plausible possibility. The only place name mentioned in this chapter is Akanthos, and the tumulus Müller has on his map would have been some kilometers away. Rather, I would like to suggest that Herodotus’ narrative allows, or even invites, the audience to draw a connection with a tumulus that presumably existed in the discourse-now,33 while at the same time the narrator refrains from making the connection himself. In other words, Herodotus exploits the potential of persuasion that lies in the existence of a monument matching his story without claiming it as authentication for his story.34 It seems to me that he enjoys the color and grandeur of this story of Artachaies’ burial, but with the awareness that it does not necessarily depict historical reality. That is why the narrator establishes the monument exclusively in the story-world, or at most with very loose and implicit reference to a tangible object in the discourse-world. This, however, is not to say that he is taking a distance from this tradition. He uses it to the advantage of his account, but in a register or category different from real existence. The narrator therefore does not focus on the tumulus as a physical landmark in Greek geography and on its potential for empirical 32  Dietram Müller, Topographischer Bildkommentar zu den Historien Herodots: Griechenland im Umfang des heutigen griechischen Staatsgebiets, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1987), 156–61; according to Müller, the tumulus seems to be an artificial hill but has not yet been examined archaeologically. He raises the possibility that it could be Artachaies’ grave but does not assert or confirm this notion. Some doubt seems to be reasonable, as the map on p. 157 indicates two more hills or tumuli nearby. A photograph of the tumulus in question is on p. 161. 33  There is a tumulus in the region now, but to my knowledge, it has not been dated so far. The assumption that it existed in Herodotus’ day is hypothetical. Other tumuli in Greece are, e.g., Mycenean or Hellenistic. 34  If there was a tumulus in Herodotus’ day, I suppose that there was a local story about it. In this case, Herodotus refrains from openly reattributing the place as the tomb of one of Xerxes’ Persian officials. If no story or etiological tradition was related to the hill, Herodotus may have exploited this as inspiration for his own narrative.

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evidence. Rather, he foregrounds the monumentalization and elevation of a human being as a hero. It is significant that Artachaies’ achievements as one of the construction managers of the Athos-piercing canal (cf. 7.22) is upstaged for the benefit of his physical, and thus ‘genetic,’ characteristics, features particular to heroes elsewhere in the Histories.35 All of this matches the claim that some Greeks consider Artachaies a hero, which casts a ray of mythical glamour on Xerxes’ campaign. It is well known that Herodotus depicts the Persian Wars also in the light of Homeric epic. Allusions to a heroic age aggrandize the fairly recent history of the Persian Wars.36 Leaving a monument to the Persian official Artachaies because of his special achievements, the narrator enhances the account’s significance: the greater the enemy, the greater the victory. Precisely because he makes no ontological statements about this tumulus in the actual world, he is not stating something that is not the case. It seems reasonable that the depiction of this pompous royal burial also serves to characterize the Persian monarch. After all, in a narratorial statement, Herodotus judges the building of the canal as a demonstration of power and excessive pride that Xerxes takes in himself (7.24). By having the Persian king honor the person in charge of building the canal, which is a monument to Xerxes’ own greatness, the narrator possibly also demonstrates the king’s conceit and narcissism.37 In this vein, the episode of the death and burial of Artachaies can be read as an implicit warning against anyone who takes pride in his own unrestricted power. In view of Xerxes’ defeat and ‘flight’ back from Greece to Persia later in the narrative, Artachaies’ burial conveys the lesson that those who are at the peak will fall far when they do fall. This might be a hidden warning to the Athenians at the time of the discourse-now. Pointedly, the difference between Artachaies’ grandiose funeral and Moses’ arcane burial by the highest authority is that the first comes without a claim to factuality. It serves to provide some pomp and glamour, or to preserve a legend of sorts that some people tell each other about a certain event in the past. It is like the snippets of gold glitter fluttering down from above on the winning team whose players turn into idols and heroes in these moments, although their achievement has been hard and solid concrete work. The phrase ‘until 35  Cf. Perseus (2.91,3), Heracles (4.82), and Orestes (1.68,3) in the Histories; and Herodotus’ claim that Heracles cannot have slain thousands, because he had no superhuman qualities (2.45,3). 36  Hermann Strasburger, Homer und die Geschichtsschreibung, SHAW 1972,1 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1972); Marincola, “Introduction,” 10–12; Wesselmann, Mythische Erzählstrukturen, 342–344. 37  The Greek word μεγαλοφροσύνη occurs twice in Herodotus and does not per se have negative connotations (7.24,1; 7.136,2).

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today’ or a narratorial confirmation that the grave or monument exists in the discourse-now, by contrast, bestows on the past, or on the story-world, for that matter, the reality and tangibility of the material remain. It is noteworthy that, in terms of Possible World Theory (PWT), Artachaies’ burial really happens in the textual actual world, the story-world. But, because the barrow on the grave is not identified with a site in the audience’s geographical environment, the reality status of this landmark in the actual world is left undefined. This episode thus contributes to aims other than rooting Artachaies and the tradition about his burial in reality. Similarly, Darius’ pontoon bridge across the Bosphorus is an event of symbolic significance in the Histories. Since it was only a temporary construction, Herodotus cannot refer to the bridge itself, but instead dedicates no little narrative space to the description of the monument (μνημόσυνον) that the architect from the island of Samos, Mandrocles, left for himself. The narrator’s reference to Mandrocles’ dedication of an image (whether it is a painting or a relief is unclear), with an inscription he cites verbatim, leaves a memorial of words to the Samian architect (4.88). The monument as a material relic is especially important in this case, since there are no tangible traces at the place where Darius’ pontoon bridge allegedly once connected Asia and Europe,38 making this feat of building liable to be forgotten soon. In my opinion, this object serves two purposes. It pays homage to the man who made an extraordinary achievement—in accordance with the preface in which Herodotus promises to honor great deeds (ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, 1.0). The narrative mentions the architect’s name twice in quick succession (4.87–88), and the narrator emphasizes Darius’ satisfaction with his work and cites a panegyric epigram in his honor. Another purpose is a claim for the significance of Herodotus’ history: This text leaves a long-lasting memory to people and their deeds that would otherwise be forgotten as time goes by. In this way, Herodotus’ narrative becomes a monument too, a μνημόσυνον—as if the narrator demonstrated to the audience that words can be as successful as monuments when it comes to commemoration. If this reading is correct, the more elaborate description of Mandrocles’ memorial is an exception in the Histories: The text creates, or reconstructs, an object in such a way that the audience can visualize it to some extent, so that the text-object fulfills the same function as the tangible memorial.

38  I owe this thought to Hendrik Svenson-Evers, Die griechischen Architekten archaischer und klassischer Zeit (Frankfurt am M./Bern: Lang, 1996), 64.

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Both accounts of a past commemorate and honor dead individuals or groups of people by mentioning their graves or epitaphs, often along with their names. The stone stelae or heaps of stones, from the beginning intended as memorials for the dead, are visible connections between the narratives and the discourse-world. Tombstones or epitaphs seem to be recorded when the circumstances of death were exceptional, or when the individual already had an elevated standing during his or her lifetime. Especially in Herodotus’ Histories, this is connected with associations of honor and prestige. Here, the narrator foregrounds the veneration individuals deserve on account of their deeds, a veneration that is implied as due to them from the audience. The addressees are encouraged to take these deceased as an example. With the exception of Moses, references to burial sites as memorials of the merits or virtues of the deceased are less of an issue in biblical narrative. Achan’s death by execution is even used to visualize the appropriate treatment of a person who violates his community’s rules. In both accounts, the documentary aspect of the reference to the graves is secondary to commemoration, but nevertheless present. In the case of Rachel and Absalom, picturing the places of the deaths adds to the tragedies. References to places of burial or memorials of individuals in both sources do not seem to spring from an interest in trivia, but rather in remembrance and justice. With the exception of Anchimolios’ grave, a common element of the burial sites and memorials as memory anchors is their creation within the storyworld as the narrative unfolds. I would not go as far as arguing that the stories connected to the monuments are told thanks to the monuments. And yet, the narrators readily refer to the material relics when they have the opportunity. The memorials are of stone, the most easily available, permanent, and weighty material. This material is known to last for a long time, and therefore provides an antithesis to human mortality. Stelae or burial sites in memory of the deceased express a human desire that at least their memory will not be as ephemeral as their life. A narrative of a past pursues a related aim. Therefore, mentioning the names of memorable ancestors, with or without their merits or guilt, can be interpreted as an indirect means of persuasion because the account gains in significance when it prevents forgetting where it should not happen. In addition to and apart from Mandrocles’ monument for Darius’ pontoon bridge, the memory connected to the stones or landmark is handed down by tradition and not through the iconography or inscription of the monument. This enables the writers of both accounts to interpret relics as monuments even if this is not their use in the discourse-world and to rededicate existing monuments to a different commemorative purpose than the original one.

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2.2 Triumph Over the Enemy As we know also from more recent history, when people assure themselves and others about who they are, they sometimes do this at the expense of their opponents. Thus, in Herodotus, the memorial for Athens’ rise to power is associated with the bonds with which the Athenians bound their prisoners of war from Boeotia and Chalkidike (5.77,3–4). It is noteworthy, however, that the same military victory is evidenced also by a large bronze quadriga on the Acropolis. In my opinion, that is why the main narrative function of the bonds is to celebrate the victory as deserved revenge, by emphasizing the humiliation Athens brought on their opponents, who are characterized by hybris in the quadriga inscription.39 Emotional and moral meanings of the event are foregrounded in the object of the bonds, rather than the factuality of the event as such. This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the bonds are no unique memory anchor. They are closely paralleled by another reference to bonds in Tegea (1.66) mentioned earlier. The textual features in the context of this relic send signals in two directions, understanding the bonds both as a literary image carrying metaphorical meanings and as physical evidence. Herodotus might have been aware of the fact that the bronze quadriga on the Acropolis in the second half of the fifth century was not the original sculpture from the end of the sixth century, which had not survived the Persian Wars,40 so for him, the shackles may have been the more authentic empirical relic. The way the evidence of the bonds at the Acropolis is rhetorically elaborated, with the components of precise location41 and the explicit claim to continuity up to the present, suggests that they are also mentioned as material evidence authenticating traditions about this battle. In any event, neither memorial of a military victory is free from spite 39  Hdt. 5.77,4: δεσμῷ ἐν ἀχλυόεντι σιδηρέῳ ἔσβεσαν ὕβριv—[the sons of Athens] quenched their [the Boeotians’ and Chalcidians’] pride in grievous bondage of iron. 40   Andrej Petrovic, “‘Kunstvolle Stimme der Steine sprich!’: Zur Intermedialität der griechischen epideiktischen Epigramme,” A&A 51 (2005): 30–42, here 37; earlier, Macan considered tentatively that the quadriga Herodotus’ contemporaries saw was a reproduction (Reginald W. Macan, Herodotus: The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books (London: Macmillan, 1895), 223). 41  κρεμάμεναι ἐκ τειχέων περιπεφλευσμένων πυρὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ Μἠδου, αντίον δὲ τοῦ μεγάρου τοῦ πρὸς ἑσπέρην τετραμμένου—Macan refers to Stein’s commentary, who identifies it as the Megaron turned to the west the cella of the Polias temple (Erechtheion). The walls then are the northern fortification walls of the Acropolis (Macan, Herodotus: Books IV–VI, 223). According to Müller (Topographischer Bildkommentar, s.v. Athen p. 615), two temples can be meant by ‘westbound megaron’, the Old Temple of Athena or the Older Parthenon. Since the quadriga was located on the left of the Propylaea, he assumes that the location of the fetters was diagonally across from the Old Temple of Athena.

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against the defeated enemy, and in this case, Herodotus’ Histories transmits the information about the objects along with their perspectival bias. The pivotal event of this Athenian victory happened as early as about eighty years before Herodotus’ present; the shackles the narrator claims to have seen hanging from the walls of the Acropolis are a manifestation of the bottom line of this story: Ἀθηναῖοι μέν νυν ηὔξηντο.42 The bonds serve as a visual prop or as a symbol for a development leading to the hegemony of the Athenians, who oppress other Greek states in the discourse-now. By choosing this object associated with power, but of course also with force and violence, to visualize and authenticate a development in Athenian history, the narrator implicitly touches upon the double-edged nature of this victory. In the book of Joshua, we can find memorials of victory representing the defeat of the combatant very clearly because they embody their leaders’ death. The narrative identifies two stone heaps as the burial places of Canaanite kings vanquished by the Israelites: the king of the destroyed city of Ai (Josh 8:29) and the five kings of a coalition of the cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish and Eglon buried in a cave near Makkedah (10:16, 27). In contrast to the fate of Ai, there is no narration of conquest and destruction of the five cities,43 and going to war against the coalition of kings is done not only in the Israelites’ interest but also as help for the allied Gibeonites. Nevertheless, there are close parallels between the fate of the king of Ai and the five kings. And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree, and cast it […], and raised over it a great heap of stones, [which stands there] to this day.

‫ואת־מלך העי תלה על־העץ עד־עת הערב‬ ‫וכבוא השמש צוה יהושע וירידו את־נבלתו‬ ‫מן־העץ וישליכו אותה אל־פתח שער העיר‬ ‫ויקימו עליו גל־אבנים גדול עד היום הזה׃‬

Josh 8:29 RSV

42  Hdt. 5.78: Thus Athens went from strength to strength (transl. Sélincourt); cf. also 5.66,1. 43  The narrative later assumes that the cities of Jarmuth, Hebron, Lachisch and Eglon were seized by the Israelites, as they are mentioned in the lists of places describing the portions of the land assigned to each of the Israelite tribes as their share (Josh 15). Josh 15:63 explicitly states that Jerusalem was not conquered and its Canaanite inhabitants live side by side with the Israelites.

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but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave […], and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day.

‫ויהי לעת בוא השמש צוה יהושע וירידום‬ ‫מעל העצים וישלכם אל־המערה אשר‬ ‫נחבאו־שם וישמו אבנים גדלות על־פי‬ ‫המערה עד־עצם היום הזה׃‬

Josh 10:27 RSV

Both the king of Ai and the kings of the five cities are hanged on trees or impaled on wooden poles, where they are presented until sunset. Joshua then has them taken down in accordance with Deut 21:22–23 and thrown out of the city or into the cave, respectively. Both locations are covered with large stones that are claimed to be in that place until this very day. These similarities suggest a literary motif, with the victory over the five kings following the victory over just one—whom the Israelites initially were not able to overcome—creating the dynamic of climax.44 This close repetition suggests the assumption that one or the other of the two incidents is tailored according to the other. This again leads to questions about the implications of the narrator’s or the audience’s manner of thinking about the past. Does this narrative show Israel’s early history as it could or should have been? I do not want to jump to the conclusion that this doubling shows that the biblical narrators are unaware of historical plausibility. To be sure, I am not saying that the writers must have made up one of the two heaps of stones and that the formula confirming their continuation into the discourse-now is mere rhetoric. Why should there not have been two heaps of stones at the two locations? Maybe there were more monuments that had to be reinterpreted, for one reason or another, than there were suitable stories or living memories? To say the least, the close parallel shows that the biblical writers and their audiences did not take issue with the repetition. Apart from celebrating the death of the kings in the Amorite coalition, the large stones authenticate a victory against the odds. The implication is that, had YHWH not fought for his people, the outcome would have been hard to predict. That the Amorites are a real threat is signaled by two details: the statement that the Gibeonites cannot counter them alone even though they are all brave warriors (10:2,6); and God’s appeal to Joshua not to be afraid (10:8). In addition, the narrative makes clear that it was not the Israelites or Gibeonites 44  The subsequent kings whom Joshua and the Israelites vanquish are then only dealt with in a short note and listed in the overview of the Canaanite kings in Josh 12:7–24.

