Imagined Pasts: Knowledge Transmission and Ideologies of Language in Early Jewish and Related Literature

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Zahn, Molly

Abstract

What can we learn from studying the ways communal pasts are imagined? The way ancient texts envision primeval history and present the origins of culture can tell us a lot about contemporary concerns and stakes for the composers of those texts. Taking this observation as its starting point, this dissertation focuses on the intersections between literary and historical representations of the origins of culture and knowledge, language ideology, historiography, and communal identity in Jewish and non-Jewish texts from the Hellenistic world of the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia and touches on the transformation and afterlives of those texts and traditions in later Jewish, Christian, and early Muslim milieus in late antiquity. I argue that while there may have been a perennial interest in origin stories and primeval history prior to the third century BCE, the sociopolitical changes that were brought about after the rise of regional Hellenistic kingdoms in the Near East created a particularly ripe environment for local non-Greek communities to turn to their earliest histories and theorize the transmission of ancestral knowledge in the past as a way to come to terms with their present. I trace the emergence and development of two distinct discourses over five chapters. The first relates to the origins and transmission of knowledge and the second relates to language ideologies and communal identity, which came about as a result of growing multilingualism, language contact, and increased interactions between local populations, global trends, and imperial presence. Each chapter consists of close readings of various texts and traditions primarily composed in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. I discuss the different rhetorical strategies those texts and their communities employ while engaging with the two discourses including drawing on metaphors of expansive and imagined libraries, creating origin stories connected to certain spaces or cultural heroes, and locating the safeguarding of ancestral knowledge in written form that persists despite multiple ruptures. The last two chapters turn to the second century BCE Book of Jubilees, which I argue is the first extant text to explicitly combine the two discourses in its narrative in a way that had not previously been attested by elevating Hebrew language as the only means of proper knowledge transmission. The final chapter then turns to the Nachleben of the discourses in later antiquity in Syriac and Arabic traditions.

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