Jewish Novels
Jewish Novels are entertaining narratives from the Greco-Roman period about both biblical figures and new Jewish characters.
- This page is edited by Meredith J.C. Warren, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
Overview
Jewish novels are short works of prose that share many generic similarities with the Greek and Latin Hellenistic romances. The novel is a narrative fiction, read popularly, which deals with a series of events over a period of time. The key theme of the novel in this period is the preservation of chastity and virtue.
Beyond Jewish texts which fit this definition completely, Lawrence Wills also identifies Jewish texts that share affinities with the historical (rather than romantic) novels, and Jewish texts that include novelistic elements but do not necessarily share enough in common with the novel to be categorized as such. Below is his division of texts from the table of contents in his Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology:
Jewish Novels
Jewish Historical Novels
- Artapanus, On Moses
- Third Maccabees
- The Tobiad Romance
- The Royal Family of Adiabene
Jewish Novelistic Testaments
Main Themes
The novels follow a more or less linear event scenario, with a beginning, middle, and end to a story. The tales of the Jewish novels are entertaining—they evoke a range of emotions in the reader, from amusement to horror. Like the Hellenistic romances, the plots of the Jewish novels involve travel, an emphasis on chastity and piety, escape from danger, legal trials, and prominent female protagonists. Whereas in the Hellenistic novels the female protagonist is part of a male-female romantic couple, in the Jewish novels the heroine often acts alone, without a male partner.
Chastity and piety are of major importance to the plots of both the Jewish novels and their Greek and Roman counterparts. A significant difference between Jewish and other approaches to novelistic piety is that the end goal is not the romantic fulfillment of love between the protagonists, ending in marriage or the reunification of a married couple. Instead, the protagonist is a Jewish female whose piety and devotion to God (and/or family) propel the plot and influence her decisions (Wills, Anthology, 14).
In labeling the Jewish novels “fictional” it is not necessary to take from this that the texts represent inaccurate or wrong depictions of events, merely that they participate in the creation of a narrative world in which events occur in a different way than they do in our own world. G. W. Bowersock’s important discussion of the blurred lines between history and fiction in the ancient world illustrates this point (Fiction as History: From Nero to Julian). Certain of the Jewish novels present us with impossible scenarios: Wills notes, for instance, the fact that Esther is a Persian queen, or that Joseph in Joseph and Aseneth serves as the Pharaoh of Egypt for a time (Wills, Anthology, 9). Other texts, such as Third Maccabees, purports to be history despite its “fanciful” content (Wills, Anthology, 9).
Authorship and Audience
The novels, both Jewish and otherwise, were composed in writing; while some Jewish novels may have originated orally, the form and content of the Jewish novels reflects the careful use of literary techniques that suggest an original written form (Wills, Anthology, 6). None of the novels includes the name of an author, in contrast to the Greek novels which are not anonymous. Thus, while Joseph and Aseneth, for instance, is included in the Pseudepigrapha, it is not technically a pseudepigraphon.
Jewish novelistic texts first arose in areas where Hebrew and Aramaic were the common languages, although such texts were frequently translated into Greek, and Greek texts of Jewish authorship were composed under the Hellenistic cultural umbrella. The sophistication of language used in the Jewish novels varies, but on the whole, their sentences are less complex than those found in the Greek novels (Wills, Anthology, 17).
The novels were consumed for entertainment and were therefore at times considered frivolous or low-brow, the dime-store novels of their day (Philostratus, Letter 66 writes scathingly of Chariton; Persius Flaccus 1.134 speaks with derision about people who read Callirhoe; and the Emperor Julian condemns reading plasmata in his Letter 63). There is substantial debate concerning the availability of such texts and their accessibility, which is complicated by the varying opinions on ancient literacy rates. Given the expense of both education and reproduction of texts, most scholars presume an elite readership of both men and women. We have no information about how readers of the Jewish novels approached them, either as entertaining fictions or as historical accounts of fantastic events, or something in between.
As popular literature, the novels represent an important way of uncovering more about the social world of the ancient Mediterranean, and in particular, provide information about Jewish ways of life from this time period. As works of fiction these texts nonetheless record historical information—slippages about the world-view of ancient Jews.
References
- Elias Bickerman. Four Strange Books of the Bible. New York: Schocken, 1967.
- G. W. Bowersock. Fiction as History: Nero to Julian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
- Tomas Hägg. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
- Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins, eds. Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998.
- Niklas Holzberg. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1995.
- George W. E. Nickelsburg. Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981.
- Bryan P. Reardon, ed. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
- Lawrence M. Wills. The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990.
- Lawrence M. Wills, ed. and trans. Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Lawrence M. Wills. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (1995 Wills), book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.