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who killed the majority of enemies, but YHWH fighting for his people (10:11,14). The story about the victory over the Amorite kings is therefore more of a celebration of God’s involvement than Israel’s own power.45 Thus, the enemies’ graves become monuments of military triumph, which is coupled with the command for the Israelites to conform to God’s will so that YHWH will be on their side and fight for them in the future. 2.3 Authentication of an Exemplum In the narrative history of Kings, Jehu, king of Israel, is commended as a role model. Accordingly, the narrator evaluates his reign partly positively (2 Kgs 10:30–31). The deed earning him divine praise is his destruction of the temple of Baal in Samaria (2 Kgs 10:27), whereby he undoes the wrong done by Ahab in building it in the first place (1 Kgs 16:32). The ravaging of this temple and its altar ruins Ahab’s architectural legacy, which is presented as being as apostate as this king. It is part and parcel of Jehu’s mission of wiping out Ahab’s descendants, putting an end to the dynasty of Omride kings in Israel. The image of the destroyed and defiled temple of Baal, turned into a public garbage depository, is highly polemical. Baal’s temple in decay and defilement transmits the message—although the narrator does not state it explicitly—that the Israelites are neither to worship nor to fear other gods, but to go against idolatry and apostasy. Leaving a visible ruin in the narrative world is more effective than a complete razing of the structure. Because the former temple of Baal is not built on anew, it is not ‘overwritten’; the misuse makes sure the ‘lesson’ of the site is perpetuated within the story-world. Jehu’s inversion of the original purpose of the temple of Baal becomes a monument symbolizing this king’s adamant loyalty to YHWH. The monument conveys the normative message about the values and practices that belong to a king who is faithful to Israel’s god. The scatological aspect of the relic reminds me of other polemics in the biblical narratives; it certainly has a touch of self-serving gratification. The foreign cult is destroyed, and thereby its god demonstrated as inferior—and it has not been revived since, contrary to the temple of Jerusalem that was destroyed and rebuilt. The ruin is a visible and vivid picture of Jehu’s commendable deeds—it is a visual prop for a typological story narrated as an exemplum. At the same time, the physical qualities of the image serve to authenticate Jehu’s successful revolution and restoration 45  Interestingly, the large stones said to have been hurled down by YHWH (Josh 10:11) are not claimed to be around like the rocks that came down at Delphi. Maybe this is due to taking a distance from anthropomorphic representations of God, or to the interpretations of the stones as hail in the following sentence.

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of ‘proper order’. On a larger scale and within the broader narrative context of Kings, the destruction of Ahab’s temple of Baal is proof that it would have been possible, as demonstrated by Jehu, to go against foreign cults, and thereby avoid the end of the Israelite kingdom and the deportation by the Assyrians.46 Reading between the lines, the statement seems to be that, if the kings of Israel had listened to God’s commands as Jehu did, history would have turned out differently. Jehu’s example implies the possibility of a different, counterfactual course of history, similar to that of King Josiah. In a similar vein, the narrative representation turns Achan’s grave into a warning memorial and a symbol of shame.47 His execution sets a normative standard that is referred to in the assessment of subsequent issues (Josh 22:20). The grave monument, a heap of large stones (‫ )גל אבנים גדול‬in the valley of Achor, again combines material evidence with a normative use of a purportedly historical event (7:26). However, this heap of stones is not unique, which somewhat weakens the persuasive force of the evidence. The dead bodies of the king of Ai and of Absalom are buried in the same way, with close parallels in the narration. This allusion may well be intended as the implicit judgment that an Israelite transgressor of God’s commandments is to be treated as if he was an enemy. If this is accurate, the normative meaning seems to take priority over factuality. On the other hand, the narrator meticulously presents Achan’s fate as contingent and distinctive, thereby making it more convincing. The story does not relate a general case—talking about ‘a man’ and ‘a war’—but presents specific data. The transgressor is identified by name and lineage, and his peculation of war spoils reserved for God connects to a specific battle, with the stolen valuables listed and valued: “a beautiful mantle from Shinar and two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold fifty shekels in weight” (Josh 7:21 NAS). With the name of the valley with the stone heap sounding similar to Achan’s name and the stones still in place, the biblical authors make a compelling case for their claim. The point of Achan’s precedent is to pass a judgment

46  In 2 Kgs 17:7–20, idolatry in various forms is given as the reason for Israel’s destruction, with mention of Baal in verse 16 (‫)ויעבדו את הבעל‬. In the formulaic appraisals of the rule of each of the kings in general, Israelite and Judahite rulers are remembered and judged much less on account of the monumental traces they leave in terms of, e.g., commemorative stelae for military achievements, or for administrative buildings, than on account of their putting up or removing Asheras or other cult objects on high places (random examples are: 1 Kgs 14:23; 2 Kgs 23:8). 47  In Joshua, the incident is severely judged as an action bringing about God’s anger (7:1), as a sin (7:15.20), and as ruinous trouble (7:25).

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and attempt to provide normative principles that help to shape the audience’s action. The relic clearly supports the moral claims.48 The similarly paradigmatic story of the capture of the city of Ai is closely interconnected. Explaining the ruins of Ai, it teaches that obedience to God’s commands is more important as a prerequisite for military success than military intelligence and calculations, strategic measures that Joshua as the chief commander does not fail to take (cf. Josh 7:2–3). Although capturing Ai at first seems to Joshua’s spies to be an easy task, the Israelites have to take such a beating in their first attempt that Joshua expresses his doubts before God that crossing the Jordan was at all reasonable (7:5–7). In response, God explains that the reason for defeat was his refusal to be with the Israelites because of a violation of the rules (7:10–12). Once Achan, the transgressor of God’s ban on using war spoils, is identified and executed among the Israelites (7:11–12, 20–25), God encourages Joshua to attack the city once more, even providing the concrete strategic advice of using an ambush. Joshua’s plan then succeeds in every aspect, and the Israelites conquer and burn the city, destroying it to ruins. Along with pride in an ancestor such as Joshua, the story especially teaches the lesson that God’s instructions need to be adhered to in every aspect and by everyone, for the hidden disobedience of even one person will endanger the survival of the whole Israelite camp. If the Israelites keep the terms of the covenant with their God and rely entirely on him—so the story teaches—they will not be let down. Joshua’s brilliant military coup is a means to the end of glorifying God even more than the human leader, since Joshua’s victory relies on carrying out divine orders. Since the story demonstrates and enacts this message without preaching it, avoiding the direct inculcation of norms for a desired behavior, chances are good that the audience will both take the message home and be able to adapt it to a concrete situation in their own field of experience. In other words, this dramatized way of presenting insights through pointing to a prominent example is one that provides good accessibility. The story alone conveys the message effectively and memorably, which raises the question of whether the reference to the ruins of Ai has any additional effect. In my view, it is the other way round. Precisely because the story can be identified as ‘true’, it can serve ulterior motives. The ruins called ‘Ai’,

48  The exemplary episode may even convey a more restricted legal case, cf. Knauf, Josua, 80, “Hier wird […] ein Präzedenzfall für den Umgang mit jenen, die Vernichtungsweihgut unterschlagen haben, konstruiert.”

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which could still be seen in the time the story was written and told,49 were natural evidence for the fact that once, a city was there that at some point in time was destroyed and, since then, not rebuilt. This is the necessary empirical basis needed to authenticate all further details of the story, which, in this text, attributes the city’s destruction to Joshua and his fellow Israelites in Israel’s early history. Like the ruins of the Canaanite city of Ai, those of the destroyed temple of Baal in Samaria are also explicitly claimed to exist in the discourse-now (Josh 8:28; 2 Kgs 10:27). On the surface level of the two stories, both relics serve as empirical evidence. The ruins of Ai authenticate the story that explains them etiologically, and the ruins of the temple of Baal are evidence of its destruction. Although explanations of the historical reason why a biblical writer used a certain narrative strategy exceed the scope of this study, it is interesting to note that contemporary bible scholars have identified the events in both stories as fictions.50 This coincidence is no surprise, because a text making a claim to relate tangible proof for a fictive event in the past fits well into the general hypothesis that new ‘facts’ need more rhetorical efforts of persuasion than old ones. Herodotus also uses this literary strategy to support some of his claims.51 Information that is introduced into an existing literary tradition for the first time needs credentials, especially if the tradition is conservative and a collective enterprise, so that “[a]uthenticity is subordinate to authority; […] originality is subordinate to the cultivation of tradition; and intellectual property is subordinate to the common stock of cultural forms and values.”52 The reference to ruins visible in the landscape of the discourse-now authenticates the new stories about the past, which in turn provide the ruins with a (new) historical context and meaning. An additional question worthy of reflection but impossible to answer is which of two scenarios is more likely in the genesis of these stories about 49  The Hebrew word ‘Ai’ means ‘ruin’; according to Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman (The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 82), the large and impressive ruins at Ai had existed since the end of the third millennium BCE. In its halcyon days, around 2500 BCE, Ai was the largest town in southern Palestine, with several thousand inhabitants; in the fourth century BCE, it was an appendix of Beth-El with some one or two hundred inhabitants, see Knauf, Josua, 76 and 83. 50  Ibid., 83; Volkmar Fritz, Das zweite Buch der Könige, Zürcher Bibelkommentare AT 10.2 (Zürich: TVZ, 1998), 57. 51  E.g., the event of the Greek troops slaughtering Euboean cattle and lighting fires to trick the Persians, which the narrator links with an oracle of Bacis in Hdt. 8.20; see Blösel, Themistokles, 145–52. 52  Toorn, Scribal Culture, 47.

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presumably invented past events. Are they told exclusively because of their meaning, are the narrative details contingent, and could a different story serve the same end? Or do the writers follow a method that generates these specific details, in which case the stories were considered more of a reconstruction? The material relic connected to the story is not a narrow restraint. The way I think of it, which is admittedly speculative, is to understand what is enacted in the stories and buttressed by material remains as the meaning the writers distill from their reflection about history, their interpretation of past events rather than their reconstruction. In other words, I think the two stories about Jehu’s destruction of the temple of Baal and Joshua’s destruction of the city of Ai were originally told and committed to writing to impart to the audience the result of the writers’ reflection about history, in search of its meaning. 3 Conclusion This section assembles objects from the past that the narrator uses to influence the audience’s behavior or norms. Where Herodotus’ Histories merely encourage an attitude of admiration for extraordinary human achievements and of awe and gratitude toward Apollo, the appeal of biblical narrative to its audience is more concrete: keeping the specified terms of the covenant with Israel’s god. Both accounts tell us about divine involvement in decisive battles, which magnifies the event and diminishes human achievements on behalf of divine assistance. The Persians’ failure to loot the sanctuary at Delphi, which the narrator implicitly connects with divine involvement, enhances the worthiness of Herodotus’ subject, and therefore the authority and significance of his history. In Genesis to Kings, the reference to material remains is a suitable and relevant strategy of persuasion for the belief in God’s involvement for the sake of those who are loyal and obedient to his will. Prominent graves and ruins in the Persian period offered an opportunity to Jews to become late eyewitnesses, as it were, of their ancestors’ triumph over their enemies as a prize for their loyalty to God. Practical philosophy tells us that ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ are better suited to trigger and shape action than is, for example, ‘pretending’. However, human beings usually need reasons for their belief. Also, it is “distinctive and constitutive of belief […] that it represents its content as true”.53 It is this reality and authenticity that tangible relics convey to the paradigmatic stories. In this section, material remains of the biblical narrative have again been prominent. 53  Peter Railton, “Truth, Reason, and the Regulation of Belief,” Philosophical Issues 5 (1994): 71–93: 74.

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This is because a significant characteristic of many biblical material relics is their presentation as monuments,54 which intrinsically carry a normative message along with the information or memory they wish to pass on. The two narratives of a past do not regularly exhibit the features of didactic prose. Nevertheless, references to burial places of individuals singled out in a positive or negative way are not ends in themselves, but convey normative standards for social interaction and the behavior toward divinity. The connection of these standards to static and lasting objects expresses the hope for the lasting authority of these norms. The book of Kings presents the two kings, Jehu and Josiah, as commendable examples, and their deeds either are triggered by a relic from the past (Josiah) and/or affect one (Jehu, Josiah). Achan’s transgression leaves a shameful monument; his story carefully takes account of the contingent uniqueness of historical detail by a plausible setting and pieces of information that are accessible only to eyewitnesses. These particular stories are told in order to influence the attitude and actions of people in the audience. The audience of Joshua and 2 Kings in Persian times most likely consisted of scholarly scribes and the male youths from elite families connected to priesthood, the aristocracy, and the government and administration in Yehud and Samaria.55 We have seen that an intradiegetic character, Joshua, erects a monument so that future generations will remember the parting of the Jordan River’s waters. This effects a smooth sliding between narrative levels. Although Joshua himself crosses no boundaries, implicitly addressing the memorial to ancient extradiegetic audience comes close to entering their world. In his explanation of ontological metalepsis, the anglicist John Pier uses words of the narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan that also apply to this passage in Joshua: Metalepsis of the “ontological type ‘opens a passage between [narrative] levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination’.”56 As we may reasonably 54  I refer to the following relics as monuments merely on account of the narrative. Questions such as whether there is independent historical or archaeological evidence for the relics and whether the average population in second-temple Palestine regarded them as monuments can remain unanswered. For an introduction into a typology of monuments, see Dietrich Erben, “Geschichtsüberlieferung durch Augenschein: Zur Typologie des Ereignisdenkmals,” in Geschichte(n) der Wirklichkeit: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Wissens, ed. Achim Landwehr, Documenta Augustana 11 (Augsburg: Wißner, 2002), 219–48. 55  E  rnst A. Knauf, “Die Adressatenkreise von Josua,” in The Book of Joshua, ed. Edward Noort, BETL 250 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 183–210: 184, 192–93; Carr, “Torah on the heart,” 18; Schmid, Literaturgeschichte, 48–49. 56  John Pier, “Metalepsis (revised version; uploaded 13 July 2016)”, paragraph 12, in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2016). URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/metalepsis-revised-version-uploaded-13-july-2016.

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assume, the ancient recipients of the book of Joshua knew the difference between their world and that of the narrative. Nevertheless, narrative means such as this one invite them to let some biblical intradiegetic characters speak to them almost directly. Although both narratives seek to prevent the audience from forgetting the content of the account and present themselves as textual monuments of the past, the biblical writers encourage remembrance more strongly, for example through characters talking about the memorialization of their experience. The memorials created by characters in the narratives point to events represented in the same narratives and call for their remembrance. In this way, the narrative adopts for itself this function of a memorial.

CHAPTER 8

Objects as Visuals and Capturing a Condensed Meaning 1

Objects as Visuals for Motivations and Concepts

Probably as part of Herodotus’ Homeric legacy, the narrator repeatedly refers to the inner world of characters. He mentions their emotions to explain why characters act in a certain way. In the field of thoughts and emotions, however, the narrator travels in an invisible realm. In order to provide the audience with something more palpable to look at, objects serve the Herodotean narrator also as visible manifestations of people’s plans and states of mind. Objects sometimes capture and ‘objectify,’ as it were, a character’s alleged mental and emotional state. In these cases, the object is to the invisible motivation what a material relic is to an event in the past: it points to something invisible in much the same way as an object is a trace of past circumstances that are no longer there. The Alcmeonid Apollo temple in Delphi, for instance, embodies this family’s political ambition and determination and their large financial capacities: The Alcmeonids spare no effort in order to end the tyrannis of the Peisistratides in Athens. According to Herodotus’ narrator, they had the temple built in a more splendid way than was agreed in advance, even paying for a front made from marble brought in from Paros (5.62,2–3). However, the nature of this building as material proof is different from the Siphnians’ treasury, for instance, both being marvels of Delphi. What it stands for1 cannot be extrapolated in the same way as the wealth of the Siphnians. The persuasive power of the monument of the new and splendid temple of Apollo rests in its metonymic relationship to the claimed characteristic of the Alcmeonid family and in the vividness of the image. However, Herodotus’ narrator does not evoke the image by way of a detailed description of the temple; he seems to take it for granted that his audience is able to picture the building without his help. With regard to Herodotus’ account of Egyptian history, Reinhold Bichler has shown that each era has its characteristic monument or landmark, and 1  The story about this not merely philanthropic investment neatly precedes and connects to a discussion of the question of whether the Alcmeonids bribed the Delphic oracle to win Lacedaemonian support for their goal to regain control over Athens by force.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_010

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each king mentioned by name goes with a building or military campaign— otherwise the rulers do not deserve to be recorded (Hdt. 2.101–102). He argues that buildings or monuments are connected to particular breaks and changes and make them visible.2 A taste of this is also present in Herodotus’ account of Athenian history.3 In this context, the rivalry and enmity between Athens and Aegina is prominent. In the story about the beginnings of these long-term tensions, the movement toward mutual hatred becomes manifested in a change of material culture on the islands of Aegina and Argos: The women there start to use longer clothespins than before to hold their garments together because of their hatred (ἔρις) toward the Athenians (5.88,3). The women’s rejection of Attic customs materializes in an everyday object. Interestingly, there is no clear connection between this object, out of all others, and the mutual traditional hatred. In the preceding chapter, clothespins play a role within the context of the conflict between Athens and Argos. This episode, however, is not a manifestation of Athenian hatred directed toward Argos. The person the Athenian women kill, stabbing him with their clothespins, is the only male survivor of their own troops (5.87,2). So, regardless of why the clothespin became the object to stand for the hatred, what is important is its concrete, material result: a specific act of rejection of Athenian customs or Athenian style by the people from Aegina. Since the damnation of the Athenians allegedly materialized in the clothespin, this object serves as visual for a mental state, and of the attempt to define one’s own identity in distinguishing oneself from others. The long clothespins of women from Argos and the Alcmeonid temple of Apollo in Delphi are tangible objects that are part of the inventories of both the text-world and the discourse-world. These objects have the potential for multiple meanings, depending on who takes a stake in them. The Herodotean narrator uses these windows of access to the world of the past by skillfully interpreting them as images for materialized invisible forces in history. This technique provides the audience with a memory anchor from the world they live in: seeing the clothespin or the building will subsequently remind the reader of the story attached to it. However, it does not stop here. Akin to etiologies, the relic also reinforces the trustworthiness of the story, and thereby manifests the world-changing power of invisible and immaterial forces. 2  Bichler, “Autopsiebehauptungen,” 137–38. 3  Another example is objects visualizing turns of ‘fate’ for a group of Samians exiled by Polycrates: Just as the transitory period of bliss is evidenced by the temples they built in their new colony Kydonia (3.59,2), so is their subjugation evidenced by parts of their ships destroyed and captured by their combatants (3.59,3). The relics witnessing the Samians’ defeat are the prows of their ships decorated with or shaped like boars in the temple of Athena Aphaia in Aegina.

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The tangible thing becomes the sidekick for thoughts, in this case Herodotus’ interpretation of history. Despite this hierarchy, the idea is in a way dependent on something visible to make an impression on the audience—in other words, to become accessible more easily. This commitment to vividness extends also to the way in which the narrator presents abstract concepts. A prime example is Herodotus’ use of the 345 statues purportedly shown to him, as to Hecataeus before, during his visit of the temple of Amon-Re in Karnak, ancient Thebes.4 The narrator is obviously not interested in the wooden statues as objects of art; he describes neither their posture nor their facial expressions. Important to him is their number and the point that every statue represents one generation in a line of priests and, accordingly, kings. This is why the narrator does not invoke the visual impression of one bulk multitude of similar statues, but emphasizes seeing and taking count of every single piece—which also allows him to claim that he knows their exact number. The visit is presented in an almost scenic manner so that a reader can picture in a lively way how the guiding priests and Herodotus inspect the rows of statues, and in this way move deeper and deeper into the past. This effect is created by the repetition of similar or the same words: They [the priests] ushered [me] into the inner hall … showed the colossal wooden statues and counted them for me (ἐξηρίθμεον δεικνύντες)—as many as the number I have mentioned before…. And so these priests counted and showed and explained to me (ἀριθμέοντες ὦν καὶ δεικνύντες οἱ ἱρέες ἐμοὶ ἀπεδείκνυσαν) that each of these men was the child of his predecessor, and they walked past the statues beginning with the one who had recently died until they had shown all of them (ἀπέδεξαν). (143,2–3) The presentation of this scene is so vivid that it can almost be used as a film script. For Herodotus’ audience, this creates the effect of going through an eyewitness experience.5 This emphatic inculcation matches the importance of this subject for Herodotus. 4  Hdt. 2.143. In the following, I am interested only in the function of the statues in the text, i.e., in the way Herodotus employs them as support for his insights into chronology. On the historical plausibility of this episode as narrated in the Histories, see Lloyd’s commentary (Herodotus Book II) and Ian Moyer, “Herodotus and an Egyptian Mirage: The Genealogies of the Theban Priests,” JHS 122 (2002): 70–90. 5  Whether the scene is Herodotus’ invention or not is not my concern here. Detlev Fehling has analyzed this episode as Herodotus fiction: “We have only to remember how many certain

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What the narrator claims to have seen in the temple of Karnak supports his conception of time: He holds that the age when gods and human beings still lived side by side, and thus, for instance, begat children together, did not last longer in Greece than in Egypt. If the Egyptian chronology is correct, this era must have come to an end in Greek lands much earlier than the Greek tradition has it, with an immediate effect on the discourse-now: Greeks fond of a deity in their genealogy have to go back much further into the past than they usually did. In addition, this insight has immediate consequences for Herodotus’ view of Hercules. He separates the figure of Hercules into two, the hero and the much older god, with a denial of supernatural powers and descent for the hero. Because of the far-reaching impact of adopting the Egyptian time-count into the past, the narrator takes care to visually prop up this concept of time. Before he tells us about his visit to the temple of Karnak, the narrator has already established the notion of an incredibly long Egyptian past, looking back on 345 generations of human rulers. In the preceding chapter (2.142), he presents a summary of his construct of a long Egyptian “historical time.” It goes back from Pharao Sethos to the first human king, Min (2.4; 2.142), amounting to a sum of 11,340 years. This calculation is based on the information he gathered from Egyptian sources (142,1). We learn that Min was followed by 330 successors, the last in that line being Moiris (2.100,1). Between Moiris’ death and his own time, the narrator tells us, there are less than 900 years (2.13), with his great-grandson Proteus contemporaneous to the Trojan War (2.112–116,1). As Reinhold Bichler has pointed out, the narrator additionally corroborates this calculation by ‘geological’ data, estimating the time it took for the Nile river to wash up all the territory of lower Egypt as alluvial land to be 10,000 years (11,4).6 In my view, the purpose of the story about the visit in this temple—whether or not it is true—is to visualize Egyptian lists of kings and priests and thereby measure the long past of the Egyptian state.7 Hence, Herodotus’ narrator uses a lot of vocabulary for cognitive operations, especially the verbs for counting and demonstrating or pointing out. The image of the statues works even if this examples of the fabrication of physical evidence we have already encountered in other passages. The battery of confirmatory devices in this particular story would hardly be complete without a proof of this sort as well” (Herodotus and His ‘Sources’, 83). Fehling rejects the view that Herodotus relies on a text really written by Hecataeus. 6  Bichler, “Autopsiebehauptungen,” 137–38; cf. Hdt. 5–13. 7  The close connection between Herodotus’ visit in Karnak and his conclusion about the antiquity of Egyptian human history in the preceding chapter is also expressed verbally. The narrator gives the number of the temple statues in terms of a reference to the number mentioned in the summary: … ἐξηρίθμεον δεικνύντες κολοσσοὺς ξυλίους τοσούτους ὅσους περ εἶπον (143,2). The number mentioned in the previous chapter is 341 generations from Min to Sethos. The number given in 143,4 is 345.

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scene originated in Herodotus’ imagination. The claim that Hecataeus had seen the place before him can be seen as a double attestation, to the effect that two critical and learned men agree in their testimony of an astonishing phenomenon.8 What the narrator presents to us as an episode in his life could well be Herodotus’ creative solution to the problem of how to make his audience see and understand that the distance to the time when gods and man lived together is much longer than they believe. It is a gripping narrative strategy that helps him transmit some rather dry chronological information. My interpretation of the 345 statues as visualization of an abstract concept gains further ground by the observation that the wooden statues are neither the sole nor the most important source for the narrator. More often than to these statues, he refers to Egyptian tradition as a source of knowledge;9 the Egyptian tradition is one he judges and appreciates as most concerned with memory and learning (2.77,1). Thus, the reference to the statues as visualization of the long Egyptian past is but one of several ways to substantiate this view. Yet, among these strategies of persuasion, the temple visit is probably the most vivid, being almost tangible, and therefore accessible demonstration of the idea that the gods have long departed from the world human beings inhabit. This solution captures the meaning of certain material relics in the Histories better than concentrating on the question of ‘fact or fiction?’, which has led scholars either to declare objects as empirical evidence or discard them as fictive. As in Herodotus’ Histories, objects serve as visualizations of ideas and meaning also in Gen–Kings. Here, however, they function in a different field, since they are not so much a visual means of characterization and mythification as a visualization of legal matters or claims to certain privileges. They are memorials, provided by the ancestors for later generations. In the book of Joshua, the Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh on the eastern side of the Jordan river build a large altar as a monument for future generations (Josh 22:10). This altar becomes the bone of contention in a conflict verging on civil war between them and the tribes on the western side of the Jordan, with their altar and sanctuary in Shilo. The Westerners suspect the altar could be used for animal sacrifice, which they seek to prevent. The purpose of the altar, 8  Herodotus uses the reference to Hecataeus in two ways: benefitting from his authority and taking him on for a view of human genealogy that Herodotus rejects on account of Egyptian evidence. This is done indirectly, as Herodotus lets the Egyptian priests, whose authority the narrator significantly boosts at various points in the Egyptian logos, take care of what presumably is his own criticism: … ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν ἐπὶ τῇ ἀριθμήσι, οὐ δεκόμενοι … ἀντεγενεηλόγησαν δὲ ὧδε (2.143,4). 9  Book 2: especially 3, 100 and 142,1; also 123,1; 125,6; 136,4.

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as the Easterners apologetically explain to the Westerners, is safeguarding their rights for their descendants. The Israelites outside of what later is Yehud and Samaria are to be recognized as part of Israel, with YHWH as their common god and the right to worship this god with sacrifices in the temple west of the Jordan (Josh 22:24–29). They affirm that their altar in the East has not been built for the purpose of animal sacrifice and invoke it as the material guarantee that the agreement reached between the groups within Israel will last in the future.10 Thus, the two-and-a-half tribes interpret this altar as a memorial. Their preemptive initiative seeks to ensure that a tradition or memory will be respected in the future.11 This narrative strategy strongly suggests a later audience external to the story-world. Biblical scholars have long noted that the conflict in this story about the ‘altar of witness’ was an issue in the fifth century BCE, the time after the exile. The episode about the prevention of a civil war among Israelites is indirectly addressed to an audience in the Persian period and presented as a historical legal precedent. The conflict is thus projected back into the remote past and solved in an exemplary way.12 What would Jewish sages in the Second Temple period gain by setting and solving the conflict in the remote past? In this way, they would make this issue contemporaneous with Joshua and the golden generation, when God clearly was with the Israelites—and whenever he was not, the reason for this was quickly detected and redressed. This invests their resolution with authority. The warrantor for the legitimacy of the Eastern altar as a monument without a practical role for a cult is an authoritative person, Pinhas the priest.13 The legal precedent, it seems, is valid and relevant for the present regardless of whether 10  ‫עד הוא בינינו‬-‫עשו אבותינו לא לעולה ולא לזבח כי‬-‫תבנית מזבח יהוה אשר‬-‫ואמרנו ראו את‬ ‫( וביניכם׃‬Josh 22:28b) […] then we shall say, “See the copy of the altar of YHWH which our fathers made, not for burnt offering or for sacrifice; rather it is a witness between us and you” (NAS). 11  It is thus functionally parallel to the large stone at Shechem (Josh 24:26–27; see above). In a similar vein, the narrator calls the bronze cover of the altar in the desert-sanctuary a memorial (‫ )זכרון‬with the function of informing and warning the Israelites about the consequences of unauthorized incense offering which is said to be limited to the descendants of Aaron (Num 17:1–5). 12  Erich Zenger, Stuttgarter Altes Testament (Stuttgart 32005) ad loc.; Knauf, Josua, 182–84. See also the dissertation on the story about this altar by Gali Dinur, “The case of the altar of the two-and-a-half tribes (Joshua 22:9–34): a linguistic, literary and ideological analysis,” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv 2006; Hebrew), and the article by the same author, “The Design of the Dialogue in the Story of the Altar of the Two-and-a-Half Tribes (Joshua 22: 9–34),” Beit Mikra 43 (2008): 89–122. 13  In biblical narrative, Pinhas is known for his zero-tolerance attitude in questions of transgressions of divine commands (cf. Num 25); in fact, Pinhas and the representatives who

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the addressees have seen the altar themselves. The question of whether this object exists in the discourse-world does not seem to be essential and remains unanswered.14 Yet it is noteworthy that the precedent is connected with a visual image. Concerning a question of cult, an altar is a very pertinent and vivid relic. The invented tradition in this case is treated as superior to a material relic in reliability and authority, although a witness and some kind of evidence is needed in legal matters. Therefore, having characters assign to the altar the function of a permanent memorial and material guarantee is a good rhetorical ploy. The rainbow used in Gen 9:12–17, by the way, functions in a similar way. In the biblical account of Israel’s entry into the land of Canaan, Joshua creates a public monument, carrying out Moses’ instruction he received before the crossing of the Jordan (Deut 27:2–4.8; Josh 8:32). What he writes in ink on plastered stones, in clear and neat letters, is the exact copy of the Mosaic Torah (‫)משנה תורת משה‬. As its location, Moses assigned Mount Ebal (Deut 27:4).15 Within the story-world, therefore, we have to imagine the existence of a monumental whole ‘scroll’ written on plastered stone, at least in the dimensions of the Balaam Son of Be’or inscription from Tell Deir ’Alla, biblical Succoth. Egbert Ballhorn and others identify the rock on which the Torah is written with the altar on which Joshua has offered up a sacrifice immediately before, which means that this altar’s main purpose is the commemorative function of a Torah memorial.16 As immediate addressees of the open display of Moses’ Torah, the narrative mentions all Israelites, and especially their leaders. In addition, it relates a reaction of several Canaanite kings to the entry of the Israelites into their territory and their ceremony at Mount Ebal. Therefore, the Torah accompany him refer to this sin of Peor in their accusation, as well as to Achan’s transgression mentioned earlier in this chapter. 14  The narrating voice does not claim that this altar is still around in the discourse-now. There is no clear indication of its location— although it is assigned a location by reference to another place presumed as known (‫)גלילות הירדן‬, the familiarizing article in 22:11 (‫ )בנו … את המזבח‬appears only in a character-speech, not in a text whose speaker is the narrator. On the purposeful ambivalence of the localization of the altar, see “The location of the altar of the two and a half tribes (Josh 22:9–34): a tendency of vagueness” (Hebrew), by Gali Dinur, at , last accessed June 5, 2017. 15  Some manuscripts also have Mount Gerizim instead of Ebal; Kartveit holds that the original reading of Deut 27:4 is Gerizim, supported by Vetus Latina and Papyrus Giessen 19 (Magnar Kartveit, “The Second Temple and the Temple of the Samaritans,” in Die Samaritaner und die Bibel / The Samaritans and the Bible: Historische und literarische Wechselwirkungen zwischen biblischen und samaritanischen Traditionen / Historical and Literary Interactions between Biblical and Samaritan Traditions, ed. Jörg Frey, Konrad Schmid and Ursula Schattner-Rieser, Studia Judaica 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 67–80: 74). 16  Cf. Ballhorn, Israel am Jordan, 205 and 480.

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monument is certainly part of Israel’s claim to the land within the story-world, comparable to Darius’ stelae after crossing over from Asia to Europe with his army. But is this monument also addressed to the narrator’s audience in the discourse-now? There is no implicit or explicit claim that the inscription is still in place in the discourse-world, nor is the monument the focus of an etiological story, and no character dedicates it to posterity. Thus, the audience is not encouraged to relate the information in the text to what is physically the case in the world they know.17 This indicates accessibility relations in other fields. Ballhorn understands it as an analogy to ancient Near Eastern law stelae such as the Hammurapi stele, which monumentalizes laws and makes them publicly accessible.18 Accordingly, the monument claims Canaan as the land of the Torah not only in the story-now, but for times to come, which thus includes the discourse-now. In addition, because of its location on a mountain, Ballhorn reads it as the transfer of the normative time at the Sinai from outside the promised land into its borders. Every new generation, and not just Moses’ contemporaries, is ‘shown’ a real, physical place as their Sinai.19 In this way, if only in the virtual world of the narrative, the Torah is addressed afresh to each generation, and in a more direct and physical experience than that of reading a text. These two aspects merge in the claim to the Torah’s validity as legislation for the land of Israel in the discourse-now. Here, the accessibility relation does not involve a physical identity of the two worlds, but the identity of norms. With the help of the image of the Torah memorial on mount Ebal, the narrating voice tells the narratee that the claim to the obvious validity of the Torah for the people of Israel is no novelty in the discourse-now, but a ‘fact’ since the ancient past of Israel’s foundational period. This makes the Torah an ancient, time-honored tradition from a past when the Israelites were outside of their own country, an era prior to and distinct from the Israelite and Judahite monarchies. As a complementary aspect, I would like to propose that this monument supports the metahistorical view that it is not God who is to blame for the political disaster of the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. After all, 17  Be this because the audience lives far away in Babylonia—i.e., not in the geography of the narrative—or because the addressees of the inscription are first-temple Israelites. 18  Ballhorn, Israel am Jordan, 480. 19  Ibid., 203–04, 480. Ballhorn also mentions the public display as an act of making the actual text of the Torah accessible to all Israelites. He does not comment on whether this is plausible as a claim in a time when only a small minority in the population was able to read a long text.

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Israel’s god would have acted in an unfair or unjustified way if he punished his people based on norms that had not been clear and known from the start.20 The narrative therefore enacts that this had not been the case by having Joshua put up a monumental Torah in the territory allocated to the sons of Joseph. The narrating voice claims that, during the period of the judges and the kings of Israel, the Torah was not hidden or simply unknown, but displayed outside in the open so that it could have been accessed. Had the northern tribes acted according to its laws and teaching, the disaster of their own land being taken from them would not have happened. By analogy, this holds for Judah, and even more so because they were not ignorant of the Northerners’ fate. Historically speaking, this interpretation of history is the result of the reflections of the exiled Judahite elite and crystallized only after the event.21 The presentation of the Torah as the basis for Israel’s life within the land promised to them in their foundational past lends authority and approval to this interpretation of history. Next to God’s theodicy, the Torah written on stone is thus an implicit claim for the relevance and significance of this view of the recent past: The current knowledge, or wisdom, compiled in the Torah would have prevented Jerusalem’s fall. The group of people to whom such a statement matters are those who return from Babylonian exile. As descendants of the former elite, they strive to reassert their socio-political status and to implement the new theology developed during and just after the exile. The actual audience of the Torah monument is therefore not to be found within the narrative, but external to it and several centuries ‘after Joshua’. Comparing this Torah monument with the 345 wooden statues of Amon Re’s temple in Karnak, both of them probably invented, we can find a number of similar elements. Both images stand for an abstract and, as such, invisible concept that is important to the narrating voice and informs also other passages of their account. Both scenes, Herodotus’ visit at the temple walking the lines of generations of priests and Joshua’s copying of the Torah on a large rock in the open landscape, are embedded well within the narrative so that the scenes also make sense on their surface level representing the character’s actions. 20  Cf. 2 Kgs 21:1–15; Jer 19:1–13; 22:6–9; 25:1–11—all texts in which the destruction of Jerusalem and Babylonian captivity are interpreted as the result of the Israelite kings’ failure to adhere to the words of God’s commandments and teachings. 21  For the dating of Josh 8, I follow Knauf, Josua, 73 and 87. Although he does not specifically date the portion of Josh 8:30–35, it follows from his commentary that Josh 7–8 were later additions to the text created by the D or Pentateuch redaction, which he dates to the fifth century BCE. Of course, the concept of loyalty to the Torah in order to secure a peaceful life in one’s own land hinges on more than just this monument. It is a recurrent theme in the narrative starting with the Israelites’ entry into Canaan, especially in Samuel and Kings.

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If interpreted as signifiers for an abstract concept, they make an audience see and understand something they cannot learn by way of a personal experience— unless they are able to go back to any point in space and time. The images are so lucid and evident that, even if they are not true, they convey the feeling of being well conceived. As far as narrative levels are concerned, there is an obvious formal difference. Since in the narrative of Israel’s past, there is no fixed discourse-now and the narrator is effaced, there is no personalized narrator who can tell his audience about his own experiences. This potential lack in authority and credibility inherent in narratorial discourse is artfully compensated for by invoking as witnesses “all Israel with their elder and officers and their judges” (Josh 8:33) and by emphasizing that every single word of Moses’ Torah came to the attention of everyone present, including women, children, and sojourners, because the text was recited to them after the completion of the copy on plastered stone (8:35). 2

Objects as Expression of Condensed Meaning

Some of the objects discussed so far in this chapter have been less palpable than those analyzed in other chapters. Herodotus’ narrator does not make an older Aeginetan clothespin accessible to the audience so that the difference in length can be observed directly. Instead, he asserts somewhat vaguely that today’s clothespins have been longer than before, starting with the conflict around the wooden idols of Damia and Auxesia. In addition, the narrator does not make an ontological statement about the 345 wooden statues in Egypt with reference to the discourse-now. It is true that these statues are likely to be processed by a reader as part of the actual world due to the narrator’s claim of having visited this site, and this effect is certainly intended. Note, however, that the narrator is not active at all in this scene. All actions mentioned are performed by the priests. The narrator does not explicitly state his seeing the statues or counting them. In Genesis through Kings, the altar of the two-anda-half tribes and Joshua’s Torah monument, including the jar of sixth-day manna, are the only objects discussed in this study without a hint to their continuity into the discourse-now. Although this absence is in itself not highly conclusive, it deserves our attention, because the far more common case is an object with the narrator’s addition of the ‘until today’ formula or other words to this effect. The following group of relics from Herodotus’ Histories are mentioned without any textual clues that the objects exist independently of the narrative.22 22  Hartmann, Zwischen Relikt und Reliquie, 492–496, calls them ‘Textobjekte’.

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Since we cannot know whether they ever existed in the actual world, there is no reason to assume that they served to convince the ancient audience of the reality of an event they are made to refer to. Rather, these objects almost point to themselves and generate meaning without a palpable connection to the actual world. It is at least conspicuous that, in these cases, the objects appear with merely a very general and fuzzy location or none at all. This makes room for speculations that Herodotus does not have his narrator mention a precise location whenever he invented a material relic. What matters for the following objects is whether the image is well-chosen as a vehicle to transmit an insight, just as a work of art can encapsulate a meaningful and ‘true’ message even if it is not an authentic and realistic image. The formal elements of these relics point in this direction. They are all monuments that characters create in the story-world without the narrating voice stating that the objects exist or stand somewhere in the discourse-world.23 This absence of a linguistic marker of continuity into the present does not seem merely coincidental; for a dramatized and forthcoming narrator persona such as the one in Herodotus’ Histories, it is noteworthy, if not suspicious, that the monuments appear only within the narrative and not in narratorial statements in the discursive mode. To begin with an uncontroversial example of an object the physicality of which is not in focus: The statue of a rider on horseback with the inscription that Darius became king thanks to his horse and his stableman Oibares (3.88,3), humorously mocks the contingency and arbitrariness of how people get into the most powerful positions of political leadership. This effect is created by a very implausible inscription the narrator purports to cite verbatim: “Darius the son of Hystaspes gained the Persian kingdom through the prowess of his horse […] and that of his groom Oebares.” As a usurper of the throne and in line with ancient Near Eastern conventions, Darius can be expected to legitimate his reaching for power by pointing out that he was long destined by fate or providence to do so, or by referring to his merits for the Persian people or Ahuramazda.24 Instead, the inscription mentions his horse and stableman as the critical agents who brought him to power. The humorous reference to the kind of monument he puts up at the height of his power (δυνάμιός τε πάντα οἱ ἐπιμπλέατο) makes the account more colorful and entertaining, while at the same time, the narrator conveys a satirical Greek interpretation of Persian political practices. 23  Cf. appendix. 24  In fact, in the Bisutun inscription, Darius claims to be king by the favor of Ahuramazda (1.11–12 and more often throughout the whole inscription).

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What is more, together with the corresponding anecdote (3.87), the brief reference to the monument is at odds with the alternative version of Darius’ coup narrated at some length immediately before, which characterizes Darius as determined, bold, and a proponent of monarchy as the best form of government. Such a statue does not so much pay homage to Darius’ deceitful cunning and determination to become ruler of an empire as it makes fun of him, thus using the ‘genre’ of a monarch’s monument in a subversive way. Through the object, the narrator conveys a meaning of a different kind than factual information. A clue in this direction is the narrator’s silence about the place where the object can be seen—as if to say, ‘do not take this monument too seriously’. The situation is different with another relic related to Darius, since its inscription even displays the language of material proof. It is a stele the king is said to leave on his way during his campaign into Scythia. After crossing the Bosphorus and arriving in Thracia, Herodotus has Darius follow the river Tearus upward to its springs, where he has him put up a stele with a selfpromoting inscription to the effect of an “I was here” statement (4.91). By citing the inscribed text, which contains the explicit claim that Darius was at this remote place, the narrator indirectly offers it as proof for this event. Note, however, that the inscription is character discourse reported by the narrator without any commitment or judgment about it in his own name.25 The rhetoric of 4.91 wants the audience to take the stele and its inscription seriously, but it does not prescribe whether this is to be in a literal or figurative way. The audience can accept it as one of several pieces of a cumulative documentation of Darius’ campaign through Thrace and into the Scythian inland. Herodotus mentions various kings who leave tangible traces on their campaigns into foreign territories.26 However, for this purpose, the narrator could have simply mentioned that Darius erected a stele in that place, without giving the text of its inscription. Readers can alternatively take it as a piece of ‘antiquarian’ information about the traces Darius left on his way to Scythia—a kind of information 25  Τεάρου ποταμοῦ κεφαλαὶ … ἐπ’αὐτὰς ἀπίκετο ἐλαύνων ἐπὶ Σκύθας στρατὸν … Δαρεῖος—The springs of the river Tearus (…) to which came, leading an army against the Scythians, (…) Darius (…). Although the identification of the river Tearus is disputed, different suggestions locate its springs in the region around Pinarhisar in the northwestern corner of today’s Turkey. For a bibliography, see Dietram Müller, Topographischer Bildkommentar zu den Historien Herodots: Kleinasien und angrenzende Gebiete mit Südostthrakien und Zypern, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1997), 942–948, and Boteva, “Re-Reading Herodotus on the Persian Campaigns in Thrace,” in Rollinger, Truschnegg and Bichler, Herodot und das Persische Weltreich, 735–759, here 741 n. 32. 26  Cf. the stelae or other monumental traces purportedly left by Sesostris (2.106), Croesus (7.30,2), and Xerxes (7.44 and 183,2).

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that was probably not of much interest to the majority in Herodotus’ audience. Finally, the stele’s inscription invites the audience to compare Darius’ image of himself as the king of all the mainland with his current status in the narrative. Such a comparison may trigger critical thoughts about Darius’ character, who already seems to call lands his property that he has yet to conquer. It is as if Herodotus expects his audience to draw the connection with Solon’s advice to Croesus always to look to the end of things and not to extoll one self prematurely (1.32,9). Therefore, it seems more appropriate to explain this stele as manifestation and visualization of Herodotus’ understanding and judgment of Darius’ character, than as empirical evidence.27 With the statue of Darius on horseback and his stelae at the springs of the river Tearus, the Persian king leaves traces in the landscape of the story-world. These traces, however, are beyond verification. Writing for a Greek audience, Herodotus certainly enjoyed a good degree of freedom as long as he wrote about remote places. What is remarkable is that Herodotus feels free to create—or at least to adopt someone else’s creation of—material remains for the purpose of conveying meaning beyond the collection of ‘facts’ even for places that can more easily be accessed by Greeks than Thracia or a Scythian desert. If recent scholarly interpretations are correct, Themistocles’ inscriptions (γράμματα) hewn in the rocks at several watering places on the coast in the area of Artemisium are a case in point (8.22). Their content is Themistocles’ appeal to the Ionians in Xerxes’ army to reconsider their loyalty and support the cause of the Greeks. Together with other scholars, Wolfgang Blösel considers these inscriptions as a Herodotean invention.28 Blösel thoroughly discusses reasons that show that this is hardly authentic historical information and argues that Herodotus shaped Themistocles’ request to the Ionians as a reflection of the ideology of the Athenian naval alliance, which failed to reach its purpose, as did Themistocles’ inscription.29 However, my point here is not primarily to state that the inscription Herodotus cites is his invention, or that of his informants. After all, he also cites speeches verbatim as if they had been recorded so that it is possible to reproduce them even after decades. What is of interest here is the phenomenon that Herodotus’ narrator does not make a difference in category between spoken and written words, and that he chooses 27  My conclusion is confirmed by Asheri, “Herodotus on Thracian society and history,” in Reverdin and Grange, Hérodote et les peuples non Grecs, 131–69: 131 and 136. 28  Wolfgang Blösel, Themistokles, 179 n. 237 (with further bibliographical references) and p. 185; cf. also Bowie’s commentary Herodotus: Histories Book VIII, 113: “it is fairly plain that there were no such inscriptions”. 29  Blösel, Themistokles, 174–79 and 180–84.

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to create a monument30 to visually represent both Themistocles’ cunning and, underlying it, his own criticism of Athens’ suppression of other cities in the naval alliance. As already seen before with other monuments, the Herodotean narrator also uses physical remains to render manifest and visible immaterial entities such as character traits and the results of his reflections. Monuments used in this way make the narrative livelier, insofar as the narrator does not just make a point in the form of a metanarrative comment, which does not contribute to the narrative proper.31 In addition, they are rhetorically more effective than narratorial explanations when it comes to encapsulating a message in a vivid and condensed way like in an anecdote. As visual ‘props’, such monuments are a carefully chosen communicative strategy assisting the narrator in his presentation of his projections, insights, and results. It seems as if Herodotus followed a poetic rule according to which it was preferable to present some results of reflections and research, especially characterizations of protagonists, in the showing-mode rather than the telling-mode. Character traits cannot be shown as such; they have to be demonstrated through a person’s statements or actions. It is interesting that the three monuments just discussed are inscribed memorials created by the person that they come to characterize. These material relics contribute layers of meaning to the account in a way that is independent of their physical presence in the world the audience lives in. Their function is not documentation, but the condensation and visualization of meaning. Therefore, it is irrelevant to the narrative whether their existence can be verified. Rather than a protagonist, the following object characterizes an event in the past. We have already seen that the narrator adds elements mythifying the Persian Wars so that they receive a special grandeur, which makes narrating them more important and deserving. A monument that is part of the narrative about Darius’ campaign into Scythia creates a similar effect. Before Darius’ army enters Scythian territory, the soldiers pile up a gigantic heap of stones at the Thracian river Artescus,32 to which each of them contributes exactly one stone (4.92). If taken literally, this pile of stones might be understood 30  There is also the possibility of Herodotus adopting a popular legend about Themistocles. 31  See also Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54. 32  In this example, the absence of a precise location is concealed in a clever way: In the narrative, Darius designates a specific place (ἀποδέξας χωρίον) where each soldier is to leave his stone. Almost invariably, the reader assumes that the narrator is familiar with the spot. The location mentioned in the narrative is vague, despite two proper names. On the problems for locating the river Artescus, see Aldo Corcella, Erodoto: Le Storie IV, introduction

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as empirical proof of both the Persian army’s presence at this vaguely mentioned place and the large number of soldiers. A literary interpretation seems more appropriate, however. In my opinion, the readers are to grasp the might and greatness of this military exploit, but not to set out in order to look for the stone hills.33 The narrator describes these heaps of stones as ‘great hills’ (κολωνοὺς μεγάλους)—not heaps of stones, but hills. They can be read as an image for the vastness of Darius’ army and military power. The fact that this is not the only ‘collective’ monument comprising a large number of the same small elements in the Histories supports this interpretation as a literary image. The lack of a reference to a known geographical place specific enough to allow verification can be interpreted as a hint from the author that this element of the story belongs to the kind of information that cannot be disproved by argument (οὐκ ἔχει ἔλεγχον).34 Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that, the larger the central event of Herodotus’ Histories becomes, the more Herodotus’ literary representation gains in significance. It is a common topos in ancient historiography to claim that the topic of the narrative is an event without precedent. The claim Herodotus’ account makes of representing an event beyond every-day dimensions is cumulative, affected by a number of episodes.35 The story showing how Xerxes’ campaign against Greece was initiated by a god (7.18) and multiple reminders of the vastness of his army help to convey a feeling of pride and exaltation in a Greek audience: the more formidable the combatant, the greater the victory. The huge heap of stones piled up by Darius’ army fulfills a narrative function similar to that of an anecdote. The primary concern is and commentary by Aldo Corcella; critical text by Silvio M. Medaglia; Italian translation by Augusto Fraschetti (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1993), 306. 33  Cf. Hollmann, The Master of Signs, 200–01; Bichler sees a literary motif in the erection of a building or a monument that consists of many small parts: Reinhold Reinhold Bichler, Herodots Welt: Der Aufbau der Historie am Bild der fremden Länder und Völker, ihrer Zivilisation und ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Akad.-Verl, 2000), 103 n. 160 and p. 191. Cf. Hdt. 2.126 and 4.81. 34  Hdt. 2.23. 35  Among them is the assertion that the Thracians treat the road on which Xerxes marched his army to Greece as a zone taboo for agricultural use that they respect with awe (7.115,3; σέβονται). It elevates Xerxes’ campaign from ‘just another’ political event into supernatural realms. The claim also demonstrates the relevance of past events for the present by showing how they influence and condition the habits and customs of the present. Thus, as a by-product, it is a way to show that knowledge of history is helpful in explaining the present and a way to implicitly justify the usefulness of writing and reading a history. Formally, it does not fit together with the other examples in this passage, since it is referred to only in a commentary by the narrator and it has a marker of continuity into the present.

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not the question of whether all details of the condensed episode actually occurred; the criterion for validity is rather whether it captures the essence of a historical person or event. 3 Conclusion I have shown that tangible relics in narrative representations of a past can serve as literary devices to strengthen the persuasive force and meaning of the account even if they do not exist in both the story-world and the actual world. Thus, monuments can be understood figuratively as a narrative way to transmit a meaning apart from documentation. This narrative strategy enhances the audience’s access to the past, and thereby the relevance of the past for the present. Concrete objects visualize character traits and interpretations of law and history. Both Herodotus and the biblical writers use monuments as visual props that aid the presentation of their insights, which are enacted as episodes in the past. As a result, the accounts contain actions that could or should have happened next to those that happened as a matter of fact. This is paralleled in the fact that both invented and actual relics from the past fulfill the function of visuals or witnesses to a legal state of affairs. Since Herodotus’ representation is generally vivid, it seems natural that his narrator presents condensed insights through the specific medium of concrete physical remains. The question of possible influences on the writer to apply this strategy is beyond the scope of this study. Thus, I can only speculate at this point that this may be due to the mnemonic practice elaborated in ancient Greek literary and rhetorical tradition, as well as to the general increase in the number of public monuments in Greek cities in the fifth century BCE.36 Another likely source of inspiration is dramatic performances. In her monograph Objects as Actors, the classicist Melissa Mueller has elaborated on the semiotic role of objects in Greek tragedies and comedies. Herodotus’ audience, for instance, seems to have understood this literary use of objects, since in antiquity, various details in his Histories were criticized but he was never attacked for the poetic license he took in inventing Themistocles’ 36  The second aspect was presented at an international conference for PhD students in Darmstadt in 2015 by Janett Schröder in her talk “Die Anfänge der Kriegsdenkmäler im klassischen Griechenland.” She states that, broadly speaking, dedications of weapons belong to the archaic period, those of treasuries to the sixth and fifth centuries, and statues as a new kind of dedication in the fifth century. Cf. also Tonio Hölscher, “Images of War in Greece and Rome: Between Military Practice, Public Memory, and Cultural Symbolism,” JRS 93 (2003): 1–17: 15.

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graffiti. The lack of a precise location and meta-narrative commentary can in some places be read as a hint that a reference to a monument is not to be taken as a statement documenting its existence, but as a condensed image expressing an insight that interprets events of the past. Thus, even though Herodotus rhetorically invokes a documentary stance, his purpose sometimes seems to be providing an object for the benefit of condensed and visualized meaning than for reasons of documentation. The more often narratives about a past have ‘visual’ anchors in the actual world, the better it is for their persuasive force. As for the 345 wooden statues in Karnak, the audience infers their existence in the discourse-now only because the narrator tells us about his visit to the Egyptian temple where the priests showed him around. In this episode, however, the narrator never states that he saw the statues, i.e. he does not claim autopsy directly. If this observation is not too subtle, we can hypothesize that Herodotus indeed uses the textual function of the narrator as a rhetorical means of persuasion, namely to arrange and present material he has read or heard of and considers relevant in a way that makes the audience’s access and understanding of the material easier. This reading takes actions expressed by past-tense verb forms used for narratives as a literary realm in which statements can but need not refer to a past reality—which would help to explain why Herodotus’ narrator intrudes into his narration of past events so frequently to connect it with his present. This observation suggests that Herodotus was in principle alert to the question whether an object or event was part of his physical reality or not. The manifestation of insights and emotional states through objects, especially the clothespins symbolizing the Aeginetan’s hatred toward the Athenians and Joshua’s Torah monument on Mount Ebal, has another aspect not mentioned so far. Since objects do not change unless through external and often violent influence, they inadvertently reify the political or legal status they stand for, which then seems irreversible and lasting. As a result, the change or innovation attached to them appears more solid and less contingent.

Conclusions This study has explored how the way in which ancient literary texts represent events of the past affects the audience’s access to the past and the way in which they relate to it. The task of comparing two unrelated ancient narrative accounts of a past from different literary traditions poses several methodological challenges. While earlier research has often assessed the extent to which how ancient depictions of a past live up to a modern definition of history, or to one of the Greco-Roman model-historians, my approach has tread a new path. It does not prescribe a priori the criteria for truthfulness and relevance. Nonetheless, it applies the same questions and analysis to both textual corpora. The analysis of which windows and doors of access to the past the narratives open for their audiences and which not reveals several means of persuasion that characterize Herodotus’ Histories and Genesis to Kings in the Hebrew Bible. This focus on the narrative organization of the texts allows each source its own characteristics and even makes possible comparing implicit with explicit strategies of persuasion. As a methodological contribution to the comparison of narratives about a past from the ancient Greco-Roman and Israelite-Jewish or even Near-Eastern tradition, I have shown that a simple but effective premise for comparative studies of means of persuasion is a ban on any prescription of rules or distinct patterns for the narrative’s rhetorical exposition. It is productive to consider that whatever is made explicit in one literary tradition could be conventionally expressed implicitly in the other. For further study, the list of narrative structures analyzed here can be expanded by other textual elements such as the basis for and distribution of narratorial omniscience, the interplay between textual gaps and narratorial commentary, the extent to which protagonists are represented as paradigmatic types or unique personalities, or the role of overarching explanatory strategies in the creation of meaning. Choosing two elements of narrative structure for a detailed analysis has meant leaving aside other possibilities that also contribute to enhancing the audience’s access to a past. This restriction provides the benefit of in-depth analyses in a way that a comparison of Gen-Kings and Herodotus’ Histories has not been undertaken before. Previous comparative discussions of early ancient representations of the past in Greek and Jewish societies have often relied on a thin corpus of actual texts. This has led to conclusions relying more on a theoretical framework of assumptions than on the narratives themselves. The analysis has shown that both narratives of a past connect the present of the discourse between narrator and narratee with the worlds of the past

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_011

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in multiple ways, of which some Herodotus and the biblical narrative have in common, and others are specific to only one of the two sources. Hesitant to generalize, because of the large amount of texts in question and the possibility of finding counter-examples, I would nevertheless characterize Herodotus’ Histories as an account of a past that tends to connect the two worlds primarily by weaving in a second narrative strand in the discursive mode, whereas Gen– Kings links them by creating metaleptic moments. The narratological investigation of the effects of the design of the narrating voice on claims of the narrative as a whole has shown that this approach does more than providing scholars with helpful descriptive tools. The selection for comparison of the narrator as an essential textual function is owed not only to the literary character of ancient accounts of a past, but also to the constitutive role of narrative structures for the shaping of the audience’s concepts about the past. The two sources give for instance different answers to the question of whether the past exists and can be found, or whether it is made. Of the various means of persuasion analyzed in this study, the choice of the discursive and diegetic narrative modes or the pattern of their alternation probably predetermines to a considerable extent the set of means of persuasion that are potentially available to a writer. The narrative modes also affect the accessibility of the narratively represented past world to an audience. In Herodotus’ Histories, elements in the discursive mode time and again directly connect past events to the audience’s present. The narrator challenges listeners and readers to agree or disagree with his judgments or arguments, if only as a rhetorical means to prevent such an interference. Despite the strong ties between the past and the present in Herodotus, the past (together with the foreign and the unknown) is presented in a mediate way, as an object for curiosity and study. In the Histories, this can change from one logos to the next, but at times, for the reader, a past event is more of a discussed case than an experience in the ‘as if-mode’. The narrator is free to intrude into the narrative or not, sometimes sharing more of his thoughts and comments and sometimes withdrawing his mediating presence from the audience’s attention. In biblical narrative, by contrast, where the narrating consciousness must be as non-personal and absent as possible, constraints on an author writing about a past are stronger: there is not much room for metanarrative commentary and no possibility to dramatize the narrator persona as a competent, self-asserted, and experienced guide to the past. The biblical narrator’s reticence and his inaccessibility as a discourse partner leave hardly any room for direct interaction with the audience. Instead, the biblical narratives reward every reader venturing beyond their narrative surface with an invitation into the process of the formation of meaning.

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Choosing references to material relics from the past as the other component for comparison makes allowance for the presumably empirical character of the inquiry and reflection about a past. The reference to material relics is an important means for writers to relate their narrative about a past to the physical reality they share with their audience. After all, a certain past must have left some traces if it was, back then, a present-day reality. An important result of the analysis of the narrative function of material relics from the past is the variety of their persuasive functions: As empirical evidence, they authenticate the factuality of an occurrence; as visual props, they are a means of characterization and for the demonstration of invisible motivation; as identifiers, objects are mentioned to familiarize the narrated information for the audience by providing a visual anchor from their experience that they can latch on. In both accounts, many material relics exhibit characteristics of monuments, i.e. besides commemoration, they transmit norms and judgments. This broad range of functions for objects already indicates that persuasion in Herodotus’ Histories and Gen–Kings includes the claim of depicting a past reality, but also goes beyond it. On the one hand, I have shown that some strategies of persuasion rely on the interrelation of the actual narrative world of the past with the actual world in which the audience lives. On the other hand, there are various other possibilities for the narrativization of claims to truthfulness. It is interesting to observe that as far as relics from the past are concerned, the two sources do not always rely on a reality external to the text to support the literary representation. Extrapolating from my own reader response, the mere reference to a physical relic already is an effective means of persuasion: I did not suspend the belief in the narrator’s words until I had seen all the relics myself. The six analytic chapters are naturally limited to those strategies of persuasion that relate to the two selected aspects, i.e. the narrator as the key textual structure for mediacy, and material remains. This excludes vividness as an important means of persuasion both sources share. Because of its salience I would like to mention it briefly to forestall the impression that the differences between the biblical narratives of the Torah and Former Prophets and Herodotus’ Histories outweigh the similarities. Such an evaluation depends quite a bit on the specific textual features, and, as a corollary, the text portions selected for comparison. As for vividness, this narrative principle is manifested in several aspects, one of them is the tendency to enact a historical event rather than reporting it, i.e. the account is a narrative representation or a re-enactment. The audience is often presented more than the bare facts: Monologues and conversations are often given in direct speech, sometimes the reader is granted access to characters’ thoughts and emotions. Such a

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proximity to agents of the past makes the narrative persuasive because the audience learns about the past in the mode of experiences of other human beings. Experientiality is essential for any good story. In narratives about a past, it is an important ingredient because it shows how exactly people who inhabited the past world thought, felt, acted, and reacted. If an author successfully makes the past come alive through a realistic or verisimilar depiction, his or her account will appear authentic. In fact, I have shown that a reader to whom the narrator presents the past in the immediate diegetic narrative mode does not rely on material evidence in the same way as a reader who is only presented a brief summary-like report of an event. Monuments and other physical relics from the past are an important means for authentication and validation. They visibly connect the narrated world of the past with the actual world and are therefore an effective way for creating accessibility-relations between these worlds. Nevertheless, both sources do not set a priority in documenting the past with the help of objects. The writers are selective in that they do not take all available relics into account and do not give each of them the same weight. Most of the times they do not exploit the relics as sources to generate new knowledge. Especially in the Hebrew narratives, many relics are in fact not unique, so that the same kind or type of object, a large rock for instance, can be associated with multiple stories. Examples from Herodotus are uninscribed standard dedications, such as precious vessels, or bonds that had been used to make prisoners of war. The strength of the object as evidence therefore often rests on the connection the narrators establish between an event or a person of the past and the object, which they do not explain. Herodotus’ use of relics evades a clear-cut categorization. His interest is not documentarian as an end in itself; rather, he often pursues philosophical questions relating to the motivation of historical actors and to their room for maneuver in view of fate and circumstance. Nevertheless, the Histories as well as the Hebrew narrative manifest a sustained effort to provide connections with visible, concrete objects. Even if some of these connections may seem more natural to us, and others more contrived, the phenomenon itself signals an appreciation of tangible evidence. From a perspective of modern historians, however, such a reference to objects is not much of a proof; ultimately, its persuasive power is based on trust in the reliability of the narrating voice. In the comprehensive narratives of Israel’s past and the Persian Wars, material relics are rarely a basis for creating or finding new facts, but auxiliaries to establish the narrated events as a past reality and thus support the larger meaning each account creates.1 1  The opposite might have been true for an individual tradition, at least if it is etiological: here, the story makes sense of the relic.—Somewhat exceptional is Herodotus’ first book where in

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Next to objects, various other means can serve purposes of authentication. Material remains are important but do not seem to be privileged over other narrative means. Whereas physical remains from the past have been an obvious source of information for historians since the modern age, they did not have the same weight for epistemology in antiquity.2 On the sidelines, the chapters of Part 3 therefore offer opportunities for an implicit comparison between ancient and modern accounts of a past. The function of objects in the Histories and Gen–Kings includes authentication, but also symbolic uses or mere illustration. Closely related to material remains, mentioning specific and concrete details is another means of persuasion that is characteristic of both accounts studied. The narrators in both Herodotus’ Histories and the biblical narratives give measures such as volume, weight, or length, building materials, and geographical localizations up to the location of an object within a specific building. Besides evidence and authentication, the function of such detail is also to bring the events and agents of the past nearer to the audience. Concrete details help human imagination to form a clearer picture of the past in people’s minds; if we are given a few vivid coordinates, we will be more likely to supply missing information ourselves. We only really know how rich a king is when we know which luxury goods he can afford and how large and generous his presents are. The narrator’s ability to supply detailed information additionally creates the impression that he is knowledgeable and could provide more specifics if asked for. In other words, to intersperse a narrative with informational details is not necessarily an end in itself but likely a strategy to enhance the reliability of the narrative voice and thus of the account as a whole. An additional advantage of measured dimensions is the possibility for comparison and the creation of a ranking, be it diachronic or synchronic. Whether objects, agents, or their actions—whatever is concrete and empirically palpable enhances the accessibility of a narrative world. Vividness is also an important means of persuasion in both sources when an idea, for example an insight about history or its interpretation, is captured in an object serving as a visual aid. Solomon’s palace and temple showcase his international reputation, power, and wealth; the Alcmeonid temple of

the first half, dedications provide a structuring device for the narrative and the narrator even seems to have in interest in giving a complete overview on Croesus’ dedications in Greek temples. 2  E.g. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, 3/4 (1950), 285–315: 293–294, 307; T. J. Cornell, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian Revisited: Some Thoughts on Reading Momigliano’s Classical Foundations,” in Ancient History and the Antiquarian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Michael H. Crawford and C. R. Ligota. Warburg Institute Colloquia 2 (London 1995), 1–14.

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Apollo in Delphi has the same function for Alcmeon’s family. The hundreds of wooden statues of high priests in a temple in Karnak visualize the sheer endless succession of human generations to convince the audience of the long Egyptian past and by implication correct the Greek notion that the human era (ἀνθρωπηΐη γενεή) goes back only a few centuries. The ruins of the alleged temple of Baal manifest that it was possible for Israelite kings to go against idolatry or apostasy. As the discussion has shown, the narrative function of physical relics often combines two or more of the four areas of plausibility in historical thought that Jörn Rüsen has defined as empirical, explanatory, normative, and narrative plausibility. In the ancient narratives of a past discussed in this study, there is no clear compartmentalization into these categories, let alone a hierarchy. Areas that to us today may appear clearly separated and different realms are merged. To Gen–Kings and Herodotus, two important pre-Hellenistic narratives of a past from different traditions, this taxonomy seems alien. To be sure, for the scholarly discussion, there is a descriptive benefit in using these labels. Yet, this must not conceal the fact that the four fields frequently interrelate and merge. Producing narratives of one’s society’s past is one approach to make sense of and come to terms with one’s experiences in the present, especially with drastic changes. If ancient thinkers experienced their world as one and not as refracted, at a time when philosophy and theology were closer to one another than today, this finding is not too surprising. However, it emphasizes once more that history as a university discipline is different from what happens in the two accounts studied here. As a by-product of this study, as it were, one might consider that a diachronic comparison of strategies of persuasion should make it possible to assess to what extent living in this world and making sense of it at a given time reveals itself as fractured and compartmentalized, activating different kinds of rationalities, or as one blend in which the various ingredients are interconnected. One of my methodological decisions has been to strictly monitor if the narrative states or implies that a given relic exists also in the world of discourse, the actual world. I have defined the continuity of the object from the past to the present, i.e. from the storyworld to the discourse-world, as a necessary condition for empirical evidence. This approach has yielded an interesting equivocal observation. The majority of objects interpreted as means of authentication indeed come with an implicit or explicit claim to exist in both worlds. This is one way to convince an audience that the storyworld is as real as the world they know from their own experience. This notwithstanding, the presence of physical evidence is no requirement for the inclusion of a tradition in the work in both accounts. Thus, two phenomena exist side by side: There

Conclusions

265

are the narrators’ efforts to establish an object in both worlds—which is more noticeable in Herodotus than in the Hebrew narrative. It seems that in the biblical narrative there are fewer linguistic and narrative signs that differentiate text portions according to how literally the audience is to take the creation of a monument in the storyworld. Scholars could interpret this as a hint that the aspect of historical reality did not matter to the Hebrew writers as much as to Herodotus. On the other hand, we have seen that in the biblical account, historical reality matters throughout; the entire narrative is told in such a way that encourages the audience to identify as eyewitnesses of the past events and to take them as knowledge that bears on their reality in the discourse-now. These efforts contrast with the observation that it is possible for some objects existing only in the storyworld to serve the purpose of corroboration and authentication, in the same way as the remains explicitly claimed to exist in the actual world. The ruins of the temple of Baal in Samaria and Joshua’s copy of the Torah at Mount Ebal, for example, serve a similar narrative function. Both relics support an interpretation of history by demonstrating that a different course of events would have been possible if people in the past had acted differently. Unlike the latter, the former is invested with a claim to exist in the discourse-now. What is more, even objects that are openly stated to be absent or invisible in the discourse-world can serve as a means of validation. Are we to conclude from this that it was either of little import to the audience if the objects actually existed in reality, or that they completely trusted in the narrator’s reliability, or that the relics came into existence simply because they were part of a narrative? It is tempting to interpret this as a sign that the virtual encounter with a site or an object through the narrative would then be on a par with seeing a relic in the actual world. The attention given to the question of whether the existence of a monument or relic can be assumed for the discourse-now is strictly speaking irrelevant for a study of narrative exposition. In order to identify claims in a narrative, we do not have to check if they are justified or can be verified. Nevertheless, this aspect matters; after all, only what one is able to actually present to the jury counts as proof. We have seen that on the one hand, Herodotus is alive to the question of what is real and empirically verifiable and what not. His use of verbforms of εἶναι reflects this awareness as well as that of implied or stated autopsy and statements about things he has not seen. On the other hand, it is obvious that the narratives do not really adduce the proof; they only refer to it. This leaves room to argue that, in early ancient narrative history, this rhetorical stance alone is enough to categorize such a reference to material remains from the past as empirical evidence. Although in the sources studied here, the aspect of empirical factuality is definitely not neglected, it can be expanded if

266

Conclusions

it is beneficial to a higher order concern of the narrative, for instance if it helps to bear out the narrative’s particular historical truth. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps no coincidence that both narratives implicitly present themselves, their very words, as memorials of the past, preserving the memory of important events, people and their interaction. Since they claim to contain a vivid representation of all the relevant events, the two narratives become an expedient substitute for a monument—superior in scope and detail to a large stone, for example, whether inscribed or not. The narratives enhance their authority and relevance for the addressees’ present also by the reinforcement or even modification of their values and norms. The commemoration of the dead as role models or warning examples is a case in point as well as repeated reference to dedications to gods, or the narration of experiences of people in the past as an exemplum or even legal precedent. It is noteworthy that in biblical narrative, such stories frequently contain a physical object or landmark to prove, as it were, that the narrative is rightly taken to pertain also to ethical aspects of the audience’s actions and decisions in the actual world. In each of the sources, demonstrating the involvement of gods is a means to assert the narrative’s significance. By sporadically mentioning divine causation, usually at critical junctures of the plot, a special light shines on the narrated events as a whole. To the same effect, sometimes the narrators present an event as an analogy of another event in the mythical past. Oracles and prophecies foretelling later events, in turn, are more concerned with plotstructure than with individual episodes; they cumulatively make the claim that history follows divine ordinance, if not a divine plan. Specific to the biblical account of a past is the recurrent modelling of the relationship between Israel’s God and his people in terms of a legal relationship, with commitments on both sides. This is the basis for yet another claim to significance based on the fact that the narrative preserves God’s promises: it puts the audience in a position to remind YHWH of his pledges. Conversely, the narrative contains the terms of the covenant, which are presented, among other purposes, as a vindication of God in view of the defeat and destruction the Judaic kingdom suffered in the sixth century. Strategies of persuasion are directed to convince one or more specific audiences. This asks for tentative inferences about the original audiences of the comprehensive compositions. As has been shown, some claims to truth and authority in the biblical narratives fit well with concerns of professional scribes as part of a religious and administrative elite. It is not by coincidence that the narrative proper refers to written texts as a means of documentation and authentication. For the Persian period, I doubt that the original purpose

Conclusions

267

of Israel’s narrative history was providing and strengthening the identity of a large social group of Judeans or the Jewish people as such. Although it can be argued that with the help of the narrative from Genesis to Kings, Israel is reinvented, we should not assume that in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a large number of Jews were familiar with the encompassing narrative.3 Israel’s reinvention was not done by an anonymous spirit of the people; rather, some strategies of persuasion point to circles of society close to legal matters, royal or high-rank administration, and the production of written texts. The learned scribes see themselves in God’s service and to have taken over the task of the prophets. In Part 3, we have encountered the settling of disputes, documentation of treaties, punishment of transgressors, the idea that pledges are binding, and the use of physical media for a memory that is partly independent of living human beings and can be referred to as a testimony. Thus, the written scrolls of tora are claimed to replace the prophets; or at least, prophecy has to be tied to the Torah. The first ancient audience of the biblical narratives seem to be people who have taken over responsibilities that previously belonged to the king; those who are to be educated for their function in leadership positions, next to the learned scribes and their apprentices. Herodotus’ audience is somewhat harder to grasp on the basis of his strategies of persuasion, which tend to be more general. The Histories cater to at least two audiences, one of them more specialized and familiar with the notion of inquiry and current discourses of knowledge. Next to his colleagues, as it were, Herodotus also addresses an educated male audience familiar with the Greek literary tradition, notably the epic heritage. Returning to the shape of the narrating voices, the biblical narrators create the illusion of immediacy of the narrated events to both the narrating consciousness and the audience, which affords to the two the viewpoint of an eyewitness. Vividness and the illusion of immediacy imply that no mediating body intrudes between the past and the audience, with the effect that the account is no text but the past reality. The speech Ezer Weizman gave in 1996 in the German parliament illustrates this biblical narrative mode and its effect on an audience:

3  A few traditions such as those associated with Passover certainly were more widely known. However, on the basis of narratives referred to as rewritten bible by Jewish Hellenistic authors, it is possible to infer that Samuel and Kings for example were not yet part of Jewish social memory. Cf. Knauf, “Die Adressatenkreise von Josua,” 183 n. 1.

268

Conclusions

Only one hundred fifty generations have passed from the Pillar of Fire of the Exodus from Egypt to the pillars of smoke from the Holocaust. And I, a descendant of Abraham, born in Abraham’s country, have witnessed them all. I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah, I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David, was exiled from it with Zedekiah, and did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion, I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain.4 Weizman mentions central moments in the narrative of Israel’s history. With a view to narrative means making different narrative levels and worlds meet and interrelate, this study adds the testimony of the queen of Sheba about Solomon’s wisdom and wealth, second-temple Jews who turn into listeners to Moses’ speech in the wake of entering the land, Joshua’s twelve rocks at the Jordan and Aaron’s jar of manna, and the thought induced in the audience of holding in one’s hands the actual Song of Moses when studying the scroll. The biblical narrative at times is shaped in a way that it facilitates the audience’s immersion in the same history, or at least that this narrative of a past concerns them in their present.5 The configuration of mediacy in the Histories does not have the same effect of drawing the reader into the narrative as an existential experience. The Herodotean narrator by and large narrates from a fixed point in time that does not change throughout the account. The biblical narrative avoids evoking the impression that Israel’s past is told from retrospect. The narrator is not explicitly located at a specific, identifiable point in space and time, but generally seems to be coeval with the place and 4  “,‫ ואני‬.‫רק מאה וחמישים דורות עברו מעמוד האש של יציאת מצרים ועד עמודי העשן של השואה‬ ‫ וקיבלתי את‬,‫ הייתי עבד במצרים‬.‫ הייתי בכולם‬-‫שנולדתי מזרעו של אברהם ובארצו של אברהם‬ ‫ וגליתי‬,‫ נכנסתי לירושלים עם דוד‬,‫ ויחד עם יהושע ואליהו עברתי את נהר הירדן‬,‫התורה בהר סיני‬ ‫ ובשוב אדוני את שיבת ציון חלמתי בין בוני‬,‫ ולא שכחתי אותה על נהרות בבל‬,‫ממנה עם צדקיהו‬ ‫ לחמתי ברומאים וגורשתי מספרד‬.‫חומתה‬.” Ezer Weizmann gave his speech in Hebrew. It was published in the brochure “Ansprache des Präsidenten des Staates Israel vor den Mitgliedern des Deutschen Bundestages und des Bundesrates am 16. Januar 1996”, ed. by the department for public relations of the German parliament, 1996, 12–18; citation on p. 12. The English translation is published online by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mfa.gov.il) > MFA Archive > 1996 > President Weizman Speech to Bundestag. 5  Cf. Müllner, “Pessach,” who points out that the future readers and listeners of biblical narrative are involved in the narrated events, and the events are opened for future recipients as participants (p. 74) in a way that goes beyond the recipients’ address as readers. Müllner explains this with the existence of a concrete community who consider such a text as binding (p. 80).

Conclusions

269

time of the narrative episode at hand.6 In terms of its distance to the narrated events, the biblical narrating voice rarely marks the long time lapse between the past and its present. When it does express this temporal distance, it temporarily ceases to be simultaneous to the events. That fact notwithstanding, the narrator also assumes a God-like perspective, although rarely explicitly. Examples are comparisons of states of affairs in different regions or at different points in time and the normative criterion of whether an action of a human character is good in God’s eyes or not. There is thus an interesting tension between the restricted viewpoint of a human observer and the non-restricted viewpoint of God’s vision.7 Apart from God’s direct speech, only a few shorter text portions are explicitly claimed to be of divine origin—which as modern scholars we are used to interpret as an obvious claim to authority. Generalizations about Herodotus’ narrative techniques and those of the Jewish second-temple writers are a risky enterprise, given the polyphonic and variegated nature of both sources. Those in this study hopefully find sufficient balance in the detailed discussions of text portions. The textual features analyzed here provide a wealth of opportunities for thinking about the worldmaking powers of narrative that includes worlds of the past, and about the connections that tie these worlds to the present. 6  As pointed out before, this is different in 1–2 Kings, although the perspective of characters is naturally restricted to their own place and time throughout the biblical narrative. That is why anachronisms pointing to a different time stick out, such as the reference to towns of Samaria in 1 Kgs 13:32. 7  This is why Blum’s interpretation that the biblical narrating voice is always immanent in the narrative and takes no external standpoint does not convince.

Appendix 1

Selected Material Remains in the Biblical Account of a Past

A. Objects with explicit or implied continuity into the discourse-now Exact place given?

Gen 31:44–52 cairn witnessing to the agreement between Laban and Jacob Gen 35:20 Rachel’s grave

hills of Gilead

–

between Beth-El and the Benjaminite Bethlehem (Parah) Ammon Moab, opposite Beth-Peor (at the Jordan river not far from Jericho) (in the Achor valley in the region of Jericho) Ai outside the city of Ai close to Makkedah

–

+

– –

+

–

+

–

+

– – –

+ + +

Expli

cit

Location

Deut 3:11 the iron bedstead of King Og Deut 34:6 absence of Moses’s grave Josh 4:9 12 large stones Josh 7:26 Achan’s grave

Josh 8:28 Ruins of Ai Josh 8:29 grave of the King of Ai Josh 10:16, 27 large stones in front of the cave used as a tomb for five Amorite kings Josh 22:10 stone circles ‘Canaan’ Josh 22:29 altar in front of Jhwh’s sanctuary Josh 24:06 terebinth tree Shechem Josh 24:26–27 large rock Shechem

Judg 6:11 terebinth tree Judg 6:24 Gideon’s altar Judg 9:6 terebinth tree (cf. Josh 24:06)

Ofrah Ofrah Shechem

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004427976_012

Impli cit

Claim to continuity

Object/material relic

+

– + – in the sanctuary of YHWH + – + –

+

+ + + +

+ +

272

Appendix

(cont.)

Exact place given?

Claim to continuity

1 Sam 6:18 large stone in the field of Joshua of Bet Shemesh 1 Sam 14:2 pomegranate tree 1 Sam 19:22 large cistern 2 Sam 18:17 Absalom’s grave 2 Sam 18:18 Absalom’s memorial 2 Sam 20:8 large rock 1 Kgs 8:8 the poles for carrying the arc 1 Kgs 13:32 the altar in Beth-El and the houses of the high places in Samaria 2 Kgs 10:27 ruins of a temple of Baal

near Bet-Shemesh

–

+

Migron Secu woods of Efraim Jerusalem Gibeon Jerusalem Beth-El and Samaria

– – – + – + –

Samaria

–

Expli +

+

Impli cit

Location

cit

Object/material relic

+ + + + +

+

B. Objects existing only in the story-world, without continuity into the discourse-now Object/material relic

Location

Exod 16:32 a jarful of sixth-day manna

in front of the ‘witness’, i.e. in the sanctuary Josh 8:32 copy of Moses’ teaching (tora) on plastered stone Mount Ebal Josh 22:10–11, 26–28, 34 altar of the tribes of Reuben, Gad, unclear and half of Manasseh

C. Texts as objects Exod 17:14 a scroll with the promise to wipe out Amalek e.g. Exod 31:18, 34:28–29, 1 Kgs 8:9 the two stone tablets of the covenant (also: lost monument) Deut 31:19, 21, 22 Moses’ Song Deut 31:9, 24, 26 Torah Scroll 2 Kgs 22:8, 11; 23:2 Torah Scroll

273

Appendix

2

Selected Material Remains in Herodotus’ Histories

Abbreviations and symbols: + ~: rough/vague rel.: relative to another object M: material; W: weight; I: inscription

Delphi Delphi Delphi

rel. + +

Delphi

With

Expli cit

1.66 bonds of the Spartans 1.69,4 statue of Apollo

Narr. comm .

1.14 Gygades 1.50,3 lion of gold 1.51,1–3 two huge mixing bowls, one gold, one silver 1.51,3 four silver storage jars 1.51,3 two aspergilla, one gold, one silver 1.52 shield and spear (massive gold)

Claim to Autopsy or Description continuity suggestion of autopsy

Impli cit

Location

Exact place given ?

Object/material relic

in na rrativ e

A. Objects with explicit or implied continuity into the discourse-now

+

implicit implicit –

M, W M, W M, W artisan

+ + +

+ + +

+

+

–

M

+

+

Delphi

–

+

–

M, I

+

+

Thebes, temple of Ismenian Apollo Tegea, eastern Arcadia Thornax, Laconia, North of Sparta Phocaea, Ionia

+~

+

–

+ ~, M

+

+

+

+

–

–

–

+

+~

+

–

–

+

+

implicit

+~

+

+

1.163 city walls of Phocaea 3.59,2 temples built Kydonia by Samians (Crete) 4.124 ruins of eight Scythia uncompleted forts in the desert

+ +

o

+

–

+

–

–

+

(+)

–

+

implicit

–

+

+

274

Appendix

4.152,3–4 bronze mixing bowl (tithe of Colaeus of Samus) 5.62.2–3 Alcmeonid temple of Apollo 5.63,4 tomb of Spartan commander Anchimolios 5.77,3 bonds/chains of prisoners of war from Boeotia and Chalcidice 5.77,4 bronze quadriga 5.88,3 womens’ clothes-pins 6.14,3 war memorial 7.115,3 the road taken by Xerxes’ army in Thracia 7.228 epitaphs for the fallen warriors and the divinor Megistias 8.27,4–5 statues dedicated by the Phocians 8.39,2 rocks in the precinct of Athena 8.121 Phoenician trireme

Samos, Heraion

–

Delphi

–

Athens

cit Expli

place give Exact + Demos of Alopecae (near Athens) Athens +

Claim to Autopsy or Description continuity suggestion of autopsy

With in na rrativ e

Location

n?

Object/material relic

+

+ +

+

+

+

Narr. comm .

(cont.)

–

+

+

(+)

–

M (front)

+

+

–

–

–

+

–

–

+

+

–

M, I

+

+

Aigina, Argos –

+

–

–

+

+

Samos Thrakien

+ +

– –

– –

– –

+ +

+ –

Thermopylae –

+

–

I

–

+

Delphi

+

+

–

+~

+

+

Delphi

+

+

–

–

+

+

Istmos (panhell.)

–

+

–

–

+

+

275

Appendix

8.121 statue of a Delphi man (12 cubits) 8.122 three golden Delphi stars on a bronze mast 9.81 serpent-column Delphi and tripod (see also 8.82)

cit

With in na rrativ e

Claim to Autopsy or Description continuity suggestion of autopsy

Expli

place give

n?

Location

Exact

Object/material relic

Narr. comm .

(cont.)

rel.

+

–

+ ~ (height) +

+

rel.

+

implicit

+ ~, M

+

+

ja

+

–

+, M

+

+

B. Objects existing only in the story-world, without continuity into the discourse-now Autopsy or suggestion of autopsy

–

+

M

+

+

–

–

+ ~, I

+

–

+

–

–

+

–

–? no access

–

+~

+

–

+

implicit

+, I

+

–

Narr. co

mm.

arrati the n

With in

Detai 2.143 345 large wooden statues Thebes (Egypt) 3.88 Darius on horseback in – stone 3.59,3 boars on Samian ship Aegina prows Bosporus 4.87 two stelae of stone with inscription in Greek and ‘Assyrian’ letters 4.88 bridging the Bosphoros Samos (image with inscription)

ve

tion

Exact place?

escrip

Location

led d

Object/material relic

276

Appendix

(cont.)

4.91 Darius’ stele

Thracia, at the springs of river Tearus 4.92 stone cairn created by Thracia, Darius’ army Arteskos river 5.82–83 wooden idols of Damia Oia, 20 and Auxesia stadiums from Aegina 7.117 tumulus of Artachaies Akanthus 7.178 altar for the winds

Thyia (exact location unclear) Artemisium Tegea

8.22 Themistocles’ graffiti 9.70,3 bronze horse manger from Mardonios’ tent 9.81 a statue of Zeus (10 cubits) Olympia

Isthmos 9.81 a statue of Poseidon (7 cubits) 9.121 ‘cables’ from the pontoon – bridges at the Hellespont

narra tive

Narr. comm .

Autopsy or suggestion of autopsy

With in the

Exact place?

d des cripti on

Location

Detai le

Object/material relic

+ (illusion) –

I

+

–

–

–

–

+

–

–

–

M

+

–

–

–

–

+

–

–

–

–

+

–

o +~

– implicit

– M

+ +

+ –

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

+ + ~, (height, M) M, + height – +

– –

277

Appendix

Explicit Implicit 4.81,3 mixing bowl ascribed to Pausanias 4.162,3 Euelthon’s censer 7.30 stela at the border between Phrygia and Lydia 7.170,4 statues dedicated by Micythus 7.225,2 stone lion

Autopsy or suggestion of autopsy

Narr. comm .

Exact Claim to place? continuity

narr.

Location

With in

Object/material relic

Descr iption

C. Objects with an identifying function

Bosphoros

–

+

–

–

–

+

Delphi

+

+

implicit

–

–

+

Kydrara (Lydien)

–

+

–

I

–

+

Olympia

–

+

–

–

+

–

–

M

–

+

Thermopylae + ~

+

Bibliography 1

Edited Sources and Translations

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Index of Ancient Sources Hebrew Bible Gen 2–3 Gen 12:7 Gen 13:7 Gen 17:17 Gen 31:44–52 Gen 31:48 Gen 35:20 Gen 36:31

82 221 96 82 195 116 116, 223 97

Exod 16:32 Exod 16:32–33 Exod 17:8–13 Exod 17:15 Exod 17:16 Exod 24:12 Exod 31:18

131 130 198 199 200 177 177

Num 22:21–31 Num 27:1

82 77

Deut 3:8 Deut 3:11 Deut 5:28 Deut 7:22 Deut 9:15–21 Deut 9:22 Deut 17:18–19 Deut 25:19 Deut 31:12–13 Deut 31:19 Deut 31, 21–22 Deut 31:24–26 Deut 32:23 Deut 32:26–27 Deut 32:46 Deut 32:47 Deut 34:6 Deut 34:10-12

97 154, 158 92 109 (und einmal vorher) 92 93 204 200 203 207 207 202 205 205–6 203 202 224–5 226

Josh 3:5, 7 Josh 3:9–13 Josh 3:15 Josh 4:4–9 Josh 4:8 Josh 4:20–24 Josh 7:21

216 217 217 218 212–3 218 236

Josh 8:28 Josh 8:29 Josh 8:32 Josh 8:33, 35 Josh 10:16, 27 Josh 21:43–45 Josh 22:10 Josh 22:20 Josh 22:24–29 Josh 24 Josh 24:26

238 233 248 251 233–4 108 164, 246 236 247 193–5 116, 164

Judg 1:19 Judg 1:23 Judg 2:20–21 Judg 2:22–23 Judg 3:1–2 Judg 3:4 Judg 6:13 Judg 6:24 Judg 9:6 Judg 11:16–22 Judg 13:2–24 Judg 19:30

108–9 95 109 109 109 109 82 116, 146, 170 164 92 82 98–9

1 Sam 6:18 1 Sam 9:9 2 Sam 1:6–10 2 Sam 11:7–13 2 Sam 18:17–18

149 95 82 90 223–4

1 Kgs 5:5 1 Kgs 7:47 1 Kgs 9:11–10:22 1 Kgs 10:6–8 1 Kgs 10:13 1 Kgs 10:24–25 1 Kgs 13 1 Kgs 13:18 1 Kgs 22 2 Kgs 6:8–12 2 Kgs 10:27 2 Kgs 18:16 2 Kgs 22

28 158 52 129 42 52 47 47 91 10 235, 238 96 203–4

Jer 3:16

178

296

Index of Ancient Sources

Herodotus’ Histories 84–5, 230 1.0 1.14 113 113 1.14,1–3 1.22,2 64 1.51 103–5, 111, 151 1.51,5 152 106–7 1.56–58 1.66 152–3, 232 1.69,3–4 148 1.71,3 28 1.92,1 175 1.92,2 79 1.95 81 1.116–117 81 1.163 113, 156 2.22 2.23 2.23–24 2.44 2.45 2.18,1 2.91 2.106,1 2.123,1 2.142 2.143

118 128 63 79 192 80 79 67, 175 65 245 113, 146, 244

3.32 3.57,2 3.59,2 3.62,4 3.88,3

110 157, 159 113 81 252

4.81,3 165 4.87 173–4 230 4.88 4.88,2 198 4.91 253 255–6 4.92 4.124 67 156 4.152,2–5 4.152,4 145, 156 65 4.195,2

5.9 5.62,2–3 5.63 5.77,3 5.78 5.82–89,1 5.87,2 5.88,3 5.89,3 5.92 η 2

80 242 226–7 153, 158, 182, 232 233 189–90 243 243 113, 171 117

6.14,3 6.82,1 6.117,2–3 6.125

227 64 80 42

7.10a 7.18 7.24 7.30,2 7.117 7.152,3 7.178 7.224,1 7.225,2 7.228

81 256 229 165 227 65, 192 171 77 163 145, 198

8.22 198, 254 8.27 186 8.35–37 211 8.36,1 216 8.37,2 217–8 113, 211, 218 8.39,2 126 8.65 8.77 65 8.121 184 8.121,1 146 214 8.122 9.48,2 9.70,3 9.81 9.85,3

118 114–5 184–5 119

Subject Index Abbreviations: Hdt. = Herodotus; HB = Hebrew Bible accessibility 47, 144, 147, 172, 184 and enacting/showing 204, 237 and mediation 60, 70, 75 and narrative modes 85, 107, 260 and speech representation 129 accessibility relations 40, 41, 44, 51, 169, 191, 215, 249 accountability of writers: see responsibility Achaemenid royal administration 205, 208 altars 169–72, 221 ancient narrative histories 31–32 ancient Near East 73, 88, 176, 179, 194 ancient Near Eastern histories 12 ancient Near Eastern literature 17, 24 argumentative reasoning 49, 80, 93, 111, 132, 184 from the visible to the invisible 157 audience connection of a. and the story-world 191 construe and complete the story-world  120 effect of narratives about a past on the  3–4 as eyewitnesses/spectators of the past  87, 132, 244, 265, 267 forming a mental picture 163 general 85, 101 implied 91, 168 involvement of 90, 105, 107–8, 111, 130, 150 as participants in the creation of meaning 69–70, 90, 260 practical relevance for 201, 203, 208, 214, 237, 265 present and future of 208, 237 processing of truth claims 184–5 trust in narrator 151, 209, 262 two or more implied audiences in Hdt. and HB 128, 164, 266–7 authentication 78, 149, 151–4, 158, 184, 226 authorial literature 20 authoritative literature 61 authoritative narration (Dolezel) 47

authority of distant past 195 of narrative 86, 177, 179 author vs. narrator 54 autopsy 66–67, 78, 150, 258 audience’s a. 171 biblical narrative ambiguity 90–91 gaps 90 phrase “at that time” 96–97 camera-eye narration 68–69 canon, of scripture 23 changes with time 95–96, 99 characterization of time span in retrospect  98–99 character narrators 92 characters as advisors 131 character speech 46, 96, 116, 253 addressing extradiegetic audience  129–31, 219 claims of ancient narrative histories 32 coherence 19–20 comparative approach 4–5 comparative studies: of Hdt. and HB 28 competition, spirit of in Greek public life 9, 16, 63, 84 conflicting traditions 79 connection of present and past 101, 130 consciousness of experiencer within the text 191 of narrating voice within the text 19, 60, 68, 70, 87, 115, 225 constraints 11, 19 continuity formula ‘up to my time’ or ‘to this day’  112, 159, 229–30 Hdt. 112, 141, 145 Gen–Kgs 115–6, 131, 146, 150, 170, 224 of landscape 150 language signaling continuity 112–3, 116 of objects 144, 145, 147, 169, 183, 196, 227, 230, 264

298 controversial knowledge 79 conventions, literary 19 correspondence between words and real state of affairs 118, 119 counterfactual course of history, idea of  236 covert mediation 68 critical distance from tradition 24 cultural loss 195 cultural memory 73, 128, 144, 184, 190, 209, 226 cultural transmission 195, 219–20, 231 description 89, 145, 166–7 didactic aids 167 disappearance of the past with time, idea of  100–101 discourse-now 61, 94–95, 100–101, 145, 182–3, 192 discourse-world 53, 143–5, 189, 217 distance cognitive 85, 105, 110 critical d. to one’s world 38 to narrated past 111 narrator’s distancing from sources  120–1, 128 temporal d. between story-now and discourse-now 95, 97, 100 divine involvement in events 211–4, 266 divine origin of biblical narrative 22–23, 88 divine sign 126–8 documentarian interests: minor role of 162, 166–7, 262 doubt 82 dramatized narrator Hdt. 60, 252 Moses as (HB) 92 effacement of narrating persona (HB)  61, 92 Egypt’s long past 245–6 ekphrasis 167 elements of narrative structure: fundamental 51 elevation of human being as hero 229 enactment of social norm 237 of the past in narrative 105, 132, 261

SUBJECT INDEX Enneateuch 71, 93 epideictic orators 62 epigraphic texts, assumption of authenticity of 180–1 epistemic shift, early modern 38 epistemology 7, 45, 60, 82, 85, 141, 167, 263 Herodotus’ e. 167 etiological narrative 143, 190, 238 evidence 41, 66–67, 80, 91 density of information reduces need for  187 empirical, without additional functions  153 and objects 130, 183, 197, 209, 261–2 exemplum 235, 240 existential statement 145 experience: authenticating function of 187 experientiality 186–7, 191, 262, 268 explicit persuasion 48 factuality 44, 128, 186, 188, 192, 265 outdone by normative meaning 236 factual narratives 48, 55, 166, 188 factual prose 31, 188 factual veracity 32, 33, 49 fiction 48, 55 final redaction 15 foreshadowing 97, 126 forgetting 6, 231, 241 historical reality 33, 74, 228, 265 see also reality, historical historical sources 41 historical thought: general 110, 147 ancient 4 as universal phenomenon 34, 39 historical truth 32, 33, 37 definition of 40 historization of 33 immediacy absence of i., see also retrospect 97 illusion of i. of the past to the audience  87, 94, 99–100, 267 implicit persuasion 48, 87, 179, 183 informant speech 123, 125, 128 innovation within literary tradition: possibility of 17, 24

SUBJECT INDEX inquiry 78 intentional history 3 intentionality 15 interaction between narrator and narratee: see audience, involvement of intercultural difference in Hdt. 36 interpretation of the past vs. its reconstruction 239, 249–50 interpretive community 32, 33, 51 invented tradition 248 John Hyrcanus 150 learned discourse 26, 83, 85 literary devices 7, 22 literati 12 materiality of the past 143, 147, 154, 196, 220 measuring/quantifying the 155–6 material remains 66, 131, 139 associated with foundational times 222 connections of m. with event 151 elevating greatness of an event 211–2 as evidence 143, 158 absence of technical term 167 definition of 143 location of 147, 166 as monument 195, 240 as monument for divine intervention 211 negation of m. with regard to Moses  226 transience of 181–2 as witnesses 139, 178, 193–5, 209 means of persuasion 40, 44, 46, 47, 48 Aristotle 45 definition 41 detail 147, 184, 263 explicit and implicit 48–50, 259 explicit in HB 129 familiarity 147 for new facts rather than old ones 238 precision 147 mediacy 59, 60, 134, 260, 268 in HB 101 mediating instance 59, 60, 85, 151 mediation 70, 75 covert 68, 87

299 modes of 86 oblique 68 overt 67, 88, 94 memorial 139, 194, 218, 224, 246–7 memory 6, 200, 220 evanescence of 200, 220 metacognitive awareness of writers see reflexive awareness metahistorical interpretation 23, 74, 249–50 metalepsis 209–10, 219–20, 260 implicit 130–1, 203 ontological 240 metaleptic crossover of characters 99 metanarrative perspective 49, 85, 102 meta-representation (cognitive science)  133 method, Herodotus’ 81, 83, 133 monuments description of m. (Hdt.) 112–13 Herodotus’ use of 161 lost or hidden 173–4 mythical narration 212 multiple views or accounts in Hdt. and Gen–Kgs 109–11 multiple voices in literary texts 20 in Hebrew Bible 22 in Herodotus’ Histories 110 narrative representation 56 narratives about past events characteristics of 43 as construction/an artifact 132, 134 as monument/memorial 163, 220–1, 229–30, 241, 266 narrative time 178 narrative worlds 41 narrativization 187, 191–2, 261 narrator attributes of authority 65–68, 83, 89 credibility 63–64 reliability 68, 70 n.’s conception of time (Hdt.) 245 constituting the text-world 46, 59 contemporaneous with the story-world  99, 267 effacement of (HB) 87, 88, 100 in Gen–Kings 61

300

SUBJECT INDEX

narrator (cont.) introspection into n.’s mind 78–80 judgments of 83, 162 as narrative device 55 noncommittal stance 123 perspective of 91 reasoning of n. 91 roles of as commentator/evaluator 59, 89, 102, 110, 132 guide to the reader 89 mediator/presenter 59 narrative character 59 organizer of the text 75–77 presenter of the text 75, 77 researcher 78, 79 self-consciousness as narrator 75, 86, 89 self-display and self effacement 61, 66 teller-mode 70 narratorial discourse 46–47, 55, 133 claiming existence of objects 144 metanarrative comments in 50, 110, 116, 158–9, 217, 260 mixed, in Hdt. 104, 106 modes of 101, 132, 260 diegetic mode 102, 105, 108, 110–11, 192 discursive mode 101–2, 107–8, 111, 260 effect on thought 110 HB 105 Hdt. 105, 119, 252 immediate diegetic mode 102, 262 normative 149, 237, 266 reference to sources within 120, 134 showing vs. telling 48, 255 signposting 75, 77 narratorial intrusions general 101–2, 107–8 Hdt. 110, 119, 132, 134, 159, 192 HB 116, 146 narrator vs. author 54 neutral narrative 68

attribution of o. to agents or events 147, 151, 158 as characterization 255 commemorative o. 224 as condensation of meaning 255 confirming received knowledge 154 connectors of past and present 111, 112, 114–6, 139, 221 dedications 115, 184–6, 188, 214–5 uninscribed 152 as evidence 130–1, 143, 148, 165 see also material remains existence of o. in the discourse-now 118 as expressions of states of mind 242–3 familiarizing and indentifying function  162–5, 167, 261 functions authentication 261–2 basic characteristics 147–8, 166 HB 154, 194, 238 Hdt. 152–3, 167, 190 memory anchors 243 source of information 155, 157 visualization 156, 246 visualization of abstract concept  244–6, 255 witness 193–4 importance relative to the event attached to it 159–62 and legends 190 narrative attention given to 178 reality of 173, 181, 222 status in the discourse-now 189–90 temporariness of 181–2 uniqueness of 152, 236 oblique mediation 68 omniscience 11 oracle 65, 126, 171, 197, 201, 211, 221, 266 oral tradition 25 orality of Greek culture 197 overt mediation 67–68 overt narrator 24

objectivity 86–87 objects absent in discourse-world 173–6, 178 agency of 190

performative narrative 43 performative texts 88 Persian Empire 27 Persian period 203, 247

SUBJECT INDEX in the literary history of the HB 27, 97, 266 Persian Wars (of Greeks) 27 perspectival bias: of commemorative objects 233 persuasion in ancient Greek philosophy 45 plausibility areas of p. in historical thought 34–37, 39, 44, 264 no clear demarcation of these areas  264 empirical 35 explanatory 35 narrative 37 normative 35, 36, 38 poetics of narrative histories 32 point of access to the past 153, 166, 243 polyphonic nature of biblical narrative 22 possible world(s) 41, 65 Possible Worlds Theory 40, 44, 46, 63, 230 Preface 84, 88 pre-modern accounts of a past 36, 37 primary narrator 5, 11, 46, 86, 92–93 principle narrating voice 5, 11, 46 promise, God’s 200–202, 221, 266 prophecy 267 prospective imperfect 182 rational arguments 66 reader response 44, 49, 59, 111, 174, 218, 261 address for 16 means to influence r. 51–52, 76, 165, 227–8, 237, 260 to traditional narrative 21–22 realistic representation 32, 43–44 realism 59, 163, 188–9, 192 reality creation of r. through narratives 88, 209, 230, 265, 269 different degrees of reality within a narrative 193 sth. which is the case 118, 143, 265 reality, historical 33, 261–2 reality narratives 43, 166, 196 reasons 83 reception: general 101, 111, 132, 186 of ancient literature 25–26, 54 aural 107

301 of discursive discourse 105 of narratives about a past 44, 79 visual 107 reflexive awareness of writers 11, 38 relation between story world and actual world 40–42, 44, 49, 59 see also accessibility relations relevance of the past in the present 30, 100, 108, 150, 201, 214, 257, 265–6 reliability judgment on r. by the Herodotean narrator 88, 123–4, 189, 192 means to enhance 79, 89, 127, 154, 185 of tradition 120 remembrance 241 representation: literary 72–73, 87 responsibility of writers 15–16 restrictedness, the narrator’s admission of his own r. 64 retrospect 98–99 rhetoric 10 rhetorical devices 7 rhetorical means 7, 49 Samaria (Persian Province) 150, 203, 208, 240, 247 sanctuaries and divine messages 171 scenic narration 89, 101, 123, 132 scribes, scholarly audience of Jewish scripture in Persian times 26, 240, 266–7 as conscious writers 10 and Moses 226 perspective/viewpoint 95–97, 201–2 and revelation 177 and written transmission 72–73 Second Temple Judaism 22, 208 Second Temple period 72, 247, 269 social memory 185 Song of Moses 205–7 sophist orators 62 source criticism 133–4 sources, historical 41 speech, representation of 120–8 direct speech 122 indirect speech 120–2, 128 as noncommittal stance 123 in Gen–Kgs 124

302 speech, representation of (cont.) linguistic taxonomy for 120 strategies of persuasion: narrative 44, 47–50 implicit 86 strategy of persuasion: see also means of aggrandizing the event 127, 211–2, 214, 256 authentication through eye-witness 127 empirical 187 enhancing significance, meaning, and authority 213–5, 220, 222, 256 God or prophets as speaker of key statements 99 proper names 127, 166 reading an event against a ‘mythical’ event 213, 229, 266 sources presented as narrator’s own inquiry 135 story-now 95, 100 storytelling 26 story-world 40, 41, 60, 94, 107 connection of story world and actual world 40, 41, 59, 159, 268 interplay between st. and discourse-world 193, 268 overlap of norms of st. and discourseworld 213, 215, 249 supernatural event 217, see also divine involvement supernatural origin of biblical narrative  22–23 (see also divine origin) supernatural sign: see divine sign techniques of inquiry 83 teleology: in models of literary histories  25, 111 teller-mode 70, 75, 89, 94, 107 temporal baseline of narrative 100 temporal deixis 95 temporal distance to the past: see distance tense imperfect 181–3 narrative ts 119, 145–6 present or perfect 145

SUBJECT INDEX texts-as-objects in HB 196–208 documenting function of 196, 207, 209 influencing the course of history 202–4 witnessing function of 196–7, 202–3, 208 texts as physical reminder 199–200, 204 text-world 169 identity of t. with actual world 145 theodicy 250 thick description 185 time of the telling: see discourse-now Torah as monument 226 Torah monument 248–9 traditional narrative 21, 23, 72, 87 tradition literature 10, 18, 20, 111 truth 45, 53, 80, 83–84, 111, 117, 120 truth claims in Hdt. 65, 83, 124 in historical narrative 44 in literature 22, 40, 48–49 truthful account 34 typological story 235 unified narrative perspective 20 unitarian reading of Herodotus 20 validity 59 validity criteria 32, 33, 34, 44, 257 variants of a certain tradition 88 verification 51, 66 viewing mode 88–90, 94 visualization 163, 165, 235, 255, 258, 261, 263 vividness and accessibility 191, 261 as authentication 184–5 in Hdt. 156, 163, 244, 246 and objects 255, 263 witnesses 91 characters as 129–30 objects as 148, 165, 178 written document as memory anchor 198–9, 205, 207–8 as proof/certificate 204–7 Yehud (Persian province) 27, 95, 150, 203–4, 208, 220, 240, 247